A Name for Ourselves

Ordinary Means · A Genesis Study · No. 10

This is the last session of what is sometimes called the primeval history — Genesis 1 through 11 — before the camera narrows to one family and one man. And it ends with humanity's pride reaching its full height, on a plain in the land of Shinar.

Genesis 10 had spread out the table of nations — about seventy peoples, every one of them placed on the family tree of Noah's three sons. The point is staggering in its simplicity: all of humanity is one family. The diversity of the nations is real, but the kinship is older. He has made from one man every nation of mankind, Paul will tell the Athenians (Acts 17:26) — which is exactly why the gospel can go to every people: because every people is family. Genesis 11 then doubles back to tell us how the one family became the scattered nations.

Listen to what they want. A name for ourselves. And listen to what they fear: lest we be dispersed — which is precisely what God had commanded humanity to do, to fill the earth. So the project is rebellion on two fronts at once: a refusal to scatter as God said, and a grasping after a name of their own making. The tower with its top in the heavens is the city of man in its purest form — humanity building up, trying to reach God, to secure itself, to make itself great, on its own terms and by its own works. It is the fig leaves again, poured into concrete. It is every religion of human achievement, every empire, every self-made greatness, gathered into one tower.

And then comes one of the quietest, most devastating lines of irony in all of Scripture:

They built a tower whose top would reach the heavens. And God has to come down to see it. The tower meant to storm heaven is so small, from God's vantage, that He must stoop to find it. All our reaching up, all our monuments, all our names made for ourselves — and the Almighty has to descend even to notice. The whole theology of human pride is answered in one verb: He came down.

God confuses their one language into many, and the building stops, and they are scattered abroad over the face of the earth — exactly the dispersion they had built the tower to avoid. The place is named Babel, a word that sounds, in Hebrew, like the verb to confuse. (The Babylonians meant the name to say gate of god; God's wordplay turns it into babble.) The unified rebellion becomes the divided nations. Human pride, reaching for one great name, ends in a confusion of tongues that cannot even finish a sentence together.

But watch what God does in the very next breath. The chapter closes with another genealogy — the line of Shem, narrowing down to a man named Abram — and to that man God will say: I will make your name great (Genesis 12:2). Do you hear it? At Babel, men said, let us make a name for ourselves, and God scattered them. To Abram, God says, I will make your name great, as a gift. The name humanity grasped for and lost, God gives away freely to a man who was simply called. The name you build for yourself ends in Babel; the name God gives you is the only one that lasts.

And the scattering itself is not God's last word. Read with risen eyes and run forward to the second chapter of Acts. The followers of Jesus are gathered in Jerusalem when the Spirit falls, and suddenly Parthians and Medes and Elamites, every scattered nation under heaven, each hear them telling in his own tongue the mighty works of God (Acts 2:11). At Babel, one language became many, and humanity was scattered in pride. At Pentecost, many languages hear one gospel, and humanity is gathered in grace. Babel divided the nations because they tried to climb to God; Pentecost reunites them because God came down to them — not to confuse, but to save. The curse of Babel is not merely paused at Pentecost; it is reversed. And the reversal reaches its end in Revelation, where a countless multitude from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages stands before the throne, one people again, singing one song.

So the tower is the last great monument of the world before Abram — humanity's name-making, reaching up and coming to nothing. And against it, God begins His own counter-history: He will come down, He will choose one man, He will give the name no one can build, and He will gather the scattered nations back to Himself through the seed of the woman.

Next time, the whole story turns. God speaks to one man in one city and sets the entire plan of redemption in motion: Go… and I will make your name great. Read Genesis 12 before then.