The Babel Builders by C. M. S.

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 19, 1906

The Babel Builders

By C. M. S.

When man has kept close to God, he has maintained no exalted opinion of himself; but as man has turned his back upon God, self has loomed in mightier and still mightier proportions, and the true greatness of God, the true purpose of God, and his sense of his great need of God, have shrunk in equal ratio.

The race had hardly scattered from the stranded ark till they were planning the erection of a tower and a city which would make them a name and preserve them from dispersion—a tower which should bridge the gulf between earth and heaven, and be to them their own gateway back into the paradise which had been lost.

God understood the purpose, confounded the common language, and did for them the very thing they aimed to make impossible. He dispersed them with the confused language of their kindred ringing in their ears; and to every country whither they went with the memory of God leaking out of their minds, they carried the heart-purpose of the Babel builders, a purpose to work out a salvation of their own.

So in the heathen countries of the world to-day we find the religion of self-exaltation and self-salvation “bred in the bone” of the people. Every heathen religion turns upon that pivot. It is but a continuation of the efforts of those who builded Babel, and went out unreconciled to the purpose of God in their dispersion.

The evangelization of those heathen countries has stirred up a spirit there of counterworking the nations which sent out the missionaries. A stream of pagan philosophy began years ago to flow back into the evangelizing countries. That flow has increased to a flood at the present time, and every “Christian country” has been deluged with it. Heathenism has tempered its teachings so that they can lie closely alongside the most precious truth and seem to be its parent or its offspring; but once accepted and followed, it bears away ever so slightly at first from the true line until the entrancing philosophies have educated the perceptive faculties to a distaste for the real and the true. The mind is confused; the soul ensnared.

In every such system of heathen philosophical religion there is found in some form the tenet of man's affinity with the divine. This doctrine has been so greedily accepted by some in our own country that they have virtually outheathened the heathen. Such have even gone so far as to declare that “man is the highest expression of God;” whereas the heathen have only dared to hope for assimilation into the divine Being when death has separated them from their clay. That is Nirvana, the snuffing out of their separate existence. In direct line with this teaching a society has been organized in this country for the “exaltation and worship of man.” Books are being written by writers of note whose teachings have the same general trend. Glittering phrases and most striking utterances are used to captivate the mind. One such writer declares: “Man will yet fling himself into the heavens and abide.”

That was what the Babel builders sought to do in ancient times; that is what they are still purposing to do in our day. It is coming in through heathenism direct; it is coming in through “Christianized evolution;” through Christian Science, through spiritualism and theosophy; and from these cisterns it is filtering into every denomination in the land without an exception.

Beware of the teacher who exalts the human; who teaches that the grass, the trees, the flowers, and all created things have God within them, transforming them into temples indeed. He who seeks to put God himself into everything that God has caused to live, is giving the heathen the very excuse he is looking for to bow down and worship every created thing. The heathen bows down to his sacred tree, for he believes God to be in it. For the same reason he worships the sacred bull, the alligator, and the beetle. The teaching of God in man and in all nature goes hand-in-hand with the teaching of the exaltation of man; and every such teaching is but rebuilding Babel. Such teachers, reasoning from such an hypothesis, invariably come to the place where they turn the back upon the whole work of Christ for man, and set forth man as able to do for himself what Jesus Christ only can do.

Paul in his prayer for the Ephesians, prays “that ye may be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inward man; that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith,” etc. Eph. 3:16, 17. The mystery of the gospel is declared to be “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Col. 1:27. “Let this mind be in you,” says the apostle, “which was also in Christ Jesus.” That does not make gods of us, it does not exalt man; it dethrones satan and self, enthrones Christ, and makes us his obedient children. Then we can “do all things,” but we do them only “through Christ which strengtheneth” us. We become, then, joint heirs with Jesus to the Eden which is above. We have, through him, the power and right to enter the paradise our parents lost; but we do not do it over any Babel of our own building. Having come into that relation, Christ is ours, and we are his. “He that hath the Son hath the life; he that hath not the Son of God hath not the life.” 1 John 5:12.

God smote the Babel of the ancients and scattered the builders. When he has smitten this modern Babel tower, the long-pending judgments will fall upon the world. Build no such towers, and beware of the teachings that lift up man and belittle the mission of our Redeemer. C. M. S.