Andy Davis preaches an expository sermon on Genesis 11. The main subjects of the sermon are the Tower of Babel and Shem.
The Gifts of Language and Ingenuity: Blessings Gone Bad
Language: Communication in the Image of God
Please take your Bibles and open to Genesis, Chapter 11. This is our second and last sermon in Genesis. It doesn’t mean that there is not more to study, there is always more to study, but we are going to be moving as we prepare for Christmas into Isaiah, not next week, but the week after. Today, as we look at Genesis, Chapter 11, we come to a story of blessings gone bad. How blessings that God has given to the human race turned against Him, in rebellion against Him, and how God sovereignly worked out His plan and His purpose by interfering in human history. What a message of comfort that is to us who trust in Him. It is a story of the building up of the city of man in rebellion and defiance against God, and yet in the midst of all of that, the building of the city of God through that godly line of Shem, ultimately through Abram down to Jesus Christ. A tale of two cities is before us today.
Listen to the words of Scripture in Genesis, Chapter 11: “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. “They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth. But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that men were building. The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’ So, the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel ̶̶ because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”
Verses 10-26, “This is the account of Shem. Two years after the flood, when Shem was 100 years old, he became the father of Arphaxad. After he became the father of Arphaxad, Shem lived 500 years and had other sons and daughters. When Arphaxad had lived 35 years, he became the father of Shelah. And after he became the father of Shelah, Arphaxad lived 403 years and had other sons and daughters. When Shelah had lived 30 years, he became the father of Eber. And after he became the father of Eber, Shelah lived 403 years and had other sons and daughters. When Eber had lived 34 years, he became the father of Peleg. And after he became the father of Peleg, Eber lived 430 years and had other sons and daughters. When Peleg had lived 30 years, he became the father of Reu. And after he became the father of Reu, Peleg lived 209 years and had other sons and daughters. When Reu had lived 32 years, he became the father of Serug. And after he became the father of Serug, Reu lived 207 years and had other sons and daughters. When Serug had lived 30 years, he became the father of Nahor. And after he became the father of Nahor, Serug lived 200 years and had other sons and daughters. When Nahor had lived 29 years, he became the father of Terah. And after he became the father of Terah, Nahor lived 119 years and had other sons and daughters. After Terah had lived 70 years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.”
Verse 27-32, “This is the account of Terah. Terah became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. And Haran became the father of Lot. While his father Terah was still alive, Haran died in Ur of the Chaldeans, in the land of his birth. Abram and Nahor both married. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah; she was the daughter of Haran, the father of both Milcah and Iscah. Now Sarai was barren; she had no children. Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Haran, they settled there. Terah lived 205 years, and he died in Haran.”
Now, as we look at the beginning section of this, the Tower of Babel, this may be a common story or familiar story to you, but as I have looked at it this week and looked at this text, I’ve seen that it really is the story of blessings gone bad, blessings which God had given to the human race. I am talking about the blessings of language and of ingenuity. The blessings of language in ingenuity. Now, in my research this week, I found that there are 6,858 languages in the world. I only know one. I have studied eight or nine of them, and I only know one. How is it you can study eight or nine languages and only know one? Just ask me, it is a difficult thing to acquire language. It is especially hard for we as Americans, we don’t really see the need. Do we? But the fact of the matter is, there are almost 7,000 languages in the world, and they are a marvel of God’s creation, a gift of the image of God in humanity. They are a reflection of His desire to communicate. God is a God of communication. He is a God who communicates to us through the Word. And, so intimately as he connected with this, that He was willing that the second person of the Trinity, the Son, be associated with the Word. “Word,” for it says in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In Verse 14, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
God associates himself with communication and, Jesus is to us, truly, the final Word from God, communication to a sinful human race. Now, in all the animal kingdom, there is nothing like human speech. Nothing. As I was looking through this, I found that the only thing that was somewhat close to the kind of communication that we take for granted every day is a certain dance that bees do to identify the location of nectar. A bee finds some nectar and does a certain movement or motion and, as far as we know, the only topic of that communication is the location and quantity of the nectar but human speech is not limited in any way, shape or form. We can talk about anything. We can talk about our passions and our feelings, our plans and desires, we can talk about God, we can talk about the future. It is truly a gift from God and it is one of those many things that separates us from the rest of creation. However, in this story, we see it is a blessing gone bad, where the mouth, the tongue is used to incite evil, “Come let us disobey God. Come let us do this or that.” So, language, is a blessing gone bad. We also see human ingenuity, inventiveness, creativity, could we even say technology, a blessing from God, but gone bad in this story.
Human Ingenuity
Now, I don’t know if you know this, but a 100 years ago, in 1899, the Director of the United States Patent Office petitioned the government to shut down his own office, because he had come to the conclusion that everything that could be invented had already been invented and there was no need any longer for the Patent Office. Can you imagine that? That was in 1899. The 20th century has seen an explosion of human ingenuity and inventiveness, and a few of those inventions have centered on communication. This is really a communication and transportation era these 100 years. Getting people together, moving them in one direction, so that we’re able to associate, we’re able to work together. This is somewhat a reversal of what happened in the Tower of Babel. As I look through the patents of the first 50 years of the 20th century, I gave the guy the benefit of the doubt.
I figured he could have at least seen that. There was no way he could have imagined what would happen with computers, electronics and transistors in the second half of the century, but maybe he could have seen what was coming around the corner. For example, in the year 1900, the photocopy machine was invented.
In 1903, we saw the airplane. In 1907, the electric vacuum cleaner and aren’t you glad for that? The electric vacuum cleaner. An electric washing machine also that same year. In 1911, we had air-conditioning and the automobile self-starter. Do you know what I mean by the automobile self-starter? Perhaps you just take it for granted. You get in your car and you turn the key, but it wasn’t always that way. It used to be you had to turn the crank at the beginning, at the front of the car. Can you imagine doing that on a cold day? It is hard enough to start a car on a cold day. In 1913, the refrigerator was invented and talking motion pictures. I am not sure whether that’s good or not, but they were invented in 1913. In 1923, the first form of television. In 1926, a liquid fuel rocket. In 1930, shortly thereafter, jet propulsion and the jet propulsion engine. In 1938, the automatic clothes dryer. So, there is a big gap between the automatic washing machine and the clothes dryer. They just hung them out to dry all that time but, finally, somebody invented the clothes dryer. In 1942, the nuclear reactor was invented, and then 1943 the artificial kidney machine, and then on into 1953, the heart-lung machine.
