Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Making God's Name Great | Torah | Genesis 11:10-32

Episode Date: January 27, 2022

Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Pride often causes us to make our own name great, while making someone else's name smaller. What happens when you try to shrink God's name? In today's episode, Patrick uses Genesis 11:10-32 to share the importance of giving God the glory he deserves. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Passages: Genesis 11:10-32 Related episode: What Kingdom Are You A Part Of? Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. I'm Tanya Wilman. I'm Jensen Holmick-Mare. And I'm Patrick Miller. We are exploring the first books of the Bible. Right now, we are in Genesis. If you're like me, you love email newsletters, but most of them don't bring me closer to God.

Well, it's time to give Jesus access to your inbox. Sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talks email newsletter. Once a week, you'll get a blilers. lessively short email with guides on spiritual disciplines, inspiring challenges to grow, interesting cultural backgrounds on today's passage, and even quick studies of Hebrew and Greek words. Each week's going to be a little bit different and you're going to love the variety. So stop what you're doing. Click the link in the show notes and sign up today. Now, let's hop into today's episode. The Hebrew Bible is full of wordplay. Unfortunately, since most of us are not Hebrew

readers, we miss out on a lot of the fun. A lot of the translations we read, they're able to kind of make it work in English, but sometimes there's just no way to do it. Genesis 11 includes a little wordplay that translations really can't catch. It's not fun, it's not funny, but I think it really is profound. Genesis 11, you'll remember, it begins with the story of the Tower of Babel. Now, you can go back to yesterday's episode with Jensen to go into more depth on that story. But a quick recap, humans rebel against God another time. This time they're building a tower, which is probably a ziggurat, which is an ancient temple. And they're building this ziggurat so that it will reach up into the heavens. Why? Because they wanted to make a name for themselves. Of course, that's a temptation for everyone.

It's the temptation of pride, the temptation to make my name great, my reputation glorious, my success, all important. And when you make your name great, it's inevitable that you'll make everyone else's names small. You see this in your office when a co-worker or manager takes credit for the work that you did. They've made their name great and your name small. You see it in school. When you're making cutting jokes at someone else's expense or you're gossiping about them behind their back, you make their name small. In your name great. But Babel, it cuts to the heart of all make my name great again, projects. You see, it shows us that the desire to make my name great always comes at the cost of making God's name small. The builders of the tower wanted to prove that they didn't need God.

Like Adam and Eve and Cain and Lamek and the people in Noah's Day, they all wanted to redefine good and evil. They wanted to define themselves, their path, their identity, and you know what? I don't need God to help me with it. They were making their name great and God's name small. And of course, that's what we all do when we vandalize the loving community that God's called us to build by cutting down the reputation of others, by taking credit for their good work, or simply bragging about our own successes. You're making your name great and God's name small. Okay, so what's all this got to do with Hebrew wordplay? Well, the Hebrew word for name is Shem. So throughout the Bible, story, we're reading about people who want to make their shem great and make a shem for themselves.

And we see that these efforts at making a great shem ultimately lead to ruin. In the rubble of this shem building project, we might expect that God would finally just give up on humanity. Adam blew it, cane blew it, the babble builders, they blew it. At every turn, humans make their shem great in God's shem, his name small. And again, it always leads to violence, always leads to slavery, hatred, and destruction. But in Genesis 11, it tells us that God hasn't given up on his creation. He has a plan to make his Shem great and to heal all of creation. How will he do this? How will he heal you? How will he heal your pride? How will he heal a world full of pride and selfishness? The answer is that God wants to do this through his creation. He wants

to do it through his image bears. And in Genesis 11, he's going to make his Shem great. He's going to rebuild his kingdom through the family line of one man. And can you guess what this man's name is? You got it right. His name is Shem. God will once again make his Shem great through the family line of a man named Shem. And the word play is profound because it allows you, who's the reader, to see what God is doing. His kingdom building project is a project to build his own glory. Genesis 1110 says this. This is the account of Shem's family line. Now it goes on to name all of Shem's sons and their sons and so on and so on. And we get all the way to the end of this and we read about one of Shem's great, great, great, great, great grandsons, a guy named Tara. And we'll pick up in verse 26. After Tara had lived 70 years, he became the father of Abram, Nehore, and Horan. Now maybe you recognize one of those names, Abram. Later on, God actually changes his name to Abraham, the name that were probably more than. likely to recognize. And it's from his family line that come the people of Israel, Moses, David, and ultimately Jesus. In other words, Jesus is the culmination of God's plan to make

his Shem, his name great in a world, but we're all committed to making our own names great. Now, I realize at this point, maybe some of you are thinking, wait a second, it's wrong for me to make my name great. It's wrong for me to be proud and boastful, but it's totally okay for God to make his name great? Doesn't that sound a little bit hypocritical? Well, I'm glad you asked. I'll answer your question with a parable. There was once a salesman, and he was selling a brand new cancer drug that virtually eradicated a very rare and dangerous form of cancer. He was the only sales rep out there who was selling this drug. And so naturally, you know, he was really proud of it. And he was really proud of his role as being the guy who gets to sell this stuff. And so he went from hospital to

hospital telling cancer doctors that he was the only salesman who had access to this game-changing drug and that there was no one better out there to sell it because he had tremendous knowledge about this kind of cancer. And so that's why the company chose him because he knew all this stuff. And if this or that doctor would just go with him and they'd buy this drug from him, well, they wouldn't just save lives. They'd make a lot of money doing it. And maybe they'd become world famous doctors in their own right, known worldwide for curing this cancer. But the salesman was shocked. Because time after time, the doctors would politely lead him out of their offices and never call him back. Finally, he got exasperated and he called a doctor who never called him back.

And he asked the doctor, why? The doctor apologized. And he said, well, I'm sorry if this sounds unkind, but I'll be honest with you because you're asking. The whole time you were in my office, you were selling yourself. How much you knew about cancer, how special you were to be the one salesman who could sell this drug? And you kept appealing to my own ego, how great I would be. But you didn't really explain much about the drug. I mean, other than that tiny pamphlet you left behind. And I thought to myself, gosh, if this drug is so great and it could really heal so many people, wouldn't he be talking

about the drug? He must be talking about himself because he knows that this drug really won't impress. When you make your name great, it makes the God you worship, no matter how great he really is, it makes the God you worship seem small. But when we make God's name great, you are giving God what he deserves. You are magnifying the glory of the one who can actually heal and satisfy every heart's deepest longing, the one who can cure the cancer of sin, the one whose beauty you are literally designed to feast upon and enjoy. There's nothing vain about celebrating a glorious cancer treatment. No one's going to think that's proud. how much more so a glorious life-given God. Jesus came to make God's name great

because in the greatness of God's name is found the healing and life of the entire world. So whose name will you make great? Whose name will you celebrate and magnify with your life? If you make yourself great, it will only lead to ruin. It will only distract people from what is good and beautiful and true. But if you make God's name great, the world can truly be changed.

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