Modern Idols: Humanity
October 9th, 2011 (PM). By: Rob Frame
What is the purpose of humanity?
That’s the question we’re thinking about in this second part of our modern idols series. Last week Rod unveiled the idol of ‘me’, of individualism the desire to have no one else tell us how to live. This week were zooming out to look at the idol of ‘humanity’. Now by the end of this month it’s predicted that humanity will be made up of over 7 billion people, so in my eyes that makes my task about 7 billion times harder than last week.
So what is the purpose of humanity? Here’s one answer from the British Humanist society who say that their aim is to:
…take responsibility for our actions and base our ethics on the goals of human welfare, happiness and fulfilment.
Nothing to objectionable at first glance goals including: human welfare, happiness and fulfilment are surely ones that we can all agree. But it’s the second part of the statement which is particularly problematic:
We seek to make the best of the one life we have by creating meaning and purpose for ourselves, individually and together
Humanity’s purpose here is to create mean and purpose for itself, from within. It’s exactly this worldview, which is described and stunningly frustrated in our text: Genesis 11. If you’re not already there please turn up p9 Genesis 11.1. We’ll look at this under three headings, the first of which is this: Man tries to reach heaven to make a name for himself.
1. Man tries to reach heaven to make a name for himself
Some context: last week Rod showed us from Genesis 3 how man rejected God’s rule over him. The result was a cascade of broken relationships between Man and God, between Man and Woman and between Man and the Creation. Humanity takes a nose dive ending with God flooding the earth in judgement. But God shows grace; unmerited favour to humanity, by saving Noah and his family. He then repeats to Noah the command he first gave to Adam in Genesis 9.1:
1 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.
This takes us up to Genesis 11.1 which says:
1 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.
2 As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.
3 They said to each other, Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They used brick instead of stone, and bitumen for mortar.
4 Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.
The key verse is v4; in that single verse mankind commits two great sins:
1. Mankind directly disobeys God
Man directly disobeys God’s repeated command to fill and subdue the earth by attempting to build a city in order that they will not be scattered over the face of the earth. Incredibly, right after God shows amazing grace; not wiping man from the face of the earth, the first thing man does is to directly disobey God again in exactly the same way, refusing to fill and subdue the earth.
2. Instead Man attempts to make a name for itself, without reference to his creator.
Man unites with the aim of building, v4:
4 Then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.
Man wants to gain a reputation, to win praise for himself by his own efforts. Or to put it another way to: ‘…create meaning and purpose for ourselves, individually and together’
The first humanist society is here; ready to worship man and not God. This is an easy idol for us to uncover and dismiss. None of us are here to unite humanity in building a tower that reaches to the heavens. No, and many of us here would claim to be worshippers of God. We’re definitely not humanists.
But look more closely and you’ll quickly see that this idol of humanity or humanism is more subtle than you might think. Verse 4 tells us that man unites in order to build a city. A city is a good thing, Jerusalem is described as the city of God and cities are exalted throughout the Old Testament as places that can offer justice and protection particularly to the vulnerable. Heaven itself is described as the New Jerusalem; the heavenly city.
Man very obviously rejects God’s command to fill and subdue the earth but he does so as he builds something good: a city. It’s a subtle perversion. Knowing this we need to examine our own hearts and our culture critically. Those goals of the British Humanist Society of human welfare, happiness and fulfilment are indeed good things but they are perverted when, in their pursuit, the Creator is deliberately ignored.
An example might be the green agenda. The bible places man as steward over God’s creation requiring us to care for it, that’s the sense of the command: ‘fill the earth and subdue it’ in that sense we are to be environmentalists. However, we are not to pervert that by worshipping the creation whilst ignoring the creator. It’s madness, complete irrationality, to honour the environment without honouring its creator and sustainer.
The environment is not our God, God is. When we lose sight of this we are left rudderless and in confusion. We make asymmetric decisions like pursuing animal welfare, in itself is a good thing, but we do so whilst turning a blind eye to the welfare of the equally vulnerable human: the elderly or the disabled. We judge our neighbours who fail to recycling whilst ourselves often ignoring the needs around us.
Or technology: medical technology capable of immense good is unharnessed from our creator and used to abort children or to choose a convenient death for ourselves. We use technology that is capable of communicating on a global scale to try and satisfy our boredom with entertainment and pornography (more next week).
