The Curve of Forgetting

Well, thank you, Luke and Melody, for the beautiful special music. I forgot to mention one thing when I was up here earlier, too. I've been getting questions as to regards. What do we call you now? Can we still call you Ben, or do we have to call you Mr. Light?

And here's my thought process on it, since it was actually asked. You can call me whatever you want to call me. I respond to Ben, I respond to Mr. Light, I respond to Hey You. But, you know, to be perfectly honest, my thought process on this whole thing is—and I know, frankly, for me, it's whatever you're most comfortable with. If calling me Ben is just something you culturally cannot do, that's totally fine by me. But personally, throwing a Mr. in front of my name is not automatically respectful, using it honorific. If that makes sense, it's the attitude of the interaction and the attitude of the conversation. So, whatever you want to utilize, whatever makes you comfortable, I'm pretty easy, really, when it comes down to it.

Okay, let me get everything all situated here. I left all my announcements up here on the table, which doesn't help at all. Back in 1885, a German psychologist named Herman Ebbinghaus published a groundbreaking work on human memory. The publication itself was simply entitled On Memory. Of course, it was in German. I don't speak German, so I'm not even going to try.

But it chronicled a series of experiments that he conducted on himself in order to understand how humans encoded and ultimately remembered information for the long term. Now, he broke a cardinal rule of science. You cannot both be researcher and research-y.

Okay, there's an issue there from a standpoint of interpretation of your data. But with all of that said, it wasn't the most scientifically voracious study that was ever conducted. But the findings that he reported in this work on memory has shaped educational policy and pedagogy for centuries. In fact, what we do today in classrooms now is a result of Ebbinghaus's work in 1885.

The way that we teach children today came from Ebbinghaus's work. In his experiment, Ebbinghaus encoded several thousand random consonant and vowel combinations. And I've got to give the guy credit. It was an incredible amount of work to do the experiment that he did.

He basically created a bunch of these little three syllable words, or three letter words, I'm sorry, that he referred to as syllables. So he made a bunch of these little syllables, is what he called them. And any syllables that had repeating consonants or repeating vowels, he threw those out.

So AAC would not be valid because there were two A's.

CVC would not be valid because there were two C's. What he was trying to do was completely randomize these syllables so there could be no associations made. Because what he wanted to find out was, once he was exposed to them once, how long could he retain that memory of what he was given? So he removed as much as possible any syllables that were similar to actual words, so there wouldn't be associations there either. It was very important for him in this experiment that these combinations were completely random because they had to be new information. They couldn't be something that he had already known. For him to run a test, what he would do is he would pull a random number of syllables, kind of out of a hat, so to speak, although I don't think he had these in a hat. He had them in a collection of some kind, and then he would ring that, or ring, or ring, read that string of syllables out loud. And the way that he would do that, he would read it out loud in a monotone voice, whatever it happened to be. He would read it in a monotone voice so that he wouldn't have inflection, he wouldn't have emphasis, and he would read it to the cadence of a metronome so that the speed was the same every time he read this particular phrase.

And then what he did was he simply measured his ability to then recall those syllables at a later date. This pioneering work that he did established what is known as the curve of forgetting, the curve of forgetting. What Ebbinghaus found was that people forget at an exponential rate. It's not linear. It doesn't start up here and then stay in a nice, perfectly linear line down to nothing. It drops off precipitously at first. The majority of the knowledge is lost in the first hour to two hours after exposure to information, and it drops down like a j-curve, essentially, to eventually, five to seven days out, next to nothing retained. Many of you who have been in college know that all too well. This is the night before the exam. This is a week later, when you can remember nothing of what you studied the several days before. We call that cramming, right? But eventually, that drop-off tapers off to next to nothing in about five to seven days.

