Martyn Lawrence - Paradox of Liberty - Class 1 - You May Freely Eat

Automatically transcribed. Accuracy is good but not perfect, and words are sometimes wrong. Trust the audio over the text.

1. 0:00

   Our first speaker this morning is Brother Martin Lawrence from the Collect Heaton UK Ecclesia. The theme for Brother Martin’s classes this week is Paradox of Liberty. Today’s class is entitled You may Freely eat, Brother Martin. Brothers and sisters, 249 years And about a week ago, Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to Benjamin Franklin asking him to edit your Declaration of Independence.

2. 0:35

   And the letter basically said, we’ve reached the penultimate draft. We’re going to meet again tomorrow. If you want to make any changes, please let us know at your earliest convenience. And the draft as it stood, read something like this. We hold these truths to be you’re finishing it in your head. I can hear We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal, that they’re endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And Franklin made very few changes. But one change he did make was cataclysmic. And you know what it was Because it’s changed on the screen. We hold these truths not to be sacred and undeniable, but to be self-evident.

3. 1:22

   And in making that change, there emerged A remarkable parable for the post Christian world in which you and I work out our discipleship in trembling and in fear. Because what Franklin was saying was, I don’t think these things are theological issues. I don’t think they’re sacred. I don’t think you need God to tell you about life and in particular liberty and everything else.

4. 1:47

   Instead, we can begin to just simply work it out through the prevailing culture of our day. These issues are just, am I allowed to put it like this, ingredients in the American dream, free to be changed and worked through based on what’s happening at any one particular time. So much so brothers and sisters. And this is the point for starting like this. So much so that when we think in the West of freedom, we tend to think about structural freedom.

5. 2:13

   We tend to think about that and everything that we talk about when it comes to liberty is framed around that particular idea, your right to live or to worship or to speak freely without hindrance. And, and in case it goes without saying it, are we not deeply fortunate to live in a world where where such things are generally fortunate, generally able to happen? An individual is free, so the line goes, when the government is out of the way.

6. 2:47

   That’s the conversation that runs beneath the surface, I think. And we think less of gospel freedom, Christian freedom, my freedom to make certain choices that might limit me and lift up God. And it’s one of the great things of Scripture, so much so that you know about freedom, you know about being a servant to God, you know about being slaves. And yet, because it’s such a big theme, it’s almost impossible to wrap our arms around it.

7. 3:13

   And yet that’s our task over the course of the next 6 sessions. So I hope we’re going to have some fun doing it together, and I hope we’ll get some great benefit from it. What does it mean, brothers and sisters, to be free? What does it mean to be free? Free, Free to do things, perhaps free to worship in the way you want.

8. 3:33

   Free to bear arms, free in the UK now, to have blue passports instead of the old purple ones, and to have wine in pint glass measures, which was apparently a big part of the Brexit process a few years ago. I’d never met anybody who wants to drink wine in a pint glass measure, but apparently it was what the vote was all about. Free to have a vaccine or not.

9. 3:53

   Free to wear a mask or not. Free to choose your own future. Free to choose your own gender very concept of bodily freedom has become something completely different now than it was 10 or 20 years ago. Suggests to you that if you lived in Jamaica or or West Africa or some of the southern states of the USA couple of 100 years ago you would have had a very different understanding of liberty.

10. 4:24

    And in fact, the Apostle Paul’s words, you are not your own, for you are bought at a price. Well, they mean something wholly reasonable and wholesome on the lips of a disciple in 2025. They mean something really quite distasteful on the lips of a plantation owner in 1725. Liberties changing, freedoms changing. What we think about freedom needs working out. Importantly, what about freedom from things? Not just freedom to do certain stuff, but what about freedom from things you might think of?

11. 5:00

    Freedom from addiction, freedom from guilt, freedom from fear. Some of your Iranian brothers and sisters in other parts of the world hold on to that one very tightly indeed. Freedom from compulsive behaviour, freedom from an abusive relationship or a traumatic memory. Freedom, I suppose, from an autocratic government, Which was where we started a few minutes ago.

