Move along Already

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Transcript:

We’re going to be in Genesis chapter 11 tonight. Alright, Genesis chapter 11. We are, if you’ve not been with us on Sunday nights recently when we’ve had church, we are going through 12 of the biblical events that have, just in my opinion, most shaped the world we live in today.

And we’re looking at each of these stories and saying, what happened? We’re looking at three things. What happened?

How does it affect our world today? and so what are we supposed to do about it? Because I don’t want this just to be a history lesson.

That’s why we’ve got to come around to so what are we supposed to do about it? Because if it’s just history, there may not be much we can do about it. We’ve looked already at the events where God told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit and they did it anyway.

They so did it anyway and then their children and their children’s children just sort of took that disobedience and ran with it until the world was so wicked that God just said, I’m done here. And he wiped the slate clean. And then we talked about Noah, and we talked about the flood, and we talked about what God did with that clean slate.

And we saw from those two stories that, first of all, wickedness, sin left unchecked, will grow, and it will take over. And so we hopefully learned from that that we have a responsibility, we have an obligation to ourselves and to God to be on the lookout for things in our lives that don’t belong there and with his help rip them out by the roots before they have a chance to grow. And from the story about Noah’s Ark, we also saw how God always tends to work through a remnant.

God could have just wiped out all of mankind and started over completely, but instead God chose to save eight people out of the floodwaters and then, of course, the animals along with them. We think of Noah’s Ark being a story of God putting all the animals on the ark. The story of that was the fact that God saved some people for the world to continue.

He didn’t have to save eight people, but he did. And God chose to use a remnant to repopulate the world. God chose to use a remnant.

And it really set the stage for how he would do things throughout biblical history. Because you see all the time that the majority just completely were alienated from God. But there were a few that even though things seemed to be at their darkest, that God continued to work through small groups of people.

And I believe that God still can and does work through small groups of people today. Tonight, we’re looking at the Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel.

And whenever I read this story, I think of Barney Fife. I know that sounds like a weird thing to associate. But on the Andy Griffith Show, watching him tell people, all right, moving along, nothing to see here, moving along.

And he’s trying to get people to move it along, and they just wouldn’t. Okay, please don’t fire me. This morning I compared Jesus to Fidel Castro, and tonight I’m comparing God to Barney Fife.

And please understand what I mean by these comparisons. God told the people at Babel, or God told the people after Noah’s ark, you need to move along, you need to spread out. He told them the same thing he told to Adam, basically.

Multiply, subdue the earth, have dominion over it. He told them go and repopulate the world. And what we see in the beginning of Genesis chapter 11 is that even though God said you need to move it along, you need to disperse, they all just decided, hey, we think we like it here better.

And we’re going to stick together and we’re going to do what we want to do. And so it says in Genesis chapter 11, the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. Now we can’t even conceive of a world like that because we live in a world where there are thousands of languages.

There are still languages today. There are still languages today that we don’t even understand, that linguists don’t know how to understand or decipher. There are still languages that have not been written down.

As hard as that is to believe, there are still languages that have not been written down. There are thousands of languages on the planet today to say nothing of all the languages that have gone extinct. There have been tens, if not hundreds of thousands of languages that have separated mankind.

But in this day, they all came off Noah’s Ark. These eight people came off Noah’s Ark. And their descendants were, this was about a 150 year period, I’m guessing, based on looking at the dates and where everybody lived in biblical times.

I’m thinking it was about 150 years in between Noah’s Ark and the Tower of Babel. And over that time, they all decided, we’re going to stay pretty tightly knit. Now, this is also a theme that we see in the Bible, because in the days of the early church at Jerusalem, what did Jesus tell them?

Once you have the Holy Spirit, you need to move along and disperse. And they didn’t. They said, no, we’re going to stay right here in Jerusalem and do something really big right here.

And so God came along and said, okay, if you’re not going to disperse, I’m going to disperse you. And that’s where the Apostle Paul came in before he was the Apostle Paul. They got off the boat.

They got off the boat and they began to multiply. They began to repopulate the earth as God had told them. But their descendants already said, you know what, we’re not going to obey God in that.

Now you would think they would have learned from the stories of their great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather, however each of them were related to Noah, you would think they would understand. Hey, not that long ago, God wiped the slate clean of the whole earth because of disobedience. Because God looked out and saw that every thought of every person was only evil all the time.

And he started over because of the disobedience. Maybe we should cool it on the disobedience thing. But they said, now, the one big thing he told us to do, we’re not going to do.

