Unity in Babel

I’m calling this season in the life of our church “Formation Fall”, a time when my hope is to serve you by encouraging and equipping and challenging this congregation to seek to be formed by God. To grow in wisdom and faith and character by participating in the process of spiritual formation that God desires for us. But now, O Lord, You are our Father; we are the clay, and You our potter; and all we are the work of Your hand” writes the prophet Isaiah. God seeks to shape and form His people.

Our world is often overwhelming, discouraging, frustrating, and uncertain. What will allow us to navigate that with joy and peace and hope? Not professing to be a Christian. Not regular church attendance. Not adhering to the right set of rules. These can be valuable, but only in the service of a real desire to know God and be formed such that we grow to resemble Jesus Christ.

As we’ve been working through the book of Genesis so far we’ve considered a few things that are foundational to understanding ourselves and what God intended for His creation.

One is recognizing our incredible value as those created in the image of God, and also taking up the calling of God’s images, which is to rule over the world and help it thrive.

And last week we explored why that so often goes wrong, which is that we rebel against ruling God’s way. We are continually tempted to decide what is good and evil for ourselves rather than looking to what God has revealed to be right.

“I can do what I want” is cry of our culture, while Jesus says “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven…”

That’s how far we’ve gotten by looking at Genesis 1 and 3 so far. And I’ve been encouraging everyone to try to read the book of Genesis over the next few weeks. It will add to your understanding of some of what we’re learning here, but it also helps establish the habit of regularly engaging with the Bible.

This, along with prayer, are essential ingredients for spiritual formation. How else will you know the will of your Father who is in heaven, and find the strength to do it?

Today I’ll jump ahead a little bit into the book of Genesis with an emphasis on one part of God’s will for His creation: unity.

The unity of humanity, of families and tribes, and ultimately, of the Church. We are called to recognize the unity that God has created, and fight and forgive to restore it in our homes, churches, and communities.

Let’s get into God’s Word with today’s passage. Genesis 11, verses 1:9. Our Father who is in heaven, whose will we desire to know and do, reveal to us the truths so relevant for today found in these ancient words preserved for us, and may your Holy Spirit work them into our hearts and minds for our good. Amen.

1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.

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

3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.

4 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.”

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

6 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.

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

8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.

9 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.

One of the benefits of reading the Bible, or a book of the Bible, through from the beginning is it can help us make sense of passages that otherwise wouldn’t make much sense without context.

This passage, if you just jump into it with no other information, makes God seem like a big jerk.

You have a story of how all of humanity had one language and founded a city together, developed this advanced brick-making technology, and decided to work together to build this really ambitious project – a very tall tower. And God says “When they work together they can do anything – I had better put a stop to this!” and scrambles their languages and forces them to scatter.

Is God against unity and progress? What’s going on?

Time to supply some context. First, from Genesis 1-11 there are a couple of important themes.

One theme is rebellion. There are three stories of humanity rebelling against God before the story of the great flood, starting with Genesis 3 which we read last week, and three more rebellion stories after the flood. This is the last of them.

Another theme is unity. It comes up first in Genesis 2, referencing the unity of marriage between a man and woman, who will then join with other families to form tribes and nations as they multiply and fill the earth according to God’s command. They are supposed to become distinct groups as they scatter and subdue the earth in different places, while retaining a sense of unity as God’s image bearers.

In Genesis 3 this unity is damaged because of Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God, and one of the consequences is a disruption in the relationship between man and woman – a power imbalance is part of the curse of the fall – “he will rule over you” God says to Eve.

Things get worse in Genesis 4 – there’s no greater destroyer of unity than violence. Cain, out of jealousy, murders his brother Abel. Some of Caine’s descendants do even worse. Things get so bad that God washes away the blood of all of this human violence with a great flood.

