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[0:00] Genesis chapter 10, we ended with Japheth's descendants and just mentioned a couple of times that his descendants are mentioned elsewhere in Scripture.

[0:14] Most of these individuals who are mentioned elsewhere in Scripture are mentioned in regard to the kingdom.

[0:32] That is, they're mentioned in judgment because they're going to be resistant. They are going to be nations that are gathered against Israel in that day.

[0:43] There are some, though, that we do recognize or will. So, hearing none, we'll go on. Look at verses 6 through 20, if you would, please.

[0:56] Genesis chapter 10, 6 through 20. These are sons of Ham.

[1:08] Now, remind me about Ham. Okay. Beside the food, Ham the man.

[1:31] He was, was he cursed? His son was cursed. By whom? By grandpa.

[1:42] Noah. Noah cursed him. Now, when I read stuff like this, by the way, I have to remind myself with the rhetorical question.

[2:03] Is God, this is a question Paul asked, is God unrighteous? No. No. No. No. So, when I read these things, I have to filter it through the knowledge that God is always righteous.

[2:21] He's always righteous. Incidentally, are there any, you can tell me because I'm going to ask it about myself.

[2:31] Are there any times in my life that I wonder, why this, why this, why me, why now? It's okay.

[2:46] You see, I need to remind myself, though, the Lord is always righteous. You know someone who has said, I don't want anything to do with God.

[3:01] I asked for this, or I asked for that, or something happened, and God didn't do what I wanted him to do.

[3:18] Is God unrighteous because he didn't do what I wanted him to do? No. So, when Noah curses Canaan, even though Ham did it, is God unrighteous?

[3:38] Will God carry out that curse, by the way? Yeah. Because it will be the descendants of Canaan that will always be the thorn in Israel's side.

[3:55] So, now, Israel, by the way, doesn't pull the thorn when they should have, do they? I know we're jumping ahead, but when Israel enters the land of Canaan, what did God tell them to do?

[4:11] I know you know the answer. Get rid of them. You either kill them, or dispossess them, but get them away.

[4:21] Now, are you supposed to buddy up to them? No. You see the difference in dispensations? Right?

[4:33] That's not our calling, is it? Here, you can get, by the way, when I try to mix the Old Testament law, or even here, pre-law, and the gospel of salvation by grace through faith, I start getting, I have to do some convolutions, don't I?

[5:01] If I try to mix that. Because, I have to, then I start justifying, well, God said destroy them. Well, what about the, what about David's psalms?

[5:18] About half of them are curses. This one, I don't want you to answer.

[5:30] Just, just chew on it. Am I ever tempted to curse the enemies of God instead of pray for them?

[5:44] I told you not to answer. But, but, in this dispensation, I'm called to pray for those, right?

[5:58] So, anyway, back to this. Do you see any names in there that you recognize beside Canaan?

[6:18] Who? Cush. Where, now, that becomes an area. Where is that approximately? Cush.

[6:30] In Ezekiel, in Ezekiel 38, it's, that word that is Cush here is translated Ethiopia.

[6:44] There. It's a, it's an area in Africa. One of, one of the sons down here will be, you recognize, um, Sheba, or Seba.

[7:05] You, you recognize that name, don't you? You recognize Havilla, where, which has been named where there is, where there is gold.

[7:16] Remember? So, that's, that's early, you don't remember. That's earlier in Genesis. But, um, most of these are recorded elsewhere as the nations that will be judged by God in the kingdom.

[7:45] So, there, a lot of them are named in Ezekiel. Seba is named in Isaiah. Um, Ramah is named in Ezekiel.

[8:01] Ezekiel for the next two, for Sheba and Dedan. Um, there's one in there that you do recognize. Nimrod.

[8:13] He's going to pop up again, isn't he, pretty soon, before very long. Okay, so those are descendants. And then, the descendants of Canaan, well, if you read through there, by the way, Mizram became the father of Ludim and Anamim and Lehabim.

[8:35] Those are plurals. Those are people's tribes that are mentioned.

[8:46] The I am suffix is a plural suffix. So, they're not all named just the individuals.

