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

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.

I would like to look at this from a different perspective. I would like to look at it from the vantage point of how God speaks of Biblical language and how the inability to understand it is a spiritual judgment. For instance, it says in Matthew 13:10-11:

And the disciples came, and said unto him, Why speakest thou unto them in parables? He answered and said unto them, Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.

Jesus is answering the disciples question about why He speaks in parables. It is really a great question. If only the churches would have asked that question, they may have been able to understand the Bible better than they did throughout the entire church age. The reason Christ spoke in parables was to teach the reader of the Bible that He is the Word and to teach how to understand the Word of God, the Bible; and that means the entire Scriptures from Genesis through Revelation. This is the way God wrote the Bible – He spoke in parables and He hid truth. The point Christ is making in Matthew, chapter 13 is that it is given to the elect people of God to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to “them” it is not given. In other words, Jesus is telling them: “To you is given the ability to understand and know what is being said in the Bible, but to others it is not given.” This means that some people will not understand the “language” of God as found in the Scriptures. In earthly terms, let us just use the example that God speaks English and the Bible was written in English and it was “given” to the saved people of God, but for all the unsaved, they could not speak or read English and when they came to the Bible, they could not understand it because it was written in English.

The Holy Spirit is given to the true believer and it is as if that Holy Spirit is the “translator” who translates the Word of God into a language we can understand and we can decipher it and see spiritual truth. This analogy might confuse people. The original language of the Bible was Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, but the “language” is really a spiritual language. It is the language of the heavenly city, New Jerusalem. God is Spirit and He speaks a spiritual language. God lives in the spiritual kingdom of heaven and He speaks “spiritual” and the Bible was written by God and that is why it says in the Book of Romans that the law is spiritual. It also says in 1Corinthians 2:13:

Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.

Sometimes, I misquote this and I say, “comparing scripture with scripture,” but there is nothing wrong with saying “comparing scripture with scripture,” because scripture is spiritual, just as the law is spiritual. All scripture is given by inspiration of God – it is God-breathed. Therefore, it has the Spirit of God within every Word of God in the Bible and it is spiritual. In order to come to truth and develop sound doctrine, we must compare spiritual with spiritual or scripture with scripture and then the Holy Ghost teacheth. It is His language. The Holy Ghost is God and God is Spirit. He speaks spiritual language, the language of the kingdom of heaven. At EBible we have Bible studies that are done in English and we translate them to Spanish, Chinese and other languages. There is a “translator,” or an individual that speaks both English and a second language and he takes the words that were spoken in English and finds the equivalent word in the second language and translates it.

Likewise, the Holy Spirit is our translator and He takes words that were written in human language and “translates” them. The original languages of Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic were translated into English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and so forth. As we read our English Bible, we are reading an English translation or a Spanish translation. When we read 1Corinthians, chapter 2 or Matthew, chapter 13, the words we read need to be translated to us in a spiritual way. We must have a spiritual definition of the words, so we can understand what it means in God’s “language” because His language is a spiritual language. That is why we use the method of translation God has given us to translate what is written in an earthly language. As we compare spiritual with spiritual or scripture with scripture, the Holy Ghost “translates” it for us as He defines words and terms and we can begin to have the “coded message” revealed to us. We have the parable revealed to us. The “mystery” of the Word of God is opened to us and we begin to understand it. We might respond, Oh, that is what ‘rain’ means in the Bible – it identifies with the Word of God. The clouds identify with God’s commandments. The sun is a type and figure of God and the moon is a representation of the Law. We can just go on, and on, with words that have an earthly language we can understand in the world and, yet, we find spiritual meanings. For example, when we search out the word “sun” in the Bible, we find it says in Psalm 84:11: “For JEHOVAH God is a sun and shield,” and we now have the definition and spiritual meaning of that word. We have been given a Biblical definition and we can now understand when we see the word “sun.”

It is like when you learn a foreign language. Someone tells you, “This is how you pronounce this word and this is what it means.” Then when you see text with a thousand words, you might not understand most of them, but you do understand that one word. In order to learn the entire language, you must increase your vocabulary, as you learn a second word and a third word, and so forth.

