[0:00] Heavenly Father, as we come to your word, might you send your Holy Spirit upon us, that we might know your word, that we might love your word, that we might see Jesus there, and that we might be renewed in faith, for we pray it in Christ's name, amen.
[0:17] Okay, we're going to be finishing our series in Genesis next Sunday, but for today, we are looking at a familiar story, but one that I think will be really good for us to look at.
[0:39] So I'll be reading some from Genesis 10, and then some from Genesis 11. These are the generations of the son of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, sons who were born to them after the flood.
[0:53] The sons of Japheth, Gomer, well, I'm skipping down, sorry, y'all have it different in your program. The sons of Ham, Cush, Put, Egypt, and Canaan. Sons of Cush, Seba, Havilah, Sabta, Rama, Sabteca.
[1:09] Okay. The sons of Ramah, Sheba, and Dedan. Cush fathered Nimrod. He was the first on earth to be a mighty man. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Verse 10.
[1:21] The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erek, Akkad, and Kalna in the land of Shinar. The reason we read that is so that you would see that there were only three generations after Noah.
[1:34] Noah experienced the flood, and by three generations, you see this story come about. So, down to verse 31.
[1:45] These are the sons of Shem by their clans, their languages, their lands, their nations. These are the clans of the sons of Noah according to their genealogies and their nations. And from these, the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood.
[2:00] Now, the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.
[2:15] And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.
[2:29] And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of man had built. And the Lord said, Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language.
[2:42] And this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down. And they confuse their language so that they may not understand one another's speech.
[2:54] So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth. And they left off building the city. Therefore, its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth.
[3:08] And from there the Lord dispersed them over the face of all the earth. Friends, this is God's word. And he gives it to you because he loves you.
[3:19] And he wants you to know him. If you've hung around with me at all and listened to me talk about this area that we live in, one of the things that I often say is that Udawah is following what I would call the American suburban story.
[3:35] The city's sprawling out. It's gobbling up all this rural land. And we're building new homes. Homes that are fashionable. You know, neighborhoods that are safe.
[3:48] We're providing more space. Mostly to kind of insulate us from people getting in our business. But also to give space for kids to roam around and play.
[3:59] And for us to have a comfortable suburban life and only be 20 minutes from Chick-fil-A and Starbucks. So we're building this life for ourselves.
[4:11] Ashley Hales is a writer and she wrote a book called Finding Holy in the Suburbs, which I put a link there in your notes, in the notes in your program. It's a wonderful book.
[4:22] I highly recommend it. But she wrote this book. And what she says is that she wrote this book after returning back to where she grew up in the suburbs of Southern California. She'd been abroad overseas for a long time.
[4:35] And so she returned back and realized that she had a lot of her identity that was built on being sophisticated and traveling and being away from home.
[4:50] Being away from the suburbs. See, home can be a lot of things, right? Home can be a place. You know, you might have on your wall or have a t-shirt or a hat, one of those pictures of Tennessee with a heart in it.
[5:04] You know, and maybe it's even orange, you know, vol orange. Or it can be a place. It can be people. You know, maybe it's family, like your sibling, your sister is just like your person.
[5:15] It's home. But you remember what it was like to be a teenager, where all of your friends felt like home to you. It can be a place. It can be people. It can even be the physical house that we live in.
[5:29] You see, home refers to this myriad of ways that we seek to find to discover safety and identity for ourselves. And it's not all bad, is it? I mean, God, the gifts of home and place and people, those are God-given gifts that we are able to steward for the good of his kingdom.
[5:49] But what Ashley Hales was writing about is that there's something about our sense of home that reveals our soul. Something that touches our deepest longings are revealed in the ways that we think about home.
[6:05] And I'm not just talking about, like, your house and the personality of your house, right? You know, that, you know, whether you're messy or clean or whether you're more magnolia, you know, in your design or more mid-century.
[6:17] Or whether you are super techie or garden and plants or whatever. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about that sense, that deep sense of our deepest longings for safety, for refuge, for intimacy and connection.
[6:35] You know, a place, home is kind of like a place where you'll be okay. But the Bible's message is that God is the only one who can provide us a true home.
[6:50] God is the only one who can make us okay. That's actually the point of this story of the Tower of Babel. The people built a tower and revealed their own soul's longing for permanence, for safety, for intimacy with God, for home.
[7:07] Unfortunately, the tower was not designed to be home. Now, remember, God gave this story to Moses to give to the people of Israel.
