"The Law of Retribution"
Gen. 11:1-9
Oct. 20, 1996 

Text comment:

v. 1: "world" would suggest that this event occurred soon after the flood. This seems to me more likely. If the word is translated "land" as it often is in Genesis and the OT, then this history would perhaps refer to a particular people, perhaps, as vv. 2 and 4 suggest, a group of settlers afraid of attack.

v. 3: The people's ambition is clearly evidence of impiety: a pride that sets itself against God and seeks to replace God in human life.

v. 5: The tower that men thought would reach heaven, God had to come down to see! (Isa. 40:22: 'He sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers.') Taken by themselves, the achievements of man are remarkable; compared to what God can do and has done, they are child's play, and actually pathetic if intended as a substitute.

v. 9: "Babel" Babylon called itself "Bab-ili," i.e. the gate of God, which may have been a more flattering reinterpretation of its original meaning; or Moses may simply be intending a play on words, indicating that God has imposed a truer label on that city and the tradition that descended from it ("he confused"). In the Bible, as you know, Babylon came more and more to symbolize godless society. One of her glories was a huge ziggurat, a kind of artificial mountain with a temple on the top. But, in Rev. 18:5 it is only Babylon's sins that finally reach all the way up to heaven.

Unlike the flood history, there is no close ANE parallel to the account of the Tower of Babel, though the existence of these ziggurats or towers is well-known and the building of Babylon and its tower is celebrated in some ancient sources. What is more, another ancient epic looks back to a golden age when, "the whole universe, the people in unison...spoke in one tongue." [Wenham, p. 236] It continues: "Enki...the leader of the gods changed the speech in their mouths, brought contention into it, into the speech of man that (until then) had been one."

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The early history of the world now reaches "its fruitless climax" (Kidner) as men, still seeking to establish themselves apart from God, conscious of their powers and abilities but, as well, uncertain of their prospects -- perhaps even aware at the deeper level of the futility of their hope to save themselves -- lay plans to give glory to themselves and to fortify themselves against all possible danger by collective efforts. This piece of history, near the end of the Bible's introduction to the nature and meaning of human life, beautifully and timelessly captures the characteristic spirit of man in rebellion against God. As Derek Kidner puts it, "The project [proposed] is typically grandiose; men describe it excitedly to one another as if it were the ultimate achievement -- very much as modern man glories in his space projects. At the same time they betray their insecurity as they crowd together to preserve their identity and control their fortunes." [p. 109]

And so the half-built city becomes the image of fallen man in this world, of man in his rebellion against God. Still today: The symbol of Nazi failure -- Hitler's bombed cities; of godless capitalism's failure -- our inner cities. Try as he might to establish himself over against God, his efforts never succeed. At the end of the day, he is no closer to having saved himself than he was at the beginning. As we read in Psalm 14:1, it is the fool who says in his heart "there is no God." The name Babel stands forever as a symbol of the folly, the futility of unbelief and godlessness. The express purpose of their building, as stated in vv. 3-4 is precisely what they failed to achieve.

Man sought to establish himself by collective effort, by joining together against the common enemy, but ends up divided, separated from and at odds with the very ones whom he had planned would provide his collective strength. And so it has been through the history of our race -- the pride and the fear which, in v. 4, motivated this attempt to gather together for the glory of man, are finally forces too powerful for him to control and drive men apart and set them against one another. And here is the beginning of all wars and all empires.

But the great point of this narrative is that the frustrating of these grandiose plans on man's part, this determination to escape the curse that God his enemy had placed upon his life, was first and foremost God's own act. Man was not frustrated so much by his own sinfulness as by the direct judgment and intervention of God. It would be far too complicated to describe and explain, but the Hebrew art of narrative is brilliantly displayed in this account of the tower of Babel, and by various means, the narrator draws our attention to v. 5 as the central point, the turning point in this narrative. Man plans and works, but then God comes to look and he sees what is going on, and then, in the remaining verses the event unfolds at the direction of God to produce the exact reverse of the aspirations that man had at the beginning. In Hebrew "let us make bricks" in v. 3 and "build for ourselves" in v. 4 and "let us mix up" in v. 7 have a similar sound -- and all sound similar to the Hebrew word for "folly" --and so further draw attention to the dramatic and total reversal that has taken place. God prevented men from successfully cooperating together in anti-God projects.

And here we have the last of those great principles of human life, the fundamental perspectives necessary for a right understanding of the world, that are the primary purpose and subject of these first eleven chapters of Genesis. And that principle is this: that God himself will never let man succeed in his rebellion, never allow him to establish himself in this world without God, never permit man to set up his own kingdom without it beginning to topple as soon as it stands.

That principle is revealed here in two respects.

