Nations and Nature

It is easy to get lost in the bookends of the narrative of Genesis 9:18-10:32. Before the list of nations, Noah sins and one of his sons gets one of his grandsons cursed. After the list of nations, mankind rebels by building a tower. Then, just another Bible list—like a genealogy of sorts. So the reader may shrug his or her shoulders or even conclude that the nations are a division that results from the fall. Nothing could be further from the truth. Equally unhelpful would be to simply ask the question of who all descends from each of these three brothers. That is not a bad question, and some scholars are certainly called to make a study of it. However, that is inappropriate for a sermon because the purpose of God’s word to the congregation is to apply the word like a sword to our hearts and lives.

As we have with so many passages thus far in Genesis, we are going to treat this thematically.

• God has the right to bless nations.

• God has the right to curse nations.

• Nations are by essential nature.

• Nations are through fallen nature.

Doctrine. To God belongs the right to bless and curse nations—which will explain both the goodness and the evil of nations.           

God has the right to bless nations.

Let’s reorient ourselves to the historical situation.

“The sons of Noah who went forth from the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.) These three were the sons of Noah, and from these the people of the whole earth were dispersed” (vv. 18-19).

Just as I said with the covenant, so it is with the nations. All came from these three; everything that immediately follows applies to the whole.

In the most general sense God had already blessed the nations in the covenant blessings. So the first thing to keep in mind is that blessing and cursing can intermingle. There is the rain of a hurricane, and there is a rainbow.

What follows in Chapter 10 is itself a blessing. Recall that generations are defined that way in Genesis 1 and 9: “God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’” (9:1). And so it was that God multiplied the lines of these three and these became the nations. The word NATION in English simply means “a people,” as in a people-group. In Hebrew it is גּוֹי, in Greek ἔθνος, and in Latin gens, from which we derive “Gentiles.” Although another Latin word, nationem, is relevant here for the English. The words natio means birth, breed, stock, race of people, or tribe.

Prior to the modern era of “nation building,” an unnatural imposition from the outside of those nations, by royal or other international interests, the word in every language would have simple referred to the natural people group, as political expression of those people groups came second, not in reverse. What we see at Babel (next chapter) is Satan’s first attempt—the ancient attempt—to reverse that creational, natural order. Modern global Babylon brings that full circle.

This is important because among the many butchered words—butchered by modern ideologies—are the words closely associated with “nation” and “ethnicity.”

That there is a diverse providence from God is evident and just. See, for example, on the heels of the curse to Canaan, it adds,

“Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem; and let Canaan be his servant. May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem, and let Canaan be his servant” (vv. 26-27).

So by the same principle that “he removes kings and sets up kings” (Dan. 2:21), so the Lord raises us and tears down nations. And He not only does so sovereignly, but He also fixes blessed consequences to righteous principles, so that nations often rise in concert with proper actions: “Blessed are the people1 to whom such blessings fall! Blessed are the people whose God is the LORD!” (Ps. 144:15)

God has the right to curse nations.

This account may seem odd to some and unfair to others, but consider that God ordained it and His word records it. It is exactly what we need to hear and plug in to our early explanations for why the world is as it is. Adam and Eve fell to a serpent and a fruit, and Noah fell to the fruit of the vine. I am using “fell” here in its secondary sense—Noah was already a fallen sinner. But in this are the seeds of a fallen kingdom before it could ever get off the ground. It says,

“Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent” (vv. 20-21).

Perhaps this is relayed to show how universal sin would remain. Noah would not be mythologized. He was a sinner, doing what sinners do.

What is the sin?

“And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father’s nakedness” (vv. 22-23).

The most natural sense of the text is that Ham’s words to the brothers involved a mocking of some kind. This is not to say that Noah was without fault, but rather that the son was to honor his father regardless. The Fifth Commandment belongs to moral law. This is the essence of God’s law that is immutable because it is communicated to all mankind in his most basic dealings with God and his fellow man. It was known from the beginning, being inscribed as conscience (Rom. 2:14-15). Consequently Ham knew deep down that his obligation to honor his father transcended how honorably or dishonorably Noah had acted to get himself in that situation.

We need to field two objections.

