One of the oldest and most common debates in politics. And this is not just American, but going back to the the Greco-Roman world is what is the purpose of government. Generally, a more compassionate or liberal approach is that the purpose of government is to right wrongs and make the world a better place. Generally, a more conservative or right leaning approach is that the purpose of government is to do less, to stay out of the way, and there's that constant tension, and you can understand the appeal to the liberal cause in that when you frame it in a positive way, can't you? I mean, if you're being honest, if somebody were to present to you, hey, there's problems in the world and government can fix them and make life better. Don't you want to make life better for more people? The answer is obviously yes. I do want to make life better for more people. And so that's the old the old adage. And I remember my dad telling me at a very young age, I went to a, you know, not from a Christian family. I went to a state university. And my dad, who was, you know, basically a a growing up hippie, um, told me, you know, if you're not politically a liberal by age twenty, you don't have a heart. Um, but then he followed it with, if you're not politically conservative by age forty, you don't have a brain. Um, and so that resonated with me a little bit. Um, and that in that has that tension in it that you recognize government is designed to do good things for people. It should in some sense do that. Well, First Chronicles takes you back to where government comes from. And we're going to bounce between here and Genesis tonight. But a little bit of that tension that's ingrained in human nature is because of the origin of government. Last week, you went to a time where there was no sin in the world, and we looked at the life of Adam. And Adam lived in a world where there is no there was no sin, there was no depravity. There was a command by God not to eat the tree, but it was a sinless environment. And that was the test. Kid, could mankind keep the command of God? And the answer was no. The answer was no. Man's nature was perfect, but it was capable of change. And through Adam and Eve, sin, death, and sin entered the world. And the era of the freedom of the garden. The era of innocence, it's called, was closed when sin entered the world. The era of innocence gave way to the era of conscience when there was no government. Nations didn't exist. The people began to multiply and fill the earth and go around the earth. But there were no laws. There was no government, there was no taxes. There was no police. There was no military. There wasn't even hose. Can you believe it? People can put their trash cans on the wrong side of their driveway scot free. In fairness, there probably was no collective trash service either. That's called the air of conscience. God gave people a conscience that was supposed to restrain them from sin. The conscience convicted them of things that they were doing that were wrong. And you see this even in back with Cain and Abel, for example, where God speaks to Canaan and says, Cain, what are you doing? Don't you know sin crouches at your doorstep? You must master it. There was this idea that Cain had to present a sin offering a blood sacrifice for sin. The idea that sin could only be atoned for by sacrifice is ingrained in conscience. We know that intuitively. We know what sin is. We don't know the intricacies of divine law. Of course not. We don't know the intricacies of some of the more complicated ethical choices in life. Without the Word of God, we wouldn't know them. But without the Word of God we do know what is right and what is wrong. We have a big picture understanding. We know that adultery is wrong and murder is wrong, and that truth is right and lying is sin. We know those things. We know that God is meant to be worshiped. We know that sin is bad and leads to death. That's all the air of conscience and people failed the air of conscience. Violence abounded. Genesis six described the end of that era as a time where where people were violent beyond all measure. The Lord said, I'm not going to strive with mankind forever. I'm going to limit their days. They get one hundred and twenty more years, and then it's over. In that one hundred and twenty years, Noah built the ark, preached repentance to the world. So few came. And God flooded the world. That picks up at the end A verse for Noah. First Chronicles chapter one. Shem, Ham and Japheth. Now what follows? And I'm actually not going to read all of the names of this list. But what follows is the genealogies of Shem, Ham and Japheth. There's about seventy names in the list, and seven is a common recurring number of them. And so by going through that list, you recognize this is not an exhaustive genealogy. Some people are given to two generations, some to three generations. It's as if Moses, who wrote this similar genealogy in Genesis, and Ezra, who wrote first Chronicles, here, are putting the list in such a way to make it memorable. I'm not going to ask you to read all the names. We'll go through them one at a time in a little bit later, but understand, they break into to Noah's three sons, and then they're structured in such a way to take them to seventy names so that you can learn them. Understand that God is repopulating the world. As I mentioned See you when you read this. If you were a Jewish person, you know who knows? You know the story of the flood. But I imagine some of you may not. And so I want you to turn in your Bibles back to Genesis. We're not going to read the whole flood account. That's three chapters long. But I want you to notice where this