In Genesis Chapter 11, we see all of the descendants of Noah attempting to stay together in one place and build a monument to themselves that would reach into the heavens. After the flood, sin started showing itself again. This plan was in defiance of the instructions that were given to Noah, to fill the earth and subdue it. God knew that their unity would create a condition where they could do anything their hearts’ desired, a one world government, so to speak. This was not what He plan was, so he confused their speech, creating all the different languages so that they could no longer communicate with each other. The unity they attempted to create was not for good as it went against God’s directions to populate the whole earth and subdue it.

Genesis 11:5-8  “But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. 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. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’ So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city.”

Abraham’s descendants to bless the nations

And so the people were scattered across the earth to fulfill the plan and purposes of God in the earth. Out of the three sons of Noah, from the lineage of Shem, came a man named Abram (he later became Abraham), who would become very important in the plan of God. Abram followed God.

Genesis 12:8 “Abram pitched his tent and built an altar between Bethel and Ai and called on the name of the Lord. ” (Also Genesis 13:4; 21:33)

Eventually, through Abraham’s second son Isaac, the son of promise, there came a nation, a people called out by God, who were favored of God, and guarded and protected by God. We might call it a type of the church, a called out people, known in Greek as the “ekklesia.” Of all the nations of the earth at the time, no other nation was chosen for this plan.

Deuteronomy 7:6-8 “For you are a holy people to the LORD your God; the LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth. The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples; but because the LORD loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers, the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.“

The nation in slavery…Moses to the rescue

This nation grew in number and multiplied in Egypt, but eventually became slaves to the Egyptian Pharaoh. But God had not forgotten His plan or His promise and sent Moses, a leader who had been raised in Egypt, to rescue them and bring them out of Egypt. Moses, a type of Christ, had been saved from an earlier killing spree of Pharaoh and raised in Pharaoh’s own house. When the nation finally was released and came out of Egypt, God met them at Mount Horeb in the desert and gave them His law so that they would know what He expected of them as His people. They were to live differently than the nations around them that were steeped in paganism.

As long as the God’s people abided in the covenant and requirements of God, all would go well with them. But if they refused, it would not be well with them. Read Deuteronomy 28. “This day I set before you blessings and cursing...”

Foreshadowing the Savior

The entire Old Testament is a picture and a story of how the eternal Creator God began to form a family in the Earth, one that he could partner with in bringing His wonderful plans to pass. His biggest and most ambition plan (first spoken of in Genesis 3:15) was to bring forth the Savior who would save Mankind from the sin and the darkness in their minds by defeating the devil who had imposed such wickedness and evil upon the sons of men. This Savior had to be a man so that he could have legal authority in the Earth. He had to be born here. So God sent His own son Jesus to come as a baby (born of a virgin) to live among men, first as a baby, then a child, and then a young man. He called Himself the Son of Man. This Son of Man (and Son of God) gave up the power and authority that was His in heaven, and all of those glories and came to earth to abide with us, to experience what we experience, then to die for us. This Son of Man was not born under the curse of sin because He was conceived by the Holy Spirit. He had no blood of sinful man in His body because His father was God.

Isaiah 54 foretells about Him growing up and finding out about his purpose. He was the one who had been prophesied of throughout the entire Old Testament, the One Who was to come to crush the head of the serpent. He was the One spoken of in Genesis 3. His “heel” would be “bruised” too, just as had been forecast.

Opposition to God’s plan

Abraham had another son, one born of the couple who attempted to “help God.” This son was named Ishmael and was born from Sarah’s slave girl. From him came nations who would always be at odds with Isaac’s descendants. (Galatians 4:28-29) From Isaac came two sons, Esau and Jacob. Jacob was the favored (by God) son who bore 12 sons. (These sons would became the heads of the 12 tribes of Israel, although there was an arrangement utilizing Joseph’s two sons as tribal heads). Jacob’s brother Esau had sold his birthright and was disqualified from God’s favor, but nations came from him too. The descendants of these tribes claim Abraham as their father, but they do not come from the “son of a promise.”

It has alway been about the “promises” given by God. The son born of the flesh (Ishmael) was not the son that God had promised to Abraham and Sarah. Ishmael was born from their own efforts to make the promise come true. The son God had promised was to come through Sarah. Through Isaac the nations of the earth were to be blessed; this is the same promise God had given to Abram (Abraham). Through Isaac came the nation of Israel, the called out people referred to in Deuteronomy 7. The supernatural formation and existence of the nation of Israel is a type of the born again “ekklesia” who have supernaturally been formed through the acceptance of Jesus’s death as payment for release from their slavery to sin.

1 Corinthians 15:22 “For as in Adam all die even so in Christ all shall be made alive.“

***I would also note that the fact that the nation of Israel is living back in their original homeland is a picture of a “coming back from the dead,” so to speak.