The Tower of Babel and God's Love

Most people believe the Tower of Babel, found in Genesis 11, is an account of God's judgement. This couldn't be farther from the truth. The Tower of Babel is a story of God's love. In the account, God sees that human beings are trying to build a tower to the heavens. "So we might make a name for ourselves." Humanity said at the time. God said, "If we do not stop them, then they will be able to do anything." God comes down and confuses their languages. From there at the Tower of Babel, God scattered us across the globe. Things became difficult. No longer was it easy to accomplish our own goals. New cultures arose. New conflict arose.

Am I making my case yet? Do you see God's love? Probably not. At this point, I'm probably loosing my argument. But wait a minute. Check out my previous blog on "Bicycles and God's Love." What did we see? What we saw was a father and daughter working on a project together. They spent time together. The human father in the story had to let go of his own agenda in order to accomplish the task of building the bicycle with his daughter. They spent time together. They got to know each other more through working on that task together, painstaking and slow it might have been.

So, let's look back at the Tower of Babel. What did God do here? He threw a wrench in the whole thing. We were moving along just fine with one language. We were building buildings and could have accomplished anything we set our minds to. But, God came down and confused our languages and all of the sudden things aren't easy. Different languages. Different cultures. Now what do we do? Just like the father and the daughter building a bicycle together, we have to learn how to work together with different languages and different cultures. It isn't pretty. It isn't efficient. But, for those who are willing to spend a lot of time with people from other cultures, learning how to work with each other, there is a far greater reward than getting things done. We have the opportunity to get things done together. We have to spend time learning each other's languages and cultures. There is conflict, but conflict is what drives us into deeper relationships, if we'll take the time to help each other to a deeper understanding.

So, what was God's ultimate purpose in confusing our languages at the Tower of Babel? In a weird sort of upside down way, it was to bring us into relationships that would require us to spend more and more time together. Then, when we build things together, we can say, "Look, God helped us put this wonderful bicycle together and we really love Him and each other so much more than before."