Living Water of Washington DC. A Christian Outreach Ministry.

The Beginning of the End of History (Part 2)

This article is a continuation of The Beginning of the End of History (Part 1) appearing in our Fall 2004 issue [and in this website]. Here, we further develop ideas set forth in the earlier article regarding the Fall in Eden, and the meaning of biblical Babylon, its importance yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We introduce the dialectic, which, in this context, is the practice of arriving at the “truth” after a series of incremental changes and compromises. The new “truth” arrived at is not God’s Truth, because God’s Truth (“Absolute Truth”) existed in the Beginning, is plainly given to us by Him in His Word, and is not subject to change. The new “truth” is the basis for today’s vogue spirituality. The legacy of Babylon is the many religions today that all lead to the same god, but the god of this form of spirituality is not our beloved LORD our God.

The Dialectic

The Truth of God’s Word goes forth into the world and shall not return void (Isaiah 55:11). Its antithesis, the Great Lie of the Serpent, went forth into the world through our ancestors in Eden and has borne its rotten fruit, having contaminated an otherwise perfect world. It is impossible for humanity to extirpate the Lie and its consequences from the world: indeed humans fell by it and have been subjugated ever since. There is no cure, none, except for the saving grace of God.

If the world were perfect, there would be no compromising of the Absolute Truth contained in original God-breathed Scripture. There would be no antithetical ideas introduced to taint proper rendering of the Word in its perfection as breathed by God. But we don’t live in a perfect world; powerful ideas contradictory to the Truth— “you will not die”, “you will be like God” (Genesis 3:4, 5)—were introduced in Eden. Their target: the Truth. The spoils: Humanity.

There is no hope for our fallen world or its inhabitants to reach perfection until Christ appears (our “blessed hope”, Titus 2:13). In the meantime, the battle for ascendancy—the “contradictory ideas” versus the Truth— rages on. This struggle results in successive stages of compromise. The strategy of the Adversary of Truth is to diminish incrementally, step-by-step, the purity of the Absolute Truth by confusing it through mixture with other impure elements (literally “babel” in Hebrew). As a result, a watered-down, tawdry “truth” appealing to itching ears has been synthesized from the pure Truth of God and will all but totally supplant it in this world.

They exchanged the Truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator–who is forever praised. Amen. (Romans 1:25, my emphasis.)

The Truth of God has therefore been compromised in the hearts and minds of humankind, and the Lie continues with each generation to corrupt the teaching of the Truth, leading Man (created thing) to believe that he, rather than the Creator alone, can bring about a perfect world. We know how all this is going to end, because the Bible tells us: the Truth wins, but only after Christ returns following a period of enormous turmoil.

A half-truth, which is synthesis of truth and lies, is the most persuasive and dangerous form of a lie. In the great struggle occurring since Eden, half-truths are manifest in many human-centered systems of morality in the West, so revered and popularly embraced as “decent”, “modern”, “civilized”, and “godly”. They are an outcome of the Lie’s contamination of the Truth. The synthesis of the Truth with the Lie is a corrupted form of truth, bent to accommodate the most beguiling aspects of the Lie, giving a version of “truth” tailored to fit people’s lifestyles without offending their self-image of goodness and perfectibility. The Great Lie (or, the Great “Half-Truth”) is more palatable to the taste of fallen man than are God’s absolute edicts or the authoritative version of history delineated in the Bible. Man is fallen and irretrievably lost without the Truth embodied by Christ, the Word (John 1:1, 14:6) to save him. The Bible cannot be clearer.

Consider this: it is modern human morality and its codes that encourage the categorical expungement of direct references to God for the sake of “tolerance”. It is because of the “sensibilities” of modern morality that quoting the Bible is characterized as a “hate-crime” because some people find its words offensive. How can prohibition of public reading of the Bible and expression of faith in Jesus Christ occur where “free speech” is supposedly a protected right? Human-centered systems of morality have been adopted as a poor substitute for God’s Truths. Even in Christian circles, the use of the word “God” is often ambiguous, not clearly denoting the God of the Bible who is One with the Son, Christ Jesus (John 1:1, 10:30). The word “god” can refer to many things –Mammon, the Self, Allah, Isis, the Sacred Feminine, just to name a few.

Modern morality is a deficient substitute for plenary biblical Truth. But they look alike in many ways. When God is taken out of the picture, Humanity eagerly moves in to fill-up the gap. But we know that all blessings of liberty and freedom come from God, not from mankind, and not from the state for that matter. The more the Lie resembles the Truth, the greater the chances for the Lie to be mistaken for the Truth. Eventually the Lie and the Truth look rather identical except for one crucial detail: the identity of God. The Truth is that the LORD is God. The Lie is that Man is like God. With the Lie, all laws pertaining to love of one’s fellow man still apply, but the commandments pertaining to love of the LORD God first and foremost (Matthew 22:37-38) are thrown into the trash heap. This is the peril of the dialectic.

