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Building Babel
vs. Discovering Bethel
Genesis 11:1-9; 28:10-19
Lord, Teach Us to Pray
January 19, 2003
Do you want to connect with God? Are you seeking to have God hear your prayers? Are you on a quest for a deep, mysterious, spiritual, life-shaking encounter with divinity?
Most of us are. We desire a spiritual life that will satisfy our souls deep inside. We want to be able to somehow build a stairway up to God so that we can have intimate connection with the divine.
But, there is a problem. Many of us have been traveling around like nomads for so long in the secular plains of our culture that we have no clue as to how this can be done. We watch the talk shows and read the magazines—and all the so-called experts give their opinions. We buy books like
Conversations with God, hoping that we too can begin a relationship with God. And, more than we actually comprehend, we are influenced by our culture in explicit and also subtle ways—we are inundated with movies and music that are spiritual in nature but give us conflicting ideas about how to connect with the divine.
We have been traveling a long time on our own or with a group of people who are just as clueless as we are about this God-stuff. But we are driven still to build a “stairway to heaven,” to connect with God.
We are like some people whose story is recorded in Genesis 11.
“Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.” (Genesis 11:1-2)
When Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, they were set out toward the
east of the Garden. Also, when Cain was cast from God’s presence, he was sent
east. This is the continuing theme in Genesis for when people move away from God’s will.
And now, in today’s passage, we read of the travelers moving in which direction?
“Eastward.”
They are literally and metaphorically moving away from God. They are like us in our culture today—nomads traveling away from God. Their “plain of Shinar” is our “plain of secular America.”
“They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, ‘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.’”
(Genesis 11:3-4)
Being distant from God has its very subtle consequences. The common thought is that a people will become more and more secular (as in godless or anti-spiritual) the further they go from God. But in reality, what happens is that we never really stop trying to connect with the divine. Relationship with God, it seems, is somehow dialed into our DNA—even when we have traveled east from God, even when we become more and more “secular,” we still seek to build a tower to God. We use all our ingenuity and the latest technology to…attempt to reach God. The concern about the secularization of our culture is not that we will jettison God out of our lives, but that we will fill the vacancy left from the true God with false gods. We see it all over our culture: we are not becoming a bunch of atheists but a bunch of people who continue to seek spirituality—it’s in our movies, music, TV shows, and magazines. We move away from the true God, only to build our own temples and our own stairways to “god”—only the “god” we create is much less than the one true God.
These nomads stop in the plain of Shinar, which was just northeast of the Persian Gulf, in between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—in other words, in what will become Babylon—and what is modern day Iraq. This is a true account—it has details that would only be there if this were history, not just some fanciful fairytale: We read of where they settled and the details of their building materials.
But the metaphor is clear as well: They have moved away from God, but it leaves them with emptiness in each of their souls. They still need God! So, they take the technology that was rising at that time in the east—they made bricks in order to build a city. In the early days of city-building, the cities were not built as dwelling places in which people would live. Instead, the city was where they built the public buildings such as administrative buildings, granaries, and (most importantly) the temple. The city, in effect, was a
temple complex. And in the middle of ancient Mesopotamian cities was the tower.
When I was a kid, we would take trips up to Cedar Point, the amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio. After the hours of driving, we would turn down the causeway that would take us out onto the peninsula in Lake Erie where the park was. As we drove, I was all eyes—looking toward the horizon. I knew that the first thing I would see would be the tower—that structure that was the centerpiece of most amusement parks at the time. It was the spire upon which a revolving room would go up, giving its occupants a 360 degree view of the park from high above it. As the years went by, I no longer looked for that, but the highest roller coaster in the park—first it was Gemini at 125 feet high, then the Magnum at 205 ft., then Millennium Force at 310 ft. This next summer they will open the tallest, fastest coaster in the world, Top Thrill Dragster, at 420 feet tall (that’s 42 stories high)! This towering coaster will reach far above the trees; it will be the first thing you will see as you travel toward the park.
Imagine living over 2,000 years before Christ. You are walking through the plain between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates—heading toward the city being built by these men. As the city would come into view, the first and most impressive sight would be the tower in the middle of the city. The tower in the middle of these cities is called a
ziggurat.
