Genesis 11:1-9 – Being Human

This is a great story from ancient history.

Old days gone by.

And before we get into that, I'll take you to take you to some different ancient history.

The history of Ben.

That's me.

When I was a kid, I really used to love to read.

Really, really just loved it.

I'd love it when my mom would get us, get us all into the car and down to the local library.

Like, ah, can find another book in the you know the kids' fiction section there, wander around trying to find a book I haven't read yet.

I couldn't tell you all the books that I read because it was just too many, and it was you know 30 years ago.

But um, you know, there's this one book that kind of has stuck with me all these years, and um I you you can you can evaluate what this says about me that it's stuck with me all these years.

It's a book called Goodbye to Good Old Charlie.

All right, and it was a story of a young man, uh a high school kid really, and his his family had just moved house, they'd come to a new community, a new town, new school.

And Charlie looked at this as his opportunity, right?

He felt that maybe he had been a little bit too safe, a little bit too boring as a person, and uh he wanted to maybe reinvent himself a little bit.

And so he created a lot of different alter egos to try out on the different people that he would meet.

You know, sometimes he was he was he would present himself as a cowboy type and he was Chuck, you know, and sometimes he would present himself as a surfer dude type and he was chip, you know, and sometimes he was you know a tough guy and he was chet, you know.

So different different variations on his name, but uh, you know, just trying to trying to figure out where he fit and how to how to go about all of that stuff.

I'm sure along the way he got himself into some trouble.

I'm sure along the way he learned some valuable lessons and came out okay in the end, because that's how those books work.

But uh our story this morning has a little bit of that going on with it as well, a little bit more at stake than just, you know, a high school kid maybe being embarrassed in front of the girl that he fancies.

But uh we'll we'll take a look at that.

But first let's go to our Lord in prayer.

Our Lord and God, we thank you that you have given us your word, and that even these uh even these stories that seem so far removed and so foreign to us, Lord, um, they have meaning for us, and we can identify with the characters and we can see some of ourselves in it.

I pray, Lord, that as we dig into this this morning or this afternoon, that we would be uh just given eyes to see it through your spirit, Lord, and that you would use it to change us, transform our thinking.

I pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So, in in its most basic sense, this is a very simple kind of story here.

Got a bunch of guys that come together, they say they're gonna build a tower, God sees what they're doing, and for some reason, God responds in a way that scatters them across the face of the earth, and the tower is left unfinished.

And as we come to this, this, uh, it's very far removed from our modern times, a very, very different scenario there.

Uh, this is kind of the end of what you might call the primeval history of Genesis.

We've been pointing forward to this redemption that God will work out, but we're not there yet.

We're not seeing how that's gonna how that's gonna be.

So this is this is kind of the end of it.

Next week, Mark will start touching on the actual work of redemptive history there.

But we can see a few questions really come to mind as we as we look at this.

First of all, what did these guys do that was so wrong?

What was their great sin?

You know, God responds very directly and in a way that really changed up everything.

Um so, first of all, what did they do wrong?

Second of all, why does God respond this way?

What can we figure out from this?

And third, really, how does it connect with us today?

What does it mean to us?

Is this just some kind of an origin myth?

You know, like this is Pandora's box being opened, and that's why there's so many languages in the world.

Um I think we can say for certain that that's not the case because God's word is for us.

It's for our instruction, for our encouragement.

And so there's more to it than just the story.

But let's dig into the story just a little bit, shall we?

The f the first question that I that I propose to you is what is that great sin that they committed?

What did they do so wrong?

Is God opposed to human progress?

Does God think that you know human humankind should only do so much or come so far?

Does God have a problem with civil engineering?

Any engineering people out there?

All right, okay.

God loves you too.

Don't worry, don't worry.

And we could laugh, but in all honesty, when you come to this passage, you can get a lot of wrong ideas about it.

Even my grandfather, my grandfather was a great man of God, you know, studied the word and knew it better than I probably ever will.

But he told me one time, back in the 60s, when they were building the rockets to go to the moon, he said, we'll never make it there.

God won't God won't allow it.

Because in his mind, the idea of building a spaceship and going to touch another world is is not any different than verse 4, where it says, Come let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves.

So is that what this is about?

Is that what this problem is?

I don't think so.

Obviously, we did make it to the moon.

Apologies if you're a lunar landing conspiracy theorist.

Sorry, we did go.

Um But what is what is God going on?

