Blogging Genesis chapter 11
You
know how people talk about how great a color-blind society would be? How ideal and peaceful the world would be if
there was no Black, no White, no race, no ethnicity--- if we were all “just
people”? Well that was the situation at
the beginning of Genesis 11.
The
first few generations of descendants from Shem, Ham, and Japheth had the same
language and customs. Shem’s, Ham’s, and
Japheth’s children weren’t divided into tribes or ethnicities. They were all Noahites. It was the pinnacle and the conclusion of a
“color-blind” world society.
In
their color-blind world, there was unity: which is good. But there was also homogeneity, which
is not so good.
Homogeneity
is the absence of diversity in form or thought.
Everybody
had the same king, a guy named Nimrod (Genesis 10:8-10). The color-blind world was a single world
government led by a powerful, charismatic, fallible, prone-to-sin man.
God
had told people to be fruitful and multiply, to spread out and fill the earth
with His image. But under King Nimrod
of Babel the people defied God’s basic command.
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.”
(Genesis 11:4)
Homogenous
humanity decided that it was us against God.
Homogenous humanity’s created the tower of Babel.
Unity is good but
homogeneity isn’t.
Diversity
provides easy excuses for division and discrimination. But diversity also forces regular
re-assessment of thought and tactics.
Our different languages carry different assumptions about the nature of
time and relationships. (Does
The Subjunctive Have A Dark Side?)
The
Bible doesn’t mention any dissent at Babel.
No one started a counter-cultural movement to question the lack of
progress filling the Earth. No prophetic
voice spoke the truth of God’s covenant commands to Nimrod’s system of power. Everybody talked the same talk. Everybody
thought the same thoughts; and, therefore, everybody sinned the same sin.
Humanity
had already proven to God that every
intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually (Genesis 6:5).
Singly-minded human sinfulness is still
dangerous. The prophetic terror of the
end-times is connected with the rise of the Anti-Christ, who will lead a single
world-government and culture that inaugurates a time of sin and tribulation of
which Jesus said, “unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved.”
(Matthew 24:22).
Homogenous humanity focused un-divided
sinfulness onto one project and God concluded that if He let human beings
continue as they were, there was no telling how successfully sinful they’d
become.
And the Lord said, “Indeed
the people are one and they all have one language, and this is what they begin
to do; now nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. (Genesis 11:6)
Without
Divine intervention, homogenous humanity will sin themselves out of existence.
So,
God intervened at Babel. He confused
their language and culture (speech), and the Noahites scattered into separate
geographical enclaves where they developed distinct ethnic identities.
And He has made from one
blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has
determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings (Acts 17:26)
The
concept of linguistic, geographical, and cultural diversity that we describe as
race and ethnicity isn’t a curse. Our
diversity is the means by which God saved and saves us from
self-destruction. The American
Constitution creates branches and levels of government with different powers
and perspectives. The diversity checks
and balances the tendency to authoritarianism and corruption (i.e, sin) that’s
part of all human government. Ethnic
diversity provides checks and balances on a global scale. So
long as we have many separate human nationalities we won’t have a single,
global, all-sovereign human ruler. We
are all sinners, but we won’t all simultaneously sin the same sin.
Good
took the Noahites who became Babelonians and turned them into --- us. Multi-colored, mult-cultural, and
multi-ethnic. Since Babel many cultural
groups have departed from the faith of Noah and his sons, but even a degree of religious diversity fits
into God’s plan.
And He has made from one
blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has
determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so
that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and
find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have
our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His
offspring.’ Therefore, since
we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is
like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man’s devising. (Acts 17:26 - 29 )
Something
in us remembers beyond Babel, remembers that we are the offspring of God (Acts
17:28). Prophets, philosophers, and
poets of every era and sect acknowledge One who is before and above all in whom
we live and move and have our being
(Acts 17:28). Our religions and our
sciences all grope for Him, sometimes
blindly missing that He is not far from
each one of us. We all should seek the Lord, but we shouldn’t
all do it in the same place or in the same language, or in the same cultural
mentality.
One
of the most epic fails of Christianity has been conflating our culture with our
faith. The church squandered centuries of
evangelism by forcing people to act like “good” Americans or “good” Europeans
while telling them that they were learning to be good Christians. The backlash against those historical
atrocities inspires millions to reject the gospel because they associate Jesus
with colonialism, slavery, ethnic cleansing, and White supremacy.
Sadly,
conservative American evangelical Christians, are repeating the same epic fail.
Every attempt to homogenize American culture, to narrowly define what it means
to be a “real” American only reinforces the position of Christianity’s critics.
There
is one Lord, one Savior, one Jesus Christ nor
is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given
among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). But that name is as holy in Arabic as it is
in English, as wonderful to praise in Yoruba as it is in Yiddish; as near to a
sincerely seeking soul in Myanmar as in Montgomery, Alabama.
That’s
how God wants it to be.
---Anderson T. Graves
II is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry,
and rural leadership development.
Rev.
Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield,
Alabama; executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking
Organization (SAYNO); and director of
rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).
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to my personal blog www.andersontgraves.blogspot.com .
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