Our Pride Causes Our Confusion

I really wish I had learned another language when I was younger. I took two and a half years of Spanish in high school, but I was too busy trying to impress my girlfriend to remember anything but what I use to order at Taco Bell.

All four of my children started life immersed in another language than my own. Studies have shown that children who experience two or more languages in their early years develop pathways in their brain that will enable them to learn languages much easier. I am hoping to teach them other languages from the start so that they will be able to converse easily by the time they are teenagers. My own preferences are Latin, Greek, Amharic, Russian, and Spanish, but who knows which will interest them? Maybe they’ll just be able to order at Taco Bell, too.

Genesis 11:1-9
11:1 “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 tar 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." 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." 

Some of the great problems of our world are the fundamental differences in culture, religion, and language, and yet here we learn that the root of those differences was initiated by God to prevent humanity from working together. Once again the human race had reached a point that pride rose to the top of the list of offenses against their Creator, and once again God put His creatures in their place.

One might wonder why God would be so concerned about a tower. After all, we build towers today that reach half a mile into the sky (one in Dubai just reached past that height).  Perhaps God is just as unhappy about human arrogance today as He was at Babel. Perhaps that is why we can’t get along – our pride causes our confusion.