idea, after the age of conscience has gone away, where the age of nations or government comes from. So you can turn to Genesis chapter eight. This is the end of the flood. The nations don't yet exist, but neither do people. The only people who exist are on the ark, the only animals that are still living on the ark. The door is open, the animals go off, and they're going to repopulate the world. You see this in verse nineteen of Genesis chapter eight. Every beast, every creeping thing, every bird, everything that moves on the earth went out by families from the ark. So all the living animals in the on the earth now are departing from the ark. The earth is being repopulated, beginning with the animals. Noah, meanwhile, built an altar to Yahweh and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. It's noteworthy that the first act in leaving the Ark was worship. There are skeptics and those that mock the Bible that say, how could Noah have offered animal sacrifices if he only had two of every animal on the ark? To which I replied, that's what happened to unicorns. Silly. That could be what happened to unicorns. I don't know, but no. He had more than two of every animal he had of the clean animals, the animals appropriate for sacrifice. He had seven pairs of them, so he was stocked for sacrifice. Even before the flood, he was prepped for sacrifice. But when he gets off the ark, the first thing he does is offer sacrifices. Now, as you watch how life unfolds off of the ark, that's establishing what Shem, Ham and Japheth are going to go into, it's establishing the era of government. And so I'll give you this quick list before after the flood, what God is giving people. And it begins, as we just noted, with worship, they get off the ark in. The very first thing they do is worship. Sacrifices are built into God's design for the post-flood world. So the age of conscience is over. The age of government is about to begin, and it begins with sacrifice that God can only be worshiped through the death of something presented to atone for sin. Now you recognize as a Christian this is all pointing forward to the cross of Christ. There is no forgiveness of sin without the shedding of blood. But before Christ, before this understanding that God was going to become a man and take on a human nature and dwell among us and be born in Bethlehem. This is before the prophecies about Bethlehem. It's after the prophecy in Genesis three, of course, but it's before the prophecy of of Bethlehem that he would be a Nazarene and all of that, that he'd be crucified. That hasn't been given yet. Yet it's already baked into the world that people will be. Will worship God through sacrifice. God, for his part, responds. There in verse twenty one, I will never again curse the ground because of man, or the intention of his heart is evil from his youth. In other words, people didn't get sanctified by the flood. The floodwaters didn't purify anybody's heart. It didn't purge Adam's sin. And God knows that the earth is going to go back to being just as wicked as it was before, unless something different happens and something different is going to happen. First God instituted sacrifice. Then he's going to institute seasons for for food. At the end of chapter eight, the earth remains. Seed time. Harvest, cold heat, summer, winter, day and night won't cease. There's going to be seasons. Be fruitful. Chapter nine, verse one. Multiply. Fill the earth. The dread of you will be on the animals. So first, worship second. Be fruitful and multiply. Now this is a repetition. This is in the wrong order. So we'll do we'll do third food here first. Be fruitful and multiply. God says, and then he says, the fear of every animal on the earth in verse two will be upon you, or it will be upon them. They will be afraid of you. But look at the end of verse two into your hand. They are delivered. Every living thing that lives shall be food for you. I give you the plants. I give you everything. So God gives them food to eat from animals this time. This is a repetition of what you saw earlier in Genesis. But now they get plants and animals. The animals are going to be afraid of them, which is a blessing, right? Animals can be mean. Animals can be mean. You think it's fun to pet a deer, right? Until you get a hoof in the head? So it is a blessing of God that deer are afraid of us. The other night I came home and just a couple of weeks ago, and there were two deer sleeping under my the bay window in my front yard, in my front yard. So I walked down a little footstep and there's a glass bay window and there's two deer sleep underneath there. I did not see them at first when I grabbed the doorknob there like maybe five feet away from me, six feet away from me. They jump up and, um. Let's just say that got my attention. Um, and they ran away, and I told. I told somebody, I forget who I told. And they said, do you know what? You're so lucky they didn't jump right through that window. And I started thinking about it. And I am super lucky they didn't jump to that. It's a big window and it was right next to him. Those things had gone right through the window. And man, what do you do when you got a deer running around your house? It's a mess for sure. Move, I think, is the right answer. Animals are afraid of us and that's a blessing. They don't want to sleep in your bedroom. They want to get out of town. That's a blessing. And then we in turn eat them. We get to eat them. This is a blessing that God gives us. Third, we noticed family be fruitful and multiply. God tells Noah, fill the earth. This also is a repetition of what happened earlier in Genesis. They were supposed to be fruitful