Playing Chess With the Devil: Making Sense of the Most Popular Book In the World. Genesis 6-11. The Covenant With Noah and Babel. Lesson 6
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Playing Chess With the Devil: Making Sense of the Most Popular Book In the World. Genesis 6-11. The Covenant With Noah and Babel. Lesson 6
The situation by Genesis 6:7 looked dour. God’s wrath was coming against the pre-Flood world like a locomotive in 120 years with the awful result being the destruction of every living thing in the creation, including the one who carried the Redeemer in his loins.
But God had made a covenant promise to Eve and to Satan in Genesis 3:15 with these words, “I will…” Thus, God bound Himself and made a unilateral covenant bond in blood, intimating that His own life and death was at stake if He failed to make good on His word. As the sole covenant-maker, He did not require that any conditions be met by Adam or anyone else. The Bible says that God doesn’t lie (Titus 1:2), and the Bible refers to God’s covenants as “the covenants of promise.” So there isn’t any possible way to circumvent or nullify any of those
covenants.
Just after the announcement of coming judgment in Genesis 6, it may have appeared very similar to the plot of a serial movie in which at the close of each episode there is always a cliffhanger, as the hero would find himself in a perilous situation from which there was no escape. It may appear often as one continues through the Old and New Testaments that Satan checkmated God, but there is ALWAYS an escape because God is always faithful to His covenant promises, all of them. There is no way for the Almighty God to fail.
The righteous man Noah is the last man named in the godly line in Genesis 5. He was one of those in the pre-Flood days who anticipated the Redeemer and was not tainted by the world’s influence about him. Noah also carried the seed of the Redeemer in him. Therefore, Noah would be spared from the coming judgment of a worldwide Flood. So
in Genesis 6:8, “Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” God also spared Noah’s wife and their three sons with their wives because one of Noah’s three sons was the last one in line and the only living human who carried the Redeemer’s seed.
God instructed Noah to build a mammoth ship that would hold all the animals necessary to repopulate the earth after the Flood. They carried with them enough food for themselves and for the creatures on board. When the time had arrived, God initiated a cataclysmic flood that covered the entire earth by water that came from both above the earth and below the earth out of deep springs (Genesis 7:11, 8:2). The flood drowned every living thing on the earth. The nature of the earth’s surface was probably a lot different before the flood than it is today due to worldwide earthquakes and upheaval that brought in so much water. Noah, his
sons, and the promise of the future Redeemer were secured and kept by God according to the last six words in Genesis 7:16 when they entered the ark before the flood began, “Then the Lord shut him in.”
The GrandMaster of the Universe then made one of the most dramatic moves ever found in the history of redemption. Satan’s mighty, pervasively evil kingdom that had millions of eyes and ears on the watch for the Avenger was literally wiped from the earth with one sweep of God’s hand as everything and everyone died. However, the seed of the Redeemer came straight up out of the water like a Triton submarine and floated right in front of Satan in the form of one of Noah’s three sons. There was the Promise, bobbing on the waters of death and destruction on top of Satan’s empire, dining on a cruise ship, and being protected in the ark while Satan’s minions lay
in their watery graves below. God simply cleared the board and started again, but this time His King was the only figure standing on the playing surface. As the Lord said, ” I will…“
When the Flood ended, Noah and his family emerged from the great ship. They burnt offerings to God to thank Him for His mercy and grace and preservation. It was then that God made another covenant promise, or the Covenant with Noah. Staring the devil straight in the eyes with a smile, God said, “I now establish my covenant with you (Noah) and your descendants after you.” (Genesis 9:9) This is the second covenant promise in the Covenant of Redemption.
It is important to note here that this is NOT a new covenant. None of the major covenants in the Covenant of Redemption are new. Each of the covenants contains new information, but none of them REPLACE any other
covenants before them. The covenants build on one another. They are not like adding beads to a string. The are like extensions of a telescope. There is ONE, unified covenant of redemption that is revealed in parts over time. It looks like the diagram below. (See diagram at http://public.iwork.com/document/?a=p38279198&d=Lesson_6_-_Genesis_6-11_-_The_Covenant_With_Noah_and_Babel.pages)
You will be able to see that the one Covenant of Redemption, like a single telescope, can be pushed in and pulled out of the last extension, Christ. The entire telescope, you could say is about Christ and can be folded into Christ, which, as has been said, is the whole story of the Bible in one word. This is the Covenant of Redemption that God made with Adam and fulfilled in Christ.
The covenant with Noah was essentially a reiteration of the covenant with Adam. The very same
mandates given to Adam and Eve in Genesis 1:28, 29 are repeated to Noah (Genesis 9:1-3).
Then God added a new feature to this covenant – a death penalty clause. This was to check the unlimited violence of man against man and against His Promise in the previous world. Man’s life was protected because he was made in the image of God.
