Hello everyone, and happy New Year! My hope is that 2025 will be a year in which⎯by God’s grace⎯you grow in your faith, spiritually mature in your walk with Christ, and day by day have your eyes opened to the beauty and majesty of the Son.
Let me begin the first episode of 2025 by asking for your forgiveness. Forgive me for the five months of silence since the last podcast, which was released in August 2024. As I explained back then, my family and I were in the middle of moving into a new home. The process ended up being far more complicated and stressful than we thought, and we were even homeless for ten days before we moved into the one and only house my wife and I could agree on. As I am sure you can imagine, it’s hard to put a podcast together when your microphone and monitor are locked away in a storage locker. Regardless, God is good, and although the road to get where we are was rocky, He faithfully led us to where we needed to be and guided us every step of the way.
That being said, it seems as if so much has happened since the summer of 2024. There have been so many global, regional, and national events, it is often hard to keep up. I have thought much about many different phenomena and wrestled with what to discuss with you in this episode. What rose to the surface is that with all the crises happening in our time, I believe it is becoming more and more apparent to many in the secular world that a godless worldview is progressively revealing itself as bankrupt. What I mean by that is, I think individuals all over the globe are seeing signs of the world self-destructing all around them, but the world offers no concrete solutions other than the march toward chaos. I think many across the globe are beginning to see that when their hope is built on something here and now, their foundation is shifting sand. What I’ve said thus far is very broad, so allow me to give one specific example of a current event that’s revealed what’s going on in people’s hearts: the 2024 United States presidential election.
Now, I’m not going to make any political statements because politics never saved or sanctified anyone. But, being an American, what became evident to me over the past few years is that⎯whoever you voted for⎯in their rhetoric and actions, Americans were expressing a desire (whether overt or subconscious) for someone to save them. They wanted a political messiah either to save them from the other candidate, to save our country, to save us from other countries, or to save us from an internal or external threat. And so, regardless of what team you were on, our prescriptions were the only path to redemption, and any other way was considered heresy. I use the word “heresy” on purpose because I think one of the explanations for why politics has become increasingly more antagonistic in the United States is that people are not actually talking about politics; they’re talking about their religion. So, of course, some folks are going to be easily thrown off balance because you are not actually talking about principles or policies; you’re talking about their prescription for secular salvation. These secular salvation plans actually need approval and encouragement from others because any system of subjective truth demands the hearty approval of others to keep the lie going (Romans 1:32). After all, whenever I meet someone who denies that Christ is the Messiah, I don’t get mad because regardless of what anyone thinks, the fact is Jesus lived, died, and rose from the dead. The empty tomb proves that whether someone else believes it or not.
So, what does any of this have to do with the Scriptures? Simple: There is no progress without God. God is the One who ultimately casts the deciding ballot in any election, but how quick are elected leaders to forget or ignore who’s really in charge? There is no progress without God; thus, once a person, a society, or a nation forgets about the Lord, the inevitable result is collapse, regardless of who you vote for. This brings us to Genesis 11.
In this chapter, the people of the earth build the Tower of Babel. Now, before we dive into the text, recall that Genesis 10 gives us a genealogy of Noah’s descendants. From Noah’s three sons that exited the Ark⎯Shem, Ham, and Japheth⎯the Scriptures tell us the whole world was populated. In particular, the sons of Japheth seemed to be the adventurers and explorers, because of them, the text says:
From [the sons of Japheth] the coastlands of the nations were separated into their lands, every one according to his language, according to their families, into their nations. (Genesis 10:5)
God was in essence revealing to us the origins of the global population and setting the foundation for the history of the world. Yet, in Genesis 11:10–32, there is a different genealogy. It is through Shem’s third son that we move through ten generations and get to Abram. Abram (who would be renamed Abraham) was the recipient of the Abrahamic covenant; that is, through him, all the families of the earth would be blessed, and Abraham would be the father of a spiritual multitude too numerous to count (Galatians 3:7). Abraham, of course, was an ancient biological descendant of Jesus. God was in essence revealing to us the origins of the elect population and setting the foundation for the history of the church. Church history is thus a subset of world history, but God’s people have special favor in his eyes. The point of world history is to serve church history because only God’s people will endure when history ends. The important point to hold on to is that for the present, there are two predominant ways of thinking about the world that coexist: a worldly one (city of man) and a godly one (city of God). We will come back to that point later.
