January 7, 2018 The Beginning and the End XXII. The Tower of Babel Genesis 11:1-9 Dr. William P. Seel Easley Presbyterian Church Easley, South Carolina When we first started our reading of the Book of Genesis, I said that Biblical scholars often refer to the first eleven chapters of Genesis as the Prologue to the rest of the Bible. What they mean by that is that in Genesis 1-11 we learn, basically, the reason behind the entire rest of the Biblical story. In Genesis 1-11, we learn the wherefore and the why and the how and the what and most of all, the Who, for everything else that follows in Scripture. One of my seminary professors used to say that if you understand, in a deep way, what is going in in Genesis 1-12 (and there is a reason why she added chapter 12, which will become clear by next Sunday), then we are ably prepared to make sense of everything else which follows from Abraham to Moses to David to Isaiah to John the Baptist to Jesus to Paul. And, the corollary, that if we don t understand Genesis 1-12, then no matter how hard we try, we will never really be able to grasp the plot or the full meaning of the rest of the Biblical story. So, this morning we come to the end of the Prologue, Genesis chapter 11, the story of the Tower of Babel. This story of the Tower of Babel is far more important than we ordinarily think. The Tower of Babel story represents the climax of the Prologue. Actually, that s not quite the right word climax would suggest the high point. The Tower of Babel actually represents the low point the lowest point humanity has yet reached. But whether we call it the high point or the low point, the point is the same that this story of the Tower of Babel represents the culmination of everything we have been reading in Genesis so far. So, let s look at Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel. Actually, forgive me for this, but before we can really do that, I think we need to go back to the very beginning and review all that we learned so far so that we can truly see how this story is the culmination of the Prologue. So, open your Bibles to Genesis 1, and follow along as we hit the high points. In the beginning, says Genesis 1:1, God created the heavens and the earth. And from there what we learn are two important truths about God s Creation. The first, and most important is there in verse 26: Then God said, Let us make man in our image. Here we learn the reason for why God decides to create the heavens and the earth in the first place. Remember what we learned about what it means for us to be created in the image of God it means that we have been created by God to be creatures who can enter into real and living and daily relationship with our Maker. To no other creature is given this capacity. To be created in the image of God means that we have been specially created to be capable of being God s conversation partners. More than that, that we human beings have been made as creatures capable of both receiving God s love and of responding to that love with an answering love of our own. Remember what Jesus said was the first and
2 greatest commandment that we should love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. Well, it is for this reason that we exist. Even more, it is for this reason that the entire creation exists. God creates the heavens and the earth solely that He might love us and that we might love Him in return. And then, the second thing we learn from this Creation story, is that when God finished His Creation, everything was good. Look at verse 31 not just good, but very good : And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. That very goodness of creation, we learned, meant three things. One, that God s creation was genuinely beautiful, pleasing in every way. Two, that the Creation was perfectly capable of supporting and sustaining life upon the earth. And three, that Creation was the perfect arena for the fulfillment of God s main intention of relationship with the human creatures He had made for Himself. It was, indeed, paradise on earth. And every day, God would come down and walk with Adam and Eve in perfect intimacy, perfect harmony, perfect happiness. All was, indeed, very good. But then came Genesis chapter 3. A serpent appears, one of God s creatures, who raises a question, a doubt in the minds of Adam and Eve regarding the goodness of God s intentions towards them. Remember, God had given Adam and Eve permission to eat of every tree in the Garden of Eden, save one the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And what the serpent suggested to Adam and Eve was that the reason why God didn t want them to eat of this particular tree was because He was holding back from them something really great that God knew that if they ate of that tree, then they would become just like God Himself, knowing good and evil for themselves. Now what was meant by that was not so much the knowledge of what was good and what was evil, so much as the ability, the power to decide for oneself what things were good and what things were evil; to choose for oneself, wholly apart from God, what makes for a good life and for human happiness; even the capacity to decide for oneself the purpose of one s own existence regardless of the purpose our Creator had assigned to our lives. So what then did Adam and Eve do? They took from the forbidden tree and ate. Now remember, understand, that the sin of Adam and Eve was not merely that they had disobeyed a direct order from God not to eat from that tree. Rather their sin lay in what that particular form of disobedience actually represented. In taking that fruit from that particular tree, what Adam and Eve were actually doing is not so much disobeying God, as turning their backs on God altogether. They were essentially saying to God, We don t need you anymore. We don t want you anymore. From now one, we are going to do things our way, without regard to you. We are going to run our lives according to our own thoughts and whims and desires, and no longer according to your will. Basically, Adam and Eve were telling God to take a hike. And this, we said, this is the original sin by which we mean the basic, fundamental thing which has gone wrong in every single human being ever since. We are all the children of Adam and Eve in that we all recommit their crime in the Garden. This is the capital letter S Sin the basic, fundamental problem that now exists between God and us, between us and our created purpose in God that we have all, each one of us, made this same choice to turn away from God and His intentions for our lives, choosing instead to live only for ourselves and only according to our own meager wisdom and desires for our lives.
