The common language of those at Babel is the worldview that comes from a universe emptied of the oversight of God, and replaced by a lower-case god. As a result, the idea of sin gets a total makeover. The Gate is a big trick to turn ourselves into the god. This is not just how pagan worship worked, it’s actually how all habitual sin works. It works exactly the same today as it did for Sargon of Akkad. Perhaps I am Sargon and so are we all.

In a universe where we are the god, we can do whatever we like. In fact, in that universe, we’d be fools not to go get our full share of pleasure, power, wealth, and honor. You can make all the appeals to morality you like, but there is no reason for the lion to lay down with the lamb if the nature of the lion is to dominate the lamb. To dominate then becomes divine. History is written by the victors. The innocent lamb stands no chance because it is there for the taking, and it is delicious. All arguments about fair play and human dignity become academic. In the animal world, the lion will only eat until its full and content. But in the human heart, the lion cannot be contented; it wants all lambs that ever existed and ever will exist to be his own forever, and no one else’s. Animals do not have this problem. This is the broken spring in our machinery, as described in the Garden and in the wrath and envy of Cain. This is what Richard Dawkins’ doesn’t understand. The Selfish Gene in a four-legged mammal plays out very different from those of us walking on two legs who happen to suffer from Original Sin.

A universe that lacks a living God is one where sin makes far more sense than repentance. In that universe, man is above God, because God is no longer watching. If you frame your life in this language, you speak Babel.

And you speak Babel.

We all speak Babel.

The state of the world today is mostly the same as when the story of Babel was being written. I say mostly, because there is one major and all-important difference, from an event that happened to a construction worker who was executed around the year 30 A.D. Have you heard this one before? This man did not stay dead. He returned from the grave in a risen and glorified form that could be touched yet could also pass through walls. In other words, he defeated the ultimate secret fear that is sunk deep within every one of us. He defeated death. As a bonus, he takes away our sins and transforms our suffering.

That little event changes a lot of things for all of us who speak Babel, and it’s extremely important that we understand how the world of Babel was changed by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In the Tower of Babel story, God observes people building a tower that will “reach the sky.” Once again, ancient people were not dumb enough to think that a Tower could be built tall enough to reach heaven, and anyone who thinks that’s what this story is about needs to put their Unconscious Bias aside. We have a lot of Present Privilege and Enlightenment Fragility that we need to face when we encounter the Tower of Babel story.

The Tower is meant to be a place where the supernatural can be pulled down to earth, like a magic act. Our presentism mindset asks, “How could anyone be so primitive as to believe that?” Yet, we know that millions of people today, if not billions, read horoscopes and pay for people to interpret Tarot cards. We have faith in many odd things today. We check our fitness watch “body battery” and go to GNC to buy pseudo-science fitness supplements. We get lost in our fantasy worlds of Dungeons and Dragons and Hogwarts. We watch sports and pray to the TV as the football soars through the air toward the uprights as time runs out. Suffice it to say, we have ample superstitions and spirit worlds circling all about us yet today, they just aren’t always as obvious as a Tower or a Ziggurat. Some of the worst examples are in our own backyards - literally; there are Catholics who bury a St. Joseph statue upside down in the yard to help sell their house (please stop this superstitious nonsense, Catholics, and immediately go read CCC 2111-2117).

At last, let’s get into the Tower story a bit more. Seeing this project underway, how does God respond? He confuses them. In trying to access heaven, he stops them from proceeding. What’s interesting is the approach to God. Because the builders at Babel are trying to manipulate God, he stops them. But God, uninvited, reveals insights into heaven later on in Genesis, and those who he offers a glimpse of heaven to react very different from the builders of the Tower of Babel.

This is the hilarious thing about our attempts to manipulate God. Whenever we yell, “Why God, why?!” he shows us later on. When we demand God listen to us, he ignores us on purpose, but when he wants us to know something, he reaches down and taps us. The difference between humility and humiliation is this: humility is when you voluntarily surrender to God. Humiliation is when God does it for you. This is gold in addiction recovery meetings, and everyone laughs together, knowing exactly what that means.

This stairway to heaven is being built for the people “to make a name for themselves.” Contrast the Tower of Babel to Jacob’s experience later in Genesis, chapter 28. Jacob is tapped by God, but he hasn’t built anything yet. In a dream, God sends him a vision. Jacob merely sees a ladder upon which angels are ascending and descending to heaven. Rather than build a staircase on a ziggurat and try to reach God, Jacob is freely given the vision.

