Word of Salvation – Vol. 31 No. 16 – April 1986
The Betterment Of Babel
Sermon by Rev. A. I. De Graaf on Genesis 11:5-7 & Acts 2:4-11
Reading: Genesis 11:1-9, Acts 2:1-18
Singing: 206, 95, Bow. 702, Bow. 604, 393, 383.
Gen. 11:5-7: The Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan will be impossible for them. Come let us go down to confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
Acts 2:4-11: All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongue s as the Spirit enabled them. Now there were staying in Jerusalem God-fearing Jews from every nation under heaven. When they heard this this sound, a crowd came together in bewilderment, because each one heard them speaking in his own language. Utterly amazed, they asked, “Are not all these men who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in his own native language? Parthians, Medes and Elamites, Residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya near Cyrene, Visitors from Rome (both Jews and converts to Judaism); Cretans and Arabs – we hear them declaring the WONDERS OF GOD in our own tongues!”
Some time ago, on our way back home, my wife and I were in Singapore. Now Singapore has four major cultural groups living together, the two main ones being English-speaking and Chinese speaking. When we were there, we saw a TV programme where English people were taught Mandarin, the main Chinese language: in fact the lesson was on how to carry out a telephone conversation in that language. Complicated! Man was IT complicated! But then if you want to do business and your client speaks Mandarin, you want to be able to communicate! How otherwise can you live together?
And I remember my young colleague Pim Oppelaar years ago telling me that he, too, was learning Mandarin to help him do mission work in Taiwan. And after a few years of slogging away at that hard language with its funny up-and-down-sounds and its two thousand different characters, he also had to start Taiwanese, another language spoken on that island.
If only those silly clots at Babel, centuries ago, would not have taken it into their heads to build that tower! Now we’ve got all these languages…Dutchies have to learn English if they want to get anywhere in Australia. And in Holland thousands of Turks have to learn Dutch for the same reason… but that is only the tip of the iceberg. For as the languages differ so do the cultures, the way people live and eat, and worship and feel and do things. And those differences in culture can become GAPS. Gaps that separate people and make them distrust and hate one another (so they call the other lot “dagos” or “wogs” or “palefaces”, and white people think all these dark-skinned dagos carry knives and are after their girls).
So you get racism and wars…! You get fear! But on Pentecost Day God came and did something also about THAT. At first glance it looks as if PENTECOST is the great REVERSAL of Babel. But when you look more closely you see that this is NOT the case. God could have done that: the Spirit could have come and make all people speak the same language. He is powerful enough to do that. But no, all those languages remained on earth. What happened because of sin was not taken away by God but it was turned into something beautiful.
That is often the way God works. Sickness is a consequence of sin. But God can change it into a platform of praise, and sometimes He does that, rather than take it away even though He can do THAT too.
Our sin was the reason for Jesus to come and die that terrible death on the cross. If we would not have sinned it would never have happened. Now we praise God for this very thing and that gruesome cross became the substance and subject of the most beautiful songs people still sing today.
O.K., says God, let people be different, let them speak all these languages: My Spirit will not cross out these differences but He will use them, bridge them, bring them together in a body where all members are distinct from each other but yet be one: The coming of the Spirit does not cross out Babel but converts it: so I tell you this morning of God’s Pentecost marvel:
THE BETTERMENT OF BABEL and we see in both cases how:
1. GOD CAME DOWN… and how, in both cases
2. MEN LEARNED A NEW LANGUAGE.
1. GOD CAME DOWN…
Yes that really is wonderful. He does not let us muddle on and He does not leave us here as orphans. HIS COMING DOWN TO BABEL was mercy already. Human power and human might became big at Babel. God came down and looked and said: TOO BIG. We better break it up. That was not just punishment. Really, it would have become punishment if He then and there had done nothing. If He had left them together and united, sinful man then would have made the Super State. Something like Orwell wrote about in his book “1984”, and something like Aldous Huxley had described chillingly in his “Brave New World”.
Both writers thought very little of the good such a Monster-State would do. What tyranny! What enslavement of men and women! Now when God came down to prevent that He surely didn’t have to do that to protect HIMSELF. When the Rulers of the earth come together and the kings of the earth make counsel together HE can still afford to laugh and hold them in derision. Even the most powerful communist state cannot threaten Him or dislodge Him from His throne.
But God did come down, to protect people. To let them live in freedom. And so He scattered the nations and kept them small. So as a provisional, temporary measure, He split them up by changing their language. But provisional it was… better was still to come. That came on Pentecost Day when He came down again… not to change their language but to change their hearts. That became possible because, before Pentecost He came down in His Son, Who became MAN, One of Us. He paid the price of our rebellion with His blood. He bought for us – straying sheep that we were – the privilege of faith, the secret of love.
Instead of tight and tense seekers after power little people might learn the glory of the cross that makes them children of the most High, Temples in which His Spirit might dwell. And when people are that, it does no longer matter that the one speaks Mandarin and the second Dutch, a third English and a fourth Turkish.
Then God could leave intact the differences in culture and the variety in which we live out the human life in the Family of Man: then there is the multitude of gifts but there is the One Spirit: the same Spirit Who brooded upon the waters and the earth and then all flowers and beasts and insects and birds became different too, the wonderful variety of creation.
New people with God inside them can afford to be different. And what was a cause for war and oppression then can become the symphony of praise.
