Genesis 11

“Then the Lord came down to look over the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, ‘If as one people all having the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down there and confuse their language so that they will not understand one another’s speech.’ So the Lord scattered them from there over the face of the whole earth and they stopped building the city.” Genesis 11:5-8

When I was a child, there was no internet, and we had very limited access to cable TV. The information people received concerning the world around them was very limited. Our Worldview was filtered through 3 network TV channels, a couple of newspapers & radio stations, and some magazines.

It never dawned on me that I could write a letter to another kid in a foreign country or that we could develop a friendship. I would never have assumed we could communicate several times a day, forming a real-time face-to-face relationship at no expense. The world was vast back then, and nations & cultures operated almost entirely independently.

But today, through satellite communication and wireless broadband internet, our world has become relatively small. English is the primary language of commerce. eBay is the world’s flea market. Amazon is the world’s vendor. Electronic banking handles all currency exchanges.

So, how does the story of Babel apply to our lives, today? What is so wrong with people sharing the same language and working together? Is society in & of itself “evil”?

As we learned in Genesis 2, both God and Adam knew it was not good for man to be alone. Man was made to live in community. It is necessary for us. Furthermore, God blesses our community when it honors Him. This “community of necessity” is not limited to the male/female relationship. It extends to our children, friends, and beyond.

The problem arises when men attempt to unite to the exclusion of God. In the days of the tower of Babel, if their designs had not been frustrated, mankind would have eventually employed their united strength for outrageously sinful purposes. We see this scenario ultimately played out in the book of Revelation…and developing rapidly in the World culture we are presently in.

All human collaborative effort, divorced from the ultimate goal of acknowledging and worshipping God, is nothing more than collective self-exaltation. Humanism is, in essence, self-worship. It is idolatry, with self-achievement as the idol of worship.