We’re going to stay here. The whole earth was of one language and one speech. And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east, as they moved down from where Noah’s Ark landed, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there.

Now that’s very likely in what’s now southern Iraq. So they found this area, and they thought, oh, this is a good place. I’m guessing they’re not talking about the desert.

I’m guessing they’re talking about the area with the Tigris and Euphrates River. Evidently, it’s fertile land and they thought it was nice. And so they decided we’re all going to just live here.

We’re all going to just congregate here and it’s going to be great. It’s going to be a party all the time. When God said, you need to go your separate ways.

And now God had multiple reasons for telling them that. I don’t stand here tonight and pretend that I know what all of God’s reasons were. But a few of them were, okay, he wanted them to repopulate the earth.

Also, you get too many people in one place, it causes problems. I was watching a documentary last night as I was trying to go to sleep. National Geographic Channel documentary about how they design different things and how designs change over time. And this episode happened to be about prison construction.

Random thing to watch. But they were talking about how they learned very early on in prison construction that if you put lots of people in one room, it was just a recipe for disaster. And they said some early prisons, they threw all the men, women, and children into one big room and locked them up there, and they decided that wasn’t working out real well.

And even I can see, even I can see, you know, taking away crime and all of that, just looking at problems that are caused, we’ve gotten very used to Seminole already, just in the short time we’ve been here. And as much as I love where I’m from, it sort of gets on my nerves when I go back to the city. We haven’t been gone from there that long, but it’s quiet here.

And a traffic jam is basically, I mean, other than the crazy intersection up there at Strother, A traffic jam is basically two or three of us sitting at a stop sign waving each other to see who goes first. And the closer we get to the city, it just gets on my nerves. The traffic and the noise. Be it at my parents’ house or Charlie’s mom’s house.

The train is so loud and I can hear the interstate from a mile away. And it’s just, there are problems that come when you get a lot of people together. Now that’s not to say that cities are a sin.

But God said, let’s sort of spread people out. And let’s have everybody go their own way and start their civilizations where they go. And people didn’t want to do that.

So they decided, we’re going to dwell here in the plain of Shinar. And they said to one another, go to, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone and slime they had for mortar.

So they’ve learned how to make bricks. They’ve started to learn masonry and how all that works. You put the clay and you put the straw and you bake it.

And I’ve done that. And I had to do that for school one time, make a brick. And that was labor intensive.

And they were doing this on a massive scale. And they’re saying, we’re going to build cities. We’re going to build towers.

We’re going to build a civilization, all of us, right here together. And they said, Go to let us build a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven, and let us make a name lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. When I was a kid, growing up in church, evidently we misunderstood this story.

And I don’t know if it’s just because we were dumb kids, or maybe we had a teacher who at some point told us something that was not in the Bible. But several of us, I remember, we were under the impression that they were building this tower to reach up to heaven because they thought that they were going to charge heaven. and take over and invade and overthrow God.

Looking back at it as a grown-up, I don’t see that in the story. When it says they were going to build a tower to heaven, I don’t think they thought literally we’re going to reach up into heaven and we’re going to go tell God a thing or two. It’s talking about we’re going to build a tall tower.

It’s going to reach up into the heavens. Sort of like Devon Tower, downtown Oklahoma City. Tall, tall building.

Dwarfs, all of them. And you look at it and you’re just in awe. You have to stand a couple miles away to take a picture and get the whole thing in it.

And so they wanted to build something grand that everybody around them would see, and it would reach up to the heavens, and it would testify how great their civilization was. And we’re going to build this tower. Now we know from archaeology also that this civilization, they built what were called ziggurats.

They built these big, tall towers that would spiral around and reach up in the middle, and they would be very tall, and they would go up in the middle and at the top, and they would worship their pagan deities. And so it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that when they’re building this tower, these are the same people who build ziggurats, that they would be building a tower for their pagan worship. Because it doesn’t, I know it’s only 150 years after the ark, but it doesn’t take too long.

It doesn’t take too long for people or for a people to get very far from God if we’re not careful. So they decided they were going to build this tower. And it said, lest we be scattered on the face of the earth.

So, we’ve got a problem here. Not just saying, well, we want to do our own thing and we’re going to ignore God. But they were actually saying, we want to do our own thing and we want to make it harder for God to enforce obedience here.

Which really, you’re not going to make anything harder for God. God can knock down your little tower anytime He pleases. But they said, so we can’t be scattered.

The one thing God told us to do, we’re going to make sure that can’t happen. We’re going to have this city and this tower as a rallying point. It’s there for their pagan worship.

