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This might sound surprising. But if you hang around the church, you’re going to run into people, arguing with one another, not necessarily so much something about Little Hills here actually, we get along really well, but if you hang around the church in general it’s going to happen, because we’re human beings. And I remember, Years back, I was serving in a ministry, and like happens in ministry, 2 people were busy arguing with one another, and it had gotten really quite brutal.
Hi, welcome to Steadfast. I’m so glad that you’re here with us tonight. We’re digging into God’s Word together. And if you hit a like or a share button that you see there on your screen, you can make a difference and help people hear about, God’s word and what he’s doing. And I think what we’re talking about tonight is going to be really relevant because it is going to happen. If you were going to hang out with other people, including other Christians, We’re going to have divisions.
Just like that division. years ago. And that division festered and grew and people started to take sides, it was really a mess. And then I remember a friend of mine in the ministry decided to try to mediate that division out between these 2 people who had decide they utterly hated each other, and they both had the right vision for the ministry, And the other person did not. And so, my friend, sat them down confronted them with the fact that as Christians, we should work together and not be opposing each other, pushed them to reconcile their differences, And it worked.
They quit fighting each other. However, that impulse that led them to fight each other. Well, now they turned against my friend instead, sought to get him fired, and so to spread things about him that weren’t true, and it became ugly. Now, as these people who had been divided against each other, started a new division against the very person who had been helping them. What do we see from situations like that?
Because while it sounds bizarre, if you’ve been around other people in general, and including other Christians long enough, you know, as bizarre as it sounds, it’s what happens. Why does that happen? Well, it’s because we try to bring unity but you know what happens when we bring unity, when we attempt to have ability as human beings to work together, we bring our sinful impulses in with that. And any unity we achieve ends up being in another sinful, destructive, divisive sort of unity.
Unity leading to division. Exactly what happened there. And it took years to deal with that because this thing that should have happened, they should have been encouraged to reconcile. went far enough to get them to quit fighting each other. But the sinful impulses were still there. Sometimes where the person trying to heal the division. Sometimes we are those who are causing the division. Now we don’t like to think about that.
But it happens. And when we think about the Tower of Babel, what do we see going on there? We see an attempt to bring human unity together. In a sinful way that’s going to cause division. And God comes and intervenes and a different kind of division happens. Let’s pray tonight as we think about the division that it would have caused in the division that it did cause that we better understand our own sinful impulses to division.
And that through God’s grace we resist them. Would you pray with me, please? Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. Would you help us to be people who seek genuine unity that only comes in you? It doesn’t come when we try to do it ourselves. You might get something that looks like unity, but it causes new division. We see that over and over again. Would you help us to find the true healing, the true true removal of division that only comes through you?
We pray in Jesus’ precious name. Amen. Let’s go ahead. We’re going to pick up in verse 6. Last week we saw the beginning of the story of the Tower of Babel. We looked at how the genealogy after Noah leads into it, and that they’re building that tower then, and they’re going to do it, why so they can stay together and build a name for themselves. Pick up at verse six. 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 will propose to do will now be impossible. To them. Sounds like compliment, doesn’t it? Well? Working together? How often? Maybe it’s at work, maybe it’s in your neighborhood association, maybe it’s at church. I think if only I get everybody on the same page on this thing that needs to be done.
Think about what we could accomplish. Here they have it. It’s working. And God’s unhappy about that. Why is God unhappy about? That unity. It’s because the fruit of our sort of unity that we do is human beings, the fruit of our unity is division, ultimate. That’s what’s going to happen. Because what was unifying them? Well, their own glory. The name, Babel is a play on the word or phrase, gate of God.
How did the Babylonians see themselves even in this pre-Babylonian era, where they saw themselves as those who were the most important in the world? That in fact, they were the gateway to God or the gods. They’re polytheistic, but to the most important God, that’s how they saw things going for them. In other words, they saw that they, they were important. In fact, that’s what they say here. God doesn’t spend a lot of time on the fact that they’re worshiping other gods.
