Transcription

Connor:
You’re listening to The Bible Guys, a podcast where a couple of friends talk about the Bible in fun and practical ways.

Chris:
Well hello.

Jeff:
Howdy.

Chris:
Welcome to the Bible guys my name is Chris this is my faithful companion his name is Jeff. And so sometimes I say, I’m the Bible guy and this is my faithful companion.

Jeff:
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah.

Chris:
So today you’re just Chris, by the way, a funny little fact, fun little fact. We took a Bible literacy test at our staff. Oh, the whole staff.

Jeff:
The whole staff did yesterday. It was a hard test, wasn’t it?

Chris:
It was a hard test. It was 50 questions. And it said, place these things in chronological order. The first, like what, 10 questions were placing things in chronological order from the Old Testament. And they were like these random names. I missed one of those.

Jeff:
Yeah, I did too. I was going too fast and I missed it.

Chris:
Yeah. And so you did minus four out of 50 questions, which is what? Which is a 92%. Yeah. And I did minus seven, which is 86%, which means technically, as a Bible guy, it’s 1A, 1B.

Jeff:
So it’s designed to be a 30%, so 15 is the average. So we use this, I’m part of another organization that helps start churches around the country, and in our assessment center for the potential church planters, they need to get at least a 70 in order to be able to go forward with the planting thing. So it’s on purpose, a hard test. So yeah, I thought you did really well.

Chris:
It was really funny because some of our staff You know, they haven’t really been Christians that long. Sometimes, you know, they just get, they become a Christian, you know, some of them, they didn’t go to Bible college. They work in, you know, certain areas that don’t require teaching or anything like that. And so anyway, one guy, he said, I said, what’d you get? And he goes, 11. And I said, you only missed 11. He goes, no.

Jeff:
So it also highlights opportunities for improvement, right? Which is really what we were doing. So we were trying to hit a base mark of this is the average score for Heritage staff. Right. And then look for an opportunity for improvement processes. So let’s just find out where everybody is and take the test. It was fun.

Chris:
It’s kind of cool.

Jeff:
Yeah, yeah. We should put that out on our website or something. Put that little test out, see how people can do. But you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to use their phone and get hundreds on it.

Chris:
Yes, of course.

Jeff:
Because we had to ban people from using the phones. Yes. Okay.

Chris:
Well, hey, we’re going to go into a segment today called Guess the Word.

Jeff:
So did you just promote me to the Bible guy?

Chris:
1a 1b. Yeah. Yeah. I gave you some credit there.

Jeff:
Wow. I just realized what just happened.

Chris:
Hey, uh, but, but again, that’s just one test. And to be honest with you, some of those were trick questions and I was angry at them.

Jeff:
So I took that test before. Okay. And only missed two the first time. So I’m slipping actually.

Chris:
So you’re getting worse. Your memory’s going.

Jeff:
Yeah, so I did, when I took it and then I went back and did the thing, I knew the answers to two of them. So two I did not know the answer. But two of them I knew the answers and I was going too fast. Yeah, well me too. Right, because I only gave everybody 20 minutes. I wanted you to move quickly. I wanted to be off the top of your head.

Chris:
I took notes when we were correcting and I wrote next to the question, I said, duh, I knew this, right?

Jeff:
Because I knew it. So I had two of those that I knew the answer and I got them out of order. Like for instance, one of them we put in order, I interposed or transposed Shem and Enoch.

Chris:
Oh my gosh, that is exactly what I did.

Jeff:
And I know Enoch came before Shem.

Chris:
That question is exactly the one I missed.

Jeff:
Yep. I missed that one, which is weird because we’re talking about those things.

Chris:
Right.

Jeff:
Right. And then, uh, uh, I, there was another one. I did the same exact same thing, right. I transposed a thing, but oh, well, anyways, so I’m slipping is what I’m saying.

Chris:
Yeah. Well, that has almost become our segment. We’re three minutes into it. So let’s, let’s hurry up and go.

Jeff:
Are you ready? Yes. So we have a guest, the word segment, and which means I have words that I’m a word. I’m trying to get you to say, and I have five words. I’m not allowed to say in order to get you to do that.

Chris:
And if you’re viewing us on YouTube, we’ll put them on the screen for you.

