The
Cross Removes the Curse of Babel
May I just say a word
or two more before we close? The Cross removes the curse
of Babel. What is Babel, or Babylon, which is the
full-grown Babel? Well, first of all, it is that
principle of man's saving power as resident within
himself. "Let us build us a
tower... and make us a name" (Gen. 11:4):
which was the re-action, as you well know, to the deluge;
that if God decided to drown the world again, they would
have found their own way of salvation by their tower unto
heaven, and they would get above anything that God could
do and be their own saviour. Now, blatantly of course,
few people would talk like that, but in principle that is
human: which comes right down to this, that there is
something in man's nature of virtue, which, if it were
only developed, nurtured, cultured, would result in his
own emergence, his own salvation, his own deliverance by
his own power, his own virtue. That is Babel or Babylon.
See this great Babylon that I have made! (Daniel 4:30).
Now, Babel and Babylon is the "I" element which
can do something, resulting in man's glory. The end of
all things for man, according to his Divinely appointed
destiny, is glory, but how you reach that destiny is
quite another matter. God says that destiny is only
possible of attainment through the Cross of the Lord
Jesus, in which man is utterly emptied of himself. It is
the way even of the Son of man, Who emptied Himself, and
eventually was crowned with glory. But man does not
naturally take that way.
You see, Babylon, after
all, is the principle which we see exemplified in the
beast and the false prophet. It is something in man
himself which can be rested upon, worked upon, and will
result in his own salvation. None of us here would
contemplate that objectively as a proposition:
nevertheless, we are all caught in it. I doubt whether
there is anyone here who has not fallen in that respect.
Have you never for a moment in your life been found
searching your own heart to make you happy, contented, at
rest, satisfied, at peace with God, to bring you on to
good terms with the Lord? You are doing it all the time.
Every time you are miserable about yourself, that is it!
You see, there are but two alterations, to be miserable
about yourself or joyful in the Lord, and those who have
the greatest reason to be miserable about themselves are
the very people to be most joyful in the Lord, if only
they knew God's basis of salvation; for God's basis of
salvation is a very practical one. God's basis of
salvation is this: "You are the most wretched and
hopeless creature, and in yourself you will never be
anything else; and I have looked upon you through your
faith in My Son as though you had never sinned at
all". That is God's basis of salvation. A real
apprehension of that should deliver us [from] those fits
of misery about our own condition into a great restful
joy in the Lord, and anything that is not that, beloved,
is the curse of Babel.
God has put a curse
upon that whole principle and essence of self-salvation,
self-glory. Get into that realm and you may well be
miserable, for you are in the realm of an active curse.
So the
Church takes that up, and when we sing, "'Tis the
Church triumphant singing, Worthy the Lamb", do not
let us project ourselves into some future date. Let us
get right to that now. The Church according to God's mind
is the embodiment of this thing; that in itself it is the
most hopeless thing and yet in Christ a most glorious
thing, full of hope, every prospect open to it through
faith in the Lord Jesus and yet at the same time in
itself worthless. The Church is to be that. It is the
issue of the Cross.
But then, you see, not
only does the Cross remove the curse of Babel as a
principle, but it also deals with that other phase of the
curse of Babel, the divisive elements in man's nature.
When God came down and cursed those builders of the
tower, He did so by confounding their language, and at
that moment they became so many fragments, not able for a
moment to understand one another, to walk together in
agreement. They had no common basis of fellowship. They
were scattered, confused, disintegrated. Calvary deals
with that. It deals with all the divisive elements in
man, overcomes them and transcends them. Of course, we
know that in measure; but the Church is to be the
embodiment of that. Oh well, that is another thing! The
Church the embodiment of that, and yet the Church being
what it is on the earth now! Oh yes! Let us say it again:
not just the mystical, the abstract, the theoretical, but
the practical reality right now here on the
earth. It may be, as it was in the case of Israel after
the captivity, that the real representation of God's
thought will be bound up with a remnant. But it is to be
there, God would have it.
Let us bring it home to
our own hearts. The Cross really does mean for you and me
that those things which naturally and in the flesh in us
as His people would divide, would lead to
misunderstanding, bringing about conflict between us, the
Cross is to mean in our case the removal of those traces
of the curse. They are marks of the curse, and the Cross
has to deal with them, and has to lift you and me on to a
plane where something greater than that operates, which
transcends that and keeps us together in spite of all
that old background. The marvel of the Cross is this,
that there can be a going on in fellowship in spite, on
the one hand, of much in the human makeup, constitution,
temperament, disposition, which makes for great
difficulty in going on together, and, on the other hand,
despite all the direct assaults of Satan by all his means
to break up that fellowship, there can be a going on
triumphantly and a holding together and a coming out at
the end, the thing not having been disintegrated. It can
be; but it will only be if the Cross is a reality there.
But if it is, you may know that the Cross is a reality,
it has been working. If there is disruption and
disintegration, you may take it that the people have
failed in relation to the Cross.
I have often thought
that the gift of tongues in the beginning was just one
aspect of the triumphant work of the Cross over the work
of Satan and the curse. I am not asking for it now
particularly, but it has sometimes been in my mind that
when they all came into a place where Parthians and Medes
and Elamites and dwellers in Mesopotamia, and so on, all
together heard and understood everything in the tongue
wherein each had been born, as though there might have
been but one language, God through the Cross of His Son,
had set aside Babel. Something had triumphed. Well, we
are content to leave it at that. In the end we shall all
speak one language, although we shall be out of every
nation and tribe and kindred and tongue - a heavenly
language.
Well now, if that is
but a sign - and it is a sign - what does it signify? It
signifies this, that the Cross is the secret, the basis,
of the Church's witness, and the Church is to be the
embodiment of that tremendous triumph of the Cross over
these disruptive and divisive elements in the race, in
you and in me. It has to come down to our relationships
every day. The more we know the Cross, the better we get
on together, and the quicker we will get over things
which offend and divide. The Church, therefore, becomes
the outcome of the Cross in this respect.
That is surely enough
at the moment. It constitutes a challenge, a very solemn
challenge, to our hearts. The Lord enable us to face this
challenge of the Cross in all its meaning, and to face
the implications. The Church is something real. Oh yes,
it is very real. Do ask the Lord to make the meaning of
the Church something more than this mystical thing, this
objective, abstract thing. It has to come down here in
our every-day life. You have said that you have seen the
Church, the Body. You have testified to it and so on.
What are you doing about it? Are you still living an
independent life, still taking your own way, making your
own plans, unrelated and out of fellowship, still
violating those laws of fellowship and Body life, still a
law to yourself? Well, if that is true, and inasmuch as
that is true, you do not know the Cross, let alone the
Church. You cannot know the Church until you know the
Cross. You do not know the Cross; the Cross has not dealt
with yourself in some way. Oh, if the Cross really does
its work in us, we shall spontaneously come on to
Church-ground, the ground of fellowship, relatedness,
cooperation. So may the Lord produce practical issues.