But the flood doesn’t solve the problem – rebellion and disunity immediately return. One of Noah’s sons, Ham, greatly dishonours his father and throws the family into disarray – the details of which are a bit of a riddle, but the effect repeats the pattern of rebellion that harms unity.

So, we have rebellion against God, unity that gives way to violence, a starting over with the flood, and the same problems begin again.

Now Genesis 10 and 11 come in, and they aren’t in chronological order. If you’ve been reading through Genesis and got to chapter 10, you probably skimmed it and though it was kind of boring – which is understandable.

Genesis 10 is a genealogy of Noah’s family. But Bible nerds find this chapter fascinating, because all the sons and grandsons of Noah correspond to different people groups around the Mediterranean and Middle East – Italy, Greece, Egypt, Assyria, and so on.

It’s an origin story for the different nations of the known world with Hebrew poetic flourishes. And, unlike some other tribes and nations who believed that they were specially created by the gods and superior to other peoples, this account clearly establishes that all tribes and nations and people groups come from a common origin – they are all created in the image of God and share a common human bond.

Most people take this for granted today, with our understanding of history and anthropology and genetics, but this was not how most ancient peoples saw it – this is a remarkable thing.

But Genesis 10 and this “Table of the Nations” creates a question – how did humanity go from starting over with one family to being spread across the world in many people groups with many languages? Genesis 11 offers some answer to that question. It’s a flashback of sorts.

It tells a story of a group of people arriving at the plain in Shinar – this would be the flood plains of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, also known as the cradle of civilization where the first human cities appeared. And they also form a city. All of the people who founded cities in the Genesis narrative so far, by the way, have been violent. Their cities produced some good things, like music, or technology, but strife and violence also grew from them, they are the places where human unity unravels.

The pattern repeats again here. By gathering together in one people group with one language and one way of thinking this city develops technology to make bricks and wants to use them to create a tower to the heavens. Why? “so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the earth.”

There are several issues here. First, this tower is more than a tower, the implication here is that it is also a temple, like the Ziggurats built in this area in ancient times, with staircases meant to connect heaven to earth. There is a pride in this pursuit – the people thought they could join heaven and earth and be the gods.

Their form of unity is also a problem, not because unity is bad, but because they are trying to centre everything around their people group and their city. They want to dominate the region, there is a sense that they are declaring “this city and the way it is arranged is the will of God and all cities and people should be like us…”

This helps us understand God’s statement “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.” That’s not a positive, God isn’t concerned that they might cure cancer, or they might travel to the stars, because nothing is impossible! It’s not meant that way, it’s about how much human sin and evil can be magnified by a unified group of people determined to elevate themselves above others.

An overused example of this would be Nazi Germany which declared the Aryan race to be superior and deserving of ruling over everyone else. In their unity they developed impressive technology and showed remarkable skill in conquest. That’s the kind of thing God wants to disrupt on the plain of Shinar.

And so God confuses their language so they cannot continue down the this kind of path, and the very thing that they were trying to avoid with their tower-building happens to them – they are scattered.

Finally, from the word play and location and history it’s clear that Babel represents Babylon, the enemy of Israel who caused them tremendous destruction and subjugation, so we’re pretty safe in assuming God is in the right by opposing their efforts!

Genesis has shown us a couple of different occasions where humans strive for something good, but  they go about it in the wrong way and ruin everything. It was good for Adam and Eve to desire wisdom, but they should have learned it from God instead of disobeying His one command to try to seize it for themselves and gain the ability to define good and evil.

It is also good to seek unity – God greatly desires that His created people be unified. But in Babel one particular group unified to thumb their nose at God and dominate their neighbours rather than seeking peace with others and recognizing their status as fellow humans.

That may have been a little more Bible trivia than you were all up for – if you need to shake your head or take a deep breath or stretch a little now is a good time as I transition. I just don’t know how to summarize that a lot faster without losing some pretty important information along the way.