The Truth is that God’s Wisdom is perfect. The Lie, disguised as truth, is that human wisdom is perfect, or at least perfectible. The Truth is the world can be made perfect only by the direct intervention of the LORD God which will occur in the End by His return in power and glory. The Lie is that in the End the world will reach a state of perfection by Man’s effort and know-how. It is the Lie that says humanity is perfectible through learning and evolution, that all things are knowable, and given enough time and thought, that there is nothing humankind can’t accomplish. Anything which advances the worldview of the Lie is called “progress”.

Origins of the Babylonian Religion

In many pagan religions that we see today, the Serpent is Eve’s savior and the savior of all humanity. According to them, the Serpent courageously ventured into the Garden to give Eve the good news that “you will not die” and that through knowledge “you will be like God”, preaching a gospel of self-actualization and fulfillment, unlimited potential, perfectibility, and the essential goodness of the human heart. Somehow, this serpentine “gospel” has gotten mixed-up with the gospel preached in many places today. According to these pagan faiths, the Serpent also warned Eve about the treacherous jealous God who wanted to brutally stamp out all competition. This jealous God was full of wrath and vengeance, quick to judge and to punish in kind.

“You will not die”, said the Serpent, assuring Eve that God was either a liar or a fool. In the Serpent’s gospel, there is no need for the Christ to redeem corrupted humankind.

In many of these pagan religions, the Serpent embodies the divine spirit of Sophia, Greek for “wisdom”. These other gospels say that the wise Serpent gave the great truth to Eve (and to all humanity), who believed the Serpent against the wishes of the stupid, patriarchal Creator. This upside-down theology is at the root of most anti-Christian faiths and pagan religions. This version of Genesis has even slithered into some churches in the form of Gnosticism. The Apostle John and other teachers in the early Church fought vigorously against Gnosticism, which is practiced in many forms to this day. Followers of Gnosticism believe what the soft-spoken Serpent said, and they discount God whom they view as angry, mean, vindictive, “patriarchal”, and arrogant.

In Eden, humankind fell from reliance on God, and glorious communion with Him, into an abject existence relying on flawed human wisdom inferior but today estimated by the world to be superior to God’s. At the same time, the Truth of God's Word is called “fundamentalism”, “darkness”, or “evil”. The proudest of people look at God as though He were the Enemy, believing that they must put a stop to even mentioning His name. The Word given Isaiah:

Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! Woe unto them that are wise in their own eyes, and prudent in their own sight! (Isaiah 5:20-21 KJV)

Babylon in Genesis

The first great civilization, existing before Egypt and long before Rome, was Sumer in Mesopotamia. We know from the Bible that great cities were founded there.

And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD.

And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. (Genesis 10:8-10)

Sumer’s city-states included, most significantly, Babel (Greek “Babylon”). Again, the Hebrew word means “mixture” or “confusion”. The words “hunter before the LORD” could also be rendered as “hunter in the face of the LORD”; Nimrod was a defiant man who hunted and gathered people to himself in the face of the LORD, luring them into the great cities of his worldly kingdom and inspiring them to rebel against God.

In Babel, people began to see the greatness of their potential and celebrated it. The pagan religion flourished there, and we can be fairly certain they were all of one mind and worshipped the same god(s), “Behold, the people is one” (Genesis 11:6). We know also that they thought quite highly of themselves, “they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name [for ourselves]” (Genesis 11:4). They believed that the One True God was nothing to be feared. Indeed they tried to challenge Him, and attempted to erect a towering symbol of their lofty conceit. God put an end to their proud aspiration (Genesis 11:7-8). When the peoples were scattered all over the earth, they must have taken their one religion with them to their respective destinations, but manifested it in many different languages! Indeed, the vocabularies are different, but to this day they all worship the same “god” (as they frequently admit), having different names after the confusion of tongues. There are many different paths to their one god and many different flavors of their religion in many different languages.

But there is only one Way to the One True God (John 14:6).

Babylonianism Today

There is nothing new under the Sun. In spite of all the talk about progress, times have changed little. Human nature remains the same. Dreams remain the same. Imaginations remain the same. Once again, the world’s peoples, once concentrated in Babylon but now scattered worldwide, aspire to regain the unity and singleness of purpose, born out of iterative compromise, that they once shared in Babylon where they believed (quite literally) that the sky was the limit! (Genesis 11:4)

In this Postmodern Age, lacking in absolute standards but abundant in relativism, each person is as “right” as any other. And by carrying forward into Postmodernism the modern principles of “human goodness” and the need for compromise, compromises are made in an ongoing dialectic of biblical dimensions, continuing until the world’s religions are blended together into one happy medium, reinstating the world Babylonian religion of supreme, unassailable humankind. “…now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do” (Genesis 11:6).

The lofty aspiration of Babylon suffered a major setback when God confused the tongues of men and He scattered the peoples to preempt the fullness of their purposed evil. But memories are short and now they’re up to their old tricks again. Today’s heirs of Babylon are busily globetrotting, striving through endless compromise to find the world’s “true” religion, long lost but not forgotten, which accommodates all faiths and belief systems through compromise. They yearn to find the “true” nature of indomitable man long dormant yet evident in the world’s advanced cultures of ancient history.

