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Genesis 11:1-9
11:1 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. 2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. 3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. 4 Then they said, “Come, 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.” 5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built. 6 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. 7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.” 8 So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. 9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused1 the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
[1] 11:9
(ESV)
Redeemer exists to celebrate and declare the gospel of God as we grow in knowing and following Jesus Christ.
I invite you to turn in your bibles to Genesis chapter 11. We're actually gonna be looking at the story of the tower of Babel. This is a timeless story, a true story, a timeless story that even those with little Bible knowledge seem to know and to understand, at least at some fundamental level. A story that speaks to the pride of man. I want you to notice that it's a short story.
Joel Brooks:And this is intentional. Right before this you have the story of Noah that we looked at last week. It takes up 4 chapters of your Bible. After this story will be the story of Abraham, which will take up 13 chapters of your Bible. But here, the story about the great achievement of man takes a mere 9 verses.
Joel Brooks:There's barely a footnote in your Bible. Genesis chapter 11, beginning of verse 1. Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, come let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.
Joel Brooks:And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, come, 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.' 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 purpose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down.
Joel Brooks: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 the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there, the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth. This is the word of the Lord.
Joel Brooks:Thanks be to God. Pray with me. Father, I pray that the grace that we just heard testified to by Jill, that grace would be present with us, through your word, through your spirit. Lord, that we would come to see, that you are the solid rock and everything else is sinking sand. I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore.
Joel Brooks:But, Lord, may your words remain, and may they change us. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus. Amen. Like I mentioned earlier, this is a timeless story That even those without ever stepping in a church and with little Bible knowledge seem to at some point have heard and instinctively understand. It's a simple story, but also one that can be be understood in a number of different ways.
Joel Brooks:If you are a a missiologist, one who studies missions, you are going to understand the story through that lens. And how really what this is, it's people not living into the mission that God had given them. They were supposed to fill the earth. They were supposed to disperse disperse around the globe and fill it with God's glory, and instead they gather all together. And that's really what the story is about is that sin.
Joel Brooks:If you're Tim Keller, of course you are going to see this lens through, through see the story through the lens of a city, and how this is really the failure of a city. One of the many cities that failed that we see throughout scripture, In Genesis 4, Cain makes the first city. He builds the first city, and you get to see what a city is like when it's being built by a person who says, am I my brother's keeper? You get to see what a city is like when you're actually looking out for your own interest. And, and really, you could see Genesis 11 and the Tower of Babel and the many cities throughout the Bible has really just you can see it through that lens.
Joel Brooks:If you are a literary analyst, you'll see this story is merely the setup for the story of Abram. Just in this story you have these people who they they don't wanna leave the the unity. They wanna unite their forces together and because they don't wanna be dispersed and they wanna make a great name for themselves. You see Abraham doing the exact opposite. Abraham leaves his safety.
Joel Brooks:He risked and he goes to a place unknown, and God says, I will make your name great. And those who study the Bible just from a literary point of view see this is really the introduction to the story of Abraham. And if you were Pentecostal, you'll see the story through through that lens. That this really points us to Pentecost, where we see the reversal of this. Instead of languages being used to disperse all the people, at Pentecost when people are given the gift of languages and they also may hear everybody in their own language the one gospel.
Joel Brooks:Some time I've taught on these things. If I had 2 hours, I would spend time walking through all of these things. But I'm not gonna do so. The reason I think that this is actually such a timeless story is because it hits us at a much more fundamental root level. It's really a story about ordinary people trying to find their security and their significance into something.
Joel Brooks:So let's look at the story. The story begins after the flood. It begins after the flood with with mankind once again having increased in number and they don't
Jeffrey Heine:disperse over the earth. Instead they
Joel Brooks:all congregate together and they look for a And it's here that they've discovered how to make bricks. Before, they could only make things out of stone or wood, but they learn how to make bricks. And with this knowledge, they decide to build a city. A city with a giant tower reaching to the heavens. What's being built here is what we would know as a ziggurat, which is this tower with this spiraling staircase or spiraling ramp going up it.
Joel Brooks:And in this day, this is how people built their cities. They built them around a giant, giant towers, which was really a man made mountain, or they would build them around a physical natural mountain. But all this was a way of them reaching up to the heavens. These were called shrine cities and they were to act as gateways to God. That's actually what the name Babel means.
