Human Progress and God's Intervention - Genesis - June 21st, 2026 (Sermon Transcript)

Well, if you have a Bible, go ahead and open up to Genesis chapter 11, or you can follow along with a sermon handout that you got on the way in. It also has the passage there. I want you to imagine something with me for a minute.

Imagine if the whole world was united, like all the people on planet Earth were united on the same page, working towards the same goals. What would that be like?

Well, first, the first thing I thought of is there would be no more wars, no more spending of our tax dollars on wars.

Some say that the United States has spent since 1900, the United States alone, this is not counting all the other countries on the planet, since 1900, the United States has spent around $15 trillion on war. $15 trillion.

Think of the amazing things that we could do with $15 trillion. Think of the amazing things that humanity could accomplish if we all put our heads together.

Like if all the brilliant entrepreneurs in America were perfectly in sync with all of the manufacturing all around the world, and we were all working together towards the same goals, what would the world be like?

Well, it would be a lot like Genesis 11. It would be a lot like the Tower of Babel. There was, in fact, a time when humans experienced incredible unity with massive amounts of people unified and working towards the same goals.

And it was so bad, it was about to get so bad that God Himself had to come down from heaven to stop it. Not what you expect, right? You think, well, if we're all unified, we're all on the same page.

We're going to solve world hunger and achieve peace, and humanity is going to thrive and flourish. But what really happened was things were going off the rails so badly and so quickly that God had to come down from heaven and disunify us.

He had to step in and save us from ourselves. We're going to read the passage in a moment and get into all the details. But if I had to summarize the message today, I'd put it like this.

Human beings have a tendency to rebel against God and try to build things their way, try to build things our way.

We, by nature, are defiant and rebellious and prideful, but God, in His mercy and grace, steps in to stop us and build things His way, the right way. He takes our power, our energy, our creativity, our visions, our goals, our resources.

He takes it and redeems it and redirects it to build His kingdom, to build things His way, the right way. And thank God that He does. Please stand for the reading of God's word.

I'll read the text for us. Genesis chapter 11, verses one through nine. Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.

And as people migrated from the east, they found a plane in the land of Shinar and settled there. 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.

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.

And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the children of man had built. 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 now will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confused their language, so that they may not understand one another's speech.

So the Lord dispersed them from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.

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. This is the word of the Lord. Please be seated and join me as I pray for us.

Father, we thank you for your word, for the light of it, the truth of it, the guidance and wisdom and goodness that it provides for us. Your word is our spiritual nourishment.

God, in your sovereignty, you brought us here this morning to hear from this passage in order to nourish our souls.

And so Lord, help us to focus, to pay attention, to pray, to think, to meditate, and to learn from your word so that we can be nourished and strengthened in our faith. We pray that your word would be a tremendous blessing to us this morning.

That we would be a tremendous blessing to you in return. Pray in the name of Jesus. Amen.

6:06

Babelʼs Historical Reality

Do you believe that the Bible is true? Do you believe that from start to finish, it is the inspired, infallible word of God? I think most of you do.

But there's something that people don't usually think about. All of our beliefs come in degrees of strength and certainty. Like I believe some things with 60% confidence, and I believe other things with 90% confidence.

Some things I believe with maybe close to 100% confidence, like red is a color. I think I'm 99.9% sure about that. The Eagles are gonna be a good team this season.

Maybe 60% sure about that one. There's all these different beliefs we hold, and they all come in different degrees of confidence.

So even if you're a Christian, and even if you're full of faith, even if you believe the Bible is true, you probably aren't 100% certain 100% of the time. But your life would be so much better if you weren't. Really, think about that.

If you really had 100% certainty, 100% of the time, you would never doubt God's goodness. Never. You would never doubt His love for you.

You would never doubt the good plan that He has for your life. So when things are falling apart around you, when tragedy strikes, when suffering hits, and you're sitting there wondering, like is God really there? Does He really love me?

Is He really good? How is this good? If you were 100% certain 100% of the time, you would never doubt His goodness in those moments.

And I think it would save so many of us from so much stress and anxiety if we really had that kind of confidence. Not to mention the fact that we would probably obey His commandments a lot more.

