Clough Genesis Lesson 37

Human good; the mystery of iniquity; the Babylon system & money – Genesis 11:1-2

We’ve been studying Genesis 10 where we have met with the doctrine, the biblical doctrine of race and racial distinctions. We could summarize all of what we said very simply by making an analogy between the body of Christ, the regenerate mankind in Christ, and the body of Adam, the entire human race corporate. Just as the body of men in Christ have certain gifts, each part of the body has a function to perform as part of an organism, so the body of Adam has natural parts to it that all work together under an ideal situation. That’s the true Bible doctrine of race; each race or each subgroup in overall mankind have certain areas of strength, certain areas of weakness, and this is why Adam is never considered to be Adam unless he is Adam over all. In other words, when God looks down and He makes any judgment about Adam He’s looking at all the races; not just one, all of them together corporately because all of them together corporately express Adam’s nature. Certain races excel in certain things and others don’t but there is no one race that is superior, we are all part of Adam.

Now mankind was designed to work together and we find that although there are racial distinctives, God’s original intention was for the races to disperse across the earth, to form their society and to have free trade and free intercourse between each element. But something happened; it’s not well understood what happened, the Bible only gives a little hint here and there about what happened but Genesis 11 is one of the most titanic and politically and economically significant things that has ever happened in the history of postdiluvian society. The Bible, as we have indicated here, only nine verses devoted to this most significant of events, and yet here is the origin of what has come to be known in later biblical history as the mystery of iniquity. It’s called this and a number of other names because the New Testament writers don’t want to glorify evil, they don’t want to point it out and worship Satan like all the movies, Omen, and Omen II and the Exorcist and Exorcist II, all these movies simply play into the hand of Satan because they ascribe sovereignty to Satan. Satan does not have sovereignty; God alone, our Lord Jesus Christ has sovereignty.

But evil exists and today we’re going to begin a two or three part exegesis of Genesis 11 and I am going to try to tie the thoughts of Genesis 11 and these trends that burst unto the stage of history at this point down to some things that are affecting you and me today in the area of finances, in the area of politics and I think some will be quite deeply shocked at the connections between the mystery of iniquity and some things that you’ve observed and you know that something’s wrong but you’ve never been able to get a handle on it. Well, we’ll try to give you a handle and try to tie some of these things together.

Beginning at Babel the mystery of iniquity operates through human good, so we want to review a little bit about human good for a moment. Human good is man’s fig leaf. Remember back in the Garden of Eden incident man was made naked, and we said why man, of all the creation was made naked, everybody else has fur except man. Now why was man made naked. There’s a reason for it theologically, three really is. The Scriptures argue that man was completely naked because man was to clothe himself with probably, physically it would show up, as glory, as a light, that man was to clothe himself with righteousness. And this gradual acquisition of clothing was to occur as he submitted himself to Scripture. So man’s nudity and his sense of nakedness is a sense of the fact that he is stripped before God of what he ought to have on him, which is righteousness. And therefore when the fall occurred and man knew that this clothing would not be forthcoming it created a guilt and nudity is an expression of guilt and it’s an expression of the incompleteness of man apart from the imputed righteousness of Christ, and thereafter all of the imputed of Christ was given metaphors of clothing in the Bible.

We said that when the couple was naked in the Garden of Eden after the fall, they hunted around for some solution and they came across the idea of fig leaves. Now God didn’t say it was wrong to put clothes on. What God did was say it was wrong to put those clothes on; it wasn’t the goal, it was the means of acquiring clothing, and the motive for acquiring clothing that was wrong. And you remember before God left the Garden of Eden, after the fall, after announcing the gospel to Adam and Eve, what did he do for the couple? When God saw that Adam and Eve both trusted in Christ He immediately killed an animal, the first blood sacrifice in history, and clothed that couple with a tunic. The Hebrew expresses it as a kind of clothing from the neck all the way down to the toe; it wasn’t kind of the… you know, the one strap on the shoulder cave man type thing that artists are fond of depicting; it was a tunic, a leather tunic type thing. That was God’s answer to man’s need.

Now when we come to the tower of Babel man has another need. We’re going to study this morning what man’s need was then; what man’s need still is today, and this human good approach to solving the problem. Now you want to be careful, this human good is the most dangerous kind of evil you will ever face. Most of us can recognize immorality when we see it because of our God-consciousness. One doesn’t have to be a seminary graduate to recognize it. However, human good is a little bit more complicated and a little bit different story. Satan’s most powerful deceptions on the human race surround this little thing called human good. We mentioned it how God views it; it’s always presented as excrement in the Scriptures, an easy to understand metaphor; excrement does not appeal to either smell nor sight and God says yes, and that’s exactly what I think of human good. So I have given you something in your daily experience that you can always refer to if you want to understand how I feel towards human good which is put out.

Why is human good so hated by God and so loved by man. Human good is loved by man because it appears to solve his problem. After all, if one is (quote) “good” and moral and ethical, good member of the community, solid citizen, good reputation, etc. etc. etc. then all is well. That’s human good. Now that’s not to say that a Christian ought not to be a good citizen but it is to say that this is a counterfeit; a counterfeit to +R, the righteousness that is available through the cross of Christ, and why God hates it so much is because this, more than any other thing in history, is what keeps people from the cross of His Son. This, more than anything else, is what prevents man from realizing his total complete need to be clothed with the righteousness of Christ. And so wherever you see human good you’ll see Satan. Satan is the arch designer of human good, he is its chief propagandist, and as we shall see this morning, one of the great organizers of human good on an international scale. Let’s look at some of the passages; we won’t get it all done this morning because I have too much catching up to do in modern history for you to see this.

Genesis 11:1, “The whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. [2] And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar.”

