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Reaching Postmodern Ziggurat-Builders

By Bob Robinson

www.vanguardchurch.com

Relationship with God, it seems, is somehow dialed into our DNA. Most of the people in our society have been traveling around like nomads for so long in the secular plains of our culture that they have no clue as to how to really connect with God. They watch the talk shows and read the magazines—listening to all the so-called experts giving their opinions.

Most have been traveling a long time on their own or with a group of people who are just as clueless as they are about this God-stuff. But the drive within all of us is always there: to build a “stairway to heaven,” to connect with God.

This is a lot like some people whose story is recorded in Genesis 11. There we read of travelers heading “eastward” until they stop on the plain of Shinar. When people move “eastward” in Genesis (look at Adam and Eve or Cain), it is an indication that they are moving away from God. These travelers in Genesis 11 are like many of us in our culture today—nomads traveling away from God. Their “plain of Shinar” is our “plain of secular America.”

So what did they do? They used their ingenuity and the latest technology to…attempt to reach God! Having an uneasy emptiness in their souls, they took the technology that was rising at that time—brick making—to build a city. But this was not a city like we think of cities today. In those days in Mesopotamia, cities were not built as dwelling places in which people would live. Instead, cities were mostly public buildings—administrative buildings, granaries, and (most importantly) the temple. The city, in effect, was a temple complex. And in the middle of these ancient Mesopotamian cities was the ziggurat.

Imagine living over 2,000 years before Christ. You are walking through the plain between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates—heading toward the city that we now know as “Babel” being built by these men. As the city comes into view, the first and most impressive sight you would see is the immense tower in the middle of the city—the ziggurat.

Archeologists have uncovered cities throughout Mesopotamia which have this tower “with its head in the heavens.” Nearly thirty ziggurats have been discovered.

What is a ziggurat?

Though they resembled pyramids, they were different in function. There was no inside of a ziggurat—the core was packed with dirt, with its outside made of brick and tar.

The ziggurat was not a temple—the temple was at its base.

One temple found in Sippar was named, the “temple of the stairway to pure heaven.” This is the key to understanding what these people were attempting to do: the ziggurat was actually the structure that was built in order to support a huge stairway. The most impressive feature of every ziggurat discovered by archeologists is the stairway on the exterior of the immense structure. The ancient people believed that this stairway could be 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 a room called the Bab-ilu, the “gate of the gods,” the mysterious portal into the heavenly abode. Near the portal was a nicely made bed in order for the god to rest, and a 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 come 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.

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, in his commentary on Genesis (NIV Application Commentary, Zondervan) 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 of 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. The ziggurat-god needs a stairway in order to travel between heaven and earth. The ziggurat-god has needs to be clothed and fed and housed.

And that is exactly how we like him! We want a god that is more like us. The ziggurat-god, since he has needs, can be manipulated and coerced like any human being to be and to 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.

Even though people in our postmodern world have moved “eastward” from the true God of the Bible and Christianity, they still have a soul-hunger for connection with God. And when that is the case, the logical consequence is for them to begin building ziggurats in order to make that connection with God.

We see it all over our culture: we are not becoming a bunch of atheists, but remain a bunch of people who continue to seek spirituality—it’s in our movies (i.e., The Matrix movies, The Lord of the Rings movies), music (many songs feature spiritual innuendo), TV shows (Oprah features spiritual segments, dramas like Miracles continue to be created), and magazines (religious topics appear on Time and Newsweek regularly because they sell better than any other topic).

Some have left God and his revelation of himself—setting out on their own “eastward journey.” But sooner or later, the empty hole left where the divine is meant to reside is too bothersome. Instead of returning to the authentic God who has revealed himself in His Word (both the written Word and the Incarnate Word), they decide to create their own ideas of divinity—something that we can change at whim, something that is not so demanding of holiness and something that allows one to live any way one wants with no repercussions. 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.

Most, however, simply have no idea who the God of the Bible is—but the problem is that they think they know; they nurture all the negative stereotypes of Christianity in their heads: the Crusades, the radical hate-mongering fundamentalist right-wingers who are so holier-than-thou, and so on. So, instead of investigating who Jesus Christ really is, they presume to know all they need to know about him, and take the route of creating a god in their own image. They create a “lesser God” simply because they do not know who he really is and how great he really is. They are distant from God but their desire for God forever is strong. So, they build their own Tower of Babel—a ziggurat of their own construction, for a God of their own construction.

This is the point: We all want to connect with the divine. We have this inner need and desire to do so. We want a spirituality that is vibrant and alive. But since most in our post-Christian culture have no idea who the real God is, they are naturally building their own personal ziggurats to a god of their own creation. Their gods are a mish-mash of all that they have read and heard and seen in movies, in music, in TV shows, and maybe even the Sunday school class they attended a few times as a kid.

The people that we in the 21^st Century church are trying to reach are not hostile toward spiritual things. On the contrary, they are using their ingenuity and technology to build their own ziggurats to their own creations of god.

But their ziggurat-god, being created after their own image, is feeble and weak, a pale imitation of the real thing. What we need to do is to offer them a vision of the real God—a God who stands over and beyond the ziggurat, a God who will blow them away with how incredible he really is.

That is what God did for Jacob.

Interestingly, the same 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 (in Genesis 28:10-19). Jacob falls asleep and is given a vision of a ziggurat—what we commonly know as “Jacob’s Ladder.” There are angels ascending and descending the stairway, and there standing beside the ziggurat is God, who tells Jacob, “I am Yahweh—the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac.”

Jacob sees a ziggurat, but notice the differences with the Tower of Babel:

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 “beside it,” (a better translation than “above it”—God is at the same time in the heavens and on the earth). Thus in Jacob’s dream, God uses the imagery of the current culture, but he distances himself in how he relates to it. God reveals to Jacob that he does not need to use a stairway between heaven and earth—HE IS GOD!

3. God uses the image of the ziggurat to reveal to Jacob who He is. He says, “I am the LORD.” Whereas the people at the Tower of Babel tried to make a name for themselves, here God reveals his name to Jacob. The “LORD” is God’s personal name, YHWH, revealed only to those who are brought into intimate relationship with Him. God is always interested in initiating and then developing a deep, intimate relationship with people!

4. Jacob’s response is worship. When God invades a person’s life with the vision of who he really is, that person’s reaction will be God-exalting, heart-expressing worship. That is what God is in the business of creating: worshippers.

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.

Most of the people in our culture are very busy building their own Babel to reach their own god.

Our job as Christians in the postmodern world is to create an opportunity in which they can discover Bethel so that they can get a fresh vision of the true God.

© Robert W. Robinson  www.vanguardchurch.com

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