St John 14:23–31 | Preacher: Rev. Dr. Christian Preus
Shortly after the flood (which God sent to destroy a very evil world), shortly after this, the leaders of the world got together and decided to build a great city. That was directly against God’s command first to Adam and Eve, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and then again to Noah and his wife, “be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” God showed mercy in the flood. He saved eight people. But in saving them, He preserved sin on the earth. And immediately it shows itself. The leaders of the world totally defied God’s command. They stay in one place and they build a tower to reach into the heavens. Why? It’s not practical at all. It’s not like it was Chicago and there was limited space (that’s why you build a skyscraper) – no, they literally had the whole world. Why build a sky-scraper? Because they could. That’s why.
Humans can do amazing things. We have (allegedly – for you conspiracy theorists) sent men to the moon, we’ve mapped DNA, the genetic code, and when we humans see the amazing things we can do, two things usually happen. The first, is that we start believing in ourselves instead of in God (we call this humanism, a worship of humanity). We see what we can accomplish. We can’t see God. And so we worship ourselves. And the second is, we stop asking the question, should we do this? Because it’s one thing to know that you can do something. It’s quite another question whether you should. You can prevent the birth of babies very easily by taking a little pill, amazing technology, amazing what we have accomplished. But should you? No one asked that question for two generations, and now the marriage rate is the lowest it’s been in human history and the birth rate in the western world is so far beyond replacement level that it spells the disaster of economies and nations all over the world. You can abort a baby, take its embryonic cells, and create a vaccine with it that will save millions of lives. Again, amazing technology. But should you?
The should you questions, God answers in His Word. Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Thou shalt not murder. Do not do evil, so that good may result (Rom. 3). And man, when he worships himself, when he looks at what he can accomplish, instead of what he should, he will always run into the God who created this world, and whose Word abides forever. There are laws higher than the laws of physics, higher than the laws of capabilities, and those laws God speaks to us by His Spirit through His Word. When the psalmist says, “The fool says in his heart there is no God,” he is not simply saying the fool thinks there isn’t a God (no one really thinks that), it’s that he lives life as if God doesn’t exist, as if there are no shoulds and should nots, as if I can simply live according to my desires, and my mind, and my wisdom. But no, man shall not live by bread alone.
Man lives, really lives, by the Word of God. And today is Pentecost, the great celebration of God’s commitment to you, that He will never leave you without that Word. He poured out His Spirit on that great day, and He has never taken that Spirit back. The people of Babel refused to fill the earth, but the Spirit refuses to stop filling the earth, and not only the earth, but your soul and your mind, with the truth not only of great and eternal laws, but of God’s great love for you in Christ Jesus your Lord.
The tower of Babel stands forever as the great example not only of man’s arrogant praise of himself and his own wisdom, but of God’s active judgment against it. Why did Babel fail? Because God said no. God intervened. This is His world. He will run it. And you defy His Word, whether you are an individual, a city, a state, a country, He won’t allow it. That is a comfort, dear Christians. The psalms cry out for it constantly, “How long O Lord will the wicked flourish?” But know this, God will not allow evil to flourish. He will punish it. He will make it fail. Psalm 91:7, “When the wicked spring up like grass, And when all the workers of iniquity flourish, It is that they may be destroyed forever.” Isaiah 57:21, “There is no peace, says my God, for the wicked.”
What did the men of Babel want? They wanted unity. And unity is a good thing. That’s what they said, “let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” And we all want unity, unless you’re a horrible human being, you want peace, you don’t want wars and fights and divorces and grudges and murders, you want unity, and peace. They thought they could accomplish that unity by defying God’s Word and uniting under the humanistic principle that we men are good and we do good things and if we only dig down deep and achieve our potential we can have peace and security and all will be well.