[7:18] And you remember what they're doing. They had just been freed from being slaves in Egypt. They'd been slaves for 400 years. And now God had promised them that he was going to take them home. You remember that? The promised land.
[7:29] And yet, they're not home. They're wandering around the wilderness. They're in the desert. It couldn't be less like home. Of course, there was going to be a tendency on the part of the people of Israel to build a home for themselves.
[7:43] And what God is showing them here is that they can't do that. God wanted them to trust him alone to provide for them a home.
[7:53] And so here's what I want you to see. Just two things out of this passage. Number one, I want you to see the people's desires, the way that they're revealed at Babel. What are the desires that get revealed?
[8:04] And secondly, how is it that God builds a home for the people of Babel? How is it that God builds a home for us? So the people's desires that were revealed at Babel.
[8:16] So after the flood, the people spread out. They didn't seem to go very far. It's only three generations. They have one language. They moved and they settled together.
[8:28] There was a sense of safety in numbers, you imagine. In fact, that was actually the original rationale for cities was for people to band together. They needed walls to keep out wild animals and enemies.
[8:40] They wanted numbers. They pooled their resources. The city was also a place of technological development. Look at this. Isn't it interesting, the details in verse 3 about the bricks? They made bricks.
[8:52] They have bitumen as mortar. You know, I don't know what that means. I'm sure I could look it up somewhere. But the people of Israel, remember that they had spent 400 years making bricks in Egypt. You know, this was God's, this was Moses' way of saying, hey, this is, you know, this is the technology they're using here.
[9:07] Isn't that cool? See, the ancient Babylonians were the first to build what we call ziggurats like this. You can look this up in a, I was going to say an encyclopedia.
[9:20] That dates me. You can lay on your floor and open up one of 17 volumes of your encyclopedia and read through them. They built, the one that was built by Nebuchadnezzar, King Nebuchadnezzar in Babylon in the 6th century was huge.
[9:35] It was 100 yards, a football field square at its base. And it was about the same high. It was double the size of the Statue of Liberty, to give you a comparison.
[9:50] It was huge. It was one of the, you know, ancient wonders of the world. See, human ingenuity is not a bad thing in and of itself. Building a home and a community are not bad.
[10:02] In fact, the building of the city is not the problem here. The building of the city was natural. It was good. It was the fact that they tried to use the city for something that it couldn't give them.
[10:14] In fact, the scope of the whole Bible goes from the beginning where you have a garden to the end of the story where you have a city. What we read earlier, Perry read for us earlier, is the picture of the new heavens and new earth.
[10:28] When Jesus returns to this world and everything is made right, what will it look like? It will be a garden city. A city with trees and a river flowing through the middle of it.
[10:39] In fact, what we can look back and see is that the garden city was what God designed the Garden of Eden to become under Adam and Eve's management.
[10:51] That was the idea for Adam and Eve. Not to just sit around and like, you know, do nothing. They were supposed to build the garden city that would be the dwelling place of God. The problem is, is that the people here go to build a city that can't ever meet their deepest longings.
[11:10] We should build cities. We should build places that are good for people. But it can't ever meet those needs. They reveal our souls. Every technology, every city, every tower.
[11:24] So here are three things that get revealed and they're all in verse 4. Focus in on verse 4. First one is this. They built this to the top of the heavens.
[11:38] Now the reason why the ancient Babylonians built these towers was for worship. They wanted to build a home for the gods among them. And so at the top, at the very top of this ziggurat, they would build a shrine.
[11:51] And in fact, they would typically paint it blue. And they would put little gold specks for the stars. Because what they were doing was trying to bring the sky down to the highest place they could go.
[12:03] So that this would be a temple for the gods. And then they would bring gifts and offerings up to the god. It was a place for them to meet. See, they were trying to answer that fundamental question that plagues all of us.
[12:17] Which is, how do I see God? How do I know God is at work? You know, I pray. I go to church. But it just kind of feels like my prayers bounce off of the ceilings.
[12:30] Is there anything really happening? That is one of the most fundamentally human feelings. And the people here desired to understand if God was real and he was in their midst.
[12:41] And so they built these ziggurats to see. They thought that they could ascend to God. They thought they could mediate this world, the veil between God and man.
[12:54] They thought they could control how God interacted with humanity. It was a disordered desire. Second thing is that they made a name for themselves.
[13:04] Or they wanted to. They wanted significance, right? They wanted a life of meaning. Why in the world would they build a big building to make themselves have a sense of meaning? Well, it's the same reason that we love the skyline in New York.