We would probably share the gospel more, and I could go on and on. For all of us, every ounce of confidence we can add to our faith is incredibly valuable. So let me try to add some confidence for you now.

This is one of those Old Testament stories that can be maybe hard to believe.

The Old Testament is filled with stories that seem like they might be made up, like nice little Sunday school tales that somebody made up in order to teach a moral lesson or some kind of ancient mythology where ancient peoples are sitting around

wondering, why do we all speak different languages? And then some sage in the community tells a story around a campfire about humanity building a tower and God comes down and confuses everybody's languages, and that's how we ended up with all these

different languages. That's what mythology is, telling stories in order to explain things that we experience in the world. But this isn't mythology. This isn't just a nice story.

This is real. The Bible is not a book of mythology. It is a book of history.

And the Tower of Babel is no exception. Starting in verse one, we are told of a time when the whole earth had one language and the same words. And here's the crazy part about that.

I was talking with Alan about this just yesterday. I found this really fascinating. There are many other historical writings that talk about a time like this.

Just like Noah's Flood, where there are cultures and writings all around the world that have ancient stories of a worldwide flood.

Well, there are cultures from the Middle East, ancient cultures that have stories about a time when humanity was united with one universal language.

So, that means that we have multiple independent attestation for this story, for what the Bible is telling us here. And multiple independent attestation is the gold standard of history.

That's what historians rely upon to come to confident conclusions about what is actually historical, multiple independent attestation, and that's what we have here.

These other stories in ancient texts and religions feature this one unified language, just like the Bible says. And yet, there are some significant and very interesting differences.

There's agreement on the history of what happened, but how to understand that history differs amongst religions and civilizations. For example, these other religions and texts talk about this time period in a very positive way.

They record it as like a great time in human history, when, you know, we were unified, we had one language, and humanity was flourishing and thriving and doing awesome things. But the Bible records the truth as it always does.

The Bible records the truth that this was not an awesome thing. Whatever the rest of the world might say, we know that God's word is true. Look at verse two, for example.

Verse two speaks of a place known as Shinar. And historians have been able to locate ancient Shinar in modern day Iraq, just south of Baghdad. And guess what they found in modern day Iraq, just south of Baghdad?

Towers, big towers built of brick and bitumen, just like we see in verse three. Did you know that there are over 25,000 archaeological finds that have verified the truth of the Bible? Over 25,000.

And I don't know of a single archaeological find that has contradicted what the Bible says. This is just one of many thousands of examples that demonstrates the truth of the Bible.

These towers all over Iraq, the most famous one, is called the Edimunanke. It's a massive 300-foot-tall ziggurat, basically an ancient temple, and it was dedicated to their patron god, Marduk.

So in Genesis 11, it doesn't record any idolatrous worship here at Babel, but it seems from the historical record that there probably was idolatrous worship happening as well.

And there are a number of these ziggurats throughout the region, so we don't know if the one at Eremenonchi is the actual tower of Babel. But what we do know for sure is that the Bible is recording actual history here.

Verse four is telling us the truth. What happened in verse four is what happened in world history.

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.

And now if you start to think about it, you might start to wonder what exactly is wrong with that. Like all these people got together and they were building a big tower. You know, I've been to the Empire State Building.

It seemed nice enough. Didn't seem like there was anything evil about a big tower.

13:51

Babelʼs Sins

So what was wrong with what they were doing here in verse four? It's not obvious, but as you dig into the text and really start to unpack it, you can see that there are three specific sins that are seeping through in verse four. The first is pride.

The people declare, let us make a name for ourselves. Let us make a name for ourselves. They wanted everybody to know about them and the awesome things they were doing.

They wanted to be glorified. They wanted to be honored and praised. They wanted people to admire them.

In other words, the creation was trying to steal glory from the Creator. The creation was trying to steal glory from the Creator. If you make a nice piece of furniture, who gets the credit?

You or the wood? You do. Sometimes it's nice to look at the wood and say, oh, that's a really nice looking piece of wood, but without you, it would have just been a piece of wood.

The wood does not make itself. It would just be another piece of wood if you had not come along to shape it and make it into something useful and good. And the same thing is true of us.

