v. 1 This statement about the world’s single language makes an inclusio with v. 9. VV 1 and 9 are "bookends" if you will and serve to set this short narrative apart as a single unit.

v. 4 "scatter" (with "language") is a key-word in this text. You find it here on the lips of mankind, but you have it again in vv. 8 and 9 in the narrator’s own comment. "Scatter" is the opposite idea of "one" and "common" that describes the language of mankind before the Tower of Babel.

v. 9 "Babel" is a pun on the name "Babylon", the vaunted city of man, the great city of the ancient world and, in the rest of the Bible, the metaphor for man in rebellion against God. Babylon means "Gate of God." But here it is reduced to "Confusion."

I preached on this text last in October of 1996 as part of the first half of the series of morning sermons on Genesis. I read over that sermon and was happy enough to find that I preached to you what I believe is the burden of this text we have read. But there is more to say from it, more than I saw in it a little more than three years ago. The help that I have received over the past several years in learning how to read the narrative of Genesis has deepened still further my appreciation of this text and made me think that it was ideally suited for a sermon on the first Sunday of the new millennium.

We begin by noticing the very interesting fact that this entire section of Genesis has been "dis-chronologized" if you will permit me the term. The table of nations in chapter ten, obviously describes the situation that prevailed after the events of chapter 11 and the separation of the nations of the world by language. The history of the Tower of Babel has been intentionally misplaced.

There are at least two reasons for this "anachrony" as it is called, for chapter 10, being out of historical order is, thus, an anachronism, something reported out of its proper time.

The first reason seems to be to give a panoramic view of the world following upon the flood, the world of nations that are going to be blessed by Abraham, the descendent of Shem, whose blessing, you remember, ends the flood account. You have the whole world before you – in a stylized way – in chapter 10. In other words, the nations that are listed in chapter 10, are a summary or a microcosm of the entire world of mankind. They stand for all the nations of the world. These are the nations that made up Israel’s known world, including Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon, her three greatest enemies (10:6, 10-11). The proof of this is that when you count up the nations listed here, there are seventy of them. A symbolic number. (Remember there were seventy souls who went down to Egypt with Jacob and his family at the end of Genesis, i.e. the entire people of Israel.)

So the world is presented in panorama with that listing of nations ending with the listing of the Semites, leading toward Abraham, through whom all the nations of the world would be blessed. It is a reminder to us that, from the very beginning, God never had any other intention but to save men and women from every tongue, tribe, and nation. We are here in this sanctuary worshipping God today, Gentiles mostly, because God loves the world! He created the whole world, he rules over the whole world, it all belongs to him, and his mercy is over all his works. He will call Abraham to salvation precisely with the intention to use Abraham to bless the entire world.

But there is another, more immediate, reason for this anachrony, this dis-chronologizing of chapter 11, vv. 1-9. It is the narrator's way of placing the account of the Tower of Babel between two genealogies of Shem, the elect line, leading to Abraham.

You will notice that 10:21-29 is paralleled in 11:10-26, with the latter leading us right to our first encounter with Abraham. So, smack dab between these two accounts of the family line of Shem we find the account of the Tower of Babel. Clearly, we are to compare and to contrast these two sections. We have the nations of the world apart from God and we have the chosen, the elect seed, before and behind them.

In the case of the nations of the world, what have we?

Think back to Genesis 3 and, immediately, you see that history being repeated again. This is a second fall, a repetition of that original rebellion against God. The Devil had told Adam and Eve, "You shall be as gods…" And here mankind tells itself, "we will build a tower that reaches to heaven!" And they say, "let us make a name for ourselves." That’s immortality they are seeking. Some way of perpetuating themselves in the world. You remember that at the end of Genesis 3, in v. 22, God had taken precautions to block mankind’s way back to the Garden and to the Tree of Life and any effort on his part to find that immortality. Now mankind is simply trying to find that Tree of Life in some other way. There we read that God prevented man from taking of that tree lest he live forever. Here we read him say something similar in v. 8, that if he succeeds in doing what he proposes, "nothing will be impossible for him." That is, his rebellion against God would go from strength to strength. God must block man's grasp for immortality apart from him, before it destroys man forever. We will return to that thought.