Let’s continue to think about unity. God’s desire in Genesis seems to have been for humanity to be diverse, forming distinct groups as they spread out, while remaining united – recognizing their shared humanity under God’s rule and living at peace with one another.

This is not something humanity has been good at. War and distrust and prejudice and racism have been the norm in history, not the exception.

In our modern world we have made certain strides in places to promote equality, which greatly contributes to unity. But the technology that we originally thought would help bring unity may be doing more harm than good. Many people now live in a digital Babel – social media and internet algorithms help them avoid contact with any person or idea they disagree with and cause them to grow more extreme in their own little bubble.

Meanwhile, we are failing to engage in the right kind of unity. Marriage is often not viewed very positively, far too many of those unions break apart, and the ripple effects are enormous.

We talk about today’s loneliness epidemic – adults have very few friends, dating has become almost like online shopping controlled by apps, and many institutions – including some churches – get torn apart by division over all sorts of things, but increasingly by politics as it replaces religion at the centre of many people’s lives.

It's pretty clear that we can’t do this ourselves. Humanity has had thousands of years to try to work toward greater unity and it’s been two steps forward and two or three steps back.

We figure out how to bridge one divide only to create another, we create systems that encourage peace but become complacent and things slip back into conflict and war. Families always find ways and reasons to splinter and disown and blame and separate.

What’s the answer to this failure of unity – our inability to live as one even though we are many? The Bible’s answer is the Church and the Spirit.

The Church entered the world at a time when the Roman Empire dominated much of the world and believed in its superior ways much like Babylon once did. But this Babel-like unity was transformed by a different kind of unity – the unity of the early Church. In obedience to Jesus’s commands and following their understanding of the scriptures the Church had this radical idea that there were no second-class citizens, that Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free should all be able to co-exist in community, living and worshiping together.

The apostle Paul wrote to the churches telling them that each person was part of one body – the body of Christ. They were many parts with different gifts and perspectives and roles, but they were part of the whole and equally important to the health of the body.

Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. 4 There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to one hope when you were called; 5 one Lord, one faith, one baptism; 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.

So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, 12 to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up 13 until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.

Jesus’ prayer for those who would follow Him went: I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— 23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Is the church’s track-record in this across the centuries great? No. All the things that destroy unity – violence, war, racism, exploitation, and so on have afflicted the Church and sometimes continue to do so.

But the Church also has the distinction of having spread to virtually every part of the world such that Jesus is worshiped in nearly every language and the gospel has been received and understand in every culture. The Church is the most universal entity the world has ever seen. We have brothers and sisters everywhere, and that is what they are. We are united to them, not just in our common humanity, created in the image of God, but by our shared faith in Jesus which makes us siblings with Him and each other.

Belonging to the Church is one of the ways disciples of Jesus are formed. Because it isn’t easy for us – sinful people in a fallen world – to choose to unite and remain united with people who may be very different from us. Who may disagree with us on things we consider important. Who irritate and frustrate us at times.

It requires maturity and grace and other Christ-like qualities to walk into your church, show love to the person who argued against you at the last business meeting, warmly greet the person who hurt your feelings with some poorly chosen words last week, or try to learn from the sermon from the pastor who messes things up and doesn’t do things the way you think he or she should.

But doing these things, and similar things, is part of how we grow into the people God would have us be, and one way we help the Church to be the hope of the world. As our world becomes more disconnected and Babel-like, wouldn’t it be great if there were all of these diverse communities of people around who both practice and preach the words we prayed over last Sunday from Colossians 3?

Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. 13 Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14 And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.

The story of Genesis, confirmed by our experiences, I think, is that we can’t do this with good intentions or sheer force of will. There is no deep and lasting unity without turning to God, being strengthened by His Spirit. And along the way we will need His grace, as we fall short and ask for forgiveness and the strength to make things as right as we can.

So as I enter prayer now I invite us to approach God as those who need His grace and strength in order to be a people who enjoy and create unity, and fight back against the curse that comes with rebellion.