So, Genesis 11:1–9 says:
Now the whole earth used the same language and the same words. It came about as they journeyed east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. They said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks and burn them thoroughly.” And they used brick for stone, and they used tar for mortar. They said, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. The Lord said, “Behold, they are one people, and they all have the same language. And this is what they began to do, and now nothing which they purpose to do will be impossible for them. Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth; and they stopped building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of the whole earth.
The first time the Bible mentions a city is in Genesis 4:17. Enoch named a city after himself in an act of hubris. The next time the Bible mentions a city is here in Genesis 11:4, where the people say, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city.” The suggestion is that much of human society (the city of man) is founded on the principle that “We can do this without God and ascend to heaven by our own power.” The men of Babel used what would have been new technology for the time⎯bricks and mortar⎯to construct a “stairway to heaven” with their own hands. Ironically, if we go back to Genesis 1 and 2, what does God create? It’s not a city built by human hands. It’s a garden where everything in it was made for man. Adam didn’t have to build anything but rather cultivated and kept what the Lord had made. And Eden was in essence a temple because that is where God met Adam and Eve face to face. Hence, the central ideology animating paradise was worship. Notably, the elect will regain paradise at the end of history: Revelation 22:1–9 tells us the garden will be restored.
Josephus was a Jew who lived in Jesus’ time. He was hired by the Romans as a historian, and in his writings, he communicates much about Jewish culture and the oral traditions that were transmitted from the forefathers. Interestingly, he also provides another motivation for why the people wanted to build a tower at Shinar: to survive another flood. Here’s what Josephus writes in Antiquities of the Jews 1:4:2:
“Now it was Nimrod who excited [the people at Shinar] to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, – a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God as if it was through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, – seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence upon his power. He also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to be able to reach! and that he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers!” [Italics mine.]
Hence, if we accept Josephus’ writings as true⎯and he would have no reasonable incentive to fabricate this story⎯then we can see that the Tower of Babel wasn’t really about the tower. It was about man trying to build something for himself to escape God’s judgment and inflict his own wrath on the Almighty. After all, what’s the use of a savior when I can build it myself? Babel was something that was built by people who spoke the same language, who cooperated for a common purpose, and who shared a common vision while living in the same place. Accordingly, I think it is a valid conclusion that Babel serves as the precursor for human civilization, the city of man. What becomes so clear, then, is that civilization and the ideology behind it are predicated on the principle that we can save ourselves. Yet, there is no progress without God. Babel saved no one.
So, in Genesis 3:7, we see the origin of the negative aspect of false religion (atonement), where Adam foolishly attempted to cover his shame with something that would never work (fig leaves). Now, in Genesis 11, we see the origin of the positive aspect of false religion (righteousness), where men try⎯by their own works⎯to make it to God. If you’re paying attention, the Bible thus has explained all false religions in the history of the world.
After the flood, everyone spoke the same language. There was thus inherent unity. Spreading out over the whole world would harm that unity because as people move apart, so does their language. God gave the command to “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth” (Genesis 9:1). Yet, twice the people at Shinar chant, “Come, let us.” As Zach Keele writes in the Sola Meda Bible Study Guide, Genesis:
“Unity is their mantra for strength; concentration is their slogan … Their proud confidence, though, is a cover for insecurity. They gather around the ziggurat, so that they are not dispersed over the face of the whole earth (11:4). This gathering, however, counters God’s intentions for humanity to fill the earth (9:1). The tower, then, is a direct challenge to God and the restraint of his providence. The people want to be like God in order to negate the Lord’s will and purpose. The foul stench of sin has ruined the new world’s smell.
The Lord will not suffer fools acting like gods. Their ziggurat may be tickling the clouds, but the Lord has to descend to get a view.”
What the text goes on to say is that God subsequently confused their language, and the people inevitably separated and scattered. You see, the linguistic confusion was an act of grace because it was the people’s anti-God cohesion that was accelerating them down the path of rebellion. By making the people babble, God was fracturing their unity and thus preventing them from being as bad as they could be. Ironically, they wanted to make a name for themselves, but what ended up happening was gibberish. To this very day, God has restrained humanity’s depravity via language. That is, language (and resultantly, culture) prevents uniform cohesion and thus single-mindedness in revolting against the Lord.
