The House That Pride Built

The House That Pride Built

Gordon Hall built his house in 1986 as a monument to his ambitions. At 53,000 sf his mansion included 16 bedrooms, 25 bathrooms, an indoor ice-skating rink, an outdoor swimming pool with a waterfall, a 14 car garage with its own filling station, 6 kitchens, and a hair salon. On top of the mansion’s roof he put a 44 foot wide sign that said “Gordon Hall Mansion”. It was a really big house that reflected Hall’s really big ambitions: his estimated worth at 32 years of age was 60 million, but it was his goal to be a billionaire by the time he reached 38 and the richest man in the world by the end of his life. Oh, and he planned to build the highest tower in Arizona. All of this, he said, was driven by a desire to be the biggest and the best. To make a name for himself.

Pride can be a powerful motivator to build something with our lives. We may not ever plan to own a 53,000 square foot home, but we all know what it is to want to impress others in some area of life – career or sports or parenting or whatever it is we spend most of our lives building. We may not want to admit it but for most of us there is a desire deep inside to make a name for ourselves.

The problem isn’t that we desire to do something great with our lives – God has wired us to want to accomplish something with our lives. There’s nothing virtuous about just wanting to drift through life with no ambitions or goals! The danger is when we are motivated by pride – the desire to impress, make a name for ourselves, erect a monument in honor of our memory. The Bible tells us that what is built by pride cannot last.

For our guests, we have been in a series in Genesis and this morning we come in Genesis to the story of the tower of Babel and it’s the story of people who, like Gordon Hall, and all too often like you and me, attempt to build something great with motives that are not good and the inevitable failure of their efforts.

Genesis 11:1-9

I. The pride that built the tower of Babel

It’s been some years after the flood now and at this time the world is still one. One people, one language, one culture. And there is a synergy in their unity – they begin to advance in their technological knowledge including the discovery of a process of strengthening bricks by burning them in an oven. Encouraged by this discovery they decide to build a great city that will be renowned for having the tallest tower ever built – a tower that will touch the heavens.

This would be the first of many such towers – known as ziggurats – found in that region and they were used in religious services as a kind of “intersecting point” between god and man. The name Babylon means “gate of the gods”. As they built this tower they envisioned that they could reach God through their effort.

Verse 4 tells us what motivated them in this project: let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth. God had commanded man to be fruitful and fill the earth but they wanted to cluster in one area, unite their efforts, and make a name for themselves. It’s not far different from people today who want to build a monument to their lives, be remembered. People have always thought their lives can be immortalized if they leave something behind that outlives them and reminds people of their lives.

II. The “sinergy” of unity

Using satirical language, Moses pictures God coming down to look at what’s going on. It’s not that God can’t see from heaven, but the writer wants to mock the efforts of these men who think that what their building is so high it’s going to top heaven, yet God has to come down from heaven just to see it.

Men have always wrestled with arrogance when it comes to God. By default we think of ourselves as bigger than we are and God as smaller than He is. The first Russian cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, while in space was quoted as mocking religion by saying, “I looked and looked, but I didn’t see God.” Someone replied, he should have stepped outside his oxygen-filled spacecraft – he would have seen God quickly!

The Bible doesn’t tell us that God is a little higher than us – hovering somewhere between the earth and the moon. It tells us that God is infinitely higher than us. If we could travel to the edge of the universe we wouldn’t necessarily be any closer to the God who created the universe by the power of His word and measured out the universe by the span of His hand and named each star as He flung them millions of light years away from our planet.

"Is not God high in the heavens? See the highest stars, how lofty they are! Job 22:12

Yet, with every advance and improvement we make, man is tempted to think we’ve outgrown God. Pride and arrogance.

So God gets down on His hands and knees and looks at this tower, but what God sees troubles Him.

And the LORD said, "Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Genesis 11:6 (ESV)

At first glance, it might look like God feels threatened by man’s unified potential, and there’s no question that there is a synergy when people work together in unity. But God isn’t insecure about our great potential showing Him up – there’s something darker about the world acting in unity that concerns God.

He knows the danger of sinful synergy – a kind of “collective apostasy” – that would happen if the world united as one. The potential for accomplishment would increase, but so would the tendency toward humanistic pride – the kind that builds greater and greater monuments to the greatness of man and drives man further and further away from God.

So the Lord acts to confuse the languages and disperse the people – exactly what they were afraid of happening in the first place. This was the birth of the division of nations and cultures and languages and peoples, and it was to preserve man, not from some insecurity in God. It was to slow the apostasy of men, to slow the God-hating, man-loving humanistic slide that mankind would eventually fall into.

The Bible tells us that there will come a day when God will lift this restraint and the world will unite as one in the last days. Maybe with language of “global economy”, global treaties, and new world order might be happening now. This one world nation will advertise itself as the dawn of man, and yet from God’s perspective it will be a dark and evil day. The man who will rise up to lead it will be known as the antichrist and he will epitomize man’s opposition of God in every way –he will be possessed and empowered by Satan himself. So satanic will this one world system be that to embrace the economic system by taking the mark of the beast will guarantee a man’s eternal condemnation.

