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Land of Confusion
First Things, Part 10
November 25, 2007
Brent James
We’ve come to the end of our series, The First Things, from the beginning chapters of Genesis. Today we end at the Tower of Babel, and I’ve got to give Bob Sanders credit for assigning one of the trickiest passages in the Old Testament to a kid fresh out of seminary. No joke, I actually went to visit a Rabbi here in Portland, to see if there was some Jewish perspective I was missing in my study of the text. You want to know what the Rabbi said? “Sorry, kid, it’s a tough text.” So I’d like to thank Bob for that. Here we are ramping up to a Sanctuary Enhancement Project, and I get stuck with one of the most famous passages from the Bible that at first glance says, God’s not a real big fan of building projects. But I think God actually is a fan of building programs, and I hope by the end of today you’ll think so too. Hear the word of the Lord, Lake Grove Presbyterian:
Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as they migrated from the east,* they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, ‘Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.’ And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then 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; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.’ 5 The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. 6 And the Lord said, ‘Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ 8 So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused* the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.
The great problem with this story is that the author never explicitly states what the sin of Babel is. As you consider, the last few weeks of teaching you’ll notice that these first stories of Genesis are stories of sin and judgment. Adam and Eve disobey, they eat the fruit and are banished from Eden and subjected to death. Cain murders his brother in a jealous rage and literally becomes a marked man doomed to roam the earth alone. In the Noah story, all of humanity has become so violent that the Lord decides that he is going to hit the restart button with one righteous family. The sin is clear in each story, but as we come to Babel there’s no particular sin that is spelled out, and yet there is an awesome judgment handed down. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke of a day when all of God's children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—would be able to join hands and sing. He had that dream, and we share that dream because he sensed and we still sense that something is off, not quite right in creation. When God confuses the languages at Babel, this great human family pregnant with endless possibilities suffers the greatest break-up ever conceived. Humanity is divorced from itself through its inability to communicate. Brother is ripped apart from brother, cousin from cousin, separated by a chasm of confusion, unable to understand the hearts and minds of each other; and with this separation come all of the problems of racism, nationalism, etc.
You know, if I was God’s Public Relations Manager, this might be a story that I would just leave out of the Bible. It doesn’t make God look all that great in its first reading. At first glance, you read this story and it seems like God is weary with mankind’s possibilities; it looks as though God wants to keep the monopoly of power in the world. But if you look a little closer, we’ll notice some clues, and we’ll see a different God from the surface reading of the story; we’ll find a God who is faithful, a God who is sovereign, a God prepared with a plan.
Our first clue, I think, is the truth of this line, “this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them".” You know, 500 years ago humanity barely had the technology to cross the Atlantic Ocean. A little less than 40 years ago, humanity had the technology to transcend the heavens, to orbit the earth, to fly into outer space, and the ability to let a man walk on the face of the moon – a staggering achievement in 450 years. In 1903, the Wright brothers were the first recorded men to build an airplane; 100 years later, in 2005, the X-43A scram jet set a new world record flying at 7000 miles per hour, almost 10 times the speed of sound. 100 years. Those are just two accomplishments. And we could talk about any number of accomplishments – nanotechnology, biotechnology, communications technology… It’s quite true, isn’t it? Nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them. But how about nuclear technology? In 1960 the Russians detonated Big Ivan, a 50-megaton nuclear weapon – a weapon so powerful that when it was detonated 13,000 feet in the air it still cause a seismic event, a manmade earthquake at 5.2 on the Richter scale, – a weapon that could erase London, New York, or Los Angeles from the map in one detonation, millions of lives destroyed with one decision. You see there’s a dark side to this human possibility when it gets away from God’s purposes.
We Presbyterians believe that mankind was made to glorify God and to enjoy him forever, and we were made to obey his revealed will. And yet what do we see when we look a little closer at the Babel text? The second clue, for those who have been reading along in Genesis. You might remember God’s command to Noah in Chapter 9 verse 7, “and as for you, be fruitful and multiply; populate the earth abundantly and multiply in it.” “Fill the whole earth,” God says, and yet what do these people of the plain of Shinar say? “Come, let us build a city, and let us make a name for ourselves lest we be scattered abroad the face of the whole earth.” God’s plan is for humanity to fill the earth, but the people on the plain of Shinar have undertaken a different plan. They have stumbled upon a technological advance, the burning of clay to make bricks, and now a new world has been opened to them. They no longer have to scatter abroad; technology has created a choice – follow God’s plan or do what they want to do. And it’s an interesting name that these people of the plain of Shinar choose for their city, Bab-El. Bab is the semitic word for gate and El the semitic word for God. Bab-El – the gate of the gods. I say gods – plural – because Babel is the Hebrew word for Babylon, and the ancient Babylonians, as far as we know, worshipped multiple gods. Many scholars believe that the tower referred to in this text is a massive ziggurat, kind of like a pyramid, that the Babylonians built. The main ziggurat of ancient Babylon was known as É-temen-an-ki. It stood about 300 ft tall. If you want an idea of that height, look at the top of the roof here and go seven-and-a-half times that height, and you’d get an idea of the scope of this ziggurat. Then at the top of the ziggurat would stand a temple to Marduk, the top god of the Babylonians, a manmade god unknown to Noah.