and multiply. Back in Genesis. So God establishes establishes kind of a repetition here that God will be worshiped, that he will provide food, and we are to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth. Family and food go together here, because if you're going to subdue the earth, you need help. Adam and Eve couldn't subdue the earth by themselves. They needed more workers. Noah can't eat people and the Ark can't subdue the earth. They need more people. The earth is big, so being fruitful and multiplying is connected with filling the earth. And now, verse six, whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed for God made man in his own image. Here's a distinction between animals and people. People are not made. Our people are made in God's image and animals are not. You can eat animals, you can eat people. And whoever kills a person murders a person. Blood will be demanded from them. God institutes capital punishment. He institutes capital punishment. This is the first time. Do you remember back in the garden? This is. You think as you read these first three things, you think this is exactly what happened in the in the garden, but now something new is added life. God protects life now that he did not in the garden because the garden was sinless, there was the tree of life that was there. And when they sinned, they were locked out from the tree of life. Now there's no tree of life after the flood. And so God. Protects human life Before the flood. Violence reigned. Murder reigns. Cain killed Abel, and Cain couldn't be touched. God said, leave him alone. Anyone touches him, I'll punish that person. Capital punishment was banned before the flood. Which led to, of course, Lamech not know his father. The other Lamech, rejoicing in celebrating over his murder, saying nobody can touch me. I can kill whoever I want. I'm untouchable. To keep the world from going down that road again. This time God establishes. This is the first mention of government in the Bible. The sword to punish evildoers. He establishes government to protect. And it's too constraining to say the protection of government applies only to life here. The idea is that this is a post-flood world. The umbrella of government is extended over all four of these. It's what God It establishes in the Post-flood world. And then in verse nine, verse eight, God then speaks to Noah and his sons. Noah and his sons is where we'll jump back to first Chronicles and look at them. He had three sons. They had wives. They had children, his sons Shem, Ham and Japheth. And then you get your list here. The first part of the list is those that descended from Japheth. The Japheth people call them. I don't know who, but that's what people say. And they went and they went north of the Mediterranean. When you look at this list here, Gomer, Magog, Magog is north of the Black Sea. The the Stan Nations, Madi that's around the Tigris River. That's very far east of Israel. Javon. That's modern day Greece. Tubal Meshek. Tyrus. Now you're starting to get the second generation, the sons of Gomer, the Ashkenaz, the Ashkenazi people. They're still around today. The Repatha. We don't really know who those people are. The sons of Javon. Another generation here, Elisha, Tarshish. We've seen that with Jonah. That's where Jonah wanted to get to. And Rhodanine, this is the Indo-European people. They went north after the flood. It populated Europe, went through the Stan nations. They even went east as far east as India. Now, you know, with all the kids listed here, you don't have enough generations to get that far east. But this is the line that will eventually populate Asia. They went north and east. There's all kinds of language similarities and arguments. Linguistically, that establishes a common origin of those nations and their languages. I won't drag you through all of them, because all two of you will find it interesting. This leads to the sons of Ham, the Hamites Cush. That's, uh, Ethiopia. Egypt ESV says Egypt. Most translations say mizraim mizraim is the word for Egypt. The Egyptians come from Ham. Canaan. They're the ones that established in the Middle East, in the Promised Land, the sons of Cush, Sheba and Havilah. Havilah is an interesting one. They, uh, gave lines to many of the kings. They went even further, like Lebanon, Libya area, Sapta Rama Sabatka, the sons of Rama, Sheba and Dedan Cush fathered Nimrod. He was the first in the earth to be a mighty man. We'll get back to him in a second. Egypt fathered Ludum anonyme la. Patria Peritoneum. The peritoneum that line here is that line that the Pharaohs had. They went south in Egypt, but they became the line that became the pharaohs, even over the Mizrahim. Even over the Egyptians. The Egyptians chose a different family to be their leaders for probably close to a thousand years. That's noted here. And a separate family line all the way back in first Chronicles, verse thirteen, Canaan fathered Sidon, his firstborn, and Heth the Jebusites. They're the ones that populated Jerusalem. David fights them. The Amorites. David fought them also, the Girgashites, the Hivites. They fought them in the days of the judges, the architects, the sunnites, the arvanites, the zemaitis, and of course, the termites. We don't know a lot about them. The architects went to the Lebanon coast. That's where they populated. This leads to the third Line there of the the Semites. We'll jump into them in verse seventeen. Shem, Elam, Ashur, Arshad, Lud, Aram, the sons of Aram gether. These are populating what we would call Arabia, Yemen, the Middle Eastern areas. Nineteen Eber was born two sons. The name of the son was Peleg. It was in his day the earth