God wanted man to represent Him, express Him, and reign for Him. However, man first needed to contact the life of God. Therefore, after God created man, He put man in front of the tree of life so that man might contact the tree of life. Regrettably, before man could contact the tree of life, Satan came and deceived man. After following Satan, man fell because he violated God’s commandment and thus was involved with God’s authority.
After man’s fall, God came and instituted the way of redemption to restore man. Genesis 3:21 says that God made coats of skins for man and clothed him. Through the slaughtering of an animal and the shedding of its blood, God redeemed man and put man back under His authority.
At the end of Genesis 4, Satan came in again to deceive man, causing man to establish his own righteousness instead of relying on God’s redemption. As a result, man left God and again fell into Satan’s hand. This was the way taken by Cain and his descendants. Since man lost God’s care and rejected God’s way of redemption, man began to make a living on his own and invent a culture for himself. Self-justification is a matter of morality, self-dependence is a matter of existence, and self-invention is a matter of living and culture. When human culture developed to this extent, the earth was filled with wickedness and violence. Eventually, this provoked God to destroy that generation by the flood.
The principle of Satan’s deceiving of Cain and his descendants can be applied to many people. Wherever there is self-justification, there is self-dependence, and where there is self-dependence, there is self-invention. The result of these three things is a profusion of evil and violence. This principle is true for an individual, and it holds true for a nation as well.
Mankind incurred God’s judgment in the first stage of their culture, yet God saved Noah’s family of eight through the ark and gave man the authority over others (Gen. 9:6). Man was originally under divine government, but because man sinned and fell, man came under the government of the conscience, which was the age of self-government. Later man fell again, and God put man under human government. The characteristic of the age of human government is man’s ruling over other men. However, the descendants of man were deceived by Satan again and utilized God’s authority to establish many nations on the earth. Among them was Nimrod, the first of the mighty ones (Gen. 10:8). Nimrod was ferocious and warlike; he was the first among the people to establish a kingdom and set himself up as a king. Satan deceived man by instigating man to use his God-given authority to establish many nations on the earth. Satan is ruling behind every nation. So in the end the children of men rose up to rebel against God collectively, joining themselves together to build the city of Babel and the tower of Babel. There they joined hands with Satan to declare that the humans on earth would renounce the God who is in heaven and would not recognize the name of God. At this point, mankind had fallen to the uttermost, and so God executed His judgment again, confounding their language and scattering them over the whole earth.
If the created man had not fallen, God’s creation would have been sufficient; God’s calling would not have been necessary. However, once man became fallen and the entire human race followed Satan, God had to come and set apart a group of people. The beginning of the setting apart is the calling.
At the time of Babel, the descendants of Adam had fallen entirely, so God came to sound a call. Every calling in the Bible is a proof that man has fallen. Every time God calls, it is a setting apart by God, a new beginning initiated by God. Adam was the father of the created race, and Abraham was the father of the called race. The adamic race fell, so God began anew and called Abraham to be the head, the father, of a new race.
Therefore, when Abraham was called, God wanted him to leave his land, his relatives, and his father’s house. This was necessary in order to be completely separated from the rebellion of the men on earth against God. God does not want our living to have any element of Babel. What is Babel? Babel is man’s denial of God’s authority. All of today’s degraded Christianity is Babylon in the eyes of God. God wants us to be completely rid of the things of Babel.
Furthermore, when God called Abraham, He said that He would make of Abraham a great nation, a great kingdom (Gen. 12:2). This kingdom would include the nation of Israel in the Old Testament, the church in the New Testament, the millennial kingdom in the next age, and the new heaven and new earth in eternity; it would be an eternal kingdom. It is Abraham’s nation, but more so, it is God’s kingdom. This shows us that God wants to reign on the earth in this kingdom.
After being called, Abraham stood in the heavenly position in Canaan as the outlet of heaven on the earth. He was a man on the earth under the rule of heaven, a man on the earth as the outlet of heaven, one who was connected to heaven. Therefore, after Abraham’s return from the defeat of Chedorlaomer and the kings who were in alliance with him, the king of Sodom offered his possessions to Abraham, but Abraham said that he would not accept them and that his possessions were not on the earth but in the heavens. Melchizedek prayed to God as the “Possessor of heaven and earth” when he was blessing Abraham because at this point God had found a man on the earth who would be ruled by Him and through whom the authority in heaven could be exercised on the earth.