There were tremendous advances of technology in the 20th century, and it is accelerating, too. It is going faster and faster. Do you know why? Because people are able to communicate more, they’re able to get together. There’s a technology transfer. It is going to go faster and faster, with what Bill Gates calls the information superhighway. The exchange of information. The United States Patent Office issues 76,000 patents every year and rejects 200,000. So, if you have an idea for an invention, you better have your ducks in a row. It takes an awfully long time to get a patent. It is very difficult to do. Human inventiveness is really one of the major stories of the 20th century, but so is the use of human evil of that inventiveness. It has been an evil century, hasn’t it? As we look back over the last 100 years, there have been terrible tragedies such as World War I, World War II, and other wars besides, as well as the advent of thermonuclear devices and weapons of mass destruction. We have seen the propagation of evil throughout our society and it has been technologically enhanced, hasn’t it? We are able through the media, radio, television, newspapers, the internet, and other communication outlets, to find out very quickly about evil things that other people are doing, and so you get copycat killings or other things. It’s just a pervasive spread of evil through this technology. It is a tragic thing.
God’s Holy Power Interferes for His Holy Purposes
As we think about this pervasiveness, we have to look at this message and see that our God is sovereign over all of it. He is an interfering God. He is not just letting it happen up in heaven. He is going to come down, He is going to affect it, and He’s going to interfere for His holy purposes. Look at verses 1-4, it says, “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.'” Now, the first thing we see here is the power of human cooperation. I think other than the power of God, there may be no force on earth as powerful as human beings working together, and that is power for good or for evil, isn’t it? Every major empire in the world, from the Roman Empires through the Nazis, have shown the power for evil of human cooperation, the power to dominate. When I was in Kenya, I was introduced to a species of ant called the Safari ant. Safari is a Swahili word, which means travel or journey. These ants have no home, they just travel around and are a remarkable and ingenious creation of God. They work together in an amazing way. They are able to cross small rivers by making an ant bridge with their own bodies. By making a cantilever bridge, they are able to get every single ant across through their strength and, somehow, through their knowledge of technology. The power of cooperation. Well, how much more we who are created in the image of God, when we come together and say, “Come, let’s do this,” for good or evil, a tremendous force, and we see the power of human cooperation here. Positively, there is no power on earth as powerful for good as the body of Christ indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We are the ones who work together under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. With our spiritual gifts, we come together as a body and we accomplish God’s work in this world. Tremendous power for good, but also in hearing the story of the Tower of Babel, power for evil, because these people are motivated by their own pride, their own glory. Building something which does not glorify God. The second thing we see here is the pride of human technology. Created in the image of God, we have inventive restless creative minds, we are always thinking, we are always imagining, thinking of new things and that is part of the image of God. That very image of God, which was committed to us at creation has been defaced and twisted through sin. We see evidence of it here.
Steady advance of technology makes new expressions of sin possible. They say, “Hey, we’ve got a new technology here.” If you bake the bricks thoroughly through and dry them out, they don’t crumble as much, they are stronger, and so we can build higher. You see. You have stronger bricks and if you coat them with pitch, they are protected from the elements, and so we now have the technology to build a high tower. So, the advance of technology makes the spread of evil a little bit easier. Human inventiveness immediately leads to human pride. Thirdly, we see here the pollution of human rebellion. Now, what is the plan in the making of this tower? They’re making a city, first and foremost, this is the foundation of Babylon, this plain of Shinar. All the people were together, they had one common language, one common speech. They are able to work together. Remember what I told you last week, the table of nations in Genesis 10, all the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth spread out, but each one had their own common language, their own common culture. So, this is actually backtracking a little bit here in chapter 11, to explain how those languages and cultures came about. What is the motive of these people as they build their city? They want to build a city, and their motive is two-fold, positively and in other words, their intention is to glorify themselves, not positive at all, but that is what they are intending to do.
They want to glorify themselves. In Verse 4, it says, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens.” Why? “So that we may make a name for ourselves.” Now, we’ve seen this before, right before the flood. I don’t know if you remember this, but in Genesis 6:4, in Hebrew, it talks about “men of the name.” Sadly, “men of the name” doesn’t come across in any English translation. It says, “men of great reputation” or “men of renown,” but they were really men who lived for their own glory. This is right before the flood. When you get a whole world of people living for themselves, living for their own glory, using the cooperation, the power of cooperation, of language, of technology to glorify themselves, we have a terrible problem, and that is what led to the flood of Noah. God needed to sweep that evil away, and so we have seen this before. People have a natural tendency to worship themselves, to make a name for themselves and that was their motive. They wanted to glorify themselves, and that was the motive of their city and certainly of their tower. The negative motive was that they didn’t want to be scattered over the surface of the earth ̶̶ “That we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” Well, wasn’t it God’s plan to spread them over the face of the earth? That was His intention.
From the very beginning, God said He commanded Adam and then certainly He re-commanded Noah after Noah stepped off the ark, Genesis 9:1, “Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.'” That was their command and by now, many of you may have memorized that verse in Habakkuk 2:14. Why? “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” The image of God spread all over the globe, intelligent creative beings, able to see His glory, able to see what He has done, spreading over the whole earth. That’s what God wanted and they didn’t want to do it. They said, “We don’t want to be spread. We want to stay right here where we are and have our own civilization, our own community apart from God’s plan.” Now, when did this occur? We don’t really know. There’s nothing in the actual text that tells us when it occurred. Genesis 10:25 may give us a little bit of a hint when it says that, “Because in Peleg’s time the earth was divided.” So, if you could kind of figure out when Peleg lived, perhaps you would have an indication when the Tower of Babel occurred, perhaps around 300 years after the flood, but we’re not really sure.
Human Pride: Reaching for Heaven
The Power of Human Cooperation
What are the theological issues to the building of this city and the building of this tower? First is the sense of the evil city, or we could say the city of man. When human beings apart from the indwelling Holy Spirit come together and bring their creativity and cooperation together, evil results. And so, we get the evil city, the city of man. This really symbolizes the whole human history, doesn’t it? You know, the cooperation, technology, working together apart from God for self-glorification, the building of the city of man. Some think that tower was a ziggurat, a kind of Babylonian tower, like a pyramid, reaching up like that, as a symbol of human pride, self-glorification, and also self-effort. “We want to build a tower that will reach up to heaven, somewhat of a stairway to heaven, where as you build each brick step by step, you can work your way up to heaven.” So, there is real pride in this. I searched the internet to try and find which city had the tallest tower, tallest structure these days. Actually, two cities are claiming it, and I thought that was very interesting. They’re saying, “No, no, it’s not that tower. We have the tallest tower.” Toronto, right? The CN Tower in Toronto.
