Noah began on his right foot and ended on his left. He promised to obey God’s laws and then turned around, became drunk and cursed his grandson for exposing his shame. Noah was a continuation of the sons of God that began with Adam and like Adam he too lost his place with God and ended losing his identity among the worldly people. It is interesting that both Adam and Noah were naked. It also suggests some form of illegal use of lovemaking. Who were their lovers, certainly not their wives? What form did the serpent take this time? It does not take second guessing what sin plagued mankind the most. The desire of the flesh has yet to be tamed. The remarkable evolvement or material progress came at the hands of the people Noah had cursed. Ham’s descendants proved that a human curse could challenge the cursed one to succeed in spite of a bad omen. It was Nimrod, grandson of Ham and great grandson of Noah who became a mighty warrior and the first power hungry king that build a tower to reach heaven. He was also “a mighty hunter before the Lord.” In other words, he was divinely endowed to be the leader. That idea led to the belief that kings, leaders and priests were descendants of the gods. The tower was not intended to reach God, but elevate a person into a god and to keep the people from scattering. An enormously huge earthquake had driven the fear of God back into their hearts. A split in the earth occurred and it has been speculated that the Americas may have been at one time joined with Africa.
The name Babylon has its origin in the Tower of Babel. It means that it is a land or a kingdom of many languages and tribes. One of the tribes, not the offspring of Shem (Abraham’s ancestors), but the sons of Ham, became the masters of Babylon and many other places including the Land of Canaan. One explanation was that it began when the unbelievers wanted to see whether there was a God in the clouds and God had to confuse them from becoming fools. History does not support such a theory. Its basic reason was not to lose power over the people. The king had gained a reputation through the fact that strength depended on numbers. The earthquake had scattered the people. To get them back and reunite them required a project and the tower was just what Nimrod needed. The Biblical explanation that the Lord came down and changed the languages may have been significant but not necessarily the correct one. People that were scattered adopted words that assigned different meanings to objects and that alone halted the tower from being completed. Human error like with Adam, Cain or Noah also brought down Nimrod’s project. God’s command to Adam and to Noah was that they populate the earth and not congregate around a useless tower. The attempt to localize God or a god that began with the Babel project appealed to the leaders. If one could draw people to a project, then one certainly could much easier unite them behind a leader or a cause. Along with the idea that these daringly gifted individuals were of God, people easily accepted divine succession of hereditary leaders.
Nimrod’s attempt to rise in power via a tower failed miserably. The language was not the only barrier; they ran out of food and building material. It was one of the first lessons of a system that outgrew its productivity. It took more to build the tower than they had or could produce. The takers became the cause that brought about the effect or the failure. And the cause of the cause was Nimrod and those that followed him. He became an example of what a leader ought not do. His entire endeavor became more complicated with the inability to provide sanitation. This early lesson on management in history has been sorely neglected. Too much consolidation of any kind robs people of the initiative to survive. By orders of the Creator, man can survive by populating the earth and cultivating it. Nimrod’s followers build kingdoms around Babylon, Erech, Akkad, Calneh, Nineveh, Resen, and others and they failed because they were not cultivating the ground sufficiently for their livelihood. Instead, they conquered and forced others through tributes and taxes to sustain themselves. That led to revolutions, uprisings and dissolution. Without producing income, the takers caused their own demise and most of them died by moral decay and not by war.
The question is, “Is there any room for united efforts?” There ought to be where safety, health or assistance is needed, only on a temporary basis, but not at the point of coercion from a dictator or a governing body that functions for its own existence. When a system becomes larger than the producers that sustain it, both fail at the end. Force and regulations do not plant or seed nor do they reap; sweaty brows and dirty hands are needed to do the harvesting. Conglomerates and Corporations are profit oriented and cease to function when the returns become insufficient to operate. Small people like entrepreneurs, businesses and farmers continue to produce regardless of their returns. Whenever these little people are encouraged or forced to abandon their livelihood and made to depend on some one big to sustain them, then that people are on the brink of extinction. It is not the sword or the tower builder that has inherited the earth, but the man that tilled the land. And it is not with chemicals, but with the natural things God has created that the earth can be sustained and human life prolonged. Man and his soil are inseparable. Separate the two and both shall die. Those nations that recognized the oneness between a man and his land prospered longer.
The Babylonians became a thorn in the eyes of the people that shall follow the God, Most High. However, they were one of the first not to disrupt the farmers when they carried the Jewish king and his people into captivity, but that only lasted seventy years. Seventy years is about the limit to a system that has stopped producing its own bread. The Levitical law demanded that a man that lost his land had to be reunited with it after fifty years. The Babylonians never learned that lesson and kept on depending on their conquered subjects to supply them with the necessities of life and so did the other nations that followed them. Their ideologies and methods of managing the world shall be the same. Fear and intimidation will be their trademark. The skills of the Nephilim will set them apart from each other. Such leaders shall be treated as if they were gods. At their hands and without God, humanity will prosper and suffer at the same time. The people of God will fall into similar traps and become like the Babylonians. One of the last such kingdoms will be comprised of many states on the Island Northwest of Eden. We know it as the seat of the United Nations and The Book of Revelation identified this last world power as Babylon (Revelation 17).
Stop and Think - Rev Dr. Daniel Kolke 