The Babel Mandate: A Prayer Against the Godless City Text: Psalm 55:9-11
Introduction: The City of Man
We live in a time of profound and deliberate confusion. Men call evil good, and good evil; they put darkness for light, and light for darkness. Our cities, which were once intended to be centers of culture, commerce, and godly order, have become festering sores of rebellion. They are monuments to man's self-worship, laboratories for every kind of social and moral experiment, and the results are in. The experiment is a catastrophic failure. We see violence in the streets, strife in the councils, and the relentless hum of deceit in the public square. And the faithful are tempted to despair, to flee to the wilderness like David in the opening of this very psalm.
But David, after expressing his desire to escape, turns his face toward God and utters a prayer. It is not a soft, sentimental, pliable prayer. It is a hard prayer, an imprecatory prayer. It is a prayer that recognizes that the central problem of the city of man is its unified rebellion against God, and the only solution is divine intervention. David sees the violence and strife, the wickedness and mischief, and he knows that these are not isolated incidents. They are the natural outworking of a unified, godless worldview. When men conspire together against the Lord and His Anointed, their unity is a wicked thing. And so David prays for God to do to Jerusalem what He once did to Babel.
This is a prayer that is deeply relevant for our time. We see our own cities choking on the fruits of their own rebellion. We see the concerted efforts of secularists to build their own towers, their own unified systems of godlessness, whether in education, government, or media. Their project is to make a name for themselves and to ensure that the name of Jesus Christ is not named, except in blasphemy. And so we must learn to pray like David. We must learn to ask God to throw a wrench in their works, to confound their plans, and to bring their arrogant projects to ruin, not out of personal vindictiveness, but for the glory of His name and the peace of His people.
The Text
Confuse, O Lord, divide their tongues, For I have seen violence and strife in the city. Day and night they go around her upon her walls, And wickedness and mischief are in her midst. Destruction is in her midst; Oppression and deceit do not depart from her streets.
(Psalm 55:9-11 LSB)
The Babel Sanction (v. 9)
David begins his petition with a direct appeal for divine sabotage.
"Confuse, O Lord, divide their tongues, For I have seen violence and strife in the city." (Psalm 55:9)
The first word here, translated "confuse," can also mean "swallow up" or "destroy." David is not asking for a mild misunderstanding. He is asking God to bring the entire enemy project to a crashing halt. And his specific strategy is fascinating: "divide their tongues." This is a direct, unmistakable allusion to the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. At Babel, mankind was unified. They had one language and one purpose: to build a city and a tower to make a name for themselves, to reach the heavens on their own terms, and to prevent their scattering, in direct defiance of God's command to fill the earth.
Their unity was their strength, but it was a wicked unity. It was a conspiracy of hubris. So God came down and confused their language, dividing their tongues. He shattered their ability to communicate and cooperate in their rebellion. This act of judgment was also an act of mercy. God put the brakes on a global, unified, high-speed train to damnation. He introduced confusion to prevent a more profound and ultimate confusion.
David sees the same dynamic in his own city, likely Jerusalem during Absalom's rebellion. The conspirators, led by the treacherous Ahithophel, are unified. They speak with one voice against God's anointed king. Their counsel is smooth, persuasive, and deadly. So David prays for a Babel sanction. He asks God to turn their harmony into cacophony, their strategy sessions into shouting matches. And we know from the biblical narrative that God answered this prayer. He used Hushai to sow discord and confusion in Absalom's council, leading Ahithophel's brilliant advice to be rejected and ultimately resulting in the defeat of the rebellion (2 Samuel 17). God divided their tongues.
The reason for this prayer is not personal pique. David says, "For I have seen violence and strife in the city." This is not a private squabble. The rebellion has corrupted the public square. When men reject God's rule, they do not enter a golden age of freedom; they descend into violence and strife. They turn on one another. The rejection of the ultimate authority, God, means that every man becomes his own authority, and the result is a war of all against all. The peace of the city depends entirely on its submission to the Prince of Peace.
The Anatomy of a Godless City (v. 10)
David then provides a diagnosis of the city's sickness, showing how this internal corruption manifests itself publicly and pervasively.