You would just be a bag of bones if God did not breathe life into you. You would be an aimless, hopeless mess if God did not come into your life to shape you and make you into something useful and good. So God gets the glory.

That's the point, right? These people wanted the glory, but for anything and everything good on planet Earth, God gets the glory. And some of you know exactly what I'm talking about when I say aimless, hopeless mess.

Some of you spent decades living as an aimless, hopeless mess, but God came into your life to shape you and to make you into something useful and good. God gets the glory. God gets the praise.

There are literally hundreds of verses throughout the Bible that talk about God doing things for the sake of his name, God doing things for the sake of his glory.

And I would argue that this is probably the greatest missing piece in most people's understanding of God.

Even church going people, maybe even especially church going people who read the Bible and pray, and they go to church and they've gone to church for 20 years or 30 years.

If you were to take a survey of Christians all across America and try to analyze their understanding of God and who God is and what God is like, I think this would be the missing piece that God does all things for his glory.

And that's why it was so offensive to him that the people at Babel were doing things for their glory. Who gave them the ability to build a tower in the first place? Who created the materials that they were using to build that tower?

Who created them in the first place? God did. But they wanted the credit, and the Bible says countless times, that God desires to be glorified.

God desires for his name to be great. One time I read through the entire Bible, and I made a note of every single reference to God's glory, or him making his name great.

Every single reference or illusion to God bringing glory to himself in the entire Bible.

And I still have it down in my office at the back of that Bible, is page after page of literally hundreds of references to God and his glory, or God bringing glory to himself throughout the scriptures. Let me give you just one of those examples.

Ezekiel 36 verses 22 through 23.

It says, Therefore, say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God, It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, That I am about to act, But for the sake of my holy name, Which you have profaned among the nations To which you came.

And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name, And the nations will know that I am the Lord, Declares the Lord God. God wants people to know his name. He wants them to know who he is and how awesome he is.

So when we seek the opposite, not people knowing God's name, but knowing our name, there's something deeply wrong and offensive to God about that. Because here's the truth, people don't need to know who you are. They need to know who God is.

That's why God does things for the sake of his name, but the people of Babel were turning that upside down and doing it for the sake of their names. In other words, this was a project of pride. It was also motivated by fear.

As it says in verse 4, they were worried that they were going to get driven out and dispersed throughout the earth.

So this project was not coming from a good place, like, oh, humans, you know, using their talents and resources and building something. It wasn't coming from a good, positive, healthy place.

They were filled with pride, and they were operating out of fear. And their fear was directly connected to their disobedience. They were worried about getting dispersed when dispersing was the very thing that God had commanded them to do.

Look at that. They're literally saying, We better do this before we get dispersed. God had told them to disperse.

Genesis 1, 28. God commanded Adam and Eve to multiply and fill the earth, to multiply and fill the earth. And the people at Babel said, Let's all stay right here.

We'll all build right here and build this huge tower and this huge city, and we'll all be in one spot. The very mission statement of humanity is to fill the earth. God reiterates that mission statement after the flood in Genesis 9.1.

He commands Noah and his family to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. But in Genesis 11, the people are saying, we don't want to fill the earth. So we better hurry and build this tower to the heavens before God stops us.

As one scholar said, the Tower of Babel was an act of arrogant defiance. So God came down to intervene. And he intervened in a way that stopped this from ever happening again.

He confused their languages. He sent them out to other parts of the earth to develop their own cultures, and humanity will never achieve this kind of unity again until we reach glory, until the eternal state.

When God sends the unrepentant to hell, and he unifies all his people in heaven, and there will be people for many tribes and tongues and languages, and we will all be unified in heaven. But until then, we will never achieve this kind of unity again.

22:00

Godʼs Justified Intervention

I think it's important to realize that God intervened because he knew how this was going to end. Again, at first, it might seem like they're building a skyscraper. Cool, that's fine.

But then you analyze it and you can see the pride and you can see the fear and you can see the disobedience. But even still, you might think it's really not that big of a deal. But in verse six, God says something very present.

He says, behold, they are one people, and they all have one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do now will be impossible for them. Think about it.

