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Episode 428: In this episode, we delve into the Tower of Babel narrative, discussing how God intervened to confound the language of the people who were building a tower to reach the sky. We explore the significance of this event in shaping the diversity of languages and cultures we see today. We reflect on how God's actions, though seemingly disruptive, ultimately led to the beautiful tapestry of languages and cultures we have in the world.
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You're listening to the Bible Guys, a podcast where a couple of friends talk about the Bible in fun, in practical ways. Well, hello, howdy, welcome to the Bible Guys. My name is Chris. This is my faithful companion. His name is Jeff. And yeah, so sometimes I say I'm the Bible Guy and this is my faithful companion. That's right, that's right. Yeah, so today you're just Chris. By the way. Funny little fact, fun little fact. We took a Bible literacy test at our staff, oh, the whole staff. We have the whole staff yesterday. It was a hard test, wasn't it. It was a hard test. It was fifty questions, and it said place place these things in chronological order the whole The first like, what ten questions? We're placing things in chronological order from the Old Testament. And they were like these random names. I missed one of those, Yeah I did. I was going too fast and I missed it. Yeah. And so you did minus four out of fifty questions, Yeah, which is what which is a ninety two percent? Yeah? And I did minus seven, which is eighty six percent, which means technically, as a Bible Guy, it's one A, one B. Yeah, so it's designed to be a thirty percent, So fifteen is the average. So we use this. You know, I'm part of another organization to help start churches around the country, and in our assessment center for the potential church planters. Yes, they need to get at least a seventy in order to be able to go forward, right, the planting things. So it's on purpose a hard test. Yes, So yeah, I thought you did really well. Well. It was really funny because some of our staff, you know, they haven't really been Christians that long. Sometimes, you know, they just didn't become a Christian, you know, some of them, they didn't go to Bible College. They work in, you know, certain areas that don't require teaching or anything like that. And so anyway, one guy, he said, I said, what did you get? And he goes eleven And I said, you only missed eleven. He goes no. So it also highlights opportunities for improvement, right, which is really what we were doing. So we were trying to hit a base base mark of this is the average score for heritage staff, and then look for an opportunity for improvement processes. So let's just find out where everybody is and take the test. It was fun. It's kind of cool. Yeah, yeah, we should put that out on the on our website or something. Put that little test out, see how people can do. But you know they're gonna do. They're gonna use the phone, get a hundreds because we had to ban people from using the phones. Yes, okay, well, hey, we're gonna go into a segment today called guess the word. You just promote me to the Bible guy? Yeah, I gave you some credit there. Wow, I just realized what just happened. Hey, But but again, that's just one test, and to be honest with you, some of those were trick questions and I was angry at them. Well, so I took that test before, okay, and only missed two the first time. So I'm slipping. Actually, you say you're getting worse. Your memory's going. Yeah, so I did when I took it, and then I went back and did think I knew the answers to two of so two I did not know the answer. Yeah, but two of them I knew the answers and I was going too fast. Yeah, well, me too, right, because I gave everybody twenty minutes I want you to move quickly. I wanted to be at the top of your head. I took notes when we were correcting, and and I wrote next to the question, I said, duh, I knew this right right, because I knew it. So I had I had two of those that I knew the answer, and I got them out of order, like, for instance, one of them would put in order. I interposed or transposed Shem and Enoch. Oh my gosh, that is exactly what I did, and I know I know Enoch came to question is exactly the one I missed. Yeah, I missed that one, which is weird because we're talking about those things right right right. And then there was another one I did the same, exact same thing, right, I transposed a thing. But oh well, anyways, so I'm slipping, is what I'm saying. Yeah, well, that has almost become our segment. We're three minutes into it, so let's hurry up here we go. Are you ready? Yes? So we have a guess the word segment, and which means I have words that I'm a word I'm trying to get you to say, and I have five words I'm not allowed to say in order to get you to do that. If you're viewing us on YouTube, we'll put them on the screen. On the screen, that's right, and we'll tell you afterwards the words I'm not all right ready, yes, okay, So if I'm talking, I'm using words, okay. And different countries have different kind of words because they have different languages. There you go, and the singular of languages is language. There you go, thank you, the tower of There you go. This is the hard one for words. Yes, so so language. I wasn't allowed to say English, French words, foreigner speech, babbel. I wasn't allowed to say talk, mumble, chatter, baby mouth, got it? Okay, So then this one b A b b l A babbel. Yes, but I got you to say babbel. I didn't ask you to spell it fanatically the twist there, that's right. Okay, okay, boy, this is a really really hard one. Uh. A thing doesn't exist, and then an architect designs that thing, and then the create, then the then the guys with hammers build it. There you go. I need to say the word build, make, construct, destroy blocks, create nice. There you go. All right, I just mentioned babbel. Babel was a babel was a Babel was a tower tower. There you go. I wasn't allowed to say Bell, Eiffel, Ivory, Pisa, or