God Came Down

Introduction

Parashat Noach starts with a God, who in spite of his anger at the generation of Noah, and in spite of wanting to destroy humanity, sees a person who is relatively righteous. He decides to save eight souls of Noah’s family, and essentially restart humanity from these eight souls.

God’s plan is successful, but not without big problems. The act of saving humanity from certain death in the flood does not cure the problem of sin, even with Noah. At the end of the story, after the flood, his son sins, and Noah is an accomplice to his sin, because he, Noah, invents wine and gets drunk.

The flood ends, and there is a “re-creation” of humanity through Noah’s three sons. Not long after that great act of salvation, through the ark that the Lord commanded Noah to build, humanity again falls into a desire to hedge themselves from the Lord’s rule over His creation, and especially over mankind.

So, they decide to unite and to build themselves for a defense two instruments: Unity of all flesh, and a mega-tower that will keep God out of their affairs. In chapter 11, we find, for a second time, this idea that God is talking to someone that is very close to Him, and they make a decision together to destroy the tower and scatter the people dividing them into nations.

God Came Down

So, in this second parasha of our annual reading cycle, the very next week after the fall of God’s creation, Adam and Eve, man and woman, we have the fall of humanity again. They are no longer suffering from loneliness, but now they suffer from fear and insecurity. They want to defend themselves from their vulnerability, so that God would not repeat His control of men and slow their ungodly desires.

God comes down with someone and talks in the plural to someone who is accompanying Him:

God comes down! There are a few texts that this phrase appears in, and in every case the dismay of the Jewish rabbis is great. How and why does the Creator of the Universe have to come down and step into the circumstances? Could God, the creator of the Universe, not command hordes of angels to come down and destroy the Tower of Babel?

He had angels come down to talk to Abraham and about the destruction of Sodom. But, in this case, God Himself and someone else came down.

The text says, “Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language…” This is very similar to the text in Genesis 1:26:

This within itself is of great interest. The Lord came down. God investigates man’s doings personally, and He came down with someone of significance to discuss what would be done with humanity, that built the Tower of Babel as an act of rebellion against Him.

The depicting of God in human terms appears again in Genesis 18:21, in connection with the divine scrutiny of the situation at Sodom and Gomorrah. This figurative usage implies no limitation on God’s omnipotence, for the divine “descent” presupposes prior knowledge of human affairs from on high, and God’s subsequent counteraction unqualifiedly exhibits His absolute sovereignty.

There is not so subtle irony here. Man builds a tower “with its top in the sky”. They want to reach to heaven where God is thought to dwell.

The Bible presents God’s infinite transcendence and incomparable supereminence. By having God “go down” in order to scrutinize the scene of what men are doing down there, and their unity in order to block God’s authority over them, they become a parody to the point of comedy.

They want to unite against God’s authority and God comes down and topples their tower of cards. In place of unity, they get scattered and alienated from the Creator. In the next chapter, God choses Abraham and his seed to fix that alienation and unite mankind by a Man who will eventually judge all flesh, Yeshua the Messiah.

It is not likely that the Lord came down and brought unnamed angels with Him, to take advice and counsel from the angels, and to divide and spread mankind by giving each his language and territory. Like Deuteronomy says:

Moses is warning the children of Israel from falling into idolatry by explaining to them that the host of heaven, that they feel driven to worship, the sun and the moon, the stars, are all what God gave the nations to worship, but Israel is to worship God alone.

What happened in this event of the Tower of Babel is that the whole world is divided, and to each is given their territory and language, and even the worship of the powers of heaven, the sun and the moon and the stars. If you notice, these are the main gods of the nations around Israel - Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, the Hittites, and in fact all the pagan nations.

What happens in chapter 12 of Genesis is that God chooses Abraham and his seed to bring back all the nations to the knowledge and understanding and the worship of the One God, who is the Father of all, the Lord of all. Abraham, Israel, are God’s choice to fix what was broken in the Tower of Babel.

A Reflection On Human Nature

Our Torah portion of Noah, and Genesis, are the demonstration that disaster and destruction and death does not cure the evil desires of humanity, and now God chooses Abraham and his seed to save the world.

As you can see, the Book of Genesis starts with one great calamity after another. It is not a typical religious book or a spiritual narrative. It is the most realistic picture of the human condition.

We are still dealing with the same human condition, and the world has only a few Mary Poppins’ and Goody Two Shoes’. Even Poppies and Snow Whites are hard to find.

There are more Cain and Abel families than the “Little House on the Prairie” type families. We are, as disciples of Yeshua, put to the test every day. We are forced to choose who are we going to be like - Noah, Abraham, and Enoch, or Nimrod and Cain!

Our Calling In Yeshua

It is incumbent upon us, the disciples of Yeshua the Messiah, to have the wisdom and the strength to make the right choices. To do this based on the mission that God has put on us, as Jewish and non-Jewish disciples of Yeshua. We are commanded to be the salt and light of this world, to make the choices that have an eternal good promise!

Read the Bible every day and every week, and follow the order from the beginning to the end. This is the only way you will get the full picture. Trust no one with your soul. You yourself guard it and keep it close to the Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, who is the only One who can, through His Son, Yeshua, guarantee your eternal life in bliss and the joy of the Lord.

Do good to all men, and above all, to those of the household of the Lord!