I. First, God promises that there shall be in human life, that he shall establish, a law of retribution.

Sin will pay a wage. The way of the transgressor will be hard. The wicked will find their plans frustrated and their hopes dashed. Godlessness will never work. This is God's world and he will not permit the godless to make it work happily and successfully for them. Such was the lesson these rebels in Shinar learned: they calculated everything except whether God would permit them to succeed in their wicked, proud, and vainglorious scheme. He did not permit them. And the Scripture will teach us a thousand times more that God will not permit the wicked to prosper! From King Herod in Acts 12 accepting praises as a god and falling dead from the judgment of the true and living God, to Stalin shaking his fists at God on his deathbed, rebels against God have had a hard go of it. As Martin Lloyd-Jones once put it: "The law of God is proved by the misery which eventuates when it is disobeyed."

But, now, you say, "Wait a minute!" Is that true? Is it true that the wicked never prosper, that they never enjoy the fruit of their indifference to God? Here is Hugh Hefner, responsible for literally immeasurable woe and carnage in untold numbers of human lives as the agent provocateur of the sexual revolution -- desperate girls who find themselves pregnant in their teens; children and families torn apart by sexual sin; abortion now destroying millions of human lives every year -- did Hugh Hefner die a miserable death from AIDS or some other sexually transmitted disease? He did not. Does he find himself now in his old age, after having made sexual use of so many young women, alone, abandoned by women and men alike who find shameful and disgusting the idea of a dirty old man? He does not. He is now the happily married father of two children, enjoying after a long life of public promiscuity, the pleasures of hearth and home.

And it is not different in the reverse. Can we say that the righteous, contrarily, always enjoy peace, security, and prosperity on account of their obedience to God and submission to him. No, of course we cannot say that.

One of the pleasures of my ministry here is the generous allowance that the elders grant me to preach elsewhere from time to time. As you know, I was in South Carolina this past Lord's Day, and wonderfully enjoyed my time at the Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church in Greenville. My hosts were delightful Christian people, warm, gracious, generous, spiritually minded. They had had four children. But their second son was taken from them a few years ago, at age 30, by a rare disease. He was a faithful Christian as a young man and had been dating for several years a fine Christian woman when he learned that he had this dangerous disease. He did not marry the woman, whom he loved, because he was not sure he would live. And then, through various treatments, the doctors came to believe that they were on top of his disease and could control it. Entirely in good faith, his doctor actually told him that he would be more likely to die in a car accident than from his disease. And so he proposed to his lady and they married. One month later the symptoms began appearing again, he gradually began losing control over his limbs, and died some months later.

His mother, my hostess, a dear woman, clearly still has a broken heart, triumphant as her faith genuinely is! [Mike George the son of John and Jewel George.]

No, we cannot say simply that the wicked will have a hard time in life and the righteous will have an easy time. But, then, of course, the Bible doesn't say that. Job may be one of the oldest books in the Bible and it is devoted to disabusing us of any such overly simple calculation. In fact, Job's comforters are condemned in the book for having precisely such a too simple view of things: that the righteous will prosper and the wicked will have trouble. The psalms are full of this same honest reckoning with the fact that the wicked can prosper and the righteous often suffer.

But true as that is, and often as the Bible admits it, it does not set aside the other pole of this same continuum of truth, viz. that sin pays a wage and that the way of the transgressor is hard. There is a tension between these two poles, we must accept that, but the tension exists because both things are true. And we have only to look around to see how profoundly, how characteristically, how inevitably true it remains that those who seek to establish themselves in defiance of the existence and the will of God, will fail. In a thousand ways they will fail. How like human life that we, in our sophisticated scientific age, should still be battling scourges, such as AIDS, that are the direct result of our sins. And here we are, the greatest economy in the history of the world, afloat on a sea of red ink, simply because we cannot and politicians cannot curb our appetites for power and ease and material prosperity. Children in this most successful of all societies are being damaged in every kind of way by their parents' lusts for one thing or another and will pass that damage on to their own children. Groups of citizens view other groups with deepening suspicion, thinking that in one way or another they stand in the way of the advance they seek for themselves. Politicians speak boldly of America's confidence in the approach of the next millennium, but almost every poll indicates that few of us buy it. We all know that there is something deeply rotten in the American soul and that the cracks that are appearing everywhere in the foundation portend terrible trouble ahead.

Dr. Waltke was exactly right when he said in this pulpit some weeks ago, that there is no hope of reformation in our country until Americans connect their growing and spreading woes with their sins.

Even when the wicked seem to prosper and the righteous to suffer, this law of retribution has not really been violated. Some things simply take time. As Longfellow -- who was no Christian -- had the sense to see and say,

Though the mills of God grind slowly,
Yet they grind exceeding small;
Though with patience He stands waiting,
With exactness grinds He all.