And it’s there to inspire awe. And it’s there to serve as a focal point. It’s there to stoke their pride and say, look how great we are that everybody in the corners of the earth, which there were that many people, most of them were concentrated right there in their little city.

But that everybody would look at it and say how great we are as a people. And there’s something to that. There’s something to the idea of a skyline being the focal point of a city, of it identifying and serving as a focal point for the people.

And I was teaching on this about a year ago to a junior high school Bible class there in Moore. And, you know, those of you who are familiar with Moore, there’s not much of a skyline. I mean, there’s not a Devon Tower or anything like that in Moore.

But there were two things that growing up there that I always thought of and that most of us who’d lived there for any length of time associated with the city of Moore. And that was the KOMA towers, the three tall radio towers that were there together. I mean, my mother and Charla’s mother talk about being little girls and growing up and heading back from visiting family down in southern Oklahoma.

and they always knew they were getting close to home when they’d see the three radio towers lit up. And then there was the water tower with the big smiley face on it, because back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the city seal and Moore had a big smiley face, and they called themselves Smile America, because there really wasn’t much else to do in Moore but Smile, I guess. And those two things were the things that we looked at and thought, those represent our city.

Well, the KOMA towers came down in one of the little tornadoes. It survived a bunch of the big ones. And they came down in one of the little tornadoes.

And as I was talking about this with my Bible students, they identified those two things as the things they thought of representing our town. Those tall radio towers, which had just recently fallen down, and then that water tower. And when we’re talking about it, I told them, I said, well, the city council just voted five to one to take down that water tower.

And I thought the junior high students were going to revolt. But that’s our tower. That represents our town.

See, the skyline becomes sort of a focus for the culture of the community. When we see Oklahoma City represented in media, you’ll see pictures of downtown with the Devon Tower and First National Place and all of those things. And so they were saying we’re going to build a city with an impressive skyline and it’s going to be a focal point for our people.

It’s going to represent who we are. It’s going to represent us. And we don’t care what God says.

It’s about us. lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. So it was about them and who they were and what they wanted and what they wanted to be and what they wanted to focus on and who cares what God told us to do.

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of men built it. I love the way the Bible phrases things sometimes. I don’t think for a minute that God had to had to physically come down here God saw that tower from eternity past before it was ever built before it was ever started before those people were ever created and yet the Bible says he came down and looked at it not sure why he came and looked at it but he did came and sized up what they had built.

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one. Okay, I realize that sounds like bad grammar. A lot of it sounds like bad grammar.

It’s not in the way that they used words back then. The people, meaning the group. This group, here on the plain of Shinar, they are one.

This group is one. This group is united. and they have all one language, and this they begin to do, and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.

And so God says they’ve started this, they’re all united, excuse me, they’re all united here in a purpose, at least for now, they’ve got one language, there’s nothing that they won’t be able to do. Now that doesn’t mean that God is powerless to stop them, obviously. but things get a lot harder things get a lot harder when you’re not working toward the same goal they get easier when you are working toward the same goal as a group things are a lot harder when you’re not speaking the same language and they’re easier when you are speaking the same language I don’t know how accurate this is anymore but I’ve talked to people who work in industrial settings where there’s a danger of injury on the job.

And they’ve said, yeah, we have workers who speak English. We have workers who speak Spanish. We have workers who speak Chinese.

And it’s nothing against them or their culture. But for safety reasons, they’re required to speak English on the job to avoid confusion, to avoid mistakes, everybody has to speak one language. Because it gets complicated.

It gets complicated when there are language barriers, when there are other divisions. And so God says if they’re all working toward the same goal, and they’re all speaking the same language, they’re going to think they can do whatever they want. And so God said in verse 7, Go to, let us go down and there confound their speech that they may not understand.

one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth, and they left off to build the city. And the way I’ve always pictured this is that God scatters their languages.

I don’t know how He did it. I don’t know if He snapped His fingers. I don’t know if He just said the words and it happened.

I don’t know exactly how He did this. But I’ve always pictured this as them gathering up all their bricks and they’re out there having their work day and working on their tower and they think things are going great and then somebody says, pass me the bricks. And the guy, he’s talking to, I’m tongue-tied.

It’d help if I could even speak one language up here, right? He says, hey, pass me the bricks and the guy he’s talking to says, no comprendo? Okay?

He turns to another guy. What’s wrong with him? And then the third guy says, You can say, And suddenly they’re all looking at each other going, Why don’t you understand me?

Why are you talking funny? No, no, he’s the one who’s talking funny. And suddenly they’re all just looking at each other going, What happened?