The best part about this covenant is that God pasted a banner – a rainbow – across the heavens that would occasionally go up from then to the end of time whenever it rained. That sign was a promise somewhere on the earth everyday that the world would never again be destroyed by water, even though every inclination of man’s heart is evil from childhood (Genesis 9:11-15; 8:21). It was a back door vow, an oath, that the Redeemer would indeed stamp on the serpent’s head unimpeded by any further world judgments like the
last one by water. Nothing in the future would ever stop God again from directly fulfilling His guarantee to crush Satan’s head. The promise was marching inexorably toward fulfillment. Regardless of man’s wicked nature henceforth, there weren’t going to be any more detours. The present world order would not be interrupted again. Remember that along with this sign written across the sky reminding and nagging Satan that the clock was running and his doom was sure, the Lord had fastened a nice set of handcuffs on him to add a bit of restraint to his murderous frenzy.
On the other hand, the devil could have taken comfort in the fact that even though his previous game was automatically forfeited, nevertheless, he now had a handle on the situation. He stood face to face with the Promise in one of those three sons. The millions of pre-flood options and their hiding places
were now gone. So what if the game was tied at zero again? What difference did it make if the devil had a couple of fouls to start the second half? Things weren’t so bad. He had done well.
The devil focused his attention on the three sons of Noah. Regardless of the fact that it was a new game, nothing had really changed in the nature of man since the Fall in the garden. The corruption resident in the sons of Adam from the Fall always gave birth to vileness when the fertilizer of fleshly temptation was spread upon it. So when the righteous man Noah in a weak moment lost his self-control through intoxication and lay naked in his tent, the sinful nature inherent in his family took its predictable course. We don’t know the exact nature of what happened in Genesis 9:22 when his son, Ham, entered his father’s tent, but something abominable took place as is stated in 9:24.
The result was that Noah cursed the son of Ham, Canaan, and his endless generations after him with slavery, 9:25. Their necks would be forever under the boot of bondage. Effectively, no Conqueror from Ham would or could place his heel on the Dragon’s precious heads. That now left two of Noah’s sons to worry about, Japheth and Shem. Which one wore the heavy boots that would come down on his royal diadems?
It didn’t take long for the Tempter to answer that question because Noah continued to speak, moving from cursing Ham’s son to blessing his other two sons (9:26, 27). He clearly stated that Shem would be preeminent and over all. But it was probably the line “Blessed be the Lord, the God of Shem” that tipped him off. It wasn’t that Noah said “the God of Shem, Ham, and Japheth.” He said “the God of Shem.” That was a spedific Messianic note sounded through Shem. The
Japhethites would be prosperous and have political dominion. But, Noah said, even the Japhethites would live in the light of and be blessed by the presence of Shem who was promised sustenance and special protection by God while the cursed son of Ham would serve Shem. Little did the Devil know then that Shem’s descendants would grow to be the nation the Devil would direct all his rage against in what became the Semites (or Shemites), the Jewish race of the Bible. The Devil would become the Adolf Hitler of Eternal Darkness and the personification of anti-Semitism as he hunted among them from house to house looking for the Promise he hated.
As an aside, from those three sons of Noah, all the nations of the world came forth and spread upon the earth. The Japhethites went northward generally.(10:1-4). The Hamites moved eastward and south and became centralized in the
eastern Mediterranean (10:6-20). The Shemites remained centralized generally in the eastern Mediterranean although many of these places in the whole chapter are unknown today (10:21-31)
Then something sinister began to evolve in Ham’s wider family. As the peoples of the earth after the flood rooted themselves in their regions, the Hamites established solidarity with countless generations of those who were hostile against the Seed of the woman. For example, in 10:6, Mizraim is named as a descendant of Ham along with Canaan. Mizraim’s descendants later became the Egyptians who were and always have been in antithesis to the Promise. Another grandson of Ham, Nimrod (10:8), juxtapositioned himself against the Promise and its people for centuries by posting himself and his kingdom up in Babylon and Assyria and taking on the character of “a mighty warrior on the earth…and a
mighty hunter before the Lord” (10:8, 9). Driven by Satan in his rage against God, these nations absorbed the character of their great ancestor Nimrod whose prowess as a hunter is pejoratively mentioned here. All of the later history of these peoples from this region of the world points to Nimrod’s moral character as a hunter of men, not animals. He established an autocratic, imperialistic, despotic system of tyranny that was used often against the Seed of the woman in attempts to eradicate the Promise from Israel’s soil. Nimrod’s rapacious attitude and character became the unifying principle for the men of that region and the events of Genesis 11. The wicked momentum that was gaining in the line of Ham through Nimrod soon consolidated men in those lands politically and in a sense religiously. It started to spread and soon the whole world was drawn to godless
rebellion and violence once again against the Creator and His authority (11:1-4). Ultimately, it would be directed against the Promised Seed of the woman if allowed to progress unstopped.
