MacDonald, John: Genesis-10 ~ Babble From Babel

I was gonna start with a joke, and I wasn't too sure. No, I won't do that. That's... You can never be too sure how people will take it, you know? Some of you just don't have a good sense of humor. Let's start by reading the portion that we're going to be dealing with predominantly this morning, the Tower of Babel in chapter eleven of Genesis. I'd like to do two things. I'd like to deal with this portion, uh, but I'd also like to close with just sort of wrapping together the twelve— the eleven chapters that we've dealt with, just to see what we might have learned, hopefully learned. But starting in chapter eleven, verse one: Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they moved, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They used brick instead of a 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 have 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 the men were building. The Lord said, if as one people speaking the same language they had 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 or 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. If we were to continue reading, we would see, starting in verse ten that we have this account, this toledoth in Hebrew. This, this is one of the, um, key literary markers throughout. Every time you see the account of somebody, the toledoth, it's the beginning of a new book or section of Genesis. And it starts with Shem, and it moves down to Terah in verse twenty six. He became the father of Abram, Nahor, and Haran. Then we see another toledoth, or another account in verse twenty seven. This is the account of Terah, the, the uh, Toledoth of Terah. And we see that we are here introduced to the next key figure of Genesis, Abram, who's later referred to as Abraham. But enough on him for the moment. The Tower of Babel. Now, one of the things I trust we have seen that is very practical for the way we think is the three W's. And, uh, this will be the last time in this series, so the last time in a while you'll see this, and I think some of you may be thankful you won't have to see this again, but I want to embed it in our hearts and our minds, that this really is a principle that is governing in our lives. It flows downstream, it goes downhill. What we worship defines who we are. We are what we worship. So our conception of God is really what defines who we are as individuals and as cultures. That worship shapes our worldview, and by worldview I mean how we think and how we make decisions, our mind grid, how we see the world. And that in turn governs how we behave. That's the third W, our ways, and it's going downhill. In other words, how we conceive of God shapes worldview, which in turn governs behavior. It's not the other way around. Now, with respect to this portion, however, we see the same principle used in the Tower of Babel account, but it's as if, uh, you were upstairs in a large house, and, um, you left a trail of string all the way down the stairs to the second floor, and then to the first floor, and out to the doorway, and then you could trace, you could follow the string back up the stairs to find out where you start. And basically, we follow the string backwards to find out what they indeed worshipped here. We see in verse one again, the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. And again, if we started with structure, we would see that the end verses of that particular account, that they were, uh, the whole world had one language and a common speech, but in verse nine, we see that that speech was confused, and they were scattered over the whole face of the earth. You'll see from verses one to four, the focus is on what humans are doing. From verse five to nine, the focus is on what God does in response. Let's see what happens here. Verse three, we have the word spoken by humans, come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. I suppose we could see the making of bricks as something like technology. Instead of using the stones that were available in nature, what they did was they conceived of a man-made stone. In this case, if we follow Nebuchadnezzar's measurement, it was a stone or a brick which was thirteen and a quarter inches by thirteen and a quarter inches and about three and a quarter inches deep, and it was kiln. It was, it was baked so that it was hard like a rock, and often, apparently, they sent- spend a whole year making the bricks. And interesting, the people to whom Genesis was written, the Israelites under the Egyptian slavery, they well knew what it was to make bricks, and they wouldn't have liked it. So we see here that technology is used to fabricate a better stone, something that was more, uh, uniform so they could build what they wanted to build. We see that, uh, this technology was then governed by a particular worldview. Why were they making these bricks? In verse four, following the string up to worldview, come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower that reaches to heaven. The reason why they wanted to use this technology was to make a city and a tower that reached into heaven. And it's most likely that this tower was what they call a ziggurat, which in the ancient Near Eastern language of Akkadian meant to build high. No? Yes. This is an example of a real ziggurat. In fact, this is the remains of, uh, the ones that, that the one is found in Ur, where Abraham came from. It's an amazing, and, and it's, it's not near as high as it used to be. But it's, when they say they wanted to have a tower which was built into heaven, it's not like a Jack and the Beanstalk story, where somehow they climbed all the way up into space and into God's throne room. The idea was to have a high platform with stairs leading up, and it was there that they would have a temple on the top. And it was there that on this man-made platform between earth and heaven, that on their human terms, they were able to have access to gods. And of course, gods was, they, their gods were invited to come down to them. In other words, this large