[8:58] They're sometimes named for the peoples that these individuals that are descendants of these individuals. So, there's another one in there that you probably recognize because of that, and that would be Philistim.

[9:16] We usually don't say the Philistim. We usually say the Philistines. now, it never happens around you, but sometimes people call one another a Philistine.

[9:35] I wonder why they do that. You little Philistine, you. You ought not do that, by the way.

[9:50] Now, down there in Canaan's, this will be after verse 15, you'll see a couple of names in there that you'll remember.

[10:04] Heth, which is another name for the Hittites, and, yeah, you recognize those, don't you?

[10:17] And the Amorites. In fact, in Ezekiel chapter 16, Ezekiel chapter 16, and we won't get into it, it's a pretty graphic chapter, but, the Lord says to Ezekiel, make Jerusalem know her transgressions, and then he says, you were born, your birth was in the land of Canaan, he says, your father, he says, your father was an Amorite, and your mother was a Hittite, and then he gets pretty graphic about how they've left God, what he did for them, and how they have left him.

[11:07] So, those, those names will pop up in relation to Israel, too, as comparisons, the reason they do is because Israel did not get rid of them, as they were supposed to, and when I don't get rid of problems in my life, they're going to be with me, aren't they?

[11:38] They're going to cause problems for me. So, those, those we have recognized.

[11:48] Now, if we go on, or unless you have something to pop in there, the next ones we go to will be Genesis 20, or 10, 21, through 32, are recording Shem's descendants.

[12:07] What do we know about Shem before we even read? It is from him that we get the term Semite.

[12:20] The Semitic peoples are descendants of Shem. Okay. Now, what's the big Semitic people that we, that the scripture talks about?

[12:36] By big, I mean pointedly. The Jews. Israel. Those are Semites, but they are not the only Semites, are they?

[12:47] There are other Semitic peoples. So, here, in this section, verses 21 through 32, we read about his descendants. Do you see anything that may stick out to you there, or that you want to point out?

[13:05] okay? We won't belabor every name, but there are those that are mentioned otherwise.

[13:21] though, I'll just point one out. One of the sons of Aram is Uz.

[13:32] What do you know? Where does that ring in your mind? John's in good form this morning.

[13:45] the rest of you, what does that ring? You can't get that one out now, can you?

[14:00] Where was Job from? Yeah. Abram was from her. Job.

[14:14] Job was from the land of Uz. Okay. Job was not necessarily a Semite, but he lived in that area.

[14:30] We don't really know if he was submitted. The scripture doesn't tell us specifically. There's a pretty good chance he did worship the Lord God.

[14:41] Okay. by the way, Uz is also mentioned in Jeremiah and Lamentations as well as Job. There's another thing that we notice in there.

[15:01] We notice that the well, I'm going to wait on that and just let you mull that over a little bit.

[15:14] So, verses 21 through 32 is where those are Shem's descendants and then we're going to take a little tour, aren't we?

[15:24] Okay. So, that ends chapter 10. Yes? Yes? Yes?

[15:49] Yes? Right.

[16:10] Maybe. Yeah. Well, we're going to go into chapter 11 and we'll see something and then the descendants of Shem will be picked up again after we go through this stretch.

[16:34] So, look at chapter 11 verses 1 through 9. This is a parenthetic in the line of descent of Shem.

[17:02] Now, what do you know about this part? I mean, we've all, most everyone here has either studied it or been taught it numerous times.

[17:19] What do we call this? the story of the Tower of Babel. What do we know happened there? You don't have to look at it right now.

[17:32] Just, this is from memory. They decided to build a tower and what else happened?

[17:45] you don't have to read it right now. We're going to get more into detail. We're going to get a little into detail. What else? God came down and confused the languages.

[18:03] What happened to them there? They scattered. started. Okay, now, just as a reminder, what had God told men when they got off the ark?

[18:17] Be fruitful and multiply and populate where? The earth. The whole earth. Okay, so, here we are in Babel or Shinar.

[18:34] Shinar is another name that will be called later on Babylon. It will be, so, we, the Tower of Babel, or rather the word, or the word Babylon will come from this.