Now it says that the human race spoke one language. What evidence do we have that the human race did speak one language? Dr. Samuel Noah Cramer, a great Sumeriologist, student of the ancient civilization of Sumeria, longtime professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and a writer of a lot of prominent books on the Sumerian civilization, gives us one of the hundreds of evidences that exist that at one time all nations spoke the same language. Tablet number 29.16.422 in the University of Pennsylvania library reads this way: “In those days the land of Shuber,” which is the word for east, “the plain of plenty, of righteous decrees, harmony-tongued Sumer [south], the great land of the ‘decrees of princeship, Uri,” which is the word for north, “the land having all that is needful, The land Martu [West], resting in security, The whole universe, the people in unison, To Enlil” which is their word for God, Elohim, “To Enlil in one tongue gave praise.” “…in one tongue gave praise.”

So Genesis 11:1 of your Bible is not unique to the Bible, it is commonly reported among those civilizations that have records extending far, far back into the ancient past. We’ve already told you what probably that one language was. It was some sort of a Semitic language, and here’s why we know this. A Semitic type of language; we suggest this is so and we’re not the first ones, Dr. Custance isn’t the first one whom I quote, Augustine says it, the church fathers say it, a long, long tradition of this, it’s made up of a very simple observation. Before the tower of Babel there are names that make sense only in Hebrew. For example, Noah comes from the Hebrew verb to rest. Noah has many other names, Utnapishtim in some of the areas, and then Deucalion in some of the Greek legends; those names don’t have that meaning in those languages; there’s only one language where the meaning means what it ought to mean, Noah. And then we have Eve, chavah, which is the wife’s name and it’s named after life. Well, Eve is known in history by other names, but only in the Hebrew language does her name mean what it ought to mean to fit in with the story.

Now of course the liberals see this but they just simply say well, that’s just because the Jews are better story tellers, they make it all fit together. But that’s not our view; our view says it fits together in Hebrew because Hebrew is a Semitic type language and it reports it more accurately. But there’s another reason. Semitic languages are very, very unchanging with time. I mentioned last week how my Israeli tutor pointed out to me that Hebrew is one of the most amazing languages because you can take a little child in Israel today and she could go talk to Moses and bridge 30 centuries of time and carry on a complete conversation, and be understood. The little girl would understand Moses and Moses would understand the little girl quite well. Do you know of another language on earth that can survive 30 to 35 centuries of transmission and not have distortions? Ha! Look at the English language, some of you have a King James Bible sitting right in front of you; that Bible was only written 300 years ago and yet many of you have trouble understanding it; that’s how much the English language has changed in just three centuries; we’re talking about 3,000 years and the Hebrew language hasn’t changed significantly.

Now because of the unchanging nature of Semitic languages and because of these other reasons we believe this one language in Genesis 11:1 was a Semitic type language. Genesis 11:2, “And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar, [and they dwelt there].” We’ve run across that word before. Do you remember where we run into it? Genesis 10:10 and who was the prime actor running the show at Shinar? It’s very interesting who he was; that was the place where Nimrod had his kingdom, the beginning of a kingdom was in the land of Shinar. And that’s the historical connection between this first one-rule, one world ruler and the Babel incident.

It says in verse Genesis 11:3, “And they,” the people at Shinar, presumably a healthy segment of the human race, presumably under Nimrod, presumably mostly Hamitic but not all, “they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime they had for mortar.” And Josephus adds extra-biblical tradition, “They built it out of burnt bricks, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water.” Admit what? Admit water… ah, and there’s one of the sources of perhaps, not dogmatically but perhaps this is one reason in their thinking why they built the tower, because if God ever sends a flood the hell with His ark, we’ll climb our own manmade tower and we’ll sit there and throw our system in His face, go ahead God, send another flood, see if you can kill us again—the attitude of autonomous independence from God, complete and total defiance of the sovereign providential God of history.

Notice what else is said, in Genesis 11:4, “And they said, Come, let us build us a city and a tower,” who built the world’s first city? Cain, remember the motive for Cain building the first urban culture? It was a place of security. A place of security from what? Security from God. What had God just done to Cain? Marked him with a mark, hadn’t he? So that no man could touch Cain because of the mark of God upon Cain. So Cain had perfect security, guaranteed in grace from God and he didn’t want that; I need more security than that which God provides and so I’ll provide my own, I’ll build my own city, and I’ll have my own security and my own city with my own works and I won’t have to trust in God, won’t have to rely upon Him and His grace; no entanglement from the divine side. And so in my pride and my autonomy, said Cain, I build the first city. The last city, incidentally, is built by Jesus Christ and it’s called The New Jerusalem. But the first city was always built, the first thrust of these cities are all built with an autonomous spirit, and here again you see it; verse 4, “Let us build a city and a tower,” not just a tower, a city around the base of the tower because the city is where we will be protected.

Notice why, verse 4, what are they afraid of, “lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” What’s wrong with being scattered abroad on the face of the whole world? You can see very easily what would be wrong. Can you imagine setting out for yourself across uncharted lands, not knowing what lies out there, and in meek obedience to God’s Word, who are you going to have to rely on out in the wilderness? God! Who won’t you have to rely upon if you bring everybody together and we organize together? You won’t have to rely on God, will you; you can rely upon your neighbor. Moreover if we bring a large group of population together in a small geographical area what else do we attain that we wouldn’t have if everybody just scattered abroad? Power, control, man can organize, man can control it; the Spirit is still with us. How often do you hear it said, in say political discussions, well, if the government doesn’t do that who will? If the government doesn’t guarantee us security, give us jobs and do all the rest, who will? Isn’t there a God in heaven who answers prayer? Isn’t God the One who gave Adam the first job? Isn’t God the One that generates wealth? Well, we don’t rely on Him, you know, let’s be practical, this is after all the 20^th century, you know 2 + 2 = 4 is a truth that might not always be true and therefore spiritual truths can change with time and so we don’t like to be in a situation where we have to trust in God.

What I’m saying here is Genesis 11:3-4 are presenting in a very, very simple way but a very, very profound way sin, the heart of sin. The heart of sin is simply independence from God; I will do what I want, where I want, when I want, however I want, I, I, I, I. They say in this, “let us build a tower,” and then it says, “whose top may reach unto heaven,” the striving after God Himself, “I will be like the Most High.” These are divine, “whose top will reach unto heaven” is a claim to divinity; it’s a deification of man. There’s a lot packed in this verse; it doesn’t mean literally they want… it does mean they want a nice high, physical tower, but there’s more to it than just that, look at the next phrase, “and let us make a name.” Now if you looked that up in a concordance, that’s a very unusual expression, “make a name.” Do you know that most of the time the word “name” occurs in the Bible it always sounds like this: “Let us name.”

