God's World Created: Babel

Hello and welcome to the Kalamazoo Church of Christ podcast.

Thank you so much for listening.

We're Startup Church.

We just planted in September, 2020 and at the Kalamazoo church, we believe that Christianity is done best when it is done together.

And so if you live in the Kalamazoo area, we would love to connect, be it coming to a Sunday service, one of our small groups, or even just grabbing coffee with a member to learn more.

You can visit kalamazoo.church in order to do that.

We pray that you are inspired by what you hear today.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

See I, for the communion, I brought the phone up.

Now we got the computer, so we know we're, we're getting serious.

Um, well, yeah, getting down to business.

Good morning church.

Again.

Um, I want to give just a happy update from the last time I spoke.

Last time I spoke.

This is an obvious one.

Last time I spoke, I had no beard.

Happy to say today that there's a beard now that has grown back.

I feel way much more confident up here.

Um, it was, it was a very vulnerable last time, so I'm really happy.

Um, yeah, as you guys were coming in today, you guys probably realized it was a little hectic, right?

It was a little hectic out there.

Um, I have this marathon going around, and so I, for Sundays right now, so I don't have a car, which is probably going to change tomorrow, hopefully, fingers crossed.

Um, but so I've been walking on Sundays at church.

I just, I really love it.

It's, it's a good way for obviously me to get some good walking in.

It's really healthy.

I just love doing it.

Obviously the walk was, you know, every turn I made was exactly where the marathon was.

I was like, all right, that's there, that's there, that's there.

And I shared this a little bit with Alec right before church.

I was like, I just, when I'm looking at people who run marathons, I don't, I feel so distant, like it feels like an alien thing to me.

I'm like, you're running at, you probably started this at seven o'clock in the morning on a Sunday for fun.

I don't understand you.

You and I are so apart, like the way that we understand each other couldn't be on different sides of the world.

Right?

I'm just like, no, I like the only way that I like to, you know, run or get that intense exercise if I'm playing like basketball, it's the only way.

But it's just so funny as I was walking, I was like, well, isn't that perfect for today's lesson?

Right?

Because today we're speaking about Babel, the Tower of Babel.

And we'll dig into it more about like, what does it mean, what happened and the events around it.

It has a lot to do about language, communication.

It's at the core of everything we do, right?

You know, the Bible and more specifically, the section of Genesis that we've been learning, the world created, right?

That's kind of the title of the last seven lessons that we've done in our thread series.

You know, they've been focusing on how God's world was created and started with the voice of God, right?

He spoke the world into existence.

He spoke us into existence, right?

And here, the story is going to end with the power of language.

Okay.

You know, language, words, tongues, and communication have always been at the forefront of the most important parts of our lives, as well as the biblical narrative.

You can go to the next slide there, Jerry.

And we can look at many situations where our communication has been a blessing, right?

But there are also many situations where our language and communication is at the root of a lot of our problems.

And that is something, if we reflect on God's world created, it's been an ongoing focal point since the beginning of time.

So our issues of communication are not new or special.

They've been happening ever since the beginning of time.

Think about the last lesson we just had.

God specifically spoke through Noah, right?

We look at the flood.

If it wasn't for his communication to Noah, there would have been no way for him to build an ark, right?

That was something that no one had built anything like this before.

It needed communication.

There needed to be strict specifics on how to build it.

Look before that.

Think about the fall of mankind.

It was the serpent's power of persuasion through language that helped plant seeds of doubt, pride, and wanting to be lords of our own lives.

We can easily bridge these ups and downs of our lives and the ups and downs of God's creation and how communication or language, I'll use those terms kind of interchangeably today, they're at the core of both.

So think about this.

We're digging into this.

Like for our lives, think about how many issues or important moments hinge on language or communication.

Think about work, right?

Even if it's not like, you know, face-to-face, it's kind of through email now, more and more, right?

I know like Cal works, you know, away from his actual workplace.

If you didn't have email, you couldn't do what you do now.

Or if it wasn't for Zoom or all these online things, right?

Work is so important.

You would get nothing done.

Our world would be in a shambles if it wasn't for communication for our jobs.

Getting a little personal about marriage.

I cannot speak from a personal experience here, but just from a viewpoint, just as, yeah, it has important moments, issues, anything in between, it hinges on communication, right?

You guys could probably think like how many times, especially, I'll just go to the men part here, right?

How many times have you been in trouble because you didn't communicate something?

You, yeah, there's a lot.

It's a lot, right?

You know, parenting, you know, all right?

Parenting, it gets deeper, right?

How many things aren't communicated between sons and daughters and fathers and mothers, right?

That anger, the emotions, that's how I felt, right?