Jeff:
That’s right. And we’ll tell you afterwards the words I’m not ready, Jeff. Okay. So, uh, if I’m talking, I’m using words. Okay. And, uh, different countries have different kinds of words because they have different languages. There you go. Um, and a singular of languages is language. There you go. Thank you. Uh, the tower of Babel. There you go. Um, This is the hard one for me.

Chris:
Was that two words? Yes.

Jeff:
So language, I wasn’t allowed to say English, French, words, foreign, or speech. Okay. Babble, I wasn’t allowed to say talk, mumble, chatter, baby, mouth.

Chris:
Got it.

Jeff:
Okay. So then this one.

Chris:
Oh, B-B-L-A, babble.

Jeff:
Yes. But I got you to say babble. I didn’t ask you to spell it. Phonetically.

Chris:
There’s a phonetic twist there.

Jeff:
That’s right. Okay. Okay. Boy, this is a really, really hard one. A thing doesn’t exist, and then an architect designs that thing, and then the guys with hammers build it. There you go. I need to say the word build. Make, construct, destroy, blocks, create.

Chris:
Oh, nice.

Jeff:
There you go. All right. I just mentioned Babel. Babel was a

Chris:
Babel was a what?

Jeff:
Babel was a tower. There you go. I wasn’t allowed to say Bell, Eiffel, Ivory, Pisa, or London.

Chris:
Oh, that’s hilarious. So she’s creating this because we’re talking about the Tower of Babel. Yeah.

Jeff:
Yeah. Okay. And then I’ve already mentioned at the very first, when we talked about English and French and foreign language. Okay. When you use language, You use it in your… Speech. That’s right. I was gonna say a president makes a speech. Okay. Talk impediment language words therapy. I wasn’t allowed to say any of those words. Good job, man. Good job, Chris. You’re the king of that, by the way.

Chris:
Am I? No, I’m not.

Jeff:
Do you play? You play a lot of like board games and family games at home. I do. Yeah. And you play, do you play like, uh, like word games like that taboo?

Chris:
No, we have taboo. Yeah. Yeah. We’ll bust it out.

Jeff:
Yeah. It was really, really fun when it first came out and then now you kind of know how it works.

Chris:
And so it came out like 30 years ago. Yeah, exactly.

Jeff:
Here we go. Genesis. So in between where we read with Noah’s, the rainbow and all those things, Noah gets into sin, he gets drunk here. We missed that part. We’re not going to read that.

Chris:
God talks about his descendants. That’s right. And it talks about, you know, the, the, the lineage and, and how basically they’re starting to repopulate the earth.

Jeff:
That’s right. And it, there’s lots of interesting things about these guys, right? And it gives their lifespan. Noah lived 950 years total. Right. So when he was 600 years old and built the thing, he was just a young whippersnapper. He was at his peak. He was like just entering middle age at that point, 600 years old.

Chris:
He was like 36. Yeah.

Jeff:
For us. So anyway, so it goes through those things. And then finally it talks about how they all, the Noah’s sons developed into these giant families that turned into huge clans. They go north and south and east, right, is what happens. And, um, So sometimes people ask about populations and why do different people on different continents look differently? This could be a big part of that, right? So here we go. Genesis chapter 11 says, at one time, all the people of the world spoke the same language and use the same words. As the people migrated to the East, they found a plain in the land of Babylonia and settled there. They began saying to each other, let’s make bricks and harden them with fire. In this region, bricks were used instead of stone and tar was used for mortar. Then they said, come, let’s build a great city for ourselves with a tower that reaches into the sky. This will make us famous and keep us from being scattered all over the world. But the Lord came down to look at the city and the tower the people were building. Look, he said, the people are united. They all speak the same language. After this, nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them. come, let’s go down and confuse the people with different languages, then they won’t be able to understand each other. In that way, the Lord scattered them all over the world and they stopped building the city. That is why the city was called Babel, because that is where God, the Lord confused the people with different languages. In this way, he scattered them all over the world. Isn’t that where we read to? That’s it. Okay.

Chris:
That’s it. So this is a crazy, crazy story. So, uh, people who don’t believe in God would say that this story is absolute nonsense. This is a fictional, um, fable that is invented to explain away why there are people who are different parts of the, of the earth and people would try to explain away different languages by evolution, right? Like people over different parts of the, of the planet would have developed their own intelligent conversation that would have developed in their own communities. And that there are so many different languages. And, and, and that’s just a part of a natural evolution, you know, community settling kind of a thing over millions of years.