Now, what's interesting is Ebbinghaus is also credited with the discovery of the importance of spaced repetition. What Ebbinghaus found was that this precipitous drop-off of knowledge could be kicked back up if it were reviewed in a certain amount of time. A day later, if you review it again, it kicks it back up to the top, where it slows down its drop. If you kick it back to the top again, the graph levels out a little bit, until eventually you could be said to know something well enough that you would retain it permanently. Now, we might look at this research in 2017, and we might say, well, duh, come on, really? Duh, dude, come on, Ebbinghaus. But, you know, we owe our understanding of what we know today to the work that you did in 1885. At the time, it was groundbreaking. Today, we just take it for granted. Yes, you repeat things so that people remember them. Right? Those of you that have been in school, you know that all too well. You circle back on it a couple of days later, you review it, you bring the knowledge back up, you let a little bit of time go by, let it drop off a little bit, you review it again, and eventually, after enough review or after enough repetition, you're in a place where you can remember it. When you don't repeat something enough, people forget. To remember something, what do we do? We repeat it over and over and over again, right? You try to remember a phone number. What do you do? Repeat the number of combination again and again and again and again and again until it finally sticks. Nowadays, we just have, you know, contact that we send each other on our cell phones. Cell phones are making us dumber. I'm convinced, myself included. If you want to memorize lines for a play, you run them again and again and again and again and again. Eventually, you'll retain those lines. You'll remember them.

Eventually, you want to remember the muscles of the human body for an anatomy exam. You memorize them before you go in, knowing that you'll never have to know them again, unless you're going into the medical profession in some way or another. You know, in the years since publishing on memory, more work has been done, and it's ultimately been found that Ebbinghaus's work and his explanation, it's more simplistic than reality, but it holds up. It does hold up. When you don't repeat something enough, people forget. If it's not rehearsed again and again and again and again over time, you lose knowledge to what is known as transience. Just over time, the knowledge is gone.

We've all experienced this. We've all learned something, not repeated it again, and then a week later, poof, it's gone. We've all been there. We've all been there. But, you know, it's not just individuals. It's not just people. It's institutions. It's corporations. They have what's known as an organizational memory, and institutions and corporations can be victims of what is known as institutional amnesia, where you forget things that at one point in time were known and very clearly understood. Volkswagen is a really great example. A couple of years ago—you've probably heard the story—Boltzwagen got themselves in hot water for cheating on emissions testing. They were installing into the car what are known as defeat devices, and you plug it into emissions and it looks real good on the computer. You unplug it, and the emissions just go completely south to increase performance on the car. Right? They got in trouble. They got in big trouble. In fact, I think one of the CEOs lost jobs, and it was a big deal. But what you may or may not know is that this isn't the first time that Volkswagen was caught installing defeat devices in their cars.

1973, they were fined by the EPA for doing the exact same thing that they were just caught doing two years ago and fined for again. Why didn't they learn? How could no one remember that they'd already been down this road once before? Again, the official term for this particular phenomenon is institutional amnesia. It involves no one talking about it, or in the situation of Volkswagen and other high-profile businesses trying to bury it, you know, making sure that people aren't going to hear about it and they're not going to know about it. So yeah, you don't talk about it. There's no space repetition. There's no reminders. As you have natural attrition, as people leave the company over the years, new people come on. No one talks about it to the new people either. And pretty soon, 30 years down the road, you've got a whole fresh set of faces. Nobody's heard a word about it, and somebody in a meeting goes, hey, what if we put these devices in the cars that, like, cheat on the emissions? That seems like a great idea, doesn't it? And everybody says, uh-huh, great idea, let's do it. Little do they know it's been done before. Eventually, time marches on. The curve of forgetting does what the curve of forgetting always does. It slowly takes the knowledge and the collective memories into the void. It's lost again to transience. Now, we're not immune to this in the churches of God. And with generational shifts that are occurring today as the ministry ages and as younger men move into the ranks, we too, as a body of believers, run the risk of not ensuring that the collective knowledge of the past is passed on. Not just sound doctrine. We always focus on that, and trust me, that is incredibly important, incredibly important.

But even a recognition of past mistakes, because if you don't recognize past mistakes, you're doomed to do them again. Institutional amnesia is a big issue in the world around us. It has the potential to be an issue in the church, and it's extremely important that we know our history.

Over the past several years, I've deserved a small number of things that are resurging in the churches of God that I thought, personally, at one point in time were once clearly understood.