Joel Brooks:Originally, that name meant gateway to God. It sounds very similar to the Hebrew word Belel, which means confusion, which the story plays on. But the reason that the people wanted to build this, they wanted to build this city and this tower, is that they thought that through their efforts, they could reach heaven. And then by doing so, they would become famous. They wanna make a name for themselves.
Joel Brooks:They want to receive praise. They want to be associated with greatness. They're looking for significance. They also wanted security. They wanted to join their forces.
Joel Brooks:Be united. To live safely behind city walls. And I probably should say at the start of this that there is nothing wrong with these desires. There's nothing wrong with desiring significance and desiring security. These are not bad things.
Joel Brooks:There's nothing fundamentally wrong with you wanting to feel safe and for you wanting to make a name for yourself. And I would go so far as to say that there's not a person here who does not want those things. The problem is, where do we look to find those things? How do we try to achieve these things? And often, it's through our own arrogance that we think we can find those things apart from God.
Joel Brooks:Now these two things, a desire for significance and a desire for security, actually pretty much drive everything that we do. So let's look at them. Let's look at significance. You should probably go ahead and admit that you want to make a name for yourself. We all do.
Joel Brooks:This is why we do things like name drop. I mean you're you're at a social gathering and what are you gonna do? You're gonna you're gonna drop some name. Try to do it really casually. How you're recently spending time with some really important person or or somebody who has some kind of fame.
Joel Brooks:If it's not at a party, you'll do it through social media because if nobody saw you there, you have to at least make sure people know. Often that's you know, attached with like a hashtag humbled. You know, I was just, you know, I was building Habitat for Humanity homes with Jimmy Carter. Show a picture, hashtag humbled. Or you receive some award, you know, you make sure you post a picture of yourself receiving an award and it's hashtag humbled, to receive this award along with so many other great people.
Joel Brooks:That has nothing to do with humility, by the way. I'm still waiting for the time to where I see a picture, you know, posted on Instagram or Facebook of somebody just lying on the couch, unshowered with like crumbs all over them saying, never left the couch today, made poor eating decisions and just wasted my life watching Netflix, hashtag humbled. That's true humility. Alright? Like that's that's humility.
Joel Brooks:But we we don't do that because we wanna be associated with greatness. This is why, I found in many occasions to just kind of slip in a conversation that the first time I ever played golf, I actually made par on the first hole. You know, it's amazing how many times you could just find ways to insert that in a conversation. Things that have not I don't even like golf, conversations nothing to do with golf and like, oh you were outside once I was outside playing golf and you slipped that. I even found a way to insert it in a sermon.
Joel Brooks:I mean, I could just find ways to let people know, like I once did I never hit another straight ball after that, but that first time was glorious. We want people to like think of us like, wow. Wow. We want to be seen as a somebody. We want people to be impressed with us.
Joel Brooks:We we want to seem significant. The people here in Genesis 11, they climbed a tower to do it. We climbed the corporate ladder in order to find significance through money or through power, or we climb the social ladder To find significance by being in the encircle or by how many people we know. Here we see their significance. It's tied at just how high they can make that tower.
Joel Brooks:We find our significance by how many likes we get on a picture or a post. The desire for praise drives everything. It drives the way that we dress. Why we strive to make such good grades, why we hang out with the people we hang out with, why we work the endless hours we do. Why we buy the things that we buy.
Joel Brooks:We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like. There's an insanity to that. Pastors are certainly not immune to this. I'd actually say if anything, we battle with this possibly more than anyone, because I can evaluate my success by how many people fill the pews. Now, you know, the the good part of me is gonna say, well I'm just really encouraged that so many people wanna hear God's word being preached.
Joel Brooks:But the bad part of me just feels good that there's a lot of people here to listen to me. Makes me feel significant and important. So pastors are certainly not immune. None of us are. And along with this desire for significance, we desire security, but we also search for it the wrong way.
Joel Brooks:Let let me ask you this, do you feel more secure knowing that God loves you or that the economy is doing well and that you have a margin in your bank account? Do you feel more safety in knowing that God cares for you? When the fact that you have a stable job and that you live in a country with the most advanced and powerful army on earth. What makes you feel secure? The desire for security and significance, they're not bad desires but the way that we pursue them are.
