Pastor Nick Gatzke

Every generation builds its own tower. Most of us don’t stack bricks, instead we build platforms, portfolios, and personal brands. We erect monuments to ourselves in resumes and highlight reels, in follower counts and framed diplomas. We want to be admired and remembered. Genesis 11 tells us this impulse is nothing new.

The story of the Tower of Babel brings the opening chapters of Genesis chapters to its close, by showing us two very different builders: God, who builds a people for his purposes, and humanity, who builds a tower for its own glorification.

Seventy Names, One Plan

Just before the construction of this doomed tower, we read the “table of nations,” a genealogy of Noah’s descendants spread across the earth. If you count the names in that list, you’ll find seventy of them. That number isn’t accidental. Seventy shows up repeatedly in Scripture as a number of completion, seventy descendants of Jacob in Exodus, seventy elders of Israel, seventy disciples Jesus later sends out in Luke. God is telling us something through the arithmetic. The earth was repopulating. God’s command to Noah to be fruitful and multiply was being fulfilled.

The line of Shem gets mentioned twice, once in chapter 10 and again in chapter 11. It’s a spotlight. God is directing our attention to one family, one people, through whom he intends to make himself known to the whole earth. From Shem’s line will eventually come Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Moses, David, and Solomon, and, ultimately, Jesus. While passages of genealogy can feel like the most skippable parts of the Bible, here they are one of the most hope filled.

A People Gathered in Pride

Chapter 11 opens with a problem: the people God had commanded to spread across the earth instead gathered together in the plain of Shinar. They resolved to build a city and a tower, its top in the heavens, and to make a name for themselves. It sounds industrious, but it’s actually rebellion.

Pride rarely arrives all at once. It builds the way that tower did, brick by brick, thought by thought, decision by decision. You don’t wake up one morning consumed by it. You get there slowly, by overestimating your accomplishments and underestimating your flaws, until you believe yourself to be something more than you are.

The people at Babel wanted to be known, not just in their own generation, but throughout history. It’s a desire that isn’t unique to the ancient world. Think of the modern athlete or politician who builds a museum to himself, complete with his own statue and a plaque proclaiming his greatness. Pride photographs well. It always has. But underneath the pride at Babel was something even more serious.

Humanizing God

Ziggurats were common in the ancient world, built as sacred staircases. Priests would climb them to offer sacrifices, believing the ritual could summon their gods down to bless them on human terms. If the Tower of Babel was that kind of tower, the people were certainly attempting to manipulate God himself, to reduce him to something they could reach out, grasp, and control.

We do the same thing more often than we’d like to admit. We humanize God when we ask him to bless plans we already know are wrong. We humanize him when we assume our contentment depends entirely on our circumstances, a spouse, a new job, a clean diagnosis, rather than on him. We humanize him when we start to feel he owes us something for our faithfulness, as if enough giving or enough church attendance puts God in our debt. Every one of these moves is an attempt to bring God down and elevate us.

Grace Disguised as Judgment

Ultimately, their tower did get God’s attention, just not the kind they’d anticipated. God confuses their language and scatters them across the earth. It reads like punishment, and it is. But it’s also mercy. If left unchecked, human pride combined with human ability is a dangerous thing. God doesn’t fear what humanity might accomplish; he’s simply unwilling to let unrestrained pride run its course. His intervention is preventative as much as it is corrective.

The people at Babel wanted God to come down and bless them on their terms. And God did come down in his own timing. He did not descend a staircase of brick and bitumen. But in the fullness of time, God came all the way down into human flesh, in the person of his own Son.

“For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly,” Romans 5:6.

What pride tried to manufacture through a tower, grace accomplished through a cross.

A Tower You Don’t Have to Build

If you’ve ever felt the pull to build your own name, your own reputation, your own tower of significance, you’re not alone, you’re just human. But the good news of Genesis 11 is that you don’t have to build anything to get God’s attention. He already came down. Trade the exhausting work of making a name for yourself for the finished work of the One whose name is already above every other.

“A Word From Pastor Nick” is based on Pastor Nick Gatzke’s teaching series: Beyond Repair, message: Certain Death