was divided. His brother's name was Joktan. Joktan fathered al Madad, Khalfa, Gerar, Obal, Abimael, Ophir, Havilah, and Joe Jobab. All of these were the sons of Joktan, Shem, Eber, Peleg, REU, Sarig, Terah, Aram, that is Abraham. So this follows the line of the Semites all the way down to Abraham. So to give you a little bit of a big picture, because that's a lot of names. Big picture here. One of Noah's sons goes into Europe and Asia. Another of Noah's sons goes out to the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the Gulf states we would call them today. And another of Noah's sons goes to Africa, particularly North Africa. Obviously, all three groups expand the line that was in the the middle there, the Hamites. They expand down towards the, um, the Polynesian part of the world, the Pacific Islanders, the ones that went to the Nephites, that went through Europe. They eventually are going to go over the land bridge and become Native Americans. Of course, the Semites, I mean the Hamites, they go from Africa and eventually they move south and cover the nation of Africa. So you have everybody in the world, all the nations and people in the world are coming back to this ark and coming from the Ark. But there are two people that are called out in there. Did you notice it, Peleg and Nimrod. They're both called out for different reasons. Nimrod was a mighty warrior. He's the first of the rulers. He was the first to make an empire for himself. There's more about him said in Genesis than he's here. But it's given to you just to give you a little date to peg this on. He was the one that started to build people to himself. He was a mighty ruler. This was not a good thing. There were supposed to be spreading over the earth, and he began gathering. There's supposed to be turning into cities and nations, and he began to consolidate into an empire. They were supposed to go out. He built up, eventually culminating in the Tower of Babel, where they began ascending up to heaven to go as high as they could. There's all kinds of reasons that was wrong, like I mentioned. They were supposed to scatter, but the key reason it was wrong is that God had promised he wouldn't flood the earth again. It's implied in my reading of Genesis anyway, and it's, you know, it's not black and white, but it's implied that one of the reasons they built up is because they doubted God higher off the ground. They can outlive the flood. They could make a city for themselves. They can make a name for themselves. They can make an empire for themselves. And God struck that down. Of course, God scattered them, and he did more than scatter them. He divided them. And this is where it kicks in with Peleg. In the days of Peleg, the nations were divided. What this means is God confused their languages. This is pegging at the Tower of Babel. He confused their languages. They're all building up, and suddenly they look at each other and you say, pass me a hammer. And all you hear is Ignacio, you don't know what's happening. Hola. And you've never met an Ola before in your life. Eventually, people begin to congregate around shared languages and they begin to scatter. And so this is God inside of one of the lines forcing national building. It wasn't all Shem, Ham and Japheth that built, but you're pegged at that timeline in all three of the families here. God scatters their families around the world, giving them shared languages, shared identity and dividing them. That's the language that's used. Peleg was his name in verse nineteen. And the nations were divided. The earth was divided. So that's the family tree. You get three people that make three groups of people that covers the earth, and all of the nations come from these people. Why is this given to us? Well, first of all, it helps Israel find their place in the world. That's the most obvious reason this is here in Chronicles, because it's pegging Israel for where they are in the world. You know this about Americans. You meet an American anywhere in the world and you ask them, hey, where are you from? And they say, and you go back and forth with the answer until you have a shared commonality with them. I'm from Albuquerque. This is how the conversation always goes. I'm from Albuquerque. Oh, I once drove through Albuquerque. Great. Now we can continue on our conversation. But this is true with everybody. It's a universal American theme, and it is pretty uniquely American. People in other countries don't really do this like to Australians don't meet each other and they're like, oh, you're from Perth? I'm from Sydney. Oh, I had a mom that went to school in Sydney. Oh yay! Let's carry on. They don't do that. It's an American thing. It's embraced. We're a people of you know, out of many one or whatever the expression is. And so we have our shared identities that way and that's fine. And all that Chronicles is functioning like that. It's letting the Israelites look at the world and saying, you have a place in the world. Remember, when Chronicles is written, they've lost their nation. They don't have a king. They don't have a David. They don't even have a family of David anymore. The whole Davidic promise, they've lost it. Even if they had David and they had a crown to put on his head, they didn't have a kingdom in which he can reign. So Chronicles starts by putting them in the scope of the nations, but it has a more of an application for us. I'm going to draw out a couple of ethical applications of this for us as we look at this evening. First, ethical application of the era of government. And I'll give you four of them. And they all apply today. First is that it gives us the role of government. We look at this