Now we know why learning languages is so hard. But there is a much deeper problem here.
This is Scripture for Students. I’m Steve Whitacre, president of Trinity College and a pastor at Sovereign Grace Church of Louisville. I want to help students build a daily habit for life-long Bible reading. Today is January 10, 2025 and this episode of Scripture for Students is called Babble On. Grab your Bible and let’s get started.
Our readings for today are Genesis 11, Matthew 10, and Ezra 10. Please open your Bible to Genesis 11.
When I was in high school, you had to take a foreign language. At my school, your options were Spanish, French, German, or Latin, and for some reason, I chose French. Still not sure why. I studied French for three years and by the end of those three years, I could hold a legitimate, if poorly pronounced, conversation with someone in French. And that actually happened to me one single time: I was hiking the Appalachian Trail in Virginia and met a hiker who spoke French but no English.
Steve to the rescue! But that was the first and last time I ever used French in the real world. Maybe I should have travelled more. When I got to college, I decided Spanish would be much more practical, so I enrolled in an intensive Spanish course and tried to learn it. I soon encountered a problem: I had trouble keeping French and Spanish separate. And the more Spanish I learned, the worse it got: French words kept leaking into my Spanish sentences and I barely realized it happened. “Dónde esta l’avenue des Champs-Élysées?” What I learned was: languages are difficult, and our passage today tells us why.
Please follow along with me as I read Genesis 11:1–9,
1 Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.
2 And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.
3 And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.
4 Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of man had built.
6 And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.
7 Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
8 So the LORD dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.
9 Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth. And from there the LORD dispersed them over the face of all the earth.
May the Lord bless the reading and the hearing and the keeping of his Word.
This story explains how we got so many languages in the world, but it is meant to tell us much more than that. This is the story of human pride and humbling.
The story starts out reasonably enough: people are moving around and they find a potential building site that looks promising and they decide to build a city. But they don’t stop there. In verse 4, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.”
There are two aspects of their pride that are on display here: first, they wanted the top of this tower to be in the heavens. This could mean that they thought of themselves as potential rivals for God. Let’s build our way to a new heaven. It’s a way of saying that they want to be in charge rather than submit to God.
Then they add to that: “let us make a name for ourselves.” What did they mean by make a name for themselves? If you’ve been reading along each day, you may remember that it was only about a week ago that we read in Genesis 4:26: when Adam and Eve’s grandson Enosh was born, “At that time people began to call upon the name of the LORD.” So here at Babel, the people want to make a name for themselves. They are competing with God’s glory and fame on the earth. And it could be that they are thinking about future generations. They should have devoted themselves to worshiping God. Instead, they built a memorial to themselves.
And God will not have it. There is actually a trace of humor here, in the description of what God does. In verse 5, “The Lord came down to see the city and the tower.” Do you see the difference? This tower that was supposed to be so magnificent, it would reach to heaven and would establish man as a rival to God for glory and fame and power on the earth—but God has to stoop down to see it. I imagine him almost squinting at it: “this little thing?”
God knows what is in the heart of man. He knows that human pride is insatiable in our desire to exalt ourselves, so he says, let’s confuse their language. Let’s make it impossible for them to work together. This is a serious blow to human pride: can you imagine how foolish those builders looked as suddenly they couldn’t understand one other and could only babble on in their new languages. I’m sure it was a perplexing moment. And humbling. My French-Spanish confusion was the far down-stream effects of this moment. That’s how serious God takes pride: He thwarted it at Babel thousands of years ago, and we’re still dealing with the consequences.
This is an egregious display of human pride: one of the most blatant and obvious forms in the entire Bible. And even though none of us is getting to work on a skyscraper in the backyard, we have our own ways of building monuments to our own magnificence. We all express pride in different ways.
It may be that we are impressed with our achievements: maybe as a musician or as an athlete. Maybe in the classroom or in the kitchen. And maybe we like the attention that those achievements bring. Or maybe it goes the other way: maybe we feel like we don’t measure up to others so we are constantly talking about ourselves or cutting others down as a way to try to level the playing field. The temptation to comparison is a form of pride.
Whatever form pride takes in our lives, we know that the antidote is humility. God loves and blesses humility. Let me read you Isaiah 66:1–2, and think about how it compares to what we read in Genesis 11,
1 Thus says the LORD: “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool; what is the house that you would build for me, and what is the place of my rest?
2 All these things my hand has made, and so all these things came to be, declares the LORD. But this is the one to whom I will look: he who is humble and contrite in spirit and trembles at my word.
How can we get humble? C. S. Lewis wrote, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.” Let’s not be like those people at Babel today. Let’s avoid pride and self-absorption today by thinking about ourselves less. The way to do that is to think more about serving the Lord and serving others. If you take a few minutes today to think about the greatness of God and if you look for a few ways to deliberately deny yourself and serve others, you will grow in humility today. And God will bless humility, in whatever language it is expressed in.
That’s all for today. If you enjoyed this episode please share it with a friend and follow us on Apple Podcasts.
This content is sponsored by Trinity College of Louisville. We shape young men and young women for Christ and for the church. Learn more at TrinityCollegeLou.com. Until next time, keep growing!