Genesis 11:1

‘OF ONE LANGUAGE’

‘And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.’

Genesis 11:1

The New Testament is always converting into blessings the curses of the Old Testament. The burdens and severities of the Law are not only the types but the very substances of Gospel liberty and truth; the confusion of Babel leads to a greater harmony, and its dispersion ends in a more perfect union.

I. After the Flood the whole earth was of one language and one speech. Now not even one country has one language within itself. No two persons that ever meet have it. The words may have the same spelling, but they do not carry to the hearer exactly the same sense in which they were spoken. There is not on this earth, in any fraction of it, one language and one speech; hence a great part of our sin and misery.

II. Even if there were a language perfectly the same, yet, until there was a setting to rights of disorders which have come into human thought, and until minds were themselves set in one accord, there could not he unity.

III. The men of the old world determined to do two things which real unity never does. They resolved to make a great monument to their own glory, and they thought to frustrate a law of God and to break a positive rule of our being. Their unity was a false unity. They sought their own praise, and it ran contrary to the mind of God. Their profane unity was dashed into hundreds of divergent atoms, and was carried by the four winds to the four corners of the earth.

IV. What were the consequences of this scattering of the race? (1) It carried the knowledge of the true God and of the one faith into all the lands whither they went; (2) God replenished the whole surface of the globe by spreading men over it; (3) it was a plea for prayer, an argument for hope, a pledge of promise.

V. From that moment God has steadily carried on His design of restoring unity to the earth. His choosing of Abraham, His sending of Christ, the coming of the Holy Ghost at Pentecost, were all means to this very end.

—Rev. Jas. Vaughan.

Illustration

(1) ‘One of the chief external hindrances to the spread of the Gospel is the confusion of tongues, such as we read of at the building of the tower of Babel. A strange language which the missionary meets when he crosses a sea or a mountain range, is like a wall that stops his progress, saying, “Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.” The men of Galilee, at Pentecost, surmounting that difficulty by a miracle of Divine power, might have sung with David, “By my God assisting me I overleap a wall.” Should we not break forth on every side and burst through or overleap the barrier of strange tongues and all other barriers that stand in the way, and never rest until the kingdoms of the world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ?’

(2) ‘A Hindoo and New Zealander met upon the deck of a missionary ship. They had been converted from their heathenism and were brothers in Christ; but they could not speak to each other. They pointed to their Bibles, shook hands, and smiled in one another’s faces; but that was all. At last a happy thought occurred to the Hindoo. With sudden joy he exclaimed “Hallelujah.” The New Zealander in delight cried out “Amen.” These two words, not found in their own heathen tongues, were to them the beginning of “one language and one speech.” ’