concept and we recognize that governments have not always been in the world. When God designed government, he gave them things to do. Governments have a function designed by God, and that function is to protect. It bears the sword. It's not vigilantism that's described back in Genesis nine. It doesn't say, whoever sheds man's blood, the closest people take him out. And he says, I'm establishing the sword. He gives it to mankind. It's the doctrine of the keys of the kingdom, so to speak. In the New Testament becomes an ecclesiastical term. But in the Old Testament it's this concept that governments check evil, they punish evildoers, they protect the post-flood worlds. And the easiest way to understand the role of government is to take that list I gave you earlier from Genesis, and help you solve those there and just add the word protect in front of all of them, which is what I've done on the screen for you. You can just draw it one time in little arrows before each of them. That's fine. Footnote. Protect. God designed a world for worship. Government is supposed to protect people's ability to worship. And this is a complicated point because I'm saying this very carefully. Government is supposed to protect people's ability to worship. Government is not supposed to regulate worship. It's not supposed to restrict worship or restrain worship, or I would say, even promote worship. I find with things the government does to stay out of the way, but it's not the government's job to be worship leaders. Pastors shouldn't report to the government. Government shouldn't be checking heretics or anything like that. It falls to the church to check heresy within the church, and it falls to governments to protect the church doing just that. And this is kind of more of a Puritan understanding of government. You know, originally with the Puritans, the idea of separation of church and state is that the church identified the government, the heretics, and the government killed them. That was a victory for John Owen that was moving the ball in the right direction, because before that it was, you know, people, you had churches that were trying to kill heretics and you had government that was trying to identify them. So John Owen's big contribution was, this is everybody stay in their lane. The church will tell you the heretics are government can kill them. Let's move on. The truth is, government shouldn't be killing heretics, but government should be protecting the true worship. Of God. That's. Every government has that obligation to protect worshiping God. Second, government is supposed to protect the food source. This is a basic function other than the most like dyed in the wool libertarian. You're not going to find too many people that argue with the FDA investigating food poisoning cases. We embrace that. You recognize that in an agrarian society, you have people that are growing and people that are buying and government taxes those and provides tariffs on those. And it's all supposed to regulate the consumption of food so that, you know, next year they're still going to be food. Joseph is a great example of this. Put enough in storage so that people can eat when there's famine. And of course, with all these our government goes too far in crazy directions, doesn't it, to protect. I have a friend who's an almond and peach and nectarine farmer, and he got banned from watering his fields because there's an endangered owl that has been living in some of the trees that are there. And he's trying to explain to the government of California that owls fly. So if I flood the field, it's not going to mess up the owls like it really won't. And. Well, what did the flood water takes away one of the trees. Then the owl will fly to another tree and build. It's California. It's not, you know, North Dakota. It doesn't matter when the tree falls, the owl just fly somewhere else and build a new nest. The owl will live. But of course, you get governments that are too strict on regulating food to the point that it makes food more expensive and more scarce. For the sake of, you know, a random owl, that's wrong. But of course, you wouldn't argue that the government should slaughter all the owls. Like there's extremes on both sides. But the point is, government is made to protect, worship and protect the food source requires wisdom on how to practice this practically lays out and all of them. Third, the government is supposed to protect family. It's one of the main functions of government in Post-fall world to allow you to, or a post-flood world to allow you to pass on inheritance to your family, to allow you to build things, build wealth, have a house, have a job, have an occupation, have resources that you can pass along. One of those basic functions of government in any part of the world, in any society, is to allow the distribution of wealth within the family and to protect the life of the family. Protecting the life of the unborn is obviously a very obvious example of this that starts to bleed into the fourth example protecting life period. Penalising. Penalising violence, protecting people. Now this maps out on a national scale. You have the word protected in here. This maps out on a national scale. God designs nations to check each other. Nations fight. C.S. Lewis writes about this in his book The Four Loves Nations fight and nations Check evil, and in some wars it's obviously clear. One side is good and one side is bad. But that's not true. In every war, some wars, it's just too strong. Nations are checking each other, and that's okay. In God's economy, it's okay for these two nations to fight because one is getting too big for its britches. You can't