When I was younger and my mom was like, do it because I say it, I'm like, that's not a good excuse.

Like, that makes me so angry because in my mind, I'm not being communicated with.

I'm not, you know, there's no dialogue.

But it happens.

So, you know, we fall in these, you know, family dynamics that are hard.

Think of the big picture.

Think of society, social media.

Everything is through language communication.

But the way we do it seems more and more like we're trying really hard to find the right and wrong words for all situations.

And language is becoming and has been a big issue and it's changing all the time of what we're supposed to say, how we're supposed to say it, and the tone we say it in.

And as you can see here on the board here, the Bible is constantly telling us how important language is.

Right?

This hasn't been something that is like brand new.

It should not be a brand new concept, especially biblically.

If you've read the Bible and parts of the Bible, it has always been an important subject.

Right?

Think about Genesis 1-3, the start here.

God created it with His voice.

Going back that God created this world with His voice.

Our voice matters.

I want to list off just a few here and their importance.

And this is something for you to take on, write down, so you can look at this later.

It's not something we'll dig in deep.

It's just a point to say, hey, it's important.

You know, Proverbs 10-19, right?

Talks about how our tongues can multiply sin.

Think about Proverbs 18-21.

The tongue has the power of life and death.

Will such power.

Matthew 12-37, our words will quit us as well as condemn us.

This is the power of our words.

So as you think about that, put yourself in that mindset.

Let's get into the story of Babel.

Genesis 11, 1-9.

Now the whole world has one language and a common speech.

As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.

They used brick instead of stone and tar and mortar.

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 earth.

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

The Lord said, if as one people speak in the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan will do will be impossible for them.

Come let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.

So the Lord scoured them from there over all the earth and they stopped building the city.

That is why it was called Babel, because it was where the Lord confused the language of the whole world.

From there, the Lord scouted them over the face of the whole earth.

This is a unique passage in our relationship with God.

Please feel free to look over this as I'm speaking too.

It's really, really important.

I have just a rhetorical question.

How does this make you feel about God?

How does this make you feel about God?

From an outside view, just reading it straight down, it kind of seems like God is working against the success of humanity.

Maybe like, we're going to build this great tower where all together we're speaking the same language, we're best friends kind of thing.

We're doing it.

God tore that up.

Why is that?

You know, think of all the hardships that come from the world still being divided linguistically to this day.

Something that I'm really appreciative of when we look at this is kind of the lessons that have gone beforehand.

So let's take what we've been learning the last few weeks about being human, human limitations, and the rest, and let's apply it to what we're learning right now.

There are indeed problems that spring from speaking different languages.

I know I barely have English down.

I've lived with it for 27 years, and there's times where I say things and I'm like, I don't think that was a word.

I'm rolling with it.

And like, that doesn't make sense, whatever.

I have troubles with my own language, and they're like, hey, you want to learn Spanish?

I'm like, I can't.

I barely know how to speak my own, right?

I have troubles with this, right?

But history has shown that there are even greater problems when we all speak the same language, but it's not the language of Christ.

You can go to the next slide here.

Think about empires.

Think about empires.

The Roman Empire, the Nazi Germany Reich, or if those are just a little too dark, think about the Star Wars Empire.

I'm really glad me and Spencer talked about Star Wars today, or not Spencer, Alec, my bad.

Close enough.

But wait, Star Wars, right?

Think about that empire, the four, five, and six, the originals, right?

Think about the empire.

That's the kind of thing that can happen when everyone speaks the same language.

There's no room for dissent.

There are propaganda campaigns that control speech.

Control is not just about language.

The Bible account begins by saying the earth had one language and the same words.

When a group of people all use the same words, it is very powerful, but can also quickly lead to a lot of trouble.

And the reason this is, and I'll dig into this, is like humans have always had their hand in taking control, right?

A couple of weeks ago, Alec's lesson powerfully pointed out what truly happened at the fall of man.

It was seeing God's purpose for our own lives and saying, no, I want God's rule.

I want God's purpose.

I don't like the purpose God gave me.

And I think it's so easy to think that if we had the same language and the same commonalities that we would all just, you know, hold hands and, you know, skip down the yellow brick road.

It's not how we are.

It's not our nature.

You know, we often forget that humans are more often a part of the dirt than the divine.

You know, we seek things of this earth rather than seeking what is God.

And Babel was no different.

I think from an outside perspective, looking in, it's like all these people are just trying to have this thing together.

But we know what happens to us as sinful humans when we try to do things in one commonality.

We usually do it for our own pride, our own control.

It usually ends up in destruction and a lot of sin.

Babel was more than a tower.

