Another of the oldest written stories we have is the little story of the Story of Babel. It comes a few chapters after the story of how we selected a second-rate attitude towards life, an outlook in which we placed ourselves at the center; an attitude which is essentially parasitical.This little story picks up from there and conveys a fascinating insight into the dynamics of interpersonal and inter-group life on earth. The author has God looking down at the folks building a big building and notices how well they are getting along together and working inter-dependently. Such co-operation is very efficient. But there is a problem. It is like God says, " today it's a tower, what will it be tomorrow. You people have chosen to live your lives without me at the center, which is a recipe for disaster. You are so efficient at what you choose to do, that I need to slow you down a bit so you don't have the place trashed before you have time enough to smarten up. I think I'd better make some of your personalities "allergic to each other", not totally, just a bit, so that your interactive life is frustrated somewhat."
So we can get a mental picture of the scene out therein the hot sun. The "server" types start complaining that the work is sloppy, the administrator types start becoming a little obnoxious about the target dates not getting taken seriously enough. The Giver-financiers are wanting to control how their contributions are going to be utilized, and the teacher-researcher types are always trying to set somebody straight. The encourager types just won't stop their incessant talking, and the Perceiver types despair about the community selling out the larger vision for expediency sake. And then there are the gentle compassionate types who finally just throw up their hands in despair and say "well, if you are all going to be like that, I'm taking my trowel and going home".
As the story has it, people wandered off in their personality-based groupings, each with a language and set of assumptions that they all understood but the others didn't. And as each group went off into its own land and formed its own cultural life, some with a gentle approach, some with a "no-nonsense, let's get at it" preference, some with a mixture of the outlooks as their group's "personality of preference", they continued to have this little "allergy" to the others. Co-operative work between individuals, groups and nations never did work very well after that.
The point of this little story is most often missed. The point is that this little "interpersonal allergy" gift from God was for a purpose. It was designed to slow us down and buy us sometime to smarten up and get our lives oriented correctly in the universe, with God at the center, lest we trash the place.
What is also missed is that the story goes on in the rest of the book to note two things.
- That God started developing an antidote to the allergy. That is, he went on to develop an extended Family through into which His Son Jesus could come and help us to move back into a relationship with Him, having an approach to life with him at the center. He designed us to live and work efficiently and inter-dependently, but frustrated our doing so as long as anything except He Himself was at the center of our lives. His centrality dissolves the inter personal and inter group "allergy", freeing us into such a life.
- As the author of Revelation points out, it's only a matter of time until somebody figures out how to do life interdependently without God at the center. It will be very efficient. It will be very nasty , It won't blast long, but we won't like it. It is at that point that we will really appreciate the value of what to us right now seems to be a "pretty lumpy sort of a gift" form Him.
But at the heart of it all is a call to us to get our outlook changed back to a proper perspective. If we choose to enact our allergic feelings towards others in nasty ways (like war) that is our choice not His. We could just walk away. Or we could move back into a relationship with Him and have the allergy dealt with in a permanent way. But we would rather not do that, because, as was stated in the earlier story, there is one issue we would rather not hear, and upon hearing it would rather not act. That issue is the issue of just whose Universe this is anyway; the issue of just who is at the center of life, God, or anything but God? And we would do anything rather than reopen that issue.