The Pride of Human Technology
Chicago has its claim with the Sears Tower. I don’t know if you saw in USA Today, about two or three weeks ago, there are plans on the books to reclaim that title from the Petronas Tower in Kuala Lumpur, which apparently is the tallest at 1,850 feet. Chicago wants to be number one so they are going to build the tallest skyscraper. How long will they hold the title? Who knows, maybe until somebody else hears about it and wants to build it. What is this? It is self-glorification. “Our city has the tallest tower.” It has been this way since Genesis 11, to make a name for ourselves. It really is rooted back with the original sin. What was it that motivated Eve? She wanted to be wise like God. It is a form of self-worship. And then, we had those evil tyrant rulers in Genesis 6, heroes of old, men of the name who wanted to make a reputation for themselves but it is mostly like Satan. It is mostly like the devil. What is it that he said to Jesus, “I’ll give you the entire world if you’ll simply bow down and worship me. Just bow down and worship me and I’ll give it all to you.”
The Pollution of Human Rebellion
In Isaiah 14:12 and following, this is said, many interpreters believe this is speaking directly to Satan, “How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart…” Now think about Babylon in this. “You said in your heart, I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” They’re acting like their father, the devil. That is exactly what he wanted, self-worship, elevating themselves and forgetting about God. But it says in Isaiah 14:15, “But you are brought down to the grave, to the depths of the pit.”
Products of Human Imagination
The fourth element we see here is the product of human imagination. In Verse 6, God says, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” God knew what he put in us, he knew what kind of ingenuity or kind of creativity he put in us and that we are able to find out amazing things about the world that he has laid around us, even to the point of researching our very selves, the genetic order and the brain to study things and then looking outwards. He knew what he put in us and so he was saying, “If as one people speaking one language, they have begun to do this, nothing they plan to do will be impossible.” As for human ingenuity, the ability to imagine something, even though it doesn’t exist yet, to imagine it and then bring it about, is very God-like. We are created in the image of God, but it is less than the power of God because everything that God plans, he accomplishes; everything that God sets out to do, he determines to do and he accomplishes.
God’s Sovereign Interference: Restraining Evil
The Lord Descends
Romans 4:17 says that, “God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.” God has that kind of power. It also says in Isaiah 46:11, “What I have said, that will I bring about; what I have planned, that will I do.” That is God. He imagines, He plans, and then He executes the plan. But He also rules over our planning, doesn’t He? Proverbs 19:21 says, “Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” Don’t we see that here? They were making a plan, they were going to raise a tower up to heaven, but God said, “No, it won’t happen,” and it didn’t happen, and God interfered. Our God is a sovereign God who rules over the minutest details of human history for his plans. We could therefore say our God is an interfering God and isn’t it a good thing that He is? Isn’t it a good thing that He doesn’t just sit up in heaven and let it happen, but He interferes? In verses 5-9, you see the interfering. The Lord descends in Verse 5, “The Lord came down to see the city.”
You know, it’s funny how liberals pick up and say, “Oh, this answered monomorphic language, it’s just a myth.” No, it isn’t. This verse is our humiliation. Perhaps, you hadn’t even noticed. God has to come down to see how far they’ve come up, you see? I have got to go all the way down to see the progress you’ve made. He’s humbling us. You don’t realize how far you have to travel, it’s a long, long way to where I am, and you are not going to do it by baking bricks thoroughly and putting pitch on them. God had to come down to see it. You know, Solomon knew this, he said in 1 Kings 8:27, “But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!” Solomon knew that. Well, let’s think about heaven, even the highest heavens. Say, “Okay, that was ancient technology. You know, we have come a long way now. We have come a long way. We can lift ourselves off the surface of the earth and we can go to the moon.” Have you ever said, “If we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to do such and such?” The pinnacle of human technology. Well, around 1972, some researchers launched Pioneer 10. Pioneer 10 moved through the solar system. It was the first man-made object to exit the solar system. That’s quite an achievement.
So, we are much higher up now than the Tower of Babel, we’ve come a long way, haven’t we? Do you know how long it took Pioneer 10 to leave the solar system? Eleven and a half years. I decided to figure out how long it would take at that rate to reach the nearest star, the nearest star mind you, not the farthest star, the nearest one, Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. As you do the math, you figured it all out, it’s 80,000 years. It would take 80,000 years at that rate to reach the nearest star. But, you say, “We’ve come a long way since 1972. What if we take the state-of-the-art technology and see how long it would take then?” Well, there is something called a nuclear thermal rocket. That sounds powerful, doesn’t it? A nuclear thermal rocket can get you to Mars in 90 days, that’s pretty good. Ninety days to Mars, seven miles per second it travels. At that rate, it would take seven minutes to cross the United States, Continental U.S. Slowing down would be a terrible pain. I mean, accelerating and the slowing down, you better have your seat belts on, but at seven miles a second, it’s only a seven-minute trip.
Okay? Alright, then at seven miles a second, how long would it take to reach the nearest star, mind you, not the farthest. Only 11,500 years. God is humbling us. He said, “You can’t reach me through your own efforts. Heaven, even the highest heavens can’t contain me.” God was humbling them. He came down to see this puny little tower they were making. Do you know, God frequently uses this exaltation language to speak of himself? Isaiah 6:1 says, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted…” Why does he use that language So that we know who He is and who we are? We are so vaunting in our pride all the time. We need this lesson. Isaiah 40:22 says, “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people before him are like grasshoppers.” Why does He do that? We need Him to do it. We need to hear this message. We are so prideful. We need to understand just how powerful God is.
What was the last thing Jesus did during his first earthly visit? He gathered his disciples together in the Mount of Olives, gave them some final words, and then he ascended. He ascended before their very eyes and a cloud hid him from their sight. Why did he do that? Is heaven up? Heaven is a spiritual place, but he wants to give us a sense of his exaltation and of our weakness, our lowliness. And, by his grace, God has promised to exalt us with Him if we’ll just humble ourselves, if we’ll just lower ourselves before Him and acknowledge His greatness, His holiness, His majesty, He will exalt us. “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted,” said Jesus. “Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand,” 1 Peter 5:6, “that he may lift you up in due time.” He may exalt you, raise you up. He conveys the same consistent message in Genesis 4:6. He said to Cain, “If you do what is right, will you not be exalted?” It says in the Hebrew, “I’ll lift you up if you’ll just humble yourself before me.”
