In the Beginning
Racial hostility didn’t begin in 1619, nor does America own the patent on it. Many long centuries before the founding of America, sin plunged the world into a pandemic of racial and ethnic hurt. In Genesis 10, God called the nations of the world to scatter, subduing the earth. In Genesis 11, mankind united against God under the leadership of Nimrod and built the Tower of Babel, “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” At the Tower of Babel, we find the launch pad of racism.
Genesis 11:1 tells us that “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech” – humanity united against their Creator God. God sent them to subdue the earth, but mankind refused to be scattered. They could not forget the absolute destruction caused by the flood, and they refused to believe God’s promise, symbolized in the rainbow, that He would never again destroy the earth with a flood. Rather than rest in His promise, men united to protect themselves and their offspring from such a tyrant God. They built a tower to the heavens in the vain delusion that if God again sent a flood, they would be able to escape it. As Matthew Henry explains,
God had told them indeed that he would not again drown the world; but they would trust to a tower of their own making, rather than to a promise of God’s making or an ark of his appointing.
Ethnic hostility is rooted in sinful man’s antagonism towards a holy God. When the nations refused to spread throughout the earth and subdue it for God’s glory, God introduced disunity between the different families of the earth:
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