Now let us go back and look at some matters on the negative side. Most readers of the Bible know that after God’s purpose and the way to fulfill it were revealed in the first two chapters of Genesis, the serpent, who was the incarnation of Satan, appeared in chapter three. Satan came to harm and damage man by injecting his poison—sin—into man, thus bringing man into death. If we have the light concerning building, we will see that the reason Satan wanted to ruin man and put man to death was that he wanted to frustrate God’s building. The man created by God was God’s material for building. Therefore, in his stratagem to frustrate God’s building, Satan’s first step was to poison the material for the building.
Satan not only used subtlety to poison the material prepared by God for His building, but he also preceded God by producing a counterfeit that was according to what God had wanted to produce. Satan knew that what God ultimately wanted was a builded city, so before God could do that, Satan did something to produce a counterfeit. God wanted to build a city, so Satan stirred up some persons whom he had poisoned to build another city. Hence, in Genesis 4 Cain built a city, and he named the city after the name of his son, Enoch. That city was full of sin and wickedness. What kind of image did the city of Enoch have? What did it express? No doubt, the city of Enoch altogether had the image of Satan and completely expressed Satan. The city of Enoch was a mixture of Satan and man.
Gradually, the wickedness of this city became so great that it incurred God’s judgment by the flood. We must remember that the age which was destroyed by the flood had the city of Enoch as its center. God saved Noah and his household from that destruction, and Noah’s building of the ark was again a story of building. Not long afterward, Satan came again to corrupt the descendants of Noah, and he instigated them to build Babel. They wanted to build a city and a tower with its top reaching heaven so that they might make a name for themselves. Their rebellion directly touched the realm of heaven. Therefore, God Himself intervened and stopped their rebellion.
After judging Babel, God called out from Babel a person named Abraham. God promised Abraham to give him and his seed the land of Canaan. Moreover, God also promised to make Abraham into a great nation. Therefore, Abraham pitched a tent and built an altar in Canaan (12:7-8). I want you to see that the one matter emphasized in the entire Bible is the matter of building. The people utilized by Satan were building something, and Abraham, who had been called out by God, was also building something. Abraham’s whole life was a story of pitching his tent and building an altar in the land of Canaan. The tent that he pitched and the altar that he built were just a miniature or scaled-down model of the tabernacle built by his descendants in the wilderness.
On the other hand, Lot, Abraham’s companion, went down to another city, the third corrupt city recorded in the Bible. The first corrupt city was the city of Enoch, which was destroyed by the flood. The second was Babel, which was judged by God. The third was the city of Sodom, where Lot went. Sodom was also a building constructed with the mixture of Satan and man, and Lot fell into its midst. Eventually, Sodom suffered God’s judgment and was destroyed by fire. Only Abraham was still dwelling in a tent, building an altar, and serving God in the land of Canaan.
Subsequently, the descendants of Abraham went down to Egypt. At that time the fourth city that Satan built appeared. This city comprised the two storage cities that the Israelites built for Pharaoh when they were serving as slaves in Egypt. Pharaoh forced them to build these two cities with bricks of baked clay. One day, however, God delivered the Israelites out of Egypt so that they no longer had to bake clay into bricks to build cities for Pharaoh. Instead, they refined gold and silver to build God’s tabernacle.
When the children of Israel entered into Canaan, they rose up to build the city of Jerusalem and the temple. In contrast, Satan also built something; he built the city of Babylon. At the end of the Bible, we not only see the New Jerusalem as the consummation of God’s building throughout the ages, but we also see the great Babylon as the consummation of Satan’s building throughout the ages. These two cities are in contrast with one another. We all know that it was the armies of Babylon that destroyed the city of Jerusalem and the temple and carried away the vessels that were in the temple to Babylon. When the children of Israel were restored, they came back from Babylon. Ezra said that on the first day of the first month of the year he began to go up from Babylon to return to Jerusalem (Ezra 7:9). Babylon represents Satan’s building, and Jerusalem represents the building of God. The two are in contrast with one another from the beginning to the end of the Bible. Therefore, the entire Bible speaks of the matter of building, both on the positive side and on the negative side. Satan wants to utilize man to build the great Babylon, while God wants to gain a group of people to build the New Jerusalem. We can clearly see these two lines in the Bible.