Look, the people are united, and they all speak the same language. This is only the beginning of what they will accomplish. Soon, nothing they imagine will be impossible for them.
— Genesis 11:6 (LLV, paraphrase)
When I was a young boy attending Sunday School, one of the Bible stories that captured my imagination was the Tower of Babel.
I pictured men carrying bricks, building higher and higher, determined to construct a tower that would reach into the heavens. I wondered how high they could possibly go.
Then I grew up in an age when the impossible began to seem possible.
I watched the space age unfold. Rockets climbed into the sky. Men walked on the moon. Spacecraft traveled to distant planets, sending back pictures of worlds we had only imagined.
And today, I continue to watch as humanity reaches farther into space than that little boy in Sunday School could ever have dreamed.
There is a verse in Genesis that comes to mind when I think about these extraordinary accomplishments:
“And the LORD said, ‘Look, the people are united, and they all speak the same language. This is only the beginning of what they will accomplish. Soon, nothing they imagine will be impossible for them.’”
— Genesis 11:6 (LLV, paraphrased)
Of course, the Tower of Babel was not simply a story about human achievement. It was also a warning about pride and what happens when people seek greatness without acknowledging God.
But I find something remarkable in those words. God recognized the extraordinary things people could accomplish when they worked together.
Thousands of years later, we are still discovering just how extraordinary those accomplishments can be.
The same human imagination that once envisioned a tower reaching into heaven now designs machines capable of traveling beyond our world.
And yet, for all our knowledge and technology, we have barely begun to understand the vastness of God's creation.
As a child, I imagined how high men could build. Today, I'm witnessing how far they can fly.
And the boy who wondered is still watching.
