From Jim McGuiggan... Back to Babel

Back to Babel

Genesis 3—11 is a single narrative describing “the fall”. Our insolence came to its stark peak on the occasion of our building of the Tower of Babel. Everything about the venture stresses our arrogant pride and our purpose to go it on our own without God. Wewould make a name for ourselves. We would provide a home for ourselves and put an end to our wandering. We would create a rallying point and centre that would remind us of our self-sufficiency. We would build a grand tower that would challenge the sky and obliterate the distinction between earth and heaven. All this we would do without God.

So goes the story of our colossal pride. A sinful stupidity and treachery that began in the Garden came to full blown conceit and daring self-worship on the flatlands of Shinar. The human family united against God and in a severe mercy God fragmented it and scattered it throughout the world, without a centre, without a common cause, without a name and without a home.

Later, out of one of the many limited centres of power, Ur of Chaldea, God called a man by the name of Abram. He was a man old in body though not especially old in years; a man whose beautiful wife (Sarai) was barren and he told this man that if he would leave his home and family that he (God) would give him a home and a great name and a vast family. All that he would not allow humanity to have in 11:1-9 he offers to this old man and his barren wife. The human experience from Adam through Cain and up to the would-be tower builders was loss of home and community through sinful and prideful independence. In Abraham, humanity begins its journey back to God and home and blessing though faith.

God created the Abrahamic community which stood then and stands now, in Jesus Christ, as a visible protest to the fragmented world’s self-worship and arrogance. The NT children of Abraham in Jesus Christ—the united families of the earth (Galatians 3:26-29)—made their entrance on Pentecost which is God’s undoing of Babel (see Acts 2).

But as soon as the Abrahamic Community begins to believe in itself, as soon as it begins to see itself as the shaper of the world and uses the coercive power of the fallen centres of power to do it, as soon as it sees itself as the creator of blessing and the righter of all wrongs it has allied itself with humanity in general and begun the journey back to Babel.

©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.

Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com.