3 And, from there from that basic, fundamental, capital letter S Sin of turning our backs on God from there everything else just begins to go to pieces. Once you turn your back on the source of your life, the only thing you are going to get is death and all of death s allies chaos and confusion; sickness, pain, and suffering; hatred and violence and discord; brokenness, ruin, and despair. And that s exactly what follows in the Biblical story. That capital letter S Sin of turning our backs on God quickly spawns a thousand and one little s sins in which we turn against each other breaking that second great intention God had for our lives, that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. Instead of love, we get tension, even struggle, between Adam and Eve. Going on a little further, chapter 4, we get the first murder, as Cain turns in jealousy against his innocent brother Abel. Then, a little later in chapter 4, we get Lamech, who boasts of how he has killed a man just for looking at him sideways, and of how if someone should somehow harm him, he will in turn take revenge on that person seventy-sevenfold. The whole thing goes downhill so fast, that by the time of Noah in chapter 6, just a handful of generations away from Adam and Eve, things have gotten so bad upon the face of the earth that God looks down and is just plain sorry that He ever made man in the first place. Look at chapter 6, verse 5. God sees that every intention of the thoughts of every human heart was only evil continually. And so, verse 7, God decides that things have gotten so bad that He has no choice but to wipe it all away, to blot out every living creature upon the face of the earth, and to start the whole creation over again with Noah and his family, who alone have found favor in God s eyes. And here we should stop and note something else really important that structure we find running through all of these stories from Genesis 3 onward. A pattern in the story: human beings sin, usually worse than before; and then God responds with an appropriate punishment, usually much worse than ever before; and then finally God offers a grace note. A grace note which tells us, reassures us, that as bad as things have gotten, God has not yet altogether given up on the human creatures He has made. He has not yet ceased to love them and to desire relationship with them. For example, the grace note for Adam and Eve as they are expelled from the Garden is that God Himself sews clothing for them to wear, to protect them from the harshness of life outside of Eden. 1 With Cain, the grace note is a mark God places upon him in order to protect him from the vengeance of others. 2 And in the story of the great flood, the preservation of Noah and his family is God s grace note. He will destroy the earth and all which dwell upon it, in punishment for human sin but only so as to start afresh with Noah, a righteous man who has found favor in God s eyes. 3 But, following the flood, what we learn is that, despite Noah s righteousness, the evil quickly returns to God s creation. In fact, even worse than before the flood. Turns out you can blot out man from the face of the earth with a great flood, but even a great flood cannot wash clean the stain of that capital letter S Sin from out of the human heart. And so now, at last, we come to Genesis chapter 11, the story of the Tower of Babel. All humankind comes together in a great cooperative venture out in a plain in the land of Shinar. Verse 4: Come, they say, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth. Now, a lot could be said about this project and the details therein. But let s cut straight to the chase. What this tower-building project is really all about what it actually represents, with its top reaching up towards the heavens is an attempt by sinful human beings, thoroughly sinful human beings, to get up into heaven where God lives,
4 and to throw God out once and for all. What they are trying to do, all of humanity in evil unison, is basically to get up into the heavens, where God lives, so that they can get rid of God once and for all. This is not merely disobedience to God, a turning away from God. This is ultimate rebellion against God, a turning against God. They have decided that God, their Creator and Sustainer, is actually their greatest Enemy and so He must be killed. This, in other words, is as bad as it can get when it comes to human sin. Not merely turning our backs upon God and His intentions for our lives, but here trying to do away with God altogether, so that we won t have to suffer His sovereignty over us any longer. So that we won t ever again have to answer to Him or even deal with Him. And that is why the punishment is so severe God scattering them across the face of the earth, confusing their languages. God s punishment making it so that this particular form of rebellion will never be repeated. Indeed, God s punishment works for the historical record indicates that ever since that day we were scattered into tribes and nations with various tongues and languages, we have been content to visit our hatred and violence only against one another my tribe verses your tribe, my nation versus your nation, my race versus your race. So, what the Tower of Babel story represents is human sin having reached a level so low, so utterly and completely evil, that there is simply no level further down to go. Once you have tried to kill God, there s really not anything worse you can do. And so the Prologue, Genesis 1-11, comes to an end with everything have become utterly sinful, rotten, evil, and bad. At the end of Genesis 1, it was all very good; by the end of the Tower of Babel story, things are literally as bad as they can get. The human rebellion against the loving and good Creator and Sustainer of their lives is now complete. So what happens next? What in the world can possibly happen next? Where does God go from here, in terms of His relationship to a humankind in complete rebellion against Him? And, to that end, note something else about the Tower of Babel story. We have the crime trying to storm heaven and get rid of God. And we have the punishment God scattering us over the face of the earth and confusing our languages. What s missing? The grace note. Where is the grace note? Look at verse 9 God confusing and scattering us, the punishment. And now look at verse 10, and what comes next? A genealogy. A genealogy! We re left hanging, in other words what s going to happen next? Where is the grace note? Does the absence of a grace note mean that God has finally had enough? That God has finally given up on us and upon His love for us once and for all now that we have turned ourselves into His mortal enemies and sinned against Him to the nth degree? Well, stay tuned. Or, what I really mean is, you had better be here next Sunday. Because something else we have learned in this Prologue because a genealogy is nearly always an indicator that what is just about to happen next is of special importance. Turns out, there is a grace note to the Tower of Babel story and it is huge! It is a grace note far bigger than even the enormity of our sin in the Tower of Babel story. Next week, in Genesis 12, God responds to the Tower of Babel by laying out and inaugurating the plan by which He will fully and finally set all things right again right between Himself and His Creation gone bad, right between Himself and His sinful image bearers you and me, right between human beings and human beings. A plan of salvation that will ultimately culminate in the event we just finished celebrating the coming to
5 earth of the very Son of God, Jesus, to be our Savior. Or, to look even a little further ahead, that great event the apostle Paul celebrates in his letter to the Romans, wherein: While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were His enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. 4 1 Genesis 3:21. 2 Genesis 4:15. 3 Genesis 6:18; 8:15-17. 4 Romans 5:6-10.