Last week we saw humanity once again turn God's blessing into rebellion. He commanded to go, but humanity gathered. He invited them out into the world to flourish under His name, but they sought to make their own. This wasn't just an architectural failure, it was a spiritual fracture.

What happens next is the subject of considerable debate. After the dispersal, God divided the nations and set their boundaries, placing them under the rule of someone. Some recent translations use the phrase "according to the number of the people of Israel" while others use "according to the number of the sons of God." The difference is important!

More recent Hebrew texts (the Masoretic to be exact) renders this passage using the word yiśrā'ēl, or Israel. Once the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, which are a much older manuscript, they render it using bene elohim, or sons of God, a concept we've discussed before. I'll spare you the gory details here, but most scholars today take the view that "sons of God", meaning lesser divine, or spiritual, beings is the proper rendering of this passage.

So, in short, after the dispersal God set the geographical boundaries of the nations, placing them under the rule of members of His divine family. Looking back, Moses could see that the group God took for Himself to rule, here referred to as Jacob, would very soon become the people who would later be known as Israel.

I know this sounds weird, but it helps to explain so much of the biblical story that will follow. This isn't a world of competing mythology or pantheism (many gods) but it is describing a world in which one True God remains absolutely supreme, but as part of His judgment and correction of mankind, he places them under the rule of lesser created beings and disinherits them in favor of His chosen portion.

Humans wanted a life apart from God, so He gave them a taste of what rule apart from him would become.

However, as we've seen before, God isn't abandoning His plan to redeem all of creation. Tucked inside this seemingly dark turn, remains a promise. God may have chosen only one of the nations to be His portion, but it was His plan to reclaim ALL the nations through the ones He had chosen. This disinheritance of the nations sets the stage for the ultimate mission of redemption. What looks like rejection on the surface, is actually the beginning of a very clever rescue plan.

Deuteronomy 32 isn't pulling us into whimsical fantasy, it is inviting us into Biblical reality. The world after Babel would become a spiritual battleground, where ground, rule, and authority are the subjects of countless battles. The nations are real. The unseen rulers are real.  But God's absolute sovereignty remains intact and absolute. His covenant purpose is still moving forward.

It's fairly easy to reduce the brokenness of the world to simple politics, rotten culture, and broken human systems. Those things matter, for sure, but Scripture tells us there is far more happening than we can see. Our allegiances and alignments reach much deeper than our national government, culture, or political system. 

How does this understanding change or impact your view of the world when you remember that human rebellion has spiritual consequences? How can it steady you to know that even when God gives people over in judgment, he is still working His plan of redemption?

Father, open my eyes to the deeper reality of your World, seen and unseen. Help me to see the world is more than the material parts I can readily perceive, more than politics and culture. Teach me to trust in your sovereignty and power, even when the nations rage and the world feels fractured and broken. Thank you that your righteous judgments are never random and that your redemptive plan will never fail. Amen.