12. 5:24

    And I need to be careful what I say about that. Liberty is hard wired into our language. That’s the point I’m trying to get across. Companies in the UK at least, sign up to the Modern Slavery Act Nations sign constitutional amendments on free speech. You might remember the Freedom Convoy where the truckers blocked the vaccine getting across the border a few a few years ago. And of course, if you limit somebody’s freedom of expression, well, then there are legal consequences. This was the Supreme Court in 1992. At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.

13. 5:58

    That’s now how we think in a Western world about liberty. And without getting too deep into the weeds on that, I can make you a pretty good case that that’s a direct air of the change that Franklin made in in the draft of the declaration, that now we can make it up as we go along because we’re free to do what we want. It’s countercultural to deny yourself. It’s countercultural to pick up your cross and follow Christ. It’s on trend to do what feels good and what feels right, because if something feels wrong, then it can’t be right. And we get our answers not from looking outside, but from looking within ourselves and then checking the Internet to see if it agrees with us.

14. 6:43

    And I don’t know about you, but I think that in the West, the very idea of liberty is rooted in the idea that you cannot be human without it. That’s why we talk about it so much. That’s why the Statue of Liberty is so significant, not just because of its of its location and where people travelled in from, but because of what it stands for. And yet the language of slavery and servanthood and freedom runs through our scriptures.

15. 7:11

    And so it behooves us just to try to understand a little more about it. Here’s the paradox, of course, Psalm 116 and verse 16. Truly, O Lord, I am your servant. I am your servant, the son of your maidservant. You’ve loosed my bones.

16. 7:33

    I’ve just dropped that verse on you. You didn’t know it was coming, so you have another chance just to reflect upon it. But whatever we understand of liberty, whatever the psalmist understands of liberty, it’s not just being free, is it? It’s not just an unfettered opportunity to do whatever I like with whoever I want, however I want, because this psalmist is a servant, and he’s descended from servants, and he’s free from his bonds, and yet he’s still a servant, apparently willingly.

17. 8:04

    It almost explains our own age, in which we have all of this freedom, all of these opportunities, and yet all of these ways in which we are not free. Like Franklin declaring all men free while stoning slaves. Like a government saying love is love because it couldn’t impinge on anybody’s freedom of expression without realising that the gospel impinges on everybody’s freedom of expression. Like the British once a year on the last Night of the Proms concert in London, singing Britain’s Never Never Shall Be Slaves, which was written when we had an empire and we had slaves.

18. 8:37

    There was a paradox within the very where we talk about this sort of stuff. Western society is at a cultural crisis point of what it means to be human.

19. 8:47

    That’s why this subject is so difficult to get our arms around because the very notion of being free is almost requires us to have a different vocabulary to make sense of it when we talk to other people. And, and I suggest to you that post, well, I suppose post COVID, the world is, is just discovering that we are not quite as omnipotent as the post war generation told us we were. So we need to begin to rework things from the ground up. This is where we’re going in our sessions. Brothers and sisters, that was a very long preamble, but I think it was an important one.

20. 9:19

    We’ve got 6 sessions and we’re going to work our way through session #1 is about principles. We’re going to think about what some key principles of liberty are that emerge from the beginning of the Scriptures. We’re going to move through the book of Genesis and in particular into the great liberate, the, I was going to say the great liberation movement, the escape from Egypt, the release from bondage.

21. 9:39

    What does that look like in this particular frame of liberty? Well, think about what liberty means in action. How does God talk to his nation when they come out of Egypt? How does he ask them to treat those who work for them? What was it like to be a servant in Israel at the time of the wilderness journey and afterwards?

22. 9:59

    Then we’ll move into the monarchy and think about what it’s like when life as God’s people, as God’s servant Israel, starts to go wrong. How does God offer solutions for that? How did the people begin to understand what comes next? We’ll move into the New Testament and think about what the Lord means about liberty and what the apostle Paul speaks about in Galatians chapters 3 and four. And then finally finish up with Roman society. Because by Saturday morning, when you’ve had hours and hours of study and you’ve had your kids haven’t slept for about four days, and they don’t recognize you anymore, the one thing you’re going to need is a Roman history lesson. So I’m saving that for last.

