Then we would worship at the tower, calling upon God, drawing Him down from Heaven, so that we could counsel with Him about how we wanted the world to run. We wanted to bring God down from Heaven, to tell Him what to do! But that's not the way God runs things. Yes, He loves us, but his ideas are not like our ideas. He knows better how things should go for the long-term health of the land and the development of his big plans for us in history. He doesn't need our counsel.
This was nothing less than pure human pride, so God stepped in. He came down, but instead of listening to our voice, He confused our one language into many mutually unintelligible tongues. No longer could we plan together to build the tower. So the project was abandoned. The people began to wander away, getting away from the crowded city before it broke down into chaos and violence.
Mankind cannot make God listen and change his plans to serve our small immediate interests. God has big plans that run on and on for many thousands of years. They are meant for our own good, our development into a better kind of people. They always consider the long run. So the best that we can do is to just be obedient and patient. But that, of course, is something that we never want to do.
Those events happened some four or five thousand years ago. Long in the past, so far back that we begin to seriously question the very existence of God. And when we assume that there is no God, we look up to the Heavens and imagine that maybe we should contrive a way to go, to get ourselves up there. If we can get up there, we can look around and see if we can find God. Then maybe He will have to listen to us, and allow us to make our own plans for our future.
We don't say it in those words, of course, but claim that we are looking for life on other worlds. We say that we want to know how life begins, but what we really want is to prove that there is no need for God. We want to make ourselves at home in Heaven, without having to pledge obedience to God. All of our "science fiction" stories presume to base our great human accomplishments upon the assumption that the one great God who created the universe by fiat does not exist. It is a precocious hope.
But at last, if we are forced to draw the final conclusion that God does exist, we still owe Him our allegiance, and we have to acknowledge that his rules are made for our own good. We can't just make up whatever rules may suit us for our own purposes and pleasures. God gave us his rules because they are eternally valid and perfectly good. And if we are honest with ourselves, we will tremble in our shoes to acknowledge that we have stepped beyond our bounds. We will have risen up in our pride to take up our dwelling in God's house before He has offered us an invitation.
We would do well to remember that God is especially angered by pride. We must remember that we are small, and our place in the universe is only what God has planned for us. He loves those who are humble, however, and prepares many good things in abundance for those who love and obey Him. He has already promised us a place in Heaven. We do not need to be so arrogant as to climb up there without his help. If He wants us to build rockets or ladders into Heaven, He will tell us. And then we may be assured of success.
I have eagerly watched the great technological leap into space for over fifty years. I bought into the rationale for the space race, and longed for the day when we would build permanent bases on the Moon and Mars, and then out among the asteroids and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. But I never gave up my faith in God. Today, I look at the new race to climb beyond the sky, and I look at humanity with all of its faults and pride. I am forced to say that we are not ready. We must not carry our power struggles and competition into Heaven.
Look carefully at our history. The very rockets that we built to go into space came from weapons that we devised for the mass murder of our so-called enemies on the other side of the world. Those people never threatened us, but they built the same weapons to fire at us because they were scared. We both feared that our leaders wanted to subjugate us into economic systems that would make us into slaves. And, at times, when the leaders didn't know how to make those systems work, it seemed like those other people were indeed becoming slaves.
We don't want to be afraid to speak up, or be forced to do only what the government demands. Nor do we want to be chained to a mountain of debt, worried that we could lose our jobs and have all that we have worked for taken away from us. We don't want government policies saying that we have to work on other things than those we will need to feed and clothe our children, so that we suffer through the winter. And we don't want rich and greedy people to determine the prices of our necessities without mercy, based only on how much they can wring from our meager pockets.
Both sides of this argument have legitimate concerns. But our leaders keep talking about pure ideologies, forever unreasonably opposed to compromise or experiment. What might we work out in practice that could work better than either system does now? Ideologies should not be allowed to condemn innovators for heresy. We don't want to be afraid that intellectuals may be purged or despised for trying to imagine how things could improve. We need to put our hope into human good will, as much as we do into technology and authority.
However, I see little hope that this new space race will not raise those ideologies up into the new homes we want to build. Why are we bringing our pride up into the Heavens? Do we not remember that, although God promised never to destroy us with water ever again, He didn't say He would prevent us from destroying ourselves with fire. Those rockets for space still have the capacity to destroy the world. We had better give some thought to learning our place, and humbling ourselves before God, before He decides we have already gone too far.
Either we find a way to make peace, through compromise, respect and harmony, or we may find that the Heavens can become a battleground from which all of our prideful hopes may be smashed to the ground. If that terrible conflagration happens, we may find that the gates of Heaven will be closed forever. We have the rules that God has given us, but will we summon the humility needed to accept and follow them? They aren't nearly as hard to bear as those we make for ourselves. And if we use them as a guide for right thought, at least we only have to answer to God for our transgressions, and He is merciful to forgive.
