The Beginning - 4 - The Tower Of Babel

So today is the fourth week in our The Beginning series. We have already looked at creation, then temptation and making with Adam and Eve. Then last week we looked at having faith when it doesn’t make sense while looking at Noah building his Ark.

This week we are looking at another account from Genesis, the tower of Babel. A story of human pride competing against God’s plan.

As we will see later on, a lot of our passage today focuses around language and communication. With this in mind we are going to play a game. This will also give you a chance to show what you can remember from the past few weeks.

Let’s read our passage for today which is Genesis 11 : 1 - 9.

Here we see the people at a place called Shinar deciding that they want to make a name for themselves. They decide to build a tower that will reach up high into the sky, a tower which will make them known across the Earth.

We then see God looking down at what they are doing. He sees them all working together in building this tower, and all speaking the same language.

The next minute we see God bringing chaos and confusion into this situation. They all start speaking different languages and cannot understand each other. Then rather than being united the people end up getting scattered all over the Earth.

How does reading this passage make you feel?

As we saw last week, sometimes God does things which don’t seem to make sense to us. However in this situation we need to look a bit deeper to get a better understanding of why God might have acted in the way that he did as part of his ultimate plan.

After the flood the people were told to spread out across the Earth. However as we read these people decided that they wanted to do the opposite. They wanted to establish a grand city to keep themselves together, and avoid being separated across the Earth.

This tower was not only built of out bricks and mortar it was also built out of the self0-centered pride of the people who made the decision to go against God’s plan. These people thought that they knew best, and that their plans were better than God’s plan.

Pride is something that can creep into all of our lives. On this person let’s all write examples of what pride might look like.

Pride can be a dangerous thing, it can blind us from the truth, and like for the people of Shinar it can lead us away from God’s plan for our lives.

This account in Genesis isn’t the only place where we are told that it is far better to be humble than proud. There are lots of examples of this in the Bible, and we are going to look at a few of them:

• James 4 : 6
• Psalm 25 : 9
• Proverbs 16 : 18 - 19

In all of these verses we see a clear message, that humbleness is the way that God intends for us to live. The final example we are going to look at is Luke 14 : 7 - 11 which is a parable told by Jesus.

This is slightly different from the others. Here we see the passage showing us that our humility can also be a blessing to others, as well as honouring God.

We are now going to build our own tower, but ours is going to be different. Our tower is going to be built of humbleness rather than pride.

The key thing we can learn from the people of Shinar / Babel is that self-centred pride doesn’t achieve anything, but humbleness can help us build up others and our relationship with God.

Today, thousands of years on from our passage we still live in a world that is divided. As you can see on this map wars, conflicts and other clashes are taking place all over the world.

There are many people across the world who are living their lives in ways that are far from the life that God intended for them. There is a huge divide between the rich and poor. According to Oxfam the worlds 8 richest men own more than the 3.5 billion poorest put together.

Let’s finish our session this week by praying for situations that we are aware of across the world.