 Archeologists have uncovered cities throughout Mesopotamia which have this building “with its head in the heavens,” the
ziggurat. Nearly thirty ziggurats have been discovered.
What is a ziggurat?
1. Though they resemble pyramids, they are different in function. There is no inside of a ziggurat—the core is packed with dirt, with its outside made of brick and tar.
2. The most impressive feature of the ziggurat is the stairway that led to the top. At the top of the ziggurat was an ornate room, painted in jewel color blue, in which there was a bed made and a table set for the city’s deity.
3. We must understand the function of the ziggurat if we wish know what this story in Genesis is trying to tell us. The ziggurat was not the temple—the temple was at its base. The temple at the base of a ziggurat found in Sippar is named, “temple of the stairway to pure heaven.” You see, the ziggurat was the structure that was built to support the stairway. It was believed that this stairway was used by the gods to travel from one realm to another—from heaven to earth and back again.
At the top of the ziggurat was what was called the Bab-ilu, “gate of the gods,” the mysterious portal into their heavenly abode. Near the portal was that nicely made bed, in order for the god to rest. And also there was that dinner table, in order to feed the god the best of foods.
At the bottom of the ziggurat was the temple, where human beings would go to make deals with this god who, hopefully, would descend the stairway of the ziggurat. In the temple, they would offer gifts to their god in order to seek him to bless their lives, their harvests, their health, their prosperity.
Now think for a moment about the implications of building such an impressive religious tower. What does such a building have to say about these people’s concept of God?
As these people moved east away from the one true God, they began to make up their own conceptions of God. Ancient Near Eastern expert John H. Walton writes, “It is fair to say that the ziggurat was the most powerful representation of the Babylonian religious system, a system in which the gods were recast with
human natures.”
When we think of the ancient gods of Mesopotamia, then of Egypt, and then Greece and Rome, what is a major characteristic of these gods? It is that they are really humanizations of the divine
image. They have family relationships, they quarrel, they are unpredictable, they are fickle…
In other words, what we see here in Genesis 11 is a major step in the falleness of humanity—the impulse to envision God in
human terms. People are no longer seeking to bow before God and seek to be
like him in his image and likeness; they are now trying to bring God down to the level of fallen
humanity—they are seeking for God to be made in man’s image and likeness. Look at what the ziggurat means:
 The god of the ziggurat makes use of a stairway in order to travel between heaven and earth. The god of the ziggurat has needs—he needs to be clothed, fed, housed. The god of the ziggurat is pampered, patronized, and manipulated.
Do you see what is so wrong with what these people were doing in building the Tower of Babel? The heart of the problem is not found in any of the other theories you may have heard (“We’re not supposed to build cities!” or “We are not supposed to speak one language!” or “We should not seek to ‘settle in comfort’ but to ‘scatter for God!’” –I’ve heard and read them all). No, the heart of the problem was in
the degradation of God into nothing more than a human being—only a little more powerful. The heart of the problem is that those who were created in God’s image stated to turn around and attempt to do the same thing back to him! The problem is that when we try to create God in our image, God is less than God—he is perverted into something less, something fallen.
But the god that we create is then able to be manipulated and coerced like any human being to be and do what we want! When God is limited to being more like us, then we can try to make him respond to us on
our terms. When God is reduced, we can manipulate him into doing what we want him to when we want him to do it.
We create a god in our image for a number of reasons.
(1) Maybe we simply do not like the God portrayed by the Bible, and we rebel against him and his revelation of himself. We think we are better off without him. But sooner or later, that empty hole left where the divine is meant to reside is too bothersome. But instead of returning to the authentic God who has revealed himself in His Word (both the
written Word of the Bible and the Incarnate Word of Jesus Christ, His Son), we decide to create our own ideas of divinity. Something that we can change at whim, something that is not so demanding of our holiness and something that allows me to live any way I want with no repercussions. We begin to build our own little Tower of Babel—a ziggurat of our own construction, for a God of our own construction.
