The American Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892. The original words go like this, "I pledge allegiance to my flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.” It wasn't until 1954 when the words "under God" were added to the pledge in response to the threat of communism. Now, as a Christian, I have no major objections to the Pledge of Allegiance. But as an American Christian, I do have many concerns for what other American Christians might think about our own nation and the Christian gospel.

Religion and politics are often viewed as being at odds with each other. For many people, this means we must keep them separate. Perhaps you feel that way. You come to a worship service, and you expect it to have nothing to do with politics. But if we're honest, we know better. We know we really can't keep these two things entirely apart.

This morning, we come to a passage that will not allow us to keep religion and politics separate. We're picking up this morning with Genesis 9:18, which we'll come to at the end of the message. But I want us to focus on the story of the Tower of Babel, which will give us a perspective on the entire passage, going back to the end of the flood story in chapter 9. The Tower of Babel story can be broken down into three parts which will touch upon the different parts of this entire passage. First, we are told about the human project in verses one to four. Verses five to seven tell us about God's evaluation of this project. And then in verses eight and nine, we are told about the aftermath of the project and the solution to its apparent consequences.

The Human Project

Let’s begin with verses 1-4 which tell us about the human project and its corruption.

Post-Flood Settlements in the East

The story picks up sometime after the great flood account. Verse 1 tells us that “the whole earth had one language and the same words,” which sets up the story for its dramatic conclusion in verse 9 where God confuses the language of the people and breaks up their project. But we cannot jump to that conclusion yet. We need to hold this story in line with the ones we’ve been told so far in Genesis, noticing the connections between them and highlighting the things we’ve seen in the stories so far that show up again here. We also need to keep in mind to whom the book of Genesis was originally written, and what the story would mean to them in their day.

So, in verse 2, we see the people migrating “from the east.” This makes it sound as if the people are heading westward, but the Hebrew could just as well be translated “toward the east” or “in the east.”[1] The key word is east, which reminds us of Adam and Eve’s banishment from the garden of Eden (Gen 3:24) as well as Cain’s settlement “east of Eden” (Gen 4:16). Following the flood, we have something like a new creation, but human presence in the east signifies judgment or exile, separation from the divine presence.

Reestablishing Sacred Space

In the original creation story, God put human representatives in a garden to serve in a priestly role. The garden of Eden, we recall, is to be considered the holiest or most sacred place within a temple, the place where heaven and earth intersects and where God meets with his people. According to the biblical story, this relationship is crucial to maintaining order in creation.

So, as people begin to settle in this new, post-flood world, what must be done first? What is the first task? We read in verse 4, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.” As they begin to build settlements, they first construct a temple. They need to re-establish sacred space before they can do anything else.

There is no question that this is what the tower of Babel is. In architectural terms, the tower they begin to build is the ziggurat, the well-known structure found in southern Mesopotamia dating to the end of the fourth millennium BC.[2] The ziggurat typically adjoined the temple; it was part of sacred space. Its architecture is a stepped pyramid not so that humans could go up to meet the gods but so that the gods could come down and meet them. John Walton says we can think of it like a modern executive elevator. It was not a stairway to heaven but “a stairway from heaven.”[3]

God Comes Down

So far so good. The re-establishment of a temple was often the first thing constructed in an ancient city. Again, it was important for cosmic order. There needed to be a way for the gods to be in the midst of the people.

And indeed, in verse 5, the Bible speaks of God coming down to see what the humans have done.

It is clear that God does not approve of what he sees, but before we move to that point, let’s not overlook the positive message that is being communicated. Central to the whole biblical story and worldview is the need for the Creator God to be present with his people on earth. Recall again the original creation story in Genesis 1-2 which has as its climax Day 7 in which God “rests.” That is to say, God moved in to the house that he had built, living among his image bearers. This is the way things are meant to be. With sacred space re-established, the creation project is put back on track and God’s human beings can get on with the task of bringing God’s good creation to its intended goal.

It is this crucial point that we must not miss or marginalize as we read not just these first biblical stories, but as we read the entire scriptures. The Bible is not about how we can ascend to heaven to be with God forever; it is a message about how God can come to earth and be with us forever so that we can do, at last, what God created us to do as stewards of his creation.

Divine Evaluation and Disapproval

So, we can read this story with some suspense as we wait to see if the human project described here is going to succeed. But when God comes down to evaluate the project, he is clearly displeased. Why?

Goodness of Human Unity

In verse one, when the Bible says “the whole earth had one language and the same words,” the point being made is that humanity is here depicted as being unified.[4] But this is a good thing. God wants us to understand each other, to be able to communicate with each other, to work together. We all know how challenging it is to communicate to people who speak a different language than we do. Communication is hard enough when we can understand each other’s language!

