7.11.24 - Confusion
Genesis 11:5-9
And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
We’ve talked about the problem with these people at Shinar building their city and tower. The issue wasn’t the building itself, but the pride in their hearts that motivated them as they sought to make a name for themselves, to work their way up to heights of the gods. And that pride led them to oppress other people, exploiting the weaker among them as slave labor to make the bricks for their tower. But then, beneath that pride, we saw fear and insecurity. They disobeyed God’s command to fill the earth, choosing instead to take safety in numbers, because they were afraid of being conquered by other nations and peoples, scattered and made into refugees. That fear and insecurity drove them to build the beginnings of an empire.
So this is the thing that God came down to see: an empire built upon human pride and driven by fear and insecurity to oppress the weak. And here the author makes a little jab at the people of Shinar. They were trying to build a tower into the realm of the gods, but it wasn’t really all that tall, because God still had to “go down” to see it. They thought they could lift themselves up to God with their tower, but they weren’t even close.
Then in a moment, God brings their efforts to a standstill, scattering their speech from one shared language to many. I think there are two facets to God’s response here that we can try to understand. The first is that it’s a restraint. God sees the potential for evil, the capacity that this people will have to conquer and oppress the weak and the vulnerable, and so he divides them by language in order to put a limit on the damage they can do. He sees the danger of human pride. He sees what we’re capable of when we’re driven by fear, and so he intervenes to keep us from going as far down that path as our hearts would otherwise lead us. To be sure, God isn’t threatened by this city and this tower. But he looks down on it with mercy, and restrains it from becoming a terror to the world and the people he loves.
Then the second facet is that God is enforcing the command that he had given. He had told the humans to fill the earth, and they refused. They disobeyed, because they were afraid of being weak, afraid of being vulnerable. So now God does for them the very thing they had failed to do. He disperses them, confusing their language to make them have to go out and and fill the earth.
The really cool thing is that if they had obeyed that command, these different languages would have developed naturally over time. As the distance between families separated them, they would gradually come to communicate through different ways in different places. And language, in many ways, points to more than just the words we speak and the way we communicate, but it represents culture. The differences between people in different parts of the world are part of God’s design for his Creation. It’s good that we have different customs and perspectives, that we have the richness of diverse languages and cultures and worldviews, because it means that we have more lenses through which to see the beauty of God in Christ, more instruments in the symphony of his praise, and more tongues with which to sing the glories of his name. That’s the vision of Revelation 5 and this people which Christ has ransomed for God from “from every tribe and language and people and nation.”
I don’t think Babel is a picture of God coming down in wrath and judgement. I think it’s a picture of the same God as all the rest of the Bible who works in love and mercy. He intervenes against the prideful, fear-driven schemes of man in order to keep them from becoming a monster. And when that fear and insecurity keeps his people from joining in on the work of putting a broken world back together, God takes that work into his own hands and says, “I’ll do it for you.” That’s the whole story of the Bible. That’s the gospel: broken people too afraid and too untrusting to live the beautiful life that God has for us, and so God comes down in mercy to say, “I’ll do it for you. You can’t be good enough. You can’t fix this. So I’ll do it for you.”