(2) Or we may simply have no idea who the God of the Bible is—but the problem is that we think we know; we nurture all the negative stereotypes of Christianity in our heads: the Crusades, the radical hate-mongering fundamentalist right-wingers who are so holier-than-thou. So, instead of investigating who Jesus Christ
really is, we presume to know all we need to know about him, and take the route of creating a god in our own image. We make God less simply because we do not know who he really is and how great he is. We are so distant from God but our desire for God in our lives remains strong. So, we build our own Tower of Babel—a ziggurat of our own construction, for a God of our own construction.
(3) Or maybe we have not been convinced that Christianity is an authentic avenue to spiritual reality. I’ve met a number of these Babel builders. The ziggurats of their own construction are often a rebellion against their parents’ “religion” or of what they view as the “institutional church.” They still seek “spirituality,” but have convinced themselves that spirituality cannot find satisfaction in what they label as the Christian Institution. So, in an effort to connect with God, they build their own Tower of Babel--a ziggurat of their own construction, for a God of their own construction.
A blatant ziggurat in our day is the best-selling book series, Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch. All three books in the series have appeared high on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction. In Conversations with God, “God” is not the Transcendent God of the Bible, but something fashioned in Walsch’s image. Talking about relationships, Walsch’s “God” says that each person should not worry about others, “but only, only about Self…The most loving person is the person who is Self-centered” (Book 1, p. 124). Walsch’s “God” tells us that the disobedience of Adam and Eve was not sin, but a “first blessing,” because through their disobedience, they made it possible for all human beings to make choices. He tells Walsch that the devil and hell do not exist (pp. 51, 115, 201). On one page this “God” says that evil does not exist, then on the next he contradicts himself to say that it does (pp. 133, 134). This God has a sneering ridicule for Jesus Christ and salvation—it tells Walsch, “So who said Jesus was perfect?” (p. 192).
Well, the real God did, in the Bible (if Walsch would bother to actually try to read and understand
it)! Hebrews 4:15 clearly tells us that Jesus “has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin.”
Do you see it? Walsch is a man who has rejected the Roman Catholicism of his youth and has decided to dream up a God of his own making. His books are paper ziggurats of his own construction, for a God of his own construction. And hundreds of thousands of people are reading these books, entering the temple of Babel, looking up at the ziggurat, and happy with a God that they can manipulate into their own image.
What is the true God’s assessment of this? Look at Genesis 11:5-9
“But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, ‘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.’ So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:5-9)
That tower was such an incredibly tall ziggurat to the people building it—but God still had to “come down” to see it! And what he sees is the pure paganism of these people and is repulsed. In this passage, we are reading about one of the most significant moments in history—when humanity crossed the line of not just doing evil things amongst themselves but to begin to do the most evil thing—to redesign God in their own ways.
And from that point in time through the Greeks, through the New Age ideas of people like Neale Donald Walsch, we see it continuing.
So, God does something to put a temporary end to the assault. He confuses their languages and scatters them. And that is why the place is called “Babel.” This is a parody on what they were trying to do. The Akkadian word for “gate of god” is “Bab-ilu.” But the place is here called “Babel,” the Hebrew word that means “Confusion.” In their building the tower or ziggurat to be a babilu (the gate of god), they were babel (dreadfully confused), and God confused their language, making this place “Babel.”
This is the point:
We all want to connect with God. We have this inner need and desire to do so. We want prayer lives that are vibrant and alive and for God to be interactive with us.
But…
…we cannot build our own Tower of Babel—a ziggurat of our own construction, for a God of our own construction with the way we pray. We cannot build a tower that will establish communication on our terms.
How do we do this?
When we think (as Christians!) that we can manipulate God by praying in Jesus’ name in order to get our selfish purposes, we are building a Tower of Babel. When we “claim promises of prosperity” as a means to make God do what we want him to do, our prayers are actually building a Tower of Babel. When we begin to think that we are indispensable to God because of our leadership in ministry, or the money we give, or the talents we have, or the worship we offer, then we are building a Tower of Babel.
When we think of God as a supreme being that can be flattered, enticed, coerced, or appeased, we have created a “god” in our own image, and our prayers are nothing more than ziggurats.