[13:17] When we drove our kids up there a couple of years ago, I made sure that we arrived after dark, after dusk. So as we were kind of approaching the city and driving in through the Holland Tunnel, the whole city lit up in front of us.
[13:28] All Manhattan lit up. Because I wanted them to get that sense of awe. Because there is a sense of awe. Now, those buildings, they represent a sense of power and wealth and accomplishment.
[13:43] Just like the tall buildings in Udawah. Just kidding. No, we don't build buildings like that here. What is the suburban equivalent of that? It's your homes.
[13:55] We build our individual homes to communicate something about what we value in the world. About who we are. See, our homes reveal our desires to make a name for ourselves.
[14:10] We use our homes to communicate our identity. So often, not everybody does this all the time, but it is a temptation. We show people who we are by our style.
[14:22] We show people who we are by our function. When our kids were a little bit younger, we, in fact, when we moved in our house here at Grace and Peace in Chattanooga, we didn't put a TV in the living room.
[14:34] Because we wanted to be clear that we didn't need to have the TV around in order to talk to people. We can really have conversations. We now have a TV there because it's just easier. But we communicate things by these simple decisions.
[14:51] The neighborhood you live in, the city you choose to be in, all of that communicates a sense of identity, a thing that we want to prove is true about us.
[15:02] But, of course, what God is saying is, you don't give a name to yourself. God is the one who has the priority to name us. Our purpose in this world is not to develop our own name for ourselves, to bring glory to ourselves.
[15:16] But we are called to give God glory alone. He is the one to whom we ought to honor. And from him we receive a name. We are meant to not achieve an identity but to receive one from him.
[15:31] See, the point of the story of the Tower of Babel is not to look at these people and go, Good night. How dumb are they? They thought they could get to God by building a temple. No, the point is, this is a cautionary tale for the people of Israel and for you and me.
[15:48] About the way that our desires for good things, like a home, can become things that we elevate to the status of identity and worship.
[16:01] I ran across this article in Southern Living, which, of course, I frequent. And it was about this couple that had moved from, they'd lived in New York and in L.A.
[16:13] And they kind of wanted to scale back a little bit in life and go to a slower pace. And so they chose Chattanooga as the place to live. And they moved up to this, I was going to say a pretty house on the lookout, but that doesn't really do it justice.
[16:26] It's really beautiful. And they redid it. And so Southern Living is talking to the designer and the woman who owns it and all that. And it's a nice article. But something struck me about it.
[16:36] When they asked the woman to talk about the design of her bedroom, here's what she said about her bedroom. I wanted to feel like I was waking up each morning in a Parisian hotel.
[16:51] I wanted to be waking up in Paris every morning. See, isn't that interesting? Like, the way she designed her bedroom was a way of her expressing her desire for beauty, for adventure, for luxury.
[17:11] And it all came out in her home. Our homes are revealing our souls. Third thing you see in verse 4 is lest we be dispersed.
[17:24] Now, there's a detail I skipped over at the beginning of this passage. It's a geographic detail in verse 2. Did you notice this? It says that they moved east. Now, don't get tied up on the word from.
[17:35] There's actually a weird translation thing going on. But the idea of the Hebrew is that the people were moving to the east. And this fits. When Adam and Eve got kicked out of the garden, they got kicked out to the east of the garden.
[17:47] When Cain was traveling away from people, he went east. Eastward has always been the way. People moving to the east has always been, in Genesis, is a little marker for you.
[17:59] It's a way that you know that they are moving away from the presence of God. They're going to the east. Now, what we're going to read about next week is Abraham. Because Abraham leaves the east and comes to the west, which is interesting.
[18:12] We'll talk about that next week. See, there's a clue to the spiritual drive of the people. They didn't want to be driven away from others. They wanted to come together.
[18:24] They did not want to be dispersed. Lest we be dispersed. Now, there's a deep idea that we're going to wrestle with over the next couple of weeks.
[18:34] But, see, part of the problem of the people of Babel is they didn't want to do the thing that they were commanded to do at the very beginning. You remember what God said to Abraham or to Adam and Eve? And then he reaffirmed that to Noah.
[18:48] Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth. Subdue it. Make this world to be the garden city I've meant it to be. Go. But they didn't want to go.
[19:00] That was scary. They wanted to stay. They didn't want to be dispersed. They wanted to come together. See, what you have at Babel is these three desires.
[19:13] They wanted worship. They wanted intimacy with God. They wanted a name or significance. They wanted safety and permanence. All of those desires are revealed right here.
[19:29] But, see, the way they solved that desire was to build this tower. It was an act of defiance, of rebellion against God. And, you know, I just want to stop and ask this question.