have a global empire before other nations rise up and start taking it from you. When the British used to say the sun never set on the British Empire, I mean, they meant it as a boast, but it became a testimony to the idea that it's not sustainable. How soon until nations and islands start revolting? You can't have that kind of empire because nations, Czech nations, to keep any one nation from getting evil or wicked to evil or to wicked. And if one nation allows violence against worshipers, violence against family, then other nations will intervene to protect even nations that don't fear God. I mean, that's that's fine. Nations that don't fear God will still protect other ethnic groups on their borders who are being annihilated, generally speaking. And that's been true throughout world history. That's a role that nations have to protect human life. And that goes down to the micro level. It's the role of police officers to do these kind of things. It's the role of judges to punish those who are violent and to put them away for protect the purpose of protecting life. These four things in the screen, this is the most basic function of government. And when government does this, it does. It does government well. When government fails in this, it fails to do the most basic things that God has called them to do. So the first ethical take away from the the nations here is that God made government for the purpose of protection. Secondly, the limits of ethnicity. You see, as you go through this table of nations, that the nations divide and they're dividing on what's going to be called ethnic lines. I like the word ethnicity way better than race. Race is a biological fiction. I hope you understand that. I think younger people understand this now better than perhaps older people do, because I know schools used to teach that race was a biological reality. Um, and that just got embedded in people's minds. But it's not true. You know, race is an artificial construct. Human beings have the same DNA as as each other. You know, bottom line, even how you define race becomes so ridiculous between, you know, it's today we define race based upon skin color, which doesn't make any sense. You know, a black African is somehow not African American, but African American is a race and not cultural. The whole thing doesn't make any sense. It breaks down at the most basic, obvious level. You know, Hispanics are supposedly white or I guess, or something is that who knows? It doesn't make any sense at all. You know, one drop of African blood makes you African American. The Hispanic race. La Raza has the African influence in it, but they're not African. Again, there's no logical way to make race work. You go back fifty years. It wasn't skin color, it was the bridge of your nose or the thickness of your hair. That was a big thing to determine race. They would identify people of the race by the thickness of their hair. And you go back one hundred years before that. You have the shape of their eyes, the proportion of the eyes to the nose and the eighteen hundreds. That's what determined race. It's complete biological fiction. But what is true is something called ethnicity. There are cultural differences in the world. There's language differences in the world that come from the separation of the nations. And God designed those language differences for sure, as a punishment and as a nation separated, you obviously have agrarian communities and farming communities and soon textile or clothing communities. And as the world progresses, you have different nations with different kinds of economy, different languages, different cultural traditions, different worldviews and all of that. And that's just part of the beauty of living in a diverse world. But there are limits to ethnicity. You recognize that ethnicity is not biological. I love it when people in New Mexico or California say they can't roll their eyes. They just biologically can't roll their eyes when they try to learn Spanish. They were born fifty miles to the south. They'd be speaking Spanish. You can roll your eyes. You've just got to teach yourself to do it. I'm looking at some of you in particular. You can do it. There's no biological reality to ethnicity, but there is a component of society and function and language and culture that defines ethnicity. And then, of course, ethnicity. Because you see, all these people are from Noah. I mean, for goodness sakes, there's no biological distinctions in the race. They're all from Noah. And if you if you say, yeah, but Noah had three sons. Okay. They're all from Adam. We all have the same father. But there are cultural differences as the nations scatter. There are, of course, cultural differences. Now, when I say limits of ethnicity, ethnicity, ethnic differences are beautiful and fun. And when they're used positively and they're always dangerous when used negatively. And it's very common to have people argue against ethnically diverse marriages by saying God designed ethnicity by scattering the nations. And so different ethnic groups should protect their own and not intermarry, and that if is ridiculous. And that shows the folly of using ethnicity to attach it to some kind of biological tradition and say, are your kids? If you're an interethnic marriage, your kids would be confused about their own identity. No, ethnic diversity is positive, not negative. A confusion about it is, you know, a limitation, but not a reality, especially in the church. And I hope that the confusion about marriage in our society helps us, you know, kind of recover this distinction because, you know, you can tell somebody, listen, anybody in the world, if you're a guy who marries