Genesis 11:4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach to heaven; and let us make us a name… Bold men — men of vigorous mind, striking out something that is very definite, and about which there could be no mistake. We, too, are doing just what they did; we are following the god Ambition — the restless god Ambition, who never sleeps, never pauses, never gives his devotees vacation, but is always stirring them up to more and more furious desires. Do I condemn ambition? Nothing of the kind. I praise ambition; I say to every young man who may today accept me as his teacher, Be ambitious; build loftily; let your aspirations be confined only by the limits which God Himself has set to human power and human capability; but — but — that old question comes in again, Is it right? Is it right? Our ambitions may be our temptations; our ambitions may be stumbling blocks over which we fall into outer darkness; our ambitions may be the cups out of which we drink some deadly intoxicant, poisoning the mind and destroying the heart's life. Therefore I pause again to ask, Is it right? Then, too, we pronounce some men ambitious who are really not ambitious. All men do not understand the word ambition. Ambition has been vulgarized, taken out altogether from its refined and beautiful associations, and debased into something that is intensely of the earth, earthy. I call men to intellectual ambition; to spiritual ambition; to the ambition which says, "I count not myself to have attained; this one thing I do, I press." Alas! there are ten thousand men in our city streets today who are "pressing"; but the question is, Towards what do they press? The apostle says, "I press towards the mark for the prize of my high calling of God in Christ Jesus." That is better than saying, "Let us build a tower whose top shall reach even unto heaven"; and yet it is true tower building — it is palace building. (J. Parker, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth. |
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