What’s the difference between the expression “let us name,” and “let us make a name?” If I go out and I name something what am I doing? I’m going out into my God’s universe and I’m looking at His handiwork that testifies to His glory, I reflect as a creature made in His image upon my Creator’s glory and therefore I name my environment. I name it, whether it’s biological, whether it’s chemical, whether it’s physical, whether it’s electrical, it doesn’t make any difference, the phenomena is God and it’s His general revelation and I, as the lord, with a little “l” am the interpreter of my environment under the Word of God and therefore I give it a name, based upon my analysis and understanding of my God’s gift to me. But if I, on the other hand, go out into my environment and say well, I will “make a name for myself,” that means I manufacture my own glory, and then I reflect upon my own glory and I give my own glory a name; a totally different approach to subduing the earth. On one I subdue it submissively to the authority of the Scripture; the other I do it to create my own glory so I can sit back, because there is in that heart of all men that which craves for glory, and therefore I won’t be satisfied with just the mundane, I’ve got to have glory, and either I’ll get it from my God or I’ll make my own. And that’s the alternative and there’s no in between. And that’s what the spirit of the people of the tower of Babel want; the spirit is expressed in words as clear as can be here in this phrase.

Now they had some legitimate reasons; let’s go through some of them. Here were the pressures that those people faced at that time in history. They faced something new, a climate. They never saw a climate like this before. After all, before the flood the climate was uniform. After the flood it changes from place to place. It means that certain plants won’t grow. In the south, in the southern areas, in the tropical areas of the northern hemisphere, in the warmer areas certain plants grow, your tropic plants, and we have to eat our pineapples in the south and our tomatoes in the south. In the north we don’t have those plants and we have to plant something else and it stresses the system. It means that people in the north land have to trade with people in the south. It means we have to get along with one another because we can’t survive unless we get along with one another and this stresses the system. The climate breaks up man; the climate leads to economic and farming specialization. We can’t be totally self-sufficient; we can’t have a farm where we can grow everything in other words. That’s one stress.

And then another one, one very hard for us to understand is wild life. The Bible says in Exodus 23:29 and other passages that early man after the flood was threatened with a fantastic multiplication of wild animals. They’d come in and they’d just destroy the crops. We don’t know why this was going on, it’s up to a Christian creationist biologist to tell us some day after he’s studied the problem. But they had a big problem with multiplication of wild life.

And most of all they wanted security. It wasn’t wrong, everybody wants to be secure. After all, the gospel says we are secure but we are secure because of Christ. Security wasn’t a problem; it was how they wanted the security and exactly the motive behind it. But this security was a security from divine interference, the same song, second tune, that Cain sung when he built his first city. I want security from the interference of God. I want to do what I want without cause/effect. I want to do without being held responsible for what I do. Autonomous spirit! And there came a man, as there always will in history, there came a man who was able to satisfy that spirit, and his name was Nimrod. We don’t know exactly how he pitched it to his generation; we know from myths that have come down about Nimrod, one of those myths says that Nimrod was able through technology to do this. It seems like Nimrod was one of the first men in history to domesticate the horse and he was able through using horsemen to subjugate the leopards and the lions and the wild animals that were ravishing in the area of the Shinar valley. We don’t know whether that’s true but it’s plausible. Nimrod, through some way, answered the problem of security. And notice this… security! For the next several Sundays you are going to watch that spirit, the spirit of Babel, reappear right under your nose in 20^th century America and you’ll see where our human good is and how it’s linked in a one to one relationship of from ancestor to descendant, to our own day the spirit of Babel still is with us.

This was their solution, but Genesis 11:5-7 give God’s solution. “And the LORD came down to see the children, and city and the tower. [6] And the LORD said, Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” Now turn back a moment to Genesis 8:21, just do a little check on that word “imagined.” Remember the last time we saw it used; notice the context of “imagination” or “imagine.” “And the LORD smelled a sweet savor,” remember after the Noahic Covenant, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagination of man’s heart is good from his youth???” Huh-un, thoroughly evil, the imagination is evil and what is God concerned with in Genesis 11? Because “they have begun to do and now nothing will be withheld from them, which they have imagined,” calculated, “to do.” Human good, God says, and the reason is because they used the corporate nature.

Now just think about this for a moment. Our world is plagued with lots of problems; famine problems, the problem of climate still is with us, the problem of international war and so on. If you want to get a glimpse of a utopia that’s real just think in reverse about verse 6. What verse 6 is telling you is that if the human race were linguistically together, if man therefore thought on the same frequency on every continent, because one language means one thought system, if man were unified in his thought system the production of the human race would be fantastic, would be phenomenal. What we’re doing today, regardless of technology or anything else, our production compared to our potential as a human race is peanuts; we are at the lowest level in our wealth, in our power, in our production. No matter how powerful we think we are it is very primitive compared to what it could be because God Himself says in verse 6, if He had not fractured us linguistically then we could have done anything we imagined to do; go to the moon, go to galaxies, anything we imagined we could do we could pretty well pull off. Why? That is the potential richness that’s in the human race.

Now why doesn’t God let us do that? Because what we would do would be evil, and therefore God has, what we call in corporate decisions or decision making process, He’s made a trade-off; He has flushed our future potential in richness momentarily in history to protect us spiritually. He has, in other words, crippled us partially in our wealth production, in our ability to subdue the earth because He’s afraid; afraid not because He’s going to be hurt but He cares for us and if He’d let us, with our evil sinful nature, we would create a hell on earth that would be beyond anything Hitler, or the communists, or the do-gooders have ever dreamed of. It’d be awful. And so for that reason He fractured us. And we’re going to deal more with the fracturing later but today I want to deal with the origin of the mystery of iniquity, or Babylon.

