Language has always been a centerpiece of God’s plan to have a relationship with us. In fact, God is the ultimate linguist. There are nearly 7,000 languages in the world, and God knows every single one.
We marvel at the variety and complexity of language, but this wasn’t God’s original design. In the beginning, there was just one language. Today, there are more languages than there were even in the time of Jesus—but our opportunities to know and share God’s hope and love have proliferated just as much as the complexity of language has done.
After the fall, there was just one language. Even after the Great Flood, those left on the earth spoke one language.
Time and again, mankind rebelled. In Genesis 11 the story of the tower of Babel stands as a monument to human pride pitted against God’s plan. Rather than obey God’s command, the people stuck together, united by one language and a spirit of boasting. “Come, let us build ourselves a city,” they said, “with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.”
God looked at their construction project and decided to put an end to it, not by destroying the tower, but by confusing their language. Essentially, God made it impossible for them to work together because they could no longer understand each other. Their work stopped, the people scattered, and the tower they built became known as the tower of “Babel,” a Hebrew word that means “confusion.” Ever since, this confusion of language has been a kind of “curse” on the human race. The “Curse of Babel” has become our curse.
True to his nature of love and compassion, God has not left us helpless and without hope. He offers clarity. Where there is division, he brings unity, not because of anything we have done to deserve his favor, but because of his great love for us.
In effect, God has reversed the curse of Babel by giving us a new language—the language of love expressed in Jesus, the living Word (John 1:1).
The work of evangelization might seem more daunting than ever before, as the “curse of Babel” is stronger today than it was even in Jesus’ time. At that time, there were perhaps 200 million people in the world who spoke a few hundred languages. Today there are 7,000 languages spoken by eight billion people. But rather than attempting to “overcome” these languages, let’s embrace them as a way of inviting the greatest number of people in history to know Jesus and his language of love.
In fact, this is the work I’ve decided to devote myself to—it’s why Come and See exists at all. Our mission is to make it possible for a billion people to experience the authentic Jesus. One of the ways we do this is through translating “The Chosen,” a historical drama based on the life of Jesus and those who knew him.
We see the effectiveness of this strategy from people around the world. Recently a woman wrote us from India to tell us she enjoyed “The Chosen” in English. But when she experienced the same episodes in her native Bengali language, she was overjoyed at the way the story spoke to her. Rather than simply understanding the story and the dialogue, she experienced the authenticity of Jesus. In other words, she found Jesus to be real and relatable, two qualities at the core of authenticity.