structure reflected a worldview, a mindset, a way of viewing the world, a way of thinking, which presumed that by building this tower on their own terms, they could have access to God. This ziggurat. Nebuchadnezzar built one as well, and just to give you a sense of the dimensions of this place, uh, this is a reconstruction. You'll see that it has seven layers almost like a wedding cake, but at the very top was a temple. And um, this, uh, the dimensions around the base were approximately three hundred feet by three hundred feet, so one hundred yards at the base going each way, and a hundred yards tall. Now, what they would do is they'd have a row of these bricks around as a wall, apparently, because they they uncovered some of this. And, uh, these bricks, as I said, were thirteen and a quarter by thirteen and a quarter and three and a quarter inches deep. And they would make a wall, and then they would pack the empty place in the middle with clay. But just to give you a sense of how much work was involved here, the first three and a third feet, would be about my waist. The circumference of that required over a million of these bricks, just to give you a size that's involved here, the amount of work and technology that went into building this tower. As we, uh, trace this technology of the making of bricks to the application and the worldview, what they were going to do with it was to build this tower so they could, on their terms, have access to God. We see that when we come to the next part, the reason is given, and this introduces us to what they were really worshiping. They said, come, let us build ourselves a city with a tower that reaches to heaven. Why? So that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth. Now, God had commanded them, given a mandate to fill the earth, to scatter over the face of the earth. So the refusal to scatter was really a defiance of God's command. They were being disobedient. We'll leave that for the moment. But let's just focus on this idea of wanting to make a name for themselves. What's in a name? If you go to the beginning of Genesis, we'll see, and I'll just go over this quickly, that in the, in the account of the he- the um creation, uh, God saw, for example, on the first day the light, it was good, and he separated the light from the darkness, and he called or he named the light day, and he called or he named the night, the darkness night. We see that the next day he called or named the expanse sky. The next day he called or he named the dry ground land, and the waters he named or called seas. And the whole concept of here, of God naming these parts of creation, is that it demonstrated he had dominion over them. He was the master. In this culture, the culture of the Old Testament, when you named something, you had dominion over it. So later God creates the humans, and he gives to the man, he gives him the dominion over the animals, for example. And then we see Adam naming the animals, demonstrating he had dominion over the animals. In two Kings twenty three thirty four, a long way into the future, we have another example of this. When we have the king of Israel, Eliakim, is conquered by the Pharaoh of Egypt, Necho. And the first thing it says that Necho did was Eliakim, the son of Josiah, king in the palace of Josiah, his father, he changed his name to Jehoiakim. And the fact that Pharaoh Necho renamed the king of Israel demonstrated he had dominion over the king of Israel, and therefore over the nation of Israel. Now, taking that principle and applying it to what we have here in Genesis chapter eleven, they wanted to make a name for themselves. Literally, they were naming themselves. And what is that saying? That by naming themselves, they were saying, we have dominion over ourselves, and by implication, God does not have dominion over us. It was an act of self-will that said, we are the masters of our destiny. Look at the tower that we're building as a demonstration of our victory. We have dominion over ourselves. God doesn't. How like humanity today? They, on the basis of their technology, they used their technology to accomplish their worldview, which reflected the fact that they themselves were sitting on the throne of their own lives. They they were in control of themselves. That was their view of God. They were the ones in control. I, um, just was looking here, and the, the parallel we have in our own, our own culture today is that in many ways we use technology that way. Now, there are some that says technology is evil. I mean, you can see some people like the Amish, for example, they would get away from all kinds of technology. They don't have washing machines, apparently. I, I think that technology has provided us with some wonderful blessings. One of them is a washing machine. If you ever had to wash your clothes by hand, as some people in other countries do, it's a very time consuming, labor intensive job. But now we just put a little bit of soap in with these clothes, as I'm told, and then you push a button, and the clothes get all washed by themselves. And the marvelous thing, they get folded and put away in my drawers as well. I don't know how that happens, but marvelous blessings of technology. When I started in the practice of law, there were some older secretaries there who had been practice- had been involved in, uh, in in the legal, the office legal, uh, practices for for, uh, well, centuries, they, uh, decades anyway. Ever figure out how they made numerous documents of court, court papers prior to the photocopier and the word processor? I I asked this question because it just boggled my mind how they would have done it. They would have made four or five carbon copies, they called them. You put a piece of carbon paper between each piece of paper, and you put this thick sheaf into a, some of them was even before electric typewriters, and then they would push these buttons, and if you make a mistake at the last line, you rip all these pages, you start all over again. The marvels of technology, even in office administration