Living Room Study

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, much less any cable TV. The information people received concerning the world around them, was very limited. Our world view 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 never would have assumed we could communicate several times a day, forming a real-time relationship at almost no expense. The world was very big back then, and nations & cultures operated almost completely independent of one another.

But today, through satellite communication and broadband internet, our world has become quite small. English is the primarily language of commerce, ebay the world’s flea market, and electronic banking handles all currency exchanges.

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 Gen 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 to 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 and beyond.

The problem arises when men unite in the absence of the one true 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 ultimately played out in the book of Revelation.

All human collaborative effort, divorced from acknowledgment of God, is nothing more than collective self-exaltation.

Blessings.

Steve Wiggins