"The True Humanist"
Gen. 10:1-32
Sept. 29, 1996 

Text Comment

v.15 Not all the nations known to the OT are mentioned here, but enough of them to make the point: all the nations of the world descend from the same ancestors and have the same creator and Lord. Many of these names are those of individuals, but they meet us later in the OT as nations or cities.

v.21 "Eber" the root of "Hebrew"; Eber means "the one who crosses over or passes through" perhaps suggesting the idea of pilgrim or wanderer.

Now, what are we to do with this? For what purpose do we read all of these proper names in "The Table of Nations" as Gen. 10 is usually called? Well, there are perhaps any number of reasons, some quite specific. For example, by identifying the descendants of both Canaan and Shem the fulfillment of the curse upon Canaan and the promise that Canaan would be Shem's slave, made in Gen. 9:24-27 can be charted exactly in the remainder of the five volume work that Moses is writing. You will see that Shem's lineage is reported again in greater detail at the end of chapter 11, as a prelude to the history of Abraham, whose ancestor Shem was. Remember, Moses has his own contemporaries primarily in his view when he writes this early history of the world.

But, there is a higher purpose than that in this record of the descendants of Noah's three sons. What we have here is a demonstration, in the form of a family tree, of the unity of the human race. All men descending from the same individuals, all the nations branches of the same stock, all owing their lives to the deliverance God granted mankind through the flood, and all, in one form or another, living out their lives in this world under the curse and the blessing of God.

The Bible is not a provincial book! Even in the OT where, after Gen. 12 the concentration is plainly on one family and then one nation, the history and the fortunes of one people, the rest of the world's population, all the remainder of mankind, is never far out of sight.

God no sooner takes Abraham into covenant with himself and promises to make of Abraham a great nation than he says in Gen. 12:3 that the purpose of this covenant and this promise is that all the nations of the earth might be blessed in and through Abraham, that is, the very nations we have just read about before we get to Gen. 12, the nations listed by name in Gen. 10 and all the nations of the world that have through the ages descended from them. Gen. 10 is thus the context of Gen. 12:3. These are the nations any reader of Gen. 12:3 would immediately recognize to be in view in the promise that God would bless all the peoples of the earth through Abraham.

And all through the OT there are those nations, seen, as it were, out of the corner of the eye. When Solomon dedicated the temple he asked God, in his great dedicatory prayer, that "when the foreigner, who does not belong to your people Israel but has come from a distant land because of your name -- when he comes and prays toward this temple, then hear from heaven, your dwelling place, and do whatever the foreigner asks of you, so that all the peoples of the earth may know your name and fear you, as do your own people Israel..." [1 Kgs 8:41-43] Prompting Rabbi Duncan to write: in the OT "before the door was wide opened [to the nations], it was somewhat ajar." [Brown, Life, p. 501] And every now and then one from those many nations would receive God's blessing as a sign that he had not forgotten the other peoples of his world: The Syro-Phonecian woman whom Elijah befriended, Namaan the Syrian general whom Elisha healed, and so on.

And then there were the prophets, thundering their judgments not just against Israel and Judah, but against Moab and Ammon, Tyre and Sidon, Assyria and Babylon. These nations too were subject to the law of the one and only living God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He was their judge as well as the Judge of Israel and he was their Sovereign and ordered their rising and their falling just as he ordered the fortunes of his own chosen people.

And not just judgments. Promises also. And what promises. Most of you were not here in the church when, some years ago, an Egyptian Presbyterian pastor -- for the Egyptian Coptic church is a Presbyterian Church -- Sobhi Ouida by name -- a wonderful man, I thought -- preached in this pulpit. He drew attention to a passage in Isaiah 19 that took on completely new meaning for me as a result of this man's comment on it. There we read of a day in the future when there shall be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians -- deadly enemies in the ancient world, you remember -- will worship together. In that day Israel Isaiah says Israel will be the third, along with Egypt and Assyria, a blessing on the earth. The Lord Almighty will bless them, saying, 'Blessed be Egypt my people, Assyria my handiwork, and Israel my inheritance."

What an astonishing thing for Isaiah to prophesy in his day, with Israel being crushed between those two great empires. And who but an Egyptian Christian could see the full wonder of that promise and the evidence in it that Egyptians too were important to God, that he cared for them, and had a future for them.

And not Egyptians and Assyrians only. What of those many grand promises we encounter in those prophets of the ancient church of saving grace that will gather in its net all the peoples of the earth. Of a time when "the knowledge of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters cover the sea."