The builders of the tower of Babel are not sinning because they are trying to stick together. While God told human beings to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Gen 1:28), this is not really a command. It is explicitly stated to be a blessing, and a blessing cannot be disobeyed.[5] Even here in this story, the people are scattered because God brings his judgment against them. The dispersion of the people described in verses 8-9 is a consequence for human sinfulness, not a way to get them to do what God wanted them to do all along.

Making a Name

We’ve already seen that the purpose of the tower of Babel was not so that the human beings could go up to heaven but so that God could come down and be with them, which is also a good thing. But in the middle of verse 4, the people say, “and let us make a name for ourselves.” “Making a name” means being remembered, and even here there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. In the next chapter, God tells Abraham that God will make Abraham’s name great (Gen 12:2) and he later promises to do the same thing for David (2 Sam 7:9). It is not necessarily sinful for a human being to want to be remembered.

Some have thought that the problem must be that the people are seeking to make a name for themselves rather than for God.[6] But in other places in the Bible it is God alone who is able to make a name for himself.[7] He doesn’t need us to make his name great.

So, what’s the problem here?

This story, like all the others we’ve seen so far in Genesis, invites us in to the conversation of what God is doing in his world and with us as his image bearers. It refuses to let us oversimplify things. It crushes our tendency to settle for the false dichotomy that either God does things or we do things, or something is either natural and completely explainable or supernatural and miraculous or that God either wants

So you go to work tomorrow and you accomplish something significant and you get noticed for what you do. Is that a good thing or not? Surely that’s a good thing, but then again, it can certainly lead us to all kinds of temptations to pride and self-sufficiency, can’t it?

On the other hand, how many of us “religious” and “spiritual” people fall into the mindset that in order for God’s name to be great we have to remain small and insignificant, that what we do day by day doesn’t really matter?

Somehow, we Christians need to regain the biblical perspective that these ancient stories in Scripture will not let us escape. The biblical vision is that the earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord, and God will see to it that it is so (Num 14:21). Indeed, from one perspective, it is already so. “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” (Psa 8:1). But God’s intention is that we will be participants in this great vision, not mere spectators.

Again, God is great and certainly does not need us. Do not dare think God is dependent on you to make his name great. You are not that important. Yet at the same time, God has made us in his image, and that is as high and honor as God could possibly give to us. Somehow, in the Bible’s vision, you and I are both infinitely more insignificant than God, and yet infinitely more important to God than we could possibly know.

Something is wrong in Genesis 11:4, and the story draws us in and makes us wonder what it is. God’s analysis in verse 6 does the same. “And the LORD said, ‘Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” That can sound as if God seems threatened by human potential. Indeed, it reminds us of what God said after the sin of Adam and Eve. “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” (Gen 3:22). And in both instances God intervenes and sends the human beings scattering.

Clearly, God has the superior power and is not himself threatened by human agency. At the same time, God’s interventions are always redemptive, and we have seen him over and over again staying involved with his creation project, determined to redeem and rescue his world and his human beings he has made to steward it to its intended end.

The Solution to Babel

The same is true here, and as this story comes to a close, it points the way forward to the solution to Bable—the redemption that God is determined to bring to his world, to his image bearers.

The Developing Nations

Whatever the causes of God’s disapproval, his intervention in verses 7-8 are decisive. He does not allow the project to proceed. “And they left off building the city” (v. 8). “And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.” Now this dispersion is one of the literary keys to this story. It connects it back to the flood story itself.

Let me show you. In the previous chapter, we encounter another genealogy, a list of names that we find so tedious to read. But in this particular genealogy, we find a repeated refrain that is interesting. Verse 5: “From these the coastland peoples spread in their lands, each with his own language, by their clans, in their nations.” Verse 20: “These are the sons of Ham, by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations.” Verse 31: “These are the sons of Shem, by their clans, their languages, their lands, and their nations.” The story of the tower of Babel in chapter 11, where “the whole earth had one language and the same words” chronologically precedes the genealogy of chapter 10 where we find the peoples spreading out according to their own distinct language.

The two chapters go together, telling us about the spread of the nations, the development of political kingdoms and earthly powers. In fact, although Genesis 10 looks like a genealogy, it is more like what Tremper Longman calls a “linguistic map and guide to the nations of the world.”[8] Here we find not just individuals names but national names. If you count up all the names mentioned, the sum is 70, the total number of nations in the world according to later Israelite conceptions.[9]

This is no mere genealogy. It is a political map. Its concern is not with biological descent but with “national and linguistic relationships.”[10]

Warring Nations

And as we all know, these kinds of relationships are the source of all sorts of trouble in the world. Political alliances are formed in order to protect us from other political alliances.

This political map in chapter 10, described as the sons of Noah’s three sons, also connects the story of Babel to the strange story at the end of chapter 9.

