Now today, Friends, we come back to the Book of Genesis, and we are down to the 10th chapter.  But probably I should say a word or two before we leave the 9th chapter because the question always comes up “Why is this recorded about Noah and the sin of Noah?”  Well, may I say that if man had written the Book, he would have done one of two things.  He would have covered it up and made Noah a hero or else he would have made it a great deal more sorted than it is.  But the fact of the matter is that it’s recorded for a purpose; it’s recorded to let you and me know that God was encouraging the children of Israel in entering the land of Canaan for the very simple reason that there was a curse pronounced upon them; a judgment upon them.  And all you have to do is read the rest of the Scripture, the Old Testament on secular history to discover it that.  The Canaanites have pretty much disappeared.

And then these things we’re told are written for our learning.  It’s to let you and me know something of the weakness of the flesh; that the Spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.  And the Lord Jesus said that which is born of the flesh is flesh.  And Paul made it very clear that no flesh would be justified by keeping the law at all.  And Paul in Galatians 2:16 says, “For by the law shall no flesh be justified.”  So that what we have here is the story of a man that fell.  And it’s a story of the weakness of the flesh.  Now we offered an excuse for Noah last time, but frankly this is the bare facts of getting right down to the nitty gritty:  Noah got drunk.  And that raises for us today the real problem and maybe that you as a Christian do not get drunk.  But may I say, maybe you and I are living in the flesh to the extent we’re just as displeasing to God as Noah was.  

We today have, I think, a wrong conception of life and this universe that we’re in.  For instance, our nation has spent billions of dollars to put man on the moon, and it’s just not a good place to live it looks like.  But nothing is spent on how to live on the earth.  And you know that’s what God is concerned about; is to train you and me how to live on the earth.  And so you have this tremendous statement, and there’s no curse pronounced upon Ham; the curse is upon Canaan, his son, and I do not know how much Canaan was involved in this.  All we are given is just the record here, and we recognize that Canaan is mentioned for a very definite purpose.  But it hasn’t anything to do with a curse of color that’s put upon any part of the human race.  I think that has been one of the sad things that have been said about the black man that is not fair to him at all.   And it’s not fair to God because He never said that.  After all, the first great civilizations were Hamitic civilizations; the Egyptians and the Babylonians.  And we need, I think, to make it very clear certainly Noah didn’t lose his salvation.  I trust that you understand that; that it was an awful thing and, frankly, I see no excuse for it.

CHAPTER 10

SONS OF JAPHETH, HAM, AND SHEM

Now, we come to Chapter 10 and, when we come to Chapter 10, we are in this area here where we see the genealogy—actually, the families—the origin of the nations of the world.  Now this Chapter 10 is far more important than the attention I’m going to give to it today.  Now I regret that I can’t give more attention to it, but we do have to cut corners in certain places.  And, very frankly, this is a chapter that will only interest certain folk who are interested in ethnology or anthropology and the story of man on the earth.  

And I have before me a chart made by a man with his Master’s Degree who has majored in ethnology, H. S. Miller, and it’s a very complicated chart.  It shows where all of the races of the world and the different nations came from.  You can find out here where you came from.  And you may be sure that the sons of Japheth never are part of the lost tribes of Israel.  They just don’t get that way.  And ethnology would never bear out that type of thing.  That makes this a very interesting chapter.  

And by the way, this man who got his Master’s in this field used the 10th Chapter of being basic to any study; that there is a three-fold division of the human family today–three major divisions in ethnology and revealed in these three sons of Noah: Ham, Shem, and Japheth.  Now we have given to us here in this 10th Chapter the genealogies of all three of them.  You have Japheth in Verses 2 and 5, and then we have those that are given of Ham, Verses 6 through 20, and they were the ones outstanding at the very beginning by the way.  And then you have the sons of Shem in Verses 21 to 33.  And you find that the same pattern that we’ve had so far is being followed—and it’ll be followed right through the Bible, for that matter.  God gives the rejected line first and a word concerning it, and then he drops that subject, not to be brought up again by the way.  And then He gives the accepted line; the line that’s leading to Christ.  