We’re told details about that in subsequent parts of this story, but the big thing here is that they want to build a name for themselves because why are they bragging out being the gateway to the gods? Not because they love the gods so much but because they want to be important. And why are they building this tower because they want to be important? Situation my friend tried to mediate, why did those 2 people unify together against him?
Because they thought that they were the ones who were important, who should be saying something. And then at some point once they got along, they realized they could do important things together. People here are doing. But when we have unity in a human sense. It’s going to lead to empowering our sinful pursuits. Sometimes explicitly, right? We say we want to unify on this principle and the principle itself just utterly stinks.
Now, building a tower in itself is a bad thing, but building a tower so that they can be glorified, the people can. Yeah, that stinks. That’s wrong. It’s just clearly prideful. So, when you unify, but unify for the wrong reasons, that’s even worse than not being unified at all, because now you’re only working together, empowering each other, so you can do more evil things. And that’s what God’s referring to here when he says nothing’s going to be impossible to them that they set their minds to, the point is, they’re going to set their minds to a lot of really bad things and God’s not going to allow them.
That’s what they’re going to do. So when commentator said about these people then, but the continuing condition that we have now that this is not unique to them. We try to grasp the good, rather than grasp onto God. I think that’s really important. Think about it. Try to grasp onto the good. We say, the good is, I have a name for myself. I have this monument to myself. I can build this great society that’s built around this monument.
I can do these things. Those are the good things, right? And what we’re really wanting is good in the general sense that we’re happy and healthy and successful, that ultimately because we realize this life is limited that we have a good eternity, right? Those sorts of things. Those are the ultimate sorts of good, but we confuse those ultimate goods with the things that we can grab onto. Like, I can make a name for that itself.
That way people won’t forget me, right? And so that’s what they do. Where if they’d said, we’d like to know about the creator and follow him, however we can, we don’t need to be known as the gate of the gods, we could just be people who worship the Lord. What would they have done instead? Well, they would have gone and farmed their farms and tended their flocks and built cities in an increasingly large area of the earth, they would have done so without needing to build a tower to build a monument to their own names.
So they unify but they unify for the wrong reason, just like we do. And as they’re building this, what do they think? Well, we have the technology to build bricks now, we have this advanced set of supervision and management that allows us to all work together to build this tower. We have success and we have success because we’re staying together. I got it. Told Noah, and before that, told Adam and Eve, go fruit, go be fruitful and multiply and spread over the earth and subdue it.
And what do they do instead, we’re going to stay right here, let’s hang out here and make sure there’s a concentrated place that has our name. Now, the point here is not, if you dwell on a high density city that somehow you’re sinful, that God only wants us to be out in the pasture land, that’s not the point. The point is they’re trying to cling to their own name and they figure the best way to do that is to have this gigantic city to themselves.
Now, if you live in a big city that you’ve named after yourself, That’s a different story. If you live in a high-rise building and you’ve named it after yourself, that’s a different story, right? If we’re all about us and our name, that’s not good. But the point isn’t, what kind of dwelling we live in an apartment in the city or a house out in the country or a cave in the woods. It’s not about that.
What are we really focusing on? What are we trying to grasp on? onto the good that we think that we can achieve ourselves or the good that God? gives us by grasping onto him. So they unify, it feels like unity, and to a degree, it is unity, but notably, in their unity, there’s a division that we don’t even really think about. We’re not, focus on, oh, because we get to the right to the part. their language is confused.
We’ll talk more about that next week language is confused. Everything’s confused. There’s divisions and nations and all that kind of stuff. Look at all that division. And yet the real division, the most important division is already happening here because they’re focused on themselves. They’re focused on building their own name and not giving glory to God. And so where are they really divided? They’re divided already.
Between humanity and God? The most important division has already happened. Even though it appears like they’re more unified than they are. A chapter later. Because, and this tells something of our hearts. We read the story of Tower of Babel, we think of it as leading to more division. And we don’t really think about the fact that the greatest division is what’s happening at the very beginning. When ostensibly they’re working together.
