We’re builders, from Legos and doll houses to skyscrapers, but nothing comes of it if God isn’t on the project.
In Genesis 11, we are introduced to one of the greatest rivalries in history. It is, in the words of Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. Dickens’s cities were London and Paris, but the real tale of two cities is the story of Babylon, where men determined to make a name for themselves, versus the city where God placed His name, Jerusalem, the salvation center of the world. In this chapter, the ancients seemed to be living in harmony. Verse 1 says, “The whole earth had one language and one speech.” Imagine! As the people moved from the east along the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley in what is now Iraq, they came to the plain of Shinar—the ideal place to build their new world headquarters! God had instructed them to spread out across the earth, but they had other plans. “Let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth” (v 4). Thus began the first concerted effort to replace God as the administrator of His own planet. The project’s name? Bab-el, “The Gate to God.” But it was the Self God they intended to exalt, to “make a name for [them]selves.” In rich irony, verse 5 says, “The Lord came down to see the city”—away down to their little sand castle! This would be the site of the future Babylon (the Greek form of Babel), and both Daniel and Revelation feature this as the religious, political, and economic system that men built to defy God, the capital of what the New Testament simply calls “the world,” the place where people are trying to be happy without God. And God said, “This will never do!”—a powerful reminder that life lived without God is like a Monopoly game. We won’t get to keep any of it. It all goes back in the box.