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Under Construction, Week 1, Day 6

by David Joynt on August 16, 2019

Under Construction, Week 1, Day 6

GENESIS 11:9 | Therefore its name was 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.

Genesis 1-11 shows us the reality of human rebellion and its costs.  Repeated attempts to live apart from God or over against God result in judgment and disaster.  Adam and Eve rebel and lose their garden spot.  Cain kills Abel and suffers exile, marked forever.  The flood story is a reaction to the great wickedness of mankind, and the fact that the earth was filled with violence.  In Genesis 11, mankind wants to construct a city and a culture without God’s help or guidance with the express purpose of self–gratification.  God keeps his promise not to send another cataclysm like the flood, expressed in 8:21, but there is a penalty—dispersal.

Can you find the grace in each of these “punishments”?

What consequences of human sin and rebellion do you see around you in our society?

 

Tags: grace, rebellion, language, babel

About the Author
David Joynt

Dave Joynt began his service as a pastor at Valley Presbyterian Church in Paradise Valley, Arizona in September 2014. This meant a move away from the Northeast, where he has a long history, growing up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and then serving congregations in Delaware and New Jersey for a total of 23 years.

Dave was nurtured in a great church in Bethlehem where his parents, Anne and Carey, served as elders. He graduated in classics from Lehigh University where his Father taught, and then from Oxford, where he met his wife Julia. Ordained in 1988, he completed a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1993.

He and Julia have a son, Tristan, and a daughter, Madeleine.

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