This all happened, if you will look at Genesis 11:9, at a place called Babel, later on the city of Babylon. Babylon is always the place in the Bible for the geographical center of evil, just as Jerusalem is the geographical center of righteousness. It started geographically in this place, not I believe in the country of Iraq, and the long ever-growing course of evil will end up exactly on this site. We don’t know but don’t be surprised at all the petrol dollars floating in the world’s economy that in the next few years you don’t see a movement by Iraq to rebuild the ancient city of Babylon. And when you see that happen then you understand that the stage is being set for the final culmination of the most evil thing that man can ever devise.

Turn to the last book of the Bible, the book of Revelation 17:5, and you’ll see the end of evil. Genesis 11 is the beginning; Revelation 17 and 18 is the end. The mystery of iniquity is the peculiar form of evil in the postdiluvian society. We live in the postdiluvian civilization of society; therefore this is our arch enemy. It says at the end, when she’s exposed, “And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY….” The word “mystery” doesn’t mean a mystery in the sense of who-done-it. A mystery in the New Testament is more of the kind of a secret society that had various initiative rights, sort of like your secret societies that still exist, modern… Masons would be an example of the use of the word mystery. Verse 5, therefore when it uses this name it’s saying something about the nature of Babylon. She is a mystery, or a secret fraternity. “… BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF WHORES AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.”

Now the metaphor is under that of a female and I’ll show you why. We’re going to list some characteristics of her, then we’ll go to some passages and you look for these characteristics. Geographically this is located in the Middle East. The Middle East is the naval of the earth; spiritually the battle focuses always in the Middle East. The second feature of mystery of Babylon is that it is a vast military and political power of some sort… or some sort.

Furthermore, another characteristic is wealth. Now by wealth now I’m not talking about just a wealthy family. By wealth, when we talk about Babylon we are talking about astronomical wealth; wealth that is just absolutely incomprehensible to the average person. We’re not just talking about your local millionaire; we’re talking about billions and trillions of dollars, wealth that is compounded. Another characteristic of Babylon is a fantastic wisdom, an evil wisdom, wisdom in the mean and skill, mixed with sorceries and demonic doctrines. Another central feature of her is colossal pride, not immorality necessarily… repeat, not what we identify with evil so glibly, but I mean deep, deep, deep evil, pride, the most satanic of all sins.

And then she is listed in terms of the female. Why? Because she’s the counterpart to lady wisdom in the book of Proverbs. There are two ladies in the Scriptures that are spoken of metaphorically again and again: lady wisdom and lady folly. Lady wisdom is the grand helper or the helpmate of the believer; lady wisdom is that which decorates the environment and expresses humanity and the delicate things of life and the beautiful things of life. It’s what needs to happen to the boy’s dorm. It is always the female that is looked upon as the embellisher. The men provide the basics and then the women hang the curtains, that kind of thing. Now lady folly is the one who provides the niceties of sin; she provides the skill, the delicacies of sin. She’s the one, so to speak, that finishes off and completes Satan’s grand scheme. It may be inaugurated in a blood bath, or a gas chamber, but by the time that lady folly gets through with it, it appears beautiful and attractive; it’s her function.

Now we’re going to look at some passages and you think about those. First, right here in Revelation 17:6, what is this woman, whoever she is? She’s “drunk with the blood of the saints,” is who she is, “with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus; and when I saw her, I wondered with great admiration [wonder].” In other words, John is impressed with her, not because he likes her; he’s impressed with the foulness, and her success at destruction of the saints. John sits there with his mouth open in utter amazement as an apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ, how can this be, how can this person have such fantastic… or the system, have this fantastic grip on the Lord Jesus Christ’s own people?

And then it says in Revelation 17:17-18, “For God has put in their hearts to fulfill His will,” that’s the people on negative volition, the people who are rebels, “God has put it in their hearts to fulfill His will, and to agree, and to give their kingdom unto the beast, until the words of God shall be fulfilled. [18] And the woman which thou sawest is that great city, [which reigns over the kings of the earth.]” What did they start to build at Babel? A city and a tower. What is Babylon? A great city, and what does this great city do? It reigns over whom? Over the kings of the Middle East? No. It “reigns over the kings of the earth.” She’s a city of some sort that has international connections and is able to manipulate on a vast worldwide scale.

Let’s read further; the destruction of her, Revelation 18:3, “For all nations have drunk…,” all nations notice, all the great united nations “have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed [grown] rich through the abundance of her delicacies.” What two classes of leaders do you see in verse 3? The political and economic leaders. Notice this; it is a constant theme of Babylon that politics and money are combined. Notice the word “fornicate” with the word “kings.” In this context fornication, as it’s used in the Old Testament, refers to treaties; it refers to other things but generally speaking it has reference to international law. To fornicate means to have treaties and business dealings with those people with whom you don’t have business dealings, extra covenantal deals that are worked out. And somehow this city has a political visibility and an international law type visibility with whom treaties are made and “the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through her delicacies,” through her use of resources; she is wealth generating.

Revelation 18:9, “And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously [luxuriously] with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning, [10] Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city, Babylon, that mighty city! [For in one hour is thy judgment come.”] Verse 11, “And the merchants [of the world],” the other group, the economic class, “shall weep and mourn over her; for no man buys her merchandise any more.” And it describes some of the merchandise.

In Revelation 18:15, “The merchants of these things, who were made rich by her,” when the city has been destroyed. This chapter, Revelation 17 and 18, give you the end of the city; the tower of Babel gives you the beginning of the city, but to complete our picture let’s look at a halfway point. Let’s turn to Isaiah 14, in the growth of the city of Babylon. Most of us are acquainted with Isaiah 14 because we’ve been taught that this represents the fall of Satan and indeed it does. But we forget that the primary historical rendering of the passage is not talking about Satan, it’s talking about the king of Babylon, verse 4.