The Lord Assesses
And so, God has to come down to humble these arrogant people. The Lord comes down in verse 6, he assesses what they’re doing. Human cooperation must be thwarted. Human sin must be restrained. Human imagination held in check. If there is one people speaking one language, they have begun to do this, nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. The Hebrew actually says, nothing they imagine will be restrained from them. So, we are really talking here about the restraining of evil, and so God is about the business in human society of restraining evil, he slows it down, he impedes its progress. Why? So that the city of God can get built, it’s going to take a long time. There is an awful lot more said about the city of man in this chapter than the city of God, it’s just a genealogy in reference to the city of God, it takes time. There’s going to be an unfolding here, a history. God had it all planned out. Abram would come and then Isaac and Jacob and the 12 tribes in Egypt, the whole history. And ultimately, Jesus Christ. So, he had to slow down evil. He already promised not to bring another flood on the earth, so he had to slow it.
The Lord Acts
It’s very much like what we Christians are called to do when we are called to be salt in society, we are the salt of the earth. Salt retards corruption, we are supposed to slow it down. That is what God does here. The Lord acts, he speaks within himself, “Come let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand each other.” Some people think this is somewhat of a heavenly counsel, he’s talking to the angels. I think perhaps as an inter-Trinitarian communication, he’s a communicating being within himself, Father can speak to Son, Son can speak to Spirit, Spirit can speak to Father. They have been doing that from before the foundation of the world. Our speech, our ability to communicate is a reflection, a dim reflection of his communication with himself. “Come let us do this,” he says, and God decides to confuse the language. Now, how did he do that? Stop and think. Did he actually get inside our brains? Yeah, that’s right. In one day, you were speaking a different language, you knew what you were trying to say, but your friend didn’t. He’s looking at you saying, “What?” I guess they spoke Hebrew, or maybe he was now speaking Aramaic, or maybe he was speaking Acadian or who knows what language he was speaking, perhaps he didn’t even know what to call his new language. Maybe you got home, hopefully God kept husbands and wives together on the same page, the husband and the wife speaking the same language. Can you imagine how detrimental that would have been? But God had it all worked out, and so there were clans and tribes coming up around that. God would start to scatter and to spread the earth, he would scatter them and spread them over the surface of the earth.
It was not a willy-nilly scattering, God had a place for each nation, for each culture, for each tribe. As Paul told us last week, Acts 17:26, “From one man, he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined the time set for them and the exact places where they should live.” He had a place for each tribe and language, people and nation, and he spread them over the earth. A powerful effect on human history, the confusing of the languages. Even more powerful is the sense of our God as an interfering or a sovereign God. Around the time of the beginning of our country, there was an idea about God called deism, an idea that God just basically created the world and then just let it run. The analogy is frequently of a clockmaker who made a clock and just let it run by itself, that is not biblical. Our God gets involved in history, He gets involved in your life, He gets involved in the events of your life, He is sovereign, and He is involved.
A sparrow doesn’t fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And so it is, He interferes, He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. As the King of kings, He comes in there with the movers and the shakers, and He moves and shakes them. He is the mover and the shaker here. He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Proverbs 21:1 says, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.” That’s God. He’s sovereign over that. And so, He directs the minds, even gets involved in the way that they think and the way they speak.
Now, in so doing, God made the spread of the gospel more difficult, didn’t He? Do you remember Ron and Mary Halbrooks? They were in our midst just a short time ago. Do you know what they’re doing now, struggling with the effects of this chapter? Genesis 11, they’re learning a language. Why? So that they can serve the Lord overseas. They’re wrestling with it, and God knew what he was doing. He knew that the spread of the gospel would be difficult too, not just the spread of evil. But God had all that worked out, he knew, and he gave servants like Ron and Mary and others who would give themselves to memorizing new words and learning new grammar so that they could communicate the gospel powerfully.
The Building of the City of God: Shem’s Lineage
God’s Elect Line
On the day of Pentecost, Babel for one day was miraculously reversed when Peter would speak one message and everyone could hear them speaking in their own native language. So, God had the whole thing under control. What was in God’s mind through all this? The building of the holy city. From Verses 10-32, just a lineage, a genealogy. There’s no need to go through it verse by verse, but we see the raising up of that elect line of Shem. He focuses in on our facts education who was the ancestor of Jesus Christ, and we see the spreading of these people and the developing of the plan of God, the city of God.
Noteworthy Elements
Now, as God works out his plans culminating in the birth of Abram, and next week we’re going to talk about the call of Abram who we know as Abraham, we see the culmination of what God was intending to do in this early phase of human history, the calling out of the Jewish people and the beginning of a matrix, a community of people called the Jews into which he would communicate in a special way, first through the prophets, and finally through his Son, Jesus Christ.
Application
Now, what lessons can we learn from this chapter? First of all, the dangers of human pride. I guess I would like to urge you, if you’re doing so, to stop making bricks as some sort of a stairway to heaven, and we do this in a lot of different ways by thinking that we, through being good people, by praying, by coming to church on Sunday, that we somehow are building up a repertoire or a resume that gets us closer and closer to God. Nothing could be further from the truth. Stop making the bricks. Stop thinking that you, through your own righteousness, are getting any closer to heaven whatsoever, you’re not. Humble yourself before the mighty hand of God. Be humbled by this. Be humbled by the fact that God has to come down from the lofty highest heavens to see our puny efforts. Let that humble you. And, also see the sovereign interference of God. Be confident that history is not running like a train off its tracks, running willy-nilly. God knows what he’s doing, he’s ruling over it sovereignly and powerfully.
God scattered the nations, but not willy-nilly, he knew what he was doing. He is going to re-gather them through the ministry of the gospel, through the preaching of the gospel, the advance of the gospel through faithful people like you and me, and through the preaching of the Word. We see the calling out of God’s redeemed line, the elect line of Semites, raising up Abram. And, what was this ultimately to do? Can I suggest it was to build a true stairway to heaven? A true stairway to heaven. Later in Genesis, Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, had a dream. Do you remember the dream? He laid down and, in his dream, he saw a staircase leading all the way to heaven with angels ascending and descending on the staircase. He didn’t know what the staircase was. Well, you have to find out but not until John, Chapter 1, will you find out what the staircase is because Jesus Christ said to Nathaniel in John 1:50, “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that. He then added, ‘I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’”
Jesus is the stairway to heaven. If you just humble yourself under God’s mighty hand, acknowledge your need for a savior, acknowledge that your brick-making and covering it with tar and pitch will never get you to heaven, and that the only way provided is through Jesus Christ, he will save you.
