DAY FIVE:

The Tower of Babel

Genesis 11:1-9

Good Friday morning!  This is the last reading for this week. You can use Saturday and Sunday to catch up on anything you've missed. I'll be preaching this Sunday on what we've been studying. Your comments have been very helpful to me as I prepare the sermon. Sometimes we preachers answer questions that no one is really asking. I'm glad that you've asked the questions that are important to you.

We're skipping over the last part of chapter nine and all of chapter ten, so I'll give a quick summary. The Bible is so brutally honest! Someone once said that the Bible is a book that no man could write if he would, or would write if he could. Noah, the man who found favor in the eyes of the Lord, settled down to farming. He planted grapes, made some wine, got drunk and took his clothes off. Ham saw his father in that state and told his brothers. This had to be more than just informing them of the fact that their father was drunk and uncovered. Perhaps he was ridiculing Noah. Some scholars suggest that some sort of sexual abuse was involved. In any event Shem and Japheth walked backward so that they would not see their father in that state and covered him. When Noah came to he cursed Ham for what he had done, along with his son Canaan. He then blessed Shem and Ham for the kindness they had shown him.

Chapter ten is a genealogy of Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth. They spread all over the world and divided into many nations and ethnic groups. Even though it comes before the passage we'll consider today these events took place after the Tower of Babel. Verse five says, "From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans, in their nations." We also read about Nimrod, "a mighty hunter before the Lord," who founded the world's first nation-state in what later became Babylon.

Chapter eleven begins "Now the whole earth had one language and the same words." Think of how much easier life would be if everyone spoke the same language! We could travel and work anywhere in the world with no communication problems. There'd be a lot less of the misunderstandings that come when trying to cross language and culture barriers. This was a good thing, right? Yes, but as we've seen that sin nature has passed down from Adam and Eve to all of their descendants, and human beings once again proved that they can take anything that's good and corrupt it. God had told Noah and his sons to spread out and repopulate the earth. Instead, they all stayed together and found a nice place to settle, the Plain of Shinar. This is the area between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers just north of the Persian Gulf in modern-day Iraq. The soil was very fertile and the climate was favorable. No need to go any further! They said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” They looked for a symbol that would unify them and decided that a tall tower, reaching far above the plain and visible for miles, would do the trick. So they set to work. There was no stone in that area and the palm trees that grew there were not suitable for this project. So they made bricks out of mud.and used bitumen (a black tar that comes from oil) for mortar. They were making rapid progress and the tower grew ever higher.

The Lord came down to look at the project and saw what they were doing. He realized that they were establishing their lives apart from Him, in disobedience to His command. If they finish this project they'll go on to even bigger things and nothing will be impossible to them. So God said, "Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech." The "us" here, as we saw in the creation story, is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the one God in three Persons. Every imagination of man's heart was evil. Yet God loved His creatures and had promised Noah that He would not destroy all mankind again. By confusing their languages so that they couldn't understand one another and would break up into groups with common languages and move on to start their own nations all over the world. They called that place Babel, from a word that means to confuse.

The Tower of Babel was a product of the same lie the serpent told Eve: "You will be like God." Don't go off and spread yourselves out. Stay here, where you can be strong and united, and build a tower to show how great you are. That lie is so tempting, but it never delivers on its promise!

There's something in our human nature that makes us love tall things. We look at the tall mountains and long to climb to the top. We build ever-taller buildings, and since 1998 the record for the tallest building in the world has been broken seven times. The Burj Khalifa Tower in Dubai is currently the world's tallest building at 2,716 feet, but there are plans for even higher buildings in the next few years. A few years ago our oldest daughter took us on a boat tour on the Chicago River. It's a lot easier to see the buildings from the water and to see just how tall the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower and seventh-tallest building in the world) and the then brand-new Trump Tower which was nearly as tall. When I was about five years old I remember my parents taking me to the LeVeque Tower, at the time the only skyscraper in Columbus. It stood 556 feet tall, and the cars below seemed as small as ants!

The desire to build big and tall things can be good. The great cathedrals of Europe were built for the glory of God. The Methodist Church's spire is the tallest structure in Sebring and can be seen all over town, it's cross reminding us of our Lord and Savior. I wonder, though, if maybe we Christians have fallen prey to the same "edifice complex" that was behind the Tower of Babel. The church is not the building, but the people of God who meet there. It is the people who make the building holy, not the other way around. One of my assignments in seminary was to write a history of the church I served as a student pastor. It's building burned down on Christmas Day in 1944. I called that a tragedy. The professor corrected me. The destruction of the building was a disaster; the split in the congregation that occurred a few years later was the real tragedy.

Many years after the Tower of Babel the Apostle Paul stood on another high place, Mars Hill, overlooking Athens. He said, "[God] made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us..." (Acts 17:26-27) This scattering of the people all over the world was a part of His great plan to redeem us!

Next week we'll see how God's plan unfolds further in the life of Abraham and his family.

I'll do my best to post this Sunday's sermon on the church's podcast page by early afternoon so you can listen if you aren't able to be with us.