now, we can go through and do these documents. You want to change a little phrase, you change the phrase, you print it off, and they all come out word perfect, you hope. Medical science, look at George Roberts. Open heart surgery is a routine operation. Putting a pacemaker in a person's heart, routine operation. Hip replacements, routine. The marvels and blessings of the technology we have today. A trip that would have taken months a century and a half ago can now be safely accomplished in a few hours. The marvels of technology. So I don't see technology as inherently evil. It's like a sharp knife. It depends who holds the knife. If you put the sharp knife in the hands of a skilled surgeon, it's a blessing. If you put a sharp knife in the hands of an evil person, it's destructive, and you can see that with the technology of print. It was used to make Bibles, and it's used to make pornography. There's nothing per se wrong with the technology, but it's the heart of those who use the technology, I would argue. And so we see these men, there's nothing wrong with bricks, but it's how they use the bricks. And so there are many dangers to technology, and these dangers, I think, give us a sense of well-being and the sense of mastery over our environment. I, you, a week ago yesterday, um, there was a ship called the Norwegian Dawn traveling from Bahamas to New York. It was hit by a rogue wave. There it is right there. Ninety-two thousand tons of displacement. A three-year-old ship. It was hit by a rogue wave seventy feet high. Smashed some windows, flooded sixty-two cabins, four people were injured. Now, just to show you how the sense that technology has mastered the universe, how that thought is embedded in our heads, one of the passengers, a Robert Clark, is quoted as saying that he was trying not to be angry about the cruise. And if I understand his statement correctly, he's saying, why would a wave hit our cruise ship? In the sense that you can put down a thousand dollars for your trip on the Atlantic Ocean and somehow magically expect the Atlantic Ocean not to act like an ocean. Embedded in our minds is the idea that technology has given us the mastery, has made us the masters of nature. It's expanded our limits phenomenally, and we need limits. But when those limits are expanded and expanded and expanded, we find as a result we don't need God as often as we used to. David O. Berger writes, with respect to technology and its potential threats, says, it replaces our faith in and need for God with a never-ending stream of goods, cures, conveniences, and entertaining diversions. So, in this case, technology in the hands of the wrong person results in a sense that they have godlike characteristics. They sit on the throne. They no longer need the God of the universe. When we come to verse nine, uh, verses five to nine rather, we see God's response. The Lord came down to see the city in the tower. Now, this doesn't mean that God didn't know what was happening, and he had to somehow physically transport himself down and take a look at this p- project. But it's almost a parody that, that, that the Lord is coming down to look at this wonderful, great, magnificent, uh, project of humanity, and it's as if when God comes down, he goes, look at the work of these pygmies. Really, when you think of it, it might be big and great in our eyes, but it's nothing compared to God's projects. He saw what they were building, and 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. In other words, this would have set a new precedent. They would have set the limit way out there, and if they were successful in this project and setting this limit away out there, nothing would be impossible to them. Their unbridled ambition would get away with them, and they could think they could do anything they wanted to, and they didn't need God ever at all. And we're a bit like that ourselves as a culture. We have technological advances that place the limits away out there to the extent that in our unbridled ambition, we don't think we need God at all. We need limits. Now, God, some people call this the judgment of Babel. I'm not sure it is a judgment, totally. Yes, he judged, and he took the languages, and he, he changed them all so that we couldn't understand each other. When we come to, um, I'm almost tempted to tell that joke again, but I'm restraining. I hope you appreciate that. Um, come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. The sense that God did judge them, but the sense that God was imposing limits in their culture once again, limits that they needed. The Apostle Paul understood this very well. He was a student of the Old Testament scriptures and would have known this portion. He was in the city of Athens, um, around two thousand years ago, proclaiming the gospel of Christ to Greek philosophers. And in there, he doesn't quote scripture, but he quotes, he relies upon the principles of scripture. And in Acts seventeen, where I'm going to read two verses, in the midst of talking to these people, he says in verse twenty six, from one man, Adam, he made every nation of men that they should inhabit the whole earth. Genesis ten, we just read that last week. And he determined the time set for them and the exact places where they should live. I always puzzled over that because the way it was translated led me to believe that God had determined the history, world history, and he had determined national boundaries. And he put Leslie Curry in India, and he put Patricia in Korea, and he put the Sings in Fiji, and that point in history and that national location on the face of the earth, God determined that. Now it may mean that, and so a lot of commentaries have that, but I would suggest to you something else here. That God has determined the limits that we as humans have by way of lifetime, time limits. Moses in Psalm ninety talks about the length of our days being seventy years, if by reason of strength, eighty years. Limits of time are imposed upon how long we live here on Earth. And when it talks about where they