It seems to coincide with the first attempt at an empire in our world.

God is decidedly anti-empire.

And here's where we dig into what the slide says, right?

Empires devalue humanity.

People are seen as cogs in a system.

Empire pushes past human limitations.

It's all about growth and the success and the glory of the empire, right?

Think of the three options, like all of it was about the pursuing of domination and progress or something that was in the name of, you know, quote, unquote, progress.

Didn't matter what cost it took to grow those empires.

Empire is anti-rest.

Once again, it's growth, it's strength.

Empire is anti-diversity.

Same language, same words, uniforms, the way that we talk, what we say.

Empires weeds out creativity.

God is all about diversity.

You know, as a church, we can look at this and we want to build something amazing.

I hope that's in our nature or that's what we're trying to do.

We're trying to do it on a day-to-day basis.

I think sometimes we see some of these characteristics and want to infuse them in the church, right?

You hear growth and success.

Growth and success aren't bad, right?

We want this room to be bigger.

We want it to succeed.

The ways that we do it, though, tying back to the ways that the humans tried to build Babel, tried to connect with God, it's usually from our own hands, from our own control rather than understanding how God wants to do it, how God wants to build the church, not how we want to build the church.

But if we have to build a church that is not an empire, we have to take an anti-Babel approach.

Go to the next slide here.

What does it look like to build a growing, healthy church that is anti-Babel?

Well, it's the opposite of the things we just listed.

Let's look at it.

It's a direct correlation or they directly oppose each other.

People's humanity is valued, right?

We are sinners.

We need healing and saving all the time.

We are not perfect.

People's limitations are respected.

We are called to the standard of Christ, but given heaps of grace.

I think everyone here can look at the times that someone has shown them love when they deserve to probably be slapped across the head.

I know I can.

There's been times where I've really messed up and people's love covers my limitations.

Rest is valued, right?

It's about His work, not our work.

Remember the creation.

Jesus or God took specific time to rest on the seventh day.

What's so cool about that?

God did not need to rest.

It's God.

He could do whatever He wants, but He needed to teach us how to rest, right?

So He specifically put it in how we need to rest in our day-to-day life.

Diversity is valued.

Differentness is honored.

People of different perspectives, ideas flourish, especially when it's under the unification of Christ and not man.

Man, this sounds amazing, doesn't it?

You look at these, you're like, that's cool.

That's what my heart wants.

That's what our church wants.

Man, it'd be so cool if we had an example of this.

Acts 2 is a really good example of this.

Let's take a look at Acts 2.

Acts chapter 2 is a hugely significant chapter in the Bible.

Acts 2 · chapter mention

We know it well.

It's the first time that the gospel is ever preached and people are saved by believing, repenting, and being baptized.

3,000 are added to the church on that first day.

But here's the thing.

That's only the second half of that chapter.

It's the one we use the most, I think, in our group of churches because it's so important.

It's talking about the building of the church the first time.

But we do tend to breeze over the first half of Acts 2.

God is building His church, and He is building it in a decidedly anti-emperor way.

So let's dig into this.

It's not on here, but it's Acts 2, verses 1 through 21.

Acts 2:1–21

I'm going to read it out loud.

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place.

Suddenly, a sound like a blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting.

They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them.

All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

Now they were staying in Jerusalem, God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven.

When they heard this sound, a crowd came in bewilderment because each one of them, their own language being spoken.

Utterly amazed, they asked, Aren't all of these who are speaking Galileans?

Then how is it each of us hears them in our native language?

Parthians, Medes, and the Ammonites, residents from Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontius in Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia in Egypt, and the parts of Libya near Cyrene, visitors of Rome, both Jews and converted to Judaism, Cretans, and Arabs.

We hear them declaring the words of God in our own tongues.

Amazed and perplexed, they asked one another, What does this mean?

Some however made fun of them and said, They've had too much wine.

Then Peter stood up with the eleven, raised his voice, and addressed the crowd, Fellow Jews and all who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you.

Listen carefully to what I say.

These people are not drunk as you suppose.

It's only nine in the morning.

No, this is what is spoken by the prophet Joel.

In the last day, God says, I will pour out my spirit on all people.

Your sons and daughters will prophesy.

Your young men will see vision and your old men will dream dreams.

Even on my servants, both men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days and they will prophesy.

I will show wonders in the heavens above and signs on the earth below, blood and fire and billows of smoke.

The sun will turn to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord.

And everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

We get the look here.

We know what happened at Pentecost.

We know about the saving.

We know about the 3000.

And we count ourselves as a part of this church that began that day, the beginning of church.

But have we considered how it happened?