I tell you frankly that I have not yet formed even a clear opinion as to exactly when and by what means that triumph of the gospel over the whole world will come to pass. But the word of the Lord stands forever and we shall someday see, as Zechariah tells us, "the survivors from all the nations...go up year after year to worship the King, the Lord Almighty..." [14:16]

And then we learn that the Lord Jesus himself came to earth to give himself a ransom for many not because the Lord loved Israel only, but because he loved the world. And before his death he told his disciples that he was sending his Holy Spirit after him to convict the world, and, in the providence of God, when the Spirit of God descended upon the disciples on the Day of Pentecost, the entire world was there, represented by those many nations of dispersed Jews that were present that day at the Jewish feast. And, later, in Rev. 5:9, the Bible's own commentary on John 3:16, we read that the Lord Jesus, in fact, purchased with his blood, "men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation..." And, at the announcement of that, there was a great song sung by "every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all that is in them, singing, "To him who sits on the throne and to the Lamb be praise and honor and glory and power for ever and ever!"

And, were that not enough, in Rev. 21:24, in that glorious description of heaven with which the Bible concludes, we are told that the city does not need sun or moon for the glory of the Lord gives it light. And then this: "The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their splendor into it."

In other words, the nations, all the people of the world, were always in God's view and always in his purpose for the world and for mankind. They are not some adjunct to his real purpose in the world, but are as well the direct and immediate interest of the living God. Their times too are in his hands; they too live and move and have their being in God as Paul taught the Athenian philosophers; all of their days also were ordered for them before their was a one of them and they too are the objects of God's electing and redeeming love -- if not individual by individual and head for head, at least nation by nation, people by people.

You know there is a debate in Christian theology as to whether the final number of the saved will be smaller or larger than the number of the lost. Did Jesus mean that always and unchangeably many are called but few are chosen or did he mean only that characteristically, in most times and seasons of human history and his own time in particular that was true. And what precisely were the prophets predicting when they said that the knowledge of the Lord would someday cover the earth as the waters cover the sea, or Paul when he promised that a day would come when the fulness of the Gentiles came and, as a result, all Israel would be saved as well? Many have thought -- our great American Presbyterians and Charles Spurgeon among them -- that at the end of this world's day, the number in heaven would far exceed the number in hell. And, you know what the population experts now tell us -- isn't it something like nearly half the people who have ever lived are alive today. How possible then to see the relative numbers reversed virtually over night if the Spirit of God gives salvation to the nations, as the prophets seem to say he will one day.

But it is not only then that the nations are a matter of supreme interest to God but now as well, through the whole course of human history. And not just in a general way -- as sinners in rebellion against him, as harboring among them those few elect whom he will send his Spirit to fetch out and lead into the church.

No, all of the life of the nations. Did you notice that striking statement in v. 9: "Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord..." That his, he was mighty "in God's sight." It doesn't mean that God loved this man with a saving love, or that he approved of how he lived his life. What it does mean, however, is that God noticed, God himself formed an estimate of his great skill. His life, his accomplishments mattered to God!

There is a dark side here and an unspoken irony. Far too much he takes notice of them to judge and condemn them. Here Nimrod with his skill and power founds Babel, or Babylon (v. 10) and how much we are going to hear of that city through the rest of the Bible, all the way to Revelation, where the name is given to all the embodied enemies of God in the world who meet their catastrophic end in Rev. 18. But, still, Nimrod was a mighty hunter before the Lord! God acknowledges his prowess, his skill, his success, his just fame.

And so it will be throughout the Scripture and to the end of the world. There is glory in the nations that God plans to take for himself to heaven! There is glory there, of course, for no other reason, than because they are his creatures, they bear his image, he has given them great gifts, they live in his rich and fertile world. Whether we are speaking of intellectual endeavors, or artistic triumphs, or scientific breakthroughs, or literary or musical masterpieces, or deeds of heroism, courage, fortitude, endurance, or acts of faithfulness, kindness and generosity, there is a great deal of glory in the nations and, irony of ironies, it is all the reflected glory of their maker and their Lord whom to date they still deny and still reject.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, my visit to India years ago. At first I found the country extremely depressing. Teeming people everywhere, dirty, and, in some respects, pathetically backward. And the depravity of the religion was deeply discouraging, the benighted condition of those whose eyes are never lifted higher than India's idolatry -- a particularly base idolatry -- can lift them. Had I left after a visit of just a few days or a week, I would have come away from India with almost an entirely negative impression. I am so grateful the Lord had me there for a month and showed me how wrong, how unChristian, how stupid, that early judgment would have been. For as time went on I began to see what I had not seen at first: how handsome the Indian people are, how clever and bright, how beautiful is much that they produce, how much reflected divine glory is shining everywhere and always in that country. And then I went to Agra and saw the Taj Mahal, which exceeds anything and everything you have ever heard about the world's most beautiful building. Its builder, its architect, whomever it was, like Nimrod was "great before the Lord." And now I am glad to think that the glory of this nation too will be brought into heaven to be enjoyed by God's people forever.