23. 10:39

    So you look forward to it most of all. Anyway, let’s get going. Genesis chapter 2, please. Genesis chapter 2. And these are words that you know, and yet I just want to hang them on a different peg. Let’s come into Genesis 2. Let’s go in at verse 16, no verse, verse 15 for connection. The Lord God took the man and he put him in the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.

24. 11:03

    And the Lord God commanded the man, saying of every tree of the garden. You may freely eat. Your translation may not say freely. Some versions say surely that the new English translation’s got a margin that says you may eat to your heart’s content, which in some ways is the is the right way of talking about liberty, isn’t it? You can do whatever you choose to your heart’s content of every tree.

25. 11:29

    You may freely or surely or certainly eat, but if the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat of it, for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die. Think about what God’s telling them, brothers and sisters, in that, that short series of words that you that you know so well.

26. 11:48

    They could, they could eat from one particular tree of the things that God had offered for them. They could pick and choose different fruits. They could wait until they were hungry, or they could have 18 meals a day if that’s what they chose. There’s no specific parameters for what they’re allowed to do with the food. They can bake it and cook it and turn it into cherry pie or whatever else they chose to do with it. There’s no specific parameters.

27. 12:11

    There is an inherent freedom within the commandment that God is giving them to do broadly whatever they choose with the creation that He’s given to them, because God is the Creator of all things. The heavens are the Lords, but the earth has He given to the children of men. This is the free gift that God is offering to us.

28. 12:28

    You have the freedom, the Lord says, to benefit from my creation and to eat as you choose. Save only one parameter 1 boundary 1 limitation. You cannot eat from the tree that will cause you harm. There is immediate freedom with very broad guardrails. And of course Eve doesn’t see it that way, does it?

29. 12:54

    Because does she? Because Eve is going to tell us a slightly different account coming to chapter 3. And and verse one, when the serpent says, has God not said you shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but if the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, God has said you shall not eat of it, neither shall you touch it lest you die.

30. 13:24

    Just look at the comparisons there with what Eve has said and what God has said. She’s dropped a fundamental word because she doesn’t say freely. That was the command in chapter 2, wasn’t it? You may freely eat, and suddenly God sounds arbitrary. There’s only one word, and yet it carries a multitude of weight.

31. 13:48

    And she doesn’t say every tree. So now God sounds limiting, the God who was abundant in his provision and his liberty and his liberation for his people. Suddenly God sounds arbitrary and God sounds limiting. And if you just contrast the words that God says with the words that Eve says, you may freely eat of every tree of the garden.

32. 14:12

    What does Eve say? Well, we can eat of the fruit of the tree. God sounds generous and his his language is rich and abundant and powerful. And Eve sounds sulky and grudging. And well, if you OK, if you, if we have to, we’ll do it. And even the tone of the voice has shifted just in setting up those two different things. Don’t forget, it’s not just this that they’re able to eat because God has given them dominion over everything else at the end of Chapter 1 as well.

33. 14:41

    So this broad provision that the Father is making for his creation is being recast, reshaped as we can eat of the fruit of the trees. It’s like you turning up at the hall for lunch and there’s like only one line and one option and it’s still amazing. That’s all we’ve got. Suddenly things look a little bit differently.

34. 15:01

    God’s freedom is rich and generous and alive. Think about the words from from John chapter 15 where the Lord speaks to his disciples. You are my friends if you do whatsoever I command you not. I’ll tolerate your existence if you don’t bother me and just sit in the corner and stay quiet. You are my friends if you do whatsoever I command you, God’s abundant provision for his creation.