[19:43] Could it be that part of the reason that life is not working great for you right now is because you're taking good desires, but you're seeking to answer them in ways that God has not given you to answer them?
[19:55] You know? Good desires for a relationship, for financial stability, for friendship, for joy, for freedom.
[20:12] And you're exercising those in a way that God has not given to you. You know, you can spend, look, you can spend all your money on the perfect home, and still all you'll do is walk around and see all the flaws that are there.
[20:26] You could have, your bedroom could be a Parisian hotel, and you're still waking up in Chattanooga. Not that that's bad, but, you know, like there's a metaphor there.
[20:40] You can spend every bit of time and energy trying to create the perfect place, and it will not ever satisfy you. Your friends and family are going to let you down.
[20:53] Every place that you go to is not going to be perfect. They're going to disappoint you. There's a self-deception for the people of Babel, an anxiety that was driving them to create home, to create home in the wrong way.
[21:08] C.S. Lewis says it this way, if you find in yourself a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that you were made for another world.
[21:22] You and I were made for more than the Tower of Babel. We were made for more than wherever you call home. So how is it that God then is building a home for these people, the people of Babel and us?
[21:38] So like many of the stories in the Scriptures in Genesis, we've seen this is a really structured story. It doesn't come across in our English, but I could show you if you're interested in seeing how the structure works, email me.
[21:50] But there are matching themes that go throughout this text, building to one central point, one line, and it's in verse 5. Maybe you guessed what it was.
[22:02] And the Lord came down. That is the fundamental hinge of this entire passage. It's packed with meaning. Here's the first thing you see. Number one, it's actually a joke.
[22:14] There's an ironic rebuke here. The people thought they built something huge. They thought it was amazing. They thought, of course, the gods would see it. And God was like, wait a minute, I can't even see that.
[22:26] Maybe I'll come down there and take a look. It's so tiny that I kind of go see it for myself. It was small and insignificant. And, of course, that's a literary image.
[22:37] God already was aware of what they were doing. He knew what they were doing. But this passage is showing how does God deal with our foolishness, our self-deception.
[22:51] God didn't just sit in heaven and stew. What did God do? He came down to see what they were up to. That's a fundamental point.
[23:02] The second thing you see here is that it shows God's heart. Now, we get this discussion in heaven, right? Wow, they've all got one language. There's nothing going to stop them now.
[23:13] What are they going to put their mind to? God was not worried that somehow his authority was in jeopardy. What that is talking about is he knows them so deeply that they're speaking one language is a way that they are going to keep making this same mistake.
[23:31] They're going to keep attempting to build home for themselves in a way that he has not given them. He knows where things are going, where they're headed, and so he decided to confuse their language.
[23:43] See, in doing this, what did he do? Look at verses 8 and 9. There's actually repetition there. Did you see that? Here's what's repeated twice. The Lord dispersed them over the face of the earth.
[23:55] They didn't want to be dispersed, but the Lord dispersed them. You see, God's judgment on the people enabled or made it possible for them to do the very thing he wanted them to do in the first place.
[24:11] God's judgment came down, and it enabled their obedience. This is an act of grace. It's an act of grace for God to free them from the idolatry and the self-deception that they would have continued to follow.
[24:26] Now, it is a severe mercy. I can't imagine what it must have felt like on that day, everybody just speaking different languages and trying to find somebody who speaks your language, trying to find somebody to link up with.
[24:37] How confusing. How weird. See, God's judgment pushed the people out to fill the earth, and there's an irony here that the more the people tried to make Babel their home, to build the world themselves, to ignore God's design, the less it worked out for them.
[25:01] Boy, doesn't that sound familiar? The more that you try to build something for yourself that God has promised only he can give you, the less it is going to work out.
[25:14] The more you try to make your children be everything you want them to be, the more you will die inside as they become their own people.
[25:25] The more you try to make sure that you are financially secure, the more you die inside as you give yourself to making money and you miss the things that you really wanted.
[25:41] The more you give yourself to these things that we think are going to give us happiness, the less they fill us. And that's really the message of the entire Bible, is that the more you try to build a home, an identity, a name for yourself, it's not going to work.
[25:55] But, but, verse 5, but God the Lord came down. But God, the two best words in the Bible, but God.
[26:07] See, the rest of the story of the Bible, this is like page 4 of your Bible, the rest of the story of the Bible is the story of God continuing to come down to his people.
[26:18] He comes down to his people, most particularly in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus, he came down from God. He left heaven.