should inhabit the whole Earth, the sense here actually is the idea where they could spiritually or psychologically, it's more the circumstances of our life. So here we're talking about God having put limits on our life with respect to time and circumstances. That's what I would suggest we're getting out of this verse here. Why did he do this? Why did he set limits on us with respect to time and circumstances? It says in the very next verse, God did this so that humans would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. The reason God imposes limits of time and circumstance in our life is so that we run into those limits and we're caused to seek for God. Because the moment you reach a limit, you realize you're out of your depth. You get sick and you're unable to cure yourself. You begin to cry out for God. You are financially wiped out, and you've reached that limit. You began to see that there are more important things in life than trying to get a million dollars. Your marriage falls apart, and there's a crisis. You begin to realize that you're not the man or the woman that you thought you were. You run into limits, and you're caused to realize your mortality, your frailty, your limited li- your limitedness, and from that hitting the limit, you are caused to cry out for something, someone who's beyond the limit. My father was the youngest of ten children. When he was two years of age, his father died, nineteen ten. So he was the youngest of ten children and basically grew up on his own. When, uh, his father died, his mother went to become a midwife and left for four years and immigrated to Canada. He was sent up to the islands in northern Scotland to be raised by relatives. He grew up on his own. He became very self-sufficient, very independent, angry at God. In nineteen sixteen, in the midst of the First World War, he was put on a ship and brought to Canada. He can remember a German U-boat chasing the freighter and the freighter outrunning it, and he thought it was a great adventure. No limits. He was victorious again. He became a very self-sufficient man. Everything that he had to do, whether it's mechanics or carpentry, athletics, educational, he accomplished on his own, and nobody helped him, and he was very proud of that. He was his own master. He went into the army in nineteen thirty nine, the Second World War, and joined a regiment, the same regiment Farley Mowat was in, the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment. I understand that when they came back from the Second World War in nineteen forty five, there was only four of the original six hundred and twenty five men still on parade. They were devast- they they were terrible, uh, uh, death and injury that occurred to that particular regiment. He survived. Again, no limits. In nineteen ninety three, I went to visit him in California. He was dying. The limit that we all have to meet was facing him, and he had, up to that point, no time for God. He was waiting for me to come. The first day we talked, and we played a bit of crib, we talked some more and ate the meal, and I asked him if I could read some scripture with him. Now, up to this point in our relationship, that was absolutely forbidden, but he agreed to it. Where would you start reading if you were in that circumstance? I had no idea how long I had. So together we read John chapter one about the God who became a human. And the next day, he was bedridden. And we would spend hours together as he would quote poetry. And at one point in that day, I said, Dad, can I read to you John chapter two?" And we read John chapter two, And we chatted about it. He was a little more open because the limit of life was becoming very obvious to him. The next day he was still alive, but weaker. Dad, can we read John chapter three together? And I was able to read to this man who was being brought right up to the limit of life about the gospel of Jesus Christ, when a religious man named Nicodemus came to Jesus by night and said, what must I do to be saved? And Jesus was able to talk to him about a spiritual rebirth that's necessary, the power of the Spirit. The next day, John chapter four. The last chapter I was able to read to him was John chapter five, but it's got some glorious verses in it. John five and verse twenty four was one of the last verses that I was able to read to him. In the New International Version, it says, I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned. He has crossed from death to life. What wonderful words. He died. Now, I don't have any clear assurance that he came to faith in Jesus Christ, but I definitely have a hope that a gracious God who sent his son and brought this man up to the very limits of the end of his life, made him open finally in the last days of his life to listen to the good news of Jesus Christ. It was the limits of his life that brought him to the place where he was willing to listen to God. We need limits in our life, and if technology is the thing that expands and expands the limits so we think we don't need God, we have to beware. We need limits, and God here in the, uh, Tower of Babel imposes limits with respect to language. And we have limits with respect to life expectancy. We have limits with respect to human strength, human intellect, and all of these things. We need limits so that we can find God through Jesus Christ. Let me just take a few moments to just look at what we might have learned from the issues of, uh, Genesis chapters one through to eleven. in closing. Number one, we realize that this was most likely written. It was n- we know it was written by Moses, but most likely written to the Israelites that he led through the wilderness, out of Egypt and into the wilderness. So that's the context of what it was written. And Moses is writing their history, going right back to the very beginning. And we see that instead of just a hodgepodge of interesting stories, that this particular book is a well-crafted historical narrative record designed to communicate truth. It's well-crafted. And there is the outline we