I don’t know the exact count but it took several adults, perhaps 10 to 12, working at least 20 hours or more to pull it off. Needless to say it required a lot of planning and work. They transformed a barren gym into a tropical island scene that you would not have believed was possible. It was quite realistic. One had the sense of stepping into another world. I suppose in some sense that said it all. Of course, it was all done by the parents of 8^th graders for their 8^th graders who were graduating from the 8^th grade. It was all part of the 8^th grade banquet that led up to 8^th grade graduation. In three months they would start the 9^th grade, and still have four more years of school before they graduated from high school. Of course, the vast majority of them would plan on going to college. Obviously, getting through the 8^th grade was a monumentally significant milestone. I’m not sure of whether they had a ticker-tape parade through the streets of Philadelphia, but had they planned one I would not have been surprised. This was all done at a Christian school and by parents whose salvation I have no reason to question. What I did and still do question is the wisdom and propriety of engulfing their 13 and 14 year olds in an avalanche of gaudy attention over an achievement that merits about as much attention as the time span it takes to say, “Well, good job, next year you start the ninth grade.” How is it that one can teach a young person how to follow hard after Jesus in a world of human self-exaltation and self-celebration, when those who claim to follow Jesus engage in the same human self-exaltation and self-celebration that shakes its fist in God’s face, but baptize it in their good intentions and rationalize it as Christian? There is a place for encouragement and rewards, but the encouragement and the rewards needs to be in proportion to the actual accomplishment.  

            There is also a place for planning and work. What God commands us to do will require us to plan and work, and those who follow hard after Jesus will diligently and persistently plan and work. We must always be careful not too over react or over compensate. American society in particular runs at a million miles per hour. It can be very easy to react to this pace of life and in the name of “resisting the culture” adopt a lackadaisical, care-free lifestyle that causes us to operate like a sloth on sedatives. But whether we operate like a sloth on sedatives or a worker ant on steroids we can be reflecting the same self-exaltation that is writ large all across American culture. The appearances of these ways of operating may be very different but what drives them is often the same—a preoccupation and absorption with what the individual wants to do. But simply giving ourselves over to an allegiance that allows us to do primarily, if not exclusively, what we find easiest to do, ought not to be thought of as a legitimate option for a disciple of the Lord Jesus. Jesus is Lord. Jesus calls the shots. My thought is not to be what work do I want to do today that will be the carrying out of my plan, but rather what work should I do today that will amount to carrying out God’s plan for my life. Of course, it is very easy to say all that and quite another thing to know what this looks like for us individually and any congregation of the Lord Jesus. But truly knowing what it looks like starts by recognizing Jesus as Lord of all creation, and that we can truly rest in his Lordship. We can plan and work resting in his Lordship because his Lordship is precisely what enables us to plan and work, and to do so for God’s glory.

            The term babel is present in and simply extended in the name Babylon, which referred not simply to a place and empire that controlled the Ancient Near East during much of the 8^th through 6^th century b. c. but in the Bible can represent evil and foolishness in general; of all human governments and ways of life that entice God’s people to abandon God (Rev. 17 & 18). One of the common features of Babylonian thought was that worship temples had their roots below the surface of the earth and tops that reached up into the heavens. So the point in Genesis 11:3 and 4 is that this work is the expression of what humans worship; it is meant to be impressive and exalt them, or make a name for them. But Scripture reveals that this is the very antithesis of what we ought to be about doing, because we are to be about exalting God’s name and that it is God who both makes his and our name great in our doing his work and adopting his plan. That what is presented here is the antithesis of obeying and worshiping God is seen in that their fear in Gen. 11:4 is that they would be dispersed, which is contrasted with the divine command to fill the earth. Since the command to fill the earth is joined to being fruitful and multiplying we can conclude that there may be by implication a refusal to do these other things as well. At any rate, the main point is that we have here opposition to the direct command and will of God.

