Right back in the earliest days of history the human race decided to show God and each other how clever they were. They decided to construct a tower which would reach high up into the sky. God saw what they had done and why they had done it. He decided to confuse them as He rightly concluded that nothing would ever be impossible for the human race to achieve if He allowed them to get away with it. The city remained unfinished. What lessons are there for us here?
It seems that we are living through two modern Babels – two events that demonstrate all too clearly that mere human beings think they are so clever that they can beat Almighty God, who is ultimately the only Creator and Preserver of all humankind.. The Climate Change obsession is the most obvious. God has so ordered creation in His divine wisdom that climate can change dramatically from one geological age to another – the long rock and fossil record proves as much, as does the Ice Age in relatively recent holocene time. Instead of accepting that this is a normal and unavoidable pattern in nature and quietly making the necessary changes in food production, housing, heating, power and transport, humans have instead become immersed in a mass display of public desperation and whingeing and decided that by their combined efforts they can beat Climate Change – in other words that they can play God at His own game. This is a colossal display of human arrogance, which despite all human efforts, will ultimately come to nothing and create much human suffering in the process. Babel all over again.
The second modern Babel is being built around the issue of human sexuality. For the entire period of human history, all societies everywhere have recognised without question that there can only be biological males and females, whether or not they happened to believe in a personal divine Creator God. Suddenly at the beginning of the 21st century humans have decided, despite the evidence of their own eyes, that there are many more genders than merely the two. Despite such theorising clearly being utter and total nonsense, the academic world seems bent upon forcing these spurious ideas upon the population at large, with the eyes of schoolchildren being one of their principal targets. Who knows where such notoriously unscientific methods of thinking will take us next? Once again humans think they are cleverer than God, who made us male and female. If this goes on, our present problems with mental health among the young will seem a drop in the ocean by comparison with what is to come. So much for the NHS. Babel indeed!
When we disobey the rules made for the good of the human race and we decide to play God, things inevitably go wrong. God is not mocked. Whatever we sow, we will reap and if we sow the wind, we will reap the whirlwind. That whirlwind lies directly ahead of us. We are on the verge of a worldwide economic collapse as all the “growth” so confidently predicted by economists comes to a grinding halt while people realise very belatedly that the entire bubble has been based upon greed, using artificial money that is being increasingly seen as not worth the paper it is printed on. Then we have the ever-present forest fires and droughts that threaten more and more parts of the world, causing huge refugee migrations and loss of food production. It is becoming ever easier for fires to go out of control, for productive land to be turned into desert or housing estates and for torrential rainfall to be wasted because nobody wants to build more reservoirs. We either cannot or will not adapt.
For Biblical Christians – and shouldn’t that be all of us - these catastrophic events are beginning to sound like the prophecies of Daniel 12 and Jesus Himself in St. Mark 14. The planet is moving inexorably towards its end and the Kingdom of God, for which we daily ask in the Lord’s Prayer, is not that far over the horizon. This is no time for the Church of God to be hitching its wagon onto climate change enthusiasm, totally unscientific biology or the latest political philosophy. Instead we should be telling people that here we have no continuing city; now, while we have a chance, is the Day of Salvation. Now is the time to turn from sin, pride, self-confidence and ignorance and look instead to Jesus, who forgives us all our wrongs and stupidities and the Holy Spirit who inspires and empowers us for life in that New World to come, whose governing principle will be the reign of Almighty God and His righteousness.
“Your Kingdom come, Your will be done ON EARTH as it is in heaven.” That is what we pray for so often and that is what will ultimately happen. As they say these days, “Bring it on!” - almost the exact words of the last chapter in Revelation. “Maranatha!”