35. 15:24

    What else is different in Eve’s words? She’s added to it, hasn’t she? Chapter 3 and verse three. You shan’t eat of it nor shall you touch it or God didn’t say that. So we again, we’ve just recast God’s liberty. We’ve recast the freedom that God’s given to his creation and she’s changed in case you die, Oh sorry, she’s in changed. You will surely die to in case you die end of verse 3 and she’s even changed the name of the tree or at least she’s dropped the name of the tree, the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden.

36. 16:00

    Chapter 3 and verse 3. She can’t even do God the courtesy of remembering his name anymore. Everything is different in just a few pages or just a few verses things have moved on. Even the way God speaks has changed. Chapter 2 and verse 16, the Lord God commanded the man and it’s now God said, this is what you and I think about freedom compared with what God thinks about freedom. The order is different as well.

37. 16:26

    I don’t know whether you’ve seen that. It’s up to three. And verse 2, we may eat of the fruit of the trees, but we can’t eat of the other one. In other words, it’s our prerogative, not the other way around. You can have all of this stuff, but just not that one. We can eat of anything, but God says we can’t do that. We are.

38. 16:44

    We are reworking freedom in our own image. We are making it into what we choose to be. Freedom principle number one, brothers and sisters, if my slide works there, it does. God’s freedom is wide, but it has guardrails for our benefit. Because think for a moment about the consequences of freedom on human terms.

39. 17:08

    They have to kill for recovering. They begin to die themselves. And Adam doesn’t blame his wife, he blames his God. You set the boundaries in the wrong place. Lord. The woman you gave me, she told me to eat it. It’s your fault. Your freedom’s wrong. Lord, You set it all up wrong. God’s freedom is wide, but it has guardrails for our benefit. Freedom principle #2 We don’t like God’s freedom and we don’t like guardrails.

40. 17:39

    We want to push them as far as we can. We want to build our own identities. We don’t want to be given one by somebody else. Genesis says we’re created for a purpose, to fill the earth and subdue it. We don’t have to invent our identity. We don’t have to find it from somewhere else. God’s already given it to us to be the creation that He made for us.

41. 17:58

    We don’t have to get and acquire and know everything. There is this great freedom in not needing to have every single fact that the Internet will offer you.

42. 18:07

    Not suggesting that we start chasing a line of ignorance, but just the very notion that God has given us what we need and told us that we are our most free, our most, can I use a loaded term, our most authentic when we live in conformity with Christ. Great lesson of Genesis 1-2 and three is that freedom comes within God’s boundaries, that when the Potter makes the pot, he gets to choose its shape.

43. 18:38

    And our challenge in our studies this week. There I say, our challenge in our discipleship and in our Eccles is to undo the narrative that says that limitless options make us more free to recapture the goodness of constraints. Touched a little on it yesterday, didn’t we? This idea that freedom is associated with multiple choice

44. 19:05

    toothpaste or mineral water or gender identity or whatever else is available out there. This was what Eden offered, and Adam and Eve wanted more. This is a quote. It’s not a Christa Delphine writer, but it just captured what I was trying to get to. Our culture conditions us to resist the lines and boundaries we’ve inherited from people in the past. But Orthodoxy insists that certain limitations are necessary for freedom.

45. 19:30

    If we do away with lines and limits, if we think every wall needs a sledgehammer, if we crumple the blueprint and toss it aside, we may feel free, but we’ll never build anything that lasts. Ours is an age where everybody has a megaphone and nobody has a filter. And we never talk about the goodness of constraints or the goodness of limits or the goodness of being finite, because everybody wants to live longer and do more things and travel further. And God is just saying, well, all of those things are there within these broad boundaries.

46. 20:03

    Freedom principle #3 unlimited freedom surprisingly limits our options and increases our isolation because the natural consequence of unlimited freedom is loneliness. If you are the center of your universe, at some point, at some point you are going to have to let somebody down.

47. 20:29

    Whether that’s your spouse or your best friend or somebody at college, if you are the center of your universe and everything revolves around you and nothing else matters, at some point somebody else is going to have to go by the wayside. Takes us back to our conversations about marriages, doesn’t it? If you want to follow your dreams and do you, you will be the loneliest person on the planet. And Adam and Eve are just about to discover that. Genesis chapter 3 again.

