Foiling the plan

Read Genesis 11:1-9

Don’t you find God’s strategy to foil the plan of the people in this story rather interesting? He doesn’t smite them, send down lightning bolts, or stir up some plague. Nope he simply makes them all speak different languages.

God brought division to the people, so that they might fulfill his command of spreading out over the face of the earth (Gen 9:1). Evil increases when sinful people gather together and so God spreads them out to restrain and subdue evil. The greatest evil is found not in individuals, but in nations and empires.

Language plays a big part in our discontinuity with other people groups, it naturally causes division. You know if you’ve ever been around other people who speak a language you don’t, it feels isolating, especially if they don’t speak your language. Language barriers slow everything down and the grace in that is that it also slows down evil.

But you see an event appears later in scripture which begins to bring a right kind of unity where God first brought division. It happened at Pentecost, in Acts 2, as the apostles and all those with them were anointed with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke in tongues so that all those around them from many different parts of the word could hear them speaking in their own native tongue.

We will not get into the debate on the gift of tongues, but one thing we can know definitively was their purpose. Where God had once dispersed the people, he was now gathering them together, no longer would language divide but God would bridge that divide and invite all people from all nations into his family.

We should realise that we are blessed. None of the apostles spoke modern English because it didn’t exist back then, but yet God has sent out labourers to work so that his word might be known in all languages. We are blessed to have his word in our native tongue, God has worked through his people so that we might hear him in our language.

God once spoke to his people in Hebrew, now he speaks to them in thousands of languages. So that he might gather a multitude of people from every nation, tribe and tongue to sing his praise and glory. Do not neglect this gift, God could have forced all of us to learn Hebrew but instead we see the true nature of our God, that he is the shepherd who goes out in search of the lost sheep, he doesn't wait for his sheep to come find him.

Questions:

How might you cultivate a deeper appreciation for the gift we have in possessing written copies of God’s word that we can read, a gift few in history have ever had?

What role might you have to play, big or small, in God’s mission to gather people from every nation, tribe and tongue to worship him?