Tag: language

God’s Purpose from Babylon to the New Jerusalem

I am inspired today to try to attempt to trace the sweep and arc of God’s plan as revealed in the Bible.

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God had a purpose when he created the universe and put man in the center of it. This is what the Bible tells us. I believe God’s plan was not thwarted by Adam and Eve eating from the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God’s plan was not thwarted by Cain killing Abel, and God’s plan was not thwarted by the Babylonians constructing a tower to their own glory.

God is patient and long-suffering. He created His universe and called it good, but His plan is and always has been to perfect His creation.

God gave us the ability to go our own way, but God’s purposes will be accomplished despite the freedom God gave us.

God gave us the ability to create our own kingdoms, but God’s purposes are to invite all people to embrace His kingdom. He provides the way freely as a gift, but our kingdoms often look better to us, and our ways seem right in our own eyes.

This is a very simplistic view of the whole sweep of Scripture, from beginning to end, which I believe we need to see so we don’t miss the forest for the trees. Of course, only God has perspective to see and to make sense of all the trees in that Great Forest. But, He gave us His word so we can begin to catch a glimpse of God’s great plans.

I want to focus on the big picture today, to survey the sweep and arc of God’s plan as revealed in the Bible, but I am not going to start with the creation of the universe or in the garden. I am going to start in Babylon. After all, we all live in a spiritual Babylon today.

We read in Genesis 11 that the world had one language and common speech. The people moved eastward, found a plain, and they settled there.

Recall that God instructed Adam and Eve to fill the whole earth. Their descendants settled in Babylon, however, and they remained there contrary to that instruction. They didn’t want to follow God’s plan; they wanted to follow their own plans.

The people came together to build a city for themselves and “a tower that reaches to the heavens” to “make a name for themselves.” This is a description of human beings choosing to go their own way, rather than God’s way.

They were afraid of being scattered over the face of the whole earth because that is what God wanted: for them to fill the earth. Because they resisted they were afraid..

The people were unified in going their own way against God. Their unity in going their own way was an obstacle to God achieving His purposes. For this reason, God confused their language, and they scattered over the whole earth.

People do not do well with differences. We isolate. We become group-focused. We despise others who are not like us, and we have inordinate pride in ourselves and our own kind. THIS is the story of human history.

It is also the story of God working His purposes in the world He created to achieve his ends. We may have trouble following it, but I think it will come into better focus if we jump quickly to the end. Then we will fill in the middle. All of this is just a brief snapshot of what God has revealed.

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How Does the Tower of Babel Fit into God’s Plan for People to Love Him and Love Our Neighbors?

Our frustration, toil and separation from other people are not contrary to the purposes of God, but part of the plan.

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The story of the Tower of Babel is included in Scripture for a reason, right? So, Why is it there? How does the tower of Babel fit into God’s redemptive plans and purposes?

These are questions we should think to ask. In fact, Scripture is designed, according to Hebrew thinking, to invite us to ask questions.

Western thinking might assume that we just take things on faith and don’t ask questions. Or the opposite: take it at face value and dismiss it when we find problems (“contradictions”) in the text. The biblical texts, however, are inherently Hebrew (“eastern”) in their assumptions, and we lose something if we do not understand that.

God wants us to seek Him, and that includes asking questions of Scripture, wrestling with it, and finding answers to our questions. We don’t exhibit a lack of faith when we find “problems” in Scripture and ask questions. Our faith propels us forward to wrestle with the text and seek answers through study, prayer, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

We can hold to a high view of Scripture and admit there are “problems” in the text. Those problems can lead us to some real gems in the answers they reveal.

God desires us to seek him and find him, as Paul says to the philosophers in Athens. (Acts17:27) Jesus, of course, promised that those who ask, seek, and knock will be answered, will find, and the door will be open to them. (Matthew 7:7) Faith is evident when we use the problems we see as the springboard to seek answers.

I recently wrote an article on the Tower of Babel story exploring some of the questions it invites us to ask, and trying on answers that are suggested by a more eastern (Hebrew) mindset than most westerners might be adopt.

One question we might ask is: why is the story there to begin with?

We might assume the story is simply an explanation for how people became scattered all over the world in different language groups. If that is all we get out of the story, though, we miss the most important meaning. If we stop there, and assume there is no more to the story, we may be missing the most important part of the story!

A Hebrew (or eastern) mind always asks, “Why?”

I resonate with this basic practice incorporated into the BEMA Podcast because of a Jewish professor I had in college. He explained one day the difference between the western and eastern approaches to Scripture. He illustrated it with the following example.

If the universe consisted of a chair in a room, people with western minds and eastern minds would approach the room differently. The westerner would measure the height, width, depth and mass of the chair. He would weigh it and measure the distance of the chair from the walls and the ceiling. The easterner (the Hebrew) would start by asking, “Why is the chair here?”

In my previous article, I discussed how the story is a chiasm (a type of poetry). A chiasm puts emphasis on the middle verse. In this story, the emphasis falls on the people’s desire to “make a name for ourselves” because “otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the earth”. (Gen. 11:4)

Why were they concerned about being scattered? Why does God care? What is God doing in confusing their languages and scattering them?

For starters, God does not break into the story, yet, when they are making bricks. We might assume, therefore, that God isn’t threatened or concerned about their development of new technology. He doesn’t break into the story until they say they are going to build a tower to make a name for themselves.

We also need to be mindful, always, of context. The context here is that people are moving away from God, away from his plans. (Moving east.) God wanted them to multiply and fill the earth, but they wanted to put down roots in the plains of Shinar (Babylon), lest they be scattered, and build a tower to exalt themselves.

