Should a country have borders, according to the Bible?

GOVERNMENT — As men multiplied the violence of Cain filled the earth, until God had to cleanse it with judgment, one family — the only righteous family amongst the earth's millions — being saved from the universal flood. God gave the government of the earth into the hands of the head of that family, and afterwards divided up his descendants into nations, setting the bounds of their habitations. Paul's address to the Athenians (Acts 17) is illuminating in this connection. It is evident from the 26th verse of that chapter that the earth's surface is sufficient for the habitation of men, and that God has set the bounds of the nations. If men had respect to these God-appointed bounds, and had been contented with the "place in the sun" that He had given them, there would have been no wars. But not finding satisfaction in their possessions and refusing to feel after God for it, they have cast covetous eyes upon their neighbours' lot and have broken the bounds by God appointed, thence the bloodshed and the sorrow. But again the cause lies in the sinful and covetous will of man that refuses the restraint that God has put upon it.

The peopling of the earth was in view of the coming of the Heir of all things, He for Whom all things were made. "When the MOST HIGH divided to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the sons of ADAM, He set the bounds of the people (peoples R.V.) according to the number of the children of ISRAEL. For the LORD'S portion is His people; JACOB is the lot of His inheritance." (Deut. 32:8-9.) In the New Testament, also, we read "Known unto GOD are all His works from the beginning of the world." "GOD that made the world … hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." (Acts 15:18; 17:24-26.)

There is another thing which marked the history of God's ways with this world. God checked the independence of men by confounding their language, and scattering them abroad on the face of the earth. In result we get the earth divided among men according to their tongues, their families, and their nations. It was a providential ordering of the world under the government of God. He would not allow one great central city, and He scattered men. There does not seem to be any question with men as to the earth belonging to God, but all were taking their share and settling down as if it belonged to them. Thus the world was spread out, and all these nations and peoples will be represented at the close of this world's history. Now the call of Abraham was at that moment. God calls him out from his country, his kindred, and his father's house. It may be said that the nations and families out from which Abraham was called were providentially settled according to God's government, but it must be remembered that it was government in judgment. In Israel every tribe and family had a God-given inheritance. That cannot be said of the Gentiles. If I had an inheritance allotted to me by God directly, I could not sell it. That is why Naboth would not sell the inheritance of his fathers to Ahab. It was divinely given to his fathers. Abraham was to receive an inheritance directly from God. Come "unto a land that I will show thee." Our inheritance is laid up for us in heaven, on earth as Gentiles we had none. We can say that what is laid up for us in heaven is given of God.

Hence the apostle by the simple statement of divinely attested facts sets aside alike a multitude of independent deities and of independent nations derived from these Satanic impostors. He asserts one true God and one common race, whose fears, with independence of God and self-centring confidence in man, and means of effecting it in direct opposition to God's declared will, brought on dispersion by the different languages in their lands, after their tongues, their families, and their nations. For up to the deluge mankind was but one community, and, whatever their growing corruption and violence, no strange gods were set up against God. Nor had God inaugurated government as a human institution having authority from Him. When He did, it was left neither to fate nor to chance, but He determined the seasons, and the limits of their dwelling. Job 12:23, etc. from early days shows how distinctly this was known by those who had the fear of God; and Deuteronomy 32:8 goes even beyond what the apostle declared to the Athenians.

But providential disposal of the nations was far from all His care. He felt graciously for every soul of man, who in losing Him had lost the only and the necessary centre for the heart, and the basis for all true morality, of which known relationship to Him must be the corner-stone. This is touched in verse 27 as His great aim for them individually — "to seek God,* if haply they might feel after and find him, though he is not far from each one of us." For man was fallen from God, and sin reigned in death; and thus death passed upon all men, for that all sinned. The sad fact is patent and undeniable. But God remained the God of goodness and mercy, ready to hear and forgive. But man must seek Him, conscious of sin, misery, and darkness. Hence God from the garden of Eden held out to guilty man, even before he was expelled as an inexcusable rebel, the hope of a Deliverer from the power of Satan, and, O what grace! to be born of woman, though the woman drew the man into her disobedience.