Jeff:
But even for the evolutionists, they would take you back to there was an original human. Yes. Right? Which means there was a language and eventually there were multiple languages.

Chris:
That’s true.

Jeff:
You’re right about that. Man, I’m not an anthropologist, I’m not going to argue that too much, but there are some very strong similarities to the Bible story in the way people in modern science would say they just want to dismiss the Bible.

Chris:
It’s a bias. That’s a great point.

Jeff:
Scientists claim to be unbiased and they’re not.

Chris:
That’s what I’m saying.

Jeff:
Everybody has a bias.

Chris:
Yes. So anyway, but this story is crazy. Isn’t it one of the craziest stories in the Bible?

Jeff:
Yeah. I think it’s a funny story. One, God looks at these people and goes, what are they doing? Because you know, God’s the creator of the entire universe. Right. Of which, you know, the next galaxy over, they haven’t even begun to hardly see our light. You know, the universe is so huge. And so it’s just a giant place. And I say they haven’t even—that was a joke, by the way. I’m not saying there’s life in other places. People are getting all excited about that. But anyways— You sort of opened that cat and mouse now. Yeah, I know, I know. That’s why I had to roll it back. I was making a joke and it didn’t land the way I meant it to. But so God’s the creator of the entire unbelievably expansive universe. And you’ve got these people in Iraq, modern-day Iraq. That’s where this is at. playing around in the sand, literally, they’re making bricks, they’re going to build a building, and the guy goes, oh, what are they doing? Right? Oh, great. Remember, he wiped out the entire world because all they ever thought all day, every day was evil. And now here they are, they’re starting to build a society, and he sees, oh no, in this, they’re going to run amok again. So I need to slow them down.

Chris:
Because of their population, they all speak the same language and they’ve grown to be this great force. And so if they want to build a tower to the sky, what else can they do? Nothing will be impossible for them, is what God says.

Jeff:
And so he on purpose slowed down human development a little bit here for the purpose of trying to slow down, I believe, trying to slow down the sinful man-centered kind of ideas.

Chris:
So we would absolutely, as Christians, we would believe the Bible at face value. And we would say the reason why there are so many languages in the world is because it happened at the Tower of Babel.

Jeff:
That’s correct.

Chris:
And Babel, meaning kind of like the Babel in the word game, B-A-B-B-L-E. They said that’s why they call it the Tower of Babel.

Jeff:
Yeah. So Babylon and Babel, they seem to be the same place or connected. And Babel sounds like a Hebrew word term that means confusion.

Chris:
Hmm.

Jeff:
So that’s why he gave that, is it sounds like a Hebrew word that means confusion. There are a lot of words in the Bible that sound like another Hebrew word that means a thing. So a lot of times names, they won’t go right on the nose, that word. A lot of times names will sound like another Hebrew word that means a thing. It’s kind of a clever, artsy way of naming things for the Hebrew mindset. So the way that Hebrews would name things wasn’t always a direct naming with a specific word. They would use words that sounded like other words. And so it was just clever. It’s a clever angle. And so this word Babel sounds like a Hebrew word that means confusion, which is exactly what God did. He confused the language. So if you think of in Noah’s day, let’s go back pre-flood. These people were living 800, 900 years. They’re populating the earth rapidly. Can you imagine just the amount of wisdom you would have? Do you feel like you have more wisdom and knowledge today than you did when you were 15?

Chris:
Oh, my word, yes.