I can also say this differently, in point two:
2. MEN LEARN A NEW LANGUAGE
Up to Babel – and alas, also after that – the one language of rebellious man was that of pride: Man sang the song of his OWN goodness, of his OWN achievements over against God. Let us make a name for ourselves… Let’s build our own tower to get into heaven. Romans 10 tells us that even in church men can speak that language. We have religious ways in which to try and make it on our own. It was after God’s quarantine action of Genesis 11 that Daniel still tells us how exactly there at Babylon a king boasted of what he himself could build. God let that King dream about what would come of his mighty building: and when he did not want to learn WHO really was Mighty, who REALLY was King of the world, then God let him become a beast eating grass for seven years. A demonstration of the destiny of human autonomous greatness!!
on
After World War II people thought they could start afresh and decide on an earth filled with peace. The Soviet Union gave the United Nations (for that was this attempt: the United Nations! “Now we will make peace together!”) a presentation of a sculpture still to be seen in front of the U.N. building in New York: it even has a Bible Text on it: “Then they shall beat their swords into plough-shares…!” Yes but the stone man of that sculpture lifts a hammer like that in the blood-red flag of the Soviet Union, and the sword it beats upon looks more like a sickle than a plough, and no nation makes more guns and bombs than that Soviet Union today! In fact they were making them when they donated that sculpture!
Towers of Babel still today are concentration camp watch-towers. You Stay In Or Else! Also in Christian churches we have not unlearned the language of pride: we, too, dream of ways of peace carved out by OUR efforts, OUR piety, OUR law-fulfilment and Our idealism.
But now listen to what the Spirit of Pentecost does: instead of the many languages of pride, instead of the multi-cultured boasting in our greatness and our science and OUR goodness, instead of “making a name for ourselves” we learn the song of THE GREAT WORKS OF GOD.
When Samuel Morse had invented the telegraph (and with it a new language of dots and dashes that you could send along a stretch of copper wire) they strung the first telegraph line from Boston to Baltimore in the United States. And at the receiving end, all those miles away they were waiting what would happen when that machine would start tapping out its first message. Do you know what it was that Morse sent out?
.– …. .- – (what)
–. — -.. (God)
…. .- – …. (Hath)
.– .–. — ..- –. …. (Wrought)
WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT! What God has done! What a splendid beginning of the use of a new language. Or what a splendid use of ANY language! Not man making his way into his own heaven, but GOD coming to deliver, God opening HIS way. God’s Son BECOMING THE WAY.
The story of the cross and the open grave, the mighty doings of a God who So loved the world that He sent His Only Son that whoever trusts in HIM, instead of what our own pride can achieve, should not perish but have as His gift everlasting life. Once that message gets embodied in people with changed hearts and changed lives whenever that God-given hope replaces our despair and our desperate idealism and even our false gospels of man-made liberation, there the Lord can afford the language to remain and even new languages to be fashioned.
What GOD has wrought: that – and not a programme of human action – is the main core of the Bible. That – and not just relief or political action – is the reason for Christian missions, the main gift to a suffering earth of God’s Spirit-filled church: The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, and to a church bursting at the seams with gifts and tongues and colourful cultures, Paul came with the same message: “I have decided to know nothing among you, Corinthians, than JESUS CHRIST and Him crucified.”
WHAT GOD HATH WROUGHT! As long as that is the message then never mind that there arises another languages that tells of it, another culture that shows it, another church even, to confess it in tones plumbing new depths, another generation fashioning another Book of Worship with songs thus far unheard-of. As long as the message remains “THE GREAT WORKS OF GOD” then any such new tones and languages will ENRICH God’s OIKOUMENE (ECONOMY) for HE will get the praise, not we. But then we will basically be TOGETHER already. It will be a sharing in spite of the differences just as in God’s Great New Future on a new earth as in heaven now already the languages are many but the song is one: “TO THE LAMB THAT WAS SLAIN BE GLORY AND POWER AND HONOUR AND RICHES AND BLESSING.” Then the hand is no longer criticising the foot, sneering that its fingers are too short, or the foot chiding the hand that its toes are too long; because the Spirit does not bring uniformity but unity.
Our programs, when drifting away critically from the Message of the Bible WHAT GOD HAS DONE will drive us apart. But we will be one already when the Spirit makes us in all languages proclaim HIS DEEDS in Jesus Christ. A community of saved sinners can afford to speak different languages. Translating the Bible in yet another new tongue can then be a discovery of new things never so clearly seen before, and the open-minded study of what that Spirit now says the churches from that Same Written Word can open up new vistas of what Christ Jesus has come to give in free grace to the children of men. Mission work will always be proclamation of the great deeds of God but if it is, and whenever it remains that, it will enable people also to speak of it in the language of service and relief, of liberation and justice. Then one generation shall sing to another of HIS mighty acts and the church will be CHURCH OF JESUS instead of degenerating into a mere Red Cross Society: faith is more than idealism. The Spirit came to teach people that song. Peter’s great sermon on Pentecost Day was not a list of the Gifts of the Spirit, but a preaching of the Resurrection of Jesus who died for the sins of those who crucified Him.
Today, Pentecost Day, is the birthday of the Christian Church. Some think that we should mourn today because that church is so broken. True, there is every reason to repent. But more reason there is to rejoice because still today in 1986 the Spirit makes people in Mandarin and Taiwanese, in English and Turkish, yes even in Dutch, proclaim to those in darkness that God has acted in His Son, and done it all. Still today the Spirit changes hearts so that new people can use any language to make known to their neighbours in words and in deed the great Acts of God in Christ.
He has come down. Amazing! He has come down after all we did to keep Him out. He has come down… to stay. That is Pentecost! Such is the love of our God. Herein is love…not that WE have loved… but that He has loved and that HE has acted. Jesus Christ and Him crucified and risen. The Way, the Truth and the Life. The Spirit wrote a book and you have it in your hands. In your own language you can have it. Give it to others in theirs. That they, too, may know Christ and have life… in His Name.
AMEN