And God said No. Hear Him today say No. That is not how you achieve unity. It’s not how you get peace, not with God and not with one another. Unity doesn’t come from us. We are, our souls, are divided, they are in turmoil, they are selfish, they want our own things, and what we want disagrees with what he wants, and what she wants, and we fight for our selfish ambitions, and that can never accomplish unity. Unity comes from God. God is one. He is totally united in love and truth, and the Spirit is the eternal Person of that love and of that truth. Where the Spirit comes, there comes also the Father and the Son, because they are one God, they are unity, and when the Spirit comes to us with the forgiveness of our sins, won by the Son, who was sent by His Father, then we finally find unity, not because we made it, but because God gave it.
All the potential of humanity, no matter how impressive our achievements are, will never bring us humans together. Look at how we’ve used our great accomplishments! We split the atom and then we annihilated two cities and put the entire globe into a cold war that can never really end. We mapped not just the earth, but below it, with archeology, and above it, with astronomy, and we’ve used that knowledge to deny the very God who made the heavens and the earth. We created computers so small we can put them in our pockets, and we’ve used those little things to separate ourselves, divide ourselves, so that families can be sitting in the same room and not talk to each other, but instead talk online with fake people who don’t really love them or know them. No, we will not find unity in our own accomplishments.
God makes unity. He poured out the Spirit on Pentecost. He created one, holy, Christian and apostolic church. Why did the disciples speak with different languages that day? How did they do it? They did it by the power of the Spirit, and God made that happen to show what you can clearly see this day, that the message of Jesus Christ crucified and risen brings all peoples and races and languages together, over all the earth. Peter preached that day a beautiful sermon that is preached again and again and again, and will be preached to the end of the earth, the word of the Spirit, that you are sinners, “You crucified the Lord of glory,” that’s where your potential finally ends, terminates, in deicide, in the murder of God, whom you hung on a cross by your sins, which He bore, and whom God raised up and declared to be Lord, God, His beloved Son, so that all who call on His name will be saved, will be brought together, in one holy Church that will last forever.
And how are you brought together? What divides you now? What causes you grief and pain? What causes dissensions and distrust and envy and fighting? It’s sin, it’s the selfish impulse we find in ourselves and we see in others. And the Spirit meets it with Christ’s blood, he annihilates it, he disposes of it, he speaks the forgiveness that the Father’s Son bought with His life. He shows you the love of God by which you learn to love Him and by which you forgive and love one another. There is unity.
Three thousand souls were baptized that day. The sociologists will tell you, by looking at their stats, that mass conversions don’t happen. Well they weren’t there on Pentecost, and the Church doesn’t measure success or unity by data points and research. The Word of God is everything. It is the sword of the Spirit. It cuts between soul and spirit, that division inherent in us. It reveals sin and it forgives it. It determines truth and it prospers always in its way and it unites the assembly of believers together as one, because God is one.
The baptism that you have been baptized with was and is and will always remain God’s way of uniting us with Himself and with each other. He claimed three thousand as His own that day, and He has not stopped to this day. You are directly connected to those three thousand men, women, and children on whom God poured out His Spirit that day, you are united with every Christian, from all time, and to all time, because the Father sends His Spirit, who unites you to the death and resurrection of His Son in that one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins. And those three thousand stayed united, and daily the numbers were added to them, because they gathered together, just like we’re doing today, and they broke the bread, and ate the body and drank the blood of their Lord, and they listened to His Word, and they prayed together to their one Father, through His Son, by His Spirit. That’s how God works unity. The Spirit speaks the Word of His Son. And it converts our souls. And we become His body. And He becomes our head.
You want unity, you want a good thing. God is building and has been building since Pentecost a new city, the city of God, built of living stones, the holy Christian Church, where we are united, living by the same Spirit, washed clean by the same blood, bearing the same name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, at peace with God and each other by the same forgiveness. And this city will never fall like Babel, because its foundation is not man’s ambitions, but the apostles and prophets, with Christ Himself as the chief cornerstone, and this city does reach, not just to heaven, but to God Himself. Cherish the Church, see God build it in your midst by His Word, be a part of it, unite together under the truth, submit to it, rejoice in it, and you will know the power of the Spirit and the peace that flows through Him, who lives and reigns with the Father and the Son, one God, now and forever. Amen.