Noah “began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard.” He must have had a bumper crop. He drinks too much wine from his vineyard and “lay uncovered in his tent” (v. 21). This is not a story about the problem with alcohol. To be sure, Noah’s actions are at the very least unwise. And it may be that Noah’s drinking of the fruit of the vine and becoming naked and ashamed is meant to parallel the same sort of thing that happened to Adam when he ate the forbidden fruit. But the reason this story is told is to put a negative light on Ham, Noah’s youngest son.

What did he do wrong? Most commentators agree that the sin of Ham was essentially one of dishonoring his father. This is easily missed in our cultural perspective, but in the ancient world (and in many cultures to this day), it is the highest of virtues to cover up the indiscretions of one’s father or mother.[11] Ham’s sin is in seeing his father uncovered and leaving him like that, doing nothing about his shame. His older two brothers show the proper response in verse 23.

But the most important question here is not what was Ham’s sin but why was his son, Canaan, the one who was cursed? As one commentator observes, “The question has baffled commentators for centuries, and there is no obvious answer.”[12] Some say that since God had already blessed Ham in verse 1, Noah could only bring a curse on his son. Others comment that since it was Noah’s youngest son who sinned against him the proper punishment would be carried out against Ham’s youngest son. But it seems that the narrator has signaled to us (SEE ON VERSE ZZZ) that the spotlight being put on Canaan has to do with what the original audience of Genesis would know about the Canaanites. They were known for being particularly sinful and in need of being expelled from the promised land (Lev 18:3).

Now, as you may know, this story has been used in the past as some sort of justification for race-based slavery and other forms of ethnocentrism. But this will not do, given the connection this story has with chapter 10 and with the story of the tower of Babel in chapter 11 where all people and their later national identities are indicted.

Undoing Babel

But these stories set the stage for the call of Abraham in the next chapter and God’s intention to indeed bring redemption to all the nations through his chosen people, Israel. Through his chosen nation. Something has now changed in the perspective of these post-flood stories. Gordon Wenham observes,

The antediluvian chapters tell of events that affected all mankind: these post-flood narratives tell of happenings that molded the lives and characters of the peoples of the world.[13]

And that includes us, whatever nation we are a citizen of.

God’s intention remains to redeem his world through one nation united under God. There will yet be a kingdom that will overthrow all other kingdoms. And outside of that kingdom, all other earthly kingdoms, all other powers, pose a threat to God’s good purposes for all creation.

If God is going to keep his promise to crush the seed of the serpent through the seed of the woman, then we must look for some kind of reversal of the curse of Babel. The division that comes into the world through our confusion, our inability to understand one another, must be dealt with. We need a new language that everyone can speak, a language that can unite the peoples of the world together.

And from the Christian perspective, this is exactly what has come through Jesus. The story of Pentecost and the gift of tongues in Acts 2 is understood to be the reversal of Babel. The gift of tongues there is not about a new level of spiritual maturity that one can reach but about the growing dominion of Christ’s reign that brings together people from every tribe and tongue.

So, these stories here that tell us about the people being dispersed (Gen 9:19), the people spreading (Gen 10:5, 20, 31-32), and God dispersing the people (Gen 11:8)—these take us back to Eden and the expulsion from the garden. God sends the people away because of what would happen apart from his presence dwelling among his people.

But it's all there to set the stage for the day in which God would finally unite his people together within a new kingdom and with a new language to be a nation that could never be undone or overthrown. That’s the kingdom of God that has come in Jesus.

And only this kingdom can demand our complete allegiance. If we want to be agents for the advancement of God's kingdom, then we must refuse to bow the knee and pledge total allegiance to any other kingdom. It is only this kingdom that, as God has promised, will never end.

_____

[1] William David Reyburn and Euan McG. Fry, A Handbook on Genesis, UBS Handbook Series (New York: United Bible Societies, 1998), 250.

[2] Tremper Longman III and John H. Walton, The Lost World of the Flood: Mythology, Theology, and the Deluge Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2018), 129.

[3] Longman III and Walton, Lost World of the Flood, 130.

[4] Bruce K. Waltke and Cathi J. Fredricks, Genesis: A Commentary (Zondervan, 2001), 178.

[5] Longman III and Walton, Lost World of the Flood, 131.

[6] Longman III and Walton, Lost World of the Flood, 132-33.

[7] Gordon J. Wenham, Genesis 1–15, ed. Bruce M. Metzger, David A. Hubbard, and Glenn W. Barker, vol. 1, Word Biblical Commentary (Dallas: Word Books, 1987), 240, citing Isa 63:12, 14; Jer 32:20; Neh 9:10.

[8] Tremper Longman III, Genesis, The Story of God Bible Commentary (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016), 141.

[9] Longman III, Genesis, 142-43.

[10] Longman III, Genesis, 141.

[11] Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 199-200.

[12] Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 201.

[13] Wenham, Genesis 1–15, 201-02.