John H. Walton writes, “We want a manageable ‘God-lite.’ We want to be able to harness his power for our own benefit, no strings attached. Our society has confronted child abuse and spouse abuse, but this is ‘God abuse.’”
("Genesis" NIV Application Commentary)
This is what’s dangerous in some of the popular writings about prayer today. While the author may not have intended for the “Prayer of Jabez” to be a prayer mantra to manipulate God into doing what we want him to do, that is exactly what it has become for many who are practicing this prayer.
So, what is the antidote to building a Tower of Babel—a ziggurat of our own construction, for a God of our own construction? It is this: We must realize that all prayer must start with God’s initiative to reveal himself to us. Prayer is a
response to God’s speaking to us first. We must let God build the stairway between heaven and earth. We must let
God reveal to us who he is and what he promises us before we can appropriately pray in response!
Interestingly, the phrase that describes the tower of Babel ("the top reaching to
heaven") is repeated in Genesis in a different context when God revealed himself to Jacob at Bethel. Look at it (Genesis 28:10-19):
Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. There above it stood the LORD, and he said: “I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it.” He was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.”
Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. He called that place Bethel, though the city used to be called Luz.
(Genesis 28:10-19)
Notice the differences:
1. The stairway of Jacob’s dream is set up by God, not by men—it is God who takes the initiative.
2. God does not use the ziggurat’s stairway; his messengers (the angels of God) were ascending and descending upon it, but God is there “above it,” (or maybe better translated “beside it”). Thus in Jocob’s dream, God uses the imagery of the worldview that the people of that day would understand, but God distances himself in how he relates to it. God does not need to use a stairway between heaven and
earth—HE IS GOD!
3. God uses the image to reveal to Jacob who He is. To paraphrase, he says, “I am the LORD…the One who has made covenants with Abraham and Isaac.” The “LORD” is God’s personal name, revealed only to those who are brought into intimate relationship with Him. Whereas the people at the Tower of Babel tried to make a name for themselves, here God reveals his name to Jacob. (And God is still interested in developing a deep, intimate relationship with his people!)
4. God reveals to Jacob his plans for keeping his promises to him and his descendents. This is God reiterating to his loved one what he has promised for him. He is a promise-making and promise-keeping God. And he is very interested in encouraging his children with these promises over and over again. (That’s why we have our Bibles!)
5. Jacob’s response is worship and to pray. As Edmund P. Clowney writes, “Prayer, in the biblical context, is always response to the God who has made himself known…Prayer is antithetical to magic. God is not to be manipulated nor his power exploited. He cannot be summoned like the genie of Aladdin’s lamp. Rather, it is he who does the summoning. Exiled Jocob, fleeing from his brother’s wrath, is met by the Lord in a dream; his vow is an awed response to the promise of the God who has spoken to him (Gen. 28:16-22).”
[quoted from the book, Teach Us to Pray, edited by D. A. Carson, 1990 Baker Books].
So in our prayers, we must first seek for God to reveal himself to us and for him to retell us the promises that he has made to his children. The way we do this in our day is not primarily through dreams and visions but through the Word of God, the sacred Scriptures, that is, our Bible. He can also reveal himself in nature, in a conversation with a trusted friend, through music or art. But the primary way, the way that all the other ways need to be analyzed through is the Bible.
If we want to be biblical in the way we pray, we must first allow God to reveal himself to us so that we can properly respond to him with our prayers.
Prayer must always start with God’s revelation of his character and his promises. If not, we are in danger of building own Tower of Babel—a ziggurat of our own construction, for a God of our own construction. If not, we are in danger of making prayer a manipulation of God. If not, we are in danger of praying things that we think should happen and trying to figure out how to get God to do what we feel he should do.
But if we read our Bibles, we will be seeking to meet God and to hear his promises to his children. Then we will be ready to respond properly, since we will know the true God and how he wants to show his love for us in your lives. You will not have to make it up. You will not have to build a ziggurat.
The people at Babel tried to build their own tower to the gate of heaven. Jacob discovered the true house of God, “Beth-El,” the real gate of heaven.
That is the difference between building Babel and discovering Bethel.
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