Like the Babel account, it begins with language, such a core part of everything we do.

But instead of everyone speaking the same language and being the same common tongue, after all, that's how things get done in empires, right?

Same language.

God makes sure that everyone hears the gospel in their own language.

Luke takes great care to point this out.

He even names all the places where people are from and where they will scatter to after the festival is over.

Instead of having everyone hear the gospel in one language, diversity is built in from the start.

The church is multilingual and multicultural on day one.

It's not just language diversity.

They did speak different languages, but the prophecy of Joel fulfilled in Acts 2 talks about old men and women dreaming dreams and young seeing visions.

The people represented had distinct cultures, age groups, men and women alike from three different continents.

They were not asked to learn the language or lingo of Christ.

They were not asked to assimilate into a one culture to the Judaic culture.

The gospel came to them and went home with them.

That's how God builds his church.

It's the exact opposite from Babel.

So let's look, and this is the same thing here, becoming anti-Babel churches, right?

We get to look at Acts 2.

It's convicting, right?

Looking at it like, whoo, it's convicting, it fires you up, it kind of does everything in between.

So what can we do to honor the Spirit's work on the first day of church and build without building empires?

First of all, we need to expand our view of Acts 2.

We often go to the end of the chapter and look at how they devoted themselves and they were together and the Lord added to their number, but we can't forget that the great diversity built into that community.

And this is where the tension lies.

And we must follow the Spirit as we build.

How can we have tight communities that are also very diverse and value one another's differences?

It's one of those classic statements, easier said than done.

It's like, oh, let's do it.

Well, we have a lot of emotions or we grew up different ways.

We have different ways of doing things and it doesn't make things easy, but also makes them way more worth it in the end.

One of my favorite stories about conversion that I think highlights this church diversity is the current campus minister in Denver, Rick Ramon, is one of the guys who trained me up.

And one of the reasons that he was so intrigued to study the Bible, he was a guy that didn't really want to study, came out to a campus midweek and something that caught his eye and made him think that, wow, something's different, was two guys that did the welcome, kind of how Paul did our welcome today.

It was Steve Medberry, so I wasn't there at the time, but I know the guys really well, Steve Medberry and Jamel Compton.

Jamel grew up in Montbello, which is one of the more dangerous crime, you know, statistic areas, you know, place that, you know, predominantly black.

Steve is redneck, as they get, wears camo all the time.

And these two men are up here talking about how great God is together.

Isn't that just, isn't that Acts 2, right?

Isn't that what we were looking for?

And that moment sparked Rick's interest to be like, I think something's different going on here.

It made him want to study the Bible, right?

That's the type of community, men who come from way different backgrounds, men and women who come from different backgrounds that in no other situation would be standing up here talking about anything together.

But God is so much more powerful than the races and the social economic and languages that barrier and divide us, right?

There is an archetype.

God shows us the path, and it's the very next thing he does in Genesis, kind of giving us a precursor to what we're going to be learning.

God's answer to Babel is family.

God's answer to Babel, his answer to an anti-Babel church is family.

This is a preview for our next series, God's People Verb.

But the very next thing we see after God's frustrated and scatters the empire and sends everyone off to their own nations, is that he fully invests into one family and giving them an impossible promise.

It's Genesis 17.4, once again, it's not up here, but Genesis 17.4, this is when he's talking to Abraham, and we will get into this a lot more in the upcoming weeks.

As for me, this is my covenant with you, you will be father of many nations.

It's impossible for one family, one person, to become a multitude of nations.

That's just genetics.

That's just the way it works, right?

All the descendants of Abraham are just the descendants of Abraham.

One family.

One nation.

Yet, God makes a promise that seems impossible.

But it seems impossible from our eyes, not from God's eyes.

And it ties back to everything we've looked at in God's world created.

God understands what he is doing.

His purpose for us has always been clear.

And as we look at every moment that God has created, humankind has done everything to try and bring our limitations into the fold.

When it comes to building an anti-Babel church, we want to do it our way, but God is so clear on how we build it, right?

The family.

And it's at the heart of these things.

It's at the heart of us wanting to grow our church.

It's at the heart of us wanting to help people be saved.

At the heart of making a difference in our community.

The key, I feel this really personally, I love this statement, the key is not an amazing program or getting everyone on the exact same page or some catchy phrase to get us all on board for the next, you know, lesson or year or, you know, whatever it is.

It's this idea of family.

God works with families to accomplish the impossible, no matter how big the group is.

If it feels like family, it will be blessed.

And if it feels like an empire, it will be cursed and scattered.

But something important for us to know about family, it isn't just a word or a comfortable feeling that we get.

Family is intentionality.

