Within View, Pt. 2

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If you had God’s power what would you do with it? End global conflicts? Cure disease? Or maybe just fix a few things in your own life? Pastor Nick Gatzke takes us back to the Tower of Babel, at a moment when mankind believed they could accomplish anything. But God had a different plan.

I can think of no greater contemporary example of desire to be known and remembered than the international soccer superstar, Cristiano Ronaldo. Cristiano Ronaldo is known in the soccer community to be one of the greatest players of his generation. And he knows it. And it’s on display for everyone to see. When his teammates do not play to his liking, he publicly shows his displeasure. If his coach is not coaching the way that he desires, he lets him have it. If his girlfriend does not do his bidding, he just goes and finds another one. Pride oozes from this man. In December 2013, news outlets around the world announced that in his hometown of Madeira, Portugal, which is an island off the coast of Portugal, Cristiano Ronaldo was opening a museum dedicated to his favorite subject, Cristiano Ronaldo. The museum, dedicated to himself, features photographs, video, awards, shoes, soccer balls, everything you’d want to see on a Saturday afternoon. Outside the museum, Ronaldo had a statue of himself erected with a plaque underneath it that boldly proclaims the greatest football player in the world.

Pride, oozing from the man. Of course, this museum has room, vacant space in it for the awards that he assumes that he will be given down the road. Pride happens when you think more highly of yourself than you ought to. But let’s bring it a little closer to home, shall we? I mean, I would imagine that most of you have no desire to have a museum after yourself, but I imagine that many of us struggle with ways in which we promote ourself. How do you promote yourself? What do you think about your own gifts, skills, and abilities, maybe in a way that are more highly given than you ought to? What ways are you striving to be remembered?

Not in a healthy fashion, but even in an unhealthy one. Maybe you find pride in your skills. Maybe you find pride in your looks. Maybe you find pride in your family, or maybe you find pride in your success. Some of us are good at masking our pride, but in the quiet moments, in the recesses of our own mind, we know those areas in which we think we are better than those around us. Those areas in which we think that we know more or deserve more. Those areas that we struggle with pride. But you need to know, you’ve heard it said before, and I believe it to be true, that pride is the root of all of our sin.

And God feels very specifically about this sin. Proverbs 8:13 says, “The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil. Pride and arrogance and the way of evil and perverted speech, I hate,” says the Lord. Proverbs 11:2, “When pride comes, then comes disgrace. But with the humble is wisdom.” And that’s what we see here in Genesis chapter 11. There’s pride and guess what? These are competent people and in their resourcefulness, their pride is met with skill, met with ability, met with resourcefulness and their prideful objectives are beginning to be achieved. Not only do they conceive of the tower in their pride, but they have the ability to pull it off, to make a name for themselves.

This pride is also in some ways motivated by fear, it says, lest they be dispersed throughout the earth. But this pride leads them toward further rebellion, as pride often does. It minimizes the words of outsiders, even God himself, and it maximizes your own elevated sense of worth and opinion, it leads to further rebellion. In Genesis chapter nine, these people were called to disperse over the earth, to be fruitful and multiply and fill it, and now they’re coming back together. Says in genealogy in chapter 10, they had a bunch of different languages, and now they’re saying they have one language. What’s going on? They’re going against the God-given command in rebellion, coming back together. But along with that, there’s another interesting piece of this offense that I wanna highlight. We might call this piece humanizing God.

It has to do with the tower itself. Look with me at verse four again of chapter 11. Verse three says, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. And then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” There was a common practice in the ancient world of building towers with the goal of reaching the heavens. These towers were called ziggurats. And it was a tower that often was built in a pagan nation. A ziggurat had no practical purpose at all. It was considered a sacred space. It was a tower that was built high enough and strong enough simply to support a staircase. And on the staircase up to heaven, you would find priests that would go up and offer sacrifices and acts of worship, but even more than that the staircase was built for the deity to come down out of heaven and to bless the people, and thus people were attempting to manipulate or to control or to evoke the blessing of their deities as they built these towers. Now if this was a ziggurat at Babel, we’re not just talking about pride and rebellion — which would be plenty, believe me — but now we’re talking about the fact that humanity was so distorted in their view of who God was that they actually believed that they could manipulate him into coming down and being present in sinful humanity on their own terms.

The first part of Genesis, we saw the major issue was their own moral destitution, and now we’re seeing that humanity’s major issue was theological destitution. In a sense, they thought they could humanize God with the goal of having him do their bidding. Now, that might feel, as we talk about it, that might feel thousands of years away, but it’s a lot closer than you think, because the temptation to humanize God, to do our bidding, is something that is pervasive in our culture and our time. It’s something that we all struggle with in a variety of ways.

Let me explain. How do we humanize God and thus, in a sense, abuse Him? How do we say, God, we’re not gonna allow you to be God. We’re gonna take your godness away and we’re gonna manipulate or attempt to manipulate you to function in line with our own bidding. Well, the first way we do this is that when we assign Him desires, assign God desires, or we call on Him for answers that are different or apart from the way that He’s already revealed Himself. An example of that would be when you do something that you know probably isn’t a godly thing to do, but you say, God, please bless me as I enter into this relationship with so-and-so, even though you know you’re not supposed to do that. God, please bless my new endeavor, though it is criminal in nature.