The Gifts of Language and Ingenuity: Blessings Gone Bad
Language: Communication in the Image of God
Please take your Bibles and open to Genesis, Chapter 11. This is our second and last sermon in Genesis. It doesn’t mean that there is not more to study, there is always more to study, but we are going to be moving as we prepare for Christmas into Isaiah, not next week, but the week after. Today, as we look at Genesis, Chapter 11, we come to a story of blessings gone bad. How blessings that God has given to the human race turned against Him, in rebellion against Him, and how God sovereignly worked out His plan and His purpose by interfering in human history. What a message of comfort that is to us who trust in Him. It is a story of the building up of the city of man in rebellion and defiance against God, and yet in the midst of all of that, the building of the city of God through that godly line of Shem, ultimately through Abram down to Jesus Christ. A tale of two cities is before us today.
Listen to the words of Scripture in Genesis, Chapter 11: “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. “They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth. But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that men were building. The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’ So, the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel ̶̶ because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”
Verses 10-26, “This is the account of Shem. Two years after the flood, when Shem was 100 years old, he became the father of Arphaxad. After he became the father of Arphaxad, Shem lived 500 years and had other sons and daughters. When Arphaxad had lived 35 years, he became the father of Shelah. And after he became the father of Shelah, Arphaxad lived 403 years and had other sons and daughters. When Shelah had lived 30 years, he became the father of Eber. And after he became the father of Eber, Shelah lived 403 years and had other sons and daughters. When Eber had lived 34 years, he became the father of Peleg. And after he became the father of Peleg, Eber lived 430 years and had other sons and daughters. When Peleg had lived 30 years, he became the father of Reu. And after he became the father of Reu, Peleg lived 209 years and had other sons and daughters. When Reu had lived 32 years, he became the father of Serug. And after he became the father of Serug, Reu lived 207 years and had other sons and daughters. When Serug had lived 30 years, he became the father of Nahor. And after he became the father of Nahor, Serug lived 200 years and had other sons and daughters. When Nahor had lived 29 years, he became the father of Terah. And after he became the father of Terah, Nahor lived 119 years and had other sons and daughters. After Terah had lived 70 years, he became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran.”
Verse 27-32, “This is the account of Terah. Terah became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. And Haran became the father of Lot. While his father Terah was still alive, Haran died in Ur of the Chaldeans, in the land of his birth. Abram and Nahor both married. The name of Abram’s wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor’s wife was Milcah; she was the daughter of Haran, the father of both Milcah and Iscah. Now Sarai was barren; she had no children. Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Haran, they settled there. Terah lived 205 years, and he died in Haran.”
Now, as we look at the beginning section of this, the Tower of Babel, this may be a common story or familiar story to you, but as I have looked at it this week and looked at this text, I’ve seen that it really is the story of blessings gone bad, blessings which God had given to the human race. I am talking about the blessings of language and of ingenuity. The blessings of language in ingenuity. Now, in my research this week, I found that there are 6,858 languages in the world. I only know one. I have studied eight or nine of them, and I only know one. How is it you can study eight or nine languages and only know one? Just ask me, it is a difficult thing to acquire language. It is especially hard for we as Americans, we don’t really see the need. Do we? But the fact of the matter is, there are almost 7,000 languages in the world, and they are a marvel of God’s creation, a gift of the image of God in humanity. They are a reflection of His desire to communicate. God is a God of communication. He is a God who communicates to us through the Word. And, so intimately as he connected with this, that He was willing that the second person of the Trinity, the Son, be associated with the Word. “Word,” for it says in John 1:1, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” In Verse 14, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.”
God associates himself with communication and, Jesus is to us, truly, the final Word from God, communication to a sinful human race. Now, in all the animal kingdom, there is nothing like human speech. Nothing. As I was looking through this, I found that the only thing that was somewhat close to the kind of communication that we take for granted every day is a certain dance that bees do to identify the location of nectar. A bee finds some nectar and does a certain movement or motion and, as far as we know, the only topic of that communication is the location and quantity of the nectar but human speech is not limited in any way, shape or form. We can talk about anything. We can talk about our passions and our feelings, our plans and desires, we can talk about God, we can talk about the future. It is truly a gift from God and it is one of those many things that separates us from the rest of creation. However, in this story, we see it is a blessing gone bad, where the mouth, the tongue is used to incite evil, “Come let us disobey God. Come let us do this or that.” So, language, is a blessing gone bad. We also see human ingenuity, inventiveness, creativity, could we even say technology, a blessing from God, but gone bad in this story.
Human Ingenuity
Now, I don’t know if you know this, but a 100 years ago, in 1899, the Director of the United States Patent Office petitioned the government to shut down his own office, because he had come to the conclusion that everything that could be invented had already been invented and there was no need any longer for the Patent Office. Can you imagine that? That was in 1899. The 20th century has seen an explosion of human ingenuity and inventiveness, and a few of those inventions have centered on communication. This is really a communication and transportation era these 100 years. Getting people together, moving them in one direction, so that we’re able to associate, we’re able to work together. This is somewhat a reversal of what happened in the Tower of Babel. As I look through the patents of the first 50 years of the 20th century, I gave the guy the benefit of the doubt.
I figured he could have at least seen that. There was no way he could have imagined what would happen with computers, electronics and transistors in the second half of the century, but maybe he could have seen what was coming around the corner. For example, in the year 1900, the photocopy machine was invented.
In 1903, we saw the airplane. In 1907, the electric vacuum cleaner and aren’t you glad for that? The electric vacuum cleaner. An electric washing machine also that same year. In 1911, we had air-conditioning and the automobile self-starter. Do you know what I mean by the automobile self-starter? Perhaps you just take it for granted. You get in your car and you turn the key, but it wasn’t always that way. It used to be you had to turn the crank at the beginning, at the front of the car. Can you imagine doing that on a cold day? It is hard enough to start a car on a cold day. In 1913, the refrigerator was invented and talking motion pictures. I am not sure whether that’s good or not, but they were invented in 1913. In 1923, the first form of television. In 1926, a liquid fuel rocket. In 1930, shortly thereafter, jet propulsion and the jet propulsion engine. In 1938, the automatic clothes dryer. So, there is a big gap between the automatic washing machine and the clothes dryer. They just hung them out to dry all that time but, finally, somebody invented the clothes dryer. In 1942, the nuclear reactor was invented, and then 1943 the artificial kidney machine, and then on into 1953, the heart-lung machine.