[19:00] Now, now, by this time, there's a pretty large population. This isn't real long after, I mean, when people are living, Noah's still alive.

[19:22] Noah's going to be alive. Well, Abram will be almost 30 years old by the time Noah dies.

[19:36] Pretty close. But, anyway, the important part, what do they say? Now, we'll get detailed.

[19:48] What do men say? They're all of one language. What do they say to one another? You've mentioned one.

[19:59] Okay, we're going to build a city and a tower, and the top of this tower may reach to the heavens. Keep going.

[20:14] We're going to make a name for ourselves, lest, lest we be scattered across the earth.

[20:27] earth. Okay, so we're going to build a tower. Now, how do they build this?

[20:41] Bricks and, if you, bricks and tar, if you have newer translation, it'll say tar. King James version says slime.

[20:51] same thing. That's, that material is naturally occurring. There's a very famous, in the United States, there's a very famous deposit.

[21:07] The debris of tar pits in California. That's the material. It's a bitumen, is what it is. that's what they used as the mortar, or the adhesive.

[21:25] So, the interior was probably packed brick, and then the exterior walls were a baked brick slimed with bitumen.

[21:41] them. Now, I looked up, this is not from a Christian source, this is, this is from an archaeological source, the ziggurat of Ur, because we're in this area, and Ur is going to be important in a, in just a chapter, a few chapters, right?

[22:06] So, this is the ziggurat of Ur, it has been unearthed, almost entirely, one of the largest and best preserved ziggurats in Mesopotamia.

[22:25] The small excavations occurred at the site about the turn of the 20th century, and in 1920s, Sir Leonard Woolley, in a joint project with the University of Pennsylvania Museum in Philadelphia, and the British Museum in London, revealed or excavated this monument in its entirety, what's left of it.

[22:51] What he found was a massive rectangular pyramidal structure, oriented true north, 210 by 150 feet, constructed with three levels of terraces, standing originally between 70 and 100 feet.

[23:12] Three monumental staircases led up to a gate on the first terrace level, and next, a single staircase rose to a second terrace, which supported a platform on which a temple and the final and highest terrace stood.

[23:31] wood. The core of the ziggurat is mud brick covered with baked bricks laid with bitumen and naturally occurring tar.

[23:42] By the way, that sounds like what we just read, doesn't it? And each of the bricks measures about 11.5 by 11.5 by 2.75 inches.

[23:58] They weigh approximately 33 pounds each. The lower portion of the ziggurat, which supports the first terrace, would have used approximately 720,000 baked bricks.

[24:15] This is no small undertaking. That's quite a building. There is a, you can find a photograph of what they've unearthed so far.

[24:29] In fact, you can find a photograph of some U.S. troops coming down the steps of the ziggurat.

[24:42] They went to visit it while they were deployed there. So, it's quite a, quite a big deal. Now, what does God say about it?

[25:09] Now, what's he mean by that? Can they do anything they want to do? will they be like God? So, what does he mean by nothing will be impossible?

[25:26] Which they imagine, right? Right? remember chapter 8 of Genesis, I think it's about verse 20, they just came off the ark, and God says, I'll never again destroy the world with a flood, although men's hearts, men's imaginations are evil continually.

[25:59] Okay? Now, let me ask you this, what's wrong with the tower? What's wrong with the tower?

[26:11] Where's the top of the tower?

[26:24] Now, that, that, that, this can be taken metaphorically, I know, but where do they say the top of the tower goes? Into the heavens.

[26:37] Now, these people, do, although they may not know the details properly about the flood, they do know that the flood occurred, because the Gilgamesh epic is going to come from this area, and the Gilgamesh epic is an epic poem that talks about a great flood and a few people being saved.

[27:10] Now, it perverts what really happened, but they know about it, don't they? So, there are a couple of theories about what this may mean, this tower may have meant, metaphorically, or even realistically.

[27:33] It may have been, well, God's not going to do that to us again. we're going to make a tower high enough that we'll get away from the flood.

[27:44] We'll make it. It's possible, it's possible, it's certain that they said, let's make a name for ourselves.

[27:59] They want to exalt themselves. That's certain. And what does the scripture say? God resists the proud and lifts up the humble.

