98. A Tiny Tower and the Faithful God

G' day and welcome to Stories of a Faithful God for Kids.

Dave here.

A couple of shout outs before we begin, a big shout out to Will and Abby, who live in New York in the United States of America.

I heard you've been enjoying the podcast as you head to bed.

Great to hear.

And Will, thank you so much for the card.

I love it.

Also, a big shout out to Isabelle, who lives in Carlton, New South Wales, in Australia.

Isabelle's mum sent me in some of her colouring.

Thank you so much, Isabelle.

It's really special to get that from you.

I should say to everyone.

Someone pointed out that the link in the show notes to the colouring pages was broken.

I'm really sorry about that.

It should all be fixed now.

Now, on with the show.

Have you ever looked at someone playing a board game and thought, yeah, they're never gonna win from here.

Or maybe you've seen a sports team and you watch them play and you think, oh, they've got no chance.

Or maybe you've watched your dad try to explain to your mum why it's perfectly OK to buy a really, really expensive barbecue for her birthday and you're like, dad, you should just give up.

You are not gonna win this one.

Sometimes it just seems obvious that someone's gonna lose.

Everyone else knows it, they know it.

Nothing's going to stop it.

That's how some people feel about God.

They think there's no way for God to beat sin.

There's no way he's going to win against all the badness in the world.

Hmm.

I wonder if that's true.

It's time to find out.

Get ready for our next episode of Stories of a Faithful God for Kids.

At the end of our last episode, it was like God had restarted the world.

He'd sent the flood, the waters had gone down and now God was starting again.

With Noah and his family, it seemed like everything could be really, really great again.

Except.

Except for the problem of sin.

People still wanted to live their own way, not God's way.

And we see that in what happens next.

Noah becomes a farmer.

That's not a bad thing.

Farming is really good.

One of the things he grows is grapes.

And grapes can be used to make an alcoholic drink called wine.

In small amounts.

For grown ups, that's fine.

Unfortunately, one day, Noah drinks a lot of wine.

The problem there is when someone drinks too much wine or any type of alcohol like beer or whisky, they lose the ability to control themselves.

It's called getting drunk.

And when people get drunk, they do really Silly things.

That's why God says it's really silly to get drunk.

Well, Noah gets drunk.

And you know what he thinks when he's drunk?

He thinks, hey, it'd be a really good idea to take all my clothes off.

I know, right?

God wants us to be self controlled so we can make good decisions.

Noah is not making good decisions.

But it gets worse.

He falls asleep naked in his tent.

One of his sons, a man named Ham, found his dad like that.

And instead of thinking, oh, no, Dad's really embarrassing himself here, I'd better cover him up, he does the opposite.

He wants to make it even more embarrassing for his dad.

He wants to make it worse.

So he goes and calls his brothers Shem and Japheth.

Hey, guys, check out dad.

All drunk and naked.

How embarrassing.

And to think these are the people God's restarting the world with.

What a disaster.

Thankfully, Ham's two brothers are much more concerned for their dad than Ham is.

In Genesis 9:23, we're told, then Shem and Japheth got a coat and carried it on both their shoulders.

They walked backwards into the tent and covered their father.

They turned their faces away in this way, they did not see their father without clothes.

Phew.

At least they did care about their dad.

When Noah wakes up, he finds out what Ham did, and he's really angry, which, you know, fair enough.

He's so angry, he asks God to curse Ham's son, a man named cainan.

In verse 25, he says, May there be a curse on Canaan.

May he be the lowest slave to his brothers.

Noah also said, may the Lord, the God of Shem, be praised.

May Canaan be Shem's slave.

May God give more land to Japheth.

May Japheth live in Shem's tents, and may Canaan be their slave.

You might be thinking, Canaan, Canaan, wherever heard that name before.

It's actually the name of the land that God's going to give to Israel later on.

All the people there are called Canaanites.

The reason for that is that they're all from the family line of this man, Canaan, the son of Ham.

And they're really evil.

They're really sinful.

They get punished by God for all the evil things they do.

And you can see some of that evil right back here with Ham, the father of canaan.

In chapter 10 of Genesis, we're actually told how the families of Shem, Ham and Japheth spread.

And they do start to spread all over the world, just like God told Them to the family members of Japheth went up north into Europe.

The family members of Ham went south into the land of Canaan, of course, but also down into Africa and also East Africa, into an area of land called Mesopotamia, where there are two really big rivers, the Euphrates river and the Tigris River.

One of Ham's family, a man named Nimrod, started a lot of cities there, including some you might have heard from other parts of the Bible.

Verse 10 of chapter 10 says, at first, Nimrod's kingdom covered Babylon, Erech, Accad and Calneh in the land of Babylonia.

From there he went to Assyria.

There he built the cities of Nineveh, Rehoboth, Ur and Calar.

He also built Rezin, the great city between Nineveh and Kelah.

Some of those cities like Babylon and Nineveh became really big enemies of God's people later on.

It's not surprising that they're started by this guy Nimrod.