Here we have the Old Testament version of the plight of God’s people—that they are to be in the world but not of it. This account gives us the way of the world. This worldly way has reached new depths of depravity in American culture. It is not confined to American culture, of course. But, if folly and evil can be said to have been perfected, then one could likely make a very good argument that much of what characterizes and drives American culture is the blossoming of Babel. Wherever we look within popular culture and what is transmitted through mass media and the internet from the entertainment industry, to politics, sports and even education we find the exaltation or glamorization of the individual. There is a fawning over and idolization of particular individuals in seemingly every pursuit. Once there was such a thing as the “great man” theory of history, and now we have degenerated to every person is a great man. That, of course, has the practical effect of dragging greatness down to the lowest forms of depravity, triviality, and insignificance. The result is that true greatness is both ignored and worse, unnoticed. It’s not just that true greatness is willfully shunned but that people lack altogether the ability to even discern human greatness, because they lack the ability to know how to think about who or what a human being is and what the fulfillment of a human would look like. As with everything else in life, when humans try to emphasize, nurture and produce the fulfillment of something they end up destroying it. As it turns out, the best way to rightly emphasize, nurture and work for the fulfillment of any aspect of God’s creation is to make your focus God and his glory through a life of obedience to him.

To live as if there is no God and that one must make a name for one’s self means sacrificing everything at the altar of individual popularity. Some have named this the celebrity culture. Certainly when one uses terms one needs to be clear about what one means; accuracy and precision in thought are important. Still, a concept and way of life can go by many names. Whatever is meant by the terms celebrity culture, the Bible is certainly clear about what it really is—it is the exaltation of the individual person over and against God, and it then manifests itself in various ways in communities where individual’s that embrace this self-exaltation form a life together.  The Bible is also clear that though this has and does demonstrate itself in particular communities it is not the sole possession of a particular community; it resides in the human heart; it is present wherever humans are present. As mentioned already some communities or societies nurture and demonstrate it more than others.

            One of the prevailing themes in Scripture is that the sin of the world is always in danger of washing over God’s people and polluting our patterns of thought and ways of living. It is in fact the city of Babylon, named after babel, and its ways, that is used in Scripture to represent a God-defying, God-denying, human exalting and seductive way of life. 1John tells us clearly and directly not to love the world or the things in it. His point is not that we are not to love God’s creation. He was not using the term world to refer to a place or objects but rather a way of life. God’s people in every era of her history and in every place have had varying degrees of success in avoiding worldliness. We can be assured that where that term worldliness and a concern to shun it is replaced by a preoccupation to learn from the world, infiltrate it in order to “redeem” it or “transform” it, and discover what important aspect of God’s common grace can help God’s people in that project of redeeming and transforming, therein one will find a very powerful enticement toward worldliness, if not already a succumbing to it.

            We live in a culture in which virtually every successful play in a college and professional sporting event is met with a corresponding yell, dance and display of emotion so that everyone watching or listening can know what astoundingly great thing that individual has done. We live in a culture in which many business executives, school administrators, and professional politicians have virtually no regard for doing what is best for people, or saying what they really believe, but in simply saying and doing whatever they have to in order to make money, stay out of trouble with the few people whose opinion they value the most, get elected, or stay in power and in order to make themselves rich, or gain the greatest advantages in life. What often passes for news is whatever outlandish thing the most extreme narcissist is doing.

            Christians individually and the church corporately is not immune to any of this. We need to ask ourselves: What does self-exaltation, or spiritual chest thumping look like? Is it possible to blend self-promotion with one’s salvation so that the two become virtually indistinguishable? One need not be on the public stage so to speak for this to happen. Even the simple games of spiritual “one-ups-man-ship” in which we try and attract attention to ourselves through what we have done are an accommodation to this spirit. We do want to be thankful for the gifts God has given to others and the ways those gifts have been and are being utilized in the kingdom, but we need to be careful about too much talk about others that distinguishes them. I recall several years ago a friend of mine telling me about another teaching elder and what a “rising star” he was. The terminology made me wince; it was and is reflective of a completely inappropriate way to think about life in God’s kingdom. 