There were tremendous advances of technology in the 20th century, and it is accelerating, too. It is going faster and faster. Do you know why? Because people are able to communicate more, they’re able to get together. There’s a technology transfer. It is going to go faster and faster, with what Bill Gates calls the information superhighway. The exchange of information. The United States Patent Office issues 76,000 patents every year and rejects 200,000. So, if you have an idea for an invention, you better have your ducks in a row. It takes an awfully long time to get a patent. It is very difficult to do. Human inventiveness is really one of the major stories of the 20th century, but so is the use of human evil of that inventiveness. It has been an evil century, hasn’t it? As we look back over the last 100 years, there have been terrible tragedies such as World War I, World War II, and other wars besides, as well as the advent of thermonuclear devices and weapons of mass destruction. We have seen the propagation of evil throughout our society and it has been technologically enhanced, hasn’t it? We are able through the media, radio, television, newspapers, the internet, and other communication outlets, to find out very quickly about evil things that other people are doing, and so you get copycat killings or other things. It’s just a pervasive spread of evil through this technology. It is a tragic thing.
God’s Holy Power Interferes for His Holy Purposes
As we think about this pervasiveness, we have to look at this message and see that our God is sovereign over all of it. He is an interfering God. He is not just letting it happen up in heaven. He is going to come down, He is going to affect it, and He’s going to interfere for His holy purposes. Look at verses 1-4, it says, “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.'” Now, the first thing we see here is the power of human cooperation. I think other than the power of God, there may be no force on earth as powerful as human beings working together, and that is power for good or for evil, isn’t it? Every major empire in the world, from the Roman Empires through the Nazis, have shown the power for evil of human cooperation, the power to dominate. When I was in Kenya, I was introduced to a species of ant called the Safari ant. Safari is a Swahili word, which means travel or journey. These ants have no home, they just travel around and are a remarkable and ingenious creation of God. They work together in an amazing way. They are able to cross small rivers by making an ant bridge with their own bodies. By making a cantilever bridge, they are able to get every single ant across through their strength and, somehow, through their knowledge of technology. The power of cooperation. Well, how much more we who are created in the image of God, when we come together and say, “Come, let’s do this,” for good or evil, a tremendous force, and we see the power of human cooperation here. Positively, there is no power on earth as powerful for good as the body of Christ indwelt by the Holy Spirit. We are the ones who work together under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. With our spiritual gifts, we come together as a body and we accomplish God’s work in this world. Tremendous power for good, but also in hearing the story of the Tower of Babel, power for evil, because these people are motivated by their own pride, their own glory. Building something which does not glorify God. The second thing we see here is the pride of human technology. Created in the image of God, we have inventive restless creative minds, we are always thinking, we are always imagining, thinking of new things and that is part of the image of God. That very image of God, which was committed to us at creation has been defaced and twisted through sin. We see evidence of it here.
Steady advance of technology makes new expressions of sin possible. They say, “Hey, we’ve got a new technology here.” If you bake the bricks thoroughly through and dry them out, they don’t crumble as much, they are stronger, and so we can build higher. You see. You have stronger bricks and if you coat them with pitch, they are protected from the elements, and so we now have the technology to build a high tower. So, the advance of technology makes the spread of evil a little bit easier. Human inventiveness immediately leads to human pride. Thirdly, we see here the pollution of human rebellion. Now, what is the plan in the making of this tower? They’re making a city, first and foremost, this is the foundation of Babylon, this plain of Shinar. All the people were together, they had one common language, one common speech. They are able to work together. Remember what I told you last week, the table of nations in Genesis 10, all the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth spread out, but each one had their own common language, their own common culture. So, this is actually backtracking a little bit here in chapter 11, to explain how those languages and cultures came about. What is the motive of these people as they build their city? They want to build a city, and their motive is two-fold, positively and in other words, their intention is to glorify themselves, not positive at all, but that is what they are intending to do.
They want to glorify themselves. In Verse 4, it says, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens.” Why? “So that we may make a name for ourselves.” Now, we’ve seen this before, right before the flood. I don’t know if you remember this, but in Genesis 6:4, in Hebrew, it talks about “men of the name.” Sadly, “men of the name” doesn’t come across in any English translation. It says, “men of great reputation” or “men of renown,” but they were really men who lived for their own glory. This is right before the flood. When you get a whole world of people living for themselves, living for their own glory, using the cooperation, the power of cooperation, of language, of technology to glorify themselves, we have a terrible problem, and that is what led to the flood of Noah. God needed to sweep that evil away, and so we have seen this before. People have a natural tendency to worship themselves, to make a name for themselves and that was their motive. They wanted to glorify themselves, and that was the motive of their city and certainly of their tower. The negative motive was that they didn’t want to be scattered over the surface of the earth ̶̶ “That we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” Well, wasn’t it God’s plan to spread them over the face of the earth? That was His intention.
From the very beginning, God said He commanded Adam and then certainly He re-commanded Noah after Noah stepped off the ark, Genesis 9:1, “Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.'” That was their command and by now, many of you may have memorized that verse in Habakkuk 2:14. Why? “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” The image of God spread all over the globe, intelligent creative beings, able to see His glory, able to see what He has done, spreading over the whole earth. That’s what God wanted and they didn’t want to do it. They said, “We don’t want to be spread. We want to stay right here where we are and have our own civilization, our own community apart from God’s plan.” Now, when did this occur? We don’t really know. There’s nothing in the actual text that tells us when it occurred. Genesis 10:25 may give us a little bit of a hint when it says that, “Because in Peleg’s time the earth was divided.” So, if you could kind of figure out when Peleg lived, perhaps you would have an indication when the Tower of Babel occurred, perhaps around 300 years after the flood, but we’re not really sure.
Human Pride: Reaching for Heaven
The Power of Human Cooperation
What are the theological issues to the building of this city and the building of this tower? First is the sense of the evil city, or we could say the city of man. When human beings apart from the indwelling Holy Spirit come together and bring their creativity and cooperation together, evil results. And so, we get the evil city, the city of man. This really symbolizes the whole human history, doesn’t it? You know, the cooperation, technology, working together apart from God for self-glorification, the building of the city of man. Some think that tower was a ziggurat, a kind of Babylonian tower, like a pyramid, reaching up like that, as a symbol of human pride, self-glorification, and also self-effort. “We want to build a tower that will reach up to heaven, somewhat of a stairway to heaven, where as you build each brick step by step, you can work your way up to heaven.” So, there is real pride in this. I searched the internet to try and find which city had the tallest tower, tallest structure these days. Actually, two cities are claiming it, and I thought that was very interesting. They’re saying, “No, no, it’s not that tower. We have the tallest tower.” Toronto, right? The CN Tower in Toronto.