I think it’s that sort of short sightedness and misunderstanding of such things that causes so much trouble in our world today when you see some old business that’s failing and they’re trying to figure out how to work it out. I was thinking about the old Kmart that used to be in O’Fallon. It was not too far from the church office where I was and it was an old store. It wasn’t fancy. It wasn’t particularly nice, but Kmart, I just merged with Sears at the time.
If you recall that about 20 years ago when that happened for a little while allegedly, these 2 giant but struggling retailers were going to be better by being unified. And one of the things, and I actually liked this about it, is that by unifying they’d spent a lot of time on being ahead on e-commerce before a lot of places were where you could actually go on to their website, order what you needed and walk in the door, and at the very front of the store, now you can do this pretty much anywhere, by the time you couldn’t, you could walk in and they’d already have the bag all stapled up, ready for you to go pick up, walk out.
Easy, right? It’s common now. It wasn’t as common then. And I liked it. It was nice. So it looked like, hey, this is really working out well. They’re working together. Now you can go to Kmart and you get Craftsman tool or a diehard battery. All the Sears brands there, isn’t this great? Isn’t this unifying? However, you may have noticed there aren’t any Kmarts around here anymore. There aren’t any sears around here anymore.
You can drive by Midrovers Mall, and there’s still the sign up for sears, but The door’s gone. There’s only a handful left. I talked a few months ago, in fact, about one, the very last Sears in the United States. It doesn’t look anything like a Sears. Or rather Kmart. There is, I think, one half of a sears left in the United States. I was thinking about that. What happened? How did that seemingly? Forward thinking thing that was really convenient.
When I was, I’d have a lunch break, I’d go to the shop next door, the pizza shop and get pizza and I go and pick up whatever I needed for the office, it was super convenient. How did that turn into what it is now? Well, they were also focused on how they could have as big company merger announcements like talk about synergies where they could work together and they could save all this money and could do all this stuff, they weren’t really focused on the fact that both companies were falling apart rapidly.
And that simply putting 2 companies that had the same sort of problem together. Didn’t necessarily fix it. This happens over and over again. There are all kinds of companies in the history of corporate America that have fallen the same mistake where they think we’ll just merge 2 failing things together and now we’ll have unity and we’ll be stronger. But usually what it looks like is, well some of the people involved in the merger they want to extract up maybe the property values and so they want that money and some of the others don’t really understand the problem and they just think, well, if they’re bigger, they could somehow fix it.
That’s sort of what the Babylonians were thinking. The pre-Babylonians, perhaps we should say. They were looking and thinking, if we can just be all together and build this giant tower, we’ll have the synergies all coming together. We’ll have the property all together. have The biggest set of assets possible and because of that, we’ll be successful and all will be going well. And they missed the point, right?
The point for a story is that needs to be nice inside, and you said the right merchandise and have good service and all those sorts of things. point of humanity in general is we need to be focused on the Lord and unity with him. Just like those companies, we try the merger of human unity, and you know what? It doesn’t work any better. A lot of times our solutions are solutions to real problems. They give the appearance of the fix, just like, Tamar and Sears being together gave an appearance of a fix.
But we’re not actually fixing up the store. Underneath, you know it’s going to fall apart. I think it’s one of the reasons why a lot of people are commenting on both sides of the political aisle right now that both of our major political parties here in the United States have a contingent in them that’s really gotten, Well, let’s just say it weird. And says a lot of anti-biblical things. Hangs out on the internet and says all this stuff.
And a lot of the reason it’s been able to do this is the people that are actually sensible, at the very least, and maybe even Christian, that are not those extremists say, but there’s this real problem, and these people kind of agree with me on some things, so I can have unity with them, and by having that unity with them, you know what I can do? You know what I can do? I can solve that problem. We can be big enough together that we can solve the problem.
But the problem is when we unify with sin. You know what we do? We implement sin. What happens over and over again. That’s why a lot of people are saying whoa, wait a 2nd now. And again, this is not a partisan issue. This is something we’re seeing on across our culture. And a lot of it’s come from. We hate certain groups of people so much the people on the other side, the opponents that we want to unify with anyone that might see them all as opponents, even if they’re actually advocating for the wrong thing.