I believe that human beings, at their core, love building projects. I happen to be a huge fan of architecture. I love the concept of a building as a work of art that people live in and spend their lives in. I stand in awe of the Burj Dubai tower which is currently being built in United Arab Emirates, which when completed will be as tall as the Sears Tower in Chicago, if you cut the Tower in half and then began to build the whole of the Sears Tower on top of the bottom half. 2,111 feet. It’s a monument to the abilities and the possibilities of mankind.
But architecture has a shadow side, and if I’m truly honest with myself, it represents part of my shadow side as well, which I think is hit straight on the nose by Nietzsche’s quote on our front cover, “In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is a sort of oratory of power by means of form.” You see, if I’m downright honest, I love power, I love to be in control. Boy, can I be prideful, and when it comes right down to it, I’m kind of like the people on the plain of Shinar – I’d much rather build a tower to a god of my own making than obey a God of truth and justice and mercy, who is sovereign, whose will is superior to my own. I don’t know where you are, but for me, I find that I can be so much more obsessed by my sense of success, of how I stack up to those around me, as I am concerned with being a faithful, obedient disciple. So many times, rather than follow after Christ, rather than heed the Holy Spirit’s call to live an abundant life, I start building my own tower… here are my degrees, here are the books I’ve read, let me impress you with a Nietzsche quote, let me show you the people in my rolodex, let me make a name for myself. I start to build a tower of self promotion and self preservation, and the Holy Spirit gently whispers, “All you need is a cross.” You see, the sin of Babel was not that they built a tower! God doesn’t have a thing against towers. The pyramids are still standing; God hasn’t struck down the Space Needle. God doesn’t have a beef with building projects, but God does have a problem with disobedience; God has a problem with pride, and God surely has a problem when we replace him with idols of our own making, when we make ourselves out to be gods.
It’s interesting, coming back to the text we come to clue 3. You’ll notice that the builders of the tower use this phrase, “Come let us,” twice – come let us make bricks, come let us build a city. It’s fairly reminiscent of some previous words spoken in Genesis, chapter one, “Let us make man in our own image.” I think the author of Genesis is drawing subtle connection, saying that humanity had deluded itself into believing it was God; humanity had deluded itself into believing that its will was sovereign, and in an act of hubristic folly, they transgressed the command of God and commemorated it with a grand gateway to a different god. Humanity was making a god in its own image. Humanity was living in open rebellion of God’s will.
What kind of devastation might happen, what horrors might occur if God allows a united humanity to live in open rebellion of him? What dark possibilities might lurk on the horizon? Let me give you just one idea. During the holocaust, Dr. Josef Mengele was infamous for human experiments, especially with Romani Jewish children. Vera Alexander, a caretaker at Auschwitz, tells the story of two Jewish children. I remember one set of twins in particular: Guido and Ina, aged about four. One day, Mengele took them away. When they returned, they were in a terrible state: they had been sewn together, back to back, like Siamese twins. Their wounds were infected and oozing pus. They screamed day and night. Then their parents—I remember the mother's name was Stella—managed to get some morphine and they killed the children in order to end their suffering. You see, when humanity deludes itself into believing that it is God, that it has the corner on right and wrong, there are some fairly dismal, awesomely dark possibilities.
At first glance in the Babel narrative, God seems kind of paranoid; but if you look closer, you’ll see a God who is a loving judge, who is faithful to his word. God made a promise. He told Noah, “I’ll never lay waste to creation again by a flood,” and He doesn’t. Nor does he wipe them out with any other type of catastrophe, which He could have. If it were me, I would have wiped them out, but God is faithful to his promise! God is loving, just and good.
In the Babel text we also see a God who is sovereign. Notice that God reclaims his phrase, God says in verse 7, “Come, let us go down and confuse their language that they might not understand each other’s speech.” What was humanity’s goal in building the city? Remember? “Lest we not be scattered over the face of the earth,” and look at verse 8, “and God scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth.” There was a clash of the wills, of human will and God’s will , and guess who won? God is sovereign, we will sing the hymn on this Christ the King Sunday, to him all majesty ascribes. God’s will, will not be thwarted. We may try, but to our own peril.
Babel is the final story of the first things, and it’s the ultimate downer story; it is the story of sin. And what is the price of this sin? In eleven chapters, humanity starts off in paradise, God’s own perfect garden, and it ends in confusion, darkness, hopelessness – and what a fitting story for the week before Advent. Chapter 11 leaves us with humanity destined to dwell in confusion. But it doesn’t end there because God has a plan.
You see, God is a master architect, and like all great architects He has built in a contingency plan. For out of the rubble of Babel, out of the darkness and confusion, out of the plains of Shinar, will come Reu, and from Reu will come Serug, and from Serug, Nahor, and from Nahor, Terah, and from Terah will come a man we know as Abraham. And if you turn to the next chapter, Ch. 12, God will make this promise to Abraham, “I will make you a great nation, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” And from Abraham will come David, and from David will come Jesus and from Jesus will come the church. God’s new building plan begins with Abraham and it cumulates in our New Testament reading this morning, 1 Peter 2, “you also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house for a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” You see, God is the Grand Architect, and God is still building His Church of living stones, of you and me. In God’s architecture, if I may borrow and amend Nietzche’s quote, we, the church, are the pride of God, we are God’s triumph over sin, we are the physical manifestation of his will unto salvation, we are the visible form of the body of Christ. We are the message of God’s power and love by means of form. Out of a world of darkness, out of a land of confusion, God has called us to His salvation. God has called us to be His architecture, His Church, where there is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female. We are God’s building, we are God’s plan, we are God’s church.
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