God be with each of you today! Last night, my wife had a couple of dear friends from church visit with her while I taught the midweek study in Numbers 20 at church. Joyce has been on some very strong medication for her pain, but there's nothing like the medicine of friends!
Proverbs 12:5 says that a good word makes the heart glad and Proverbs 15:13 says a merry heart makes a cheerful countenance, and Prov. 17:22 tells us that a merry heart does good, like medicine. Joyce got a huge dosing of "good medicine" from her friends, which really helped encourage her for facing her start of chemo this afternoon.
Here's a few thoughts I gleaned from one of my studies in Genesis 11 on the Tower of Babel:
What was the aim of these ancient people? Build a tower to reach heaven.
All of the false religions of the world follow the same pattern.
1. Starting with an earth base, there is an attempt to reach heaven.
2. There is a quest for God. A reaching out to touch Him.
Why would man want to build such a tower?
There is built into the very nature of man that inate need for God.
The Psalmist expressed it when he said: "My soul thirsts for God, for the living God." This is true of every man.
In Romans 8 Paul tells us that this is how God designed man when He created Him. "The creature was made subject unto emptiness, and that by the design of Him who created Him." what's that mean?
God designed us that way so that we might seek after Him. If God does not fill that void in my life, my life is out of balance, and this inner urge within me is to reach out and touch God.
Nature abhors a vacuum and will always seek to fill it.
So we see men constantly trying to fill this vacuum in their lives. This explains why man of every culture universally is religious. Even communism and evolutionism are religious
systems that require faith to believe, and demand blind devotion and consecration to the
cause.
Man has to believe in something, and if you reject the truth, you are then subject to every folly.
Gen. 11:5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.
6 And the LORD said, "Indeed the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them.
7 "Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech."
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.
9 Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
The result of man's attempt to build the tower to reach heaven?
1. Failure, he never made it, he could not touch God from his tower.
Starting with his earth base, he could not reach infinity. This is true of every religious system, they are destined for failure.
2. Confusion, God came down and confused their languages.
The net result of religion is confusion. Every religious founder is pointing to a different path, proclaiming that their path is the only true path.
Look at the confusion within the various divisions of so many belief systems today.
True Christianity is not a religion. There are some similarities to a religion, i.e. it is a
system of beliefs that demand faith to receive. This is where the similarity ends.
Religions all start with the earth base to begin their towers to reach heaven. Man reaching for God.
Jesus said that He had come from God out of heaven. In Him God was reaching out to man.
Religions require the works of men to become worthy. "Let us build" They would have man to trust in his efforts, his works to save him.
Christianity says that we must trust in the work of Jesus for salvation, there is no good work that we could possibly do to save ourselves. It is through Christianity that the grace of God is revealed. No religious system teaches grace, but just the opposite.
This is the place where the perversions to Christianity have come within the church, where they have set aside the grace of God and made your salvation dependant upon something other than your simple faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ.
May we all grow in that simple faith in Jesus today!
In His Arm's,
Pat
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