Joel Brooks:The desires were put within us as a way of leading us to God, not leading us to idols. The yearning that we have for this security, the yearning we have for significance is ultimately a yearning for God himself. Saint Augustine, he famously said that our hearts are restless until they find rest in God. And he used a a metaphor of a journey to illustrate this. Saint Augustine said that our lives are like a journey.
Joel Brooks:A journey that's really being fueled by a restless desire for a better country, for a better life. And we know that we will find this better life, this better country on the other side of the ocean and so he he uses this illustration. We get in a boat and we take off for that destination, that other shore. So life is a boat ride. But then he says, the problem is this.
Joel Brooks:We begin to fall in love with the boat. We begin to look at things like, you know, the decking, the sail. We like the way that the wind flaps the sail. I mean, now I mean, if if Augustine was alive now, he'd say we like the water slides and the pools and the bowling alleys and everything else on the ship. We like the camaraderie we feel with the fellow passengers.
Joel Brooks:We begin to feel safe. We begin to feel comfortable within this boat. Soon we begin to lose the desire to ever leave it. We fall in love with our own creation. The very boat that we created to get us to the other side.
Joel Brooks:We we fall in love with our own creation, and then when we finally arrive at that glorious shore, we don't wanna leave it. We're happy in the boat, but we were not meant for the boat. That boat cannot satisfy the cravings, those deep desires that we have, that we're for a better country, that we're for God himself. That security and that significance that you are seeking through your career, through your home, through the relationship that you were in, through being a parent, that security and significance that you're seeking in those things is really a desire for God himself. Don't be distracted by the boat.
Joel Brooks:The joys that you might find in those things are really only to point you to the ultimate joy that you are to find in Christ. Let's see how God responds to these people who build this tower. Look at verse 5, We read that the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of man had built. Now God didn't actually have to come down to see what was going on there. God already knew what was going on.
Joel Brooks:This is just kind of, it's kind of a mocking thing here. That as high as that tower was, God had to condescend. He had to go down to it if he was ever even able to get a glimpse of it. It was nowhere near reaching the heights of heaven. The highest achievement of man is nothing compared to God.
Joel Brooks:Verse 6. 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. Now God isn't here thinking about the greatness of man and the great things that mankind is going to achieve when man is united. God is thinking about how much evil mankind can do if left unchecked.
Joel Brooks:He's like, I literally just destroyed the world because of evil. And here like in this fresh start if you will, they're already doing this. Just think of the evil that man can do if left unchecked. That's what that's what this is about. Verse 78.
Joel Brooks:Come. Let us go down and they are confused their language so that they might 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. So God comes down and he confuses their languages, which makes it impossible for them to communicate or to work and then they disperse. Now most people when they think of this story they they immediately think well this is how God judges them.
Joel Brooks:This is how God judges their evil actions as he he makes the language them all have different languages so they will disperse over the earth. But let me ask you this question, what makes you assume that this is God's judgment? Like why would you think that? That this is God judging them. No one's hurt.
Joel Brooks:No one is killed here. I mean if it was God's judgment you'd have to say it's a pretty light one since no one dies or is injured. What we're seeing here is not God so much judging them, but God doing something to them to get them to walk away from their idolatry. He's getting them to let go of their idol. It's actually an enormous grace of God that we see here.
Joel Brooks:Judgment would have looked like God killing them, Or judgment would have allowed something even worse, I think, allowing them to continue. To keep working and to keep working, to keep putting up brick after brick, to keep going higher and higher Only so when they finished, for them to realize it was all in vain. It all amounted to nothing. To spend an entire lifetime building this and to realize that they were no closer to God than they were before. They had no more significance or safety in their life than they had before.
Joel Brooks:That would have been real judgment. The emptiness of success is real judgment. Judgment is when God allows you to keep on pursuing that career that he knows is never gonna bring you happiness. Judgment is when God allows you to keep on trying to find significance in the arms of another person when he knows that isn't going to bring you ultimate joy. Judgment is when God just allows you to keep on holding on to that idol.
Joel Brooks:Trying to find satisfaction in it. Have you have you ever wondered, like, why it is celebrities are so unhappy? Such miserable human beings, why why their lives are always falling apart? It's because God has allowed them to keep building and building and building. And they keep building their tower, and they're finding with every brick they lay that there's no more joy being that high than there was of being a little bit lower.