began with the first day on, uh, and this is by Bruce Waltke, just a summary of it, but you'll see from verses, um, chapter one down to the introduction of Noah in chapter six, we have it broken up into these segments, A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And as we saw in the flood story in chapter six, we have A with that little dash there, A prime, B prime, C prime, D prime, E prime, F prime, G prime, and it's a repeat of the same story, different circumstances, different people, but basically the same stories, same ideas that God creates. God gives a new creation. Humans turn away from God. Humans turn away from God again. And we see that it's a well-crafted story, but I'm not going to take any more, uh, moments on that right now, but just this one lesson that we would have got from that is that this repeating of the story and humans ending up basically exactly in the same place, in rebellion and defiance of God, just before the flood, in rebellion and defiance of God at the Tower of Babel, same thing. That idea brings us to the conclusion, it's not about putting us in a new location. It's not about putting us in new circumstances. It's not about giving us a new start and a new lease in life, turning over the leaf. But it's about us individually becoming a new creation, not being put in a new creation, but becoming the new creation, letting God change you by his spirit through the Lord Jesus Christ. Then we see some of the basics that would have been covered for these Israelites. Same kind of basics we ask in our life. Where did all this come from? And it starts with in the beginning, God. You know, I've, I've had people, you know, they, they, I've read books on the philosophical arguments, ontological arguments, all these other cosmological arguments on the existence of God, through logic, proving that God exists. You ever wonder why Genesis one doesn't start with a philosophical argument on the existence of God? It's because it was written to these Israelites, and they didn't need any arguments that God exist. They experienced him every day. They were slaves in Egypt. It was Yahweh that delivered them. They were trapped by the Red Sea. Yahweh opened it. They were hungry in the desert. Yahweh gave them food. They experienced God, so they didn't need any argument. I mean, can you imagine me getting up in the morning and going through an ontological argument on the existence of my wife Sharon? What a bunch of nonsense. I just roll over and say, good morning, dear, and give her a kiss. I experience the woman. I don't need an argument that she exists. And if you experience God, as the Israelites did, as a Christian does, you don't need a philosophical argument. You enjoy the relationship. Anyway, where did all this come from is answered by in the beginning God, and we see him creating this wonderful universe. Another question, who is God? We realize he's a powerful, wise creator. He's the voice in the garden that communicates with Adam and Eve. It's the heart rending, the pa- the pathos that was in that question, where art thou? Where are you? When the relationship was broken. It's a God who is righteous and yet continually strives to reconnect humans to himself. He doesn't give up quickly on rebellious humanity, but he does ultimately judge. The question of who am I, again, is in relationship to God. I am image of God. And it's because that each human being is in image of God, we are wired for God. In other words, our circuits, if I can put it as bluntly as technologically as that, are pre-designed for relationship with God. And if those circuits don't accomplish that, then there's something wrong with the machinery, if I can put it in those terms. Pascal puts it this way. He says, within the heart of every human being is a God-shaped vacuum. You are designed for God. Saint Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo in the three hundreds, he says, you have created us for yourself, and our heart is not quiet until it rests in you. You are designed for God. You are image of God, and until you come into relationship with God, you're an empty shell of what you're intended to be. And that's what the Israelites needed to hear, that's what we need to hear. What went wrong? That illicit reach of unbelief in the garden, when in rebellion, in disobedience to God, we turned our back on God and went our own independent way. Sin. And as a result, we think we're free, but we've never been more in slavery. How can I know God? We saw last week that refrain, constantly surprised by the grace of God. We talked about the limits, and as we come into contact with those limits, the need to know God and his forgiveness. What will it take to make you aware of this God? What will it take you to be aware of the limits that are inherent in you as a human being? So that you would seek for God, that you will grope after him, even as a blind person gropes, that you would find him. And it's not so very difficult because he's come, he's become a human being. His name is called Jesus. He's died. He's resurrected, and he invites you to come to be one of his. We read in Genesis, in the beginning, God, but really in the final analysis, it's also in the end, God. So as we've gone through this study on Genesis, I hope that some of these basic questions to life would have been answered, caused you to begin to seek and to know him through the Lord Jesus Christ. Let's close in prayer. Father, we, um, come to the end of this study on Genesis, and it's so rich. It's amazing some people can look at this and think that it has no application for us today. But Father, we know that all scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for teaching, for reproof and correction, and for equipping us to live life as it ought to be. So, Father, we ask that you would, um, stir our hearts by your spirit, and take your word and use it to transform our lives into something beautiful, into something that gives you pleasure, and something that would bless others. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.