Babel Effect: From reddish brown to freckled, exclaiming 'Uff da!'

 When God judged the rebellion against Him at the Tower of Babel, He didn’t just supernaturally give the human race new-spoken vocabularies and dialects; He miraculously scrambled the cells in their brains so they were different.

“Folks who speak 2-3 different languages know that you think differently in each language and God literally reprogrammed their thinking processes where all of a sudden they couldn’t communicate with one another,” explains Preacher Richard Jordan.

“Not only did they wake up the next morning with their brains rewired, their bodies had been changed and suddenly there were ethnic changes to physiques, skin color, facial expressions, etc. You say, ‘Can God do that?!’ Sure He can. He made you to start with!

“But there’s more than that, because if you go to Genesis 10 where it describes the migration of Noah’s descendants, you see in verse 5: ‘By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations.’

“What it takes to make a nation is an identity of geographic territory. We say ‘borders, language and culture,’ and that’s what that was right there. Without identifiable borders enforced by a government, you don’t have a country.

“A family is simply you have a head you come from and that’s the ethnic division that happened at Babel. The culture came from that ethnic identity.

“Think about what Christ does? He comes into any culture and lives His own life. He sanctifies that culture; purifies it. He says, ‘This is how I live in that culture.’ It demonstrates the life and, by the way, when you get every culture filled with Christ, what would you have? Christ in a multi-faceted array.

“You remember ‘the coat of many colors’? Adam had it first because the Lord Jesus Christ had it first. Jacob didn’t get the first. You have this multi-faced display of the life of God through the people He created, demonstrating all that the Father’s put into His Son.

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“Genesis 10:31 says, [31] These are the sons of Shem, after their families, after their tongues, in their lands, after their nations.
[32] 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.

“This chapter’s talking about God establishing national entities made up of government-enforced geographic identifiable boundaries out of which are languages groups and then ethnicity.

“When God set the nation Israel aside politically with their captivity, putting them off into Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar was the first head of the Gentile nations to replace Israel in the earth temporarily and the Bible says seven times in the Book of Daniel: [4] Then an herald cried aloud, To you it is commanded, O people, nations, and languages.

“Obviously when God divides up humanity, He divides it up as people, nations, languages and that issue about dividing the thing ‘on the face of the earth’ is important. Genesis 10:25 says, ‘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.’

“Eber, by the way, is where we get the name ‘Hebrew.’ Abraham is a descendant of Eber. The name Peleg means ‘divided, torn apart.’ His daddy named him that 'for in his days was the earth divided.' Genesis 11:18-19: [18] And Peleg lived thirty years, and begat Reu:
[19] And Peleg lived after he begat Reu two hundred and nine years, and begat sons and daughters.

“So if Peleg was 30 years old when he had his first kid, and then he lived 209 years after that, how long did he live? He lived 239 years and during that time the earth was divided. Obviously the earth was divided at the time of Babel. How long did it take God to scramble the brains and change the language? Bingo!

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“Ever hear anybody talk about the ‘mark of Cain,’ telling you that’s where black people came from? That’s about as stupid as you can get because, if that’s where it came from, how did it get through the Flood? The mark of Cain wasn’t a skin color anyway. People say, ‘Well, it’s the curse on Ham,’ but did you ever notice in Genesis 9 He didn’t curse Ham? That’s another non-starter.

“By the way, when God changes people’s skin color and wants to curse them, the color He changes them to is white. When Miriam rebels against Moses, for example, God smites her with leprosy, which turns your skin white.

“So people who want to argue about that stuff, you know, they prove too much. Adam wasn’t white or black; he was reddish brown, made out of the dirt (reddish-brown clay) of Palestine. But that’s the only way you can get the other extremes. God heals a guy of leprosy and what color does his skin turn? Back to what it was before and He does it instantly.

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“The idea often put forward is that when the verse says, ‘the earth was divided,’ it wasn’t just about dividing the languages and that this is where the ‘continental drift’ came in. I don’t know if there was a continental drift, but if there was, for 239 years the one earth mass had to divide up to where it now is and that means it had to move about 10-12 miles a year. I know in the text it tends to say there was something that happened, boom, this day, and the earth was divided. You can study in Amos about the earthquakes.

“Many people say the division of the earth and the change in its topography all took place at the Flood, but if you’re going to believe in continental drift you have to say it took place about 250 years after the Flood in the time of Peleg.

“The idea there is when God divides it, he divides it out of distinct geographic areas. Deuteronomy says He divided men their inheritance. The continental configuration of the way the planet looks today is designed to facilitate this issue.

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“Now, if Peleg lived 239 years, he lived within a decade or two of the time of the birth of Abraham. So when Abraham’s born this stuff is freshly happening. Sometime we think about all of that going thousands of years long and then Abraham just showed up. That’s not what happened so this stuff is in the mix and the nations have rejected God and defied Him.

“God separated out humans to compartmentalize the violence that came from rejecting Him and then He chose one man out of it, who was one of them, a Syrian ready to perish and an idol-worshipper, and He made of him a great nation.

“The word Gentile in the Bible is almost always, not every time, the translation of the Greek word ethnos, which we have in our language as the word ethnic. Our term ethnic is to describe the difference in the racial makeup of people and is the term that comes from the term Gentile.

“When the term Gentile, or nations, is used in the Bible it’s really addressing the various types of people that make up nations. You realize the colors aren’t really the issue. It’s not that I don’t see any differences; it’s that I do see the differences and the differences are not what make the difference.

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“When we think of the word Gentile, most of the time we think of this blob of people; everybody out there who’s not Israel. But in the Bible, and in Paul’s thinking, when he thought about Gentiles, he understood that it wasn't just everybody who wasn’t a Jew; he understood that the Gentiles had divisions among them that God put there so that when it's asked, ‘What’s the origin of the different races in the earth?’ you see in Scripture God did that.

“The issue of who did it and where’d it come from, or when and why did God do it, are all questions Paul understood and had a very definite viewpoint about. You have to understand it’s a radical thing for the Apostle Paul to think these things. Paul was a rabbinical scholar. He was a Hebrew of the Hebrews, circumcised the eighth day, of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamim.

“He was a thoroughbred Jew and they don’t think well of the Goyim. Acts 10:28 says, [28] And he said unto them, Ye know how that it is an unlawful thing for a man that is a Jew to keep company, or come unto one of another nation; but God hath shewed me that I should not call any man common or unclean.

“For Paul to talk about being the Apostle to the Gentiles there was a radical racial change in his thinking. He started out thinking, ‘It is unlawful keep company.’ Now what made the difference? What made the difference was Jesus Christ.

“I want to tell you something, the only place you’re going to find making a real difference is in Jesus Christ. The answer to the divisions is not going to be in politics, not in economics, not in education, not in social justice. It’s going to be in Jesus Christ, and when you have that answer then you can go out into the social-political issues and live out the answer.”