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СКАЧАТЬ that we experience are constantly telling us that we are out of fellowship with our Creator and urgently need the Savior.

      But all fallen men are perverse, and their imaginations are evil. Instead of responding to the remedial purposes of the curse, early men and women tried to circumvent it and soon became so irretrievably evil that God had to destroy the world with the Flood. Then, instead of gratitude for deliverance from the antediluvian morass of wickedness by the Flood, the descendants of the survivors soon manifested their own perversity by a new rebellion at Babel.

      Man has now somehow, in his warped thinking, converted the universal decay principle into an imagined universal evolutionary process, and the worldwide testimony in stone concerning the Flood into a contrived record of the history of evolution. The Flood itself is explained away altogether, either as a local flood or a tranquil flood or an allegorical flood (these theories will all be evaluated in chapter 4, and eliminated as possible options).

      Accordingly, God ceased to concern himself directly with mankind as a whole, after routing the conspirators at Babel, choosing rather to work through an elect nation, Israel, and then through an elect assemblage, the Church, to accomplish His redemptive work in the world. Not again would He impose another remedial curse of some kind on the ground, nor would He again send another world-purging cataclysm as long as He continued to offer salvation and redemption to man.

      “While the earth remaineth,” He said, “seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease” (Gen. 8:22). That is, the earth’s axial rotation and orbital revolution, which processes largely control all other terrestrial processes in the present economy, would remain unchanged, and so would all other processes until man’s temporal probation and God’s reconciliation were accomplished.

      Origin of the Nations

      Another great event in the ancient world has also had worldwide repercussions to this very day. That was the post-Flood rebellion led by Nimrod at the Tower of Babel, resulting in God’s miraculous confusion of languages of the various families gathered there. This, in turn, led to their dispersion from Babel and their eventual development into the many tribes and nations around the world.

      Man is a unique creation of God, entirely without evolutionary relation to the animals, and Adam was the first man, created on the sixth day of creation. However, the present-day nations, tribes, cultures, and languages of men have all been derived from the three sons of Noah, after the great Flood. “And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth. . . . These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread” (Gen. 9:18–19).

      For a time after the Flood, most of Noah’s descendants lived together in the Mesopotamian plain south of the mountains of Ararat, where the ark had landed. This settlement, in itself, was contrary to the will of God, who had commanded them to “Be fruitful, and multiply and replenish the earth” (Gen. 9:1). He had also entrusted to men the responsibility of governing themselves, in stable social units, even with the prerogative of capital punishment if the crime should so warrant (Gen. 9:6).

      However, rather than obeying God’s command to scatter and fill the earth, their rebellious leader Nimrod persuaded most of the people (no doubt Noah and Shem, who apparently were still living, did not participate in Nimrod’s scheme, and this may have been true of others, too) to remain in one place, at Babel, and there to build a great tower dedicated to the heavens, to pagan gods of the sky.

      The events are described in Genesis 11:1–9, and the leadership of Nimrod in Genesis 10:8–12. It is probable that there were approximately 70 family clans at Babel, as indicated by the 70 original tribes listed in Genesis 10:1–32. These included Semites and Japhethites, as well as Hamites.

      Rather than moving out to “fill the earth,” as God had commanded, they all prepared to unite together in the form of a great city, in which they could “make us a name” (Gen. 11:4). This decision involved a direct rebellion against God’s command, and thus indicated that at least their leaders, especially Nimrod, no longer feared God.

      They seemingly had been convinced, perhaps by some form of occult communication with demonic spirits, that they could successfully follow Satan in his continuing rebellion and thus be free from God’s restraint. They built the first great temple “tower, whose top [was to be] unto heaven” (Gen. 11:4), as the central headquarters of this rebellion. They probably emblazoned the various astrological emblems in the shrine at the top, thus dedicating the tower “unto heaven” — that is, to the worship of the host of heaven. The stars were identified with the host of satanic angels. This primeval astrological system is the fountainhead of all occultism, polytheism, and false religion in general. Babylon was the “mother of harlots and abominations” (Rev. 17:5). That is, Babel was the primeval source of all spiritual adultery and idolatry in the world’s false religions.

      In any case, it was from Babel that God forcibly dispersed the rebels, by a mighty miracle. “The Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth” (Gen. 11:9).

      The skeptic may question this record, but let him devise a better explanation for the origin of human languages! The languages of even the most “primitive” tribes are extremely complex and are removed by a great gulf from the chatterings of the most “advanced” apes, as well as other animals. There is neither any evidence nor any explanation for any assumed naturalistic evolution of human language.

      The attribute of language — the ability to articulate and communicate even abstract concepts — is the most basic aspect of any human culture. Physiological distinctives such as skin color are of minor importance compared to language as the cause of divisions among the nations and tribes of mankind. When God decided to enforce a separation and scattering of the people, He did so by the most effective way possible, confusing their tongues. After they were separated into distinct tribal units, then it was possible for distinctive physiological characteristics, hitherto inhibited by the intermarrying at Babel, to become fixed genetically, by tribal inbreeding. Thus, the different physical characteristics of different national groups were indirectly the result of the confusion of tongues.

      The 70 original nations, as listed in Genesis 10, have proliferated into more than 3,000 tribes and languages. Since this primeval dispersion there have been many attempts by strong leaders to unite all nations under their rule, as well as efforts by politicians to establish voluntary unions of all nations, but every one has failed. This is because “the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of Adam” (Deut. 32:8). God has “made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation” (Acts 17:26).

      It is well to recognize that, while the Scriptures place high importance on the distinctiveness of nations and tribes as such, they never once mention the concept of race. Biblically there is only one race of men: the human race. There is only one kind of man: that is, mankind. “God hath made of one blood all nations of men.”

      The idea of race is strictly a category of evolutionary biology, not of Scripture at all. The threefold division of mankind into Japhethites, Semites, and Hamites is not a racial division, but, rather of three different streams of nations. The biological entity known as “race,” on the other hand, is supposed to be a sub-species in the process of evolving into a new species, with a long evolutionary history of its own. Modern racism has always found its strongest and most vicious expression among doctrinaire evolutionists, men such as Karl Marx, Adolph Hitler, and other such advocates of group struggle and survival of the fittest.

      A real understanding of man in relation to his world will never be attained, nor solutions to his problems ever achieved, as long as our educational and political leaders persist in thinking СКАЧАТЬ