What does Jacob do? He does not wake up and start building the ladder, or the stairway to heaven. No, what he does the very next morning is the opposite of what happened at Babel. Jacob builds an altar, to worship God, with humility. He even calls it the “gateway to heaven,” but it is not built to “reach the sky.” It is about three feet tall by the way it’s described. His response of humility is nothing like the builders at Babel. This act by Jacob happens at Bethel, which means “House of God.” Now, “House” has a very different connotation than “Tower” or “Gate”. There is very different symbolism in a house than in a massive Ziggurat. Jacob says:

“How awesome this place is! This is nothing else but the house of God, the gateway to heaven!” Early the next morning Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head, set it up as a sacred pillar, and poured oil on top of it… “This stone that I have set up as a sacred pillar will be the house of God. Of everything you give me, I will return a tenth part to you without fail.” (Gen 28:16-22)

Jacob sees the stairway to heaven, or the “gateway to heaven” that the Babylonians were trying to build! Also, notice that he is able to pour oil on the altar or pillar, so it’s short. He’s not trying to reach the sky. But he doesn’t try to build a tower, he offers what little he has, gives praise, and asks for nothing in return. He even promises to tithe, just for the glory of God, for the rest of his life. The difference may seem subtle, but this is central to the theme and story of the entire Old Testament and how it ties to Jesus in the Incarnation and the Resurrection. We bring what little we have, and God provides the rest. He comes to us, we do not lasso or wrangle or capture him. God came to Jacob, while the rulers at Babel tried to go up to seize God.

What’s happening at the Tower of Babel is not praise or worship of the one true God. It’s an attempted coup to replace the Most High God.

The Tower is an attempt to leash and control God, ultimately to dictate rules using God and thereby remove all “sin” from whatever those in power desire. The people are using their minds and hands to perform the ultimate merger of magic and science, so that they can get God to come down to earth. This would be like all the characters in Macbeth building a giant staircase to kill Shakespeare.

With that image you can recognize the absurdity easily in what Babylon was attempting to do with this Tower, or Ziggurat. It is a ludicrous project from the start. Even if Macbeth and Banquo and the rest of the dramatis personae were building a a tower in the story, the tower would be as flat as the page itself, and Shakespeare would still be the author who wrote the tower into the story. If anyone ever tells you they know the mind of God, prepare to run. They could be playing Babel games, or they might be a real prophet. In either case, be very careful. Remember, Iago seemed nice at first, too, before he ruined Othello’s life, and that was all done on purpose by Iago’s and Othello’s creator, Shakespeare. God knows our path, we do not. We must follow his will, or conform our heart to whatever outcome. Repeat after me: I am not the author, I am a character. I am not the potter at the wheel, I am the pot. I am not the Creator, I am a creature.

What the Macbeth characters would fail to understand is that building a staircase cannot escape the pages and the story they are inside. They live in two dimensional paper while Shakespeare lived in three dimensions, in our world. Shakespeare is on a different level, a different plane that cannot be ascended to, and furthermore, Shakespeare is the Creator, so anything the characters do was allowed by Shakespeare in the first place.

Likewise, the Babel construction company doesn’t realize that God cannot be pulled down, and what the people are actually doing is a self-destructive stunt that will pull the Tower down upon themselves because of their arrogance. The lesson here is that you cannot control God, because he created us. He’s not on the same plane as us, but he lets us know he is there in some mysterious way. But he doesn’t need us, we need him. We cannot reach up and pull him down, we can only reach up.

So the story of Babel goes on and gives us God’s response. Keep in mind that figurative language must be used here because the sacred writer is conveying something that goes beyond this Tower project.

Then the LORD said: If now, while they are one people and all have the same language, they have started to do this, nothing they presume to do will be out of their reach. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that no one will understand the speech of another. So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. (Gen 11:6-8)

This scattering is the origin story of where the idea of “the nations” comes from in the Bible. In the previous chapter, the nations were listed in the Table of Nations, so there’s this odd sense that everyone was living together in harmony until this event. But we already know that Noah’s sons were at each other like a family on Jerry Springer before that. This is one place where the sacred writer seems to be instructing us on a few things:

* The nations formed when they took up false gods. (Straight outta Lord of the Flies)

* The different languages created different cultures, triggering communication breakdown.

* Thus, the nations do not like one another.

* Instead, we have hatred, distrust, treachery, and war.

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