6 Seek the Lord while He may be found; Call upon Him while He is near. 7 Let the wicked forsake his way And the unrighteous man his thoughts; And let him return to the Lord, And He will have compassion on him, And to our God, For He will abundantly pardon. 8 “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord. 9 “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways And My thoughts than your thoughts. Isaiah 55:6-9 (NASB)
The emergent movement and actually all forms of “Christianity” that has a problem with preaching the whole Gospel and the Law in order to “remain relevant” and to “not offend” seekers are, in fact, repeating a very old error. A study of Genesis 11 shows that the gathering together of all people into one group by the settlers of Babel was disobedience to God who had commanded Noah and his family to spread out, multiply, and populate the Earth. This is a parallel with today’s apostate forms of Christianity. How? Instead of obeying God to spread and populate the Earth these people gathered together saying, “Come, let us build for ourselves a city, and a tower whose top will reach into heaven, and let us make for ourselves a name, otherwise we will be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4). This was not what God had commanded. God’s plan for man was to continue to spread over the face of the Earth, not come together in one city and defy Him. There are obvious similarities and parallels with the emergents and the purpose driven and seeker sensitive folks with this rebellion, and, in fact, any of those cultic type forms of Christianity that seek to gather a people together in as large a group as possible in order to “make a name for themselves.”