To make a name

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 11v4

It didn’t take long for man to see his own measure of self-importance. As these people travelled they knew that God’s command was for them to scatter and fill the earth, but they were in their comfort zone. They liked being together. So when they came to this plan they decided to settle right there together and build a tower so high that it would draw them back together.

We might consider this the very birth of secular humanism, the idea that man is great enough that he can survive and even thrive without God’s help. Self-sufficiency, self-reliance, and self-dependence are all popular terms. Today, much like in this day, mankind seems to think he has outgrown God and can do it all himself.

‘Why should we separate? If we stick together we can do anything!’ ‘What does God matter anyway?’ Things really haven’t changed a whole lot, shut God out and sort things out ourselves seems to be a constant theme of mankind. Utopia has always been man’s dream World governments and world organisations have tried and failed. The Pax Romana, the Holy Roman Empire, the Congress of Vienna, and the UN have all tried to draw man together and make a great name for humankind.

It hasn’t worked. Wars still rage. Man needs God and God knew that when the people settled on Shinar. He stepped in and scattered man. He knew that man left to his own devices could do anything and that the ‘anything’ would be destructive.

The ‘make a name’ concept is not exclusive to the world. If we don’t watch it we can find it creeping into the church. The desire to ‘make a name’ only has one motivation. Pride alone gives us the desire to make such a name.
Pride puts man above God. It did it at Babel and it does it today.