You Can’t Grab Heaven

Every now and again I recall my childhood when I would be sitting around the table at dinner trying to grab a cookie from a plate in the center of the table. My mother would slap my hand while correcting me, “Don’t grab!” From an early age my mother was teaching me that it was better to receive than to take. Taking is selfish.

In the reading today from Genesis below, the Lord was teaching us the same thing. You can’t grab yourself into heaven. Heaven must be given to you from God. Adam and Eve learned the same lesson in the Garden. By eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, they were, in essence, trying to grab their way into heaven. “”Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil. And now, lest he put out his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever,” (Genesis 3.22) they were removed from the Garden to till the earth.

Today, our ancestors were trying to grab their way into heaven building a huge tower, when God confused their languages. It wasn’t that God didn’t want Adam and Eve, or the builders of the Tower, to reach heaven. He desires us to be with Him eternally in heaven. He just wants to give heaven to us rather than for us to take it for ourselves.

Great Lent can help us learn to wait, rather than grab it for ourselves. When we fast, we learn the important lesson that we can’t always have what we want, when we want it. We don’t fast because food is bad. We fast to learn self-control. Once we learn self-control, we are prepared to accept heaven on God’s terms, rather than our terms. We don’t have to build towers or pick fruit. We just have to wait for God’s time. He will take care of the rest.

These are the families of the sons of Noah, according to their genealogies, in their nations; and from these the nations spread abroad on the earth after the flood. Now the whole earth had one language and few words. And as men migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the LORD said, “Behold, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; and nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore its name was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. – Genesis 10.32-11.9