Not Confused

 DEVOTION

GENESIS

NOT CONFUSED

Gen 11:5-9

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.

NIV

This vacated city became Babylon, as the Hebrew word Babel has a direct meaning of confused as God confused their language so all they heard from each other sounded like babel which in English is defined as a confused noise made by many voices. Either way, God did not want man to think he could do anything he wanted to do, that is nothing would be impossible for them if they all understood each other perfectly. We do wonder what God thinks about mankind now as we have overcome this confusion of language and now have built spaceships that have taken us to the moon and now have their sites on Mars. That is far more than a tower to reach the heavens. But it is the pride, the arrogance of believing they can do anything, that it is the impossible only takes us longer to figure out how to accomplish. However, we know that is not true, for many things are impossible for man, but nothing is impossible for God. The largest impossible action of man is to get into the heavenly place built by God. This is what those people of the past were trying to achieve, get to heaven. the Hebrew word used when it is described as they were trying to reach the heavens, is to mean the abode of God, although the direct meaning is sky, or the abode of the stars. Man can reach out to God, but not by building his own tower, but by doing the work that God requires to reach him, and that is to believe in that one he sent, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Redeemer, the Savior who became the perfect sacrifice and thus because we have faith in Jesus we have indeed reached God, in fact, He dwells within us in the person of the Holy Spirit. We can get no closer to God than we already are, and we do not have to do anything, build anything through our own works, our own abilities, or through any advanced amount of learning. We reach God through faith in Jesus and that can be done by anyone, anytime, anyplace without anything but faith, accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior. Can we learn more about God, about his person and his plans? Of course, for he has made sure we have a record of all he has done, all his interactions with mankind. He has revealed himself to us through his own words. We can study and learn more about him and have more knowledge about his ways for us to live with all the love, peace, and joy he has to offer us. Let us not try to build our way to God, but simply allow God to reach out to us and accept his hand at work in us, building us into the person he desires, then we will not be confused about who he is and who we are.