Jeff:
Can you imagine if you lived another 800 years, how much you would know? Right. Right. Then let’s get people like Edison or Tesla or Ben Franklin. who could not help themselves, Da Vinci, who could not help themselves just tinkering with why do these things work and how do you do this, right? For 800, 900, because these guys died at 70, 80 years old. 50 years old. Can you imagine if they lived 900 years, collectively, the information they’d be able to share with each other? The incredible advancements that they’d be able to come up with. And so I believe probably in Noah’s day, things were much more advanced. pre-flood than by the time you get here, right? It’s like they got hit reset on the planet. Okay, you’re going to start over. You’re not going to carry a lot of the collective knowledge of the whole country, the whole world at the time. You’re going to bring what you know, Ham, Shem, and Japheth. And then when you look at their descendants, some are builders, some are hunters, some aren’t, right? And they just go back to the foundational things that humanity needs. Some are farmers, some are shepherds, You got Nimrod as a warrior, those guys. And then finally they go, hey, let’s build a city. And they start to collect and God sees the pattern is the same. Now they’re going to live shorter, but the pattern is the same. They’re coming together with all this collective knowledge and that collective stuff, he believed, was going to take them into all kinds of wickedness again. He’s not going to confuse them. And so when you have language, it’s hard. It’s hard to communicate.

Chris:
Yeah. Have you ever met somebody who speaks an impressive amount of languages? Yeah. What’s the most you’ve ever seen one human speak?

Jeff:

11. I knew a guy who spoke 11 languages.

Chris:
Really?

Jeff:
And he was fluent in them. Yeah.

Chris:
11 languages. Yeah. Holy cow.

Jeff:
So he spoke English. He spoke… You know them? Yeah. So he spoke English. He spoke French. He spoke… Arabic was his main language. He spoke… Russian, he spoke German, he spoke Dutch. Because those six, he spoke in, he worked in a tourist area and he could do business in all of those languages. And then he had four tribal languages, two Bedouin type languages and two Sub-Saharan African languages. He speaks Swahili and I forgot what the other one was. Yeah, but there was, he had 11 languages he could speak. He was fluent in them. And he could just flip from one to the next, next, next.

Chris:
Wow. Yeah, that’s great.

Jeff:
Oh, Spanish. He spoke Spanish. That was the other one. I was trying to think through what the other one is. His Spanish was kind of a Spanish-Portuguese mix. Yeah. But yeah.

Chris:
So when we were in Africa, we were in the bush. We, uh, our driver ran over a cow, literally hit it. Right. And, and turns out that this tribe who was taking the cow to the market to sell it. So they can get, and the guy who owned it was trying to sell it to get money for his mother. She was dying to get medicine. Right. So anyway, so we run over this cow and the driver only spoke, um, uh, Pocot. And the guys who owned the cow spoke only Swahili. Did I say this already? Yeah. And then what ends up happening is they’re arguing, and then this polka driver comes back over to us, who speaks English, and he says, obviously he speaks English, and he says, the driver says to us, roll up your windows, lock the doors, these guys have spears, they will kill you. And so, and so he said, they are very upset and we’re trying to, you know, sort some things out. So he goes back over there and they’re arguing to the point to where like, uh, it got so heated that we’re in the car. There’s like six of us and we’re just a couple of white guys who don’t speak anything other than English. And so we began to pray. We’re like, God, like do something miraculous here because, uh, we’re picturing those seven guys stabbing our driver, who has the keys in his pocket by the way, right? So we’re not safe.

Jeff:
That was a mistake. You guys should have said, give us the keys.

Chris:
Right. Give us the keys. We’ll pray for you. Give us the keys.

Jeff:
We’re just kidding. We’re going to back up here. We’re going to back a couple hundred yards away and we’re going to go up on that hill and pray for you while you negotiate.

Chris:
So it turns out that, so we pray and we’re like, God, just do something miraculous here because this looks like it’s a serious situation. Cows on the side of the road, it’s almost dead. It’s just laying there. You know, we don’t know what’s happening. And all of a sudden there comes this motorcycle. We haven’t seen another vehicle in like four days. But here comes this motorcycle in cloudy dust, you know, coming right toward us. And the guy stops because he sees a commotion and he knocks on the window. We roll it down and he speaks English. And he says, can I help you? It turns out he is a guy who speaks both English and Polkot and Swahili. And by trade, he’s a veterinarian. I’m not kidding. We prayed for this. We prayed that something would happen, that it would help. It’s almost as if it is a ridiculous story.

Jeff:
And you know, God sent that guy on the way, way before you prayed that prayer.

Chris:
Way before we prayed that prayer, right? So God had this in motion. Well, it turns out, because he was able to bridge the gap of languages, What ended up happening was we discovered that this guy was trying to, you know, sell the cow to bring medicine for his mom. And he wanted 60 bucks for the cow. And, uh, our driver was so cheap that he was saying this, this old scrawny cow isn’t worth more than like $40. Right. And somehow they were able to talk a little bit back and forth with each other over 20 bucks.