And these men have confidence, for they have great powers. They are already superlative architects and can build impressive structures. They have the technology to fabricate the parts and then to fit them together in a great structure like this ziggurat or tower. It is language that makes all of this possible, that makes education and culture and technology possible. It was in the ancient world and it is today. We can do very impressive things in this world and have done them, as the ancients did very impressive things in their world. People still today argue over exactly how the pyramids in Egypt could have been built, how the staggering weight of those immense stones could have been lifted to such heights, and how they could have been cut and shaped and positioned so precisely.

But, then, think of the space program. We take it for granted that men have walked on the moon – no doubt, just as the Egyptians took the pyramids for granted after they were built. But it was an astonishing feat. As was the unlocking the secrets of the atom, harnessing of atomic power, and, in our own moment, the manipulating of the genetic makeup of living creatures.

Much as we may worry about the uses to which technology may be put in the new millennium – and, as the millennium begins, that seems to be a far greater danger, a far greater threat to humanity than rumors of wars – there is no denying the fabulous accomplishment of human ingenuity. God did not do cheap work when he created man in his own image. We stand back in wonder at the powers God gave him by which he was to exercise dominion over the world.

And today, human confidence, hubris really, pride and self-confidence, marks the public life of human beings just as it did at the Tower of Babel. Indeed, in a very similar way. Again an effort is being made to bring the peoples of the world is being brought together, in a certain way, by a common language: the language of the computer. And all manner of grandiose statements are being made about what this computer will do for us and how it will solve our problems and, perhaps, even conquer death itself. Indeed, all the talk you hear about computers becoming like human beings and human beings being, after all, just highly developed computers, opens the way to eternity for some of the more confident analysts. If humans are machines, then perhaps they can be built to work, to run forever, spare parts provided when needed.

But, alongside of all of this is something else. There is fear. "Let us make a name for ourselves so that we won’t be scattered over the face of the earth." This is hubris mixed with fear. Just as Adam and Eve hid from God in the garden after their sin, so now men and women everywhere are afraid. They are afraid of God – though they seldom put it that way to themselves – they are afraid of one another; and, they are, as we read in Hebrews, in bondage all their lives to the fear of death. So, the project they propose is grandiose alright, but they crowd together in fear as they set out to accomplish their grand scheme.

It is no accident, brethren, that so many of man’s greatest technological achievements are precisely those that man thought would, in some way, lessen his fears. The atomic bomb was a way to keep enemies at bay. Space travel, I fear, was, at the outset, a means of warfare in the cold war, and, more and more, has become a search for immortality and deity, a means of assuaging the fear of being alone and the fear of death. And, what of all these medical marvels? Anything, however unethical, if only you can tell me that I will not die.

I read recently that in the 1998 Michigan campaign to legalize assisted suicide, the opponents of the initiative discovered, to their surprise, that the phrase "sanctity of life" had no resonance with the public at all. The public didn’t care about the principles of life and death. What led to the defeat of the initiative to legalize assisted suicide was the publicizing of the example of the Netherlands, where assisted suicide gradually became euthanasia, and then "unconsented killing." People could very well imagine themselves the victims of that. They could very well imagine other people dispensing with them because in their illness they were too much of a bother, were consuming too much medical attention, or were too much of a burden for their family. [Robert Bork, First Things 99 (Jan. 2000) 19] People still today act out of their fears!

What we have, in the account of the Tower of Babel, is an absolutely accurate, searching, defining picture of modern human life – both in its hubris and in its insecurity.