There's a degree sometimes of questioning these things, maybe a lack of understanding overall in the younger generation, and I think institutional amnesia, as a result of the curve of forgetting, is largely to blame. Because what happens when the majority of people already know something? When you look at the vast majority of people and they already know something, you stop talking about it. At some point, you just go, yeah, we've heard that already. We know, we know, we know. Except that the younger people that are coming up, they've never heard it before. You know, my son, Aiden, is my oldest. He's got ten whole years of experience on this planet.

You know, if I haven't talked about something in our family for the past ten years, he's never heard it. Not once. He has no ideas, no recognition, no understanding of it.

When you have a majority of people that already know something, there's a tendency to not talk about it, which is great, again, for those that already know it, but for those that don't. Young people, for example, that are coming up in this phase, that lack of discussion, the lack of space repetition, causes what was once institutionally known to be forgotten. I'm going to illustrate this to you to the best I can today. And children, I'm going to need your help. So those of you that are little kids, ears and hands in a moment, okay? I want to get a show of hands real quick from the audience today to kind of help to illustrate this point. Recent research on memory that's been done in addition to what Ebbinghaus has done shows that individuals don't tend to remember anything clearly before age seven. Age seven is like that magic number where right before seven, five, six, seven, four, there's not a lot of memory that's there unless there's trauma. I mean, trauma steers things into your brain. But so what that means, parents, is that if you've messed up before seven, you can turn it around. You're good. That's what I'm saying. But no, we're going to use that number as a guide. Okay, we're going to use that number seven as a guide. Okay? So what I would like you to do is I would like you to, all of you out there, little kids too, if you're still awake, I don't dare wake you up, I'm not going to shout into the mic. Would you raise your hand, please, if you were born after 1977? After 1977? Please raise your hand. Okay, so everybody take a quick look around the room. Everybody born after 1977, theoretically, see, even one of my own kids isn't participating, thank you, Desmond. Before or after 1977, your hands are in the air. Go ahead and put them down.

More or less, those individuals that just raised their hands would have been younger than seven or eight years of age during the final couple of years of Mr. Armstrong's life. 84, 85-ish.

They would have been seven in 84, 85, or not existent at that point in time. So if we reference, Herbert W. Armstrong, if we reference what his teachings were and go into that, many of them have no connection, have no framework to hang that on, unless there has been discussion of videos and audio and other things as time has gone on. Okay, another show of hands real quick. Would you please raise your hand if you are under the age of 22? Under the age of 22? Okay, I'm not. I almost raised my hand. No, no, no, you're a little bit mad. Okay, so quick, raise your hand again. Those of you that are under the age of 22, thank you, go ahead and kind of look around again. Those individuals that have their hands in the air currently, go ahead and put them down, weren't even alive when the church split in 95. They weren't even born yet. So when we reference the worldwide Church of God, they might have an inkling, they might have an idea of what we're talking about, but no real framework, again, to connect it to. And I want to be very clear, I'm not advocating that we spend more time talking about the old days. That's not what I'm advocating in the least bit. God expects us to go forward. But it does illustrate the importance of spaced repetition. Otherwise, knowledge is lost. If it's never discussed, if it's never brought up, if it's never mentioned, those that have never experienced it or never heard of it have no understanding of it at all. If we're not careful, we lose knowledge to transience. Let's go over to the book of Joshua. Let's go over to the book of Joshua. And we're going to go ahead and read the ending of the book. It's always bad for him to read the end and not the whole thing, but in this case, we'll let it slide.

Pardon me. Joshua 24, and we'll go ahead and pick it up in verse 31.

Actually, for sake of context, let's go ahead and go 29. Joshua 24 and verse 29 says, Verse 31.

That's a pretty incredible statement of Joshua's leadership ability given to him by God and provided by God, as he worked with him incredibly. But as long as Joshua was alive, as long as the elders who had outlived Joshua were alive, Israel served the Lord. And they served him well.

