7000 Languages & Counting
Did you know there are approximately 7000 languages being spoken on planet earth right now?
How many of you speak more than one language? More than two? Three?
I don’t know about you, but I have trouble communicating in one language sometimes! Just ask my wife and kids!
Jesus has called us as his disciples to GO into all the world and preach the gospel… and we certainly want to do that. But here’s the good news, for so many of us the world is coming to us!
The question we have to answer is: Will we partner with God in sharing His good news about His great love revealed in Jesus not just with the world, but with our neighbors!?
It’s pretty amazing to think about how all around the world and all across the places we live, there are people worshiping our great God in every language. People calling on Him by Name with their own words.
In the original Hebrew language God revealed His name as Yahweh. In Spanish He is Dios. In Ukraine He known as Boh. In Japanese He is Kami. In German God is Gott. In Turkey He is known as Tanri. In Vietnamese He is Chúa. In Chinese I learned from one my new FriendSpeak friends, God is Shangdi (神).
I could go on and on. 7000 languages, remember!?
One Language
The truth is, all our words fall short in every language to name God, to describe God, to talk about God. Whenever we begin to speak about God we quickly realize that no matter the language there are no words that can adequately describe the greatness of our GOD.
The reason there are so many languages, approximately 7000 different languages at this present moment in time, is because… are you ready for this? …God initiated the diversity of language.
There was a time when everyone spoke the same language. But instead of that uniting people around the greatness of God and the name of God, people united around their own greatness and making a name for themselves.
Do you remember this story? It’s often relegated to a Bible story we teach children at VBS but it’s not a “G” rated story!
This story is found in Genesis 11.
1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
At this point in the story we’re still pretty early in the story. We’re only in Genesis 11. I don’t know if you remember what’s happened in the previous 10 chapters, but a lot has happened in a short amount of time.
The First Fall
It all started in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve sinned. That decision to stop trusting God, stop believing God, to turn away from God and turn towards themselves and their own desires has become known as the Fall of Man. It’s the moment sin entered our story and everything changed. After that initial sin, humanity continued to take matters into their own hands.
But what started with taking fruit from a tree that God said not to take fruit from has now progressed to murder in the span of a few pages. Adam and Eve have two sons, Cain and Able. And what happens next is unthinkable for any parent. Cain kills Abel.
Sometimes we forget that those decisions, those sins, those things that we think are small and insignificant lead to sins that are unimaginable. I’m sure Adam and Eve never thought for a moment that their decision to disobey God in the garden would one day lead to one of their children murdering the other!
Yet that’s what sin does. It destroys.
I pray you’ve never experienced anything like that, but we all know the destructive power of sin in our lives, in our families, and in our world.
The World Washed Clean
Things continued to spiral downward from there. In fact, by the time we get to Genesis 6.5, we read:
“The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.” (ESV) “…it broke his heart.” (NLT)
At this point God decides to cleanse the earth with a flood. And we often think about the story of the flood as God’s anger poured out on wicked people but what we read in Genesis 6 isn’t anger, it’s grief, it’s sadness. God’s heart is broken for the people he created who have turned away from Him so God in His desire to preserve the goodness of the world He created decides to wash it clean. In a sense, God is going to baptize the world and wash away it’s sin, making it new again.
Noah and his family are saved and charged to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth. (9.1).
Falling Again
And so they do that, but things quickly turn again and we see sin and evil return into God’s good creation. We see this at the end of chapter 9 where there’s an incident with Noah who drank too much and something happened with one of his sons.
Then we get to chapter 11 and it seems that things are just as bad as they were before. All the people have come together to build a great city and a great tower and make a great name for themselves.
They have this new technology called the brick and they want to use these bricks to build something unlike anything that has ever been built before so that everyone everywhere can see it and can know just how great they are!
Their desire to build something wasn’t their sin. Their desire to build a city or even to build a tower, essentially the world’s first skyscraper, wasn’t their sin. Many cities and many skyscrapers have been built since that day!
Skyscrapers!