a girl, you're doing it right. And if you're a Christian guy and you marry a Christian girl, you're doing it right. You know, you make it more complex than that. You start to lose the plot a little bit. The purpose of marriage is to provide a covenant union in the family, to produce kids, to pass down your faith and your property not to pass down an ethnic identity. Third, the scar of slavery. The passage of Shem, Ham, and Japheth is one of the most commonly used passages to justify slavery. And this goes back to Noah, who was. And you're thinking, well, we just read. How would that justify slavery? Well, through church history it has been used or American church history it has been used because when Noah was drunk, of course, ham comes in and, um, doesn't cover him and God doesn't curse him. God curses Canaan, curses Canaan him. Son, why does he curse Canaan instead of Ham? Ham was the one who sinned. Why does he curse Canaan? Probably because God had blessed him. And Noah's not going to curse someone who God has blessed. And that seems reasonable enough. Even Balaam understood that when Balaam was paid to curse the Israelites, he was like, I can't curse somebody God blessed. Probably Noah knew more than Balaam. If Balaam knew that point, no one knew it also. So no, it doesn't curse him, but he does curse Canaan. Perhaps he saw the same sinful tendencies in Canaan that were in him. Now, if you take it like that, it's a very straightforward reading. Ham sins. Noah looks at him. He can't curse him, but he looks at Canaan and sees his son acting just like his dad. He's like that conduct is going to wreck your life. But people have said because Ham went and populated Africa, that ham is supposed to be ruled by his brothers. That was the curse. And so Ham populated Africa. It is okay for Europeans or Asians to subjugate Africans into slavery. That was a very common teaching. Seventeen eighteen hundreds America. And I just want you to know that that fails at every level. First of all, it's not recorded in first Chronicles at all. So as Chronicles is recording the Table of Nations, it does not even present that at all. This idea that one third of Noah's kids would be perpetually in servitude to the other two. If that was a thing, it would be noted here. So it's good to zoom out a couple hundred years and say what was noteworthy to be passed along by Ezra here. Not that he tells you about the Tower of Babel, tells you about the flood, tells you about the nations divided, doesn't tell you about that. But secondly, Canaan was the one who was cursed, not him. Ham is the one that Africa remember. Canaan didn't go with him. Ham went to Africa. Canaan stayed. So it doesn't even make sense in a geographical way. And there's like eight other reasons too. I mean, it was Noah who said it, and there's no record that God approved of Noah's curse. It's not repeated in the scripture. It's not supposed to be perpetual. Canaan is dead. Okay? Canaan is dead. And don't keep bringing him out to justify slavery. And then fourth, the plan for a king. This establishes nations in the world with nations established that sets the stage for God to send the Redeemer. You remember in the era of conscience. It was every man and woman for themselves. Where's the Savior going to be? You had no idea it could be anyone in the world. But now, in the era of governments and nations, people are divided into groups. If God would tell you which group, the Savior would come. And it would make your hunt for him much easier. And that's what we'll see next week. Lord, we're grateful that your word, even something like a genealogy, is inherently ethical and practical. I pray for the men and women in our congregation who serve in government and law enforcement in legislative capacities. I pray that you'd give them wisdom as they protect life and protect food, protect family, protect worship. We know governments all do this imperfectly. Often they restrict worship and exploit food and harm families and ignore the deprivation of life. But I pray our congregation wouldn't have those kind of people in it, that you would give us the moral courage and fortitude to live according to your calling in our life. Lord, I pray for repentance for people that have harbored some kind of ethnic superiority or ethnic exclusivity exclusivity. I pray that even something as basic as a table of nations would cause them to repent in their hearts of that they would see the union of our of the human race in Adam, the beauty of national diversity, but the beauty of the image of God and family and marriage. Finally, Lord, we pray for wisdom as we live our own lives. We live in a morally complex time, but we pray that your Word in every area, not just the table of nations, but in every area would resonate in our hearts that your spirit would convict us of sin and guide us as we serve you in obedience. We ask this in Jesus name. Amen. And now for a parting word from Pastor Jesse Johnson. If you have any questions about what you heard today, or if you want to learn more about what it means to follow Christ, please visit our church website. If you want more information about the Master's Seminary or our location here in Washington, DC, please go to TMZ.com. Now, if you're not a member of a local church and you live in the Washington, D.C. area, we'd love to have you worship with us here at Immanuel. I hope to personally meet you this Sunday after our service. But no matter where you live, it's our hope that everyone who uses this resource is involved in their own local church. Now, may God bless you this week as you seek Jesus constantly. Serve the Lord faithfully and share the gospel boldly.