48. 20:54

    Come down with me to verse 17, because freedom is now channelled in a particular direction to Adam. God said, Because you’ve hearkened to the voice of your wife, and eaten of the tree which I commanded you, saying, You shall not eat of it. Cursed is the ground for your sake. In sorrow you shall eat of it all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you, and you shall eat the herb of the field, and in the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken.

49. 21:25

    For dust you are, and to dust you shall return. Freedom is restricted because of sin. It’s still wide, it’s just not quite as wide as before, and it involves work which it didn’t before. In sorrow you’re going to eat all the days of your life. Thorns and thistles will be with your food.

50. 21:41

    In sweat you will eat until the day that you die. Sets a theme which will again land up in the parable of the Prodigal, that only when he realizes where the bread of life is to be found and comes back to his father ready to make his confession of faith and say only here can I find life, does the father come out running to him. That’s why the father didn’t chase him off when the parable starts And he says, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.

51. 22:11

    And he doesn’t say please. And he doesn’t say Lord, father, if it’s OK. And he doesn’t say if the farm is financially solvent. He says give it to me now. And the father let’s him go because the father represents the Lord who says if that’s the freedom you want, then you need to go out and find how difficult it is to live that particular life. There is.

52. 22:34

    This is a random historical fact. We’re not going to spend along with it, but the very first written reference to freedom is about four and a half thousand years old. And, and it’s a Sumerian word and it literally means return to mother. The word idea of manumission, the idea of coming back home, the idea of restoring somebody to their original status.

53. 22:53

    Find that really intriguing, you know, because if that’s anywhere close to how Scripture is talking about it, then there is within this idea of freedom, this notion of restoration of being put back to where we were before of the journey that Scripture takes us on of. Well, we’ve come out from the garden now and everything that the Scripture is going to run from here to the end of Revelation is about how we get back through the tree because God has made man upright and he has sought out many inventions. Return to mother is a rather intriguing way of looking at how this works.

54. 23:25

    Chapter 3 and verse 24, He drove out the man and placed at the east of the Garden of Eden Kerubim and a flaming sword which turned every way to keep the way to the tree of life. Freedom is flipped on its head suddenly here at the end of Genesis chapter 3. It’s the same in the law, actually. People go outside the camp, don’t they? For discipline, for uncleanness because of a particular sin. And then there is a period of waiting and after that they come back inside.

55. 23:59

    You tell somebody who doesn’t have a, a biblical background, a biblical training about the idea of Adam and Eve going out of the garden. You’d say, well, they’re free now. They don’t have these boundaries where God is saying you can’t do this. I mean, Genesis 3 and verse 24 is, is a tragedy, but the world’s going to look at it and say, well, you’re, I can do what I want now. There are no boundaries.

56. 24:20

    I am free to deconstruct and do whatever I choose. What the world calls unfettered freedom, God calls exile and captivity. We need to learn to look through an entirely different set of lenses. Principle #4 freedom looks like captivity and captivity looks like freedom. Think about when Israel asked for a king. Remember what Samuel warns them of. If you have a king, he will take your men and women and he will put them to his work.

57. 24:54

    Things that start out looking good will actually finish up looking bad. And so whenever Scripture talks about freedom, in particular whenever Genesis talks about freedom, it’s going to be hung around these particular ideas.

58. 25:09

    Liberty is about bringing us back to how things were at the beginning. God is looking for us to find, to find a restoration, a return to what He’d offered his creation at the beginning because in a very dark sense, creation is now in bondage and is subject to futility. To borrow words of the apostle Paul.

59. 25:31

    Come on to Chapter 9 with me, brothers and sisters. Genesis 9. This is the covenant with Noah. Let’s just summarize the first few verses. This is after the flood. 9 and verse 1. Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. So we’ve got a little echo of earlier on in Genesis verse 2, Noah’s going to have dominion and, and God is generous with this, isn’t he? Every beast of the air and of the earth and every fowl of the air and all that moves on the earth and all the fishes of the sea into your hand, they’re delivered. This is God’s liberality.