And I’d imagine there were some people planning to build this tower that, yeah they wanted their name to be great, but they also maybe even knew about the Lord maybe even offered sacrifices to him, but they said, but there’s these big problems we have to deal with. And so I need to unify with these people. You know what? They got enveloped in it. It became part of it. Because their fix was unifying with sin.
Rather than being unified with God and letting him unify more people with himself. It’s a profoundly different thing. And we think we’re healing divisions because we’re bringing this big group of people together, this big constituency it’s going to work. We have a coalition now. But if it isn’t built first, foremost, and only on the Lord, it will not work. See this in the church too. Or churches that are shrinking, merge with other churches that have shakier theology, and they say, it doesn’t really matter.
We’re bigger and we’ll figure that all out later. And they don’t prioritize the fact that God and his word are the most important thing. Let’s start trying to stabilize the institution instead. It doesn’t work. Doesn’t work on an individual level either. You might say, well, I’m not leading political parties. Try to stay in a formed citizen, but I’m not really a mover and shaker there, and I’m certainly not merging church denominations or churches together, so I’m not doing that.
But you know what? We do the same thing. Make the same sort of decisions at work where you work with someone doing something that’s a little bit questionable, but you think, well, but I’m going to use it for good reason. Or you have a small business and you cut some corners and you work with someone else who’s cutting corners at another business because you think I can somehow make this work. You do these sorts of things on an individual basis.
It seems so justifiable because after all it’s even bringing people together. But the question is, it bringing people together in their sin or bringing people together in the Lord. You need to ask that. God here is going to divide the people. They’re building this tower. And so we say, now divisions happen. God has actually caused the division. No, God’s division is a different kind of division. You see, the fruit of our unity causes division, but the fruit of Gaz division is, ironically, unity.
Take a look at the next part, verse seven. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language so that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord disperse them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore, its name was called Babel because they… Because there the Lord confused the language of all the people. of the earth. And from there, the Lord dispersed them over the face of the earth.
The fruit of God’s division is going to be unity, and we’re going to see more of that next week. We’re not going to solve it all entirely now, but let’s consider how God’s scattering everyone actually is an act of unity. It seems counterintuitive. But notice why God did it. That’s what we’ve been looking at, this sin that was the unifying principle for them. Well, by breaking that apart. There’s now something that’s been keeping them from God that isn’t going to be there anymore.
God scatters them so they’re, they’re divisive unity can’t exist any long. That opens up the possibility, at least of proper unity with God. This is the very thing, and we struggle with this passage sometimes, but when Jesus talks about dividing rather than unifying Luke 1251. Do you think I come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather, division. Certainly would have seemed like it to the people who had been waiting for the Messiah, and some of them were believing in Jesus, and following his teaching, and some of them were saying, no, we don’t think he was the Messiah.
Well, now you have people who are either God fears or Jews either way, right? So the Gentiles are Jews, who believe in the God of the Old Testament, who are now divided over whether Jesus is the Messiah or not. And so it seems like more divisions happened. But, Not really, because the people who were God fearing Gentiles, or they were lifelong, faithful Jews, If they were focused on how they could keep the law and be self-righteous and do all these sorts of things, It was actually a dividing point between them and the Lord even if the overall people looked like they were unified.
They’re still unifying ultimately on their own plans, trying to have that merger that’s not going to work. And God says, okay, there is going to be division, right? Jesus, I’m going to say, it’s okay if you believe in me or not. It doesn’t matter. Just stay unified, everybody. I just want you to get long. Jesus doesn’t sing kumbaya. No, Jesus says, you’re gonna follow me or not, and you’re either for me or against me.
It actually matters. There are divisions that are legitimate and real and unavoidable in the sinful world. He says, you know the one that actually is worth dividing on? Whether you believe in me or not? Do you believe in what God’s word says or not? He says, I’m going to bring that division. It’s going to happen. Say, well, but Jesus, it seems like you’re making things worse. And yet what do we see?