But notice, after Joshua and these individuals who had seen the works of God passed away, after those who had firsthand experience at what God had done in their lives as a nation, after they passed away, then what do we see? Well, we see the book of Judges is what we see. We see Israel basically go off the rails. And what happens is periodically this cyclical nature of Israel's obedience kicks in. Israel goes off the rails. God raises up a judge. They kind of respond to the judge. Then basically the judge passes away or passes from power. And ultimately they forget it all, and they go right back off the rails again until God raises up another judge. And the cyclical nature of this obedience kind of begins—or disobedience, you might argue—begins. And that cycle continued for hundreds of years. Hundreds of years. The summation of the entire book really is found near the end of the book of Judges, that people did what was right in their own eyes.

People did what was right in their own eyes. So Solomon so aptly stated, there's nothing new under the sun, the curve of forgetting was as real then as it is today. And the reason for that is because people are people. Folks is folks, as you might say. In case you hadn't guessed it already, the title for the message today is The Curve of Forgetting. And today in the time we have left, in this second split, I'd like to take a look at one of these things that was once, I think, understood quite clearly, but its understanding appears to have been muddied a bit in recent years.

Over the past several years, particularly on social media, I've seen an increasing number of young people in the churches of God openly celebrating New Year's Eve. Not just getting together with friends and hanging out because you have the next day off, but complete with champagne, party hats, New Year's decorations, and rousing, you know, Happy New Year's to all of their friends. I want to be very clear I'm not giving this message because of anything that I've seen locally. I'm not picking on anybody in specifics, but I am giving it to highlight a concerning trend among the young people in the churches of God, people whom I love and whom I care for as a result of institutional amnesia and potentially the curve of forgetting. And I want to make sure that we're all very clear on what the Bible states about these types of things, and so I'd like to dig into that today. We hear a lot about Christmas every year. We hear a lot about Christmas. The church has a number of publications about why we don't keep Christmas. In fact, I went on last night and typed the word Christmas into ucg.org, and it gives you that cool little number on the side, how many hits back you get when you type in Christmas. Like 36,000 articles came back on just the word Christmas. When I typed in New Year and hit Enter, I got 19,000 back. But what I found is I started scrolling through the first few pages of that. That wasn't even really accurate because I couldn't exclude new showing up in one article in a year. Even putting quotes around it, I couldn't exclude it. So what was popping up was any article that had the word New in it, which is a lot of them because there's this New Testament thing.

Maybe you've heard of it. And then Year, which there's also a lot of articles with the word Year in it. So it wasn't really an accurate representation, but the point was there was only 19,000 even with all of that extra data. We have significantly less writing on that topic than we do on Christmas. You don't hear as much about New Year's and why it's something that we as Christians should avoid. And so to address this topic, what I'd like to do today is take a look at three main points to illustrate why, if we as Christians desire to serve God, why we should completely avoid New Year's and related celebrations. The first of those points is taken completely out of context, and I'm going to own that. The point is God is not the author of confusion. And I use that statement only because it's a recognizable statement. I recognize it's not in the way that it was intended in that particular scripture, but God is not the author of confusion. Second point is that New Year's and its related things are rooted in paganism. Rooted in paganism. And then thirdly, the final point is, come out of her, my people. We'll start with God is not the author of confusion. And I prepared off a page from Wikipedia to help me kind of look at this. And what my hope was with this was to illustrate how many different New Year's celebrations there are around the world and throughout history. There is a New Year's celebration for every month of the year, from January clear through December. Some culture somewhere is keeping New Year's randomly in the middle of June, keeping New Year's randomly in the middle of July, September, you know, three days apart, you know, on a different thing. And so when you take a look at this, the vast majority of people, especially today, are keeping New Year's on January 1st. Because we all use the Gregorian calendar worldwide, and that generally is recognized as New Year's by most places. We also, though, are familiar with their Chinese New Year, which essentially is in the spring part of the lunar, the first lunar month at the beginning of spring. It says exact date can fall anytime between January 21st and February 21st. So we have Chinese New Year. There's a Korean New Year, which is, again, another lunar New Year. There's the Vietnamese New Year, and then there's the Tibetan New Year, which is between January and March. So even if those four, they don't agree on the same date. There's differences in the date calculations and whatever else for that particular one. The Mesoamerican New Year for the Aztecs, for example, their New Year was February 23rd.

