Deeper Reflection
This week’s theme is “The Nations in God’s Hands”. The Lord God, who is Creator of heaven and earth, is also Maker of the nations — the nations were formed by God’s hand! Following God’s command to be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth (v.1), Shem, Ham and Japheth “went forth from the ark”, and from them “the people of the whole earth were dispersed” (v.19). Genesis 10 (the “Table of Nations”) follows. It traces the origin of the nations (goy, meaning peoples; see Gen 10:5,20,31)¹⁶ back to the genealogies of Noah’s three sons.God preserved Noah’s family during the flood, and through him, repopulated the earth, person by person, forming the nations. “The nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood” (Gen 10:32), and “cover parts of Asia, Europe and Africa, from the Iranian plateau in the east to the Mediterranean coastlands in the west, from the Black Sea in the north to Somalia in Africa.”: ¹⁷The nations are also blessed by God’s hand. Nine generations after Shem, the Lord covenanted with Abraham, making him the father of a multitude of nations (Gen 17:4-6). Just as He had formed the nations through one man (Noah), the Maker of the nations also blessed the nations through one man (Abraham). Abraham was to “surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him” (Gen 18:18; cf. 12:2-3; 22:18; 26:4). This alludes to the coming of the Messiah thousands of years later! Right from the very beginning of His divine salvific plan, God had intended to bless the nations!

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¹⁵ Adapted from Deuteronomy 32:8 and Psalm 67:3-4, New Living Translation ¹⁶ James Swanson, Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains: Hebrew (Old Testament) (Oak Harbor: Logos Research Systems, Inc., 1997) ¹⁷ John E. Hartley, Genesis, ed. W. Ward Gasque, Robert L. Hubbard Jr., and Robert K. Johnston, Understanding the Bible Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2012), 116.