Isaiah 14:4, “Thou shalt take up this proverb,” Isaiah, “against the king of Babylon, and say, How has the oppressor ceased!” This is forecasting the destruction of the Babylon. The place in verse 4, literally in the Hebrew it’s not, “The golden city ceased,” but “The place of raging has ceased. [5] The LORD has broken the staff of the wicked, and the scepter of the rulers.” That’s Psalm 2, they have gathered together to rebel against the Lord and against His united, [6] “He who smote the people in wrath with a continual stroke; he ruled the nations [in anger],” international power. Now Isaiah 14:7, “The whole earth is at rest;” when the city of Babylon is destroyed. [8] Yea, the fir trees rejoice….” Verse 11, “Thy pomp is brought down to the grave [sheol]” and behind her who is it that motivates Babylon but “Lucifer, son of the morning! …who did weaken the nations!” Internationalism!

Let’s turn to Isaiah 47 for another little insight into Babylon. I think some of you who are more politically acute can begin to detect where this sermon is leading. Isaiah 47, talking about Babylon in verse 1, now in Isaiah 47:4-7, “Sit thou silent, and get thee into darkness, O daughter of the Chaldeans; for thou shalt no more be called, The lady of kingdoms,” plural. Notice again her female imagery and notice her internationalist imagery, “lady of the kingdoms.” [6] “I was anger with my people; they [I] have polluted mine inheritance, and given them into thine hand; but you didn’t show them any mercy…. [7] And you said, I shall be a lady forever, so that thou didst not lay these things to thy heart, neither did remember the latter end of it. [8] Now hear this, [thou that are given to pleasures],” and he begins to describe the judgment coming upon her.

Finally let’s turn to one other passage on Babylon, Jeremiah 51. Isaiah and Jeremiah both prophesied the end of Babylon. The reason is because the world can’t rest until she’s destroyed. And we, unfortunately, can’t destroy her; only Christ can! Isaiah 51:7, “Babylon has been a golden cup in the LORD’s hand, that has made all the earth drunken,” …all the earth! Internationalism! But “the nations have drunk of her wine; therefore, the nations are insane,” literally, the nations have drunk her wine and they are insane.

Jeremiah 51:13, “Thou that dwellest upon many waters,” what’s that an imagery of? Waters are chaos, a city and a system that feeds on chaos, you’ve set upon many waters, and you are “abundant in wealth [treasures], your end has come….”

Why do the prophets act so vehemently and so violently against this epitome of evil, Babylon? Let me fill you in on why before I conclude with an application for us in our own day. Let me bring some of you up to date on Babylon. Let’s turn to a book that we’ve looked at before; the book of Daniel, we just want to look at one verse and that’ll be all the Scripture references for a while; Daniel 7:12. You remember when we went through Daniel, remember the four kingdoms? Some of you have been taught this by other Bible teachers; it’s a classic scheme. The first kingdom was what? After 586 BC when the times of the Gentiles began and Israel disappeared politically and officially from the face of the earth, you have the kingdom of Babylon. And verse 12 says a peculiar thing about all these kingdoms. “As concerning the rest of the beasts,” that is the other kingdoms, “they had their dominion taken away, but their lives were prolonged [for a season and time].” “…they had their dominion taken away, but their lives were prolonged.” That means that these kingdoms disappeared in history. The Babylonian kingdom did disappear in history, but its life was prolonged. And then along after the Babylonian kingdom came the Medo-Persian kingdom, and it too disappeared, apparently, from the surface of visible history but God says it’s life was prolonged, the Medo-Persian kingdom. And then after that came the kingdom of Greece, and it disappeared from history but its life was prolonged. And then along came the Roman Empire and it kind of joins in with the last empire and when its broken all the other kingdoms are broken.

The thing I want you to notice is that though the kingdoms appear to disappear, their life is prolonged; their influence is prolonged, life is influenced, historical influence, cause/effect in history, and all we need do is go back to historians, secular or non-Christian, it doesn’t matter, any historian can answer this question, describe in one sentence what each of these four kingdoms are known for. And when this is done here’s what you’ll see. Babylon was known for the central banking concept; Babylon was the center of economic transactions on a massive scale; Babylon was the place where fractional reserves came to be used on a wide scale. Fractional reserves is that concept that the bank has of taking your savings and since you want the savings out at any time it’s called demand, savings in a demand passbook account, and you put X amount of dollars in the bank, and then they’ll turn around and loan it because they have to make money on it, but instead of loaning one dollar on each dollar put into the bank, they begin to notice something after a while; if we have ten people with their savings accounts in the bank you know, at any given time all ten of those people aren’t going to come down here and ask us for their money, so we’ve got a brilliant idea. We’ll loan two loans out on every dollar we’ve taken in, make more money that way. And besides, everybody isn’t going to come down to the bank at once and pull out their savings, so we’ll have only a fraction of the savings that we’ve got and we’ll bank on that and this way we make more money, we create, “create” in the word (quote) “wealth.” Well, the government does that on a massive scale. Anytime the government needs money you wonder why President Carter and President Ford, both political parties, it doesn’t make a difference, either one, they’re both anti-Scriptural in this regard, why both of them have financing on a deficit that is just fantastic. Where do the sixty billion dollars come from? The old printing press just keeps on going, turning it out, to inflate and throw more dollars and dollars in the economy. And so more and more dollars compete for the same amount of goods and what happens to prices? Up… up… and what’s happened to that dollar bill you’re carrying around in your pocket? It gets smaller and smaller. The mentality behind this creation of wealth and the politicians call it “full employment,” we must have full employment, and so to get full employment we just spend, spend, spend, spend. The man who introduced this weird idea in America was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

But this man who brought this apostasy in on a large scale, it was brought in cooking a long time before him, but he was the one who was in back and managed to really do things good, and when this thing got started, and you have this wealth created…. We have a fellow in the church that had a very interesting illustration of what happens, it’s always in the name of creating wealth, progress in economy. It’s not progress in the economy; it is all one massive illusion. It’s as though here we are cramped in this building and we need more square footage for this auditorium. And so it’s a lot of trouble to actually build a real auditorium, make it bigger, that costs a lot of money, so suppose we hit upon this idea. Let’s make the ruler smaller and we’ve got more square feet; we change the standard of measurement. Isn’t that another way of generating more square feet, make each square foot smaller? And now all of a sudden miraculously, without one penny expenditure, we’ve created wealth, haven’t we? Aren’t buildings calculated in real estate, so many dollars per square foot? Sure, $25-$30 a square foot, okay, multiply it, we’ve got a new number here, we’ve got more square feet, the building’s worth more, now we can sell it to somebody, make more money on it, all we need to do is change the length of the ruler.