The Meso in Northeastern India celebrate their New Year on the 29th to 30th of September, which I don't know why that's located in February, but it is. The Babylonian New Year started with the first new moon after the northward equinox, and ancient celebrations lasted 11 to 12 days. The Iranian New Year, March 20th, 21st, and a couple others on March 20th and 21st, which is kind of that spring beginning part of what we would recognize as a bib.

Ugadi, March and April. Let's see, this one's March, April, end of March and April. This one's early April. This one's late April, the Felmic New Year, the Cindy Festival. Calvian Babylonian New Year was end of April. I'm sorry, first day of April on that one, and then the Felmic again on April 10th. I'm not going to read all these, but the point is cultures throughout history, throughout the world, have all disagreed as to when the New Year is. Tons of them have disagreed as to when the New Year is.

However, we do see very specific instructions from God. Let's go ahead and turn over to the book of Exodus. Let's go ahead and turn over to the book of Exodus. The book of Exodus, we'll pick it up in verse 12. Exodus 12. And this is inside of those instructions to Moses and Aaron regarding the Passover, specifically Exodus 12. And we see essentially in this area a reinstitution, so to speak, of God's calendar. This wasn't the first time that this had been illustrated. This was really a you've been slaves for 400-plus years in a system that isn't mine. It's time for a reset. It's time to take you back to what it should be and where it should be, because you're coming out of a crazy system of this pantheon in Egypt. Exodus 12, verse 1, says, Now the Lord spoke to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, saying, This month shall be your beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year to you. Speak to all the congregation of Israel, saying, On the tenth of this month every man shall take for himself a lamb, according to the house of his father a lamb for the household. Put a couple of other passages together, we find that that beginning month is a bib, or it was later known after the Babylonian captivity as nysen. And it's still to this day in many ways known as nysen. So we know that it's specifically referencing the Passover. We know that it's specifically referencing a bib. God was clear. The first month of the year, as far as he was concerned, was a bib. Everything else along that setup coming out of that comes off of the beginning of that month. Now, it's additionally important to notice that nowhere in there, nowhere in Leviticus 23 does God specifically say, celebrate the new year. He had ample opportunity to do it. Today is the first day of the month. By the way, it's a huge holiday. You should give resolutions, and you should do all these other things. He had ample opportunity to do that when he's talking to Moses and Aaron here, and he did not. He chose not to. For whatever reason, he chose not to.

So we don't see a bib 1 mentioned as a date that we should be celebrating for new year. We don't see it. The first feast mentioned in Leviticus 23 is the weekly Sabbath, and then after that, Passover on the 15th of a bib. Now, what's interesting is, despite that divine revelation, despite God telling Moses and Aaron, this is your beginning of months, the Jews managed to put together four separate new years based on the information that God gave them. They had the one that began in a bib. They had one that began in the fall on Tishri 1. They had another one that was used specifically to mark the tithe year for cattle, specifically just cattle, only cattle. They had one year that was set up for that, and then they had another year that was set up for fruit trees. And the idea was, if the fruit was blossomed by a certain time, then it was partly this year. If it was after this, then it was this year, and that was to prevent violation of Torah. So it was to prevent violation of tithing on something that wasn't yet mature and should have been waited until the year after, at year three, or whatever else. Only one of those four years, however, calendar new years that the Jews had, was given by God to mark the beginning of the year.

The rest of them were developed by man. So in the spring, when the life is beginning, God considers that to be the new year, not in the middle of the dead of winter.

The dead of winter. I mean, write smack dab in the dead of winter.

Now, when we examine current practice of new years based on the calendar alone, we recognize God's not the author of confusion. You know, we had a list here of cultures all over the place. He established a very specific new year for his people, month of Eibib, and did not command them to specifically celebrate it. We are not an Israelite society today. I think we all recognize that. The Israelite lunar calendar is not widespread use today. We use it for holy days, and that's about it. You know, we don't toss the Gregorian calendar and go to a lunar calendar. The world around us operates on the Gregorian calendar. And so, you know, there's a degree of marking a passage of time that occurs at the end of one year going into the next.