The Pride of Human Technology
Chicago has its claim with the Sears Tower. I don’t know if you saw in USA Today, about two or three weeks ago, there are plans on the books to reclaim that title from the Petronas Tower in Kuala Lumpur, which apparently is the tallest at 1,850 feet. Chicago wants to be number one so they are going to build the tallest skyscraper. How long will they hold the title? Who knows, maybe until somebody else hears about it and wants to build it. What is this? It is self-glorification. “Our city has the tallest tower.” It has been this way since Genesis 11, to make a name for ourselves. It really is rooted back with the original sin. What was it that motivated Eve? She wanted to be wise like God. It is a form of self-worship. And then, we had those evil tyrant rulers in Genesis 6, heroes of old, men of the name who wanted to make a reputation for themselves but it is mostly like Satan. It is mostly like the devil. What is it that he said to Jesus, “I’ll give you the entire world if you’ll simply bow down and worship me. Just bow down and worship me and I’ll give it all to you.”
The Pollution of Human Rebellion
In Isaiah 14:12 and following, this is said, many interpreters believe this is speaking directly to Satan, “How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! You said in your heart…” Now think about Babylon in this. “You said in your heart, I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of the sacred mountain. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.” They’re acting like their father, the devil. That is exactly what he wanted, self-worship, elevating themselves and forgetting about God. But it says in Isaiah 14:15, “But you are brought down to the grave, to the depths of the pit.”
Products of Human Imagination
The fourth element we see here is the product of human imagination. In Verse 6, God says, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.” God knew what he put in us, he knew what kind of ingenuity or kind of creativity he put in us and that we are able to find out amazing things about the world that he has laid around us, even to the point of researching our very selves, the genetic order and the brain to study things and then looking outwards. He knew what he put in us and so he was saying, “If as one people speaking one language, they have begun to do this, nothing they plan to do will be impossible.” As for human ingenuity, the ability to imagine something, even though it doesn’t exist yet, to imagine it and then bring it about, is very God-like. We are created in the image of God, but it is less than the power of God because everything that God plans, he accomplishes; everything that God sets out to do, he determines to do and he accomplishes.
God’s Sovereign Interference: Restraining Evil
The Lord Descends
Romans 4:17 says that, “God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.” God has that kind of power. It also says in Isaiah 46:11, “What I have said, that will I bring about; what I have planned, that will I do.” That is God. He imagines, He plans, and then He executes the plan. But He also rules over our planning, doesn’t He? Proverbs 19:21 says, “Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” Don’t we see that here? They were making a plan, they were going to raise a tower up to heaven, but God said, “No, it won’t happen,” and it didn’t happen, and God interfered. Our God is a sovereign God who rules over the minutest details of human history for his plans. We could therefore say our God is an interfering God and isn’t it a good thing that He is? Isn’t it a good thing that He doesn’t just sit up in heaven and let it happen, but He interferes? In verses 5-9, you see the interfering. The Lord descends in Verse 5, “The Lord came down to see the city.”
You know, it’s funny how liberals pick up and say, “Oh, this answered monomorphic language, it’s just a myth.” No, it isn’t. This verse is our humiliation. Perhaps, you hadn’t even noticed. God has to come down to see how far they’ve come up, you see? I have got to go all the way down to see the progress you’ve made. He’s humbling us. You don’t realize how far you have to travel, it’s a long, long way to where I am, and you are not going to do it by baking bricks thoroughly and putting pitch on them. God had to come down to see it. You know, Solomon knew this, he said in 1 Kings 8:27, “But will God really dwell on earth? The heavens, even the highest heaven cannot contain you. How much less this temple I have built!” Solomon knew that. Well, let’s think about heaven, even the highest heavens. Say, “Okay, that was ancient technology. You know, we have come a long way now. We have come a long way. We can lift ourselves off the surface of the earth and we can go to the moon.” Have you ever said, “If we can put a man on the moon, we should be able to do such and such?” The pinnacle of human technology. Well, around 1972, some researchers launched Pioneer 10. Pioneer 10 moved through the solar system. It was the first man-made object to exit the solar system. That’s quite an achievement.
So, we are much higher up now than the Tower of Babel, we’ve come a long way, haven’t we? Do you know how long it took Pioneer 10 to leave the solar system? Eleven and a half years. I decided to figure out how long it would take at that rate to reach the nearest star, the nearest star mind you, not the farthest star, the nearest one, Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light-years away. As you do the math, you figured it all out, it’s 80,000 years. It would take 80,000 years at that rate to reach the nearest star. But, you say, “We’ve come a long way since 1972. What if we take the state-of-the-art technology and see how long it would take then?” Well, there is something called a nuclear thermal rocket. That sounds powerful, doesn’t it? A nuclear thermal rocket can get you to Mars in 90 days, that’s pretty good. Ninety days to Mars, seven miles per second it travels. At that rate, it would take seven minutes to cross the United States, Continental U.S. Slowing down would be a terrible pain. I mean, accelerating and the slowing down, you better have your seat belts on, but at seven miles a second, it’s only a seven-minute trip.
Okay? Alright, then at seven miles a second, how long would it take to reach the nearest star, mind you, not the farthest. Only 11,500 years. God is humbling us. He said, “You can’t reach me through your own efforts. Heaven, even the highest heavens can’t contain me.” God was humbling them. He came down to see this puny little tower they were making. Do you know, God frequently uses this exaltation language to speak of himself? Isaiah 6:1 says, “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted…” Why does he use that language So that we know who He is and who we are? We are so vaunting in our pride all the time. We need this lesson. Isaiah 40:22 says, “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people before him are like grasshoppers.” Why does He do that? We need Him to do it. We need to hear this message. We are so prideful. We need to understand just how powerful God is.
What was the last thing Jesus did during his first earthly visit? He gathered his disciples together in the Mount of Olives, gave them some final words, and then he ascended. He ascended before their very eyes and a cloud hid him from their sight. Why did he do that? Is heaven up? Heaven is a spiritual place, but he wants to give us a sense of his exaltation and of our weakness, our lowliness. And, by his grace, God has promised to exalt us with Him if we’ll just humble ourselves, if we’ll just lower ourselves before Him and acknowledge His greatness, His holiness, His majesty, He will exalt us. “Whoever exalts himself will be humbled and whoever humbles himself will be exalted,” said Jesus. “Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand,” 1 Peter 5:6, “that he may lift you up in due time.” He may exalt you, raise you up. He conveys the same consistent message in Genesis 4:6. He said to Cain, “If you do what is right, will you not be exalted?” It says in the Hebrew, “I’ll lift you up if you’ll just humble yourself before me.”
