Sunday, February 23, 2014

Building up to God: A Sermon on the Tower of Babel

Building up to God


Genesis 11: 1 – 9.


Introduction

Our Scripture this morning is one of those familiar Old Testament stories that many of us remember from children’s Sunday School or from a childhood Bible “picture book.”  It is the story of the Tower of Babel.
One of the things that separates the story of the Tower of Babel from other biblical stories we learned as children is the fact that we don’t often hear “grown up preachers” preaching sermons about this story.  (Of course, I prefer you to keep your opinions to yourselves about whether or not we have a “grown up preacher.”)
We hear sermons about David and Goliath; Jonah in the belly of the whale; and even Noah’s Ark; but we don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the Tower of Babel.  And when was the last time you heard a sermon on Sunday morning about this biblical story?
I think there are some important lessons we can learn from this story…


Genesis 11: 1 – 9…

What’s the big deal about building a tower?  Why would God get so concerned about what the people were building?  If building towers is so bad, then cities like Houston, Dallas and New York City must be in big trouble with God. 
Preparing for this sermon led me to do a quick Internet search on the world’s tallest building.  When I was a child, the tallest building in the world was the Sears Tower in Chicago.  Today it is known as the Willis Tower.  It has 108 floors and stands 1,450 feet tall.
The world has come a long way since I was a child.  The world’s tallest building today is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.  It has 163 floors and tops out at 2,717 feet tall!
I wonder how the Tower of Babel stacks up to the world’s tallest building today…
More than likely, the biblical story refers to a Babylonian ziggurat.  It was a kind of pyramid with seven “floors.”  The bottom floor was the widest.  The floors were built like stair steps leading up to a temple on the top floor.
Ancient people often worshipped their gods on the tops of mountains.  They thought they could get closer to the gods by getting higher off the ground.  When people lived in low lands, they built their own mountains with a temple on the top.  Again, they hoped they could get closer to their gods by climbing higher above sea level.
This biblical story functions on several different levels.  One of the basic meanings of this story was to explain why there are so many different languages in the world.  You can imagine a child asking her father why people from different lands spoke different languages.  The father could tell the story of the Tower of Babel.  And, everyone is satisfied.  (The child gets her answer, and the father gets to tell a story.)
Another basic meaning stems from God’s actions at the end of the story.  In verse 8, we read that God “scattered” the people.  God confused their languages and scattered the people all over the earth.  This is the fulfillment of God’s command to Adam and Eve in the Garden as well as God’s command to Noah after the flood.  God commanded that the humans should “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.”  In Genesis 11, we see that the humans had only upheld two-thirds of God’s command.  They were fruitful and multiplied.  But they had not filled the earth.  The Tower of Babel explains how God achieved his purpose to fill the earth with people.  God scattered them across the face of the earth.
But there is another way to read this that goes beyond the basic ideas of languages and filling the earth…


Genesis 11: 2…  2 As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

This sounds like a very innocent verse.  It almost sounds like a geography lesson to help us locate the Valley of Shinar.  But, there is a very important spiritual lesson in this verse.  In the Book of Genesis, east was a very important direction. 
When Adam and Eve sinned against God, they were kicked out of the Garden of Eden.  Do you remember where they moved?  They moved east of Eden. 
When Abraham and Lot grew too large to live comfortably in the land they had to separate.  Abraham gave Lot the first choice of where he wanted to live.  Do you remember where Lot moved?  He moved to the east to Sodom and Gomorrah.  (And you know what Sodom and Gomorrah are remembered for.)
In the Book of Genesis, when people move to the east, they are moving away from God.  With this in mind, I think we can read something about the spiritual condition of the people as they settled in the Valley of Shinar.  They were moving away from God.
This is not an innocent story about people who simply wanted to build a city with a tower in it.  They were moving away from God and their efforts to build a city and a tower were signs that they didn’t want to live according to God’s will and purpose.  They wanted to live their own lives and to be free from God.


Genesis 11: 3…  3 They said to each other, "Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly." They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 

Notice how this verse contains a quote and an explanation.
One way to look at this is that the narrator is helping his audience understand what is going on.  The people who would have read this originally would not be familiar with the concept of building with bricks.  They didn’t build with bricks, because they didn’t need bricks.  They lived in a region of the world that was filled with rocks and stones.  Why go to all the trouble of making bricks when all you have to do is gather up stones for building material?
Another way to look at this is that it shows how the builders relied more on themselves than on God.  God doesn’t make bricks.  God makes rocks and stones.  People make bricks.
In the ancient world making bricks was a technological breakthrough.  If people ran out of rocks and stones, they could still build houses and towers as long as they could make bricks.  Or, if they lived in a region of the world where there just weren’t enough rocks and stones, they could just make bricks.
Don’t get me wrong.  Technology is a wonderful thing.  I love having central heat and air at home and at church.  I enjoy having a cell phone that is smarter than I am.  (Sometimes I enjoy it more than at other times.)  I like having a computer that gives me access to hundreds of years of human knowledge at the tip of my fingers.  However, there is a huge drawback to technology. 
No matter how simple or complex the technology is, technology brings a temptation.  When people learned how to make bricks (and today with access to human knowledge on the Internet), we felt tempted to think we no longer needed God.  We have deluded ourselves into thinking that we have advanced beyond God.  We think the concept of God is outdated and old fashioned.  We think that we have reached a level of self-sufficiency that excludes our need for God.  This self-sufficiency was just as incorrect in Genesis 11 as it is today.
Technology and scientific discovery can be good.  They have accomplished a wonderful quality of life that exceeds anything our parents and grandparents ever imagined.  But we still need God, because we did not create ourselves; we cannot meet our own needs; and we cannot resolve our basic sin problem on our own.


