Babylon, Part 1

In Revelation 17, the Apostle John was inspired to write about an end-time political, economic, and religious system that would try to unite the world. It won't be successful. It will end up creating world war. It will end up actually destroying itself. But that would actually fight Jesus Christ at His return. In Revelation 17, he says, The system is called Babylon. Why? We all know that Babylon was an ancient civilization. It was an ancient city. We know that it existed in what is modern-day Iraq. Saddam Hussein actually tried to reconstruct Babylon, so it would look like it would at the time of Nebuchadnezzar. What he produced was a very sad model. It doesn't look anything like the greatness of what Babylon was at the time of Nebuchadnezzar. Of course, the land there between the Tigris and Euphrates was quite different then, too. Through irrigation at the time of ancient Babylon, that was a very lush, beautiful area. Not near as desolate as it is today. But why would God use Babylon as a description of the end-time system? What does ancient Babylon have to teach us about the end-time Babylon? Now, there are some people who say that what this means is that the end-time Babylon will come out of Iraq. There is, in the Protestant world, a trend into that belief. So they believe that the Muslims are the end-time Babylon. There is quite a movement among Protestants to believe that the end-time Babylon are Muslims. That's not what we'll find and see today in the Scripture. What we're going to do today is a very simple exploration of why he uses Babylon. We're going to go through some history today. They get sort of boring. For the kids, I have a few slides. I figured a few slides made me keep some of the kids and some of the older people from falling asleep. I know history can be a little...okay. But it's important to understand Babylonian history if we're going to understand why he uses this example. There are certain elements that started in Babylon that will be in this end-time system. And it's gone through an evolution over the years. It won't be the same culture. The culture of ancient Babylon is not going to be exactly the culture of the end-time Babylon. It's the system that's the issue. And the reason I say that is it's important for Christians to understand that the culture will be of such that it can deceive us. The culture will seem good. It won't be exactly what the culture was then, but there will be elements of what the attempt was. So to understand Babylon, we have to go clear back to Genesis chapter 10. So let's go to Genesis chapter 10. Here's where Babylon, the city of Babylon, is founded. So this is not long after the Flood. What we have after the Flood in the founding of Babylon is an attempt to do something.

An attempt to do a number of things that the end-time Babylon will also attempt to do. So that's what's important. It's an attempt to achieve something. What was it that when Babylon was founded and then through its history as an empire, what was it that they were trying to achieve? We understand that. We can get an understanding of what the end-time Babylon will be their goal, the people who try to do that. What will they be trying to achieve? Genesis 10 verse 8.

Cush begat Nimrod. He began to be a mighty one on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it was said, like Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord. He was a warrior. He was a hunter. He took care of people. He protected people. He gave them security. He was a leader. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel. He started and founded a town. Now, how big was this city? Probably when Nimrod founded it, it wasn't more than a few hundred people.

This isn't that long after the flood. Population was expanding and growing. But he wasn't dealing with millions of people. But he's dealing with thousands of people. And little villages. When people left, Noah's family began to have children. And they began to have children. And people were having lots of children. So they're having children and the population is growing very quickly. They're not exactly having a population problem.

They have the entire earth to repopulate. But human beings being human beings, we all gravitate towards being around other human beings. It's very normal that towns and villages form. Basically, you have an agricultural system, but you also have people who are artisans, and people who create things, and you would have blacksmiths. It is amazing that right after the flood, they took things from before the flood, and you have it immediately after the flood.

And this is what you find interesting about Babylon, the formation of Babylon. They took writing. There was writing before the flood. But immediately after the flood, you see writing expanding in Babylon. The wheel is being developed. Now, you see this also happening in Egypt. It's not just happening there, but there's like two centers where it's really growing. You see the wheel. You see architecture. You see mathematics. There are certain things that are growing in this culture.

This is causing it to expand faster than other cultures. And once again, you see the same thing happening in Egypt at the same time. Babylon in Egypt would become the two far ends of the Fertile Crescent. It's struggling with world power for many, many centuries against each other. It's interesting that Nimrod's name means, We Will Revolt. Another Hebrew dictionary says it means, We Will Rebel. The point is, he set himself up and said, We do not need God.

God hurt us. We can do this on our own. So he literally organized people to rebel. And it's directly against God. We know this also from chapter 11. Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. Well, of course they did. Now if you study history before the flood, Adam and Eve had one language. But you know what happens over a thousand years? Different dialects form. And they eventually change and change and change until they can't understand each other.

I know when I'm speaking to a Welshman, he's speaking in English. But I have no idea what he's saying. Sometimes you hear someone with an Irish brogue and it's like, Okay, don't speak to me in Gaelic. Speak to me in English. I am. Okay. Of course they have the same problem with us, right? This American accent is like, he's talking American. We have no idea what he's saying. Well, you have different languages formed before the flood. But no one comes out of the flood with one language. And so everybody gets, you know, they can talk to each other. And you have, when you have that kind of communication where everybody has the same language, cooperation happens, they work together, there are certain things that happen with a singular language.

