Dear
Friend,
If you do not already have a habit of gathering daily manna the first thing in the morning (we can look at the example given to us in Exodus 16 and find the pattern for collecting daily manna), make it a habit. Establish your life and your schedule to allow you the necessary time to do your daily collection first thing every morning to give you the strength to make it through the day. And remember that today’s manna will not be sufficient for tomorrow; tomorrow’s manna must be collected tomorrow morning.
Monday, March 12, 2018
Today's Passage : Today's Passage:Subjecta:The Tower of Babel
Bible Verse:Genesis 11:1-9 (ESV)
"Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar [Babylonia] and settled there.
And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.”
So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth."
Message:
Babel sounds like the Hebrew word for “confusion”; thus the passage says that Babel was named because it was the place where God confused the languages of the world. In 1700 B.C., Babylon was probably the largest city in the world. It again became the largest and one of the richest cities in the world over 1,000 years later, in the period when it was ruled by Nebuchadnezzar and his descendants (@ 600-450 BC). It was a city given to grand structures, including one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the great Hanging Gardens.
The story of the Tower of Babel would thus have made sense to anyone living in the Middle East. Babylon was a great crossroads of trade, a meeting place for cultures with widely disparate languages, and was repeatedly conquered and reconquered by great empires.
Secular history tells us that there was a great tower built in ancient Babylon proper, known as the Etemenanki (Sumerian “temple of the foundation of heaven and earth”). Nebuchadnezzar wrote that the original tower had been built in antiquity: “A former king built the Temple of the Seven Lights of the Earth, but he did not complete its head. Since a remote time, people had abandoned it, without order expressing their words. Since that time earthquakes and lightning had dispersed its sun-dried clay; the bricks of the casing had split, and the earth of the interior had been scattered in heaps.” So this might well be the same tower as described by Genesis.
Tower of Babel from Genesis
Genesis is an ancient book, and it is always difficult to tell how literally God intends us to take it. I will not argue with anyone who wants to say it is factual truth to the smallest detail; nor with anyone who wants to say it did not happen at all, but is simply a Godly allegory, true in its message but not in fact; nor with anyone taking a position in-between.
But why seek confirmation of the Bible in the secular world? The moral is the important point; and in this I have no doubt, that Genesis is the very Word of God. The Tower of Babel was not built for the worship of God, but for the glory of man. It was temple dedicated to sinful pride. Even the materials used were manmade, a brick manufactured by the hands of men, rather than stone given to them by God. So God stopped them by giving them different languages and scattering them around in tribes, and the tower was abandoned.
One cannot find God by the artifice of man. No matter how high we build a tower, no matter how far into space we look, we are not going to see God using the devices of technology. We know God only by His revelation of Himself to us. We might find Him by seeking Him, but only in humility.
Meditation
:
Prayer :
The blessing of the Lord rest and remain upon all his people, in every land, of every tongue; the Lord meet in mercy all that seek him; the Lord comfort all who suffer and mourn; the Lord hasten his coming, and give us, his people, the blessing of peace....Amen
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