Joel Brooks:This is why Jim Carey, he he said a few years ago, he says, I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so that they can see the answer that it is not the answer to anything. God disrupting your life and keeping you from building your tower is actually a tremendous, tremendous act of mercy. And really, what we need to understand about what we feel is God's judgment in this life, is really every judgment before the final judgment is an act of mercy. Every judgment we receive before that final judgment is really an act of mercy. Now when I was studying this story, one of the things that struck me, that I was a little confused over.
Joel Brooks:That's why God didn't tear this thing down. I mean, he confuses their languages. He he he orchestrates things in such a way that people just abandon the project, but the project still stands unfinished. I mean, if that was God, I would have maybe caused some, you know, fireball to come down or the earth to open up. A giant earthquake and just swallow this thing up hold.
Joel Brooks:But instead, God leaves this half built tower to slowly decay over time. I don't know how long it would take for that thing to fall to the ground, but he leaves it to slowly decay over time as a monument to their failure. And this too is a mercy of God. It's a painful mercy, but it's a mercy. If you have lived life long enough, somewhere in your life I can guarantee you have a half built tower.
Joel Brooks:A tower of disappointment still standing in your life. You have this constant reminder of a past idolatry and a past failure and it just won't leave. Perhaps it's some failed relationship that you have, and yet you keep seeing this person over and over and over again. Everywhere you go, you keep seeing this person. And the reason every time you see them it is so painful is because you have wrapped up all of your security and significance in that person.
Joel Brooks:And they're a constant reminder of that and it hurts. Perhaps it's an actual building where you used to have a job, a career that you tried to find your identity through. Perhaps it's something that you once said or maybe worse, you posted in arrogance years ago. And you have such regret, and you wish everybody would just forget it. But nobody forgets that.
Joel Brooks:It's amazing how often they bring up that old post, that old tweet, or that old thing you said, I remember when you said this. And it hurts. Those are towers of disappointment that God, in his mercy, has has left standing. He left them standing as a way to remind you of your idolatry. And they now stand as a testament, not towards his judgment, but as his mercy that he had to remove that from you.
Joel Brooks:They're left standing as a way of reminding you that your security and your significance can only be found in Christ alone. What we're seeing is this. When God looks at you and he sees that you have fallen in love with the boat, he'll send a storm, and he'll shipwreck you. Not to destroy you, but so that you might actually leave the boat and swim to shore where you were going all along. And now when you can look back and you see that shipwreck, it's not a monument to God's judgment.
Joel Brooks:It's a monument to God's salvation and how he ripped you from that to take you to this shore. God, in his mercy, he does these things that sometimes feel pretty extreme and hurt. Your desire for security and significance can only be found in God. That's really why the story is a setup for what we'll see in Abraham week, in which Abraham actually takes a great risk and he does leave for this other country unknown to him. Leaves for another shore, if you will.
Joel Brooks:And he could do so because God says security. And he could do so because God says, I will make your name great. You don't have to strive for greatness. I will make your name great. And hear me.
Joel Brooks:This is actually the good news of the gospel for all of us. Our security and our significance are found in Christ alone. We can never climb up high enough to reach God. We can't ever do it. But the good news of the gospel is this.
Joel Brooks:God, through his son Jesus, has come down to us. He's come down to us. He loves us so much that despite our sin, despite our rebellion, he came to us not to judge us, but to be the one who would be judged for us. Jesus rose from the dead and now he offers us forgiveness and life if we will actually call out and we'll trust him. Our significance now is in this, we are a child of God.
Joel Brooks:Our security is this, not even death can separate us from God. We have an eternal security, and we have an eternal significance in Jesus. So will you quit placing your hope in whatever tower you are building? And place your hope in Christ, the solid rock on which we stand. Pray with me.
Joel Brooks:Lord, there are some people here who refuse, outright refuse to build their lives on you. They've been hearing this week after week after week and and there is still rebellion going on in their hearts. And I pray right now that through your spirit you would break that down. Whatever towers that they are building, Lord, and your grace, Lord, might you stop that work. I pray that they would not get what they want.
Joel Brooks:They would not spend their entire lives pursuing that vain thing, only to realize at the end how worthless it is. God, in your grace, would you cause that to start crumbling now? And may they call out to you and build their lives on you, Jesus. Thank you for coming down to us. We can never reach you, so thank you for coming to us, Jesus.
Joel Brooks:And we pray this in your name. Amen.