Gentile History
When people think about Gentile history and its great rulers, they think about the Pharaohs in Egypt, Alexander the Great, the Caesar’ of the Roman Empire, Great Britain and its kings, or Nazi Germany. Those civilizations covered a timespan of over four millennia in history, yet they all have one thing in common: bloodshed.
Gentile history is filled with assaults, conquests, the slaughter of people, the conquering of nations, and the destruction of empires. These are the things that most Americans learn about in school. There are textbooks four inches thick putting on display the “greatness” and the “success” of these empires and rulers. The only accurate record of history that is left out of the textbooks is the record of the Gentiles that God himself recorded.
God’s History Record
God begins recording Gentile history in Genesis 4 with Adam and Eve having two sons born to them (Genesis 4:1-2) named Cain and Abel. Later, we read that Cain killed Abel because he was jealous of him. That’s the start of Gentile history. Men get jealous of what other men have, or what other men have done, and they kill each other for gain.
Further in Genesis 4, we encounter a man named Lamech (Genesis 4:18) who is from Cain’s lineage (Genesis 4:17) and I bet you can guess what he did to a young man one time in his life (Genesis 4:23-24). God takes you from Genesis 4 to Genesis 6 and tells you that the whole earth is filled with violence (Genesis 6:11) and that he’s going to kill off everything he created because of its wickedness and corruption (Genesis 6:13).
The Lord saved Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives by boat. They come out on the other side of the flood and God blessed them (Genesis 9:1). These three sons become the nations of the earth (Genesis 10). In Genesis 11, these nations all came together at Babel to build a tower and a city to make a name for themselves.
God saw that and was displeased because when nations come together (Genesis 6) there is nothing that can stop the wicked imaginations of men’s hearts. The Lord separated the people from Babel by confounding their language (Genesis 11:8) and divided to them their inheritance in the earth (Genesis 10). Thus were sovereign nations established, but left alone by God.
The Record Ends… For Now
If you have read the Bible from cover to cover a few times, you have probably noticed that God stopped recording Gentile history when he scattered them in Genesis 11. He took a man named Abram out of Ur of the Chaldees and began something new with him. That specific history runs from Genesis 12 to Acts 28.
If you took your Bible and got Genesis 4 in one hand and Genesis 11 in the other, you would be holding a span of recorded history that covered a two-thousand-year period. God recorded two thousand years of Gentile history in 8 chapters and most of that record is genealogies. If you take Genesis 12 in one hand and Acts 28 in the other, you would be looking at a record of the history of one nation that covers a two-thousand-year period.
That’s how much God “cared” about the nations after Genesis 11. There’s a specific reason for that much detail being focused on one nation that covers three-quarters of the Bible. That reason was kept secret through that entire record of history until Acts 9..