Babel

This is a story of unity, of a one-ness, but of a one-ness that was not built on a sure foundation.  But let’s go back to the beginning..

Once upon a time, a long time ago, when the world was still young, it went through some great troubles.  Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden, Cain killed his brother Abel and as the generations passed, things went from bad to worse. There was stealing and cheating and lying and hypocrisy and immorality and greed and jealousy and anger and murder.  The Lord looked down upon this and surely thought, ‘I had such high hopes for this creation of mine, made in my image, yet now I wish I hadn’t bothered. Apart from me, man’s every thought in his heart is evil.  I will wipe them from the face of the earth, all but the one righteous man I see, my friend Noah, who shines like a beacon in this evil world, and for his sake his family. Them I will save to start a new world.’  So the Lord God carefully shut Noah and his family into the ark which they had made on his instructions, then sent rain for forty days and forty nights to destroy all that he had made that lived and breathed on the earth.

Once the flood had gone down again, the three sons of Noah and their wives received the blessing of the Lord God and were told to repopulate the earth.  And gradually the population did increase through a number of generations, and the people flourished: but they forgot, as men will do, what the Lord had done to save them and they thought that their good fortune was down to themselves alone. The people gradually spread out to different parts of the earth.

We are told in the living word of God that ‘the whole earth had one language and one speech’.  I think the ‘one language’ meant more than that they simply all spoke to one another in Hebrew or Urdu or French, but that it is meant in the way that , when we meet someone, we might say, ‘I like him: he speaks my language’.  They had thoughts and ideas in common, aims and aspirations, goals and values and standards.  But one group of Shem’s descendants, travelling east and arriving at the plain of Shinar, were aware somehow that this unity of theirs was vulnerable, and asked themselves how they might create a monuments so that their oneness would be remembered forever, and a place of safety where they could live together in this like-minded community and preserve their unity.  They wanted to build an early version of Camelot.

They were very logical and mathematical people and they put their heads together and worked out what they had to work with, what they were capable of and what they were trying to achieve.  These are the equations they used – P for the people to ‘A’ the power of their abilities, M for the materials to hand, D for their desire for (Monument and Security) and ‘y’ for the unknown that they were seeking. I have made it simple for you – they had pages of this stuff!  After a long discussion and many calculations they decided that the best way to achieve their double aim of immortality and safety, to anchor their oneness in a way that would last, was to build a large city with a magnificent tower in the middle.

But these very clever people had left out one element: God had not entered into their equations at all.  It wasn’t that they were rebelling against him or rejecting him, not denying him or challenging him – he simply did not figure in their calculations, they just left him out.  As long as you are challenging God or trying to prove that he cannot exist, you are acknowledging him or at least the possibility of him: but these people had just forgotten about him completely.

God looked down upon these busy ones, bustling around to build their city and the beautiful tower which reached almost to the very heavens: and he said to himself, ‘these are very clever people, made in my own image.  And with the oneness they have of ideas and customs, which is based on their own understanding alone, now that they have learnt to co-operate in this manner, they can do anything they set their minds to.  There is nothing that they can imagine that they will not eventually be able to work out how to do.  But I have already seen what happens to men left to themselves. If I leave them to their own devices, it will not be long before we are right back where we were before the flood, because man without Me turns always in the end to evil.

They will feel pride in their achievement once this city is finished, and gradually the pride will turn to boasting and to each trying to take credit for himself.  We will once again have the jockeying for position, the jealousies and anger, all the evils that emerged before I sent the flood to cleanse the earth.   I cannot let this happen again.  I must break up this unity – which is very real but which is based only upon their very human desire to leave a mark upon the world and an equally human desire to live safely with people of one’s own sort, which they think they can achieve for themselves and which is not based upon a relationship with me – and I must send confusion into their thoughts and ideas, I must break their language up so that they can communicate only with difficulty.’

So God came down to the plain of Shinar and sowed confusion among the people: they found they no longer understood each other as they had done, they differed in their ideas and their aims and found it hard to communicate: so group after group decided to leave and try to make a life for themselves somewhere else, somewhere where people would be less difficult to get on with.  So they scattered over the face of the earth and the city stood in its abandoned splendour, until one day a great storm swept up and destroyed the city, leaving only a stump of the beautiful tower which had tried to reach higher than man should dare to reach alone.