Genesis 11: 4…  4 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." 

In verse 4, we read the fundamental motivation for building the tower.  The builders wanted to “make a name for themselves” and to guarantee their own futures. 
The Bible uses the word “name” very similarly to the way we use it today.  To make a name for myself means that I want to establish my reputation and to leave a legacy.  It is an almost universal desire.  Most of us want to make a difference in the world.  We may act humble around our friends and family, but we would love to have something named after us so that we know our lives were not lived in vain.  People give money to universities so they can have their names put on buildings and scholarships.
But the Bible also uses the word “name” to refer to a person’s character.  That’s why the Bible tells us about several individuals who had their names changed.  But in each of these stories, God changed their names.  When God changed their character, God also changed their names.  Abram became Abraham.  Jacob became Israel.  Simon became Peter.
Despite our very best efforts, we cannot change our own character.   Only God can change a person.  Only God can “make our name great.”
The reason we cannot change our character is the fact that we are sinners.  Our very basic nature is sinful, and the individual things we do are unrighteous, unholy and sinful.  As sinners, we cannot fix our sin problem or pull ourselves out of sin.
Perhaps you have heard the statement that religion is the primary cause of all the suffering and wars the world has ever faced.  This was certainly not true in the Twentieth Century.  The biggest perpetrators of suffering and death in the Twentieth Century were Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.  Hitler never claimed to be a Christian and merely tolerated the presence of the church in Germany.  Ironically, the Soviet Union was formed in reaction to the role of Christianity and the church in Europe.  Its founders believed that they could create an atheist state more peaceful than any “Christian” state.  But, when the Soviet Union fell, the rest of the world discovered official records detailing over 3 million executions!  (These 3 million “official” executions do not include deportations, imprisonments, forced labor camps and artificial famines inflicted by the Soviet regime.  Ultimately, the Soviet Union was responsible for over 20 million deaths![1])
The primary source of suffering and war is not religion.  It’s people.  People have a fundamental sin problem and when people are left to live according to the rules we create for ourselves, the result is suffering and war.


Genesis 11: 5…  5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. 

Don’t miss the humor of this verse.  The builders used the very best of human knowledge and character.  They had access to the very best technological advances of their day.  And they built the largest tower anyone had ever seen.  Standing on the ground, it appeared that the tower stretched into the heavens…all the way up to God.
But, when God wanted to get a look of this human creation…God came down.  God couldn’t even see it without coming down from Heaven.


Conclusion


I wish this had happened to me, but it didn’t.  It happened to a woman named Kelly Fryer who serves as a Lutheran minister.  (I found this story thanks to technology and the wonders of the Internet.)
When Kelly Fryer was in seminary, she had to go to class on a day that everyone wanted to be outside.  It was a beautiful day.  Everyone was daydreaming and not paying attention to the lecture.  The seminary professor figured out that no one was paying attention and that he was wasting his time teaching the class.
The professor closed his book and announced that he wasn’t going to waste another breath on this class.  Then, he went to the chalk board and drew an arrow pointing straight down.  He told the class, “If you understand that, you understand everything you need to know about Christian theology.”  And left the room.
Kelly Fryer says that the first thing she thought was, “He thinks we are going to Hell.”  But, the professor explained it in the next class…
He drew a similar arrow on the board and said, “God always comes down.  There is nothing you can do to turn that arrow around and make your way UP to God.”

Our greatest efforts aren’t good enough (or tall enough) to reach God.  Technology will never reach the point that we no longer need God.  Character development will never be good enough to achieve God-like character.  Perhaps we can add here that religion and religious activity can never get us into Heaven.  The only hope we have is for God to come down and rescue us…to save us from sin…to change our character.
Ultimately, this is the story of the Bible / the Gospel / the Good News.  God comes down to us.  God came down and made himself known.  God broke into Abraham’s life and called him to go to the Promised Land.  God spoke to Moses on Mount Sinai and gave him the Law.  God spoke to the Old Testament prophets and revealed his will for his people.  God spoke through the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus.
We would never know God on our own…Unless God came down to us.




[1] Statistics from The Black Book of Communism in Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (New York: Doubleday, 2004), pp. 231 – 237.  Also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Book_of_Communism

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