We’ll see this rudderless confusion illustrated graphically in what happens next in Genesis 11.5-9:
5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.
6 The LORD said, If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
7 Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.
8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
9 That is why it was called Babel— because there the LORD confused the language of the whole world. From there the LORD scattered them over the face of the whole earth.
Here we see the futility of man’s efforts apart from God. The key verses here are v5 and 6:
5 But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.
6 The LORD said, If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.
‘Nothing they plan will be impossible for them’ hang on I thought you said we were going to see the futility of man’s efforts. Well hang on, be patient. The point is not that man’s efforts are insignificant. Man is capable of some incredible things which reaffirm the bible’s claims that we are imagers of God.
That’s the tragedy of our idolatry: not that we’re incapable but that we pervert our capability by ignoring our creator. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer creator of the atomic bomb is famous for saying:
‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’
We have great power as this verse acknowledges, great potential but apart from God we use it to destroy ourselves.
And yet despite man’s incredible and frightening powers, there is futility here. Verse 5 says that God has to come down to see the very thing that is meant to reach up to the heavens. There’s a hint of sarcasm here; the clear implication being that Man’s efforts to reach the heavens, to be Godlike are futile. The tower will never reach heaven no matter how hard man tries. Man may become the destroyer of worlds but he never comes close to power of the creator of the universe.
Now I suppose to us the image of a physical tower reaching up to the heavens is almost comic but in fact it’s a very apt visual metaphor for the way humanity acts know. The idea of a tower reaching the heavens might be ridiculous to us but what man is doing here is simply leveraging its best technology in order to remodel the earth on its own terms. Put like that is it very different from our society which often preaches a gospel of technology, looking to it as our saviour, the solution to all our problems whether that be global warming, food production or disease. Technology we are told will provide all the answers.
The problem is that even with 21st Century technology we still can’t reach the heavens; there are still many things that we cannot control, which we do not have mastery over. Our attempts to make a lasting name for ourselves, for our species are limited and ultimately futile just like those who started this tower.
Take the Gulf oil spill last year. Despite the resources of a multi-billion pound company like BP and access to the very latest technology, the leak could not be fixed. At one point BP put up a page on its website, literally, saying; any suggestions?
If we just put all our knowledge together then we maybe we can do it: so Google is busy trying to index the world’s data, IBM trying to understand it. Even some of my colleagues are trying to crowd-source their sermons! Come let’s gather together and build ourselves smarter cities, an information super-highway, high-yield crops and skyscrapers that reach to the heavens.
This week the CEO of Apple the world’s biggest technology company lost his battle with cancer. The man who put the world’s data literally at your finger tips is being mourned this week because despite all those achievements he, like you and I, are still vulnerable to death. Deaths such as his or events like the Gulf oil spill along with natural disasters like the tsunami are very uncomfortable for us, particularly in the developed world. They remind us that although our technology can do many wonderful things – ultimately it cannot save us.
Man is not capable of acting as his own saviour. God comes down and sees man’s futile efforts but he does more than observe from a distance God intervenes decisively to frustrate man’s ignorance of his creator. That’s our second point God reaches down to us to make his name known.
2. God reaches down to us to make his name known
God comes down to deal with humanity’s idolatry, v7 says:
Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.
8 So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city.
God cannot allow man to ignore him. It is a matter of justice that his name is the one that is made known. We’ll see too, in our third point, that man’s true happiness and fulfilment are dependent upon this requirement that God’s name be known and praised.
God intervenes in human history; dividing languages so that man is forcibly scattered over the earth, fulfilling God’s original command, the tower and city simply being left. All very neat you might say, things are back on track and were given an interesting insight into the origins of the world’s languages but what has this got to do with us?
Well just as this city and tower wouldn’t be the last time that man would try to make a name for himself apart from God so this won’t be the last time that God intervenes in human history to deal with humanity’s prideful sin. That phrase in v7; ‘Come let us go down’ contains something approaching sarcasm at man’s attempts to reach heaven but it also gives us a glimpse of God’s willingness to reach down to earth.