The Lord Assesses
And so, God has to come down to humble these arrogant people. The Lord comes down in verse 6, he assesses what they’re doing. Human cooperation must be thwarted. Human sin must be restrained. Human imagination held in check. If there is one people speaking one language, they have begun to do this, nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. The Hebrew actually says, nothing they imagine will be restrained from them. So, we are really talking here about the restraining of evil, and so God is about the business in human society of restraining evil, he slows it down, he impedes its progress. Why? So that the city of God can get built, it’s going to take a long time. There is an awful lot more said about the city of man in this chapter than the city of God, it’s just a genealogy in reference to the city of God, it takes time. There’s going to be an unfolding here, a history. God had it all planned out. Abram would come and then Isaac and Jacob and the 12 tribes in Egypt, the whole history. And ultimately, Jesus Christ. So, he had to slow down evil. He already promised not to bring another flood on the earth, so he had to slow it.
The Lord Acts
It’s very much like what we Christians are called to do when we are called to be salt in society, we are the salt of the earth. Salt retards corruption, we are supposed to slow it down. That is what God does here. The Lord acts, he speaks within himself, “Come let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand each other.” Some people think this is somewhat of a heavenly counsel, he’s talking to the angels. I think perhaps as an inter-Trinitarian communication, he’s a communicating being within himself, Father can speak to Son, Son can speak to Spirit, Spirit can speak to Father. They have been doing that from before the foundation of the world. Our speech, our ability to communicate is a reflection, a dim reflection of his communication with himself. “Come let us do this,” he says, and God decides to confuse the language. Now, how did he do that? Stop and think. Did he actually get inside our brains? Yeah, that’s right. In one day, you were speaking a different language, you knew what you were trying to say, but your friend didn’t. He’s looking at you saying, “What?” I guess they spoke Hebrew, or maybe he was now speaking Aramaic, or maybe he was speaking Acadian or who knows what language he was speaking, perhaps he didn’t even know what to call his new language. Maybe you got home, hopefully God kept husbands and wives together on the same page, the husband and the wife speaking the same language. Can you imagine how detrimental that would have been? But God had it all worked out, and so there were clans and tribes coming up around that. God would start to scatter and to spread the earth, he would scatter them and spread them over the surface of the earth.
It was not a willy-nilly scattering, God had a place for each nation, for each culture, for each tribe. As Paul told us last week, Acts 17:26, “From one man, he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined the time set for them and the exact places where they should live.” He had a place for each tribe and language, people and nation, and he spread them over the earth. A powerful effect on human history, the confusing of the languages. Even more powerful is the sense of our God as an interfering or a sovereign God. Around the time of the beginning of our country, there was an idea about God called deism, an idea that God just basically created the world and then just let it run. The analogy is frequently of a clockmaker who made a clock and just let it run by itself, that is not biblical. Our God gets involved in history, He gets involved in your life, He gets involved in the events of your life, He is sovereign, and He is involved.
A sparrow doesn’t fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And so it is, He interferes, He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. As the King of kings, He comes in there with the movers and the shakers, and He moves and shakes them. He is the mover and the shaker here. He is the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Proverbs 21:1 says, “The king’s heart is in the hand of the Lord, he directs it like a watercourse wherever he pleases.” That’s God. He’s sovereign over that. And so, He directs the minds, even gets involved in the way that they think and the way they speak.
Now, in so doing, God made the spread of the gospel more difficult, didn’t He? Do you remember Ron and Mary Halbrooks? They were in our midst just a short time ago. Do you know what they’re doing now, struggling with the effects of this chapter? Genesis 11, they’re learning a language. Why? So that they can serve the Lord overseas. They’re wrestling with it, and God knew what he was doing. He knew that the spread of the gospel would be difficult too, not just the spread of evil. But God had all that worked out, he knew, and he gave servants like Ron and Mary and others who would give themselves to memorizing new words and learning new grammar so that they could communicate the gospel powerfully.
The Building of the City of God: Shem’s Lineage
God’s Elect Line
On the day of Pentecost, Babel for one day was miraculously reversed when Peter would speak one message and everyone could hear them speaking in their own native language. So, God had the whole thing under control. What was in God’s mind through all this? The building of the holy city. From Verses 10-32, just a lineage, a genealogy. There’s no need to go through it verse by verse, but we see the raising up of that elect line of Shem. He focuses in on our facts education who was the ancestor of Jesus Christ, and we see the spreading of these people and the developing of the plan of God, the city of God.
Noteworthy Elements
Now, as God works out his plans culminating in the birth of Abram, and next week we’re going to talk about the call of Abram who we know as Abraham, we see the culmination of what God was intending to do in this early phase of human history, the calling out of the Jewish people and the beginning of a matrix, a community of people called the Jews into which he would communicate in a special way, first through the prophets, and finally through his Son, Jesus Christ.
Application
Now, what lessons can we learn from this chapter? First of all, the dangers of human pride. I guess I would like to urge you, if you’re doing so, to stop making bricks as some sort of a stairway to heaven, and we do this in a lot of different ways by thinking that we, through being good people, by praying, by coming to church on Sunday, that we somehow are building up a repertoire or a resume that gets us closer and closer to God. Nothing could be further from the truth. Stop making the bricks. Stop thinking that you, through your own righteousness, are getting any closer to heaven whatsoever, you’re not. Humble yourself before the mighty hand of God. Be humbled by this. Be humbled by the fact that God has to come down from the lofty highest heavens to see our puny efforts. Let that humble you. And, also see the sovereign interference of God. Be confident that history is not running like a train off its tracks, running willy-nilly. God knows what he’s doing, he’s ruling over it sovereignly and powerfully.
God scattered the nations, but not willy-nilly, he knew what he was doing. He is going to re-gather them through the ministry of the gospel, through the preaching of the gospel, the advance of the gospel through faithful people like you and me, and through the preaching of the Word. We see the calling out of God’s redeemed line, the elect line of Semites, raising up Abram. And, what was this ultimately to do? Can I suggest it was to build a true stairway to heaven? A true stairway to heaven. Later in Genesis, Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, had a dream. Do you remember the dream? He laid down and, in his dream, he saw a staircase leading all the way to heaven with angels ascending and descending on the staircase. He didn’t know what the staircase was. Well, you have to find out but not until John, Chapter 1, will you find out what the staircase is because Jesus Christ said to Nathaniel in John 1:50, “You believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree. You shall see greater things than that. He then added, ‘I tell you the truth, you shall see heaven open and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.’”
Jesus is the stairway to heaven. If you just humble yourself under God’s mighty hand, acknowledge your need for a savior, acknowledge that your brick-making and covering it with tar and pitch will never get you to heaven, and that the only way provided is through Jesus Christ, he will save you.
