Babel feels counterintuitive: if God wants to bring people into peaceful unity, doesn’t the consequence He applies to the tower building effort actually work against what He intends? Not necessarily.

We see lots of details but miss the main point when we come to Jesus mainly to eliminate problems here and now. In Matthew 9:18–26, two people reach out to Jesus with needs very much like the ones we have and must wrestle with the deeper point of Jesus’s ministry — just like we do.

When we struggle to translate from one language to another, we’re painfully reminded of the problems coming from the Tower of Babel. But do we remember the temptation of that situation, one that plays to our own ambitions still today?

We’ve all felt the pull to add one more pious act—fast a little longer, pray a little harder—convinced the right combination will finally make us right before God. In Matthew 9, John’s disciples bring that same assumption directly to Jesus, and his answer reframes not just the practice of fasting but the question of what season we’re actually living in.

Maybe you had a childhood toy that took your voice and sent it back distorted and amplified. Small choices work the same way in Proverbs 3:34-35 — God reciprocates what we put out into the world, amplifying our foolishness so we see it clearly, or honoring our wisdom in ways that matter eternally.

Most of us know our own dirt isn’t the curated kind—and suspect it may be too much to clean up. In Matthew 9, Jesus walks past everyone with the polished-for-consumption sob story and stops at a tax collector’s booth, a man whose sin was public knowledge, and says simply, “Follow me.”

When we try to live by “Don’t Be Evil,” we find that we end up being evil in the end. There’s a better way.

We scramble to fix what’s broken, certain we know the one restoration that matters most. But when friends lower a paralyzed man before Jesus in Matthew 9, desperate only to walk, the first words he hears are “Take heart, my son, your sins are forgiven.” Do we trust Jesus enough to receive what he says we actually need?

When we try to live by “Don’t Be Evil,” we find that we end up being evil in the end. There’s a better way.

We’ve all known someone’s birthday was coming, kept it in the back of our minds, and then realized two weeks too late that we never said a word—recognized it, but never responded. In Matthew 8, the demons who meet Jesus call him “Son of God” with more clarity than almost anyone else in the Gospel, yet that recognition leads somewhere unexpected and deeply unsettling.