And this, of course, is just a snapshot, as are so many similar narratives in Genesis. The reader is invited to take this picture of human life in rebellion against God and apply it to any part of human experience he or she wishes. It is as true regarding the affairs of a single human being who plans quite confidently to make his life without reference to God but who worries about many things and refuses to think about many things of which he is afraid as it is true about the affairs of men and nations. What is racism, after all, but an effort to make a name for oneself in the face of the fear that others may take that name from you, or that no name may remain for you if others are not kept below you?

And, then, we see God’s response to all of this. The great God, who is infinitely greater than man, whose power is infinitely greater than man’s, stoops down to see what man is doing. The tower that man thought would reach to heaven, God must stoop way down even to see. This is what man in sin stubbornly refuses the accept, for accepting it would require him to worship the God he has rebelled against. The whole vast structure of evolutionary thought, the expectation of finding life elsewhere in the universe, and all the rest, is simply man’s extraordinarily clever and determined effort to avoid the obvious – that the universe and the life of mankind has the fingerprint of Almighty God all over it! Man never learns. He never will admit that he never profits from his rebellion against God. No, he will try this new thing, he will make this other change, develop this new technology, reach out to that distant planet, and that will bring the peace and immortality he hopes for. One wise observer of modern culture put it this way:

"In the nineteenth century, when there was, perhaps, more excuse for investing extravagant hope in ‘change,’ Tennyson wrote: ‘Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.’ We should now know that the key word is ‘down.’" [George Will, Pursuit of Virtue, 66]

But, of course, they do not know it and will not admit it. Never have, never will; not until God brings this futile and silly rebellion to an end.

And what did God do and what does he do in the face of man’s hubris, this self-asserting pride, this arrogance, this rebellion, this determination to make a life for himself without his Maker, without regard to the will of his God?

He scattered men then and does so now. He frustrates man’s effort to make a tower that will raise him up to heaven, he defeats the purposes of men to unite against him. And so, at Babel, they sought significance and immortality and gained instead alienation and confusion. And so it has been ever since.

The extraordinary achievements of mankind – and let no one underestimate how extraordinary those achievements have been, whether we are speaking of space travel or cloning sheep – have, nevertheless, left man just where he always has been, struggling in fear with his mortality and his alienation from others. Take note: They built the tower. They finished it. God did not stop them. He just prevented them from achieving by it what they hoped. Here we are in the most technologically advanced culture in the history of the world, and like all men before us, we are at one another’s throats, churning out laws and regulations and treaties by the thousands to keep others from taking some advantage of us. Here in the USA, the most technologically advanced culture in history, we sue one another, husbands and wives divorce one another at an unprecedented pace.

I heard on the radio the other day the results of a survey of what people wanted for the new millennium. First and foremost on the list was "peace on earth, goodwill to men"; somewhat lower down was a cure for cancer. Well, brothers and sisters, they may find the cure for cancer. They really may. But they will not find peace on earth and good will among men. And, when they find the cure for cancer, they will find that there is something else that has come in cancer’s place as a scourge of human existence. The UN Tower in New York, for example, is a shadow of the Tower of Babel and a perfect illustration of how little man ever succeeds in getting a name for himself apart from God.

The lesson of the Tower of Babel is that every effort on sinful man’s part to have peace without the Prince of Peace shall fail, shall utterly, miserably fail. God will see to it that it fails. Christians need never fear that somehow man is going to succeed in his plans to achieve peace and immortality apart from God. He has been investing his best effort in that for all these thousands of years and he is no closer to achieving his goals than he was at Babel. God will not let him and God is much more powerful than he! I fully expect the next century to bring some astonishing technological advances – Towers of Babel – and I guarantee you that mankind will not solve any of its fundamental problems – including the most profound and fundamental problems of alienation and death – at least that part of mankind that seeks its peace apart from God and Jesus Christ.

But, if the Tower of Babel, man’s hopes in it and their disappointment in its aftermath is the story of mankind in rebellion against God in a nutshell, what does the narrator want us to compare with it. Well, clearly, the two genealogies of Shem that come, one before and one after it.