Even as that division’s just starting to appear at the beginning of Acts, what do we see that even as that division’s occurring? God starts to fix the division that has plagued us, including that division of language. Acts 2, disciples suddenly are given the gift to speak languages, but they don’t know so that people from different places can hear the message of the gospel. We’ll talk about answering the Tower of Abel.
There’s the reverse babel right there. And you might say, well, it didn’t last right? Missionaries spend years learning a language so they can go minister to someplace. It didn’t last, but actually it did because the important thing, the unifying thing, isn’t that we share a language or ability to understand each other’s language, the unifying thing is believing in Jesus. And far more than anyone could have imagined at that time.
Fastly more. There’s unity in this gigantic, amazing group of people that we call the church. That’s unified not because they’re all in one institution. Or 2 institutions or three. Not because they all can point to the exact same confession of faith, but because they confess the same faith. Faith in one lord, one faith, one baptism. And some of us might express it slightly differently, but if we actually believe in the Jesus of the Bible that he, he came as both fully God and fully man, that he lived the perfect human life, that he died for us, that he rose from the grave that ascended into heaven, that Father Son, and Holy Spirit, our God, is there for us and loves us, and that we believe on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ that we’ll be saved.
We share that. That’s the unity that actually matters the unity that the people building the Tower of Babel were missing. Yeah, they spoke the same language. So they had unity. But they just have unity with their God. You call on Jesus, you have unity with your God. And with all the other people, even though our sinfulness sometimes distorts it, we fight each other. But with all the people who call in the name of the Lord, because one day we will sit in peace and harmony together in the presence of Jesus.
Years before Jesus was incarnate on this earth, Zephaniah 3, verse 9. Prophet says know for sure that I will then enable the nations to give me acceptable praise. And all them will invoke the Lord’s name when they pray. And we will worship him in unison. From beyond the rivers of Ethiopia, those who pray to me will bring me tribute. And you know what that’s happened? You can go anywhere in the world today, in some places there are more Christians in some places.
There are fewer Christians, but there is absolutely no part of the world where you can go and say there aren’t any Christians. Even the places that deeply persecute and oppress Christians, like, well, Iran right now, right? You know what? They’re Christians there. Jesus is doing things. And we look at the Middle East, the whole all kinds of oppression of Christians. You can’t go to a place like Cudder or Saudi Arabia and convert to Christianity freely.
But does that mean there aren’t Christians there? No. God is doing things. China doesn’t like having vibrant living Christianity. They want a distorted one that just promotes the state. But does that mean that guy’s given up there? No, not at all. Christiania spreading there. Perhaps it’s the largest group now of Christians in the world if we could get an accurate number. Why? Because God is working and unifying even as sinful human impulses break things down.
Sure, The communists in China could decide to unify and build a people’s republic. And it looks very strong, but that unity will break. Someday that that entity will fall. But the unity with the Lord that’s happening underneath it, it won’t fall. Even if it seems pretty good that we have a more perfect union. In a country that has lots of freedoms you know what? It’s going to fall that unity is still based on simple human beings working together, but We believe in Jesus.
That unity will not fail. Even when sometimes it feels like it’s actually dividing, right? Be easier to unify on something else common language, common freedoms. But the thing that really matters to unify on is Jesus. Even though sometimes it seems inconvenient because other people that we wanted to work with don’t believe in him and it becomes a division instead of a healing at the moment. Even when you spread everybody out because they’re trying to build a tower to their own name, and it looks like a division, but now they no longer focus on that and God’s going to work in that division.
to bring unity. A few years ago, getting ready for a trip I noticed the hinge on the ancient cooler that always serves so well on vacations because it’s this, you know, one of those old robust igloo coolers that doesn’t have any fancy features or anything, but just keeps things cold and wears like a tank and it’s actually older than me, and yet still works perfectly. Well, it had a problem. One hinge was starting to crack.
You kind of try to to hold the lid in place and it would stay seemingly unified but you know, every time you opened it even if you were trying to be careful with it. That crack was growing bigger, and it was putting wear on the other hinge, and soon both hinges broke off. Most of the way. It’s kind of dangling. Then the question is, well, what do you do with this? Great cooler that has a lid that’s all messed up.