            The utter folly of human self-absorption and self-exaltation is seen in God’s having to come down from heaven to even see their tower. This is a joke. But it is not humorous but rather catastrophically tragic; utter folly. This is on par with my 10 yr. old son Gresham’s football team trying to seriously plan and work in order to try and beat the Green Bay Packers. And yet, this does not do their folly justice, because the contrast between God and the people united in opposition to him is a contrast not between one powerful creature and a weak one. Instead, it is the contrast between Creator and creature. My son’s football team does not live and move and have their being in the Green Bay Packers; the Packers did not create nor providentially control all the players on my son’s team. What is taking place with these people who are united in their opposition to God and seeking to make a name for them is their complete disregard of who they are as creatures, and who God is as their Creator, Judge and Redeemer.

            As a result, the very thing that they think they will accomplish and also prevent from happening is the very thing in which they will not succeed. The very thing they fear—being dispersed—is the very thing that happens to them because Jesus is Lord. You see, they accomplish God’s will, but not because they do so willingly, but rather despite their rebellion. In part, one of the things we learn from this is that this self-exalting way of life is dispersed throughout the earth, but we also learn from it that God’s plan and work is accomplished on earth. Everyone will glorify God. It is sort of like the commercially ditty, from I believe Midas mufflers, a number of years ago in which we were told “you can pay me now, or pay me later.” You can either glorify God now or later, but in the end, you will glorify God. The Psalmist says, “The whole earth is full of his glory.” It is only because America is consumed with human self-exaltation and celebration that we think everything God does depends on human choices. Arminianism controls so much of the thinking of American Christians, frankly, because they think too highly of humans and too little of God. God does not live, move and have his being in us, rather we live, move and have our being in God (Acts 17). This does not mean God does not or cannot have real union and communion with us. Of course he can and does. The question is: Who ultimately decides how that union and communion takes place, when, on whose terms, and therefore what does it “look like”? God determines all these things. This is one reason why it is questionable at best to constantly refer to “the Christian faith” as my faith. Oh, is it yours? In what sense is it yours? You can only answer the latter question in a biblically sound way when you have a clear understanding of the truth that both the source and content such faith is God, and its goal is God’s glory not yours.

            The earth and the fullness of it belong to God (Psalm 24:1). Even Satan, as a creature, is God’s servant, as the book of Job makes clear. And the ultimate judgment against Satan as mentioned by Jesus in the Gospels and the book of Revelation will be to the glory of God. How interesting that when the Lord says in Genesis 11:6 that nothing they propose to do will be impossible for them, a verb form is used in the Hebrew that is only used in one other place in the Old Testament—Job 42:2—when Job affirms that nothing God plans and does can be thwarted. In other words, the people in Genesis 11 are attempting to be like God; they are exalting themselves, and trying to make a name for themselves, and in doing so are attempting to be like God. It is this way of life that is not only scattered throughout the earth and represented in Scripture by Babylon, but also judged and overcome by God. This is seen vividly in Acts 2 in the work of God’s Spirit applied to God’s people because of what Jesus accomplished in his life, death, resurrection and ascension that results in he and the Father sending the Holy Spirit. The very nations mentioned in Acts 2 were from the people mentioned in Genesis 10.

            As those who seek to obey the Lord Jesus in a country that is obsessed with celebrating humans we need to be very careful about adopting the patterns of thought and way of life of the babel around us. Glamour, popularity, prestige, being the center of attention, fawning adulation all these things mark Babylon, they mark so much of American life. God calls his people to come out of Babylon, and indeed, through that call he actually does bring his people out of Babylon, because God as the Creator Judge and Redeemer always has the first and final word. So, what’s your plan?