It binds people together. And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east, and they found a plain in the land of Shinar, and they dwelt there. This is between the Tigris and Euphrates River. But they said to one another, Come let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.

They had bricked for stone and they had asphalt for mortar. They said, Come let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves, thus we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. Now remember, Nimrod is the one who founds these series of cities.

Because you can look through what we read there in Chapter 10. Babel wasn't the only city he founded. So he is the leader of this movement. And notice the singular concept. The singular concept is that we will not be scattered. Before the Flood, there were lots of civilizations, and lots of languages, and lots of peoples. We're going to have one singular empire. This is just the foundation of the whole Babel movement.

We're going to have one singular empire, and in this case, one singular king. But the Lord came down to see the city of the tower, which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, indeed, the people are one language, and they all have one language. And this is what they begin to do now. That nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Come, let us go down, therefore, and confuse their languages, that they may not understand one another's speech.

So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. Therefore, the name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth, and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over all the face of the earth. God confused their languages. He gave them different languages. So I don't know what the languages were. The languages we have today are all derivative of those languages, and they're all talking in whatever language it was. Let's just say it's Hebrew, for sake of argument. They're all speaking in Hebrew, and also the person next to them is speaking in what would become Assyrian, or the person next to them is speaking in what would be Japanese.

The languages are so different, they can't find the connection between the words. So immediately they began to probably get into fights, thinking each other was crazy, and everybody who spoke Japanese got together and left. And everybody who spoke Egyptian got together and left. And God broke up what he was doing. Let me show you a map here. I think most of you know. I forgot my little pointer. This first slide is a map of the Middle East. Can you all see where Babylon is?

And although me being able to speak is okay. The map is not that important. You can look in your Bibles and probably find a map of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, which is a modern-day Iraq, which as I said was a much more fertile place at the time. And they had come from... Noah had migrated south from the mountains, and he'd come into this valley, and this is where the majority of mankind had settled at this point. Now it's interesting that he began to build this tower. Josephus, when he gives us... Oh, a pointer!

As long as I don't poke myself in my eye. This is Babylon. This is the Mediterranean Sea. This is Egypt. That's the Nile. Can you see that? This is the Sinai Desert. This is where Israel ended up. This is modern-day Turkey. Here's where the ark would have ended up. And they migrate south. This is a shadow. I kept thinking, what is that? It's a shadow of this string hanging down here. A river formed. It was amazing.

This is the Persian Gulf down here. The tigers of Euphrates run right through here. This is Babylon. Sumer down here where Ur is, is one of the earliest civilizations after the Flood. This becomes the center of civilization after the Flood. Here and here. Fertile crescent. You all learned that in high school. Well, they don't teach that anymore, but many of you learned that in high school.

Fertile crescent. This is where civilization comes from. Because what existed before the Flood is gone. We know they had languages because they've been able to dig up clay tablets and so forth. But what we know about before the Flood is limited. What we know after the Flood is amazing. We have ruins, we have clay tablets, we have all kinds of things. This up here is Assyria. And this down here is Babylon. Some ancient records say that Assyria was even more fertile than Babylon.

The Babylonian system and the Assyrian system are so intermingled sometimes it's hard to... They worship the same gods and goddesses. Their culture isn't entirely the same, but they have a lot of similarities.

But remember, these are the people who came out of the Flood. Basically what you have is the Babylonians and Assyrians that are separated by a language. But they developed somewhat of the same cultures. Although the Babylonians could never be quite as mean as the Assyrians. They just couldn't. I mean, the Assyrians were a mean people. So that's what we're talking about. He builds Babel. Now, according to Josephus, who is a Jewish historian of the first century, we know that he has some historical information.

We also know that, like most historians of the day, he mixed in myths. Because they didn't have ways to research things. But he says that the reason Nimrod built the tower was because he said, if we build a tower high enough, God can't get us with a flood again.

We'll all get in the tower, and we'll get high enough that he can't get us this time. Now, that's an interesting concept because I've often wondered, okay, they're building a tower. I mean, we have skyscrapers all over the world a whole lot higher than the tower of Babel was. What is it that God is intervening here in dealing with?

Let us rebel. Remember, that's what his name means. Let us rebel. Let us revolt. That's an interesting concept. We're going to build a building big enough. There's probably only a few thousand people in the area. We can all get in that thing and get up there, and he can set another flood. He can't hurt us. That makes sense. Now, we don't know exactly what the tower of Babel looked like. I'll give you... The next slide is actually a... This is from a painting in the 1500s.

The reason I'm showing you this is because it's in the public domain, and it's free, so I can show it to you. But this is sort of how people think about the tower of Babel. What's interesting is, if you really look at close-up with this painting, they're all using machinery from the Middle Ages, and they're all dressed like people from the Middle Ages. So it's sort of anachronistic. It just doesn't fit the time. They don't look like people would have back then, and they're sure not dressed like them.

