Babel and Evil: Maximum Maturation

Creation by Jordan

We’ve talked a bit about wheat and tares in classes, and how good and evil grow side by side until the day that the harvest is reaped—at which point the tares will wither into unsubstantive nothingness. There was another maturation idea that I was trying to think through which was brought up by Jordan in Creation. It had to do with how much Adam and Eve knew in the beginning. For instance, we know that bread and wine were not around until the time of Noah. Is that a picture of not only the growth of the fruit of the earth but in knowledge of husbandry? The creation was not prefabricated. It had to mature into the cycles of growth brought on by the tending of man through the seasons of sowing and reaping.

Secondly, how advanced was language at creation. Did mankind start out with oral traditions, and where, when, and how did writing begin. It couldn’t have begun with Moses because hundred of years of history would have been left to the telephone method. There must have been some written records that were compiled and edited to make the canonical Genesis account.

So, if mankind had to mature in the areas of gardening and social development, after the fall there was plenty of room to mature in the area of sin and evil. Man’s imagination had the opportunity to come up with all kinds of engineering, entrepreneurial, and inventive advancements while at the same time crafting perverse, profane, and odious wickedness.

With the Babel debacle came God’s acknowledgement that evil had reached its greatest height yet. Genesis 11:6 says of the attempt to rebel against name, calling, and place,

“…and this is only the beginning of what they will do. And nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.”

To what point in mankind’s maturity do the words of Solomon first adhere? “There is nothing new under the sun.” Is it at Babel? Is that the point at which everything that could be done had been done and then became about perfection rather than discovery? Is all maturity now just a variation on a theme until the day that the wheat and tares are separated?