Welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the Book of Genesis. This is study #4 of Genesis, chapter 11 and we are continuing to look at Genesis 11:5-7:

And JEHOVAH came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And JEHOVAH said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

As we have been discussing these verses, we have seen God’s purpose in hindering this building project, a project of “secular society.” It was God’s plan that mankind not discover the secrets God had placed within creation at that time, but that certain things would not be discovered until near the time of the end. We know the end stage of earth’s history began in 1988 with the end of the church age and the beginning of the Great Tribulation. That was the official beginning of the time of the end and we have now gone through the 23-year Great Tribulation period and we are currently living on the earth in the prolonged Day of Judgment. So, about a century before the end time, God begin to reveal to the minds of men certain secrets hidden in His creation.

You know, God is in complete control of what the secular world can come to know and understand about the creation, just as He is in complete control of what the Christian world can come to know and understand about spiritual things. As the wheat and tares grew together in the congregations for 1,955 years, God kept back the understanding of both groups from many hidden truths of the Bible. He allowed partial knowledge and we saw through a glass darkly. We had some understanding of things related to the end, but it was partial or even faulty understanding. Even for true believers, there was nothing they could have done five hundred years ago to break through the seal on the Bible in order to rightly understand the end of the church age or to understand the loosing of Satan and how he would take his seat in the churches as the “man of sin.” They could not have understood the 23-year timeline of the Great Tribulation and how this period would end to reveal the Day of Judgment beginning on May 21, 2011. The secrets God reveals are for us, but the things He withholds are not for us at certain given times. God could reveal His secrets at a later time, but God operates according to His “times and seasons.” That is why God said to Daniel, “Shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.” This is exactly what happened, but now at the end of time tremendous amounts of spiritual information have come forth from the Bible and our knowledge of truth has increased.

Likewise, the secular world had been restrained from much understanding and knowledge of the physical creation and all the benefits God had built into it. They were kept at bay. No matter how prideful man is as he thinks he has “finally arrived” and evolved to the point of unmasking all these secrets of the universe, it is just “wishful thinking” on the part of mankind. It is not true. As a matter of fact, the longer mankind goes along, the further we have come from our original perfect condition in Adam and Eve. That is when mankind was most intelligent and most quick to learn and to gain knowledge. It was when he was perfect in body and soul. Adam had a superior intellect and a mind unhindered by sin; his mind would have been a great and wonderful thing in top operating condition. After the fall into sin, man’s physical body began to deteriorate and Adam lived 930 years and died. Noah lived 950 years and many ancient men lived long periods of time because the effects of sin were not as rapid as they are in our time. We can live, by the grace of God, for only 70 or 80 years. Of course, that is a general statement, as some live less than that and others live more than that. Our physical bodies have deteriorated and this means our minds have also deteriorated because of the effects of sin, so we are not “smarter” than ancient man, but the opposite is true.

Just think about what you can read in some of the Biblical commentaries of old. These men wrote without Bible “helps” like a concordance, an interlinear or the online helps we have today. They had none of these things. They had the Bible and the original Greek and Hebrew and they spent time searching the Bible. They had to remember where that Greek word was used somewhere else. When you read their writings, it is sometimes amazing to see the truth and understanding they did have and their ability to put related Scriptures together. Of course, true believers back then were guided by the Holy Spirit just as true believers today, but it still required a lot of work and immersion in the Word of God. It required understanding of some Greek and Hebrew and, perhaps, Latin. It is incredible to see the brilliance God gave some of these men. Today, we put in far less time and study in “burning the midnight oil,” because we do have all these aids. If we want to know every place in the Bible where a certain word is found, it is at our fingertips. In our day, the Lord has also opened Scriptures that were previously sealed. Since it is the proper time and season, we are seeing the deeper meaning of many Scriptures. It is because we are at the end of the world.