What is going on here, and what is why does God see it as wrong?

I see really three aspects to this sin, and we'll we'll cover those real quick here.

The first aspect is just plain and simple disobedience.

Right?

Chapter 9, after the floods have subsided and Noah and his family are released out onto the earth, God gives them a gives them a charge.

He says, Go be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

So this really comes up against the end of verse 5 where the builders are talking and they say, Lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.

Right?

Over here, God says, fill the earth.

Over here, the builders say, We don't want to be dispersed over the whole earth.

Not hard to see that this is plain and simple disobedience.

But if we look at it at a step deeper than that, the disobedience that they're entering into is actually denying them some of God's blessings, if we think about it there.

We have this whole basically new world.

Lots of potential, lots of options, lots of ways they could go.

And instead of running out there and finding a place and carving out a life for themselves, these folks are saying, let's not do that.

Let's come together, let's let's bunch up here, let's build this tower.

You know, it'd be like saying, hey, I'd rather rather live in this crowded high-rise than build a nice place out in the country.

So that's that's part of it.

And you see God's words in verse six.

He says, Behold, they're one people, and they have all one language.

And it seems like this fact that they are all together and they're not diversifying, they're not going different places and doing different things is definitely seen as a negative.

We heard last week when Mark shared about the table of nations, right?

We saw that diversity in creation has always been part of God's plan, that there's a beauty in our uniqueness, just a certain wonder that comes into it when we see how vastly different we are.

All these different cultures that we have here on earth, all these different people groups, we all image God.

We're all carrying the image of God in different ways, and there's beauty in that.

We can also think of it like this: by not filling the earth, by not, you know, going all around, they're also not subduing the earth.

We saw this idea in Genesis 1.

God says, fill the earth and subdue it.

Now, I grew up in the state of Nevada.

I lived 21 years in the state of Nevada.

If you've never been there, it is basically one great big desert, right?

It's it's dry, it's hot, it's arid, you know, all of these things going on for it.

And I've read about, I've heard about when European settlers first came across the state, they really struggled.

They really had a hard time because there's no water, right?

And there was not a lot of game to hunt for food, there was not a lot of plants and stuff like this.

So they really struggled with it.

But in the intervening time, there's been farming and ranching that have started.

And yes, that helps the people who are farming and the people who are ranching, but there's a trickle-down effect that it impacts the entire ecosystem and it helps it.

So there's more biodiversity, there's more wildlife, there's more plants and animals living out there than there were before.

And this is just kind of a direct result of this idea of filling the earth and subduing it.

So this is disobedience, and you can see that the the builders had a lot of initiative, they had a lot of creativity, they were ready to work hard, but instead of turning that that uh initiative outward and making a place for themselves, they decided instead to bunch up.

Imagine what they could have accomplished, but instead they chose to disobey.

And we see disobedience to God's commands all around us in the world today.

In fact, we might often see that that God's commands or the ideas that we see in the Bible are somehow restrictive or oppressive, like backwards.

You know, you you've heard it before, people say, why does why why can't the church just stop telling people how to live their lives?

But there's also a sense here, like I said, that that by obeying God, there's a blessing that comes with it.

And I'll just give you a simple example of it that we can identify with today.

But telling the truth to one another is something that God commands us to do, right?

We're commanded to speak the truth and not to lie to one another.

If we choose not to, if we say, you know, that that that's backwards and restrictive and oppressive, and I'm gonna tell whatever I want to tell, what does that do?

That breeds distrust, right?

And so the people in our circle can no longer trust us if they find us lying to them.

And if they don't find us lying to them, if you get away with lies, do you know that this has its toll on you as well?

That uh you start to doubt what other people are telling you is true.

I used to work for a man like this.

He lied all the time, and so he assumed that everybody who worked for him, everybody that he encountered, was always lying to him.

The ability to trust and to be trusted in your community is a blessing, and we can very easily give that up.

Just a simple example, but that's that's the first aspect of this sin here, friends, is disobedience.

The second aspect is something I might call self-creation.

If you look in verse 4, it says, the builders are saying, Let us make a name for ourselves.

For this idea, we have to kind of step back into Genesis 1 and 2, the creation narratives there.

Chapter 1, we see God expressing his authority over the created world, this new world that he had created, and he's naming things.

He's calling this day and this night, and the stars and the heavens and the dry land and the sea and all of this stuff is all being named by God.

It's an expression of his authority.