One thing is almost certain: in their pursuit of the truth, they will when culling the repositories of man’s wisdom miss the fact that man is inherently sinful, that “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). Or, the biblical truth of man’s inherent sinfulness will be whitewashed (i.e. compromised) by the Serpent’s antitheses since it represents an “extreme” view of Christianity. If things go as the Serpent planned, the concluding synthesis of the dialectic will be the consensual exaltation of Humanity. Prior to this conclusion, utter hedonism will be pitted against a compromised version of Christianity. If this particular version of “Christianity” (based not on the Bible but on the traditions of men, rife with half-truths that exalt Humanity) wins, then the Father of Lies (John 8:44) has also won. (Thankfully, we already know the final outcome from the Bible.)

The dialectic ensures that we will reach a postmodern form of the Babylonian religion unless the world puts its complete faith in God and His Word. We know that the world, fallen and hopelessly lost (outside of Christ), will simply not do this unless and until Christ Himself returns. Until that happens, the unfortunate fact remains that with sufficient “will to power” and in the absence of reverence for God’s absolute standards, there is nothing, except for God's own hand, to prevent an anti-Christ figure from accepting the devil’s offer for “all the kingdoms of the world” (an offer that Christ refused, Matthew 4:8-10). Remember that in His response to Satan’s offer, Jesus appealed not to any intuitive moral convictions (although His are perfect); instead, Jesus appealed to the written Word which He embodies! He said, “it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”

If somebody (or something) despises the Word, then he just might take the devil up on his offer. The frightening thing is, such a person will be viewed as “good” or “godly” by millions of deceived followers, because he would embody the Serpent’s half-truths (i.e. lies).


Above: who would have taken the devil up on his offer?

This state of affairs results from eradication of absolutes standards (and promotion of moral relativism) to lengths that result in conspicuous absurdity, except that the “absurdity” will not be so “conspicuous” if people are slowly, incrementally, conditioned to it through step-by-step compromise. This is the result of synthesis of God’s Absolute Truth with the corrupting influence of the Serpent’s lies in the minds of the unsaved. It has been occurring for centuries, but we’ve seen only a hint of things to come.

As we observe today in our own communities, distinguishing right from wrong has become a “personal” matter, and the validity of one’s personal morality depends only on the strength of one’s will to promulgate and enforce it. In effect, the “standard” becomes, “what's right for me is good,” period. And “evil is anything that stands in my way.” Acceptance of these personalized standards of morality has also become deemed as “good”. As the world moves toward a human-centered religion (“you will be like God”, Genesis 3:5) instead of a Christ-centered religion (“My Lord and my God!”, John 20:28), no Christian should accept such personalized standards: a Christian is devoted to God’s Truths and His standards, not his own. We fall far short of His standards, but that is why we must put our trust and faith in the Lord Christ for our salvation. Also, we must love our neighbors, but not their convictions if they contradict what we know to be true. We can hate the sin, but love the sinner, just as God loves all of us who are sinners. We must forgive people of their sins, but in no circumstances are we to condone sin, let alone encourage it. Furthermore, although we can forgive people of their sins against us, the sin itself can only be washed away from the person by the atoning blood of Christ.

And Next?

God (and His absolute standards) is an obstacle to this eleventh-hour revival of the religion founded on the lies of the Serpent, the religion which once flourished in ancient Babylon and then was spread over the globe when its people were scattered. The Truth is an obstacle to this religion because most people have qualms about self-exaltation in the face of the righteous LORD and His unchanging Law, which with stark clarity exposes their iniquity. For the religion of Babylon to succeed, the Truth must be forgotten, discounted, or “changed” little-by-little. The traditions and laws of men (Mark 7:7-8) on the other hand do change over time, and the postmodern trend has been to incrementally modify or reinterpret laws in order to mask iniquity rather than expose it, freeing people of their sins in their own minds and blinding them to perception of their dire need for Christ.

But as long as people know that God exists as the Bible reveals, they know that there are boundaries, standards, and rules. They know that there are severe consequences for breaking them. Thus, for the Babylonian religion to succeed, Man must take the place of God as the highest form of divine goodness, guided in his endeavor to create a perfect world by spiritual counselors (as the Serpent was to Eve). For this false religion to succeed, God and His Word must be marginalized or maligned as the religious preference for those of inferior intellect, pejoratively labeled “Christian fundamentalists”, “extremists”, “intolerant”, “zealots”, “legalists”, “Pharisees”, etc. (Ironically, even though Pharisees are commonly characterized as meticulously observing the laws, the fact is Pharisees constantly twisted the laws, used them to support empty traditions, and interpreted them to suit their own ends, see Mark 7:8-13.) In this topsy-turvy environment, Lucifer can convincingly appear out of the darkness as a divine angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), barely distinguishable as “evil” in the mass of confusion where good and evil have been turned upside down, in which Man, the mere creature, has placed himself above the Creator (Isaiah 29:16, Romans 1:25).

Only the everlasting Word of God incarnate in Christ Jesus can put an end to the confusion and bring everlasting peace. We know this to be true, because thus says the Bible.