Saturday 07 October 2023

Psalm 134

Background

The writer of the book of Genesis has taken his readers from darkness to the new light, which came via the flood sent by God that we read about earlier this week. We begin to see the development which comes from the group led by Noah who landed on the top of Mount Ararat to the world in which the writer of Genesis is living. This is a world which is no longer one family, but a wider community.  At first we read there was one communal language. Skills such as brick-making are learned and a tower is built that we can presume reaches up to the heavens. A community has come into being, a people with like minds who talk to each other and live together it would seem. 

But then, the writer envisages the next change. God looks upon the people and decides they need to be divided and scattered across the face of the larger world. God confuses the languages being spoken, the people scatter, and the world which the writer sees around him, and indeed which is the same world we live in today, came into being. 

When we consider these words we can appreciate what the writer of the book of Genesis was seeking to do. He was trying to make sense of so many of the problems he saw around him as he wrote, stemming from the different races, the different languages and the very different ways of life. Perhaps as we reflect on the world we live in today, as from time to time we mark One World Week, we can understand his emotions, his confusion over why something that began as an ideal (unity of all God's people) fell apart so much. Over the centuries there has been so much conflict and disharmony in a people whom we read are all children of the one God, the creator God, whom we still honour in our worship today.

To Ponder:

• What can we, as followers of Jesus, do to play our part in rebuilding God's one world which was envisaged in the beginning?
• Does the God the writer of Genesis envisages in the words we have read, relate to the God we know through his son Jesus, or was the writer mistaken and confused?
• How do the words we have considered speak to us in the way we live our lives as disciples of a living God and how can we help others to turn to him?

Prayer

Almighty God, help us to look at the world in which we live. It is a world which in many ways is as confused as that we read of in the book of Genesis. May we play our part in making it the world that you would have it be, where all people can have the purpose  you intended for them. We ask in the name of Jesus Christ our saviour and redeemer. Amen.