Luke 14:28-30 For which of you, intending to build a tower, sits not down first, and counts the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Such uncompleted buildings, open to all the winds and rains of heaven, with their naked walls, and with all that has been spent upon them utterly wasted, are called in the language of the world, which often finds so apt a word, This man's, or that man's Folly; arguing as they do so utter a lack of wisdom and prevision on their parts who began them. Such, for example, is Charles the Fifth's palace at Granada, the Kattenburg at Cassel. They that would be Christ's disciples shall see to it that they present no such Babels to the ready scorn of the scornful; beginning as men that would take heaven by storm, and anon coming to an end of all their resources, of all their zeal, all their patience, and leaving nothing but an utterly baffled purpose, the mocking-stock of the world; even as those builders of old left nothing but a shapeless heap of bricks to tell of the entire miscalculation which they had made. Making mention of "a tower," I cannot but think that the Lord intended an allusion to that great historic tower, the mightiest and most signal failure and defeat which the world has ever seen, that tower of Babel, which, despite of its vainglorious and vaunting beginning, ended in the shame, confusion, and scattering of all who undertook it (Genesis 11:1-9). (Archbishop Trench.) Parallel Verses KJV: For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? |
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