He seems to be a pretty dodgy guy.

Well, the family members of Seth, the last of the three brothers, travelled both south and also eastwards.

Everywhere people went, they took their sin with them.

They were violent and rude and unkind to others.

They cared more about themselves than about God.

And we see that in one story we're told in chapter 11 that happened as people were spreading after the flood.

We're told that at that time, everyone in the world spoke the same language.

Imagine that.

No one ever getting confused or not able to talk because they use different languages.

As the people move east, they find a nice looking place in a land called Shinar, and they do something that possibly no one had ever done before.

They make mud into bricks and they bake the bricks in ovens.

So they become hard.

They also work out how to stick the bricks together with mortar.

Then they say, hey, let's build a city for ourselves with a tower in it.

And we'll make the top of the tower reach right up into the sky.

Unfortunately, the reason they want to do that is really bad.

There are two reasons.

I'll read them out from chapter 11, verse 4.

The people say, we will become famous if we do this.

We will not be scattered over all the earth.

Hmm.

They want to become famous.

They want to make a name for themselves.

They want everyone to look at them and say, they're really great.

But you know what?

It's God who makes people great.

But they don't want God to decide whether they should be great or not.

They want to do it themselves.

They don't care about what God thinks.

And you see that in the second thing they said.

They said that once they have their own city and their tower that reaches to the sky, they won't be scattered over the earth.

Except God had told them to scatter over the earth.

It was a part of his good plan to have humans look after the world.

That's the job he gave them when he made them, and then he gave it to them again after the flood.

But they don't care what God says.

They want to be in charge, not him.

They want to decide what they should do.

They don't want to let God decide.

They figure, yeah, with our great city and our really big tower that reaches up as high as God, we're pretty much the same as God.

That means we can decide what's right and wrong for us.

Which is exactly the same thing that Adam and Eve were thinking back in the garden when they ate the fruit.

God told them not to.

Oh dear, this is so bad.

Sin's been going on for ages by this stage and it doesn't seem to be getting any better.

The people who like God, haven't been able to stop it in themselves or in other people.

The flood didn't stop sin.

Maybe.

Maybe God doesn't know how to stop it.

Maybe God doesn't know how to beat sin.

Maybe God is obviously going to lose.

Ah, no, that is not what's going to happen.

And you see that in what God does next.

Verse 5 says, the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built.

Hmm, let me read that again.

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built.

The people think they're building this massive tower and massive city.

They think they're reaching as high as God, but really it's like God's got to get down on his hands and knees to come and see this little itty bitty tower that they've made.

Their building is so silly compared to God.

Trying to make themselves great compared to the greatness of God is so silly.

And that's what all sin is like.

It can look strong, people can feel powerful, but it's nothing compared to the power of God.

It's not obvious that God's going to lose.

It's obvious that sin is going to lose.

God looks at what they're doing and he has a think to himself.

In verse six, he says, now these people are united.

They all speak the same language.

This is only the beginning of what they'll do.

They'll be able to do anything they want.

He isn't scared of them, but he knows that if they keep working together, they'll just use that to do more and more bad stuff.

And so he makes it much harder for them to work together.

He does it by confusing their languages, making them speak all sorts of different languages.

Suddenly, one person says, pass me the hammer.

And the other person's like, vas hastu gesakt?

And the next person's like, por que hablas asi?

They don't know what each other's saying, so they all scatter in different directions over the Earth, just like God planned.

Nothing can stop God's plans, no matter how hard the puny humans try.

And that place where he confused all the languages, it got a name.

A name that means confused.

The name Babel, which is where we get our word Babel from, because everyone sounded like they were babbling.

And Babel became Babylon.

Many years later, the people of Babylon actually attacked God's people, the Israelites, and took them away.

They thought they were much greater than God.

But if you've listened to our series on Daniel, you'll know that God showed them exactly who has the most power.

It's him.

It's God.

Just to be really, really clear, just so you completely understand, it is God who has the most power.

He showed that to the people when Babel was first made, and he showed it to the people later on when it was called Babylon.

But you know what?

A long time after that, God did something more amazing.

After Jesus had died and rose again and gone back to heaven.

God wanted people of all languages to hear about Jesus.

He wanted people of all languages to be saved from sin by Jesus.

There was a problem, though.

On the day when a large crowd gathered together and the disciples of Jesus wanted to tell the crowd all about Jesus.

The people in the crowd actually spoke heaps of different languages, languages the disciples had never learned.

So you know what God did?

Amazingly, he made Jesus disciples speak in lots of different languages, languages they'd never learned because God knew them.

And God is in charge of all language.

You can read about what God did there in Acts 1:2.

Ever since then, followers of Jesus have worked hard to translate the Bible into other languages.

Because in the Bible, we get to know Jesus, who came to save people from every language.

Back in Genesis, God's actually about to start the mission that will lead to Jesus coming.

He's going to make an amazing promise to someone that'll affect the whole world.

But that's a story for next time.