Businesses, schools, civil life, they all use this basic calendar. And what I'm getting at is, we don't throw out the Gregorian calendar and all of a sudden start operating off of a lunar calendar only. It takes balance, obviously. But what it does mean is that when we see something like new year's, quote-unquote, smack dab in the dead of winter, we might want to ask them questions about, wait a second, why this time of the year? Why so close to the time when the sun died, quote-unquote, and then suddenly was rebirthed around the time of the winter solstice? That should be running through our heads of, wait a second, wait a second, we need to ask some questions. So how did it come to be during the dead of winter? Well, it came because it was rooted in pagan gods and pagan practices. New Year's is thought to be one of the oldest celebrated festivals in human history. Most cultures out there have a New Year's celebration of some variety. Most of them have something to mark the passage of one calendar year, quote-unquote, to the next. As far back as 4,000 years ago, there are records of New Year's observances being kept in Mesopotamia, more specifically Babylon and Sumeria. The ancient Mesopotamians kept a 12-day festival known as Bagmuk, could have worked on the name, but it was around the vernal equinox in the spring, so it had no association whatsoever with the end of winter. At least not initially.

During this time, the Babylonian gods battled the forces of chaos. They tamed them. They tamed the forces of chaos. And honestly, many of the traditions that we see as part of the traditional 12 days of Christmas, burning the Yule Law, giving presents, carnivals, merry-making, people singing carolers going house to house to house to house, playing songs, throwing big feasts for sessions with lights and songs, things like that. Most of those things took place during this 12-day festival. Now additionally, the Babylonians would make promises to their gods during this time. And if they kept their promises, the belief was that the gods would honor them, would honor the deal that they made, quote-unquote. But if they didn't, that they'd ultimately receive a degree of punishment. Enter the Greeks onto the world's theme. The Greeks were known for pretty much conquering everybody, right? Alexander the Great went out, took over all sorts of places. The Greeks adopted many of these customs, many of these customs that they came across, and they celebrated another festival known as Cronia, which was a festival that honored the Greek god Cronos, who was the god of time. And this time, this festival was designed to symbolically represent a golden age when Cronos had ruled, when things were better than they were today, when Cronos was in charge. This festival was celebrated with role reversals and a temporary abolishment of social hierarchy. So what happened is, for a little short period of time, the masters served the slaves, not the slaves serving the masters. Suddenly there was equal hierarchy. They played games, they gambled together. Slaves and free, rich and poor, they all dined, they all played games together. It was a time in which social restraint was cast off, and as one source quoted, the slaves were given permission to run riot through the city, shouting and making noise. Sounds like my neighborhood on New Year's. Mostly fireworks and gunshots, to be perfectly honest. While this was originally celebrated in late July and August, so Cronia was late July, late August, when the Romans came in, they adopted the festival for their own purposes and changed the dates. The Romans came in, and they changed the name, and they changed the timing. Saturnalia, which you'll recognize, I think Mr. Consellis spoke a little bit about Saturnalia last week when we were talking about Christmas, was originally celebrated on the 17th of December by Roman reckoning. So Saturnalia was at first a one-day thing. It was originally a one-day deal. Now, interestingly, the Romans were celebrating the golden age of the rulership of Saturnus. That sounds familiar? Well, it's the exact same thing the Greeks were doing with Cronia. They just adopted it. Saturnus was the same as Cronia. It was just a Roman version. In that day's same thing, all social hierarchy was thrown off. It was a day filled with revelries and festivities. The philosopher Seneca wrote to a friend, it is now the month of December, when the greatest part of the city is in a bustle. Loose reigns are given to public dissipation. Everywhere you may hear the sound of great preparations as if there were some real difference between the days devoted to Saturn and those for transacting business. Loose reigns, as Seneca said, were given to public dissipation. Drunkenness promised fuity were the norm.