It is a similar situation with the world. Brilliant scientists and other brilliant minds of the past have tried to understand certain facets of the world around them; maybe they could understand a few things, but they were held back by God until the proper time and season. In our time, there is a multiplication of knowledge and understanding of how things work and the secrets that were hidden in the creation. It has also served to increase the pride of men and pride is never a good thing. It has increased mankind’s arrogance and he thinks he is really something. He thinks the world is at his fingertips, but he does not realize that it was God’s doing. God restrained men with even better minds for thousands of years, but as we approached the time of the end, it had to happen for God’s own purposes to “pull back the curtain” to allow an inventor or a scientist to see something he had never seen before. Just think of Thomas Edison and the inventions that had to do with electricity or Bell and the telephone. These men lived at about the same time and inventions began to multiply so quickly and it had to do with the necessary preparation for God’s end time program.

God’s program called for the end of the church age. It was an enormous corporate entity which we would have thought was strategically placed in most of the nations of the world to bring God’s end time message to a world whose population had exploded to seven billion people. And, yet, God’s program was to end the church age and depart from the midst of the congregations, thereby rendering them useless in reaching the billions of people upon the earth at the time of the end. However, God had made preparation and this preparation had to do with the electronic medium and communication technology. The churches had been the corporate entity that represented the kingdom of God, but they had become apostate. God would raise up another entity to bring the Gospel to the world as a witness to the inhabitants of the earth. The electronic medium allowed for the Gospel to be broadcast over the radio and internet. He used the few elect and he used Family Radio. He had raised up Mr. Camping and gave him a deep interest in the Bible. God opened his eyes to see much truth from the Scriptures and, along with that, God gave Mr. Camping a worldwide platform through the electronic medium, enabling Him to reach people all over the world with the Gospel message. Again, with the tremendous speed of communication and travel, believers could fly to other nations in a matter of hours and reach people in cities all over the world.

This really demonstrates the wisdom and incredible foresight of God to hold back all this technology and advancements in the secular world until the proper time. Then we see everything coming together at the time of the end. The church age was over. Iniquity abounded. The churches were apostate and Satan was ruling there, but God called His people out of the churches and into the world and provided them with resources that were already prepared. It was like when God called His people out of Canaan in the days of Joseph and God had made advance preparation by allowing Joseph to be sold as a slave in Egypt. He was put into prison and then he was raised up to become second in command under Pharaoh. God revealed dreams to Joseph and gave him advance knowledge of the years of plenty and famine and the need to store up grain for the seven years of famine, which typified the Great Tribulation that would come at the time of the end of the world. Again, there was preparation out in the world. The world knew nothing about God’s plan when they made their advancements and achievements. They gave no thought to God’s purposes and reasons for all of this. As a matter of fact, the more the world achieved advancements that made life easier and communication and travel faster, the more arrogant and atheistic they became: “We did all this ourselves. It is all our doing.” They did not know that it was God working behind the scenes and allowing mankind for the last century to make these kinds of advancements. So, when 1988 came, which was the 13,000th year of earth’s history and the beginning of the end of the world, the “stage was set.” Preparation had been made. The “grain” that had been stored up (the Word of God) was dispersed and God’s people were nourished with spiritual knowledge and outside in the secular world there was a way to deliver that spiritual food and the things that had once been hidden to “feed” the sheep all over the earth. God used the electronic medium to distribute the Gospel worldwide.

However, the electronic medium also served to increase wickedness and the abundance of transgressions against God, but even that fulfilled God’s Word.

The God of the Bible is way ahead of us. We can be sure of that. He is “light years” ahead of us and even that gives us too much credit. God is so tremendously beyond us. Remember, it says in Isaiah: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” And, remember, the heavens are still expanding and they just go on, and on, and on. If you could ever get to that point and you could look back to the speck of the earth, that would still be inadequate to describe God’s thoughts as compared to our thoughts. We are tiny, finite men and our minds cannot compare to the enormous, brilliant mind of God who inhabits eternity. Of course, there is no comparison.

God has mapped it all out and He has perfectly planned for these days. He planned for the Great Tribulation. He had that plan set in motion and He departed from the churches that contained about two billion professed Christians. He would not use them any longer, but He planned to reach a world of about seven billion people without using miracles or supernatural events. He limited Himself to the Bible when He completed that Book, and He used the resources He had prepared in the world to accomplish His purpose to broadcast the warning of Judgment Day, May 21, 2011 to all the earth and save the great multitude. He did accomplish that purpose in His own time and season.