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Part III – God Moves the Battle Forward in Ancient History

God’s flooding of the Earth was basically the expected result from the fall of man – man under the devil’s rule becomes more and more evil to the point where God has to wipe him off the face of the planet.However, rather than totally end the war, God chooses to save one man and seemingly start over.Why this way?Perhaps it is because Adam and all of his progeny were born by natural descent, but Noah and his had to in a sense be born by faith.Therefore it’s not just literary flourish when the New Testament speaks of the flood as a “baptism.”The new earth is populated only by the children of a man who had passed through death by water through his faith. Furthermore, the earth itself has been baptized – rendered lifeless by water, and living again because one man had faith to pass through the death by water.So in what on the surface looks like a near total victory for the devil, God has taken a step closer to the redemption of mankind.The extreme corruption that Cain and his sons brought is forever forgotten, and a new race of Noah’s sons will pervade.

Noah’s descendants begin to move in the same direction when they start to build the tower of Babel – a way of saying “we don’t need an ark to save us”, but God stops it by destroying their tower and scattering them to the four corners of the earth. There they will languish, unable to rebuild the horrible ancient society and force God to wipe them out again until God’s redemptive plan has time to reach them. After thousands of years of living in the darkness caused by our God hating ancestors, these scattered people will be ready to turn again to the living God, because nothing makes you want good more than living with the consequences of evil.

In the meantime, God will advance his plan by calling forth a race from a man (Abraham), who was willing not only to sacrifice not only his son, but his entire future and dream on the altar.This demonstrates the kind of confidence in God’s character (faith) that will ultimately lead to the devil’s defeat.Moreover, it is no coincidence that it is the son that was on the altar from whom this people will be descended.Just like the baptism of the flood, it is only in death that man can have life.God is not just calling a single man now like Noah, but he’s calling a people out from among the rest of the Earth.

Saying that they are His is not enough, however, God must separate them from the world’s system in a permanent way.This is why they must come out of Egypt.Egypt was the capital of devil’s system.Leading a people of Egypt makes them separate from the world’s system and sets the stage for permanent conflict.The very existence of such a people is a threat to the devil, and so he must do everything possible to wipe them out.He has tried at every stage in human history, even after the cross. They are an inexorably “separated” people, and that’s a threat.

After coming out of Egypt the Israelites must establish a beach head in the world. God placed that beach head (Canaan) in the center of all the world’s commerce, so that they could be a literal light to all of the other lost people. The world was going to come to them as the Queen of Sheba did, but when they rebelled against God, he made them go to the world through the diaspora in the 6^th century. In this way God’s law becomes intermixed in the foundations of civilizations. Furthermore, where Israel had had conflict against the world’s empires (ruled by the devil) now they will be subject to those empires, and will participate in conflict within them. Mordecai and Ester are the outstanding example of this, and it is a direct precursor to Christ’s coming and expanding the conflict. Instead of one race in conflict with all others from within, now it will be a conflict within all races. The broader the conflict is, the more success God is having, because remember it had been down to a single righteous man at several points in history.