Objection 1. The sin was Ham’s, therefore the curse of Canaan is unjust.

It is precisely in the depth of the sin, and its place in biblical history, that one begins to see the connection between the sin of the father and the curse being applied to the offspring. Although the concept of “the sins of the father” has been frequently misapplied, often at the extremes of the Charismatic notion of “generational curses,” nevertheless the original idea is quite biblical. It is a truth of covenant theology. If we start our view at the two mountain peaks of redemptive history—Adam and Christ (see Rom. 5:12-21 especially)—we will note that God has placed all people in a larger covenantal framework under heads, or patriarchs. This highlights the great seriousness of all moral action on those around us, that we are not autonomous or simply “private persons.” While the second and third generation is not held guilty “for” the sin of the father (Ezk. 18:20), the father’s rebellion against God has a great impact on his generations, and that this impact is judicial. After all, God is handing down the sentence, and if it impacts the sons at all, it does so as a consequence of sins not their own.

Objection 2. Noah cursed him (v. 25), but it never says that God did.

That is true. However, nowhere in Scripture does God give the power to curse to man in any positive way. Man may “curse” in a lowercase sense of using his tongue to condemn and degrade his fellow man (cf. Rom. 3:14; Jas. 3:9), but when a text so foundational in the Bible shows a curse going forward with effect, as it is here, it is unnatural to divorce the curse of the man (Noah) from the decree of God. Therefore, Noah acted as God’s vice-regent and lower judge.

Nations are by essential nature.

I said that we may easily shrug our shoulders at Chapter 10 and conclude that the nations are a division that results from the fall. I said that nothing could be further from the truth. How so? Think about this from the most common sense perspective. Suppose that Adam and Eve had not fallen, yet produced offspring. What would this imply from a geographic and economic perspective alone? The answer is that, over the course of the fourth and fifth generation (and beyond), each generation would increasingly spread out, even as their population tended to collect in one area versus another. Given the necessity of ancient people to live near rivers or coasts, these would eventually divide along the lines of a Nile, Mesopotamian, Indian, East Asia, Mediterranean, and so forth. Note that these would be separated from each other by various desert and mountain regions. In other words, the proliferation and even some amount of spatial separation between people groups would be a positive portion of common grace. 

Now combine this sinless diversification with the divine command: “Fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28).

Shem is said to be the father of the Semitic people, which includes both the Hebrews and the inhabitants of Arabia and possibly more.2 If it is exclusive to those, then that means (assuming that Ham is the father of those in the remainder of the Middle East and Africa), that Japheth would have to father all of the rest—all of the Asian groups as well as the European. Perhaps that is what is meant by “May God enlarge Japheth” (9:27a); but this is conjecture. As to the foreshadowing that he shall “dwell in the tents of Shem” (9:27b), Calvin balances out the natural affections of people groups with the spiritual affections of the elect across boundaries:

“But the form of the expression, ‘Japheth shall dwell in the tabernacles of Shem,’ commends to us that mutual society which ought to exist, and to be cherished among the faithful. For whereas God had chosen to himself a Church from the progeny of Shem, he afterwards chose the Gentiles together with them, on this condition, that they should join themselves to that people, who were in possession of the covenant of life.”3

Satan as the prince of spiritual Babylon seeks to gather all humanity to a rival world that opposes Christ. If these nations get away from him, that puts him at a tremendous disadvantage, since human beings already have the natural knowledge of God and since the gospel can move faster through time and space by God’s spiritual means than by the world’s political means—even by means of violence.

So it behooves the devil to centralize power—first by infiltrating and second erasing these people groups as a naturally developing filling of the earth. Satan must seek a unifying principle. He must make oneness “his idea.” He must make the dividing line of truth—the distinction between light and darkness, good and evil—to be “getting in the way” of human beings coming together for a common good. 

Nations are through fallen nature.

None of this is to say that the division of nations does not also carry out sin. In a sinful world, the activity that make up divisions will be filled with sin and initiated (on a human level) by sin. So God draws straight lines with crooked sticks. We have the paradox that nations are good and nations are bad. This should not be a shock by this point. Man is good and man is bad. The former has reference to God’s design; the second has reference to sin’s distortion.

