“A God-fearing woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira, was listening. The Lord opened her heart to respond to what Paul was saying” (Acts 16:14, CSB).

The events in these verses take place during Paul’s second missionary journey. Paul and Barnabas had decided to go visit the churches they had established during their first missionary journey. When they disagreed about who should be on their evangelistic team, they parted company and Paul selected Silas to accompany him on his second missionary journey.

Paul and Silas set out across the regions of Phrygia and Galatia, which is in the eastern half of the modern country of Turkey. But, Paul’s plans to journey north into the region of Bithynia were constrained by the Holy Spirit and instead they traveled west to Troas on the coast of the Aegean Sea.

At Troas Paul had a vision of a man pleading with him to cross over the Aegean Sea into Macedonia, just to the north of the modern country of Greece. Paul and Silas would evangelize in Macedonia and eventually travel south into the Greek cities of Athens and Corinth.

Then the Lord came down to look over the city and the tower that the humans were building. The Lord said, “If they have begun to do this as one people all having the same language, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let’s go down there and confuse their language so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So from there the Lord scattered them throughout the earth, and they stopped building the city. Therefore it is called Babylon, for there the Lord confused the language of the whole earth, and from there the Lord scattered them throughout the earth (Genesis 11:5-9, CSB).

The tower of Babel was probably a ziggurat, which was a common archaeological structure in ancient Mesopotamian cities. Archaelogists have unearthed dozens of ziggurats in the region, the most famous being the Great Ziggurat of Ur in Iraq. It is a huge, 4,100 year old structure made up of more than 700,000 baked bricks.

Ziggurats, unlike the pyramids in Egypt that were tombs for pharaohs, were stairways for the gods. The defining structure of a ziggurat was a long stairway leading to the top where a room with a bed and table was prepared for the deity. The stairway was not for people to climb up, but for the god to come down.

In these verses God “came down” to look over the city and the tower the people were building up to heaven. But, God didn’t need to be invited or enticed to come down from heaven to the earth nor did He need to descend a stairway to facilitate His descent.