It’s no surprise that the geographic area where Babel was erected is the same place where the city of Babylon would arise. The point is that the people may have failed in erecting a tower, but the idea animating Babel never died. In fact, that ideology is alive and well today.
And now we return to the idea of the ideology of the world and the ideology of the church. Worldly ideology is that of Babylon, whose fundamental sin is pride: refusal to glorify God, refusal to give thanks, and worship of the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:18–25). Pride means that Babylonian thinking actively encourages living independently from God, resisting His lordship, and rejecting His claim over our lives. This is why in Revelation, the city of Babylon is described as a harlot, a prostitute, and a witch.
But what about the city of God? That is the new Jerusalem, which is described as a bride, the wife of the Lamb. As Thomas Schreiner writes in his article, “Two Cities,” in the December 2024 issue of Tabletalk Magazine:
“This bride is not a harlot but worships the Lord and His Christ, and the bride wears linen that is bright and clean. She has washed her robes in the blood of the Lamb (Revelation 7:13–14; 22:14) and as a consequence lives in a way that pleases God.
If Babylon represents the city of man, the city to come, the new Jerusalem descends from heaven (22:2, 10), which symbolizes that the city has a divine and transcendent origin that is God’s work and not man’s.
What makes the city so lovely is God’s presence. He will dwell and tabernacle with us, and God will reside with us as our God, wiping away every tear and removing anything that defiles, defaces, or dehumanizes (vv. 3–5). The beauty of the city of God is in God Himself, and we “will see his face” (22:4).”
As with every other narrative in the Bible, God isn’t telling us history for the sake of history. He’s also teaching us. Babel drives home the lesson that without God, there is no progress, and although men may try, God’s will is what triumphs. Let us not forget that God commanded men to fill the earth, and at the end of the Babel narrative, that’s exactly what happened. Man’s rebellion in between command and fulfillment ended up returning to him void.
Going back to what I said at the start regarding the 2024 election, what Babel helped me to see is that the world will never stop trying to build false arks and unsuitable redemption plans, whether that be in the form of a candidate, an ideology, a worldview, or a culture. Babel has saturated thinking in all of human history; that is why it appears in the Bible’s first book. It’s a foundational principle of human civilization, and God is telling us, “This is what to expect.” Does reality prove this right or wrong?
In closing, what I will also say is that for those who⎯regardless of political party⎯yearned for political salvation, I do not think the mere longing for deliverance is wrong at all; rather, it is a whisper from God telling us that we are in trouble and need help. We need to be saved, and yes, Someone else must do it for us. Yet, we will never find that redemption in an elected leader, politician, or president; we will only find it in Christ. There is no progress without God. As I mentioned before, the point of world history is to serve church history because only God’s people will endure when history ends. The real question I have then is: How will whoever is leading function to serve the Church?
Before the flood, God said His Spirit would not strive with man forever (6:3), and as a result of the Spirit’s departure, judgment came on the whole world. The only way anyone found safety was if they listened to God and followed His plan to build an Ark, which was a symbol of Christ. As long as you were in the Ark, you were safe, and only God’s Ark could survive God’s flood. In the New Testament, at Christ’s baptism (Mathew 3:13–17), we then see a beautiful reversal. We again see the Ark (Jesus) atop the waters, but this time it is the river Jordan. Yet, God’s message was not that He would take His Spirit away. Instead, the Spirit returns in the form of a dove and says, “This is My beloved Son in whom I am well-pleased” (Matthew 3:17) And now, because of Christ⎯in His life, death, and Resurrection⎯He mediates the Spirit’s return and offers salvation to the whole world to anyone who believes in Him. He alone is the vessel of refuge that will endure the wrath to come.
As Charles Haddon Spurgeon once said:
“The Lord knows very well that you cannot change your own heart and cannot cleanse your own nature. However, He also knows He can do both. Hear this and be astonished. He can create you a second time. He can cause you to be born again.”
Of course, only after God causes a person to be born again will they respond to Christ in faith. Praise be to God that “Whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:4).
Beloved, it feels good to be back talking about what I love to all of you. Expect to hear from me next the first Wednesday in February.
Happy 2025.
Dr. C. H. E. Sadaphal