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… This, we may depend upon it, was no republic of builders; no cooperative association of bricklayers and bricklayers' labourers, bent on immortalizing themselves by the work of their own hands. This early effort at centralization, with a huge metropolis as its focus, sprang, we may be quite sure, from the brain of some one ambitious potentate, and was baptized, from the very first, in the blood and sweat and misery of toiling millions. That "Go to, let us make brick, let us build us a city, let us make us a name," is not the language of voluntary association; but is the stately style, which emperors affect. By this time we know only too well what it means — the cynical indifference to human suffering, the wastefulness of human life, the utter selfishness, the cruelty, the hardness of heart, masked under gilded forms. The characteristic of all world empires — that which makes them world empires — is that they lean upon might, and not upon right. Just in so far as they do this, they are world empires. And, doing this, they are a defiance to the eternal righteousness of God. And, being this, they are doomed to decay. In such world empires there is no true cohesion. The force which unites is purely external. The moment its pressure relaxes, the thing breaks up. In other words, man, seeking to make himself as God, can offer no rest, no centre of unity, no position of stable equilibrium, to his fellow men. He may be armed with irresistible might. He may be statesman and general, as well as king or emperor. By his very success he sows the seeds of decay. Collapse and disintegration overtake his work, even in the very hour of its seeming triumph. I remember visiting the tomb of the First Napoleon in Paris on one of the last days of the June of 1870. You know it, or you have heard about it. It struck me irresistibly, with all its accompaniments, as the symbol of just such a world empire, as I have been speaking about tonight. Within three months from that day, that empire — like its predecessor — had collapsed in blood and disaster. Not he, who, being man, would make himself as God; but He, who being God, makes Himself man; is the true centre of rest and union for a suffering and divided humanity. (David J. Vaughan, M. A.) Let us make us a name. — 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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