God created it, he gets to name it.

And if you look in Genesis chapter 2, he starts to share some of this authority with mankind.

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

He has the first man come forward and name all the animals, kind of kind of sharing some of his authority over the created world.

So naming implies authority, and so for these folks to be saying, hey, we're gonna make a name for ourselves, that's pretty direct, uh is flying right in the face of that uh idea of God's authority and taking it onto themselves.

And we see the idea of self-creation in our world all the time.

And I don't wanna I don't want us to misunderstand that because self-expression, right?

We express ourselves in different ways because we're different people, right?

We're all different in this idea of diversity being a beautiful thing and always part of God's plan is good.

But there's a sense in which we can seek other ways to identify ourselves, other ways to find our hope, our security, our identity outside of God, and that's destructive.

Right?

We can we can identify with with things that we would look at and say, yeah, that's obviously bad.

Addiction, right?

You get into addiction to find your hope and to find your your stability in life.

And we can look at that and say, yeah, that's not good.

Pornography, abusive relationships, stuff like this, these are ways that we can kind of try and self-create that are that are negative in our eyes.

But it's also true of things that are that are positive.

Anything that we're putting our hope in ahead of the Lord Jesus is gonna crumble.

It's gonna be a negative thing.

So if you have your identity wrapped up in what kind of education you're gonna get, if you have your identity tied up in what kind of job you'll have, or family, or romantic relationship, any of this stuff, not only is it subverting this natural order whereby, you know, God is the one who creates us, but we're building on a foundation that is sure to crumble.

Right?

All of these things.

If you have a life's ambition and goal that is so far out there, and you work your whole life to get to it, and you get it, it's still not gonna satisfy you in the way that God can.

It's still not gonna have that ability to do it.

It's gonna crumble, it's gonna let us down.

Relationships, all of these things will eventually let us down if we're not finding our hope in the Lord Jesus.

So self-creation, disobedience, and the third aspect is what we what what we might just call trying to take the place of God.

Looking again in verse 4, it says, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its tops in the heavens.

Now, if they just said, hey, we want to build a city and a really tall tower.

If we want to build a city with a beautiful tower, a tower that's that's that's appealing to the eye, or you know, very practical purposes, all of these things, you could argue, you know, they're just they're just creating.

They're just expressing uh the image of God through creating order out of chaos, they're taking the raw materials of creation and they're building something that's useful for them.

But that's not what they said.

That's not what they said.

The idea of trying to build a tower that will reach heaven, this this is very suggestive of the state of their hearts.

Basically saying, we will by our own efforts become like God.

And this reminds us of Genesis 3 in the garden, when the serpent was was tempting the woman to take the forbidden fruit.

And he lies to her, and he says, When you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God.

And so she ate it.

This right here is the same sin.

It's the same sin, but instead of it being on an individual basis, this is an entire community.

So we have community sin here.

And whether it's an individual or a community, it it just doesn't work.

They're not gonna do any better because humanity is never gonna be able to work its way to God.

It just doesn't work.

There's no such thing as kind of a city of man that can reach the way to God.

But we try.

We have this idea.

We we we live in a world where we trade one thing for another, where we work and we're compensated for it.

And so the idea of doing something for God, of of you know, having observances and and ideas that will earn God's favor, it makes sense to us.

Somehow we think we can do business with God.

I'll do this thing, God, I'll give up this thing, I'll give this money, I'll serve in this way, and then I'll be okay with you.

You'll be okay with me.

We'll be able to have fellowship.

But it doesn't work.

And it's not it's not a problem with God, it's a problem with us.

Right?

We're here.

We can't uh we can't justify ourselves, we can never do enough.

That's not how grace works.

You wind up in one of two places in that kind of a system.

Either you're constantly frustrated by the fact that you can never live up to God's perfect standard.

And let me tell you, you can never live up to God's perfect standard.

We see that time and time again.

Or you wind up thinking, well, I may not be perfect, but I'm better than this person, and I'm better than this person, I'm building my way up there, and I'm okay.

And you wind up just puffing yourself up and feeling good about it, but not really making any changes there.

So either we're gonna wind up broken and discouraged, or we're gonna wind up puffed up artificially.

But just like this tower that we're talking about here, we're always gonna fall short.

So those three ideas there, that's our sins, right?

The the direct disobedience, the self-creation, and the effort to become like God.

And they're not really three different sins, if you think about it.