As Israel then was to be His earthly people, God made known in a brief survey the sources of all the nations here below, having provided, laid down, and committed to man government in its root principle. None of these facts applies to the antediluvian earth, where all consisted of a vast indiscriminate population of one tongue and under no restraint of government, as it ended in all but universal lawlessness and a judgment that spared a family of only eight persons, including its head. He Who alone could reveal the primeval state when the first man and woman were made, and ushered then into an unstained earth, now deigned to tell the story of how nationalities began with their miraculously started distinct languages, spreading over different lands according to their families. His pleasure was both to bring to nought man's union for a name of pride and to set Israel in the most central spot, not more for righteous government than for shedding on all the earth the knowledge of Jehovah and His glory. So says Deut. 32:8: "When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when He separated the children of Adam, He set the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the children of Israel." The people were redeemed first, then the land: all in view of Messiah and His redemption and reign in manifest glory, when they shall bow in faith who are still unbelieving, and living water issuing from the house eastward shall heal the Dead sea and gird the globe with blessing. See Ezek. 47, and Joel 3:18; and Zech. 14:8-9 adds that half goes westward: the sign doubtless of universal blessing from the divine centre in that day.

We shall see from Gen. 11 how little man's will had to do with the distribution. Here we have simply but clearly the fact. It was quite a new thing on earth, not only unprecedented before the deluge, but the very opposite was man's purpose after it; so that the replenishing of the earth could not but seem distant indeed, however fruitful Noah's sons might be. But the God of creation is the God of providence, and He knows how to give effect to His word; and here we have Europe, though not Europe only, the destined scene for the Japhetic line, of all the earth the most varied in contour, the fullest of coast-line as being the most deeply indented, and so the most accessible through its inland seas, and as well the most open to foreign connection. It was exactly suitable for him who was to be enlarged in his activity beyond his brethren. What a contrast with Africa or even Asia, and their more elevated highlands and extensive plateaus!

Yet contrary to this common purpose each country was allotted to its respective race, and in all this startlingly new fact of lands partitioned by families constituting nations, and distinguished by its tongue appears, as we have seen, the line of Japhet, which mainly and in due time settled in Europe. The remembrance of the deluge would not dispose men to separate. But God meant it to be, and so it was: one race of Adam, but with all the variety into which the several stocks were to divide and replenish the earth. And the immediate occasion was the opposing determination of man, and the practical end for which they united, as the history relates afterward, along with the simple and effectual way in which God confounded their vain and selfish purpose and accomplished His own.

Nor was the earth itself externally out of harmony with God's mind about man, but adjusted in general to his use who was to eat bread in the sweat of his face, and especially to the new condition, fitted to their separate life as nations with mountain barriers and river boundaries, till man's enterprise made even the seas the ready means of intercourse, commerce, and conquest.

This idea springs out of the one we have just dealt with, and is a corollary to it. It also has some truth in a creatorial sense inasmuch as God has "made of one blood all nations of men" (Acts 17:26). It is not true in any other sense. The Scriptures draw the most distinct line imaginable between the believer and the man of the world. In his first epistle, 1 John 3 and 1 John 4, the Apostle John has much to say to the Christian as to his brother. And who is the brother in question? Any other child of Adam? No, any other child of God; any one who is "born of God." John, indeed, wields his pen in the clear and cutting style of his great Master and speaks of "the children of the devil" in contrast to "the children of God" (1 John 3:10).

So it was pressed on Israel then. The king of Ammon had forgotten, or had never enquired after the real righteousness of the case. What he felt was that these lands had once been his lands, and that the children of Israel now possessed them. More he knew not, nor wished to learn. But this was far from the true and full history of the case. The fact was that some other races and peoples had dispossessed the Ammonites of these lands. Now it was perfectly lawful for the children of Israel to treat them as intruders and strangers, who had no rightful claim, no valid plea why they should be restored. For we must remember carefully this, in looking at the dealings of God with the holy land and with His people Israel, God had always destined the land of Palestine for the chosen people. Had not He a right to do so? The Canaanites might have retreated from it; the Ammonites might have sought other lands. The world was large enough for all. There was at this time, as at every other, ample space for occupying here and there; and if the reason why they did not move was because they cared not for the word of God, they must take the consequences of their unbelief. They did not believe that God would enforce His claims. They had no faith in the promise on God's part to Abraham or to his seed. But the time came when God would act upon that promise, and when those that disputed the title of God must pay the penalty.

Thus, instead of a vast commonwealth of all mankind, the divine Governor brought about man's dispersion first, and at length in Peleg's day the division of the earth. Whatever might come by migration or resolution, the nations after their families and tongues occupied their lands to the apostle's day and to ours. God is not mocked.

Yet the next thing we hear of the world is that men set about in the plain of Shinar to defy God, centralise man, and possess the earth in their own might and for their own name; just as men will do by-and-by in a yet more daring way, but Jehovah will confound them also, as He did at Babel. Thus, we see, by His judgment, the world ordered into nations and tongues; and the very fact of the existence of different tongues shews that men are separated into nations. This took its rise at Babel; so that the children of men could no longer understand each other. And still there are these peoples and tongues, nations and families. Thus the world was settled then.