Now that’s obvious when it’s applied to space and volume measurements; it would be obvious if we applied that to pounds. We have in all government services, supposedly, some outfit called the Bureau of Standards that is supposed to protect the measure of value, except in one area, and that is the thing you’ve got in your wallet. That used to be a standard of value; it is no more because Babylon is a concept of generating wealth out of nothing.

And so we have these four levels, but notice these four kingdoms. Each one of them is known for something that persists through our own day. In the Daniel series we said Babylon persists in her life until the present time because of economic and banking transactions. The Medo-Persian Empire persists in what it was known for, and what was it known for most? Just take a map, look at the Medo-Persian Empire, where did it extend to in the west? The Aegean, and interacting with the west, Greece. And where did it go in the east? All the way to the Indus Valley, interacting with the Orient. And so you have the East meets West, one-world culture. You’ve heard that before, that’s what every child in Junior and Senior High get in their social studies classes, the salvation of all men is one-world culture, erase all distinctions and make us all one big happy family. That’s Medo-Persia, her spirit lives on. And Greece, anyone who studied history knows what Greece is and where that measurement comes from; it’s the intellectual, rationalism. We’ll show next Sunday the significance of that. And then Rome, everyone knows Rome, its organizational ability, military and political power.

But here is where we can learn a lesson, as Bible-believing citizens, when we look out and we look at the structure of the world system. This little innocent picture has just given you a cross-section of the power of evil and how it is layered, and how it has certain things that depend on other things in it. The basic power of the mystery of iniquity in the world system is money. Babylon is so critical to this that in the book of Revelation when the kingdom of man is referred to it’s not referred to as Rome, it’s not referred to as Greece, it’s not referred to as Medo-Persia, it is referred to by the first name of the first layer, Babylon. Why? Because Babylon gives it its strength, its foundation, its ground of rest is upon economic power, always the dollar, it is money that talks. After that we dream our Eleanor Roosevelt dreams of one-world culture; after that we dream our dreams of the academia of Plato, who as I will show next week, generated his book called The Republic solely to justify the totalitarian politicians of his own day. And then we have finally, the mighty armies of Rome.

But notice the structure; it is not the military power that keeps the world system in the driver’s seat. It is not the intellectuals that keep it in the driver’s seat. It is the powerful financial transactions that go on behind the scenes that keep it in the driver’s seat.

Now to bring this up to date and see where Babylon has gone since the time of the Reformers; from the Renaissance until 1978 the spirit of Babylon keeps on going; it’s going to keep on going until Christ returns. And if we can understand it as Bible-believing Christians maybe, though we can’t defeat it totally, we can retard it and give ourselves more freedom and latitude to operate. Babylon in its modern form was begun by a philosopher from Italy called Dante and another German called Kant. Both of these men were the authors of the idea of international law and a world government. Notice Dante comes from Italy and Italy is Rome; the continuity of [can’t understand word]. Notice too, as I develop this, how Babylon centers in Japheth because Japheth is the one who conquers. International Babylon began with the first level, we’ll deal with the second, third and fourth later, this Sunday we just want to introduce you to Babylon as the first level, the economic level.

Let’s study the economic basis of the modern world system. The economic basis of the modern world system is basically only a few families. It is not the complicated thing that a lot of people say it is, although there are complexities, obviously. But there are basically a few people, not in total power, but can basically influence any nation they wish. One example of this, known very famous in the history of finance, was a Jewish family by the name of Rothschild. The Rothschild’s started in Germany, the old man, Mayer Rothschild, died in Vienna in 1812. He was a banker. By the way, this is not intended to be a slam on Jews because I’ll show you very quickly the Gentiles are in it also, he just happened to be a Jew, and if people fuss at Jews who bank in the Middle Ages, just remember, it was the Catholic Church that forced the Jews into the banking operation. So this is not an attack on Jews.

But Rothschild, the old man, died in Vienna but he actually lived in Germany most of his life. He had several sons. His first son, Amschel Rothschild became the treasurer of a German confederation and the key banker of Germany, which means when Kaisers wanted money to fight wars the Rothschild family was there to provide the money. A second son, Salomon Rothschild went to Vienna and became the financial leader of the Austria-Hungarian Empire. So now if the Germans fight a war with Austria-Hungary, either way the Rothschild family controlled the finances on both sides of the war. The third son, Nathan, went to London, England and became very powerful in England and later on had some deals that Rothschild, derivative to that in setting up the modern state of Israel, so they had beneficial things; it was not all black, but I just point you the structure. So the third son goes to London and gets into the English financial circles. The fourth son, Carl, goes to Italy, Naples, and forms a tremendous banking complex that dominates the Italian political picture. The fifth son, James, goes to Paris and does the same thing to France.

So now observe what we’ve got: one family, all related, one of them is in Paris, one of them is in Naples, one is in London, one is in Vienna and one is in Germany. And I think you can safely say that if you control the finances of those nations you basically control the west. And this concept, then, gradually led to the idea of a central bank, that is, not your small time banker in your city, but the central bank. The central bank would be the central of the nation that would loan money to the treasury of that nation. So the idea now is that whereas you have a politician here who appears to be leading the country, he is the king, he is the president, he may be the dictator, he had all the political activity up here but underneath, quiet and hidden, are the wealthy who control the purse strings of the politician. They don’t usually like to be seen and you don’t parade them around on the front pages of your newspapers because that’s not what they’re interested in; they don’t care for politicians, all they care is that they control where they want it to go.