So, now in the fall, the “nations rage” (Ps. 2:1), and by nature the nations who hate God make war against His people: “all the evildoers who eat up my people as they eat bread” (Ps. 14:4).

The crucial figure the next chapter is given prominent place in the genealogy here. We read,

“Cush fathered Nimrod; he was the first on earth to be a mighty man. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD. Therefore it is said, “Like Nimrod a mighty hunter before the LORD.” The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. From that land he went into Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth-Ir, Calah, and Resen between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city” (10:8-12).

The point is not that either MIGHT or being HUNTER is bad. What might be easier to miss is that Nimrod’s imperialist impulses did not end with Babel. It lists three names after Babel in the same region—that is ‘in the land of Shinar’ (v. 10), but also that afterwards, ‘he went into Assyria and built Nineveh’ (v. 11). This was a very industrious tyrant. Most of this will have to wait for next week.

But Stephen Charnock says of him that he was “without any fear of God … An invader and oppressor of his neighbors, and reputedly the introducer of a new worship and the first that built cities after the flood.”4

Practical Use of the Doctrine

Use 1. Instruction. Both in the preservation of nations and in the honor of fathers, the fifth, sixth, eighth, ninth, and tenth commandments are at stake—some more obvious than others, but all equally true. Calvin says of Ham’s sin,

“We know that parents, next to God, are most deeply to be reverenced; and if there were neither books nor sermons, nature itself constantly inculcates this lesson upon us. It is received by common consent, that piety towards parents is the mother of all virtues. This Ham, therefore, must have been of a wicked, perverse, and crooked disposition; since he not only took pleasure in his father’s shame, but wished to expose him to his brethren.”5

Now consider that the same sin against one’s father may be drawn out of us by the world’s demands that children testify against them—as the devil’s ideologues always do. So the Bolsheviks in Russia and Mao’s Cultural Revolution offered all manner of incentives to the youth to rat out their parents, to subject them to trials, and to cast away their heritage in shame. So today’s children need to understand how voices from popular culture will do what they can to turn you against your parents—specifically to paint a picture to you that your father and mother’s religious instruction is as disgraceful as Noah’s drunkenness, that their rationale is exposed as his nakedness. Parents and children that love the Lord must love their heritage, and, “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet. 5:8).

Use 2. Correction. When we speak of the most difficult doctrines for the past few generations of Evangelicals to accept, we typically think of the sovereignty of God in salvation, or perhaps hell, or else God’s design for male and female. We may not readily think of this doctrine of the nature of nations. But it makes or breaks one’s Christian worldview.

It is the difference between voluntary and violent means.

Voluntary diversification means a natural outgrowth of people, freedom of movement, and exchange of ideas and material resources.

Violent diversification means an unnatural imposition from a class powerful enough to force unfamiliar populations onto each other.

Whether by war or by mass migration, people groups that would otherwise have no reason to fear or use force against each other are pressured into doing just that. This is specifically designed to replace that which is natural to God’s order of light with an alien principle that will reunify the human race under an unnatural reign of darkness. Everywhere that empires have introduced their tyranny, they have had to replace the local allegiance with the larger imperial allegiances.

Use 3. Consolation. Christ will be worshiped for all eternity for ransoming a people.

And they sang a new song, saying, “Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation”  (Rev. 5:9).

If anyone should object that if the ultimate form of worship will be most cross-cultural, it may be replied that the arch of redemptive history too has a nature. Its timing has a nature. More than that—He who gets the glory for ending all hostilities reflects an objective nature of King and kingdom as well. The point may be granted without surrendering that such a state will be the most perfect. Thus between nature and grace we are kept from two ditches until that Day.

__________________

1. The word עַם is more general than גּוֹי. Nevertheless, it is used of nations outside of Israel, so that it may cover both Jews or Gentiles. The point is that it is a universal principle taught in this Psalm.

2. Calvin seems to lean in that direction: “the sons of Shem, of whom the greater part had revolted and cut themselves off from the holy family of God” (Commentaries, I:309).

3. Calvin, Commentaries, I:309-10

4. Stephen Charnock, Discourses on the Existence and Attributes of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), I:62.

5. Calvin, Commentaries, I:302