60. 26:10

    Again, this is God’s broad freedom. Every moving thing that lives is meat for you. Even as the green herb. I’ve given you all things. It’s not 1000 miles away from how we begun with God giving them so much, but now there is just a a rider on it. Verses 4-5 and six, it’s all yours.

61. 26:34

    But here are the limits. First of all, you’ve got to kill the animal before eating it. Verses 5 and 6. Freedom to have dominion does not mean the freedom to end human life at your blood, your blood of your lives. I will require. So it mirrors Genesis 1-2 and three, but it’s conditioned now for sin being in the world because we’ve had the sacrifice of Genesis 3 and we’ve had the murder of Genesis 4 and we’ve had the rise of sin that has has culminated in God sending the flood.

62. 27:10

    It’s the same pattern as before. Creation isn’t free. It’s free to do something. It’s not just unfettered access to whatever you want. God is painting brothers and sisters on a massive canvas. This is the redemption story that God creates and man is driven out and Eden is restored through this way back through the sword that the Lord will take back to the tree of life to go back to where we were at the beginning. Creation is in bondage now and and God’s God’s open handedness that we saw in those earlier chapters is just is just reworked slightly.

63. 27:45

    Freedom requires boundaries. If you have children, you know that absolutely. If you’ve ever driven a car at a speed limit, you know that absolutely. We like to be free, but also we know some way deep down there’s some values in having some kind of boundaries. Now, Genesis Chapter 9 is the second iteration, second, working out of a narrative that has begun back in the beginning, because you will notice in Chapter 9, there are some connections with those early Genesis chapters.

64. 28:15

    Verse 20, for example, there is a vineyard, just like at the beginning there was a garden and Noah is going to take the fruit of the vine just like Eve took the fruit of the tree. And things are going to go wrong. And suddenly we’ve got mention of nakedness in verse 22 and there is shame and a covering and there are curses, verse 25, and a blessing, verse 26, that the language is it’s a different event. Don’t don’t misunderstand me, but they’re just little threads that come through from those early Genesis chapters. Aren’t there God’s Providence and a garden and and fruit of a tree and nakedness and curses.

65. 28:53

    These these look like things that we’ve seen before. It’s a repeat in some ways of Genesis chapters 2 and three. And not only is this passage looking back, but it’s also looking forward to the exodus that will come when God leads his people from Egypt. Because when you think about the fundamentals of the Noah account, the screen jumped ahead of me, but it’s there. You can perhaps see it.

66. 29:18

    There is there is a judgement on a wicked people. There are faithful family passing through the water. They’re going to go from the flood to a mountaintop and they’re on that mountain. People and animals will be brought into covenant with God at this mountain. It’s like Sinai. Things that are happening in the Genesis accounts are just whispering to us of things that God’s going to do later on a bigger canvas, telling us about the things that God will do when he leads his people from Egypt, when they are forged in the fire, when they come out through the water, when they become his people, the Kingdom of priests and the holy nation. And we’re just getting whispers of what freedom actually looks like.

67. 30:06

    Nowhere is is living rather and and his family are living a release from captivity, a release from slavery long before that event actually takes place. And they are part of a single thread that is running through these passages. Freedom principle number, whatever number it is five. I’m losing track already. God has a plan to reverse our captivity. That’s the critical part of this. Not just that we’re going to be left on our own, not just that we have to make it up as we go along, but that God has a plan to return us back to where we were before Chapter 11. And, and please take it in the right way. When I say the reason that we’re just skipping over the surface of these chapters is because I’m, I’m assuming you know what’s going on in them.

68. 31:01

    So that’s why we’re just bouncing off the surface a little. So this is Chapter 11. Well, if, if the events of Noah looked a little bit like a reworking of, of the fall. So to Genesis 11 looks a little bit like the reworking of the four, because Genesis 11, of course, is the chapter about the, the, the tower of Babel.