London. Oh that's hilarious. So she's creating this because we're we're talking about tower babble. Yeah, yeah, okay, yeah, okay. And then I've already mentioned at the very first when we talked about English and French and foreign language. Yeah, okay, when you use language, you use it in your speech. That's right. I was gonna say a president makes a speech, talk impediment, language, words, therapy. I wasn't allowed to say any of those. Good job, man, good job Chris. You're the king of that. By the way, No, I'm not. Do you play you play a lot of like board games and family games at home? I do? Yeah? And you play do you play like like word games like that taboo? No, we have taboo? Yeah, yeah, we'll bust it out of Yeah. It was really really fun when it first came out, and then now you kind of know how it works, and so it came out like thirty years ago, yeah, exactly. Here we go Genesis. So so in between where we read with the Noah's the Rainbow and all those things, Noah gets into sin, he gets drunk. Here we missed that part. We're not going to read that. We uh got to talk you about. It talked about his descendants, that's right. And it talks about you know, the lineage and and how based they're starting to repopulate the earth. That's right. And there's lots of interesting things about these guys, right, and it gives their lifespan. Noah lived nine hundred and fifty years total, right, So when he was six hundred years old and built the thing, he was just a young whipper snapper. He was at his peak. He was like just entering middle age at that point, at six hundred years old, he say thirty six. Yeah, yeah for us. So anyway, so it goes to those things, and then finally it talks about how they all the Noah's sons developed into these giant families that turn into huge clans. They go north and south and east, right, is what happens. And so sometimes people ask about populations and why do different people in different contents look differently. This could be a big part of that, right, So here we go. Genesis chapter eleven says, at one time, all the people in the world spoke the same language and used the same words. As the people migrated to the east, they found a plane in the land of Babylonian settled there, they began saying to each other, let's make and harden them with fire. In this region, bricks were used as set a stone, and tar was used for mortar. Then they said, come, let's build a great city for ourselves with a tower that reaches into the sky. This will make us famous and keep us from being scattered all over the world. But the Lord came down to look at the city and the tower that people were building. Look, he said, the people are united. They'll speak the same language. After this, nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them. Come, let's go down and confuse the people with different languages. Then they won't be able to understand each other. In that way, the Lord scattered them all over the world and they stopped building the city. That is why the city was called Babbel, because that is where God the Lord confused the people with different languages. In this way, he scattered them all over the world. Isn't that where we read too? Yep, that's it. Okay, that's it. So this is a crazy, crazy story. So people who don't believe in God would say that this story is absolute nonsense. This is a fictional fable that is invented to explain away why there are people who are different parts of the of the Earth. And people would have tried to explain away different languages by evolution, right, like people over different parts of the of the planet would have developed their own intelligent conversation that would have developed in their own communities. And there are so many different languages and and and that's just a part of a natural evolution, you know, community settling kind of a thing over over millions of years. But even for the evolutionists, they would take you back to there was an original human, yes, right, which means there was a language and eventually there were multiple languages. Well that's true, right, yes, So so man, I'm not an anthropologist. I'm not going to argue that too much. But there are some very strong similarities to the Bible story in the way people in modern science would say they just don't want the just want to dismiss the Bible. Yeah, but it's a bias. That's a great Scientists choose to claim to be unbiased and they're not. That's what I'm saying, so so, uh, everybody has a bias. Yes, so anyway, but this but this story is crazy, isn't it one of the crazy stories in the Bible? Yeah? I think it's. It's a funny story. One God looks at these people and go, what are they doing? Because you know, God's the creator of the entire universe, of which you know, the next galaxy over. They haven't even begun to hardly see our light, you know, or universe. The universe is so huge, and so it's just a giant place. And I say, they haven't even That was a joke. By the way, I'm not saying there's life and other places. People get excited about that. But anyways, I know, I know, and that's why I had to I had to roll it back. I was making a joke and it didn't land the way I'm in it too. But so, God's the creator of the entire unbelievably expansive universe, and you've got these people in Iraq, modern day Iraq, that's where this is at, playing around in the sand. Literally, they're making bricks, they're going to build a building, and I goes, what are they doing? Right? Oh? Great? Remember he wiped out the entire world because all they ever thought all day every day was evil, right, And now here they are, they're starting to build a society, and he sees, oh no, in this, they're going to run amock again. So I need I need to slow them because of their population. They all speak the same language, and they've grown to be this great force. Right, and so if they want to build a tower to the sky, you know that what else can they do? That's right, nothing will be impossible for them, is what is what God says. And so he on purpose slowed down