And the ships... I don't know if you can see there's some water in there, but there are ships over here. Well, you probably can't see that because it's too dark. The ships all look like ships from the 1500s. I mean, they're all big wooden ships, probably have cannons on them. It's not... It's really not historically correct. But this is sort of how we think about the Tower of Babel, the big round tower. It's possible it was that, but it's very probable it wasn't.

And the reason why is, they have found hundreds and hundreds of ruins from Babylon and up into Assyria, all through Iraq and Iran, that from this time period onward for about a thousand years, and the biggest things they would build were step pyramids. They weren't pyramids that they would go... you know, like the pyramids are just in Egypt or mainly stone. These had floors, and each floor would have rooms in them. See the idea? We can get in this thing? We can get high enough? And so step pyramids, and they were huge.

Let me show you the next picture. This is actually from the ruins, probably about 3,000 years old in Iran, of a step pyramid. And you start to realize this is the ruins of it, not made out of the kind of stone like the ones in Egypt.

But this is made out of mud brick, and it's lasted 3,000 years out of mud brick. And you can see how it would go up a step at a time. And there were huge ramps. You could go, you know, up to different floors, or ramps that would go almost to the top. The next picture will show you a little more close-up of this. So it's all mud brick. But all these floors have rooms in them. These were functional buildings. And step pyramids were the main structures.

They built them like skyscrapers. We think of these people as being so primitive, but if you could be in Babylon at the time of Nebuchadnezzar, it was an amazing city. Amazing. One of the seven wonders of the world was there. So we see these ziggurats. Remember that from school. Probably, you know, if this is the main way people built things after Babel sort of stopped its progress, then for the next thousand years everybody built these.

You have a pretty good conclusion that this is sort of what Nimrod started. Giant step pyramids. And we could make this one eye enough, he can't get to us this time. Now, outside of the Bible, once again, we don't have any information or little information about Nimrod except for Josephus. Some people try...he has been associated with certain historians that tried to make him one of the Egyptian pharaohs. Some of them have tried to make him different people in history. Some say he didn't exist, that he's actually from Gilgamesh, from the Gilgamesh mythology. Gilgamesh is a fascinating mythology from Babylon. It's the oldest thing we have right after the Flood.

So it's the earliest thing we have right after the Flood, okay? And we have these tablets that tell us the story of Gilgamesh. And Gilgamesh meets a guy who survived the Flood. Now, I can't remember...I'll tell you the truth. I've never read all of Gilgamesh. It's really boring. I can't remember where Gilgamesh goes through the Flood or one of his buddies.

He meets somebody who goes through the Flood. But anyway, it's a Flood story. How God destroyed the earth...the gods destroyed the earth with the Flood. So part of the original...what we have is the most important literature of Babel from its inception was about the Flood. Now, they had to make sure the gods couldn't get to them again.

The difference is that Babylon knew there was one God. We've got to make sure he can't do this again to us. Now, what happened after the Flood...hundreds of years go by, and this Babylon... In other words, it's not just Babel. It's just Babel. It's one place. It's Babylon. It's a lot of places.

The idea that Babylon can expand and include other cities... Because what you have is the formation of city-states throughout the Mesopotamian area. But Babylon was the biggest, baddest city-state. And eventually they said, you know, we like your city-state. So guess what they did? They came and took it. And then they took the next one, and the next one, and the next one. Until they built an empire. And there was a point in the 1700s BC, okay? So this 1700s BC, that they created what was the largest empire on the earth at the time.

And some of you...remember the Code of Hammurabi? I don't even remember that. Okay, a couple. Phew. Hammurabi did something that was so unique that it had never been done before. He conquered all these city-states so that what is now what is Babylon, Assyria, that whole Tigris-Euphrates River Valley is now under the control of one man in one place.

