God's Solution to the Tower of Babel
Apr 27, 2010
When the original Tower of Babel was built (in Genesis 11), God confounded their language, which resulting in a scattering of the people.
(7) Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. (8) So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of the whole earth, and they stopped building the city.
The Eurozone has been the modern attempt to unite Europe. Its planners have used the Tower of Babel as their model. They even published a poster telling everyone of their intent.
They constructed a building in which to meet, which looked like a half-finished high rise. Every few days they have to pack up and drive from Brussels in order to actually use this building. It is inconvenient and expensive, but important for its symbolic and spiritual implications.
It occurs to me that God's solution to the Eurozone will be the same as in Genesis 11. To confuse men's languages means essentially that men come into disagreement. This causes paralysis, the inability to get anything done. We are seeing this occur today, not only in the Eurozone but also in America's own Babylonian experiment.
One of the basic disagreements is over how to resolve the financial crisis and preserve the life's blood of Babylon--money--by which men exercise power. The Federal Reserve System has been the largest Ponzi scheme ever invented, and it is now reaching its end, as all such schemes do. It was based on the idea that money is created and loaned into circulation at interest that had to be repaid. So for every dollar put into circulation, a little more than a dollar always had to be repaid at some point and taken out of circulation. Thus, because of interest, there would always be a net deficit which could only be resolved by more borrowing.
Eventually, when the debt reached a certain threshold of insolvency, it would come crashing down, because there were not enough people with good enough credit ratings to replace the money being sucked up into the banking system through interest. We reached that point in 2007. Government has tried to make up for it by increasing the federal deficit by over two trillion dollars. This works for a while, of course, but eventually it too reaches a level of unsustainability.
When both the people and the government run out of credit, the game is over.
So the builders of Babel are now trying to figure out how to complete this Tower. God has confused their language, and at least two major factions have emerged, along with multiple sub-factions. They are fighting each other behind the scenes. Have you noticed how many bankers, high finance men, and government officials have been suicided in recent years?
Even the SEC's recent fraud charges against Goldman Sachs is evidence of this. The blowback is the news that some employees in the SEC have been watching porn while at work. It's a typical tit-for-tat slap in the face, using the media and the general public to hurt each other.
I suspect that the real disagreements are yet to surface. Goldman Sachs and other big banks have sold bundles of toxic mortgages to Europeans, and they are not happy about this. There has always been deadly competition between big banks and competing currencies, but this was over the top, a financial declaration of war.
Europe fought back, and the dollar tanked. America hit back via the Eurozone's weak links (Greece in particular), and now the euro is dropping in value. Germany has agreed to bail out Greece, but only if they end their Socialist way of life that has brought them to the brink of bankruptcy. The Greek government might agree to these conditions, but the people will riot before they agree to any disruption of the good life.
Greece has a multi-billion dollar bond that is due in a few weeks. If they cannot pay the debt, they will be bankrupt, and they could take down the rest of Europe with them. As it now stands, Greece cannot afford to borrow money to pay off the debt, because no one will lend them cheap money. They must pay nearly 10% interest, while Germany pays on 3.5% because its credit rating is so much better.
I think that for too long Christians have held the simplistic view that the Babylonians are united and are all following a distinct agreed-upon plan of action. This is simply not so. And as financial pressures build in the final days of the Ponzi scheme, these disagreements are forced to the surface for all to see.
God is confounding their language once again, and the great Tower of Babel will again prove to be an unfinished building.
The four beast kingdoms in Daniel 7 are all fighting among each other today. Babylon is the overall "head," of course, but Persia (Iran) is in the fight, as is Greece and Rome. So we see Babylon disputing with Iran over nuclear rights. Greece is near bankruptcy, which threatens to pull down the whole tower. And Rome (Vatican) is under fire as well for its handling of pedophile priests.
It reminds me that when the Stone strikes the image on its feet (Dan. 2), the whole image crumbles into dust.
So when we see all four beasts snarling and chasing each other in a circle, I think we are nearing the collapse of all of them and the rise of the Kingdom of God, the Stone that is the fifth kingdom of Daniel 2. In symbolic terms, we have gone from gold, to silver, to bronze, to iron (and clay), to STONE.