“God is kind of being a jerk, isn’t He?”

It wasn’t the response I was going for. There we were, sitting around our eggs and toast, just like most mornings. We had the Bible open for the morning devotion, reading from Genesis 11 – the story of the tower of Babel:

The whole earth had a common language and a common vocabulary.  When the people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. Then they said to one another, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” (They had brick instead of stone and tar instead of mortar.) Then they said, “Come, let’s build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens so that we may make a name for ourselves. Otherwise we will be scattered across the face of the entire earth”(Gen. 11:1-4).

You remember the rest of the story. To stop their tower building, the Lord confused the languages of these people and scattered them throughout the earth. We had read this story to our kids, and that’s one of the responses that came back:

“It sounds like God is being a jerk.”

Interesting. And an unexpected challenge over breakfast. So we tried to dig in a little bit more to understand the thinking behind the statement. In the minds of our kids, there was a disproportionate response to the actions of the people. After all, it was only a tower. And people in cities build towers all the time, don’t they? And God just drops in and confuses their languages? Sounds like some kind of cosmic bully.

Kids have a way of cutting to the heart of the issue, don’t they? They aren’t yet so polite as to hide the truth behind platitudes…

This post originally appeared at thomasnelsonbibles.com. Read the rest here.