And he writes a set of laws for everybody called the Code of Hammurabi. The Code of Hammurabi is so detailed, and some of the laws are similar to some of the laws in Leviticus' Numbers and Deuteronomy. So you know what historians say? Moses stole laws from Hammurabi, which of course is bizarre. In the history of Moses, he lived 300 years after Hammurabi. But Hammurabi creates these laws. And he enforces a system of law on all these peoples who have different languages, they have different cultures, they have different religions. He does not enforce that everybody has to give up their religion, they just have to accept Babylonian gods as the best gods. I mean, the proof is, that's what this will destroy your city. Okay, your gods are the best ones. So you could go into a city-state, they would be worshipping their local gods, but they would also be the worship of the gods of Babylon, because their gods are stronger than our gods, obviously. So they didn't erase freedom or religion, they just sort of had a semi-state religion. But what they did was encourage free trade. Everybody could trade now, back and forth. They tried to erase tribal boundaries. Nations had formed little city-states, they tried to erase all those boundaries so that there could be free trade. And you know why? They could tax it. There was free trade so it could be taxed. And it's very interesting that the Code of Hammurabi deals with, okay, if somebody commits murder, they should be killed. There were laws against, there were a lot of laws against lying in court. Bearing false witness was punishable by death. There were laws against witchcraft. There were laws against evil judges. Laws against robbery. There were laws against kidnapping. There were laws against looting and robbery. There were laws that regulated the selling of slaves. You could own slaves, but you know how slaves were sold back and forth was regulated. They had a caste system. The caste system was at the top was the king, and then there was the government officials, and then there was the army, and then there was landowners, and then there were workers, and there were slaves. So they had a caste system. And the laws protected that caste system. Interesting enough, hurting a pregnant woman received a very strict punishment. And that's where people will look at that and say, well, Moses said the same thing, so Moses stole that law. Moses had no interaction with Babylon, and God gave him the law, so they didn't get them from Babylon. But you can see how historians who don't believe the Bible connect those two things together. And so you have a central economic system run by an empire whose government is driven to create all this trade so they can tax everything. So that the government gets more rich, richer and richer, has more and more power. Actually, if you were under the Babylonian system, everybody got more wealth. You just lost freedom, but you got more wealth.

Everybody got richer under the Babylonian system. That's why a lot of people didn't try to overthrow the Babylonian system. They never had it so good. Because everybody got wealthy. And there was a certain amount of, you know, you could have your own business.

Everybody owned it. Now, there wasn't big businesses. We see it today because everything was little businesses. Because remember, we're talking about city-states. Babylon, at the time of Hammurabi, probably had 100,000 people and was probably the biggest city in the world. There may have been, you know, Memphis in Egypt may have been bigger and bigger, but there weren't... It was by far one of the top, you know, one or two, three cities in the world.

So the population, remember, is not as great as the population today. But you say, wow, you know, 100,000. Remember, if you come from a village of 200, and you walk into a city of 100,000 people, that'd be like, you know, walking into New York City today.

It was just shocking to walk into Babylon. Interesting enough, there was a time during the 9th through the 7th centuries that Assyria actually took Babylon.

And that's where their cultures really got mixed together. And it was during that time that Assyria took Israel and then Babylon overthrew Assyria, and they got power again.

And when they seized power again, they now controlled an even larger area, which included, eventually, Israel and Judah, cleared out into Egypt. And the greatest king under the...now we're into the 600s BC. The greatest king was a man named Nebuchadnezzar, and he rebuilt Babylon into the greatest city of its day.

Now, we know from the ruins a little bit what it looked like, and of course, they actually have taken part of the ruins of Babylon and taken them to, I think it's the Berlin Museum. And you could actually see them. But if we try to consider what it looked like...I'm going to give you a few artist's renditions here of what they...what must it have looked like at the time of Nebuchadnezzar. This is an interesting one, because if you look in the background, the tower built by Nimrod is still there, which I sort of doubt if it was still there. I probably have been torn down, rebuilt, torn down, rebuilt. But, you know, this gives you an idea of the modern view...I mean, what it would have looked like. It would have been a modern city for its day. You know, you come from a mud-baked village into Babylon, it'd be like going into the Nile Delta and seeing the pyramids. And of course, the hanging gardens of Babylon were one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The second one here...here's another artist's rendition. Notice that all the buildings, both in the last picture of this one, notice they go up as steppe pyramids. That would have been the design of the buildings. So you would have had what appeared to be skyscrapers for everybody else. Can you imagine an eight-story-high building, when you live in a one-story mud hut? This was enormous! This was shocking to people! Look at the next one here. This was another artist's rendition of the hanging gardens, which just was one part of Babylon.

This became the population center. We do know that at one point its population reached a quarter of a million. This city sprawled out for miles. It had skyscrapers. It had gardens that people came from all over the world. We look at modern Iraq, and we think, it's just all desert. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, between those two rivers, were so fertile, all they had to do was irrigate. They built these enormous irrigation systems, and it was a beautiful land, all the way up to the northern part, which was Assyria at the time. They had enough food to feed everybody. They could export food. In fact, they believed from records, the main thing that Babylon exported was food. They could feed the world, so they had this enormous economic power.

And so raw materials just flooded in to Babylon. They could have whatever they wanted, because they traded for food. What's really interesting is that, oh, by the way, the walls around Babylon were so wide at the top that they could take two chariots, each pulled by four horses, and race around the walls. They were that wide. They had a mechanized army that for hundreds of years, during Hammurabi, and then for a time period under Nebuchadnezzar and some following kings, they ruled the world. You have to understand why Nebuchadnezzar thought he couldn't be overthrown. Who could take Babylon? There weren't siege engines anywhere in the world that could take Babylon. They didn't exist. The walls were too high and too thick. He had thousands of trained men. One thing that an empire creates is a professional army. They know how to fight. They're trained how to fight. They fight as units. They had a mechanized army. They had chariots. They had cavalry. They had trained infantry. They had archers. Nobody could stand up to them. During the time of Daniel, remember? How could anybody take Babylon? It's not possible!

