The purpose of nations – Part 4

Last week, in advancing the current topic, The Purpose Of Nations through a quote from Acts 17:26-27, I pointed out eight of the several points we must note from that part of the scripture. I will continue from there today.

If a nation fails to accomplish her purpose, or fails in its timing, as in the case of Jerusalem that missed the time of her visitation, this could affect their boundaries.

God is the ultimate decision maker on the boundaries of nations and the length of time they possess the land.

Failure to fulfill Gods purpose by nations affects their direction and destiny, hence every 100 years geographical maps of the world are constantly changing to reflect new nations and nations that have disappeared. Everything is subject to purpose; that explains to us why there are no longer countries like the Soviet Union, Prussia, Babylon or the Roman Empire, etc. That also explains to us why the African continent had to be divided into smaller countries. It explains to us why God would sometimes allow war and conflicts.

The universal purpose for all countries and nation is seen in verse 27. “God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.” God gives nations chances and opportunities to discover him and his purposes for them. God has a time span which could be rotational for each nation and continent. No nation would be left out, that is why Jesus said in Matt.19:30 “But many who are first will be last, and the last first.” Therefore there is no reason or room for anyone to be arrogant or boastful because every nation would have their time and chance.

As we can see above, we keep on coming across the fact that God is not a God of accident, he is a God of purposeful intentions. He divided the nations. He gave nations their territories and boundaries. I hope that case has been well made above. If everything is more or less clear regarding nations and countries, what could be said about continents? Does God have an opinion about continents? What does he have to say about the different continents in our planet? Are the continents by chance or by accident? Could there be God’s hand behind them? Did the Bible tell us anything about continent? I believe the answer is yes. The answer to this question is in that word with which I began writing this current series – PELEG. Let’s go to its origin:

“Arphaxad begot Salah, and Salah begot Eber. To Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg, for in his days the earth was divided; and his brother’s name was Joktan.” Gen 10:24-25.

The explanation we see for the name Peleg should catch our attention indeed. Something happened when Peleg was born which gives us insight into the events and circumstances of his birth. In Israel children are often named according to the occurrences at the period of their birth. The Bible recalls that Peleg was born at the time the earth was divided. Not countries were divided but the whole earth, the land piece, was divided. This surely must have been a rather monumental event that God needed to fix it in memory and in time. That division of the earth in the days of Peleg, I believe, is what we have now come to know as continents. I did some research on this matter and here is what I found:

Creation scientists and Flood geologists do not deny that these continents may have been connected to one another in the past as a single supercontinent in light of Genesis 1:9. Actually, it was a Christian geologist named Antonio Snider in 1859 who was the first person to publicly comment on this jigsaw puzzle fit of all the continents, except that he believed the spreading apart and separation of the continents occurred catastrophically during the Genesis Flood.

In the 1900’s, a German meteorologist by the name of Alfred Wegener noticed that the continents seemed to fit together, not at the continuously changing shoreline, but at the edge to their continental shelves.  He derived this hypothesis from the observation that the continents in the southern hemisphere exhibit an identical pattern of rock and fossils known as the “Gondwana sequence”.  The most logical explanation was that the continents themselves were once parts of a much larger “super-continent” which was named Pangaea.

In today’s secular society, people have been taught as fact that the continents were once joined together in a supercontinent that spilt apart and then the resultant continents drifted over millions of years into their present positions. One primary piece of conclusive evidence usually presented to support this idea is the jigsaw-puzzle fit of Europe and Africa matching closely with North and South America, respectively. If the North and South Atlantic Ocean basins are closed, these continents fit together at approximately the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a range of mountains on the ocean floor centrally located in the Atlantic Ocean basins. Creation scientists believe, along with their secular colleagues, that there is good observational evidence that is consistent with an original supercontinent in the past that was split apart, and that today’s continents moved to their present positions on the earth’s surface. I have long discovered that there are secrets and understandings in the scriptures that have been revealed long before science discovered them. The example of continents is a case at hand. What scientists are just discovering now had been written in the Bible since the days of Peleg. (To be continued next week.)