Babel

Day 9

Babel

I’ve heard it said that small is beautiful. But I don’t think this is a statement that has often had much uptake with the human race… ’bigger is better’ ‘might makes right’ ‘live large’‘mine’s bigger than yours’, big business, big vision, mega church… we humans seem to measure our success by size, the size of our income, the size of our house, the size of our facebook or  Instagram following. Bigger is better. Small… well it just doesn’t get a look in.

But what if this measure we use to evaluate ourselves and each other by is all wrong? What if success were not measured by size, amount or status. What if it were measured by love?

“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.” Genesis 11:1-2

East. It sounds like a location on a map but sometimes it is more. Adam and Eve were banished from the garden of Eden and blocked from entering it on the east side. Cain wandered ‘east of Eden’ when he left the presence of God. East can be a pattern, a pattern of wandering away, losing our way, losing sight of God’s face and intimate presence.  And when we lose sight of God’s face, all we have left is ourselves.

‘They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens,’ Genesis 11:3-4a

These people were resourceful, talented and creative. But as the story of Cain’s family line has already demonstrated, all the knowledge, talent, technology and progress in the world cannot restore humanity or give us a moral compass. Only YHWH’s love, God Himself at the core of the beating heart of humanity can do that; not God at a distance- at the top of a tall tower we build, but God up close, human beings walking in partnering relationship with Him.

This tower they were building. It wasn’t just any tower. The ancient author of this story and their original audience hearing it would have made an assumption that we modern readers often miss. There was only one architectural tower commonly featured in ancient Mesopotamian¹ cities: The Ziggurat. And the function of a Ziggurat was precisely what the people of Babel described “a tower that reaches to the heavens”. A Ziggurat was an ancient religious structure built to reach to the heavens², not so people could actually ascend to heaven, but so that heaven (a deity) could descend to earth.

At first glance, this might appear to be a good and devout thing to do, as though these people of Babel were getting their priorities right- putting God at the centre, building a tower to welcome God.  But there is a big difference between building something in loving partnership with God, and building something for God without His presence with us.

And this is perhaps the greatest irony of this story of Babel. Though the people of Babel were building a tower for God to come to earth, they weren’t working with God and weren’t actually motivated by a desire to welcome Him among them. The very next line reveals their underlying motivation, disclosing the true state of their hearts…

‘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; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ Genesis 11:4

Not ‘so that we can dwell with God’ or ‘so that we can welcome God’, but ‘so that we may make a name for ourselves’. They weren’t truly reaching for God. They were creating a tall tower to make it look like they were reaching for God. And in truth they were reaching for their own significance ‘a name’ for themselves. They were creating their tower ‘reaching to the heavens’ to make themselves look good, feel strong and appear devout. It was all about them. Verse four, which has them talking collectively, has five personal pronouns in just one sentence.

‘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; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’ Genesis 11:4

God was neither the centre of this project nor the centre of their hearts. They had removed God from the centre of their hearts and replaced Him with their empty religion and their drive to feel significant.

Small wasn’t enough for these people of Babel. They were out to prove that they were a mighty people, strong, powerful, too big to fail. They had no time for small things. Small things like the still small voice of God in their hearts whispering that He loved them.

When God is not at the centre of a beating human heart all sorts of darkness rushes into the void; darkness like fear and insecurity, fuelling pride, selfishness and drivenness.

When all we have is ourselves, we don’t actually have our true selves at all. We only have who we feel we need to be, and who we fear we’re not.

They thought being a cog in the machine of a big vision, a powerful project, could satiate their need for significance. They had forgotten who they were. They wanted to make a name for themselves because they’d forgotten their true name; Imago Dei Human. Children of God.

The significance they craved was their true beating heart, the image of God within them, but the way they were reaching for it was tearing them apart.

Lurking beneath all our treadmill drivenness towards success and significance is so often the fear of our own insignificance. Subconsciously perhaps we hope that if we can prove it to everyone else, maybe we’ll start to believe it ourselves.

All human towers will one day fall. There is no human monument, project, empire, movement, organisation, multi-national company, political system, or ideology that will not one day crumble into dust. We fear when big things fall, like banks ‘too big to fail’, because we have bought into the lie that bigger is better, that there is somehow safety and strength in numbers, in size. Our fears programme us to buy the lie of ‘empire’ building. The lie that size is success, that power and might is what we should strive for.

God is not opposed to human technology or building projects. He is opposed to being shut out of human lives altogether, because without Him at the centre of human life, human life breaks down. When we forget God, we forget ourselves. We cut ourselves off from the one relationship that makes us fully human.

Our human desire for significance is not wrong, it is part of our true beating heart, the Image of God within us. Human beings are significant, not because we are big and strong and mighty and large. We are significant because we have the God of the Universe’s breath in our lungs, the Being who made the spinning stars’ Spirit in our hearts.

We are big. Small on the outside but endless on the inside. God’s own imprint was pressed into us, His likeness lines the sinews of our hearts. We are bigger than time and space. God has placed eternity into our hearts and we have never understood this ( Ecclesiastes 3:11). 

The people of Babel didn’t understand this either, so God came down to make it clear.

“But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.’

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’” Genesis 11:5-6

God came down because this is who God is. We may have wandered east of Eden, and far from Him, but He is never really far from us, and He is always a Father in search of His children.

In the beginning, the genesis of all our beginnings God said “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). Us. Not I. God exists as a triune God, a family of three and it is this family that intervenes to help humankind remember who they are. Jesus has been walking with His father, searching out his wandering children from before time was written down.

“‘Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’” Genesis 11:7

Love intervenes so they cannot understand each other, because they have never truly understood each other. They had never understood their own worth, their own breath, their own significance as children of God. So in love God comes down and divides them, not to break them, but to make them whole.