Heavy stuff, but the problem isn’t man attempting great things – it’s the wickedness of pride – building for our glory rather than God’s. Exalting man and diminishing God. Worshipping the creature rather than the Creator. And though that is the natural flow of the world, it is accelerated by the world’s unification.

III. Lessons from Babel

That’s a quick flyover of the tower of Babel. Let’s drop in a little closer to consider briefly three lessons we can apply to our lives from this unfinished project.

Lesson #1 - Pride makes lousy mortar when you’re building a life

Remember Gordon Hall and his big ambitions? 11 years later he had been forced to sell off his home, was nearly penniless, and was named as a defendant in a racketeering and fraud case. And the tower he planned to build? Never started.

We all have pride and we will all be tempted to build our lives with the mortar of pride. But pride makes lousy mortar. Whatever is built with pride or on pride will not last – it will come crashing down one day. It may happen quickly, it may take years, decades or even centuries but eventually what man builds in pride will fall.

Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. Matthew 23:12

Sin is deceptive and one of its deceits is giving us spiritual vertigo. Vertigo is a phenomenon that can often hit pilots where they lose all sense of situational awareness. Pilots have been known to ignore their instruments and fly their planes into the ground because everything inside of them screams that they know their attitude and wing level better. In the same way we think that the way up is exalting ourselves and that the way down is humbling ourselves. Jesus says it’s just the opposite.

True greatness is found in humility. If someone wants to truly be great, Jesus says, they must become the servant of all. Man that just screams against everything inside of us. I want to be the kind of great where everyone serves me! Jesus says that kind of great will be seen for what it is one day: not great. And not good. And they will be humbled.

This should cause us to examine not only what we are doing, but why. Are we seeking to grow in humility or are we trying to protect our pride?

So we need to pursue humility in all we do. We want to build our relationships on pride, but if we do those relationships will rot eventually.

• Pride can infiltrate our marriages. Ever try to keep up Hollywood marriages? I saw yesterday Elizabeth Taylor is getting ready to marry her ninth husband. You’d think if anyone could churn out perfect, lasting marriages they would – perfect guys with trophy wives on their arms making a lot of money and enjoying a lot of fame. What could go wrong? Apparently a lot. Pride makes lousy mortar.

A strong marriage needs to be characterized by humility. Love doesn’t boast – it serves. It cherishes. It looks to the other person not itself.

• Pride can motivate our parenting – there are some parents who work so hard to make sure their kids are perfect. Know what I mean? They never publicly misbehave, they excel in academics, sports, theatre, speech, dancing, stamp collecting, whatever they do. Those kinds of families drive me crazy! I know what it’s like to want to see my kids excel and find satisfaction in that. Not wrong to want our kids to do well – in fact it would be wrong to not want them to really do well in life. But it’s pretty sad when we feel validated because our kid hits a home run or gets the highest score on their SAT or becomes a doctor – instead of loving them and wanting the best for them we’re sponging off of them.

• We can do the same thing in every other area of life: we measure ourselves by shallow yardsticks like salary, title, corner office, and promotions. How popular we are. How nice our house is. How fast our car is. How good our looks are. You name it, we build it! Pride makes a lousy mortar when you’re building a life. Jesus calls us to humility – which ultimately means we want to live for important things – great things even – for the glory of God and the good of others, and not to make a name for ourselves.

Lesson #2 - We can’t reach up to God – but God has reached down to us

All religions except Christianity have one thing in common: man can reach God. Through good works or traditions or certain rituals we can reach God, impress God, earn heaven (or Nirvana).

Bible declares that because of sin even our best efforts are filthy to God and unacceptable. We can’t reach God with our efforts. But God, in the Person of Jesus Christ, reached down to us. He lived among us and taught about God. He reached out to those who were humble enough to hear His voice and accept His teaching, and He died on the cross to save anyone – anyone – who would place their faith and trust in Him. We can’t reach up to God – we can’t build a tower that can reach God – but God in His mercy and love reached down to us, if we will humble ourselves and receive His gift of eternal life.

Lesson #3 – We can look forward to – and work toward – the day when the world will be united in giving praise and glory to Jesus Christ

When man unites the world the result will be a humanistic, devilish system but the day will come when God will unite all those who have been redeemed by the blood of His Son and peoples from every nation and tribe and tongue will unite their voices in praise to God, and the glory God receives will be greater because it’s not just one tongue or people, but many.

“After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” (Revelation 7:9-10).

Until that day, we can work to see it happen. The Great Commission calls us to go and make disciples of all nations. God loves all people, and Jesus died to save all peoples, and our mission isn’t confined to one nationality or culture, but to all peoples and nations of the world.

And what should be shrinking in our hearts is the desire to make a name for ourselves. Our craving for praise and applause. And what should be growing in our hearts is the desire to see God glorified and Christ’s name exalted in all the earth.

And if that is the motivation of our hearts than we really can attempt great things for God and expect great things from God. True greatness, lasting greatness, as defined by the only One who is truly great.

Let’s pray.