They were in a situation that was extremely powerful. But what happens when human beings get power?

Having a universal language unlocked massive amounts of potential, having that kind of unity led to vast power and resources, but what happens when you give people vast amounts of power and resources? We have a saying for this.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I mean, what is government? Government is a collection of human beings who are given power and resources to use for the good of society.

And what do they do? They use it for their own good. They spend it on themselves, and they make a name for themselves.

Or look at people who win the lottery. All of a sudden, they have a ton of money, and what does that mean? Nothing that they propose to do now will be impossible for them, these lottery winners, because they have effectively unlimited resources.

So now that they can do anything, what do they do? Well, usually, they self-destruct. Like the one guy who bought 50 identical Cadillacs as soon as he got his check.

There are all kinds of documentaries and stories about this. People, all of a sudden, nothing they propose to do now will be impossible for them, and they buy 50 of the same car.

They self-destruct, or at best, they live in luxury and self-indulgence, and whatever sins that they dealt with before just get amplified.

So God saw in this group of people building this tower, he saw what so many of us fail to see and understand until it's too late. When human beings are given vast power and resources, bad things usually happen unless God intervenes.

Unless God intervenes. This is true for us too. God blesses you with a great job.

God blesses you with a team to manage or a family of kids to raise. That's only going to lead to bad things unless God intervenes and saves you and changes you and gives you a new heart and new mind and directs you to his word.

But when he intervenes like that, the script flips. Everything changes, right? When human beings are given power and resources, things go bad, but if God intervenes, then things can be fruitful.

People can flourish and thrive. So it's all about the intervention of God. It's all about the intervention of God.

Now, I want to show you clearly here how God was right about this, how things really were headed in a bad direction. Looking again at verse 9. It says, there its name was called Babel.

But later in history, that name Babel became Babylon. And Babylon became an epicenter of wickedness and rebellion against God.

So even after God intervenes and confuses the languages and disperses the people throughout the earth, there was probably a little group of people left over in Babel.

And they were massively hindered in the direction that they were going and what they were trying to do. They were massively hindered, but that little group managed to persist.

And as they persisted, they just grew in wickedness and rebellion for thousands of years. In the Book of Daniel, we see the Babylonians worshiping false gods and persecuting God's people.

In Isaiah 47, we see the Babylonians walking in wickedness and witchcraft. And the Bible says that their wickedness will persist until the very end of human history, until God destroys them completely in the Book of Revelation.

All the way through to the Book of Revelation, to the literal end of human history, Babylon is a symbol of wickedness and depravity, a symbol of opposition to God.

In all that, just from the leftovers after God dispersed the people, imagine what would have happened if he let them continue doing what they were doing. So God was right.

He has been completely vindicated in his assessment that those people needed to be stopped. God came down because he had a good reason for it. And that phrase there in verse five, God came down is such an interesting phrase.

And if you pay attention, you can see that it's a pattern that repeats throughout history. Human nature simply does not change. We are born with hearts and minds that fall into the same sins as the people of Babel.

We are born with hearts and minds that fall into the same sins as the people of Babel. Who doesn't love to be admired and praised by other people? Who doesn't love to make a name for yourself?

So, you know, everybody at church talks about, she's so sweet, she's so generous, she does so much, and praise, praise, praise.

We all love to receive praise, or he works so hard, he's the hardest worker that I know, or she's so smart, she's brilliant. Anytime, we love to receive praise, often far more than we love to give God his praise that he so richly deserves.

We all suffer from pride. We all operate out of fear. We all disobey God's direct commands.

We're all sinners, just like the people of Babel. So unless God intervenes, if you give me power and resources, unless God intervenes, it's only going to amplify my sin.

Unless God intervenes, people are always going to operate out of pride, and fear, people are always going to try to make a name for themselves. So God must intervene.

As it says in verse five, God must come down in the gospels, and in the gospels, we see that God comes down again to save us again. Think about who Jesus is. It's God coming down to step in, just like he came down to step in at Babel.

But when Jesus came down, he came down to save us finally and completely and for all of eternity. John spells it out so beautifully for us in his gospel, and we'll close with this. John 1, 14.

And the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only son from the father, full of grace and truth.