Nothing so grand, so impressive as a great Tower reaching to the sky. But godly men and women raising children to love and trust the Lord and live according to his Word. And, then, finally, one son, Abraham, who would be the means of God’s blessing the entire world, the great ancestor of Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World. The great kingdom, the one that would reach to heaven, the one whose citizens would gain a name for themselves and live forever, that kingdom Jesus Christ would build, for no one else could. This line, this people, this tradition of faith in God, this is the hope of the world, this is the future of mankind, nothing else! It is in such men and in them only that peace, true and lasting peace, and immortality can be found. In the men and in the women who trust in God and who belong to the kingdom that Abraham’s descendant will build in the earth.

It will take time to build this kingdom, much more time than it took to build the tower of Babel or send a man to the moon. Events will unfold slowly. Christ would not come for thousands of years and, after he comes, the progress of his kingdom in this world would continue to be slow, at times a snail’s pace, nothing more. God is patient. He is saving his people, and a world. But there is nothing of the world's way in this salvation.

You see, there is the grace in all of the frustration of human life and in all the failure of man to establish himself without God. God will not let him succeed in his plans precisely so that there may be hope of his salvation. It is an act of judgment, of course, when God scatters the nations and separates them by language to prevent them from prospering in their unbelief and their rebellion against him. But there is mercy in it as well. For in their isolation, in their futility, in their alienation, in their hopelessness they are far more likely to turn to God and be saved.

Malcolm Muggeridge gave expression to this when he wrote,

"Supposing you eliminated suffering [we were speaking earlier of the possibility of a cure for cancer], what a dreadful place the world would be! … because everything that corrects the tendency of…man to feel over-important and over-pleased with himself would disappear. He’s bad enough now, but he would be absolutely intolerable if he never suffered." [in Brian Moore, Pulpit and People, 147]

Intolerable to himself and to others. And so God does not allow it. He frustrates the plans of man, all and everyone of his plans, somehow, in someway to get back to the Tree of Life and take from that fruit that he might live forever on his own terms and not on God’s. For God knows what man does not: that immortality in this cosmos is hell, not heaven. God punishes man for his rebellion. He makes this world a place of trouble and futility instead of triumph. God exposes everyone, however great, however prosperous, to fears that he or she cannot quiet. He allows no one to succeed in finding peace, true peace, apart from him.

So, brothers and sisters, when you hear the modern equivalent of "let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves" – and we will be hearing a great deal of that in coming days and years – you remember what became of Babel, and every other grandiose effort and plan of man to establish himself apart from God.

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half-sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains, round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Ozymandias was the Greek name of Rameses II, the Egyptian Pharaoh, whose effort to build the Tower to heaven and gain the Tree of Life was no more successful than those ancient peoples’ after the flood. And the new efforts man will make in the new millennium will be no more successful than theirs. God will see to it.

But to be a son or daughter of Abraham, that is, a believer in Jesus Christ, a follower of the Savior of the world, you will find that peace, that rest, that hope of eternal life, that God’s people have always found, simply by trusting in Him.

How striking, how meaningful the juxtaposition: the vaunted, impressive, thrilling effort of mankind to gain salvation without God on the one hand, the silent march of faith on the other. The one, for all its magnificence, never succeeds; the other, for all its humility always succeeds. God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

The new millennium will be the proof of that as the last millennium has been. With a new conviction, a new sense of purpose, a new gratitude and a new sense of privilege, let us trust the Lord to bring down the world's towers and give ourselves anew and afresh to pointing ourselves and others always and only to Abraham’s seed, Jesus Christ, the way, the truth, and the life, the King of Kings, and the light and hope of the world. To the Lord, whose birth however miscalculated, is the reason for this date the world is now so ecstatically celebrating: anno domini -- the year of our Lord, 2000!