II. But, in the second place, this principle of retribution has a merciful intent.

I do not say that its entire purpose, its entire motive is merciful, but God has much kindness and mercy in this law of retribution that he enforces upon human life and by which he frustrates and renders futile human wickedness.

You may have wondered at the Lord's statement in v. 6. It is something like the statement we encountered in 3:22 when God prevented Adam from returning to the Garden because he might reach out for the fruit of the tree of life and live forever. Is God afraid of what man might achieve? Does he mean that unless he acts now, he will not be able to control or suppress man's rebellion against him? No! Of course not. The entire Bible and this passage also renders that interpretation of God's words absurd.

What is meant is that if man is allowed to succeed in this arrogant effort to assert himself against God, then further and still more egregious offenses will be in the offing and man will sink ever more deeply into the habit and the love of sin and unbelief. But this note of foreboding, this concern for what might come from this rebellion should it succeed, is the mark not so much of the Creator's outrage, but of his concern, his unwillingness to allow mankind to pitch itself into everlasting doom. By frustrating man's hopes and plans against God, he makes a way for man's return to God.

And this too, is a note that will be sounded over and over again throughout the rest of the Bible and throughout the story of the church. What is it that makes men and women cry out to God but simply that their lives are not working without him. Why does God so regularly visit upon human beings the just desert of their sins, except that they might learn before it is too late what wage sin pays and that the broad road they are walking leads right to the edge of the cliff. How many are there here, this morning, who would not be here, and would never come here, except that months ago or years ago, God made you feel the want and waste of your life without him, God frustrated you in your plans to build a happy life without him, he defeated your effort to succeed as a human being while ignoring God and his holiness.

Indeed, the most dangerous position in all the world is to be happy in one's sin, to be opposed to God and seen to be getting away with it. For that man, that woman will not learn until it is too late that to be without God in God's world is the way to certain and eternal woe! Think of Hugh Hefner now! Has his judgment already begun because God is preventing him from seeing the true error of his ways, because is allowing him to be happy on the road that leads to hell?

God's judgment upon human sin and rebellion is the antidote to an arrogance that would put men finally beyond hope of salvation, because it would put them finally beyond any recognition of their need for salvation. We ought to be grateful that we live in a world where God sees to it that promiscuous people get diseases and despair, that greedy people lose their friends, that grasping people always finally overreach themselves, that pride goes before a fall, and so on. If it were not so, no one would ever be saved! Remember, he confused the languages of men, but he did so only in order eventually to save some from every tongue, tribe, and nation. And, of those, he will one day give them to speak a single tongue again.

"Yea, at that time I will change the speech of the peoples to a pure speech, that all of them may call on the name of the Lord and serve him with one accord." (Zeph. 3:9)

I have been thinking more of John Bunyan these days, because of the place that the Pilgrim's Progress played in the last days of my sister's life. But that made me remember this. During the English civil war, the Puritan army of Oliver Cromwell captured a certain royalist major. He was a particularly noteworthy catch, for he was a man who was viciously the enemy of the cause of true religion in England. But, the Puritans, being the Christians that they were, did not perhaps make the best jailers. They allowed this major's sister to visit him in the prison and he escaped in her clothes. A great loss to the cause.

After the war the major, who was also a doctor, made his way to an English village and set up as the town physician. He was a dissolute man, given to drink and gambling and soon had lost all he had. His gambling had made him destitute, his drinking had made him a drunk! And then, there at the bottom of his life, despairing of everything, a book fell into his hands, and, in his desperation he read it, and was guided by it to faith in Christ. The village was Bedford, the man John Gifford, the very man whom John Bunyan would later call "Holy Mister Gifford," and to whose doctrine and preaching John Bunyan would later owe his soul. It is this man--this former wasteral and drunk--who is immortalized as "Evangelist" in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress.

Are we not glad, are we not grateful to God that his loose living and his drinking and his gambling brought him to despair. Do we not shudder to think that this man might have remained happy and successful while all the while raising his fist against God. Had God not intervened to frustrate all his sinful plans for happiness, where would Bunyan have been and where the Christian world without Pilgrim's Progress. And holy Mr. Gifford is but one example of a multitude no man can number of those who will, for all eternity, give thanks to God who did not permit them to build their tower, but instead confused them and scattered them and made them to lose hope in everything in order that they might come to hope in him! And are you not glad, brothers and sisters, that the law remains in force in your Christian life and mine, to keep us from wandering away from the narrow path, as you know and I know we would, if we thought we could do so with impunity! No, praise God that he disciplines those he loves and punishes every son that he receives. It is not only justice but also love that holds the rod and demolishes the tower!

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