Tall Towers

January 6    (Genesis 11) 

My hat is off to those who speak multiple languages. Ninety percent of the world speak in one of seven hundred languages, with six thousand other languages for the remaining ten percent! How these languages came into being is a God thing, for sure, and we read about it in Genesis 11.  The account of the Tower of Babel is a message to people who do what they do to the rejection of and in defiance of God. What’s going on here?

After the world population grew in the years following the story of Noah, God’s desire was that they scatter out and “fill the earth.” Eventually they did, but God had to jump start the migration. One group decided to settle in Shinar, in modern day Iraq. When they got there they decided to create a stronghold of their own. Strength being in numbers, they attempted to create a monument to their own power, their “tower of power.” 

Artists create beautiful but exaggerated pictures of this structure reaching to the heavens, disappearing in the clouds. It probably looked more like a ziggurat, of which the ruins of many have been found. People thought they could reach the home of the gods. Some think it was so they could rise to the level of the gods.  Others believe they were hoping the gods would come down and visit them, taking a break if they needed along the way at the shrine built at the top. 

One thing is sure, God DID “come down” to show what he felt about their efforts. What they fashioned with their hands was not ‘blessable.’ Grand things have been accomplished through cooperative unity, which is good, so long as such efforts don’t end up causing people to boast in their reputation or find security in their power. What does God feel about the “work of our hands?” It all depends.  In Psalm 90:17 we find a positive request, “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us, and … establish the work of our hands!” Yet God decries idolatry when he says in Isaiah 2:8, “They bow down to the work of their hands, to what their own fingers have made.”

Legacy is a very important word, and what the world thinks of us after we leave is important. I’d like to hope any future memory of me will be of spiritual things greater than the tall towers I have built with my own two hands. 

“Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come.” Jeremiah 17:5