Why can you not understand me? Why can’t I understand you? And they’re all confused and they’re trying to figure it out.

You know, sometimes we go to, sometimes Americans are known for going to a foreign country and we just think if we talk louder and slower, they will understand it, and it very rarely does that ever work. Or making hand gestures. I would like to buy a chicken sandwich.

Making butterfly, well, it’s the closest I know how to chicken. Trying to act it out. How well is that going to work on a job site where you’re trying to build a big tower?

confusion and chaos and I see them getting frustrated and getting angry and finally they throw down their bricks and they say you know what we’re out of here this isn’t going to work and it even says they left off to build the city they stopped building I’m not going to build with these people they can’t understand me anyway it would have been frustrating again I don’t know how God did it but there was a day that they were just going on about their normal everyday disobedient lives and God stepped in and said oh you think you can disobey me and get away with it you think this is not going to have consequences alright here you go and again consequences that disobedience has far reaching consequences We talked about that in discipleship training tonight. Talked about Abraham and his decision to try to father a child with Hagar.

And we are still reaping the benefits of a conflict that started there 4,000 years later. They disobeyed God and it led to division. And we are still reaping the benefits of that division now 4,000 years later.

Therefore the name of verse 9, the name of it is called Babel because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth. And from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. You know it says God scattered them or made them to scatter.

He confused them and frustrated them to such a point where they left voluntarily. He made them leave voluntarily if that makes sense to you. He made them leave voluntarily.

You know, God has a, God has an interesting way of telling us, you’re going to do what I tell you, whether you want to or not. And you can disobey me, but one way or another, you’re going to do what I tell you. Sort of like I used to, I finally, I hit on this a few years ago, because I would tell Benjamin, it wasn’t that long ago, but I would tell Benjamin pick up your toys or you’re getting a spanking.

Well sometimes my stubborn son, and I have no idea where he gets that, would say, well I’m just going to take the spanking. And I’m enough of my father’s son that that’s not going to fly. I see this as a trait carrying on down the family tree.

So finally I got to where I’d say, you’re going to clean up your toys with or without a spanking. It’s your choice. And sometimes I think God looks at us and says, you’re going to pick up your toys with or without a spanking.

Do you want to do this the hard way or the easy way? There are certain things that, I mean, God does allow us to be disobedient, but there are certain things that God says, no, this is going to happen one way or another. You’re going to obey me whether you do it, whether you do it by choice or whether I have to come down there and spank you.

But you’re going to obey me. And so he made it to where they were so utterly frustrated by the confusion of languages that they just left. It would have been so much easier if they’d just done what God told them to in the first place.

So how does this affect our world today? The fact that God said, okay, you need to move on. They didn’t.

and God came and said, well, then I’m going to, you’re going to move on if I have to make you. Well, first of all, the obvious answer to that, how this still affects our world today, is we’ve still got linguistic division, we’ve still got cultural division, and we talked about some of these things in discipleship training today. We’ve still got these little battles that take place in our world today that follow along ethnic and linguistic and cultural lines and class lines, And all of this division began at the Tower of Babel.

All of it began there. There are, you know, regardless of your feelings on immigration, there are some people who just dislike people from other countries. I’m not saying everybody.

And I’m not saying if you’re against immigration or illegal immigration, it means you hate people. I personally happen to believe in a secure border. That’s just my personal opinion.

It doesn’t mean I hate anybody. But it means I believe in the rule of law. But there are people, and we know this, there are people in our country who don’t like brown people from south of the border who talk differently.

Just as there are and have been in our country people who don’t like people with dark skin. Or don’t like people with light skin. Or some people in other countries, they don’t like Americans.

some groups of people don’t like Christians some groups of people don’t like Europeans I’m not describing anything you don’t know there are people in the world people in our own country who have negative feelings toward other people because of things that started right here the language differences and the cultural differences that came as a result because the different language groups separated off and they split off and they went to different countries and they adapted to where they went and developed different cultures. And folks, all those fights began right here at the Tower of Babel. And our world got just a little bit more messed up because people disobeyed God and God had to confuse our languages.

But even that leads us to a deeper effect on our world, which is to realize that disobedience to God will always lead to conflict. disobedience to God will always lead to division now they were united for a time in their purpose of saying we’re going to build this city but their disobedience had the unintended consequence that God had to divide them I don’t know that they would have the different groups of the world would have left here hating one another if they just dispersed on their own and God hadn’t had to confuse their languages. But we see throughout the scriptures and we know from personal experience that disobedience to God leads to conflict.