God’s plan was to have them “multiply and fill the earth”. This was the instruction from God to Adam and Eve. The people who built the Tower of Babel didn’t want to do that. They didn’t want to be “scattered”. They resisted, and they put down roots when they should have been filling the earth.

Building a tower to make a name for themselves, in this context, means wanting to pursue their own plans to achieve their own ends. The concern about being scattered suggests they knew they were doing their own thing contrary to God’s plans for them. They might have feared being scattered because it would disrupt their plans to exalt themselves.

Maybe they thought God couldn’t scatter them if they built a fortified tower. Maybe they were trying to make God deal with them on their own terms, in a location they established, by a structure by which they thought they could ascend to God and control where God met with them.

Of course, God did exactly what they feared, and scattered them a against their wishes by confusing their languages.

But why? Was God threatened by them?

Um…., no. God is sovereign. He created the heavens and earth, and He created these people. They were no threat to Him. So why did God scatter them?

I believe the answer lies partly in the fact that they were pursuing their own plans in exultation of themselves. God had other plans, and God frustrated their plans that were not in keeping with His plans.

That might all seem arbitrary unless we keep asking questions and seeking answers. Why were the peoples’ plans something God couldn’t abide? How did the peoples’ plans interfere with God’s plans?

What were God’s plans?

Continue reading “How Does the Tower of Babel Fit into God’s Plan for People to Love Him and Love Our Neighbors?” →

East and West Meet at the Tower of Babel

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I have been listening to the BEMA podcast. I highly recommend it. As defined on the website, “‘BEMA’ (or bimah) is a Hebrew word that refers to the elevated platform in the center of first-century synagogues where the people of God read the Text.”

The early Christians knew their Scripture. They built their lives around it. They devoted themselves to it, and to prayer, and the apostles reaching, and to fellowship and shared meals. (Acts 2:42) The bema in was where early Christians gathered in first century synagogues before they were persecuted and scattered.

The BEMA podcast attempts to approach Scripture the way easterners would have approached Scripture – the way the early Christians in the Middle East would have approached Scripture. The idea that Hebrew people were more “eastern” in their thinking was first pointed out to m by my Jewish professor in college over 40 years ago, so following up with that concept intrigues me.

Christianity quickly became westernized, but the origins of Christianity are eastern, growing out of the Hebrew culture and scriptures. For that reason, we would do well to gain some new perspective from a more eastern way of thinking. I encourage you to listen to the first couple of episodes of the podcast linked in the opening paragraph if you want an introduction to an “eastern” perspective of the Bible.

Reading the first 11 chapters of Genesis from an eastern, Hebraic perspective, opens up new insights. Not the least of which is the genre of literature these chapters represent. They are poetry. They are written in chiasms with intricate organization and emphasis that is found in the structure of the chiasms.

The Tower of Babel story is one of those chiastic passages in Genesis. The story actually begins in the Hebrew with the last verse of Chapter 10 (as it is organized in English Bibles), and it goes like this (ESV):

These are the clans of Noah’s sons, according to their lines of descent, within their nations. From these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, ‘Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.’ They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. 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; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.’

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. 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. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. 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.

Hebrew has no vowels, only consonants. Rather, vowel signs are placed over the consonants to denote where breaths should be taken for anyone reading Hebrew out loud. 

The consonants in this chiasm are repetitive: N, B, L, H; then H, L, B, N in reverse. There is a front half and a back half to the structure. The middle of the chiasm is verse 11:4, which I have emphasized by bolding it.

The verse in the middle of the chiasm is where the emphasis lies: the peoples’ concern about being scattered over the face of the earth. They didn’t want to be scattered.

Why not? That’s the question we should be prompted to ask according to the emphasis we find built into the structure of that story.

I am not sure I can do any justice to the layers of meaning and the questions that arise in these verses in a short blog post. I can only scratch the surface, but here goes….

Continue reading “East and West Meet at the Tower of Babel” →

The Linguistic Origins of Modern Drumming

We have the Civil War to thank for modern rock music

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I am going off my beaten path here today, though music is certainly a beat I follow. Music is a universal language. Music is a creative gift from our Creator who made us in His image. We reflect Him, therefore, in the creation of music.

Music is mathematical and linguistic, even in its essence. I didn’t previously know, for instance, that drumming has an “alphabet” of 26 rhythms. I did know that drummers in the Civil War (and I assume previous wars) played a key role in their battalions. They weren’t just there to boost moral; they were the communicators on the battlefield, signalling the orders from the generals and commanders to their troops in the heat of the battle.

These things are discussed in the video embedded below on the originals of the shuffle – a type of pattern that mimics a train passing by on a track, and a basic backbone of most modern music. Marcus Petruska takes time in this video to talk about “the debt we all owe to the Civil War drummers”.

He goes into some detail about how drums (and bugles) were used to communicate commands in the fog of war to the troops in the battle. Those various beats used to communicate to troops in war became the percussion vocabulary that informs modern music – the 26 rudiments of drumming. It’s a bit mind blowing to think that we have the Civil War to thank for modern rock music!

These two subjects, music and the Civil War, meeting at the confluence of drumming resonate deeply with me because my great great grandfather was a drummer in the Civil War. He enlisted with the 40th Illinois Infantry that was organized by Stephen G. Hicks, a lawyer in Salem, Marion County, Illinois, and commissioned on July 24, 1861. He was part of Company “F” from Franklin County, Illinois, comprised primarily of farmers.

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