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Several years ago, I watched a six-part documentary on the development of New York City. It traced New York from a whaling outpost of Boston into one of the most powerful cities in the world. The most fascinating period was the 1920s, when new steel-girder technology allowed buildings to rise higher than ever before, sparking a fierce "sky scraping war" between competing architects and companies.
Two buildings raced for the title of tallest in the world. One added a small mast to edge ahead, but the Chrysler Building secretly installed a needle-like spire, briefly becoming the tallest structure on earth. That title lasted only four months before the Empire State Building overtook it, built at an astonishing rate of four floors a week.
I went to New York and stood beneath these towers, marvelling at them — even arranging to meet my wife at the top of the Empire State Building. But why does this skyscraper race matter for us? Because it has everything in common with what we read in Genesis 11. Both are grand human projects, dreams realised, amazing feats of achievement reaching for the stars.
As you heard that Bible story, you may have wondered: is God the ultimate killjoy to human endeavour? Before answering that, we need to ask the more important question: what was the author trying to convey? Genesis 11 is part of the foundational chapters of the Bible that answer our biggest questions — who we are, who God is, and what our world is like. Its agenda is the why, not the how.
We'll trace this passage in four movements:
"Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves."
At first glance this looks harmless — people uniting around a shared project, wanting to live in harmony and build something great. This is an age-old human dream: one language, one culture, one economy, all united. Genesis 11 runs rings around NATO, the UN, the G20, and every modern alliance we can think of.
We Australians have our own version of this impulse — the Big Banana, the Big Pineapple, the Big Merino, the Big Lobster, the Big Swoop. We build monuments too. So what's wrong with wanting a tower reaching to the heavens?
The problem is that this building project is all about power. The city and tower are architectural symbols of human greatness — much like the skyscrapers of New York still represent today. Left unchecked, this pursuit convinces people there is no greater reference point in life than themselves, and that everything is subject to their own will and authority.
This isn't just an ancient story. We do the same thing today, just more locally: looking after our own family, wanting our kids to have every opportunity we didn't have, drawing significance from our careers, fearing who we'd be if our achievements were taken away. Notice the insecurity in verse 4 — "lest we be scattered." Underneath the grand project lies fear and urgency.
"But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the people were building."
It's almost comical — God has to descend just to get a good look at what they've built. For all their climbing, they haven't got very far by heaven's standard. Whatever human achievement is made, it's puny from God's vantage point.
So why does God stop them? Is he like an older sibling stomping on a sandcastle? No — there's no comment here about the morality of their building methods. The issue isn't building towers; it's trying to become God themselves. They are organising humanity to engineer heaven on earth, understanding their world without any reference to God at all.
The real problem is not building — it's building God out. He is excluded from their plans. This is also flagrant disobedience of God's command in Genesis 9 to "be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth." It doesn't take harsh words or a raised fist against God — simply leaving him out of our dreams and plans is enough. This, in its boldest form, is what sin is.
Picture the solar system: the sun at the centre, the planets in orbit. The sun is vastly larger than any planet and utterly different in kind — a blazing source of life. The planets only function well while they keep their orbit around the sun; put a planet at the centre and the whole system collapses.
Now let the planets represent areas of your life: sport, sexuality, health, family, career, hobbies. All good things. But if you try to put any of them where the sun belongs, it cannot hold. This is our problem — not that these things exist, but that we've made them the centre.
Genesis 11 isn't a fable explaining how we got different nations and languages (although that does happen) — it's a commentary on the deep independence of the human heart. The builders created another centre to replace God, and found identity and security in something that can't bear the weight.
I have someone in my life who is dying and recently told me they have a voluntary assisted dying plan. When I asked when they'd enact it, they said, "When I lose control." As a disciple of Jesus, I thought: I gave up control when I was fifteen and started following him. This person is wrestling with control even in death.
So, ask yourself: what is at the centre of your life right now — and is the centre holding? Sin is fundamentally about misplacing what belongs at the centre.
"Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."
God's judgment scatters the builders across the earth, and the only name they ever make for themselves is Babel — babble, confusion.
As a teenager I loved a ride at Luna Park called the Rotor. You were herded into a spinning drum, pressed against the wall by centrifugal force while the floor dropped away beneath you. The thrill was in that spin. In the same way, these people in Genesis 11, without God at the centre, cannot hold together — they are scattered like marbles across the face of the earth.//
This picture of expulsion echoes throughout Scripture — the wedding banquet parable in Matthew 25, where people are shut out from God's presence. C.S. Lewis pictured hell in The Great Divorce as a city constantly expanding in size but also in emptiness, as people quarrel and move further and further from each other and from the centre. That is what happens to people who live without God at the centre — you end up, quite literally, with nothing at the centre at all.
How will God and humanity ever get along again? The story ends in scattering, confusion, and despair — but turn the page to Genesis 12, and there is hope. God takes one man, makes his name great, and builds a people who become a blessing to the world — because they put God at the centre.
In the New Testament, Jesus gives building advice with striking parallels to Genesis 11:
"Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock… But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on the sand."
Jesus pictures two builders: one digs deep to bedrock, the other settles for the sand because it's good enough. To a casual observer, the two houses look much the same — until the storm comes, and then it becomes clear which one truly holds.//
Jesus lived in an age like ours, full of competing philosophies and lifestyles, yet he doesn't let anyone off the hook. He doesn't say it doesn't matter what's at the centre as long as it works for you. He insists there are only two ways to build — not many. Build on him, and you have a solid foundation; build on anything else, and it spells ruin.
He wants every hearer to ask: what am I building, and is it load-bearing enough to build a life upon? It only takes a bad diagnosis, a moment's distraction at the wheel, a broken friendship, a poor financial decision, a sudden retrenchment, or global upheaval to reveal whether our lives are built on sand. We don't have as much control as we think.
Far more important than your future career, your life partner, your forever home, or your children's education is the foundation you are building on right now.
Please don't hear this as me commending a religious system. Religion won't hold your life together — Christ will. What's striking about the Christian faith is that it isn't fundamentally about us reaching up to God; it's about God deciding to reach down to us.
Jesus, who had a truly great name, descended into this world, lived a life showing us what it looks like to have God at the centre, and then died — punished in the place of those who refuse to live with God at the centre — so that we might be re-centred. This is not simply about being a good, moral person who lives a useful life. This is the difference between belief and unbelief, hidden deep in the foundations, out of sight.
In Jesus, God provides a rock on which to build your life — a centred life where you can know the truth, the way, and God as your creator.
Back in New York, a friend I stayed with worked in a building at 11 Madison Avenue, ten blocks from the Empire State Building. He insisted I see its foyer. From the outside it looked like an ordinary skyscraper, but the foyer inside was breathtaking — marble cut and matched with painstaking symmetry, glorious in every detail.
I asked what happened to the building above. He said they ran out of money in 1932, in the depths of the Depression. They only reached the 28th floor before putting a roof on it. To this day, that building doesn't even have a name — something of an embarrassment to New Yorkers.
In God's eyes, every person faces a choice. You can, like the Babel builders, construct a monument to yourself on a precarious foundation — an effort that ends only in scattering and confusion. Or you can act on Jesus' words and be anchored to a truly great name, drilling deep to a real foundation.
Perhaps you're curious about this community, just exploring — I've been fairly blunt tonight, but I'm asking whether it's time to stop sitting on the fence. Or perhaps you're already a believer, and you recognise you've got a misplaced centre. It may be time to repent of that.
Two questions of enormous significance remain for each of us:
Father, help this story in Genesis 11 to be more than just a story, but one we learn from and make our own. We don't want to build you out, and we don't want to receive your judgment — we know that Christ has received that on our behalf, so that we can be re-centred. In your mighty name. Amen.
