“And they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top [is] in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.'” Ge. 11:4 NKJV
Since Adam ate the “apple” man has been trying to finagle a way to obtain the benefits of Heaven without following God.
For a race that ate the fruit that was supposed to make us wise we sure have trouble learning the simple lesson that God’s way is best.
After the flood God commanded Noah and his sons to spread out across the face of the earth and multiply upon it (Ge. 9:1). Instead they clung together and set upon a building project to keep themselves from being “scattered”. Babel was just another attempt by mankind to show God we would forge our own way into the annals of eternity.
I suppose looking back on it all, with our sophisticated 21st century minds, we can laugh at our provincial ancestors who thought Heaven could be reached via staircase. We know better! Everyone knows God is an alien and can only be reached by a starship with warp drive.
The point is however “advanced” we have become, we still as a race haven’t learned the lesson that God’s way is best and that the only way into eternity is His way!
God doesn’t live to serve us. Jesus’ death on the cross wasn’t God signing the kingdom over to us. It was His invitation for us to rejoin His kingdom on His terms.
For instance tomorrow is the global day of prayer for the poor and suffering. http://www.prayforhope.com/events/2011/12/12-12-annual-global-day-of-prayer-for-the-poor-suffering-1/.
The church gets pooh-poohed all the time for praying about stuff. I was once told “I suppose if you have to pray about something you should pray about world peace…” The implication of course was that prayer was a fairly useless exercise unless it raised the collective consciousness about an issue.
The worldly mind’s first response to trouble is economic or legislative. The Heaven-bent mind’s first response is to pray.
I am not against giving money. The Bible tells us to give. But when our first response is to give money and our eleventh response is to pray we are only about the business of building more Babels.
I hope tomorrow you will choose to pray for the poor and suffering. It will do more good than any other activity you could think of!
Reinventing the We'll 