human development a little bit here for the purpose of trying to slow down I believe, trying to slow down the sinful, man centered kind of ideas. So we would absolutely, as Christians, we would believe the Bible at face value, and we would say, the reason why there are so many languages in the world is because it happened at the Tower of Babel. That's correct, and Babel meaning kind of like the Babbel and the word game ba b bla. That's they said, That's why they call it the Tower of Babel. Yeah, So Babylon and Babel they seem to be the same place or connected and babel sounds like a Hebrew word term that means confusion. Right, So that's why that's why he gave that is it sounds like a Hebrew word that means confusion. There are a lot of words in the Bible that sound like another Hebrew word that means a thing. So a lot of times names they won't go right on the nose that word. A lot of times names will sound like another Hebrew word that means a thing. It's kind of a clever, artsy way of naming things for the Hebrew mindset. So the way that Hebrews would name things wasn't always a direct naming with a specific word. They would use words that sounded like other words, and so it was just clever. It's a clever angle. And so this word babble sounds like a Hebrew word that means confusion, which is exactly what God did. He confused the language. So if you think of in Noah's day, let's go back pre flood. These people were living eight hundred, nine hundred years. They're populating the earth rapidly. They can you imagine just the amount of wisdom you would have. Do you feel like you have more wisdom and knowledge today than you did when you were fifteen? Oh my word, yes, can you imagine if you lived another eight hundred years how much you would know? Right? Right, then, let's get let's get people like Edison or Tesla or Ben Franklin who could not help themselves, Da Vinci who could not help themselves, just tinkering with why do these things work? And how do you do this? Right? For eight hundred and nine hundred Because these guys died at seventy eighty years old, fifty years old. Can you imagine if they live nine hundred years collectively, the information they'd be able to share with each other, the incredible advancements that they'd be able to come up with. And so I probly I believe probably in Noah's day things were much more advanced pre flood than by the time you get here. Right, It's like they hit God hit reset on the planet. Okay, you're going to start over. You're not going to carry a lot of the collective knowledge of the unit of the whole country at the whole world at the time. You're going to bring what you know Hamsham and Jafith. And then when you look at their descendants, some are builders, Some are hunters, some are right and they just go back to the foundational things that humanity needs. Some are farmers, some are shepherds. You got Nimrod as a warrior, those guys. And then finally they go, hey, let's build a city's and they start to collect, and God sees the pattern is the same. Now they're going to live shorter, but the pattern is the same. They're coming together with all this collective knowledge and that collective stuff he believed was going to take them into all kinds of wickedness. Again, He's not gonna confuse them. And so when you have language, it's hard, it's hard to communicate. Yeah, have you ever met somebody who speaks uh? Yeah, an impressive amount of languages? Yep, what's the most you've ever seen one human speak? Eleven? I knew a guy who spoke eleven languages and he was fluent in them. Yeah, eleven languages. Yeah, yeahly so he spoke English, he spoke you know them. Yeah, so he spoke English, he spoke French, he spoke Arabic was his main language. He spoke Russian, he spoke German, he spoke Dutch, because those six he spoke in uh, he worked in a tourist area and he could do business in all of those languages. And then he had four tribal languages a couple, two Bedouin type languages, and two sub Saharan African languages Swahili, and I forgot what the other one was. Yeah, but there was. He had eleven languages he speaks, he's fluent in them, and he could his flip from one of the next the next next. Well, yeah, that's great. Oh, Spanish, he spoke Spanish. That was That was the other one. I was trying to think through that. What the other one is? Yea, he could. His Spanish was kind of a Spanish Portuguese mix. Yeah, but yeah. So when we were in Africa, we were in the bush. We our driver ran over a cow. He literally hit it right, And turns out that this tribe it was taking the cout of the market to sell it so they can get and the guy who owned it was trying to sell it to get money for his mother. She was dying to get medicine. Right. So anyway, so we run over this cow and the driver only spoke pocot, and the guys who owned the cow spoke only Swahili, Did I sell you this already? And then and then what ends up happening is they're arguing, and then this Poka driver comes back over to us, who speaks English and and he says he could obviously he speaks in and he says, the driver says to us, roll up your windows, lock the doors. These guys have spears. They will kill you. And so and so he said, they are very upset and we're trying to, you know, sort some things out. So he goes back over there and they're arguing to the point to where like it got so heated that we're in the car. There's like six of us and we're just a couple of white guys who don't speak anything other than English. And so we begin to pray. We're like, God, like do something miraculous here, because we're picturing those seven guys stabbing our driver, who has the keys in his pocket by the way, right, so we're not safe. That was said, give us the keys. We're gonna back up here. We're gonna back a couple hundred yards away, and we're gonna go up on that hill and pray for you. So it turns out, it turns out that. Uh uh. So we pray. We're like, God, just do something miraculous here, because this looks like it's a serious situation. Cow's on the side of the road. It's almost dead, it's