You can sum them all up in a simple way, saying that they're all rebellion against God.

And this is something that we've seen in the book of Genesis, all the way back to the garden, all the way back to chapter three.

Adam and Eve had it.

We saw it with Cain and Abel.

We saw it with Cain's descendants, you know, the song of Lamach and in boasting over this murder of a of a young child.

We saw it in the in the whole world before the flood.

We think, okay, well, that was that was a terrible world.

And the flood took care of all that, so there's no more wickedness.

Well, no, that's not true anymore either.

Because we saw it in the actions of Ham, who was in the ark, came through the flood, and now we're seeing it again here in this tower building.

In all of these cases of rebelling against God, we see God's judgment, but we also see God's mercy.

So, how do we characterize what we see here?

Is this a judgment?

Is this a mercy?

Is it a little of both?

Let's take a look at it.

So, verse five says, and the Lord came down to see the city and the tower.

And that's hilarious, isn't it?

Because you've got these people and they're industrious and they're engineering and they're building and they're doing all this great stuff.

Let's build this tower.

It's so big, it's so high, we've got to be up to God by now.

What does God have to do to see it?

He's got to come down to it, right?

There's no way they're gonna reach him there.

The psalmist writes, Who is like the Lord our God, who's seated on high, who looks far down on the heavens and the earth?

If God has to stoop down so low to see the whole earth, imagine how much more he's got to stoop down just to see this tiny little tower going on here.

But going on to verse six, this is the one that always used to trip me up.

It says, This is only the beginning of what they will do, and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

What does that mean?

What is that about?

I used to look at that and say, you know, is God just saying human progress is a bad thing, right?

We talked about that a little bit with the space missions.

But is that what this is saying?

Is God concerned that mankind will become too smart, too capable, too willing and able to do things, and you know, suddenly they won't need him anymore?

Is that what is going on here?

And I think no.

That's not what it is.

Because mankind, you know, can't outsmart God, can't outstrengthen God, you know, all of these things any more than they could build a tower to reach him.

And the thing that stands out here is that God has in mind not great things, not good things that will not be impossible for them, but bad things.

We have a focused and industrious community of people actively rebelling against God.

The idea seems to be that an act of no act of evil will be beyond their ability, beyond their willingness to do.

Stepping back into ancient history for a minute.

When I was in high school, we had to read a book called Lord of the Flies.

Have you guys read this one?

Great book.

Highly disturbing.

Um if you haven't read it, basically the story is you've got uh these proper British schoolboys who wind up marooned on a desert island, you know, kids, eight to twelve years old kind of thing.

And they're stuck on this island and they kind of working together.

There's no adults to help carry them along there.

So they start off trying to build a life for themselves and trying to set things up, but over time they descend into factions and they start to fear one another and start to really oppress one another.

There's there's scenes of torture, there's scenes of killing.

They wind up lighting the whole island on fire, trying to burn each other out, and it's a really, really disturbing story when you read it, because these are just innocent children in there, and they're uh doing all this terrible stuff.

But if you were reading that book and there was a line in there that said something like, There's no limit now to what they'll be able to do, you wouldn't think, oh, this is this is holding it holding them back, or this is somehow looking at great things that they'll do.

No, there's no act of evil, no act of oppression that will be out of reach for them.

If this is what God had in mind when he said this in verse six, and I think it is, then scattering the people, all the builders, was a judgment, yes, but it was definitely also an act of mercy.

So we've discussed what the builders did wrong, we've discussed how God responded, we've discussed how the judgment is also a mercy.

You know, they get to now go and experience the grandeur of creation, all this limitless potential, and they get to uh avoid falling into this oppressive kind of assembly there.

And it's a great story.

But I think it's more than just a story for us.

We've already kind of looked at the fact that the sins that we see.

In the builders here, we also see in our modern world, we see in ourselves.

And so the fact that we can connect so readily with the builders here tells us that this is not just a simple story.

There's more to it.

So what do we see?

If we want to sum this up a little bit and tie it to ourselves, we have, each of us, this longing for significance.

To be able to do things that are important, to make a name for ourselves, to make a lasting impression on the world, to be thought well of, to be respected.

Yeah, we've talked about how building an idea, an identity outside of the work of the Lord Jesus will come to nothing, just like this building project.

But we still have that desire, we still have that longing for significance.

So how can we find that?

What does the Bible point us to as a better way of expressing what the builders wanted here?

Significance.