69. 31:20

    And you can look at this in lots of different ways. And people write about the tower of Babel and, and say, whatever, there are things going on here. It’s, you know, it’s a tragic scattering of people who had been a community. That’s one way of looking at it, that that things had been good and now they’re not. There’s there’s some crazy theory going around that this is what this is proof that God doesn’t like technology. I don’t think that’s what’s going on in Genesis 11, but there’s a theory out there that says that that’s the case. But something is amiss, isn’t it? In this narrative, Chapter 11 and verse 1, the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. Well, actually that’s true in Chapter 11. It’s not true if you go back to chapter 10, because there are languages everywhere.

70. 31:57

    In chapter 10, verse 5, for example, the Isles of the Gentiles were divided, everyone after his tongue, after their families in their nations. So that idea that that there is just one language in the earth is, is, is true of this place. I don’t think it’s true of of all of creation at this time.

71. 32:15

    I think it’s true of what’s happening in this particular location. And Genesis 11 is positioned as a rebellion against the Lord. God has called them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. And it’s the filling of the earth which is being resisted here. They’re trying to stay in one place and not be be be scattered and not be moved further away.

72. 32:37

    And so the first thing that they do, well, I was going to say the first thing that they do is build a tower to stay in one place. Actually, it’s not first thing that they do is to fire bricks and your Bible antenna will go up straight away because people who make bricks tend to speak of us to us, the things that will happen later on.

73. 33:01

    It actually tells us the key problem with Bible, the key motivation for what’s going on. You know, is it the is it that they’re trying to build it high? Or is it that it’s the very notion of trying to do something that God has asked them not to do, which is lying underneath this.

74. 33:13

    And I think it’s the second one. And I think this idea of the bricks tells us why verse three, they said to one another, go to let us make brick and burn them throughly. There is one other place where that expression pops up. You probably know it. It’s Exodus chapter 1 where where he where Pharaoh says, come on, let’s go and do the same thing. What’s happening in Genesis 11 is again, just anticipating the release from bondage, or at least the circumstances that prompt the release from bondage.

75. 33:45

    Brickmaking is is slave labour. It’s something that’s going to get returned to when we get into the book of Exodus and they’re going to secure their legacy by building it up to heaven. Now, just, you know, for the avoidance of all doubt, brothers and sisters, this is not about saving everybody who’s around them. You know, you think the slaves who are making the bricks are going to get into the tower if a second flood comes, Not in a million years.

76. 34:14

    This is not a way of making sure everybody is safe. This is a way of making sure that those in power are safe and those who are doing the work are not. And there are other connections there and you can see them if you can see the screen with what will happen later in the Exodus from Egypt. They’re going to build a city that reaches up to heaven, which is an an echo or which is echoed in Deuteronomy Chapter 9. They are spoken of in verse 6 by the Lord as being one people and one language, which is a phrase that only ever pops up once in Genesis in in another place.

77. 34:48

    And it’s to do with sexual assault, which is not a great comparison. What what Babel is, is, is being shown as is a city in, in light of other awful places, Shechem and and Egypt, and that the cities of Canaan. What’s going on in Babel is not good news. It’s narrating the birth of empire where I get to control somebody else by making the work for me and exploiting them.

78. 35:17

    And I think it explains that the transition between Genesis chapter 10 and Genesis Chapter 11 as well. It’s not a golden age of understanding where there is one language and everything is a utopia and it only goes wrong from here. We know that that’s not the case because we’ve seen it go wrong twice already.

79. 35:37

    We’re actually regressing from God’s command to fill the earth and subdue it and go out and explore what’s there to something enforced. You will speak only like this. When the English colonized island they banned the use of the Irish languages. It was designed that only English was spoken when slaves came across on the Middle passage W African languages were banned to avoid rebellion, so that only English was spoken when Franco’s Spain was at it’s height. Catalan and Basque languages were banned to avoid rebellion. It’s the same principle as empires all across history. We stop people talking in other languages because we don’t know what they’re saying and we can’t control them. And that’s what’s going on in Genesis Chapter 11. Freedom has turned in upon itself. God has has commanded Noah to have dominion over a post Eden, post flood world.

