“Cain does two things to make his curse bearable: he knows his wife sexually, who then gives him a son; and he builds a city. . . . This first builder of a city . . . will satisfy his desire for eternity by producing children, and he will satisfy his desire for security by creating a place belonging to him, a city. . . . For God’s Eden he substitutes his own.”
Jacques Ellul, The Meaning of the City (Grand Rapids, 1970), pages 5-9.
The human reality we call a city is more than a collection of buildings. It means something. Every city means something profound.
The Bible sees the city as, originally, a mechanism for escaping God, for getting on with life without the impact of God’s judgment landing hard on us, a way to pool our resources so that we might create our own reality on our own terms.
One of the greatest pictures of redemption in all the Bible starts with Cain’s desperate invention, the city, in Genesis 4:17. At the other end of the Bible, when God’s work is complete, what do we find? The city. Rather than discarded and thrown down into hell, the city is remade into heaven: “And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:2). The city stops being a way to evade God and is remade into the eternal dwelling place of God with man.
“Behold, I am making all things new” (Revelation 21:5).