5-26-19 Sermon Notes
“Origins” “The Aftermath” – Genesis 9:1 and 11:1-8
Introduction
Last week, we looked at the time Noah and his family along with all the animals spent on the ark and the exit from it. This week, we will delve into the aftermath of the flood.
Read Genesis 9:1
9 “Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.”
Read Genesis 11:1-8
The Tower of Babel
11 “Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
5 But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 6 The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”
Message
Introduction – After the flood, God had said to Noah in Genesis 9:1, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.”
“Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.” That’s what chapter 10 describes. It was happening as peoples and languages multiplied. It looked like a simple fulfillment of God’s command. It looked like obedience. Then Genesis 11:1–9 drops the bomb on us. It wasn’t obedience. They weren’t spreading. They were clustering. God came down and shattered their disobedience and made their clustering impossible. He confused their language and broke humanity into many peoples and languages.
A side note: ‘Babel’ sounds like the Hebrew word for ‘confused’ – we’d say ‘babble.’
Another side note: Nimrod, the great-grandson of Noah played an important role in the building of the tower. From Gotquestions.org, we find the following: “Nimrod in the Bible was the great-grandson of Noah through the line of Cush (Genesis 10:8). Nimrod is described as the first of the “mighty men” to appear on the earth after the great flood.
The Bible calls Nimrod “a mighty hunter before the Lord.” Nimrod established a great kingdom that included “Babel, Erech, Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar” (Genesis 10:9–10). He later extended his kingdom into Assyria, where he built the cities of “Ninevah, Rehoboth Ir, Calah and Resen” (verses 11–12). Nimrod was obviously a skilled man and an ambitious leader. Besides being the founder of the infamous Babel and many other cities, Nimrod was a mighty man with great physical strength and great strength of will. If he was also of giant stature, then that would be another reason why the people of his time would follow him—and why so many legends would spring up around him.”
One more side note about Nimrod – In the 1980’s it was popular to associate the word Nimrod to someone who was considered a ‘nerd’ by saying, “Don’t be a nimrod.” That derogatory term came from Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, in 1932, when they referred to Elmer Fudd as being a ‘poor little nimrod.’ Far be it from who the real Nimrod!
Now, let’s dig in here for a few minutes and see what the sin was:
3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
The key statements are in verse 4:
- they aim to build a city
- they aim to build a tower in the city that reaches to the heavens
- they aim to make a name for themselves
- they aim to not be dispersed over the whole earth.
The first two of these correspond to the second two. Building a city is the way one avoids being dispersed over the whole earth. And building a tower into the heavens is the way one makes a name for oneself. So the city and tower are the outward expressions of the inward sins. The two sins are the love of praise (craving to make a name for themselves) and the love of security (building a city to avoid taking the risks of filling the earth).
Mini Conclusion
God’s will for us is not that we find our joy in being praised, but that we find our joy in knowing and praising him. His will is not that we find our security in cities but in God whom we gladly obey. So the spectacular sin of man is that even after the flood, which was a warning against sin for Noah and his descendants, it turns out that we are no better after the flood than we were before. The human condition is just like it was with Adam and Eve. We decide for ourselves what is best. We think we can even rise up and claim the place of God. This is the story of mankind to this very day apart from redeeming grace.
Concluding Remarks and Application
Things to ponder about this story as it relates to us today and the problem of pride.
Consider the opening lines from the story:
“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. 2 As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
3 They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
Note in this story that there is a technological innovation: the making of fire-hardened bricks that were both uniform and very hard. As such they could bear enormous weight. Further, the uniform size of the bricks and the use of tar (asphalt) to bind them, meant that the weight was more uniformly distributed, and thus the walls could reach much higher than stone walls which bore weight so irregularly due to the varying shape and sizes of the stones.
So, we’re dealing with a technological breakthrough and now the men of that early time could build higher than ever before. The results were impressive and they took great pride in what they had done.
And this is very much our stumbling block today, for we are very technological. The fact is, we have been through a period of wondrous invention, ingenuity, and technology. We have been to the moon and back! We have seen the dawn and advancement of electricity, computers, televisions, medical science, physical sciences, and all the endless gadgets and devices that enhance and simplify our life.
But technology has a way of fooling us, as we see in the story of the Tower of Babel. We start to think we are so great, that we can save ourselves, that we don’t need God or the wisdom of our ancestors. If Babel rose high, look at our skyscrapers! It is very easy to be impressed with ourselves.
Pride is a very deadly thing, for by it we come to think of ourselves incorrectly and we take dangerous risks. We tend to think we are more powerful than we are. We think we can beat the consequences of our acts. Through pride, we act recklessly and think we are no longer small, tiny and in need of God and one another for all we do. We forget we are contingent beings, fragile and vulnerable. So, through pride, we go on sinning and think we will never have to face judgment or even the simple physical consequences of what we do. Through pride, we can feel so invincible. But this is very dangerous because we are NOT invincible.
Humor comes in the story of Babel, so that when the tower is built, the great tower, with its “top reaching to the heavens,” the truth is, it is actually so puny that God has to come down from heaven to see it. The text says,
5 “But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.” (Gen 11:5).
Now, of course, as omniscient, God clearly sees everything, and the humor in the text is not some primitive notion of God. Rather the humor is for our benefit. For, in effect, it says that our greatest, tallest, most prominent and glorious work that we saw as reaching heaven itself, is in fact so puny, that God has to stoop to even “see” it. He has to descend to get a glimpse of it.
God, therefore, must act. Pride is our mortal enemy. There is nothing so destructive in us, as individuals and as a race, as pride. Pride is the most deadly of all drives. It leads to every other sin, for we think ourselves wiser than God. It makes us forget God and our debt to others and to the resources of this world. Through pride, we think too highly of ourselves and forget our fragileness, we stop accepting necessary and healthy limits, and consider the wisdom of the past to be childish. We overrule God. Pride is so foolish, but, being blind, it does not even recognize itself.
Therefore, the Lord had to act and put an end to this foolishness before we did something really stupid:
6” The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other. 8 So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 9 That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.”
One might ask if God will act again and scatter our language or some other thing. Perhaps he will.
But one can wonder if he has not already done so. Consider how hard it is (in this age of communication) to actually communicate. People have developed such different world views and work from such fundamentally different premises that it almost becomes impossible for us to have a conversation. We have dabbled in the language of relativism so long, we really have little left to say, and do not agree even on some of the most basic moral, let alone civic principles. And as developing any consensus becomes increasingly impossible we see a breakdown in the unity we desperately need to survive. The West as we have known it is passing away. We are depopulating, our families are disintegrating, our economies are in ruined states and there seems to be no agreement on what to do about it. We know we should spend less, but no one is willing to do so, so deeply selfish have we become. Economic reform means some other person has to take a hit, but don’t touch my precious program or benefit. Developing any moral or political consensus seems quite a remote hope.
Perhaps we are being scattered and our language has been confused. Perhaps this is increasingly why we can no longer agree or even hold intelligent conversations, let alone reach consensus. Hence our unity is scattered. Perhaps God has taken the proud and now thoroughly secular West and made it less possible for us to “build our city.”
It seems, on the one hand, there is an attempt to become a unified one world order and on the other, a segregated and divided society. One can only wonder!
An old story, Babel is, but ever fresh.