Well, this came up and formed gradually methods of banks. The Bank of England, notice, formed after the restoration, 1694 is the date of the Bank of England. It was the Bank of England who were pulling demands on George III that later on led to the American Revolution. The Bank of England became extremely powerful. In America the most powerful figure was J. P. Morgan, now known as the Guarantee Trust, but it used to be more visible in the financial world. J. P. Morgan was one of the great financiers. Again, we’re not saying all these people are evil; we’re simply saying factually they have their hands on the world’s purse string. He was joined, later on, by the Rockefeller family. John D. Rockefeller bought the Chase Bank. William Rockefeller bought the National City Bank of New York, and a man by the name of Paul Warburg bought the Manhattan Bank of New York. Later on the Chase Manhattan merged and became one of the most powerful banks, if not the most powerful bank in the world today.

Carroll Quigley, who is a professor at Harvard University, wrote the book, Tragedy and Hope, notes this about this family. Now this is a man who traveled with these wealthy families recently, in the last 15-20 years. He’s not a John Bircher; he’s not some wild-eyed right-winger that can be accused of spewing forth all conspiracy theories and so on. He’s simply a man that cooperates with them and quite frankly says in his book, I like these people, they’re basically right. But he also adds in his book, the right-wingers, the extreme right wing in the United States was onto partial truth, that the destiny of the world is… not totally, but is influenced deeply by just a very few people. And he goes on in his book to describe this. One of the means was the formation in the United States, shortly after World War II of the Federal Reserve System, which is essentially a central bank. Don’t let the word “federal” delude you, it is not the United States Government agency; it is a private agency owned and operated by private men in a private corporation. It has nothing to do… and the proof of it is, all you need do is look at the Washington D.C. phone book under the United States Federal Government and you will not find the Federal Reserve listed; it is listed separately because it is not a federal agency. The Federal Reserve System is a cover, and Dr. Quigley tells us quite frankly what it’s like. He says: “In practice the Federal Reserve Bank of New York became the fountainhead of a system of the twelve regional banks, for New York was the money market of the nation. The other eleven banks scattered around the United States are just expensive mausoleums, erected to solve local pride. Under the federal system, unsuspected by the nation, was brought into interlocking relations with the Bank of England and the Bank of France, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands, able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was designed to be controlled by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements, arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. Each central bank sought to dominate its government in its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperating politicians by subsequent economic rewards,” (end quote).

Now some examples for the skeptic of how the system actually has functioned in United States history; I cite you nothing you can’t investigate for yourself, the data is at hand. I can give you the footnotes if you want them. Trotsky was financed from the Bank of England to undo the Czar of Russia. Trotsky and Lenin got a 20 million dollar note at a very critical time that led to the final success of the Bolshevik Revolution from a Wall Street firm called Kuhn, Loeb and Company, and the receipt of that loan is available for public inspection. After Nixon maneuvered the recognition of communist China, guess who set up immediately, within 48 hours, a branch bank in Peking. Chase Manhattan; Chase Manhattan needs foreign markets for its loans, and after all, China is a developing country and there’s a lot of room for making loans; there’s nothing wrong with that from a strict banking point of view. But it is kind of interesting to notice who was the first beneficiary. You can’t make loans if we don’t legally recognize the nation, so shall we say there was some more economic possibility of recognizing communist China than being faithful to our loyal ally, Taiwan. Taiwan, you see, doesn’t give the bankers so much profit as communist China they think might.

And finally, the last great spectacle enacted out before us Americans has been the Panama fiasco. Panama can be explained through deals with the Merchant Marine Bank in New York. The nation of Panama owed, deeply, Merchant Marine Bank of New York loans. Torrijos was outstanding in arrears of these loans by millions of dollars. Do you know who’s paying those loans back to Merchant Marine? You are, I am, because we not only gave them the Panama Canal but we’re making annual payments on the Panama Canal which Torrijos, in turn, you bet, must be sending back to Merchant Marine Bank. Who was one of the negotiators of the Panama Treaty but Saul [sounds like: Line o witz], who also happens to be on the Board of Trustees of Merchant Marine Bank, New York City?

So this is how it goes. As Christians we ought not to be surprised that these deals are made behind the scenes. What does the Bible tell us all the way back to Daniel? It tells us that the kingdom of man has layers and the bottom most layer be Babylon or banking layer. This is the heart of evil. This is why the merchants in the book of Revelation so sad when Jesus Christ comes back to smash Babylon, because they’re loans are outstanding, they can’t get back the investments they have made on the international market. Too bad!

Let’s turn to the New Testament for some application. At this point we can go into total despair or total skepticism. We can say I’ll put this all out of my mind and never think about it. Fine, be like the ostrich. 1 Timothy 6:10 gives the alternate. You can also do what the conservative non-Christian does, ah, everything is controlled by these bankers, there’s absolutely nothing that we can to. Baloney! Christ is our sovereign Lord, not Satan. There is something we can do and what we can do is think through why God permits this and how Babylon gets fed and all you have to do is cut off how she gets fed and you weaken her every single time. First the key verse, 1 Timothy 6:10. Now do you understand why this statement is made in this epistle? People usually cite this in terms of just an individual. “For the love of money is the root of all evil.” Now that’s usually cited, and it does apply chiefly in context to the individual’s wealth. But I suggest to you in the light of this mystery of iniquity that operates from century to century, this spirit of Babylon, there’s a deeper meaning intended in verse 10. “The love of money” is a principle that runs at the root of Satan’s entire structure, “love of money.” Now how, exactly, does this work. The Bible tells us that; it’s very simple. Turn to Deuteronomy 28.