And on the surface level it looks like God is just being mean, a bully stamping on a child’s sand castle, like the capricious and moody later Greek and Roman gods. But God does not measure success the way that humans do- ‘Big is better’, ‘might makes right’, big business, big vision, big empire.

God’s measure is not the size of a persons success but the size of the love in their heart and the shape of their heart as truly human. Imago Dei.

We humans, we measure the world so differently to God. So often we see the world through the lens of our own short term gain, but God has a longer view in mind, an eternal perspective. Babel’s monumental tower was, in Gods eyes, a monumental mistake. A dangerous mistake teetering their civilisation towards self destructive selfishness. Love was nowhere in the rhetoric of the people of Babel, not love for people nor love for God. Pride cannot love. Fear cannot love.

When we stop loving God with our whole hearts, we stop remembering that God loves us with His whole heart and we become less whole ourselves.

“So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called 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” Genesis 11:8-9

Love came down and divided all their languages to help them be small again, smaller communities with smaller plans. Because love, connection and intimacy grows best in the smallest places, small spaces like families, small groups of friends, small moments where eternity enters time and we breathe in our human breath once more, long and deep and slow. Small moments like a baby’s chortling laugh, the hug of a good friend, the disclosure of a difficult truth, the knowing that we are truly deeply known.

Bigger has never really been better for humankind. We might relish the buzz of the big cities but we rarely thrive in them. The loneliest place in the world can be the centre of a crowded room. God said ‘It is not good for humankind to be alone’, but we cannot find each other in a crowd, nor in all our pretensions towards grandeur. 

Humility is authenticity. Small truly is beautiful. 

They’re the only place we can reach out and truly find each other.

God is larger than a this spinning Universe of light, and yet He too is part of the smallness of intimacy and love, He is not a crowd, but a family. And with Him it is never business, always personal.

It is not a coincidence that this story of Babel is situated in scripture just after story of Noah and just before the story of Abraham. Both these men walked obediently, intimately and faithfully with God. They didn’t experience God at a distance, at the top of a tall tower they built, they experienced God up close, walking in relationship and partnership with them. They didn’t reach to make themselves significant or great, they reached for God, and in doing so discovered true significance and greatness in Him. I don’t think the juxtaposition, the comparison between their storylines and Babel’s is a coincidence.

Abram, like Noah lived in the family line that walked faithfully with God, calling on His name. He was not searching for significance or building a tower to make his own name great…“he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” (Hebrews 11:10)

A city, a people, whom God intended not just to build, but to join. Himself. God came down for Babel to save them from themselves and centuries upon centuries later, after Abram’s family had become a nation, God Himself came down once more, making Himself small, small as a seed planted silently in the ground, small as a shoot from a sawn-off stump, small as a baby laid to rest in a manger. Small as a human being. Like us.

Paul of Tarsus later described this upside-down-right-way-up way of God; the small way, the humble way. The way we humans struggle to comprehend.

“In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,

did not consider equality with God something to be used to his

own advantage;

rather, he made himself nothing

by taking the very nature of a servant,

being made in human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a man,

he humbled himself

by becoming obedient to death—

even death on a cross!” 

Philippians 2:5-11

God didn’t come to earth to prove Himself, to show us how large, mighty and powerful His is (though He is all those things). He came small. To show us how to love. Like Him. In humility He made himself nothing, in order to give us everything. God, in love came down to usurp the dehumanising power of monument building and to re-humanise a humanity dismantled by everything we reach for that is not Him. He came down, not to create a religion but to ignite a revolution, not to build an empire, but to establish a Kingdom. A Kingdom revolution that starts as small as a tiny seed planted unseen in the earth.

The Kingdom of God, the way of being human God intended for us, is totally unlike the way of Babel, the way of Empire. It is small, it is family, it is a network of small communities, it is the humanising fabric of relationships that are woven around the central threads of who God is: faithfulness, justice, righteousness and love.

The lie of Empire is that bigger is better and success is measured by size, quantity, wealth, power and status.

The truth of God’s Kingdom is that from small seeds eternal things grow and  true success is measured by love, love for God and partnership with Him in bringing His Kingdom to earth.

The God of all the vastness of the Universe, the Being who breathed out galaxies of spinning stars, made Himself small. Made Himself minute. Made Himself nothing. And made Himself the victim of all our pride, sin and selfish conceit, to help us begin to learn, begin to see, begin to understand that it’s not the monuments we build that make us great, but His Great Love that reaches out to us to heal us, restore us and make us great in Him. His great love that has been on this journey to find each one of us since before all time began.

When we one-day find ourselves standing on the final shore of our lives looking out across the ocean of eternity (as every one of us one-day will) we will find that all the monuments we built to ourselves, all our tall towers of success, our big businesses and big visions are nothing but sandcastles washed away by time. Nothing we grasp on earth will come with us into heaven, nothing but the small moments where eternity entered time, nothing but the people we have loved along the way and nothing but the space in our heart we left open to God’s love.

Love is actually the true measure of success.

Size never has been.

      

Journey Further 

Where have you attempted to satiate your need for significance in the works of your hands or in something you have produced?

Stop and Listen. What does God’s still small voice long to share with you?

References, Notes, and Credits

¹ ‘Shinar’ was situated in the heart of ancient Mesopotamia. Notes on Genesis 11, NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, Zondervan 2016

² This description occurs multiple times in ancient literature and consistently refers to a temple structure with a ziggurat. Commentary on Genesis 11, NIV Application Commentary, John Walton

The photo of the bee and flowers was taken by Simeon Evenhuis