Well, you can go on eBay, I found out, and sure enough, I found the part you can buy brand new official igloo hinges and put them back on it. And so to do that, you had to completely take off the mostly broken hinges. And taking off those hinges that went from a cooler that was amazing, but getting harder to use and kind of breaking to one that was fully broken right? The lid’s not attached at all.
Try to travel with a cooler that its lid is loose. is not going to necessarily be a particularly good thing. And I have to say, as I looked at this faithful cooler, I remember going back to to when I was a kid and it was just always there. I wondered if I’d killed the thing essentially, right? We’ll ever go back together. Well, these parts fit properly. But you know what? Getting to that kind of division actually allowed it to reach a new unity.
Those new hinges went on, fixed the problem. And now it’s that cohesive whole again that hopefully will go a very long time. And do what it was supposed to do. And when God brings division like he does here, he’s taking out those broken hinges right? They’re hinging, they’re opening up and closing, they’re working together, so it seems like things are going well, but you know what? Every time they open, the crack’s getting a little bigger.
They’re ultimately going to be able to do their purpose. And every time we unify in the wrong thing, those cracks, well, they get a little bit bigger. Don’t think. Goes wrong. And sometimes when God’s working in our own lives and in the lives of his people in general, it’s going to look like he’s bringing division rather than healing it. Sometimes the broken hinges need to come off. And then the lids just loose and we wonder, well, why God did you allow that lid to be loose?
The thing is, God knows what’s broken and he fixes it. In God’s way, in that can feel very destructive in the moment, far more destructive than whatever we were doing before. But it prevents a greater break, right? If you have the cooling, you say, well I’m not going to take that off and the lid finally falls off and hits a rock and gets a big gouge in it or something. That wouldn’t be. Progress would be a far greater setback.
And when we focus on human unity over actually unifying on Jesus and him alone. It often looks at the moment like it’s more destructive. But it prevents something far worse than that gouge. It actually prevents us from being eternally divided from the only one whom we truly need to be unified with, the source of all life and goodness. We think, well, that’s not so bad. I just trying to make a little bit of a name for myself.
I’m just trying to work with other people. It’s okay, right? And indeed, we don’t need to be disagreeable. But we need to make sure the thing that unifies us is what God’s actually restoring, not what God’s destroying because God’s going to destroy evil including the evil in us, and that’s going to feel at times like division and brokenness. But God divides for a creative restorative purpose. So here’s the thing, even as he’s dividing you and me and our sinful nature and breaking those parts apart.
You know what he’s going to do? He’s going to restore us. He’s going to restore us to himself. The unity, that actually lasts. Would you pray with me, please? Father, would you help us to be people of genuine unity? Yes, we do pray that as believers that you’d keep us unified. That people would see how we work together and we love each other and we do the things that you’ve called us to do together, but Lord, would you never let us unify on the wrong thing?
You help us to unify what’s good and true. Would you help us to unify on you and you alone? And if we think we’re unified because we’re working with other people, but we don’t know you, Lord, would you show us that’s actually the worst sort of division of all? Help us to cling to what truly matters. Pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen. If you’re trying to think about how things seem to be breaking apart in your own life, you think it seems like God’s destroying things.
It’s a great time to come to him in prayer and say God, I don’t understand why these things are happening, but help me to understand how you were rebuilding. Rebuild me. You haven’t trusted in Jesus yet. It’s a great time to say, God, break down the division between you and me because that’s the division that I want to go away. And if you’d like someone to pray with you, you can use our texting line.
It’s 833-356-4032. Or you can use the comments below either way. Great to hear from you. Great to get to pray for you. We’ll be back next week. We’re going to be looking at where we go from the Tower of Babel, right? Because the story isn’t over and God makes it very clear. He’s going to do exactly what we’ve been talking about. He’s going to bring blessing immunity. And we see that in the aftermath of the tower.
So I do hope that you’ll join me next Monday night for that. In the meantime, have a wonderful and blessed week, and I’ll see you again very soon.
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