Through the Holy Spirit, God begins to define His own terms. For example, the word “Jerusalem” can refer to the Old Testament city or the Jews that inhabit it, but then we learn that it can refer to “Jerusalem below,” the external church or “Jerusalem above,” the eternal church consisting of all who are saved. Yes, historically, we can have an understanding regarding “Jews,” but, spiritually, we are a “Jew” if we have become born again. Slowly, we learn. That is why Bible study takes so long to do because we must learn the whole language. We must learn the language of God and how to understand the spiritual language of the kingdom of heaven.

Of course, this is where the corporate church has failed miserably. During the church age, there was a time when the corporate church had some understanding, but it was always partial. They never fully grasped what Jesus was saying when He said, “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.” They developed their own earthly, natural-minded way of interpreting the Bible and their hermeneutics were also natural-minded. It is much worse today. They say if you can see a statement in the Bible that has a plain, literal meaning, you just accept it and look for no other meaning. This approach is guaranteed to keep them in a physical, earthly mindset and their “Christianity” becomes like any other religion in the world that does not transcend the physical realm. It does not enter the spiritual realm where God dwells in a spiritual kingdom and speaks in a spiritual language. Therefore, they are “cut off” from God because of their inability to properly decipher and understand the Bible. The Bible does not translate into that spiritual language and that is the judgment of God against them.

If we go back to Matthew 13, we saw that Jesus said, “Because it is given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given.” Then He said in Matthew 13:12-13:

For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath. Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

Let me just interject something here. I have visited other countries, like Bolivia, and I remember the first time I went was in the year 1994. I visited my wife’s family home and we were sitting around the table and I was the only one that could not speak fluent Spanish. Everyone was speaking rapid-fire Spanish. I could pick up a word here and there, but mostly I was just hearing the words and I had no understanding of what was being said. That is how it is with most people when they hear the Bible. Yes, they hear it. The Bible is read in church, after church. People may even read it thoroughly and they may read it often, but in reading and hearing, they “hear not, neither do they understand.” This is because they can only hear the earthly words. When they hear of “sun, moon and stars” or when they hear of the river Jordan or when they hear of Moses striking the rock, they literally think of sun, moon and stars and they literally think of a river in the Middle East and they literally think of Moses as an ancient figure that smote a rock because he got angry one day. They do not understand types and figures and representations. They do not understand that the Bible defines its own terms and, therefore, they hear a language they understand not. It is just like the ignorance I would have if I sat among a group of people speaking Chinese; I would not understand what they were saying.

Neither do people understand what God is saying in the Bible unless there is an “interpreter” or “translator” to help them understand. That is where the Holy Spirit comes in, as we compare spiritual things with spiritual and the Holy Ghost teacheth. He instructs. He guides us into truth. He shows us the language of the kingdom of God and if you lack the Holy Spirit, you cannot understand. Yes, the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter, but we could also call Him the Translator. He is the one that makes the Bible understandable to our spiritual ears and then we can understand what the Bible says. If you lack the Holy Spirit, you cannot understand. The Bible says in 1Corinthians 2:10-11:

But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit: for the Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God. For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.

Because we are all natural-minded in our unsaved condition, none of us had spiritual life and, therefore, we could not speak the spiritual language of the kingdom of heaven. We could not understand it. We can hear it, but not hear it and we would lack all understanding and be completely ignorant of it. But the Bible is the things of God and the Spirit of God understands it. This Spirit enters in to an individual God has saved and He begins to serve as a translator and teaches us what Christ means when we read of Him healing the physically sick. Christ’s healing of the physically blind points to those that are spiritually blind. The deaf represent people that cannot “hear” the Bible. When Christ healed the deaf, He was demonstrating what God does when He grants a person spiritual ears through salvation. With everything in the Bible, the Holy Spirit must show us. He is the guide spoken of in the Gospel of John: “Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth.” We cannot understand truth unless we can understand the spiritual realm.