Genesis 11:1 which introduces us the tower of Babel story begins with God’s assessment of the situation on earth. The text says, “Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.” The one language enabled corporate potential but they used it to unite against Him. Guzik observes, “If we accept the Biblical teaching that mankind has a common origin in Adam, then this simply makes sense; that there was a time when humanity spoke one language instead of the hundreds on the earth today.”1 Verse 4 tells us what they say with this one language, “Let us make a name for ourselves and build our own tower to heaven.” Since this is the first recorded event after the flood apart from Noah it has been suggested that the tower was man’s fear of another flood and they wanted to have security from that if it ever happened again. That, of course, is a complete mistrust of God who promised he would never destroy the world again with a flood as he had in Noah’s day. But i believe the key to understanding what was going on is found in verse 4, “Let us make a name for ourselves.”
If Canaan is the illustrative case of sexual perversion, Babel (Babylon) is the Illustrative case for the pride of man in which he attempts to take God’s place. “Let us make a name for ourselves and build our own tower to heaven.” (Genesis 11:4) Nebuchadnezzar, centuries later, looked at the same territory and said, “Look at what I have built.” (Dan 4:30). Then Centuries later Herod, Acts 12, accepted man’s praise as being a god and not a man. This passage is about what God thinks about our “little Babylonian heart.” We are all tempted to exalt ourselves to the very throne of our lives and displace God. “Let us make for ourselves a name.” Strassner is correct when he observes, “Isn’t that the mantra of our age? It’s why we wear what we wear; why we drive what we drive; why pastors long for the bigger and better church. It is why the Pharisees (like some of us) loved to do their religious deeds—to be noticed by men. Self-promotion is simply the air we breathe in the Western world.”2 Francis Thompson wrote a poem many years ago about this. He wrote,
And all man’s Babylons strive but to impart
The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart.3
But God is always paying attention to us. Notice that Vs 5 says, “The Lord came down to see” what man had done. It wasn’t necessary for God to come down, but it struck me as funny that these men who were intending to build a tower to heaven didn’t make anything more noticeable than a toothpick. God had to “come down” to see it. (I think there’s humor in God’s word) Then, in verses 6 through 8, God’s hammer of judgment drops. Their means of corporate identity, the one pure language, is destroyed and ever since man has been unable to globally unite on anything! And the tower came tumbling down! You might say, “Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. And all the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men couldn’t put humpty together again.” I believe that God sending His Holy Spirit in Acts where everyone heard Peter in his own language was God’s way of entering mans “Babylonian heart” and uniting us all to our corporate potential of worship rather than rebellion.
1 David Guzik, Genesis, David Guzik’s Commentaries on the Bible (Santa Barbara, CA: David Guzik, 2013), Ge 11:1–4.
2 Kurt Strassner, Opening up Genesis, Opening Up Commentary (Leominster: Day One Publications, 2009), 54.
3 Francis Thompson, “The Heart,” Poems of Francis Thompson (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1941), p. 267.