What's Your Tower of Babel?

Introduction
Who do you serve? Seriously think about it, what do you think about when you get up in the morning? Is it how to make a quick buck, so you can feel financially secure, or to get dressed up in order to impress others? Do you ever wake up and dwell on how awesome God is, how majestic, beautiful, and holy He is? Or is He primarily a means to an end, a kind of wish fulfiller that is at our beck and call? What kind of God do you serve, or does He simply serve you? Many of us grew up hearing the story of the Tower of Babel. Of how God came down and scattered humanity by confusing their once unified language. But what is the lesson within this historical narrative? What can we glean from this short passage?

Original Meaning
Before extracting what the passage means to us today, let me first unpack some of the historical-cultural meaning to shed some light on what was going on here. This episode in history occurred after the cataclysmic flood that destroyed every living thing on earth except of course for Noah, his three sons, their wives, and the animals that God had ordered him to rescue. Humanity has been repopulating the earth as God gave us his blessing, telling Adam and Eve to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). It was a second chance to do the right thing. The passage first tells us that, “the whole earth had one language and the same words” (11:1). This would make sense, since there was most likely not that many people. It then says, “…they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there” (v. 2). Many scholars believe Shinar to be in the area of Sumer in southern Mesopotamia. Those of you that are service members and have deployed to Iraq most likely drove and walked through this very area. Maybe you were even lucky like me and were able to tour the ancient city of Babylon, though this came much later in history. Anyway, here the ancient peoples settled and decided to build a city and tower using bricks and bitumen. Brick making was needed because stone was not available. If you’ve been, you know how desolate and barren the area is, so the need to make building materials was great.
Now concerning the tower, what could this have looked like? Let me give you a hint, you (again, you deployed service members) may have seen or toured one in Iraq, in the city of Ur near Nasiriya, where Tallil Airbase resided. Yes, the ziggurat was most likely the type of tower that this passage refers to. How do we know this? As my seminary textbook states, “Throughout Mesopotamian literature, almost every occurrence of the expression describing a building “with its head in the heavens” refers to a temple with a ziggurat.”  These ziggurats were built not as dwellings or temples, since the inside was simply filled with dirt. No, they were built as staircases for the gods to descend upon; they were a stairway to heaven. “…it was a visual representation of that which was believed to be used by the gods to travel from one realm to another.”

Ziggurat at Ur

Why was this bad? It was bad because we know from Mesopotamian religion that they saw gods as needy, often indolent, and unpredictable figureheads. These people in this passage then, were beginning to attach human characteristics to the sovereign God, turning Him into a mere puppet. It is the wicked and unholy beliefs that began to stew within the hearts and minds of the people that caused God to, as the passage states, “confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech” (v. 11:7).

Bridging Contexts
So here we have the steady increase of corruption of the heart and mind after God had already destroyed humanity in the Flood. What short memories people have. Anyway, man is bent on doing things his own way despite God’s offer of blessing. Not only that, they are distorting who God is, progressively moving further and further from the truth, from their lifeline, from a life abundant. Again my textbook states, “The heart of paganism is not found in the perversity of rituals but in degradation of deity.”  God was being stripped of His majesty in the hearts and minds of his people. You can also see and sense a move toward self-sufficiency and self-aggrandizement. In the passage, “Let us,” is stated three times. “…let us make bricks…let us build ourselves a city… let us make a name for ourselves” (v. 11:3-4). God here is being pushed aside, so that man can make himself great and mighty in the eyes of others. Will not God provide greatness to His people, as we are His image-bearers?

Contemporary Significance
Today is no different. The American dream is about picking ourselves up by our bootstraps, as the saying goes, and making a name and living for our families and ourselves. Let me be clear though, it’s not bad to want to care for our family, in fact, the Bible commands it. Paul tells Timothy in 1 Timothy 5:8 that, “…if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” The problem occurs when we refuse to look to the almighty and sovereign God for guidance and counsel and instead go our own selfish and me-centered way. There is also the problem of excess. “…a tower with its top in the heavens” (Genesis 11:4), is a, “Hey look at us, look what we did,” type project. In his book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith form the American Dream, David Platt boldly said that,
We have in many areas blindly and unknowingly embraced values and ideas that are common in our culture but are antithetical to the gospel he [Jesus] taught. Here we stand amid an American dream dominated by self-advancement, self-esteem, and self-sufficiency, by individualism, materialism, and universalism.

Where are we putting our faith, our obedience, and where do we derive our greatest joy? Think about it.
Looking further, the people in this passage from Genesis proclaim, “let us make a name for ourselves” (Genesis 11:4). Identity does not come from what we do for a living, what we build, produce, make, or anything of that nature. No, today our identity resides in Christ. As the apostle Paul says, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus” (Ephesians 2:10). For the Hebrews, they were set aside by God and their entire world revolved around Him. It is critical to understand where our true identity comes from. It is not the rank we wear on our chests, nor the position we hold at our jobs, it is in Christ alone!
Bringing this discussion full circle, I ask again the question I posed from the start, who do you serve, that is, who is God in your life? As I said earlier, the people in the Genesis account had brought God down to their level. Do we not do the same when we bargain with God, telling him, “If you do this for me, get me that new job, bless me with just a little more money, make this relationship work, etc.” Walton, in the NIV Commentary calls it the “Babel syndrome.” He says,
When we think we can manipulate God by praying in Jesus’ name to achieve selfish purposes, our paganism is showing. When we ‘claim’ promises as a means of making God do what we want him to do, our paganism is showing. When we come to think we are indispensable because of the money we donate, the talents we have, the ministries we engage in, or the worship we offer, our paganism is showing.

Friends, the author of Genesis, Moses, stood face-to-face with the living God, and you know what God told him when asked his name? He said, “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). He is self-existent, in need of nothing, God of the universe, transcendent from it; yet he is immanent and loves us. He cares for us as he holds time and this world together by his Word. So as we go out today, put on humility, and remember who you are in relation to God.


Bibliography
Platt, David. Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream. Colorado Springs, CO: Multnomah Books, 2010.

Walton, John. Genesis: from Biblical Text...to Contemporary Life. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001.