At the time, the whole world’s communication was based on one language spoken by all. That one simple language allowed Nimrodic schemes to coagulate rapidly and coalesce into a unified stand against God in the building of a political and religious center of operations in Babel (Babylon), the seat of Nimrod’s tyranny. From here, his command center, Satan could hunt the Seed with the whole world pursuing Him in swift, clear, common communication with one another. Their hunt for the Seed would be precise and decisive. Since God had promised Noah that never again would He destroy the world by water and that there would forever be “seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter,
day and night” (Genesis 8:22), wiping out the world again was not an option to stop the gathering clouds of darkness. So the Sovereign Lord came down among them in Babylon and sabotaged theirs and all international, unifying language forever by confounding the one tongue spoken by all and breaking it into thousands of tongues and dialects (11:5-9). Understanding each other’s words, meanings, nuances, and intents became a nightmare and confusion, which is what resulted at Babel. From that day, diplomacy between nations would forever be a curse for men, but it would be the same also for Satan in his quest for the Promise. Whatever conspiring was done – evil or good – was forever fraught with misunderstanding, thus retarding the progress of wrongdoing and conspiracy wherever it appeared. Such barriers of speech would distance men from one another, make them suspect of each
other, and seclude and isolate them in their territories and countries from that day forward. There would never be international union and cooperation again till the end of time. Nations would tear at one another and be at each other’s throats without reprieve. A few would consort together from time to time but with difficulty. Most would be at odds with each other most of the time. The Tempter was now to face division and wrangle on every hand when he attempted to bond nations together against God’s Seed. These events probably took place well before 4000 B.C. Though Satan appeared to be equal to God at times, the Sovereign Lord ruled with almighty hand over all the affairs of His covenant with Adam and Noah, and none could stay His hand.
Meanwhile, the Promise proceeded along family lines in the sons of Shem, moving silently as it always had from him to Arphaxad to
Shelah to Eber (who became father of the Hebrews) to Peleg (10:22-25). Peleg probably knew little about the Promise he held or why the world suddenly became such a bizarre place to live in on one day in his life. On that day the whole world had need of speech pathology because men’s tongues tangled themselves. Worldwide confusion, fear, anger, and separation between peoples took immediate effect. It would have been incomprehensible to him that the reason everyone talked one way on one day and then talked differently the next day was indirectly because of him (10:25). He had witnessed a cataclysmic, miraculous event of Biblical proportion in his lifetime, but how could he have known that it was because of the future King within him?
Genesis 11:18-26 continues to trace the footprint of the Redeemer till it comes up to the one man whose presence dominates the rest of
Genesis and, for that matter, much of the rest of the Bible – Abraham. God’s covenant promise to Adam and Noah had stealthily moved through antediluvian and postdiluvian times with two eras of major revelation over a numbered period of years that are unknown to us. But special revelation began its third period of pronouncement when God chose and called his servant Abraham from out of the center of the symbol of Imperialism.
Up to this time, the only knowledge about God’s Promise was that a single Being would come, whose lineage was traced through Shem to Noah and eventually back to Adam and Eve. That individual would do mortal damage to the one who had deceived Eve and brought death and ruin to God’s creation. Nothing more was known about Him than that. It was only an ancient Promise, passed on from generation to generation. But nothing had happened. Nothing had
changed except that corruption had advanced exceedingly, and man, the masterpiece of God’s creation, was drowning in an endless cycle of death (Genesis 5, “…and then he died…and then he died”) and was in desperate need of redemption. Only a naked Promise of “I will” from God stood. But there had been nothing more for a long time. A very long time. God had remained silent, and the world waited.
“With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping His promise as some understand slowness.” (II Peter 3:8,9) But the desert of silence was about to bloom. Two hundred and fifteen amazing years of redemptive revelation was about to come down. That revelation was going to give a wealth of more details, more data, and more definition about the Promise. With Abraham, God took the artist’s brush in His hand, and He
sketched a broad outline of the portrait of His Promise. From Genesis 12-50, He dabbled meaningless paint on the fabric. He sketched a few rich but incoherent details about His Promise’s nature, His family, His work, and His destiny. At the end of Genesis, the Seed of 3:15, however, would still be unrecognizable, but all those marks on that canvas would eventually be splotches of paint that were needed for the whole picture to be complete. One day you would see an altogether lovely picture of His Promise. It would be so clear that it looked like a color digital photograph of His face and His life, so clear that you would wonder how anyone could not see Him in all His glory. Each touch of paint would tell you something about Him, but none of them by themselves meant much.
In spite of all the devil’s display of power and attempts at eradication of the Promise, this man,
Abraham, who would be at the center of all of redemptive history throughout the Bible, came – unbelievably – straight up out of the middle of the devil’s lair and Nimrod’s empire where Satan had made his last stand to find the Promised Seed of the woman at Babylon. Yes, Babylon! Abraham’s family emerged directly out of Babylon from the Ur of the Chaldees (11:31) The Promise sat right there, invisibly, directly in front of and right under the devil’s nose. What irony! The Lord played with his foe like a cat with a helpless mouse.
“Oh, the depth of the riches and the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable His judgments, and His paths beyond tracing out. Who has known the mind of the Lord?” (Romans 11:33,34)
Dale is a resident of California, a motorcycle rider, writer of humorous articles, caricatures, features, and theological studies that help people make sense of the most popular book in the world.
http://www.born2razehell.com and http://dalehavencox.weebly.com/
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