Remember what the Persians did? They drained Euphrates and snuck in under the iron grates. They knew they couldn't tear down the walls. They took the Euphrates River, routed it out, and then in the middle of the night had the soldiers go under. Because the grates came down, you couldn't swim under them to get in there. It was too deep. But you drain the water out, and the guy crawls under the grates. If you remember, in Daniel, they were having a big drunken orgy. They were surrounded by an army, and they weren't even afraid. So, you know, a bunch of dirty, smelly Persians who just crawled through the muck of the Euphrates show up inside the palace. Hello, one night. Hello, one night.

So what did they introduce? What did they introduce? Well, they introduced a lot of things.

They introduced the idea of an empire, a system of free trade, protected by the empire. They produced a road system. They produced a postal system. No one had ever thought about a postal system before, where you could then send a letter all the way from Babylon to Nineveh. You could actually send a letter all the way from Babylon to Memphis, Egypt. No one had ever thought of that before. Road systems? Your army needs road systems to march on. That is for free trade. You have a postal system. You have a taxation system.

So the first thing is the concept of empire. The second is the concept that you have an army that can enforce the will of the empire. Three, the Babylonians did something by the time of Nebuchadnezzar that the Assyrians had taught them.

One of the problems you have with empire is that somebody is always trying to revolt. What they did was, if someone tried to revolt, they moved them to another place. They literally took entire populations of people. What did the Assyrians do with Israel? They moved them. Why? They would lose their identity and they would become part of the empire, which is exactly what Israel did. The ten tribes lost their identity and got absorbed into the Assyrian empire. The Jews didn't do it. The Jews didn't do it. The Jews got taken into Babylon and never gave up their identity. They never got absorbed into the Babylonian empire. Well, partly so, but not entirely absorbed.

Why did the Babylonians do that? Well, they had learned. When you can't convert them, move them.

Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, they just get on the move and move them to another part of the world.

Of course, Babylon became the center. Architectural. Architecture thrived. Artisans thrived. Free trade thrived. Taxation thrived. They also had an idea that the whole empire could be governed by one set of walls. That was a new idea. Each city-state had its own set of walls. But at the top of this was a singular king with full power. Also, this is very interesting, Babylon had a two-system power structure. You had the king, but you also had a religious system. In Babylon itself, most of the wealth was controlled by the church. The reason why is they would build temples. And when they build temples, they would hire people and they would take the best land. And they would grow food and they would sell the food. And eventually, the priest of Barduk, who was their number one god, had become a power structure in their own. And so Babylon had a two-pronged power structure. One was a religious and one was governmental. And they needed each other to survive. So that's what we get from ancient Babylon. Now we know that Babylon was used by God to destroy Judah. In fact, he told them that. The minor prophet Micah, when we get to Micah, he told them, I'm going to send the Babylonians. Jeremiah told them, Ezekiel told them. Look at 2 Kings. Look at the story here. What's interesting, though, and I think they had a hard time with this, was when he told that Babylon's going to take you captive, Syria was the major power in the region, not Babylon.

This was that time period between the time of Hammurabi and those kings, and Nebuchadnezzar and those kings. Remember, there's a couple hundred year period between there where the Assyrians ruled. And during the time of the Assyrians, they got to have the Babylonians, they were going to come take you captive. It's like, come on, you've got to be joking. They're a secondary power. That would be like telling the United States, yeah, Canada is going to come take you. You've got to be joking, right?

This is an interesting thing that happened here in 2 Kings 20, verse 12.

At that time, Merodok Baladan, the son of Baladan, king of Babylon, sent letters that are present to Hezekiah, for he heard that Hezekiah had been sick. Hezekiah, of course, is the king of Judah. Hezekiah was attentive to them and showed them all the house of his treasures, the silver, the gold, the spices, precious ointment, and all of his armory, all that was found among his treasures. There was nothing in his house or in all his dominion that Hezekiah did not show them. We get the people coming from Babylon. I'm going to show them how great we are. I'm going to show them that Israel is a much greater power than they are. I mean, Judah is a much greater power than they are.

They're just Babylonians, sort of under the control of Assyria. We're an independent power here. Then Isaiah the prophet went to King Hezekiah and said to him, What did these men say? And from where did they come? And Hezekiah said, Well, they came from before our country. From Babylon!

And he said, What did they see in your house? Hezekiah answered, They have seen all that is in my house. There is nothing from my treasures that I have not shown them. And Isaiah said to Hezekiah, Hear the word of the Lord, behold, the days are coming. When all that is in your house and what your fathers have accumulated until this day, shall be carried away to Babylon. Nothing shall be left, says the Lord. And they shall take away some of your sons, who will descend from you, who you will beget. And they shall be eunuchs of the palace of the king of Babylon.