So you have here these three-fold divisions of the human family.  Let me read again:

Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood.  The sons of Japheth; Gomer, and Magog, and Madai, and Javan, and Tubal, and Meshech, and Tiras.  (Genesis 10:1-2)

Now in this chart that I have before me, if you wanted to follow through in that, you’d find out that the Seythians, the Slavs, Russians, Bulgarians, Bohemians, Poles, Slovaks, Croatians all came from Magog.  And then from Madai, the Indians came from there and the Iranic races—Medes, Persians Afghans, and Kurds.  And then from Javan, why we have the Greeks, Romans, and Romance Nations; French, Spanish Portuguese, Italians, and so on.  Then you have coming from Tiras are the Thracians, the Teutons, the Germans, and from them you have the east Germanic and the European races, the north Germanic or the Scandinavians, and the west Germanic and from them the High German, the Low German, the Angles, and the Saxons and the Jutes, the Anglo-Saxon race, the English people.  May I say to you this is a tremendously interesting chart, and I wish that it was possible for us to send it out, but we have no supervision over that chart at all.  And I’d get in trouble if I attempted to send it out.  But it is extremely interesting.  

And then you have the sons of Ham given here:

And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan. (Genesis 10:6)

Now you see there were other sons of Ham, but the curse only went upon Canaan.  Why it didn’t go upon the others, I’m not prepared to say.  I recognize there are others that can give you the whole thing.  

Now from Cush, there came the Ethiopians.  And may I say that actually from the Canaanites, you get the Phoenicians, and the Hittites, and the Jebusites, and the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites, and all the other “electric lights” too, by the way.  But frankly, you find that the Africans came from Cush, and they’re the Ethiopians; Mizraim, the Egyptians and the Libyans, you see.  So that all of these races, they were Hamitic, if you please.  This is a tremendous division.  

And then we have the story here of Cush—

And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. 

And mighty—actually what this man wanted, he wanted to become, if you please, the ruler of a great world empire.  That’s exactly what the man was interested in.  He wanted to become a great world ruler.  And we find that he attempted to do it.  We’re told here:

 He was a mighty hunter before the Lord: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.  (Genesis 10:8-9)

And he’s not a wild game hunter.  Sometimes they give a boy a little air gun, and he goes out and he shots a sparrow and when he comes in, why they say, “My, look, he’s a little Nimrod.  He hit a sparrow.”  But actually, Nimrod wasn’t shooting sparrows or hunting wild game in Africa.  He was a hunter of men’s souls.  That’s the thought here.  “Wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord.”  

And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar.  (Genesis 10:10)

Those great cities that were there, he’s the founder of them.  Now here’s quite a story that you pick up in secular history.  Alexander Hislop, in his book The Two Babylons, gives the background, which I’m not going to enter into today at all.  But it’s a very fascinating story of how Nimrod actually is responsible I think for the Tower of Babel for he attempted to bring together the human race after the flood in an effort to get them united in a race or in a nation where he could become a great world ruler.  He was the founder of Babel.  He’s a rebel, hunter of the souls of men; he’s the lawless one, and he’s a shadow and a type of the last world ruler, the Antichrist who is to come.  And this is the man that is before us here.  I don’t care to enter into more detail concerning him.  

The first great civilization came, therefore, out from the sons of Ham.  We need to recognize that.  It’s so easy today to fall into the old pattern.  We were taught that in school; let’s face it, a few years ago.  Now the black man today is wanting more study given of his race.  I don’t blame him.  I don’t think probably he’s been given an opportunity in the past couple hundred years.  But if you want to know the story of the black man, the story of his beginnings, he just happened to head up the two great civilizations; the first two that appeared on this earth—they were sons of Ham.  And that’s important to see.  Nimrod was a son of Ham.  

And then we’re told, as we go on down, in this—and I’m not going to attempt to develop that line at all, but in Verse 21 we’re told “Unto Shem”.  Now we’re given the line that is going to lead to Abraham and then to the nation Israel and to the coming of Christ into the world.  This is the pattern of the Holy Spirit.  He gives the rejected line first.  He drops it, and then he picks up the other.  Now we’re going to follow this line, which is a very important thing to know.  And God is bidding goodbye to the rest of humanity for the time being, because He’s coming back after them later on.

Saphir in his book (The Divine Unity of Scripture)–and I want to quote him.  Now this is one of the most remarkable statements concerning the 10th Chapter of Genesis.  Let me read it.

“The tenth chapter of Genesis is a very remarkable chapter.  Before God leaves, as it were, the nations to themselves and begins to deal with Israel, His chosen people from Abraham downward, He takes a loving farewell to all the nations of the earth as much as to say, ‘I am going to leave you for a while, but I love you.  I have created you: I have ordered all your future.’  And their different genealogies are traced.”