just laying there, you know, we don't know what's happening. And all of a sudden, there comes this motorcycle. We haven't seen another vehicle in like four days, but here comes this motorcycle in cloudy dust, you know, coming right toward us. And the guy stops because he sees a commotion and he knocks on the window. We roll it down and he speaks English and he says, can I help you? What turns out he is a guy who speaks both English and Pocot and Swahili, and by trade he's a veterinarian. I'm not kidding. We prayed for this, We prayed that something would happen that it itself. It's almost as if it is a ridiculous you know, God sent that guy on the way way before you prayed that prayer, way before we prayed that print, right, so God had this InMotion. What turns out because he was able to, you know, bridge the gap of languages. What ended up happening was. We discovered that this guy was trying to, you know, sell the cow to bring medicine for his mom, and he wanted sixty bucks for the cow. And our driver was so cheap that he was saying, this old, scrawny cow isn't worth more than like forty dollars, right, And somehow they were able to talk a little bit back and forth with each other, fighting over twenty bucks. They were fighting over twenty bucks. He was risking your life over twenty bucks. Right. Do you ever wonder how much you're worth? Right? That's it, you worth twenty dollars. So we find this out, and then the guy who was with down, who was leaving the group, we all get out of the car. We walk over to the tribal leader and don takes out one hundred dollars and hands it to the guy who owned the cow and says, we are so sorry. And by the way, the veternarian said that the cow would pass away, he would die, so he said, so he get into him and said, we're sorry. And so then the travel leader got emotional and he said, we'll load the cow up onder your roofs. You can take it because you just bought it. And we said no, no, no, we don't want it. What turns out, he got even more emotional because now he has food, and now he has the money for medicine. Right, and everything's worked out and we have a great story. Was glorified. It costs a hundred bucks, It cost a hundred bucks. Died, We almost died? How did God? Did Chris die? And I forgot? We ran over a cow, that's right. But the point is it was the language barrier, right, and yet and yet God had sent us somebody who spoke all three languages and was a veterinarian, and we just thought to ourselves, you can't make that up. My wife and I talk about language stories. I got a million of these. But my wife and I were in Casablanca, in Morocco, and we went to dinner, and then we need to get back to the UH, to the train station, because there was one last train leaving Casablanca going back to Robot, which is where we had a meeting the next morning. And UH, we got turned around, and then we get in a cab and the cab driver doesn't speak anything that we can speak at all, and so we're trying to figure out and I'm trying so hard. I'm trying to use an app on my phone. The language apps were newhere back then. It just wasn't working right. I'm trying to explain to him, I need to go to the train station. Uh, and we need to hurry. Couldn't do it, couldn't do it, could do it. Finally, my wife taps him on the shoulder. It turns out she goes, and I goes, Oh, we took off from I'm like, hurry, and he took off it. We made it, barely made it for the trade. But it's funny. Sometimes you don't need language, sometimes you need a little bit of Uh. So God confounds the language, but something beautiful comes out of it. And God takes even the difficult things, and there are the bad things that makes good from them. Rome's eight twenty eight talks about that God can create all things, or caused all things to work out for good. What happened is all these beautiful cultures, this incredible tapestry of language and culture comes out of the fact that it's not one homogeneous culture. It's all these cultures on one side. That causes a lot of trouble, a lot of wars and racism, all these kind of things, but in its purest form. Have you ever been in a place When I was in Dubai a couple of years ago and we brought in leaders with the Timothy initiative. We brought in key leaders from like thirty countries around the world, and they did some worship songs that everybody knows, and we went into so on stage there were seven different languages leading worship wow, And then on the screens they had the different languages there so you could follow the lyrics up on the screens. You just had to follow your language right while the band was playing, and they went into Chris Thomlins, how Great is Our God? And we had three hundred and fifty people in a ballroom in a hotel in Dubai, all singing their own language of how Great is Our God? Wow? Right, And I was just thinking, man, that's like heaven. That's what heaven can be like. Right, It's a little bit of heaven on earth. Now in Heaven we'll all understand each other. We won't have the languages anymore. But it was a really beautiful thing to see the cultures and they're wearing all their tribal uniforms and outfits and all that kind of stuff. And it was all the different colors and the joy of the Lord, and it reminded me in Galatians. Galatians says, there's no more Jew or Greek. So he's talking about, you know, political lines or nationalities. There's no more slaver free, there's no more male and female. We're all one in Christ Jesus, and so in Jesus we can get back to that oneness, even though the language barriers. The way, Yeah, and God tells us to go to the highways, the hedges. He tells us to go through Jerusalem Judea to other most parts and everyone tell everyone, and that includes bridging the gap of languages. So God didn't create it for a permanent division, you know. But but it's so it's a beautiful thing that we should come together with different languages, different cultures, everything else. So that's great. So okay, well that looks like our time. So hopefully we'll see you tomorrow on the Bible. Guys,