genesis 11 :: the tower of babel

3 times in the account of the tower of babel, the phrase “come let us” appears. the first two times, it comes from mankind. the third comes from the Trinity.

the first time man utters this phrase, it is the inception of the thought of the town and tower. they say, “come let us” and they go to make bricks. this is an act of creativity. they take the resources before them and make something new. rather than cut the God-given stone, they gathered earth and straw and water and created their own building materials.

the second time they say “come let us” they gather the people and begin to build the city and the tower to heaven. this is also an act of creation, but this time coupled directly with defiance. they did this so that would not be scattered around the earth.
God’s decree to fill the earth was being sidelined for their own goals. they wanted to make a name for themselves. they wanted to be big, to be known and to reach up to heaven on their own, by their own devices. they were attempting to usurp God.

our pride is always our biggest weak point isn’t it? it took out adam and eve in the garden. it brought abel’s blood to the ground by cain’s hand. it threw lucifer from heaven. pride is a killer.

what is it about mankind that we cannot get past ourselves? why are we so selfish and self-centered?
people used to get in trouble with the church because they said that the universe didn’t, in fact, spin around the earth. the geo-centric view point had been taken up by the church as a fact of life, and any that disputed it were punished.
it wasn’t until the advent of the merging of glass and tube into telescope that we finally saw that the universe did not spin and exist with humanity as it’s center. and as we look farther and farther out, we continue to see just how off center we are.
douglas adams said it best i think when he described our location in the “hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy” series. he says something to the effect of, “back in the unfashionable, backwater, eastern edge of the galaxy lived a people who…still thought digital watches were pretty neat.”

we get all wrapped up in ourselves, and don’t even take the time to look beyond our own little worlds.

when our oldest son was starting to assert his independence for the first time, he acted a little greedy as any child is wont to do. so, when he acted that way, i would just look at him and say “gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, i want, i want, i want” to let him hear how he sounded. he never said that phase to us. he wasn’t overly demanding, but his attitude dripped with that sentiment.
and still today, we use that phrase form time to time.

it’s the siren song of humanity.

we want what we want, and we want it now. if someone else has to suffer so that i am happy, then so be it. i want my cheap coffee, never mind that people aren’t being paid a living wage to raise and gather it, and that they have been essentially enslaved through debt. i want my folgers, and i don’t care what happens to get it to me.
i want cheap shoes. i don’t care if they’re made by children in indonesian sweat shops. i want my shoes.
i want this, i want that. God and His plan for me can step aside, so that I can make a name for myself, and do what i want how i want.

and so, to no-one’s surprise, God nips this uprising in the bud. the tower remains unfinished, the people are scattered and never again will they work -as a whole- to try to usurp God.
now while we may not be physically building any huge towers today, we are definitely doing it in figurative ways.

what bricks are you baking? what personal agendas are you pushing on God? what personal agendas are pushing God out of your field of view?

being faced with the reality of our own poor decisions, most of us throw up our defensive walls and refuse to look into the heart of the issue at hand, or more importantly, the heart of our own lives. what is driving us? what motivates us to do what we do? are we even thinking? are we engaging life as it engages us, making decisions based on our faith systems? or are we simply being simple. do we let life just happen to us? do we even react?

seriously, think for a minute, and try to identify a point in the last few days when you eveluated what you were doing. not just that you thought about doing something, but that you took the time to weigh out your reasoning (again, if there was any) for why and how you were going to respond.

in order for the Church to stand out from the world around it, the people that claim to make it up need to think about their actions. they need to evaluate their motivations to make sure that they are lined up with the very will of God.

we were not created just to lazily react to life around us with no real passion. it’s like that old cartoon from gary larson of “the far side” fame…a husband and wife amoeba are shown in their living room (of sorts, everythings floating in fluid. he’s in a lazy-boy, i think she’s holding a bowl and spoon or something, anyway…) and she is nagging him about his lack of action, saying something to the effect of, “stimulus, response, stimulus, response! don’t you ever think?!” and while that is funny from a biologist’s standpoint, the sad truth of that comic is that most of us just flost through life in the same way. never really thinking or engaging life.

we cannot live as Christ, in the apostle paul’s words, if we refuse to really live. so now, in a positive sense, come let us go…

let us go to engage life as God designed us to do.

let us go to awake our brothers and sisters from their stupified slumber of apathy.

let us go to make disciples

let us go to baptize them

let us go to teach them to obey all Christ has commanded us

and surely He will be with us always, to the very end of the age.

come, let us go.