Where?
August 24, 2011 (Wednesday)
Yesterday’s blog about a 26-story building prompted me to ask myself, when and where was the first skyscraper built? Did you say New York? Wrong. Chicago was the city. Did you say it was built in 1884? Correct. It was the Home Insurance building, 10 stories high (later extended to 12). Look it up on Wikipedia.
Several New York City buildings exceeded 600 feet in height in the early 1900’s. Some of them are still standing today. The Empire State Building, which held the title of the world’s tallest building for a long time, is one of my favorites because it was built in 1931, the year of my birth. If I forget my age, I just ask how old it is. Same age.
Today’s giant structures dominate the skyline in countries around the world. The tallest in the world (completed in 2010) is Khalifa Tower in DuBai, UAR at 2,717 feet.View image
The Tower of Babel was a structure described in the Bible (Genesis 11). The people of Shinar built a city and a tower “with its top in the heavens…lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the Earth.” God was displeased and caused a language problem so that the people could not understand each other and eventually moved away to separate places. Clearly their actions were an attempt to make themselves more important than God.
Hundreds of years later, God set aside a people for his name and gave them his law, summed up in ten powerful statements. The first four of these told the people to have no gods other than him, to make no images for worship, to reverence his name, and to set aside a day just for him. These four commandments are designed to remind us that God is our creator and we are the work of his hands. We are to humble ourselves and worship him. Whenever we get to thinking that we are as good as God, or that we can do very well without him, we are treading on unsteady ground that shall crater sooner or later, swallowing us and all our self-important dreams.
The many accomplishments of humankind are made possible because God created us in his image. We owe him everything. Every once in a while something (like the earthquake yesterday) reminds us that some things are bigger than we are. We say, “God is great!” We are glad we can also say, “God is good.”