Jamin Bradley

Eden was the sacred mountain where heaven and earth met. Part of God’s plan was for humans to multiply so they might eventually leave Eden and cultivate the rest of the world to look like this heavenly space. This plan faced some difficulty when humans had to be forcibly removed from the premises for their sin. In due time, sin infected everything, giving rise to a deeply corrupt society.

God then hit the reset button and started afresh with Noah, his family, and many animals on a new Edenic mountain. His instructions to Noah’s family were the same ones he gave to Adam and Eve all those years ago: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” In other words, they were to leave the Edenic mountain and cultivate the rest of the earth to look like Heaven.

Fast forward a few generations, and we get to the story of the Tower of Babel—a story in which humans try to build an offensive ziggurat to reach the gods. But this tower was offensive to God for another reason: they built it so they wouldn’t be dispersed across the earth. In this light, the tower directly affronted God, for his instructions were to spread out.

And so they faced the consequences. Like an awkward youth group game (the most horrible of consequences), God gave everyone a number and then told them to get into groups with others who had the same number—except in this case, the groupings were by languages, not numbers. They would now have to spread out to create functional societies, for their unified nation had been instantly thrown into chaos and dysfunction.

But this wasn’t their only consequence. They wanted the lesser gods, so God gave them to them. According to Deuteronomy 32:8, each nation was assigned a powerful spiritual being to look over them. In the meantime, God decided to develop a nation out of Abraham that would bring about his prophetic promise to Eve to stomp the serpent’s head. This plan might have worked in an orderly fashion, but Psalm 82 informs us that the lesser gods betrayed God and joined with evil instead of ruling their nations with justice.

Nonetheless, God paved the way forward for the other nations. Through Abraham’s nation, he raised up Jesus to stomp the serpent’s head. He then followed this action with a reversal of the Tower of Babel. On the day of Pentecost, the same languages that divided the nations were given to Jesus’ disciples so that they might bring the nations back to God. As people decided to leave their lesser gods behind for the one true God found in Jesus, they would then go on to fulfill Jesus’ mission to fill all the earth and cultivate it to look like Heaven. That’s where the Bible started, it’s what we’re doing now, and it’s how the Bible ends.