Bashan Ministries

If you have ever wondered what it was like way back in human history when everyone seemed to be in perfect harmony and working together as one, Genesis chapter eleven paints a certain kind of picture like that. It opens up with a single verse:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. Genesis11:1

Try to imagine what it was like to have no wars, no lying, cheating, or stealing.

I can remember the days when we could go out somewhere and leave the house wide open and no one came in, people parked their cars and left the keys in the ignition when they went into a shop and no one touched a thing.

I can remember the days when men really respected women and vice versa and the men opened the car doors for their wives.
I still do that for my wife.

Was it really like that? In Genesis 11, scriptures speak of one language, unity and collective effort. Everyone understood each other, not because they had one language, but because they had the same ideals and one single goal.

There is a Hebrew phrase known as safah echat that literally means “one lip”. It points not only to shared vocabulary and speech but a shared way of shaping their own reality. Humanity spoke devarim achadim, “the same words.” In Hebrew, devarim can also mean matters or concerns.

This suggests a deep unity when people aligned in the same language, purpose and intention.

Their common speech moved on from words to action. They all journeyed east, settled on a plain and began to build something.
I think we all have a desire to build something.
We may talk of building a career for ourselves, getting married and building a home etcetera. Whatever it is, I think it is in us. As we see in Hebrews, we are all looking for a city, just like Abraham and that city is being made by God.

Back in Genesis, those people said to each other:

Come, let us make bricks… Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens.

The repeated word havah, “come, let us” is the language of collective resolve and momentum.
The builders encouraged one another forward, shaping a shared project and a shared future. Their motivation soon became clear.

Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

The word for name is shem. It speaks of identity and memory and a shem is what endures. God is often called HaShem.

They wanted to make a name for themselves, looked for permanence through construction, motivated by fear. They feared dispersion and loss of continuity. Their tower rose as a human answer to that fear. It is hard not to recognize this impulse in the world we live in today.

Where did fear come from? Only a few chapters earlier, God had commanded man not to do a certain thing, but he did and then hid himself from God because by his own admission, he was afraid.

We know from the New Testament that God does not give us a spirit of fear. There is however a form of fear, more like holy reverence or awe and respect, but that other fear is not Godly.
I suspect that it enters in when we are disobedient.

The people of Babel did not act in chaos. They planned, organized and fully cooperated with each other. Their unity was disciplined and effective—but it was centered inwardly, shaped by the desire to secure themselves against the uncertainty of what they thought they could not control.

The city and tower became instruments of control, designed to hold humanity together on its own terms, but that was not what God had commanded. He had previously told man to spread over the entire earth and act as His vice-regal agents on the earth. After the flood this generation never went far, but settled down—to make a name for themselves.

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower.

The divine response is deliberate and restrained. God observed the project and intervened not through destruction, but through speech. Scriptures do not say that God destroyed the city or the tower.
The structure remains, but what changes is the ability to coordinate.

We hear that this is when all the different languages started, but that may not be necessarily so. They could have continued to say the same words in a common language, but interpreted the meaning differently. I find it amazing that Christians can read the same scripture, but see things differently. Often times it seems that we worship different Gods.

Is that because we do not believe that they are Holy Spirit inspired and we prefer to rely on the human intellect instead of trusting Him? Hmmm. I wish we all relied on Him.

The word balal means “to mix”. It describes what happened to their language. Speech was not removed, but rearranged. Human creativity, skill and ambition remains intact, but the shared safah, the unified singular speech that made the project possible, was disrupted. When communication fractures, the universal momentum that sustained the building effort ceases.

The story of Babel is brief yet rich, inviting many layers of interpretation. The problem at Babel is human unity organized around fear and self-preservation. By intervening at the level of language, God addresses the root cause.

What they sought to prevent became reality. As Job said, the thing that he greatly feared came upon him. We can set the stage for our future and destiny by our belief structure and should always be mindful that God’s plan eventually comes to pass.

It may be easy to think that their scattering was a calamity, but its result achieved what God originally intended. Man had to disperse over the entire planet and that was a mandate first given in Genesis, where blessing is tied to movement, growth, and life spreading outward rather than concentrating in one place.

It seems to me that the early church never met in one place as we do, in church buildings, but where the people were, usually in believer’s houses. When I look at Jesus’ ministry, He seemed to go from place to place to where people gathered. It may have been in someone’s home, in a market place, on the beach, at a funeral or a wedding and in synagogues—anywhere He found people. He talks about “His Church” and His Church is people—wherever they may be. We tend to centralize ourselves, putting church inside the walls of a building, but the church is people, wherever they may be.

We link Babel with confusion and it certainly appears to be so, but it would perhaps be better to regard it as a resistance to the plan of God, as man’s attempt to centralize power, identity and control. The builders seek to compress humanity into a single place, a single language and a single name, resisting the outward movement embedded in a vision of blessing.

When people are drawn into a single place, language, identity, power and control and inevitably concentrate, identity becomes enforced rather than shared. Security is sought through man’s structures and organizations instead of trusting in God.

Taken to its extreme, it seems to sound like a singular church, without Christ the head, a one world government or a universal religion. Certain people want to bring such things into place today.

The story of Babel remains a meditation on speech, identity and control. Language shapes worlds and when words are driven by fear, we can be in trouble. At the risk of preventing hate speech and inciting violence for example, certain laws are being introduced in many countries that seem to be stifling free speech, especially religious speech.

The fear the builders cling to is deeply human. It is fear of stepping beyond what feels safe, fear of being scattered, fear of losing what defines us. Yet the biblical response suggests that humanity is not meant to be preserved through sameness, but diversity with its foundation on God and what God says in His word.

Human beings are different, shaped by distinct stories, memories, experiences and ways of seeing the world.

This richness is not accidental. It belongs to creation as God intends it. It belongs within the framework of God’s own word to us. This is one reason why I sometimes say that the bible does not need to be re-written, but re-read.

Blessings,

Robert