[28:15] So, any exaltation of man over God or to God or in the place of God, God, not because he's, not because he's petty, but because he's God.

[28:37] He can't deny himself. He can't say, well, it's okay, you are, you're just like, I mean, if you say that you're God or important is me, that's okay.

[28:52] He can't do that because there is only one God and it's him. Okay, well, in later years, by the 1800s, metaphorically, I'll say, that has become a, let's build a tower up to heaven to drag God down.

[29:23] Nietzsche, the philosopher who described, self-described as I do philosophy as with a sledgehammer, which kind of worked out true.

[29:43] Nietzsche, we have, what's his famous saying? We have killed God. God is dead.

[29:56] I saw a t-shirt, by the way. God is dead, Nietzsche, and on the back, Nietzsche is dead, God. But, the point of it is, mankind really hasn't changed much, have we?

[30:15] the heart of man is still that way. Still building the tower, yeah, we're still, the heart of, yeah, right, still building the tower, and still wanting to be in the penthouse.

[30:33] God okay, so, did God not know what the men would do?

[30:46] He knew, he knew. So, what is God going to do now? Now, what is God going to do now?

[30:58] What is God going to do now? He's going to confuse them. I'm confused, I know that, but, let's review again, the heart of man, this tower of Babel.

[31:21] What is my heart like? My flesh. Desperately wicked, who can know it? in my flesh, what are my imaginations?

[31:38] We just read it, in chapter eight, evil from my youth, and continually so.

[31:53] In my flesh, I can't trust my own heart, can I? And, my imaginations are wicked in my flesh.

[32:05] So, what am I to do? As a Christian, in this dispensation, I trust Christ, I know I'm saved.

[32:16] That's a wonderful thing. Do I ever fall? in my flesh?

[32:30] Yeah. Romans chapter seven, though, gives me what I do today.

[32:44] Romans chapter seven, 24. Paul says, O wretched man that I am. Who will set me free from this body of death?

[32:57] Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then, on the one hand, I concur with the law of God, but on the other, in my flesh, the law of sin.

[33:13] Therefore, chapter eight, verse one, this is great. Therefore, now, there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

[33:27] For the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death. For what the law could not do, weak as it was in the flesh, God did, sending his own son in the likeness of sinful flesh as an offering for sin.

[33:51] He condemned sin in the flesh so that the requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us who do not walk according to the flesh but according to the spirit.

[34:03] That is the gospel of grace. That's wonderful because in my flesh, I can't please God.

[34:13] God will stumble but in Christ Jesus all the requirements are fulfilled and I'm no longer under that condemnation.

[34:28] That's for us today as we sit here. That's a wonderful thing. That's a wonderful thing. When I when we're reading through Genesis, I'm thankful for grace because it's not a pretty picture, is it?

[34:50] It's not a pretty picture. Okay. Yes. Yes. Well, Chris said it's almost as though, correct me where I miss it, it's almost as though with more and more persons coming to speak English, that what God did by dispersing with the languages at Babel is being reversed and wondering could it be in preparation for the coming of the Antichrist and the one world government again.

[35:54] Certainly it's not going to impede it, is it? Did I reiterate that fairly well? Okay. And who's doing it?

[36:08] Man is doing it. Still building the tower, aren't we? Still building the tower. Talk about making a name for ourselves.

[36:22] we're going to control even nature, aren't we? By fiat.

[36:37] I mean, I'm going to pass a law that says, in fact, now we see ourselves ourselves as some.

[36:53] I don't think it's as popular as some people would try to make it, but we do see some, very vocal and very well supported, who will say that nature doesn't even matter.

[37:10] I can decide it. do it. They won't prove it by jumping off the cliff and showing me that gravity doesn't work, but, you know, some things can, I heard it said, some things can be imagined but not lived.

[37:25] just because you can imagine it doesn't mean it can be done. They will try and they will try to make you say that it is, but the people of God will not say that, will we?

[37:50] We can't do that. Okay, we're going to stop there and have a great week. we can watch through your comments options on the page.

[38:04]  Okay, if you what do have done on the time. you can see the you can see the you guys need to hear