This is the Vemal Podcast with Marty Salman. I am his co-host, Brent Billings. Today, Marty is leading us in a special conversation that means a lot to him personally.

And so I won't have much to say beyond this introduction. This conversation around language is meant to help us consider one of the things God is inviting us to as we partner with him to put the world back together.

I'll be listening long to put whatever comes up in the show notes, but otherwise without further ado, I leave it to Marty to ponder this question. How do we make it back to Eden?

Hey, everybody. I just wanted to do a special episode today. And this conversation is meaningful to me. And it, it's, I don't know what I would, what I would call it, but I wanted to give this conversation special attention.

And so I just, I just wanted to sit here alone by myself and have a conversation with all of you. I didn't want to have all the extra curriculars. I didn't want to worry about having to be, you know, funny or cracking jokes.

I just want to sit down and have a conversation that means a lot to me. And you, you could think about this episode as almost an interview with myself. It would fit in the categories. It's not a part of our John series. This isn't, this isn't John verse by verse.

This is more like, and like when we're having interviews on session six with different people and only today it's just an interview with me. And so I wanted to do that. And to have this conversation, I want to go back to the tower of Babel, like all the way back to session one.

We have this conversation.

And what we call the preface and it's just, I'm read the whole story all what is it nine verses. I'm going to read all nine verses. I don't have Brent with me today to do my reading. So you're stuck with me. Here we go.

Now the whole world had one language in a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plane in Shanaar and settled there. They said to each other, come let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They used brick instead of stone and tar for mortar.

They said, come let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves. Otherwise, we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

The Lord came down to see the city, the tower at the people were building the Lord said, if as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

Come, let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand each other. So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth and they stopped building the city.

That is why it was called Babel because they are the Lord confused the language of the whole world from there, the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Now, if we just, I'm not going to go through that lesson and teach it again. I'll have Brent put in the show notes. He'll put a link to our original lesson all the way back years ago, where we kind of examine this story from a literary perspective, but just kind of want to back up today and look at this story.

Like if you were just to look at this story, what would you say this story is essentially about a story is essentially about, I'm looking at language.

I see one language, many languages, confusion being in the name of Babel. So Babel means confusion.

And then let's see what else I, I really see this idea of settling. I mean, this is very prominent. We're told in verse two that they settled in the plane of Shana.

We're told that they don't want to be scattered. Verse four over the face of the whole earth.

We're told, let's see here, we're told in verse, what is it? Verse six, that the Lord scatters them from all over the whole earth. Maybe that was verse, not was verse six.

And then again, at verse nine, just to kind of make the point and double down on that from there, the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole.

So there is definitely, there's a sense of settling and the sense of scattering. They're about to settle. They want to settle. God does not want them to settle. And so God scatters.

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