80. 36:33

    And one of the ways that that was going to be worked out was that people would spread across the world. They would speak in different languages and they would glorify God in the way that it was going to happen.

81. 36:44

    And it’s a story of how we can miss apply freedom at the expense of other people, particularly, I suppose, at the in the pursuit of power. I suppose it’s a comment on on what happens when you undervalue other people when you don’t see them as made being made in the image of God.

82. 37:05

    Peter talks about this idea. You might remember, in fact, maybe just come over if we’ve got time. Yes, we have first Peter chapter 2. It’s only a single verse, but it’s good to good to look at it

83. 37:19

    one Peter chapter 2 and I want to bring you to verse 16, but let’s get the context from verse 15 as well. So is the will of God that in well doing you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men as free and not using your liberty for a cloak of maliciousness, but as the servants of gods, don’t use your freedom to cover up evil.

84. 37:47

    So freedom can lead to evil. Just in case we thought that that wasn’t the case. I think we figured it out now. But just in case we weren’t sure, freedom can lead to evil and liberty is good because God’s already cast his creation in that particular way. But there is something about being in that place that can lead us astray, which is why the end of verse 16 says you’re free.

85. 38:14

    But living as free men and women requires service. And I just bring before you the example of the man who comes after the building of the Tower of Babel, a man whose entire life was to run counter to the principles that lay behind building that tower. Just come back to Genesis. I should have asked you to to keep a finger.

86. 38:39

    But it’s not tricky to find, is it? Genesis Chapter 11 and chapter 12, Abraham’s call against the backdrop of the failure to build this tower and the promises that God is going to make to Abraham. Abraham, as he’s called at the beginning, is everything the builders of the tower wanted to get for themselves. Abraham’s going to give up his freedom. It’s the wrong slide.

87. 39:05

    There we are. He’s going to voluntarily give himself up. Just remind yourself about what happens in his, well, in the broad span of his life, he’s going to leave his father’s house and move away. The very opposite of the Babel idea of let’s stay here and make sure that we are OK. So chapter 12.

88. 39:27

    Leave your home, your country, and your father’s house. Turn your back on your past. Give up everything that anchors you and makes you who you are. Genesis chapter 20. Genesis chapter 17, the covenant of circumcision, that the way in which you you show through this thoroughly unpleasant process that you are not in control of yourself.

89. 39:56

    This vote of no confidence in the flesh, where the way in which God was to show that the son of promise was to be born was not through anything that Abraham could do.

90. 40:06

    So he gives up his past in chapter 12 when he comes out of her of the Colbies. He physically gives up his present in chapter 17 and then on Moriah, where there is little echo of Chapter 12. Leave your home and your country and your father’s house. Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love. These threefold repetitions just to tie up the passages. He’s going to go to Moriah and we’ll offer his son. And the whole test of of gods and Abraham and Isaac on the mountain is for him to realize whose son Isaac really is. And so he will give up his past and he will give up his present. And in picture language on Moriah, he will give up his future as well.

91. 40:54

    That’s how God is going to reverse our captivity, by us doing as Abraham did, by realizing that we can do nothing of ourselves, but we can only place our discipleship, our future, our hopes, our children, our ecclesias in the hands of Almighty God. And so the story of Abraham and of the people that follow from him in goodness and truth and in faith is that the place that we find our our identity trying to use as many loaded terms as possible in the first session.

92. 41:33

    So you get used to them coming down the track. A place that we make our legacies completely different from the Babel project, completely different from a view that says, well, it’s your fault, Lord, you put the boundaries in the wrong place. What will happen with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob? What will happen with Moses, What will happen, at least in principle, with the nation of Israel is that people who choose to leave their place and be scattered can have faith in Almighty God.

93. 42:01

    That, brothers and sisters, is how true liberty can be seen.