God makes his name known spectacularly by coming down to earth as Jesus. He comes not to just to frustrate humanity’s self-worship but to die for it. What’s particularly incredible for us looking at the idol of humanity is that God comes down to earth as a man. Jesus lives as a human; Jesus dies as a man and is resurrected in the form of a man, He is the second Adam a man who isn’t just godlike but is God himself. He is the head of a new humanity a new humanity that doesn’t worship itself, but that worships its creator and redeemer the very thing we were made to do.
This God-man: Jesus provides real rescue. He is not limited like our technology; we know that because he has conquered even death itself. God is willing, in spite of our common desire to make our names known apart from him, to come down and give us his son. So there is now a route ‘up’ to heaven, not through our achievements or efforts, we have no tower to take us up to heaven instead God in his great love for us has come down to us and offered us a route up to heaven. It’s a route to that doesn’t deny our humanity but redeems it. All that potential that we have as imagers of God is employed, harnessed. It’s not the end for humanity but the fulfilment of what it means to be truly human.
So what does this true humanity look like then, well that’s what I want to give us a glimpse of in our third and final point: humanity’s true purpose is to worship God forever.
3. Humanity’s true purpose is to worship God forever.
Please turn with me to our second reading on p874, Revelation 7.9:
9 After this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no-one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and in front of the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands.
10 And they cried out in a loud voice:
Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb.
This is true humanity – a beautiful redemption of Genesis 11. In Genesis man is united by language and a common desire to make a name for itself. It ends in a half-built tower and a jumbled mess of languages as man is forcibly scattered across the earth. In Revelation 7 this new humanity is united not by self-worship but by worship of Jesus as they sing the words we sang earlier: ‘Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb’
Here are gathered people from every nation, tribe, people and language. This is man as he was designed to be, revelling in God’s presence, making his name known. It’s in this context that those aims of human welfare, happiness and fulfilment find their true meaning. Hunger and thirst die, there is no more sorrow we see God’s stunning perfection with absolute clarity here and it is not alien to us, we are like it because we image our creator without any taint of sin or shame.
This is God’s coming kingdom, the life which is truly life which we have access to through Jesus. It’s our true purpose not a long church service but all of humanity’s creativity, talent and potential harnessed to the goal of praising God. God who is worthy of and inspires all praise.
Let me illustrate using another unfinished building: This is the famous Cathedral in Barcelona designed by Gaudi. You might be able to see that there’s some scaffolding around it, it’s not for repairs it isn’t finished yet. When Gaudi died in 1926 only 15-25 per cent of it was finished, whilst he was still alive Gaudi was asked about it’s slow progress and was said to have replied: ‘My client isn’t in a hurry’. Unlike the Tower of Babel Gaudi’s client wasn’t himself. His client was God so he could attempt this incredibly ambitious project with great freedom, it didn’t really matter if he didn’t live to see its completion because it wasn’t built for him.
You see contrary to what the new atheists say worshipping God does not limit humanity, we are not suppressed by him. Rather we are free, free to be truly human, free to attempt great things for God. We’re no longer on a never-ending treadmill constantly trying to create meaning for ourselves; we have found real meaning through Jesus our redeemer. Humanity now gets to enjoy the true meaning that was won for us on the cross. We’re no longer slaves to the fear that our technology or our abilities will one day let us down. If we trust in Jesus we are united to the one who has defeated death, our destinies are secure.
How are you answering that question: ‘What is humanity’s true purpose’? Which building are you constructing? Is it the Tower of Babel, proudly built with the aim of making a name for yourself? We’ve seen that our idolatry can be subtle, perverting even good things. What about you job, whether that’s paid employment or not. What you do – is it built to win honour for you or for God? Who is setting the agenda? Is its first purpose to provide you with an income, to satisfy your desire to do something meaningful, to give you a sense of purpose and status or is it directed by God? Are you working for him? Do you see your labour as being God’s? Caught up with his passions, his will?
The Tower of Babel was left frustrated, left ruined, incomplete an epitaph to man’s unfulfilled potential without God. Is that your life? Or are you building a Cathedral? Are you being truly human? Is Jesus the God-man inside of you fuelling your passions, your creativity, and your massive potential – harnessing it for God’s praise?
Will you be part of this humanity pictured before the throne of God living out our true purpose: to worship and enjoy God forever?