It works like a charm every time. Keep in mind, we are not labeling all the people who are the international financiers as evil people. We’re just pointing out the mechanics of how it operates; we’re not judging it yet. Deuteronomy 28:12, when God decides to bless the nation Israel and he outlines how he is going to bless this nation, notice carefully in the blessing of Israel what is chief. “The LORD shall open unto thee His good treasure, the heaven to give the rain unto thy land in its season, and to bless all the work of thine hand;” now what are we talking about here? What does that look like? That’s production, that’s agricultural business, “to bless the work of thine hand,” and notice, though there’s a colon at the end of the word “hand” the sentence doesn’t stop there, it continues, saying, “and thou shalt lend unto many nations, and thou shall never borrow.” Why? Keep on reading, there’s no verse break in the original. [13] “And the LORD shall make thee the head, and not the tail,” that’s why. The borrower, the borrower is always servant to the lender. That is an absolute: the borrower is always servant to the lender. We can make all kinds of deals and say well inflation forces me to borrow; yes, it does, but just remember the absolute still holds, the borrower is servant to the lender. And the borrower is always the tail; the head is always the lender.

Now conversely, Deuteronomy 28:44, when Israel is cursed notice how it shows up. “He, “the stranger, the Gentile,” shall lend to thee,” the Jew, “and thou shalt not lend to him; and he shall be the head, and thou shalt be the tail.” Now is it any wonder that the Rothschild’s, the J. P. Morgan’s, the Rockefeller’s control the destiny? Of course, they have a right to, they have some money that the nation owes them and they dictate the policies that are going to happen. It’s their right; we owe them money, … this national debt idea, oh we just owe it to ourselves, come on, we owe it to the central bank; we owe them, we have gone in hawk to them and we, frankly, are “the tail,” and that explains why you can sit here and yak, yak, yak, yak, yak, all you want and the 51% are against the Panama Canal and it doesn’t make any difference because the tail doesn’t tell the head what to do, even if it has 51% of the votes it still doesn’t tell the head what to do; the head tells the tail; you do what I want you to do, period. That’s the way the system operates; gruesome, but that’s the way it operates; that’s the way the Scriptures say it operates, that’s the way it always will operate.

So therefore, how do you fight the system? Simple solution, simple conclusion. The only reason this system functions the way it does, it depends totally on one thing—the lust for wealth. If people did didn’t borrow they couldn’t have the handle, right? If people were blessed and were productive, like God says in Deuteronomy 28, and generated wealth, if you had production and not everyone sitting around waiting for handouts, if you had production and generation in savings and wealth, and you controlled where this money is kept, there wouldn’t be this evil of the system. But no, we always have well, I want to borrow because I need this; the nation, I want to borrow 500 billion dollars because I want to live the way I want right now, never mind our grandchildren that have to experience the results, I want my luxury now.

So therefore, like we have in all other areas of creation, God has what he calls His garbage men. Remember the scavengers, Deuteronomy 14, the bugs, the flies, the vermin; the vermin form a function in human society because they eat garbage. Germs form a function because they digest degenerating portions of our body. We wouldn’t be plagued with infection… you know this from your own personal observation, you get sick when you get tired. When you get run down, that’s when you’re sick. Does that means there are more germs in the area when you get sick? No, the germs are there before, they only affect you when you get sick; they are there to pick on, to attack, to destroy, to wear down that which is weak; that’s the way God has designed creation. Christians who are spiritually aggressive do not have deep demonic problems; it’s only those who are carnal for long periods of time that have these culpable demonic problems. And if this is the situation then it holds true in the economic realm. Why does Babylon fornicate with the king? Ha, the kings want to fornicate, it’s that simple. Don’t blame Babylon, don’t blame the central bank, like all the conservatives, oh those evil men; they’re simply lending money to the people who want it. And so therefore the answer is back to a biblical system of economics that is tight.

We’re going to conclude with a very pointed personal application, the Christian’s use of money; Philippians 4:17. Just relax, this is not a pitch for giving money to Lubbock Bible Church, we’re not talking about giving money, even to Christian organizations as such. I am simply pointing out the stewardship over money wherever you use it. Do you notice the language of this section? I want you to notice the language here; it’s very important or you won’t see the theology behind this Babylon, which is the opposite. “Not because I desire a gift; but I desire fruit that may abound to your account.” What Paul’s arguing there is that you get credited for your use of money and resources. And what’s he’s arguing is that faith is always expressed with a buck; people put their buck where their heart is and if people’s bucks are put in human viewpoint schemes you can rest assured that their faith is a human viewpoint faith. Faith always expresses itself and what the Bible is simply arguing is that where we use our money, there is our heart.

But Paul says, [18] “I have all, and I abound. And I am full,” in other words, he’s got control, he’s grabbed control of his own life, the things, he says, that I “received from you,” I don’t lust after, but I accept them as “an odor of a sweet smell, a sacrifice acceptable, and well-leasing to God.” Did you ever think of that, not a bloody sheep, or a goat or a bull, but this is a sacrifice. Men sacrifice to their gods; Nimrod and the tower of Babel represents a collective, internationalistic sacrifice to Satan; the whore of Babylon is a product of thousands of dollars of wealth that has been cast to Satan, the god of this world, as a sacrifice. And so conversely, our gifts, when we use our finances and we use them well under the laws of the Scripture, it is a sacrifice acceptable and well-pleasing to God.

And then Paul adds a by faith verse in verse 19, “But my God shall supply all your need according to” not your riches but “His riches.” That’s to prevent and cut off any idea that we have that we are helping God by all of our great wealth. Oh no, God will supply with His own riches, He doesn’t need our riches. That’s the proper attitude toward wealth.

How, then, do we do this. It comes down to a very simple verse you’ve all heard a hundred times; this is a verse that gives you the principle for opposition to Babylon and to the spirit of the tower of Babel. What did John, the apostle, who saw Babylon’s end say? “This is the victory that overcomes the world,” what? Our faith, because faith, when it’s expressed, never gives the parasites and the vermin and the garbage men and the central bank the opportunity to control the system because we don’t need them around. We only need them around when we are weak, when we are lusting and we want to borrow, borrow, borrow, for tomorrow, for the next week, the next day, and on, on, on, on, on, because we can’t wait for the Lord to supply our needs. That’s the situation.

Next week we’re going to go into the second and third layers of Babylon and watch even more shocking how some of the great educational establishments were financed and controlled by these very same people I named this morning; very interesting, and then we’ll find how the political system borrows their advisors from the educational establishment financed by these same families. It all works in one big happy buddy system.

We’ll sing a hymn….