Boy, this wasn't smart. These people are going to go back and they're going to tell them, You know what? Israel is a very rich place. And sooner or later, the Babylonians are going to have power. And they did.

And it wasn't long after they had overthrown the Assyrians that guess what they did? They marched an army down to Israel and said, You could be our friends. We'll open up the borders for free trade, and you pay us taxes. And then they sent the army home. Oh, they took some people with them, like Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach, and the Medigo. They took a whole bunch of young people with them to teach them, as it says, the ways of the Chaldeans. We're going to teach you how to be good Babylonians. So that way, we will send them back someday, and they will teach all of us, all of Judah, how to be good Babylonians. The idea was that we take the population, and we don't enslave them. We teach them how to like us. We teach them our ways, because it's better because they'll get richer.

It's interesting, the first Babylonian army did not sack Judah.

It simply said, We're here to show you that it's good business to be our friends.

And so, Israel lived under Babylonian control for a while. But they still had their own government, they still had their own religion, they let the temple stand, until Judah tried to revolt. Guess what they did? They took everything.

They took everything. That's it. That's why you have an empire. You can either join us, or we'll take it. It's up to you. If you join us, you pay taxes. If you don't join us, we'll come take it. What do you want to do?

And so Judah eventually was destroyed because they said, No, we're not going to join you. We're bigger and badder than you are. But of course, God wasn't with them anymore. We get to Daniel chapter 2 now. Daniel is in Babylon. He's been taken captive by Nebuchadnezzar. This is in the 600s. Well, by now we're into the 500 BC.

We know the story of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar. Let's go to Daniel chapter 2. Now, this will be actually another sermon at another time. I don't like to do two history sermons in a row because I like people to come back.

We'll do this another time. Daniel chapter 2. You know the story here. Nebuchadnezzar has a dream. Let's show the next slide. So we'll summarize this dream.

He has this dream in which there is this image, this statue, and there's a head of gold, a chest and arms of silver, thighs of bronze, legs of iron, feet of iron and clay. And what Daniel explains to him is, this begins with your kingdom and goes on through other kingdoms. We know, looking back through history, that Babylon was the first of those kingdoms. And you read, he talks about four kingdoms. Babylon was taken by Persia in one night. They simply drained the Euphrates. And of course, Persia was conquered by Alexander the Great by Greece. Greece was eventually conquered by Rome. At the end time, there will be a divided Roman Empire that's partly strong and partly weak. Now, what's interesting is, when you go through these four different empires that are all mentioned in Daniel chapter 2, they have different cultures. There's a dramatic different culture between Rome and Babylon. Dramatically different culture between Greece and Babylon. And Persia was different than all of them. Persia had an Asian type of culture to it. Different cultures, but they're all driven by the same concepts. And that is the concept that they can unite the Western world into one empire. And that one empire, everybody will live better. They did not want to enslave the world. We think, well, the Romans wanted to enslave the world. Actually, they didn't. It was like, you want to join us and be our friends? No. Okay, now we'll enslave you. There was always this, join us, this free trade, and everybody gets better, and you pay us more, you just pay us taxes.

So it's a concept of empire. The empire controls the economy. The empire enforces its will to a mechanized army, a well-trained mechanized army, all four of these empires, at their height, the strongest army in the world.

They allowed religious freedom. They all allowed religious freedom as long as you accepted their religion as the best.

As long as you accepted their religion as the best, you can believe you're a silly little religion, but you had to accept ours as the best, which is very interesting.

You can believe crazy stuff, and of course, a lot of paganism is insanity. You can believe crazy stuff as long as you accepted their religion as the best. You worship the true God, which means you can't accept theirs as the best, and you get killed. As long as the Jews were quiet, worshiped their gods quietly, they basically let them alone.

I think the Jews, for a long time under Rome, were able to get away with certain things because they didn't worship any of the gods of Rome, but they did do a sacrifice in the temple for the emperor once in a while. Oh, okay. Well, they're sacrificing for the emperor, so we'll accept them.

But eventually, of course, they could not accept the paganism. It's like the Christians. Christians were persecuted by the Romans. Why? Did they care if you believed in Jesus? They didn't care one bit. It's because they were atheists.

They denied all the gods but won. That's atheism.

Because all the gods exist, everybody knows that.

So it's interesting. There was religious freedom as long as you would accept their top state religion as the best. There was economic freedom. There was a certain amount of cultural freedom.

They didn't try to...the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans... They tried to make everybody exactly like them. You just had to accept a central set of laws.

A central set of laws that everybody can enforce. You could even have your own laws in your own little town. They didn't care. In that way, it's strange enough, these four empires actually had a type of democracy. At a local level, you could do whatever you wanted. You could have your own laws, your own way of doing things. They didn't care. You just had to obey Roman laws. Think about the Book of Acts. You know, like the one governor of one of the prophets is saying, Stop this riot. Next thing you know, they'll be sending in a Roman legion. We've got some freedom here, folks. Don't do this. It's interesting how all four of these empires enslaved people, but usually if you agreed to go along with everything, they didn't enslave you.