[26:29] He left off the glory and the name of which he had every right to have, and he clothed himself in our mortal flesh so that he could become man, live with us, to redeem us, to make a place for us.
[26:47] You remember, he actually told the disciples this very thing. He told the disciples in John 14, I'm going to be crucified, and then I'm going to go back to be with God. And they were like, whoa, what?
[26:59] I thought you were coming to be the king here. And he said, no, no, no. I'm going, why? So that I can prepare a place for you. I'm making a home for you.
[27:11] I'm going to give you everything that you need. I'm going to provide for you what you can't provide for yourself. This is grace.
[27:25] And you know, like the people of Israel, like the people of Babel, like the disciples, you know, the disciples couldn't see it, right?
[27:36] Jesus told them, I'm going to make a home for you. It is an act of faith, a spiritual act of faith, to trust God to build a home for us.
[27:48] And we can't see it. The disciples couldn't see it. So you know what Jesus did? Because he's so kind, he said, I'm going to show it to you. I'm going to give you a taste. I'm going to give you a hint.
[27:58] And just a couple of weeks later, after Jesus said this, he was ascended into heaven. And you remember what happened? He'd sent his spirit to the disciples. And we call it the day of Pentecost.
[28:10] The Holy Spirit descended on the people. And what happened? They all spoke in languages that they didn't know and proclaimed the gospel. What happened on that day was the reversal of the curse of Babel.
[28:25] For a moment, for a couple of hours, the scatteredness of the languages of the nations became one again. And it was there to proclaim the kingdom of Jesus and his gospel.
[28:39] And so for that moment, God gave them a glimpse of where the whole story was going to head one day. A glimpse of the home that he had secured for them.
[28:50] I mean, this is why I read verses 31 and 32 right before our passage. Because even back there, the Bible is just, is always thinking about the nations, the people, the nations, the languages, the tribes, the tongues.
[29:11] You see it in Genesis. You see it at the very end in Revelation. That part of the vision that God has for this world is that the many would become one.
[29:22] The curse of the many, the curse of all of our cultures and languages, the way that we can't figure out how to talk to one another, all the ways that we make mistakes, all the ways that we're different and we can't get over it and we hurt one another and we fight against one another.
[29:37] All of that is going to be healed on the day when the new heavens and new earth come. Where we see the glory of God descend as we read about a minute ago, in a place where there will be forever no crying or weeping.
[29:54] There will be no pain. There will be no more isolation and loneliness. That you will no longer have to deal with the difficulties of being without a home anymore.
[30:06] We will be home. That's what Jesus wanted the disciples to see. That is the message of Pentecost. And that is the message of Babel.
[30:20] Quit trying to build home. And find your home with Jesus. See, this is what we get to do as a church. We get to give just a glimpse, just a taste.
[30:35] Imperfect as we are. You know, it won't last forever. But just a taste. We can show one another and show the entire world that it is possible to find a home in God alone.
[30:55] The only question is, will we pursue that or not? Will we pursue it or not? There's this great Mumford & Sons song, I Will Wait.
[31:08] I will wait. I will wait for you. You know this one? Here's one of the lines that I love in this song. He says, Gosh, guys, don't you want to be tethered to Christ rather than tethered to the lies of your own mind that tell you that you can accomplish something in this world that you cannot accomplish?
[31:43] See, the place to start today, like the people of Babel, is to repent. To acknowledge.
[31:55] Maybe to sit in your own home this afternoon and to walk around and to ask yourself the question, in what ways am I putting too much hope in this place?
[32:06] What desire am I trying to meet within these four walls that can never be met? And then turn to Christ and to say, I trust that you've said that you can answer this desire for me.
[32:22] That's the movement. That's what we do when we come to the Lord's table. This is why we get up out of our chairs and we walk forward. It is a physical marker of a spiritual movement.
[32:36] The physical act of getting up and leaving behind the falsehood, the lies we tell ourselves, and walking forward to receive from Christ.
[32:49] Come find home with him. Amen. Father, we pray that you might equip us to do that work. It is so difficult to see what we can't see.
[33:00] We think we're doing the right thing. The people of Babel thought they were seeking after you. They thought that they were creating a sense of permanence. They thought that they were being saved from being dispersed over the earth.
[33:13] But Lord, they had it wrong. And we have it wrong. Just because we haven't tried to build a tower in Udawah doesn't mean that we see it rightly. Help us to see ourselves.
[33:27] And Lord, help us to turn our hearts to you this morning. For we pray it in the name of Christ. Amen.