That is the picture we have before us.  Now in this chapter, 70 nations are listed; 14 of them from Japheth, 30 of them came from Ham—don’t forget that—I’d give you  different conception today of the black man at his beginning.  Now I do want to say this, and I should add I think that 26 nations are from Shem.  So you have 70 nations that are listed here.  It would seem to me that God has done this.  

Why has the white man in our day been so prominent?  Well, I’ll tell you why—because at the beginning, it was the black man, the colored races.  Then you have the sons of Shem.  During the time of David, they made a tremendous impact upon this world.  And you’ll notice that from Shem there came others; actually, the Syrians–not the Chaldeans, I disagree with that—but there came the Lydians, and not the Assyrians, but Syrians, and the Armenians, and you find that from them came the Arabians from Joktan.  And you find several of these great nations; now they appeared next.  Now we are in that period, apparently, where the white man has come to the front.  I think that all three are demonstrating that regardless of whether it’s a son of Ham, Shem, or Japheth, they are incapable of ruling this world.  And that’s what God is demonstrating, I believe.  And to see this is a tremendous thing.  

Now you have in the sons of Shem, one that is mentioned that a great deal is made of, and that’s in Verse 25.  And I must mention it to pass on.

And unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan.

Now when I went over this before, I received all sorts of weird interpretations of what it meant the earth was divided, and that it speaks actually that there is physical division here in the earth; that the earth had some tremendous physical catastrophe that took place.  Well, frankly, all in the world that Moses is saying here, Friend, he’s anticipating the next chapter in which he’s going to give the Tower of Babel.  That was the time the earth was divided.  And may I say the simple interpretation just seems to be the one that a great many miss.  And we ought not to.

Now I’ve dropped down to pick up the last verse.  Verse 32 of this chapter:

These are the families of the sons of Noah, after their generations, in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood.

And I want to submit to you that this is one of the great chapters of the Bible, and yet we spent less time with it than any other.  But you can see what a rich study this would make for anyone who really wanted to take, not a bias, but a fair appraisal of the human family.  This has been a very remarkable chapter and a great many have used it.

CHAPTER 11 

THE TOWER OF BABEL

Now we come to the 11th Chapter, and we come here to what I sometimes have called the greatest tongue movement on record, and that was the Tower of Babel.  Now let’s move down in this because I won’t get very far, but I will get a little ways.  

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.  (Genesis 1:1)

I do not know what language they spoke at that time.  A friend of mine, a fellow Texan, a preacher in Texas, he told me—he said, “You and I probably are the only two that really know what they spoke before the Tower of Babel, and that was Texan.”  Well, I’ll be honest with you, since then I’ve come to the conclusion it could have been something else.  But what the language was, I don’t know.  And I believe whatever that language was will be the language that will be spoken in heaven.  I think it’s going to be a much better language than we have today.  They’ll have better nouns and verbs and adverbs and adjectives.  Now will you notice, and “And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech.”

And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.  (Genesis 11:2)

“As they journeyed from the east”—now apparently man was moving toward the west.  “That they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.”  Now that is in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley.

And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.  (Genesis 11:3)

Well, down in that area there’s no stone, and so they made brick, and that in and of itself reveals something about the building.  It’s not, shall I say, a sort of a phony building.  Well, according to that then, practically all the buildings in our cities today are that way made of brick, and that’s the type of building material I guess that’s more popular than any other kind today.  And yet the brick was used there because of the practicality of it; it was a necessity.  Now notice what they did.

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.  (Genesis 11:4)

Now you will notice that I have emphasized that business of “us”.  They’ve got a bad case of perpendicular “I-itis”.  “Let us make us a name.”  And this is to be a rallying place for man.  I think the sole purpose of this was to be a rallying place for man.  And I’m going to go into a great deal more detail next time, but the Tower of Babel was a ziggurat.  And there are many ruins of them in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley.  I have a picture of the ruins of the one in Ur of the Chaldeans where Abraham lived.  And it was made of brick, solid, and around it was a runway that went to the top; and apparently on top of it was an altar on which, in certain instances, they offered human sacrifices.  Later on, the children were offered, put in a red-hot idol.  All of this was connected with the ziggurat later on.  But at this time, they make a tower, and it’s to reach to heaven.  Now don’t get the impression that they’re trying to get their feet out of water or they’re trying to build above flood stage; that’s not even the thought at all.  The whole thought is that they’re attempting to build something that is a rallying point for man against God.  That’s what the Tower of Babel was; it was rebellion against Almighty God.