We can find it in Christ.

And I say that because doing the Lord's work, being involved in Him, serving as His His messenger, as His emissary, as His servant here on earth, is more significant than anything we could ever hope to do.

And it's not based on popularity or respect that can come quickly and go even more quickly.

I could be standing up here this morning going, I hope every one of you thinks how smart and how intelligent and how wise I am in teaching you this stuff.

And if I built my identity on that, I'd be uh feeling real good sometimes and feeling really bad sometimes.

My my sense of self would be would be very shaky.

But if I if I devote myself to what God thinks of me, if that's where I'm finding my sense of self, that's where I find my significance.

Second, we see the search for meaning.

The builders wanted a tower with its top in the heavens.

The idea of building a life that rises up to meet God, that's a theme in so many world religions, so many belief structures out there that, you know, you take this enlightened path or you carry out these rituals or you live a certain way and you'll be acceptable to God.

And we see that that's just not how the Bible works.

You'll even find Christians who say, yes, well, you know, grace is fine, but you have to do more.

You have to you have to do more for God to really like you.

And it's just, it's false.

So, like I said before, no matter how well-intentioned we are, no matter how devout, we can't hope to reach God by human effort.

We can't lift ourselves up, we can't build a city of man that reaches to God.

But you want to know how it works?

It works the other way.

God coming down, right?

We saw this in the person of Jesus Christ, who looked upon our inability to reach up to God and instead came down to reach us.

That's the gospel.

That's that's the truth right there.

If we want to contrast these two ideas just a little bit differently here, can look at the book of Revelation, the very end of the Bible, right?

We're in the beginning, we're in the very early part of the Bible here.

But this idea carries all the way through the Bible.

All the way to the end, we see this figurative city of man.

Listen to these words.

It says, Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, Come out of her, right?

Come out of the city of man.

Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues, for her sins are heaped as high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.

Think about those words in light of our passage this morning.

We have people trying to build a tower to reach to God, and they can't come close.

But they can build sin that reaches to God, that reaches up that high.

And that's not a legacy anybody would hope to leave behind.

That's not great things, that's not good things.

Now listen to how the same book, a few chapters later, it talks about the city of God.

It says, And I saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, and I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.

He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.

You don't see people reaching up and striving to reach God.

You see God bringing his presence, coming down to live with man, to dwell with man.

And I just want to say, we talked about diversity and the beauty of all the different cultures and all the different races and all of this.

Somebody could look at the story that we were reading this morning and say, well, God wants all the races to be separate.

God wants us all to be apart from one another, that there's there's if there's truly beauty in diversity, then we shouldn't be together.

But that's not what we see here in the city of God.

All peoples, all tribes, all nations, all tongues coming together with that diversity still expressed, not that they're coming together to be all the same, but that diversity filling out the city of God.

So if you're listening today and you're a follower of Jesus, your citizenship is in the city of God.

It's not in the city of man, but it's so easy for us, living in this world, living in this broken and sinful place, to kind of go native, right?

I hope this passage this morning is revealing to us, each of us, where we need to let God transform our thinking.

You know, am I looking for significance in the wrong places?

Am I trying to find meaning in my life in the wrong ways?

Am I trying to work or earn my way to God?

Let this passage kind of transform us there and shake us up.

If you're not yet trusting Jesus as Lord of your life, do you see how this city of man just doesn't work?

We try to build great things, but instead we're just piling up sin, selfishness, glory seeking, false hopes.

Let me encourage you this morning if you're not yet trusting Jesus, he is the way, he is the truth, and he is the life.

He came to seek and save the lost, so you can stop building your tower.

And finally, to the church as a whole, let's live out what we are called to be.

We're the embassy of the city of God.

Jesus compared his followers to a city on a hill, something that isn't hidden away, but shines brightly in a dark world.

That's what we're meant to be.

We're meant to be a place of hope and refuge, a place not built on efforts and goodness and greatness found in ourselves, but resting in the loving character of a holy God.

Let's pray.

Thank you that you chose to come to us, to make your dwelling place among man, so that we might approach you.

Not that we can come to you on our own merits or in our own strength by our own efforts, Lord.

But because you have so chosen to reach out to us.

Thank you.

I pray, Lord, that as we as we reflect on this passage, that uh you would remind us and show us the ways that that we do need to change our thinking.

We need to change our approach to life.

I thank you for your word.

We pray this in Jesus' name.

Amen.