"Day and night they go around her upon her walls, And wickedness and mischief are in her midst." (Psalm 55:10)
The picture here is of a relentless, 24/7 patrol of sin. The walls of a city were meant for its protection, manned by watchmen to guard against external threats. But here, the very guardians are the threat. The "they" here refers to the personified forces of violence and strife from the previous verse. They are not occasional visitors; they are the new sentinels. They patrol the city's defenses, meaning the entire system is compromised. The corruption is not just a bug in the system; it is the new operating system.
This patrol is constant, "day and night." There is no rest from this wickedness. This is what happens when a society abandons God's law, which provides a rhythm of work and rest, justice and mercy. The godless city is a tireless machine of sin. It never sleeps, because ambition, greed, and malice never sleep.
And while the perimeter is patrolled by violence, the heart of the city is rotting from the inside out. "Wickedness and mischief are in her midst." The Hebrew for wickedness can mean trouble or sorrow, and mischief carries the idea of iniquity. The external violence on the walls is fed by the internal corruption in the heart of the city. The public sins are just the visible symptoms of a deep-seated spiritual disease. The city has a heart condition. It is not a safe place with a few bad neighborhoods; it is a sick patient with poison in its bloodstream.
The Inescapable Rot (v. 11)
The diagnosis concludes by showing the final state of this corrupt metropolis. It is a place of utter ruin, where the basic elements of a functioning society have been dissolved.
"Destruction is in her midst; Oppression and deceit do not depart from her streets." (Psalm 55:11)
The word "destruction" here points to a ruinous calamity. It is not just trouble; it is a state of being engulfed by ruin. This is the logical end of godlessness. A society that rejects the Creator is a society that embraces self-destruction. It is building its tower on a foundation of sand, and the collapse is not a matter of if, but when.
And notice where the final, persistent sins reside: "Oppression and deceit do not depart from her streets." The streets, the marketplace, the public square, these are the places where people are supposed to interact, conduct business, and live in community. They are the arteries of the city. But in this city, the arteries are clogged with oppression and deceit. Oppression is the abuse of power, where the strong crush the weak. Deceit is the abuse of words, where truth is twisted for personal gain. When a society can no longer trust its leaders to be just (oppression) or its neighbors to be truthful (deceit), that society is finished. There can be no commerce, no community, no covenant life without a foundation of justice and truth.
This is the inevitable result when a city's tongues are united in rebellion against God. The only thing they can build together is a ruin. Their common language of godlessness produces a common culture of destruction, oppression, and deceit.
Praying for Babel Today
So what does this mean for us? We too live in and among cities that are rife with violence, strife, oppression, and deceit. We see the concerted effort to build a secular utopia, a great global city where God is not welcome. They speak with one tongue, the language of secular humanism, and they are building their tower.
Our first response must be to pray as David prayed. We must ask God to "divide their tongues." We should pray for their councils to be thrown into confusion. We should pray that their unified front against the gospel would shatter into a thousand squabbling factions. This is not a mean-spirited prayer. It is a prayer for mercy. It is a prayer that God would halt their mad dash toward destruction, that in their confusion, some might be humbled and brought to their senses.
When we see Planned Parenthood and Black Lives Matter marching together, we should pray for their tongues to be divided. When we see university faculties and corporate boardrooms speaking with one voice to promote sexual chaos, we should pray for their tongues to be divided. When politicians conspire to remove God from the public square, we should pray, "Confuse them, O Lord."
But we must also remember the ultimate answer to Babel. At Pentecost, God did not reverse Babel by giving everyone one language again. Instead, the Holy Spirit came and filled the apostles, and they began to speak in other tongues, declaring the mighty works of God. Men from every nation heard the gospel in their own language. The curse of Babel was not erased, but redeemed. God's purpose is not a monolithic, globalist uniformity, but a rich, variegated, catholic unity in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The true city, the New Jerusalem, is not a place of one tongue, but a place where every tribe and tongue and nation gathers to worship the Lamb. Our task, then, is to be agents of that Pentecost reality. While we pray for God to confuse the language of the city of man, we must be busy speaking the clear, unchanging language of the gospel to our neighbors. We are to build a counter-city, the church, whose walls are salvation and whose gates are praise. In this city, violence and strife are replaced by peace and fellowship. Wickedness and mischief are replaced by righteousness and joy. And oppression and deceit are driven from the streets by justice and truth. This is the city of God, and it is the only hope for the world.