There is even this reflected glory in the religions of the nations, the false beliefs and practices that they have devised to hold the living God at a distance, to give expression to their nature as religious beings without bending their knee to the living God. As C.S. Lewis observed:

"If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth."

Some of you may have seen, as I did late a few evenings this past week some of the new documentary on the American West. And you will have heard something concerning the religion of the Native Americans of the West. The incipient monotheism that lies behind the belief in "The Great Spirit," the claim that that Spirit sees and knows all, and that he expects everyone to treat others as one would like to be treated oneself. Now, honestly, I have a feeling that some of that construction of ancient Indian religion owed something to the influence of Christianity and, in any case, no effort was made to draw attention to the fact that, if that was their theology, those nations singularly failed to live by it, making war and human conquest the great interest of their lives. Nevertheless, there is an echo of the divine glory in those nations too and all that we find attractive and worthy in their life, we can say, as it is said here of Nimrod, that this was great "before the Lord."

The word "humanist" has a bad press in the evangelical world of our day. A humanist in common parlance is someone who believes in man, who denies the existence of God, and who seeks for the meaning of life and whatever hope may be found for the future in man and in human potential alone. Such is the creed of the "Humanist Manifesto," for example. And so we often link "humanist" with "secular" and speak of "secular humanism" as a religious world view that is in complete opposition to Christianity.

But, as with so many other fine words, this meaning, this understanding of humanism is johnny-come-lately. That is not what a humanist was first thought to be, nor what the word means in its classical and original sense. I looked up "humanist" in the Oxford English Dictionary, that huge, definitive lexicon of the English language.

It gave this more modern definition of humanism as a worship of man and belief in man to the exclusion of belief in any supreme being. But it was the last of four definitions of the word. Definition numbers 3 and 2 both had to do with humanism as a movement of learning founded upon a return to the languages and the learning of the classical world. In this sense a humanist is a scholar of the classical languages -- Greek and Latin -- and of the literature and philosophy of that period and written in those languages.

But the first definition of "humanist" in the OED, the basic and original definition of the word, is "a student of human affairs, or of human nature."

A humanist is someone who finds human culture and human history and human affairs interesting and important and gives himself or herself to that study and that interest.

And, in that sense, Genesis 10, with the witness it bears to God's interest in the life of the nations and the accomplishments of even unbelieving men and women, is a summons to every Christian to be a humanist in this sense, to be a true humanist because one is a true Christian!

Why? For this reason? These nations too are the subjects of the living God. But, you see, that makes them the subjects of our heavenly Father, yours and mine! That makes them the bearers of our heavenly Father's image. That makes them of interest to our Father in heaven. The God whom we love and serve, the God whose interests and whose will is our command, this God, our God, knows these nations and their lives, has given them great gifts, takes note of their accomplishments, and has them in his great purposes for the world.

No, the Christian church and the individual Christian -- separated as he must be from the world on account of its refusal to believe in the Son of God -- cannot for that reason be indifferent to the nations. No one should love them more, no one should admire what is admirable in them more, no one should care for their interests more, no one should carry them in their hearts more, no one should pray for them more, no one should have a brighter hope for them more, than the sons and daughters of God, who is the God of those nations also and who looks down upon them from heaven and sees them as -- a drop in the bucket, yes; Isaiah says that -- but also as the people he has made and whose eventual salvation he has made the cornerstone of his plan for the world.

That is how a Christian obeys Genesis 10 and the Table of the Nations -- he lives as a Christian humanist, a lover of the nations, an admirer of all that is good in them -- for that comes from God -- and who is always grieving over their rebelling against his God and theirs because he so fondly entertains the hope of their eventual salvation and so faithfully prays and works to that end!

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