But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. – Genesis 11:5

Today's Scripture Reading (August 9, 2021): Genesis 11

Swiss Roman Catholic Theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, in his "Unless You Become Like This Child," argued that "(Mary's) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world." It is the story of Christmas, of God come down to earth for the express purpose of our redemption. It is the story of the perfect Son of God who comes down to take the burden of a guilty world onto his shoulders. But the Christmas story is not the only time that God came down to meet with his creation. It was the only time that God came down to take the world's guilt onto his own shoulders.

At the beginning of the story of humanity, Adam and Eve existed in a garden, tasked with the job of taking care of creation. And in the evenings, God came down. "Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden" (Genesis 3:8). Maybe the hope was that a physical relationship where God walked among us in the cool of the day would be enough to keep Adam and Eve making good decisions. But the effort failed. Even though God walked in the garden with his creation, they still decided to go against his will.

In the days of Noah, God came down once again. "God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways" (Genesis 6:12). God came down and saw the evil that we committed and tried to purge the earth of its sin. God decided to start over again with Noah. The hope was that the second Adam and his descendants would do a better job than the first.

As the descendants of Noah multiplied, they moved to the East of where Noah finished his life, to the plains of Babylon, in modern-day Iraq. And there, on the plains, they decided to build one of the first great cities. Babel on the plains of Shinar or Babylonia probably predated Eridu, Byblos, Jericho, Damascus, Aleppo, Jerusalem, or any other great cities that like to lay claim to the title of "the first city."

God came down to see the city of Babel and the tower that was being built there. And God realized that all of his hopes for Noah had been for naught. The descendants of Noah didn't do any better; they had failed just as the descendants of Adam had generations earlier. Babel was now a city on which God's judgment would fall. By the way, it is unlikely that the inhabitants of Babel called the city by that name. That was a name given to it by the descendants of the cities inhabitants, one given to it in the aftermath of God's judgment which confused the language of the citizens of the city.

What was needed was a different kind of solution. And so, God scattered the descendants of Noah, and they would stay scattered until God would come down once more as the Son of Mary, and under his banner, all the world would be unified and redeemed. 

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Genesis 12