I had a colleague one time say, God, please, friends, please pray for us. Please pray for us because so-and-so is trying to avoid the immigration officer as he comes back into the country. This is a calling upon God to bless things that are contrary to his character, thus humanizing him and in a sense, abusing him. Another way we do this regularly is that sometimes we reduce God by limiting his power. God is all-powerful in his nature and he is able to fulfill and to give you contentment in all areas of life through his person and through the work of Jesus Christ in your life. And yet, we are so often tempted to reduce that power or to avoid it by saying things like, God, I will only ever be fulfilled in this life if… dot, dot, dot. I will only be happy in this life if I find a spouse. I will only be fulfilled if I get out of this job that I have right now and get into something that’s more in line with what I want to do. God, joy and contentment will only be mine if I’m cured from this disease. When we do those things, when we say those things, we reduce or we limit God’s power and you need to know that God is capable through the work of Jesus in your life to give you complete fulfillment and contentment. He has already given you everything you need. And if that’s true, if that’s true, then it is part of our task in the Christian life to continue to embrace, depend, rely upon him for our wants outside of our needs. But when we limit ourselves to joy, contentment, to only our external circumstances with what our temporary desires are, we are in sense saying, God, you are not as powerful as you say you are. Taking away his godness.

Another way that we humanize God is we limit his autonomy. It’s easy to think that God owes us something after we’ve committed to following him, isn’t it? It’s easy for us to say, God, I’ve given money to you faithfully now for a lot of years. You owe me a well-paying job. God, I have taken my children to church every Sunday throughout their whole upbringing. You owe me that they would follow you in this and that type of way. God, I have surrendered my whole life to you. You owe me certain types of blessings that I cannot achieve for myself. It’s easy to think that God owes us something, but here’s the problem. When you do that, if you have the sense that God owes you, then you limit his autonomy. A God who is not autonomous is not God. A God that doesn’t have his own sovereign will is not God. A God that is bound by your will is not God.

And this is a temptation for us. We should never think of our worship to God in a quid pro quo type of manner. In fact, anything and everything that we do in response to God, whether that is our worship to Him, whether that is surrendering to Him, whether that is giving to Him, whether that is serving Him with our lives, whether that’s being charitable with people who are in need, whatever it is, anything should be in response to the fact that He owes us absolutely nothing, but we owe Him everything. And this is part of His power and His autonomy.

So how does God respond to a prideful people? Well, we see here in Genesis 11 that God does not allow the proud rebellion to succeed. Look with me at the text. Verse five, he comes down and he investigates. They wanted him to come down the ladder to bless them. He comes down and he investigates and he decides he doesn’t like what he sees. Why? Because they are trying to seek him in a way outside of what he has revealed about himself, to be true. Verse six and seven, he sees the danger of this situation. “Behold, they’re one people, they have one language. Nothing will be impossible for them now.” And he intervenes by confusing the language and by spreading them throughout the earth. And his intervention is both punishment for sin, but even more than that, it’s preventative in nature. He could have easily just destroyed them in judgment for sin, but it’s preventative in nature. He’s not afraid when he says, behold, now nothing will be impossible for them. He’s not somehow threatened by that. He’s God. But what he is concerned about is that their pride, their unabashed pride will take over to the fact where they will try to do anything and everything to seek his bidding. And so what is ultimately an act of incredible grace, he confuses their language, he stops this project, and he spreads them throughout the earth. That’s his short-term response. But God also has a long-term response.

And this is where the story of Genesis 1 to 11 ultimately points us to the promise of Genesis 12, and it ultimately points us to the arc of the whole Bible. The short-term response is to spread them out. The long-term response is that knowing that the sin problem wasn’t going away, knowing that there would be more actions from prideful people, that there’d be more distortions of God’s character throughout human history, that there would be more manipulations of his works or attempts anyway, God enacts a long-term response. He would use a people to show himself to the world. He would use Israel to ultimately be the people from which his own son would come into the world. You see, the people at Babel wanted the blessing of God and they didn’t get it on that day, but they would get it someday.

The people at Babel pridefully built a tower in an attempt for God to come down. And though he didn’t descend the ladder in the way that they wanted on that day, he would come down someday. Their prideful acts toward him were met with humble acts by God, as he would come down in the form of a servant, his very son Jesus, humbly coming to bless even a prideful people. At the beginning of the message, I mentioned one of the themes of Genesis 1 to 11, is that sin was our biggest problem. And we can recognize that intellectually speaking, but I hope you realize just how desperate, I hope you feel how desperate of a problem this really is.

When you come to understand the weight of your own sin, when your eyes are open to the reality of your offense to God, a God who has only ever loved you, who has only ever been kind to you, who has only ever sought relationship with you, when you come to realize the depth of your own depravity, the natural response is desperation. I don’t know what to do. And he helps us. Romans chapter five says, “For while we were still weak” — you might even say desperate — “at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare to die, but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 10:13, “For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Friends, I know that many of us here today have sensed and even felt that level of desperation of our own sin, and we’ve called upon a savior and he has saved us. And I know that there are some among us today that have never really seen your own sin with that type of weight or desperation. And my most sincere encouragement to you is think carefully about this God that we serve and respond in the way that he calls you to respond, to seek the forgiveness that he offers so freely, the help that he gives to undeserving people. This is why we celebrate Christmas. This is why we celebrate the fact that God comes down in the form of a humble servant. This is why we partake of the Lord’s Supper every month together as a church, because we remember that while we were still weak, when we were the most desperate, God sent his son to die for us, to forgive us, to help us, to bless us, even though we were undeserving of his blessing. This is pure unadulterated grace. And if you have not yet put your faith in Christ, then friends, wait no longer. Let today be the day where you say, God, please forgive me. I put my faith in Jesus for the forgiveness of that sin.

Let’s pray together. Let’s ask God for his forgiveness afresh. Let’s confess our sins to him. Father, we thank you that you do not leave us or forsake us, that you are a God who is quick to forgive and that your forgiveness is displayed in the coming of your son. That you did come down, not down the ladder of Babel, but that you came down in human form, humble and gracious. And we need your forgiveness and we confess our sins to you now. Please hear our prayer. Amen.

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** This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.