Because everybody got it better. Everybody had an economic... they got improvements economically if they went along with the empire.

And so you have these empires that stretch clear down into the end time. Now, I'm not going to go through all of Daniel 2 for lack of time. We'll come back to Daniel 2 a couple times throughout the next years. Occasionally, I go through this because, remember, one of the things that we're going to be talking about this year is how do we come out of the world? Well, one of the ways you and I come out of this world, you and I have to recognize the world we live in and where it came from. You live in a world that has some Babylonian influences, some Persian influences, not a lot. A lot of Greek influences and a lot of Roman influences in the world that you and I live in.

It's a European-based culture.

Now, remember, Mexico was conquered by the Spaniards and then ruled by the French. There is European elements in the Mexican culture, too. Now, not all those things are wrong. If you lived in Rome through much of its history and simply lived under the system, you had a pretty decent life.

As long as you obeyed the laws and paid your taxes, you could have a pretty decent life.

So Babylon was destroyed. We know it was destroyed by the Persians.

And they seem to have disappeared. But the system, the attempt, through all four of these empires, the same attempt to do this. What's interesting is Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome ended up with the emperor being divine.

Now, you start moving into the Book of Revelation. Like I said, today is just really a huge overview. But we start moving into Revelation.

And as we do, we begin to see this Babylonian system.

What is the purpose of the Babylonian system? It is to bring the whole world into some kind of empire. That doesn't mean every country has to be conquered. As long as you participate, you become an ally, you don't have to be conquered. Assyria did not conquer Israel the first time they invaded. Babylon did not conquer Judah the first time they invaded. They said, friends... Look at the... because they're backed up by this huge, well-trained, well-armed army. Now, they're sort of like the mafia.

These are my guys, these are my friends. Would you like to join us?

Your neighbor down here didn't join us. Something weird happened. His pizzeria blew up.

You want to join us? The Amorites didn't. How many Amorites have you met lately?

This is how they work. The end time system will be the same.

It would slay people because they won't go along.

Because they won't go alone.

If you're willing to go along, you will get enormous benefits, including economic benefits. The end time system, according to Revelation 13, will be in two parts. A governmental system and a religious system. Interesting. All the four of these empires had two elements to it.

All four had two elements. All four of the empires, the Emperor, became divine. At the end time, people worshiped the beast. The Emperor becomes divine. This is what we see. So if you keep looking for every aspect of Babylon, you're not. There are just certain threads that don't go all the way through. There are certain threads that go all the way through these empires.

Free trade. Laws that apply to everybody. If everybody lives under the same laws, we'll stop war. Good things happen when everybody lives under the same laws. So there'll be a benefit to live under this system.

Revelation 17.

So for those falling asleep, let's go to the last slide. The next slide was Daniel 7. I knew we were going to have time to go to Daniel 7, so I made a slide about it. There's the woman riding the beast.

Revelation 17.

Then one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and talked with John, saying to him, "'Come, I will show you the judgment of the great harlot who sits on many waters.' With whom the kings of the earth committed fortication, and the inhabitants of the earth were made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirits of the wilderness, and I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beach that was full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. The woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet, and adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls, having in her hand a golden cup full of abominations, and the filthiness of her fornication. And on her forehead a name was written, mystery, Babylon the Great. He says, this is just another resurrection of Babylon. But through these progressive revelations, different cultures, different attempts, sometimes different ideals, but it's the same attempt to do something. The mother of harlots and of the abominations of the earth. And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of the saints and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. And I saw her, and I marveled with great amazement.

You read through the rest of this chapter, and you read Revelation 13, and this symbolizes the church that's going to be locked into a relationship with this power, this political power.

There is coming a false religious system, which already exists, which will seem to be Christian. I don't have time to go through that, but that's what Revelation 13 tells us. It speaks like a lamb, who is the lamb.

It appears to be Christian, but is it? And this is where we're going to have to be careful. It will probably make a stand against Islam as a heretical religion.

It will, with the political power, offer an enormous sense of economic safety while the world is going through economic confusion.

It will offer a sense of security because its laws will bind people together in agreements where they won't fight each other, they'll fight the common enemy.

This is how empires work. This is Empire 101. I love the teacher class. Empire 101. This is how they work. Now, you do have the empires that just conquer and destroy, like Genghis Khan, but he was never able to actually create a system that people liked. Those kinds of empires conquer, conquer, conquer until they die. These empires survived because of a concept that we will create a better world for everybody. And in a limited way, they did. That's what's so deceiving about it. In a way, it will design a better world.

There'll be a sense of security, a sense of economic wealth. There will be a sense of religious...

strangely, a sense of even religious freedom. But it will create a false Christianity that will fight Islam. Or whatever is the thing that has to fight Islam seems to be it from Daniel. Daniel 11.

