Matthew 7:26-27 contains Jesus' warning about unstable foundations:

But everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does not do them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it fell. And great was its fall.

Every stable building needs a solid foundation. As Matthew 16:18 informs us, Christ builds on a firm foundation: "And I tell you, you are Peter [Greek, Petros—a large piece of rock], and on this rock [Greek, petra—a huge rock like Gibraltar] I will build My church, and the gates of Hades (the powers of the infernal region) shall not overpower it [or be strong to its detriment or hold out against it]" (The Amplified Bible). The rock foundation that Jesus refers to is Himself, and the church—the ekklesia—He speaks of is not a physical building but a spiritual assembly.

Metaphors are powerful teaching tools. We will examine the story of what can happen to a building without a proper physical foundation, using its example to teach us the importance of a sound spiritual foundation.

San Francisco's troubled Millennium Tower is a modern-day example of a structure with daunting foundation problems. Originally begun in 2005, Millennium Tower is a 645-foot, 58-story, mixed-use skyscraper containing 366 condominiums. The complex also boasts a 125-foot, 11-story, 53-unit building on its northeast corner and a 43-foot, two-story glass atrium. Each unit cost several million dollars to buy, one selling for $9.4 million in 2009. When the last condo unit sold in 2013, total sales amounted to $750 million, a 25% profit on the estimated $600 million in development costs!

The Tower, which has a concrete skeleton, is very heavy. By comparison, an average single-family home produces about 100 pounds of pressure per square foot on the subsurface. Newer steel-structured buildings produce 2,000-3,000 pounds of pressure per square foot. The Millennium Tower's design imposes a load of 11,000 pounds per square foot on its foundation, and some estimates say the load is closer to 14,000-15,000 pounds per square foot!

Another issue with the Tower is that the land under the building is a mixture of mud and rubble reclaimed from San Francisco Bay. For its foundation, the designers chose a ten-foot concrete slab supported by 950 friction piles driven into the ground 60 to 90 feet. These friction piles allow more of the underlying soil to support the structure, spreading the building's load vertically. Unlike end-bearing piles that are driven down to bedrock, friction piles rely on the weight of the building compressing on the piles and the friction of the surrounding soil for support.

This "Old Bay Clay," a thick layer of Ice Age mud topped by the area's dense, sandy soil, led the builders to expect the building to sink four to six inches over its lifetime. However, the heavy, reinforced-concrete building sank eight inches before it opened in 2009 and another eight inches over the next six years!

The condo owners sued, and during arbitration, negotiations over the cost of retrofitting the building's foundation to slow the sinking and tilting became very contentious. An early proposal called for drilling hundreds of micro-piles through the existing foundation down to the bedrock, but the cost estimates reached as high as half a billion dollars, more than the original cost of the entire building! The current renovation plan adds 20% ($100 million) to the development cost.

In addition, the building's northwest corner now tilts 29 inches, as attempts to sink 52 piles to bedrock and tie them to the existing foundation exacerbated the problem. It also caused the building to drop an additional inch, which in turn produced an additional five-inch lean to the Tower's top. The repair project was revised, resulting in it being supported partially on one side by six piles sunk two hundred feet to bedrock with another twelve similar piles planned, which should stop any further sinking or tilting of "the Leaning Tower of San Francisco."

A blog, "What Really Happened at the Millennium Tower," on the Practical Engineering website opines:

Most people will wonder why the building's foundation didn't just go to bedrock in the original design. The answer is the same reason my house doesn't have piles to bedrock. No one likes to pay for things they don't think are necessary. If those geotechnical and structural engineers could go back in time, I think they probably would go with a different foundation, but whether they could have reasonably predicted the performance of the original design with all the extra dewatering and adjacent construction is a more complicated question.

Years ago, John Ritenbaugh taught that Laodiceanism (Revelation 3:14-22) is not laziness but a love of beauty without a corresponding love of righteousness. In our example, the builders were not lazy; they built on the wrong foundation. Righteousness—that is, right doing—takes work, and there are no shortcuts, but even hard work must be channeled in the right direction.

The apostle John writes in I John 2:15, 17: "Do not love the world, or the things in the world. . . . And the world is passing away, and the lust of it; but he who does the will of God abides forever." The word underlying "love" is the Greek verb agapaō, and in reference to inanimate objects, it means "To be well-pleased, to be contented at or with a thing." "World" translates kosmos, which implies "world affairs, the aggregate of earthly things."

Verse 16 informs us that the Father's love is not in us if we love the world. Our hearts easily become fiercely attached to things, things of this world. The Revised English Bible's translation of verse 15 tells us what occurs when we do this: "Do not set your hearts on the world or what is in it. Anyone who loves the world does not love the Father."

John is not telling us to abandon the world by living in seclusion on a mountain peak away from the world. Instead, we must glorify God before the world by our words and conduct, witnessing to it, and overcome the worldly character that remains in us. Since we cannot serve two masters (Matthew 6:24), God wants us to choose Him and give Him all our devotion, building godly lives. The Millennium Tower example depicts the importance of choosing the proper foundation to build on.

Only a godly foundation is sound enough to withstand the pressures of life in this world. This world started in the Garden of Eden with the sin of Adam and Eve, when it could have begun with staunch, unyielding obedience to God's commands. Did our first parents look back to their earliest days and wish they had chosen God's way? By then, human sin had set the course of this world, and no amount of shoring up could straighten its crooked ways.

Our salvation depends on building on the right foundation. The psalmist Asaph writes in Psalm 82:5, "All the foundations of the earth are unstable." A foundation of mixed truth and error will fail, just as this world, built on a mixture of good and evil, has failed, careening from one war or disaster or plague or philosophy to another. We must carefully choose where to put our faith, hope, time, and energy. We have all made choices we would love to take back, and God is very merciful when dealing with our mistakes. But why would we not choose to build on the best foundation and follow His holy and righteous way to eternal life and awesome rewards?

This entire world is built on "Old Bay Clay" and cannot be fixed. All the architects, engineers, mathematicians, scientists, politicians, philosophers, or even theologians cannot make it upright! This is not God's kosmos, and human means cannot solve its problems. But Jesus provides the beginning of a solution in Matthew 7:24-25:

Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.

The apostle Paul writes in I Corinthians 3:11 (English Standard Version), "For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ." God's calling affords us an opportunity that billions of others have not been offered. Starting with His elect, God is building a new civilization on a new, godly foundation. In a sense, we have been given access to the Two Trees in the Garden of Eden, and the entire world is counting on us to make the right choice. We must choose our foundation wisely.