“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves.” The desire to “make a name,” to be recognized is innate in human beings. Remember how during protests over senseless killings the crowd would chant, “Say her name.” The victim was worth remembering. The problem comes in that the Bible teaches that we don’t make, God makes and we receive. That was the problem at Babel – they wanted to create themselves instead of being who God made them to be. But also innate in human nature is a tendency for competing voices to drown out one another and produce a ball of confusion. This tendency is reversed at Pentecost where everyone could hear the good news of the Risen Jesus “in their own tongue.”