They walked across beams or hung from wires or cranes hundreds, even thousands, of feet above the ground, often without any harnesses! The New York Times wrote that they “put on the best open-air show in town. They rode into the air on top of a steel beam that they maneuvered into place as a crosspiece by hanging to the cable rope and steering the beam with their feet, then strolling on the thin edge of nothingness.”
Even though the Empire State building is no longer the tallest building in the world, or even in New York, it still stands as a great icon in a great city demonstrating what man can achieve.
The Why Behind the What
I’m not sure if the Babylonians could have built a tower as high as the Empire State Building, but they wanted to try. And their reason for building this city and this tower is revealed in verse 4. Let’s read it again.
4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
They did NOT want to be scattered.
They DID want to make a great name for themselves.
These are people who are the direct descendants of Noah. They know about God’s salvation. They know about God’s power. They know about God’s desire to preserve the goodness of the world He created. They know that God hates sin and the destruction that happens in the wake of sin. They know that they were instructed by God to scatter across the earth, to be fruitful and multiply (Gen 9.1; 7, 19).
Yet they wanted to come together in one place to make a great name for themselves!
God’s Response
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
The people did NOT want to be scattered.
They DID want to make a great name for themselves.
God DID want the people to scatter.
And God wanted His name and His name alone to be great in every place and in every language.
So God initiated the diversity of language. And everything God does is good.
He did this FOR the people and FOR His name. So they could be fruitful and multiply and so that they could declare the greatness of His name.
And I just wonder…
Who’s Name?
Are you living for your own name and your own fame?
This is the primary problem in the world we live in today just like it was thousands of years ago in Babylonia when those descendants of Noah attempted to build a city and a tower to make their name great.
Perhaps the greatest temptation you face is your desire to make your name great.
You see it everywhere you look. You try to make a your name great by the life you portray on social media, the car you drive, the clothes you wear, the houses you buy, the title you go by, the degrees you hold, the achievements you’ve made, the achievements your kids have made, the things you’ve done, the things you haven’t done.
The list goes on and on and on with the little kingdoms you and I have tried to build in making our own names great.
And if you’ve ever done this, and we’ve all done this, then you might have discovered what some of us have discovered…
Living for your own name and your own fame, it’s too small a thing to live for.
You can live for your own name and your own fame.
OR…
You can live for His great name and His great fame!
I love the way the prophet Isaiah would talk about this idea in Isaiah 26.8: (NIV)
“…your name and renown
are the desire of our hearts.”
The Psalmist echoed this same thought when he wrote…
Psalm 115.1 (NLT)
“Not to us, O Lord, not to us,
but to your name goes all the glory
for your unfailing love and faithfulness.”
And every time you leverage your life for the sake of His great Name, the Name above every other name, you bring glory and honor to God. You live for His glory, not your own.
And so today, I just want to encourage you, I just want to implore you…
Leverage your life for the Name and renown of the LORD of life!
He is God in every language, for every people, in every place, with every person who calls on His name.
He is YAHWEH. He is Dios. He is Gott. He is Chua. He is Shangdi. He is Yeshua. He is the King of kings and the LORD of Lords. He is the Great I Am. There is no one like Him. There is no one beside Him. He has no rival. He has no equal. There is no God like our God because there is no God except our God. He is God alone!
Will you leverage your life for the Name and the renown of the LORD of life?
Worship Rising in Every Language!
One day, we will gather with all God’s people and we will hear worship rise in every language from every nation. I suspect we’ll hear His song sung in more than 7000 different languages on that great day.
The writer of Revelation pictured it when he wrote of his vision of heaven:
Revelation 7.9-10
9 After this I saw a vast crowd, too great to count, from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing in front of the throne and before the Lamb. They were clothed in white robes and held palm branches in their hands. 10 And they were shouting with a great roar,
“Salvation comes from our God who sits on the throne
and from the Lamb!”
What I want for us is to be there on that great day to sing that song. And what I want for us is to have people by our side, people we’ve had a hand in reaching with the gospel, people we’ve helped point to God, singing in their own native language the words to this great song!
“Salvation comes from our God who sits on the throne
and from the Lamb!”
How great is our God!
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