Becoming Human: A Devotion on Genesis 1-11Isampula

When I was 20 years old, I had the opportunity, as part of my undergraduate degree at Moorlands College, to travel to Washington, D.C., to shadow a church pastor. It was a phenomenal experience that left me with a love of a city known most for its significant political backdrop. You can sense this not only in the culture of almost anywhere you go in the city but also in the architecture. The capitol building dominates the skyline and is a little further from the Washington Monument. The giant marbel obelisk was at one point the tallest building in the world, created to be unparalleled to anything else that existed at the time. The idea was that it would reflect the greatness of George Washington himself.

When I imagine the Tower of Babel, I imagine something very similar. It was a giant tower that could be seen from all around, which would remind people each day of not only its greatness but also the greatness of those after whom it would be named. There are impressive towers worldwide named after people who wanted to be remembered. It isn’t a bad way of doing it; buildings normally outlast people, after all. But for some reason, in this story, God seems to have a problem.

It begs an obvious question: What’s so bad about building a tower, or at least this tower in particular? Why does God seem so threatened by a tall tower? And why on earth would God decide the best way to stop the work would be to give the people different languages?

Think about it. Imagine you’re on the most important building project of your life, and as you head onto the construction site the next day with your hard hat and high-vis jacket, the site manager comes up to you and says, ‘Peux-tu me donner le marteau?’ It would be confusing - but this is the most important building project in the world. You discover that everyone speaks a different language. Over the next few weeks, you would all sit together and figure out another way of communicating the essentials and carry on; after all, the desire to build to the heavens hasn’t changed, just the language, right?

But maybe building the tower to the heavens was never really the problem in the first place. Perhaps God's concern wasn’t at all that he felt threatened, but maybe it was something else. I think the key phrase comes in verse 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.”

- Genesis 11:4

What did it mean for them to make a name for themselves? Why did it matter? Was who they were not enough? That question reveals the heart of the matter. At the center of this short story is an attitude that perhaps we find replicated in our own lives more than we would probably care to admit. That attitude is the pursuit of finding our identity in all the wrong things.

All of us do this in one way or another, whether it’s in the success of a career, the security of a relationship, a sporting victory, or the stability of wealth. We all utilise our God-given creativity so that there might be things we can find security in. For the builders in the story, it just so happened to be a tower.

When we allow our creative nature to become who we are, we miss who we are called to be. Creating is something we do, not ultimately who we are. Even in Genesis 1, God uses the last day to rest and welcome us into a sabbath. If creativity is the goal, people become expendable as a means to an end. At its most extreme, it is where we find examples of slavery. Just think of how we start reading the Exodus story when we next find God’s people making bricks.

But notice how God deals with the problem. God does not remove their creativity altogether or destroy the thing that they have created. Instead, he restrains them by gifting them differences. He forces them to discover who people are beyond what they do, clothing themselves in something that doesn’t come naturally to them. He gives them different languages.

The lesson here is something that I am reminded of whenever I travel to France. As someone who can only speak English, whenever I speak to someone with another language, I am reminded that at least to start with, we will not be productive. We may be able to share a joke, even become friends. We can give each other gifts and have an understanding of each other's value, but production is the last thing that is achieved. The building work in the story stops because the desire at the heart of the builders contradicts what it would mean to overcome the restraint God puts in their way: to value others above themselves. Instead, in verse 8, they are scattered in a way they worked so hard to avoid in verse 4.

Likewise, whenever we decide to pursue the desires of our hearts at the expense of others, we ultimately face the same consequences as those in the story. We find ourselves in the very place we fear, lost, and confused.