We know that in the Bible, a woman... the church is pictured as a woman. Ancient Israel was pictured as a woman. And a harlot is always a false church or false people. And so what we have is a false church. And this imagery is very simple because this is something that is throughout the Bible. You know, a false church or a false prophet or a false people are shown as a whore or a harlot.

One little extra historical point here I find interesting. Herodotus was a Greek historian who traveled the world and collected stories about different nations. And it's hard to tell what's true and what's not true because Herodotus wrote down everything as if it was true. My favorite one was in India, there were giant ants as big as a fox that would dig into the sand and mine gold.

And the Indians would come up on camels, grab the golden run, because when the ants heard them running, they would come out, chase them down, bite their camels on the leg, and then eat the camels and the men. So you had to grab the golden run. And he wrote it as true because he just collected information. He traveled the world and wrote stuff down. But he writes down the customs of Babylon. And he says they have one ancient custom that's interesting. He said, every woman, one time in her life, had to go to the temple of Aphrodite and sell herself to any man that would come in. And that money would be given to the temple. And it was enforced by law. And he describes this horrible thing of women would wait until they were... You know, who wants to do this? So they would wait and wait and wait until they were older. They would go in and sit down, but no man would come by them. They'd buy the younger women. So the older women would have to go in every day, sometimes for three years, before someone would buy them. This humiliating, horrible thing. But basically he said that every woman in Babylon, eventually, at least once in her life, had to be a prostitute, had to be a harlot. Isn't that interesting? At least once in her life she had to be a harlot. She had to sell herself to state and forced this religious right. And of course he found it appalling. It was a Greek. That was just appalling to him. We know in Revelation 18 that Babylon falls.

And when you read Revelation 18, what's interesting is when it falls, all of Revelation 18 is a description of that impact on the world. And all you see is the merchants upset, the people of business upset. Because Babylon will have created a system. This last part, which really is the revival of the Roman Empire. So it's going to have more Roman ideals than Babylonian ideals. It'll be European-based. Babylon had a Middle Eastern culture.

This is going to have a European culture, which will appeal to us, by the way. If it had a Middle Eastern culture, it wouldn't be so appealing to us. One of the things that's going to make Babylon appealing to us is that it's going to have a European culture. We're going to recognize elements of it. We're going to be comfortable with elements of it. Now, if it was a Chinese culture, we wouldn't be comfortable with it all, would we?

The reason it's going to be deceiving is because we're going to be comfortable with certain elements. But if you read through Revelation 18, it's because of the economic system. That's why everybody cries. But we were finally doing well. There was security again. We know where the food was coming from. We had nice houses. Our cars ran. We had electricity. Life was good. It was nice. All we had to do was live by those laws, except the king is having some divine power, which I could pretend even if I didn't believe it. Right? No, people are.

Except their sort of religious beliefs, but they didn't care as long as I accepted their religion as the best. Long as I accept their way of doing things and pay my taxes, life is good. That's what the Babylonian system is going to do. It's going to appear to be mankind's last best hope in the Western world. It never gets hold in the Eastern world.

You know how I know that? Because in the end, the East sent huge armies against them, right? It never takes hold in the Eastern world. It's at some point that that trade system breaks down and the Eastern world doesn't accept it. It doesn't seem to... it has to conquer the Middle East. The Middle East doesn't absorb in. They have to conquer it.

Because the Middle Eastern people won't accept the concepts and the values, which makes sense if you have a Catholic-driven Christianity and Islam. They're going to go head-to-head sooner or later. Why? How do I know that? Well, they've only been doing it for 1,500 years. This isn't hard stuff. This is stuff you can read in a high school history book.

You have to dig secret knowledge out. This is stuff that most of us were taught when we were kids. It's the world that we're headed to. It's the world that we're going into. There's a great Neo-Babylonian empire of Nebuchadnezzar. That failed and eventually faded into history.

Yet the spirit that motivated it is still there. The spirit that motivated Nimrod to create this first one keeps going on and on and on. It's not the spirit of Genghis Khan. Let's just conquer and pillage and rape and kill everybody and steal their food and steal their gold. This isn't the concept. It's a different concept. We unite everybody and we build a tower high enough. This time God can't get us. That's the central concept. United, we are greater. We don't need God the same way.

At the return of Jesus Christ, the spirit of Babylon is going to be destroyed. We will have an empire, the kingdom of God. You and I live in a time when the spirit of Babylon is on the rise again. We need to understand that. It's already there. It's been inside European and American culture since the beginning. It's the beginning. It's how we trace our history. Why do you think when you take a civilization class in college, they start with Egypt and Babylon?

Babylon is the foundation of Western civilization. Why do they tell you that? Because it is. And that spirit still runs through this culture, and it's on the rise. That means we must be diligent. We must be spiritually minded. Because there's going to come a time where we're going to have to come out of her, as God says, come out of her, my people.