At this point it is obvious that our entire cultural project is aimed at overthrowing God and enthroning ourselves. This is nothing new, of course, notwithstanding the fact that Psalm 2 makes it very clear that such a project is nothing short of a fool’s errand. “He who sits in the heavens shall laugh; The Lord shall hold them in derision.” “Yet I have set My King On My holy hill of Zion.” There is no overthrowing of God the Father, nor of his Anointed One, Jesus. Yet I think we Christians are too accustomed to think of such things only in terms of the final judgment. The Eschaton is a worthy object of meditation, to be sure. But it often escapes our notice, to the detriment of our witness to the world, that the failure of all such rebellion is baked into the rebellion itself. There is one particular feature of all such cosmic insurgency, which ensures the failure of all such endeavors, and the victory of the Gospel. That is the confusion of speech.
Back in Genesis 11, there is the famous account of the Tower of Babel. If you spent any time in Sunday school as a kid, you have heard it. If you are a regular reader of the Scripture, you know it well. By way of summary, the people of the ancient world, sometime after the flood, said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth”, and the Lord defeated the counsel of the people by confusing their language. It should not escape the notice of the perceptive Bible reader that this tower was what the Old Testament often refers to as a “high place”. It was a place of worship, a temple, a “Stairway to Heaven”, as it were. These high places, as places of Pagan worship, were often the subject of God’s complaints against the Old Covenant people (see 2 Kings 17:11, among many other passages).
Among the reasons the high places were so offensive to God is the fact that they were, in a real sense, an attempt on the part of fallen Man to get back to Eden on his own terms. All false religion is exactly that, Man’s effort to fix the fall by his own religious machinations. This is a direct violation of the first commandment, of course, but I wonder if the contemporary relevance of God’s judgment on Babel occurs to us. As already mentioned, God put a stop to the project at Babel by making it impossible for them to communicate: “And the Lord said… ‘Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.’” The inability to communicate will be the overthrow of any undertaking, including our modern attempts at getting back to innocence through our own rejection of righteousness, a truly idiotic strategy if there ever was one. This is because confused speech is an inescapable feature of all such shakings of Man's less than almighty fist.
It is true that God’s intervention at the Tower of Babel was a direct one. I am not suggesting that God is going to descend upon America and split our languages up as he did at Babel. But our language is nevertheless confused and confusing, increasingly so, and this confusion is unavoidable. What is behind this?
Simply put, any attempt at concerted, society wide rebellion against the one who is Truth itself must, in the nature of the case, be predicated on lies. This world is God’s world and any denial of that is a lie by definition, right off the block. The Scripture tells us what is behind these lies when it describes seditious humanity as those who “suppress the truth in unrighteousness”. Later on in the same passage we learn of the culpable nature of our pretended ignorance, “although they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God, nor were thankful, but became futile in their thoughts, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Professing to be wise, they became fools”.
Our language is becoming confused because we have painted ourselves into a corner. We have decided to go a particular way and our chosen course requires that we tell lies in order to justify it. We must lie to ourselves, but more importantly, we must lie to each other. The only alternative is repentance, which we have so far eschewed. The first few verses of Psalm 12 are instructive.
“Help, Lord, for the godly man ceases! For the faithful disappear from among the sons of men. They speak idly everyone with his neighbor; With flattering lips and a double heart they speak. May the Lord cut off all flattering lips, And the tongue that speaks proud things, Who have said, ‘With our tongue we will prevail; Our lips are our own; Who is lord over us?’”
Here is a description of a society in which the faithful are few and far between. Notice that the situation is characterized by the way in which people speak to each other. Useless, flattering, double-hearted, proud speech is the way in which rebellious people assert emancipation from God. Is it not the case that our society is so deluded that it thinks we can prevail over reality itself simply by changing our speech?
Is the demand that everyone call a he a she because neither word actually predicates anything objective about anyone not double hearted speech? Is it not flattery of the most destructive kind to lie to the sexually confused and pretend it is for their good? Is there anyone who does not actually see at this point that the emperor is a streaker? As this madness accelerates, lies are increasingly being demanded of us. The inevitable result of all of this will be a society in which no one can really communicate with anyone else.
A people that hates truth must demand lies. People that demand that lies be told will eventually, and inescapably find that they cannot communicate. People who cannot communicate, cannot cooperate. People who cannot cooperate, cannot maintain forward motion on any project, let alone one of rebellion against God himself. Confusion of language, although an acute judgement in the days of Babel, is built into all human rebellion against God because all such behavior requires false speech. Therefore, the judgment, the seed of the eventual collapse of a culture like ours is present in the thing itself, ipso facto. As Christians, this ought to encourage us, even though it almost certainly means there are dark days ahead.
We know that a culture like ours cannot maintain itself. We also know that we have the only real answer for the casualties of our absurd cultural project. We have the Gospel. We have Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, God with us, the one who dwelt among us and died to take away the sin, the lies, of the world.
We must not let the dire straits in which we find ourselves be a source of anxiety, but of hope. The God who loves to save sinners like us from our self-imposed, self-defeating delusions has promised to use the means of Gospel preaching and the Church’s worship to call self-deceived rebels to himself. The failure of cosmic insurrection is a guarantee. The success of the Gospel of "Jesus Christ and him crucified" is also guaranteed. In other words, we know the outcome. We know that Christ will not fail. So we can confidently speak that Gospel to the world, in the throes of its rebellion, and know that our Savior, the one who is Truth, has already overcome all of it. "But take heart; I have overcome the world."
