“The Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built.”
-Genesis 11:5

This verse comes out of the story of the Tower of Babel and it used to always throw me off. Why exactly did God “come down” to see the tower? God knows everything, doesn’t He? So why didn’t He already know about it? I had no sudden epiphanies and could not for the life of me come to a conclusion as to why exactly this was said. So, while the verse lingered in my head I decided to give a message to a youth group on this particular passage.

I explained how the Bible says that the people building the tower were partially doing so to make themselves famous (verse 4) and somewhere towards the end of the message, God grabbed my thoughts and twisted them all around. Finally this verse made some sense to me, at least through the new perspective God had given me. These people had started working on their own plans for their own selves and had forgotten about God and His plans. Or to say it differently, God was not a part of the builder’s plans. It was as if they had never even invited God to be a part of what they were doing and so it seems to me that the Bible is asking the question:

How could He know? It’s not like anyone told Him about it.

Do not hear me wrong. God is omniscient and knew about the tower, but the way the Bible words it brings about a very good point. So much of the Bible is worded in ways to make you think, or uses other different literary forms to catch your attention.

I’m not so sure we’ve changed that much really. All to often it seems that we go about building our towers—our dreams—and forgetting to invite God along. Of course the right thing to do would be to let God give us the blueprint to what He wants us to build and I definitely understand the struggle. But it’s time we learn to let go and not only invite God into our lives, but invite Him into our journey whatever it may be.

I wrote a song about Babel awhile back called Tower in the Ether. Feel free to listen in the video below, read the lyrics that are in it, or download it for free here.