The Gate of God

Thoughts on Genesis 11 at the start of a new academic year

There’s just been a great flood, an apocalypse of unprecedented enormity. Your city, your whole civilisation has been destroyed. You are a survivor. With the remnant of your people, you set out to start again somewhere new.

In time, you find a plain, fertile and ripe for settlement. You start the fires, bake bricks, build a new city, and at its centre, a temple, towering high. This will be a city that will last. The city will give you and all your people everything they need. The city will be famed throughout the world. They will call it Babylon: but to you, it is Babel, the Gate of God.

But soon, it is not just the name of your city that spreads throughout the world. The city itself spreads, engulfs, submerges. The flood of water has been displaced by waves of bronze and brick. Great Babylon means to bring the whole world into the security of its embrace. And if the world doesn’t want that embrace, well, education can take many forms. The rod is a language everyone speaks.

As the city grows, so does its temple. The tower rises with the prestige of the city. But to whose glory? The glory of God, or the glory of the empire? Maybe it is the empire which deserves the glory. Maybe it is the skill of people, the new technologies of brick and bronze, to which Babel owes her success. Maybe we are greater than God now. Maybe we can grow so wide and tall that God will come down and bow before us. Maybe we can enslave God, like we have enslaved everything, to our machines. Maybe we can kill Him and make a better version after our own image.

But we have forgotten. We have forgotten the flood and the reason that it came. We have forgotten that it came to wash away the sins of the city founded on a brother’s blood, the blood of Abel. And we have forgotten the forbidden fruit by which man set off the cycle of murder and death when he presumed to take God’s power for himself.

So God does come down, but not to serve us. The empire of Babel is laid waste. The city spreads no longer. The tower rises no more. And all the security and stability men thought that they had brought to earth by technical ingenuity and force of arms, all the guarantees of peace that seemed as permanent as bronze, are brought to nothing. All the hopes in our technology, our power.

This is not a myth of ancient times. It is a story of a real empire that existed long ago, and of every empire since. There is a Babel in every generation, but every Babel ends. In Jesus’s time, the new Babel was Rome. There have been Babels ever since, the Babels of great nations, including my own. Yet they fall. And so will the Babels of today. Not just the Babels of nations with military might, of capital or collective, but the Babel built by internet giants and international technocrats, with its denizens of useful soft-power lackeys, influencers and informers, entertainers, pedagogues and mandarins. This Babel too will fall.

There has just been a cataclysm. You are a survivor. You have a plain ahead of you, fertile and ripe for settlement. It is the plain of your life. Only you can decide what tower you will build. Only you can choose where to turn for guidance, where to put your trust. So, choose your friends wisely. And remember: the shifting sands of human pride and power make for a weak foundation, and bricks and bronze are good only when ordered to the blueprint of God’s Law.

A final hint: a high tower needs deep foundations. If you wish to ascend, look first to the one who descends.