Genesis 10:15-20: in context

The table of nations turns to Canaan and his descendants, and the names are significant: Sidon, Heth, the Jebusites, Amorites, Girgashites, Hivites, and the rest, spread across the land from Sidon to Gaza and around toward Sodom. To a reader of Israel's story, this is a roll call of the peoples who will fill the promised land and become Israel's adversaries centuries later, the very nations they will face when they cross the Jordan.

What is worth noticing is that these future adversaries are charted, by name, generations before the conflict. Long before Israel existed as a nation, before the exodus, before the giants terrified the spies, God's word records the Canaanite peoples who would one day inhabit the land of promise, mapping out the whole board in advance. The nations that would seem so formidable to Israel at the border are here reduced to a genealogy, entries in a family list, part of the human family descended from Noah. There is something quietly steadying in that. The powers that will later loom so large in the story are, from the vantage of this chapter, simply named among the descendants of Ham, known to God from the start, no surprise to him. The Jebusites who held Jerusalem, the Amorites and Hivites the spies feared, are here on a list, catalogued long before they became obstacles. God was never caught off guard by the giants in the land; he had known and named those peoples generations earlier. The adversaries ahead of us are, to him, already known and already accounted for.

Do the obstacles and adversaries ahead of me seem to loom larger than they are, when to God they are already known and named, no surprise to the one who charted the nations generations in advance?