For those of us who grew up in church, there are a lot of stories that we “remember” with details that actually aren’t in the Bible. For instance, I’ve found that a lot of people seem to think that the Tower of Babel story ends with God destroying the tower. But it doesn’t. God leaves the tower there, and I think that’s incredibly significant.
God leaves the Tower of Babel, unfinished and left to gradually decay. The tower would stand as a monument to human rebellion, a warning about the final destination of sin. I’ve found that God often does this for us, too: he frustrates our sinful plans, but instead of crushing those plans completely, he’ll often leave the broken towers there. We’d rather him clean up the mess so we don’t have to see it anymore. But he leaves it so that we’ll stay indebted to him and remember his grace.
What are the “broken towers” of your life? Where have you tasted disappointment? It might be a broken relationship, a drug addiction, a moral failure, a lost job. What if you learned to think about those disappointments as broken towers, monuments with a message: Return to the love of God!
Broken towers in our lives feel like God’s judgment. And in a sense, they are. But any judgment before the ultimate judgment is mercy, because it can wake us up before it’s too late. God’s small judgments in this life are warnings to us, towers that scream out: “Don’t go down that path! It will only leave you empty!”
I read a magazine article recently about a famous Christian leader whose name was exposed during the Ashley Madison leak several months ago. (Ashley Madison is a website that facilitates adulterous affairs.) It was a humiliating experience for him. As he explains it (I’m paraphrasing here):
“I signed up for the website in a moment of weakness. It was a dark time in my life. But I never acted on it. I had largely forgotten about it…until the email addresses went public, and my name was exposed with all of the rest of them. My ministry board asked me to step down. I did, but I was angry. I felt like God was judging me harshly for my sin. But over the last couple months, I’ve come to see that this wasn’t God’s judgment; it was God’s sweet mercy to me. Had I gotten away with this and moved on, I would never have dealt with the dark place in my heart that led me down that path to begin with.”
What if you began to see the humiliating, disappointing towers in your life as God’s mercy to you? What if you believed that in all of your darkest hours and most painful trials, God wasn’t trying to pay you back…but to bring you back?
The idols of our lives promise so much, but they always end up as broken and rotting towers. They promise to make us safe, to give us a home, to make us beautiful and significant and loved. But even as we diligently try to build our godless towers, God himself comes along and knocks the tools out of our hands. “You want to be safe?” he says, “You’ll be safe with me. You want to belong? You’ll belong with me. You want to matter? You matter to me. You want love? No one has ever loved you more than me. You want a home? I’ve been building you one since the beginning of creation.”
You see, the arms we’ve been searching for in romance are his arms. The security we’ve sought in riches is found in his promise. The fullness we yearn for in every pursuit is experienced in his presence. And once we learn to see the never stopping, never giving up, unbreaking, always and forever love of God, we’ll praise God for every broken tower in our lives.
For more, be sure to listen to the entire message here.