Family is setting up time with someone because you want to be a part of their lives.

Or it's something like doing Friday Tulips for anyone who wants to come.

Because we want to have great community, we want to build memories together so that we tie together, especially when the hard times come.

Because if we're not with each other, if we're not creating tight memories, it's easy to get lost.

It's easy to separate.

Right.

Family isn't a vague statement that we can make without any intentionality behind it.

I think it's important.

It's a conversation me and Jared had at one point, right?

It's like family is it's a very loose term.

It's a great term.

We use it because we want to fill that connection.

But I know growing in campus, a lot of times, especially after COVID, it's like we need to build family.

We need to build family.

What does that mean?

Right.

Like there's nothing behind it.

That's why I think behind it, intentionality.

I want to build family.

Well, what does that mean?

How do you do that?

Right.

You spend time with each other.

You go out and you make specific times to hang out, have talks.

It could be fun.

It could be spiritual.

Right.

The idea, like go and have a quiet time with someone that's building family.

But the reason is because you want each other to grow in God.

You want to make sure that you are, you know, stay connected to the Bible as well as the person right next to you.

Right.

That is family.

Yeah.

And something super important about it is it's not going to happen by osmosis.

It's not going to just overwhelm you in one day.

It's like I created family or someone did it for me.

Initiate with others and in the nicest way possible.

Don't look for excuses.

Right.

Like it's so easy.

But why didn't me?

It was time and X, Y, Z.

Don't look for excuses.

Don't wait for someone to initiate with you.

Go after it.

Go create the anti-bible church.

You do it.

I think often these lessons create time.

To reflect on the vision for our church in the end, what it should look like, and more importantly, how it can reflect to God more and more.

It can be easy to take these moments and challenges that we have and think of them as not accomplished.

Think of them as something that's like we're here in the mountains up here.

The preacher just told me I had to go do it.

Right.

We have to climb in.

It looks long and tall.

But I want to end kind of today with rather of encouragement for the good that we are already doing as a church.

You know, I've been reflecting a lot on my time in Kalamazoo and we had a very impactful gratitude midweek this last week that Jaron led.

And it's part of the reason it made me think about what I've learned in the nine months.

It's already been nine months that I've been here.

And what stuck out to me about Kalamazoo Church of Christ, and to put it plainly, is that I think we are truly trying to build an anti-baptist church.

Right.

One that's rooted in our family.

And I think being a small church really makes that, I want to say easy, but it makes it clear to do.

Everyone here, we can meet and someone has a big enough house, we can all meet in it.

That's a unique opportunity that most churches will never have.

Right.

That's awesome.

Right.

We could all, you know, and we can like, half of us could like go do yard work for someone or whatever it is like we can connect, we can get together, we can make it very intentional.

And.

Like, I want us to know that this is good.

Like, I don't want us to lose, like, the sight of this.

I think you can very much grow weary in doing the good that we're supposed to do.

And not understand just like how awesome it is in the moment.

I love our little, big impact we have on the kingdom of God.

Wow.

Our town might be a dot on a big map, but everyone's soul here is important in the kingdom of God.

Whether it's the ever growing chaos the kids bring, to the intentional prayer requests that we post in our churchwide groupmeet, we are building an intentional church.

It won't look perfect or pretty at times.

Actually, most of the time it won't look pretty.

But God will bless people who fight for this type of anti-babble mindset.

Let me pray for the end of our lesson.

Dear God, I'm so grateful.

I'm so grateful that you scattered us.

It's a weird statement.

I just, you know, I have never really thought of that before this week.

I'm grateful that I can look across the room and I know that someone is here from a whole different side of the continent, a different culture.

I'm so grateful that not everyone is like me.

That'd be really scary.

And I think it'd be really bland, it'd be really boring.

I'm just so grateful that we have such diversity in this group.

And we're trying to build that.

Doesn't mean we're going to be perfect in it all the time, God, but I'm so grateful that you showed us the way, that you showed us Acts 2, that you showed us what it looks like to be multicultural, to go and spread the good news of your son to everywhere we go, God.

So let us take that.

Let us be encouraged that we are building an anti-babble church and we don't lose sight of all the good that you've done in our lives.

And we remember to do it with careful language and communication.

And we just try to do it in your name and not ours.

Yes, I pray.

Amen.

Amen.

With that, I think that we're done.

Once again, go get your crazy children if you have them.

Thank you so much for listening to the Kalamazoo Church of Christ podcast.

If you're in the Kalamazoo area, we'd love to get connected.

Please go to kalamazoo.church and fill in your information to come to a Sunday service or any other event that we have going on.

In any case, you'll be hearing from us next week.