Jeff:
They were fighting over 20 bucks. He was risking your life over 20 bucks. Right. You ever wonder how much you’re worth?

Chris:
Right. That’s it. You’re worth $20. So we find this out. And then the guy who was with Don who was leading the group, we all get out of the car. We walk over to the tribal leader and Don takes out $100 and hands it to the guy who owned the cow and says, we are so sorry. Oh, and by the way, the veterinarian said that the cow would pass away. He would die. So he said, so he gave him to him and said, we’re sorry. And so then the tribal leader got emotional and he said, we’ll load the cow up onto your roofs. You can take it because you just bought it. And we said, no, no, no, we don’t want it. Well, it turns out he got even more emotional because now he has food and now he has the money for medicine. Right. Right. And everything’s worked out. And we have a great story. Right. And God is glorified.

Jeff:
It costs a hundred bucks.

Chris:
It costs a hundred bucks. What a story. And you almost died. We almost died. How did Chris die in Africa? We ran over a cow. That’s right. And, but the point is it was the language barrier, right? And yet, and yet God had sent us somebody who spoke all three languages and was a veterinarian. And we just thought to ourselves, you can’t make that up.

Jeff:
My wife and I, talking about language stories, I’ve got a million of these, but my wife and I were in Casablanca in Morocco and we went to dinner and then we need to get back to the train station because there was one last train leaving Casablanca going back to Rabat, which is where we had a meeting the next morning. And we got turned around, and then we get in a cab, and the cab driver doesn’t speak anything that we can speak at all. And so we’re trying to figure out, and I’m trying so hard, I’m trying to use an app on my phone, the language apps were newer back then. It just wasn’t working right. I’m trying to explain to him, I need to go to the train station, and we need to hurry. Couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it. Finally, my wife taps him on the shoulder, he turns around, she goes,

Chris:
Woo-woo!

Jeff:
That’s hilarious. And the guy goes, oh! He took off just as fast. I’m like, hurry, hurry, hurry! And he took off and we made it, barely made it for the train. But it’s funny, sometimes you don’t need language. Sometimes you need a little bit of woo-woo. So God confounds the language, but something beautiful comes out of it. And God takes even the difficult things or the bad things and makes good from them. Romans 8.28 talks about that. God can create all things or cause all things to work out for good. What happened is all these beautiful cultures, this incredible tapestry, of language and culture comes out of the fact that it’s not one homogenous culture. It’s all these cultures. On one side, that causes a lot of trouble, a lot of wars and racism, all those kinds of things. But in its purest form, have you ever been in a place when… I was in Dubai a couple years ago, and we brought in leaders with the Timothy Initiative. We brought in key leaders from like 30 countries around the world. And they did some worship songs that everybody knows. And we went into… So on stage, there were seven different languages leading worship. And then on the screens, they had the different languages there so you could follow the lyrics up on the screens. You just had to follow your language, right? While the band was playing and they went into Chris Tomlin’s, How Great Is Our God. And we had 350 people in a ballroom, in a hotel in Dubai, all singing their own language of How Great Is Our God. And I was just thinking, man, that’s like heaven. That’s what heaven can be like, right? It’s a little bit of heaven on earth. Now in heaven, we’ll all understand each other. We won’t have the languages anymore. But it was a really beautiful thing to see the cultures and they’re wearing all their tribal uniforms and outfits and all that kind of stuff. And it was all the different colors and the joy of the Lord. And it reminded me in Galatians. Galatians says there’s no more Jew or Greek. So he’s talking about, you know, political lines or nationalities. There’s no more slave or free. There’s no more male and female. We’re all one in Christ Jesus. And so in Jesus, we can get back to that oneness, even though the language barriers are in the way.

Chris:
Yeah. And God tells us to go to the highways, the hedges. He tells us to go through Jerusalem, Judea, to other most parts of the world. Tell everyone. And that includes bridging the gap of languages. So God didn’t create it for permanent division, but it’s such a beautiful thing that we should come together with different languages, different cultures, everything else. So, that’s great. So, okay. Well, that looks like our time. So, hopefully we’ll see you tomorrow on The Bible Guys.