The Christian and Cultureনমুনা

Day 2: From Babel to Modern Ziggurats

Genesis 3 records the beginning of human failure. The Fall ruptured our fellowship with God and touched every sphere of life, including how we make culture. What was meant to glorify God soon became an avenue for pride, idolatry, and death.

We already see this in Genesis 4:17–24. Cain built the first city, naming it for his son rather than for the Lord. There appear early signs of cultural progress — tents, animal husbandry, musical instruments, and tools — but alongside them moral decay: Lamech takes two wives and boasts of violence. Progress, without holiness, hardens into corruption.

At Babel this spirit grows. Under Nimrod’s leadership — whose name signals rebellion — people determined to build a city and a tower whose top would reach the heavens. The tower was a ziggurat, a stepped temple of Mesopotamia, where people sought to meet or manipulate the divine.

The project revealed three desires: (1) to satisfy the hunger for the eternal apart from the Creator, (2) to make a name and define identity for themselves, and (3) to refuse God’s command to scatter and fill the earth, trusting in their own political unity and power.

Those same impulses persist today. We raise our own ziggurats: projects, reputations, systems, relationships, and ideologies that promise identity and security but exclude God.

Today, pray that God would expose the ziggurats you have been building — whether tied to success, identity, or control — and ask Him to teach you to find true security and purpose only in Him.