Why Did God Stop The Building Program?

Sermon.965

See Genesis.012, Sermon.491, Sermon.613

“Why Did God Stop The Building Program?”

From the pulpit of Bayview Baptist Church.

Genesis 11:1-9

Everyone in our sanctuary is part of a minority group!

Less than 10% of the people who are living in our world today speak English.

Just fewer than 500 million people speak English, while over One Billion people speak Chinese.

English is just one of over 200 languages spoken, plus there are about 2,000 dialects that people use.

Of the 500 most used English words, there are over 14,000 different meanings for these words.

Linguists who study language have decided that the Bible is right, and for the most part, they agree that at one time all the people who lived in our world spoke the same language.

Even though Babel may be thousands of years after Noah and the Great Flood, we know that the events recorded in Genesis chapter 11 occur between the times of Noah and Abraham.

Genesis 11:2 says, “men moved eastward”, probably still in the general vicinity of the Tigris Euphrates Valley.

It’s always best to “go west, young man, go west”, because in the Bible, when folks moved toward the east there was always trouble around the corner!

When people arrived eastward and settled there, they started a building project.

They said, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

Notice there are at least 5 references in that statement to self and works as a way to achieve greatness for self.

“Lets, let us, ourselves, we, and ourselves.”

The biggest problem is their motive for the building project.

Motives matter to God.

Why we do something is just as important as what and how we do something.

The people who moved eastward were looking for fame and totally ignoring God.

At Babel, they declared their independence from God, saying, “We can take care of ourselves. We don’t need God.”

God’s response in verses 6-9 was, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

Who is the us in verse 7?

God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

So, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit “scattered them from there over all the earth and they stopped building…”

The word “Babel” means “confusion” and is synonymous with failure.

The people built a tower to make a name of fame for themselves, and the exact opposite happened, when God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Everything backfires at Babel.

This story shows us that humans are no matches for God.

When there are conflicts between God’s plans and man’s plans, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out who is going to win for there is never any conflict between God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

There is only conflict between the Triune God and man.

Stealth bombers, super computers, and laser weapons are no match for God.

The lesson from Babel is that God is God and we are not!

This seems like a basic and simple lesson, but it’s one that we humans have a hard time remembering.

For the spirit of Babel is alive and well today in secular humanism.

What’s secular humanism?

Secular humanism is a belief that man has concepted in his mind that basically ignores God to the point that man gets to decide what is right and what is wrong.

Instead of looking to God for those standards, we use our own reasoning and our own experience to determine what is right and what is wrong.

The Humanist Manifestoes spelled out between the years 1933 and 1977 proclaim, “we as human beings control our destiny. We take the blame for mistakes, and we will take credit for our accomplishments. If we work hard, if we work together, there is nothing which can keep us from accomplishing what we want to do.”

Christians and churches buy into this concept of secularist propaganda more often that we would like to admit it.

Secularism is so dominant in our media in America today that God, the church, and traditional religion are rarely seen except on television shows like Promised Land, Touched by an Angel, Amen, or reruns of the Waltons, Little House on the Prairie, and the Andy Griffith shows, Leave It To Beaver, and My Three Sons.