Show me a war taking place in our world today that does not have sin in some form or fashion at the root of it. There’s not. The desire to kill people and take over other.

. . want to take over your country and kill your people so we can have your country.

That’s a sinful attitude. I look back at all the wars that I can think of, and somebody wanted something that wasn’t theirs, or somebody wanted to kill another group of people. Somebody comes from the sin nature.

It all comes from where God tells us the proper way we’re supposed to live and the proper way we’re supposed to treat other people and we say, nah, I’m going to do what I want instead. It all comes from disobedience. Disobedience to God will always lead to conflict and will always lead to division.

Now that’s not to say that if you’re perfectly obedient to God which is impossible anyway, that your life is going to be free from conflict. we still live in a world where there’s sin and it spills over and sometimes we deal with the consequences of sin that isn’t even our own and some person’s choices that are not our own can affect our families can affect our homes, can affect our lives but sin, disobedience to God will always lead to conflict you see families being torn apart somebody somebody’s not listening to God. You see people whose lives are in turmoil and they just can’t seem to stay out of trouble and they can’t.

. . Somebody’s not listening to God.

You see a nation being ripped apart. I feel sometimes like we’re watching that before our very eyes. Seeing a nation ripped apart.

Somebody’s not listening to God. Disobedience to God will always lead to division and conflict. That’s one of the lessons that I take away from the Tower of Babel that still applies to our world today.

So how do we respond to this? As I told you, there are three things we look at in these stories. What happened?

How does it affect our world today? And what are we supposed to do about it? Two things that we need to remember from this story.

First of all, our disobedience not only separates us from God, it separates us from each other. and that goes along with what I was just saying. That disobedience leads to conflict and division.

Disobedience to God and sin will cause us to be in conflict with one another. And we need to remember this. We need to remember this because we’re faced with choices every day.

Are we going to obey God and do the right thing and sometimes the hard thing? Or are we going to go and take the easy way out and disobey God? Nothing good lies at the end of that road.

Nothing good lies there. We need to be reminded of the consequence. We need to be reminded what happens whenever there’s sin and disobedience.

There is always a division. There is always a separation.

When I have a sinful attitude, when I have a sinful attitude and I let that start to take root, it separates me from others around me as much as it separates me from God last night we were sitting at dinner it’s okay to tell stories about my family if it’s about me we were sitting at dinner and we were trying to decide what to order and Charlie kept asking me questions and I was going you’re not understanding me and I was you know kind of snapping back and finally I said I’m sorry because she’s starting to I can tell she’s starting to feel like what is wrong with him and there’s a barrier growing between us and I finally said I am sorry it’s not you I’m frustrated about something that happened earlier in the day and it’s not you I’ve just had my fill of questions and I’ve had my fill of discussion on this and I’m just frustrated and I’m irritated and it’s not you, but I’m taking it out on you and I’m sorry.

And that sinful attitude I had was sort of putting a growing barrier in between us until I stopped and apologized. See, that sin in my heart was leading to separation. It was leading to I mean, please don’t get me wrong not like legal separation or anything just the relationship was not right where it needed to be at the moment.

that’s exactly how sin works it drives a wedge between us and God it drives a wedge between us and those closest to us and so we’ve got to remember that before we make the choice hey, sin, disobedience that road does not end well we’ve got to remember that it’s going to cause separation that it’s going to cause conflict and if we remember that if we think ahead of what our choices are going to do it’s going to make us live differently You know, I’ve avoided a lot. I’m not perfect. Y’all know this.

But I’ve avoided a lot of trouble in life by thinking to myself before I make choices. And I’ve done this since I was a teenager. How is this going to affect my life 15 years down the road?

Now, that doesn’t mean I do like my wife and plan what we’re going to be doing 15 years from now in the morning when we wake up. But it does mean I think, okay, is this choice going to hurt my family? Is this choice going to hurt my ministry?

Is this choice going to make my life harder? How is this going to affect me 15 years down the road? You know what?

You start thinking about the consequences of your actions ahead of time, it changes the way you live. And that’s not to say I’m perfect. That’s to say, thankfully, God gave me some foresight that I was able to avoid some things that otherwise I could have gotten mixed up in as a teenager.

We need to remember how sin works. Think ahead about the consequences and the conflict that it causes. And we need to guard ourselves against the pride within us that causes us to ignore God’s will.

The big reason why they ignored God, the big reason why they disobeyed him and his instructions was pride. I don’t think they hated God. I don’t see any evidence here that th