Rome had borrowed the traditions from the spring of the year in Babylon. So they took the Zagmuk festival from the Babylonian Sumerians. They took Cronia from the Greeks, and then they combined those things with one other little festival that happened to be going on right around that same time, which was the festival of Bacchus in Greek, or what the Romans called Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility. And so the wine flowed like you wouldn't believe. The promiscuity was everywhere. And it just so happened that that particular festival coincided with the winter solstice. And so taking this and this and that and combining everything together gave us the Roman festival of Saturnalia. Now, interestingly, they had another ancient custom that was associated with this time in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. They crowned what was known as a king of chaos. And lots were cast for this person. Sometimes they'd put a coin in the bottom of a bowl of pudding. And if you found the coin, you're the winner. Winner, in quotes. You'll see why here in a second. They were given unlimited rain, essentially, for a year. They were allowed to do whatever they want, whenever they wanted, for an entirety of a year. The winner was able to behave like a fool. They could insult party guests, you know, and it didn't matter what their social status was. They could insult party guests. They could chase women and girls all over the place. They could wear ridiculous clothing.

And they were given one year of rain before they were ritualistically sacrificed the following year. And the next king of chaos was chosen. This was what was going on during the time of Saturnalia in the Roman Empire. And that person was sacrificed to ensure good luck for the coming year and the return of light and fertility after the solstice, after the sun had symbolically died at the solstice. So this timing in Rome, late December, right at or after the winter solstice, you have this convergence of all these festivals, and they're all kind of being blended into one another and becoming known as Saturnalia. During Saturnalia gifts were given. Fine meals were had, roles were reversed, slaves and masters reveled together. Often masks were worn to preserve anonymity, because no one knows who you are. You could do whatever you want, wherever you want, however you want. Much wine was imbibed. Drunken revelry and sexual promiscuity reigned. The Roman poet Catalyst referred to it as the best of days. Catalyst loved it. Catalyst loved it.

About the closest thing we probably have today that exists to Saturnalia is Mardi Gras or Carnival. And that's probably the cl- and that's tame compared to some of the descriptions that you read of what went on during Saturnalia in Rome. Anyway, moral of the story, it was such a riotous success that the Romans expanded it for several more days. Because if one day of drunken revelry is great, seven days is better. And that's ultimately what the Romans did. They expanded it out significantly and now Saturnalia encompassed not only December 17th, but it carried through the solstice, which they calculated at December 25th, which we know to be Christmas today, and on it went. When Julius Caesar implemented the Julian calendar in 46 BC, he looked at it and he recognized this transition of newness represented by the winter solstice and the rebirth of the sun as well as, at that time in Rome, proconsuls started their reign January 1st. And so he looked at that and he said, you know, the first month of this is going to be named January. It's going to be in honor of the Roman god Janus, which was a two-headed god that looked both forward and looked backward. The Janus was the god of doors, gates, beginnings, and transitions. Janus looks back over the old and focuses on the new. And Caesar recognized the symbolism and dedicated the first of January to the god Janus. Many of the traditions and revelries from Saturnalia were moved into—I mean, you know, more days of partying are always better than less days of partying—so they moved those into what we would now know as New Year's. Resolutions and sacrifices were made to Janus as the Romans that were making the sacrifices promised good conduct for the following year. You know, if you give me this, well then I'll do better. I'll be good. What we would now recognize today is resolutions. If the person kept the word, Janus would honor the resolution with good luck. If not, then they'd have bad luck for the remainder of that year. Today, as you look at resolution-making today, it's estimated 80 percent of resolutions fail by February.

80 percent of them don't make it a month. Mark Twain—you know, Mark Twain just had a way with words. Mark Twain once said, yesterday everybody smoked their last cigar, took their last drink, and swore their last oath. Today we are a pious and an exemplary community. 30 days from now we shall have cast our Reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcuttings considerably shorter than ever. Now, where this gets interesting is early Christians decided to adopt this practice of resolutions into a religious service that is known in some religious circles as a watchnight service, where an individual prays and makes resolutions to God in hopes of bettering themselves the following year. It's no different than what the pagans have been doing with Janus for hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years. So what does God think about these practices? Well, let's go ahead and turn over Revelation 18 and verse 4. Revelation 18 and verse 4. We'll take a look at what God thinks about these sorts of things. And this is an end-time fulfillment. This is not, you know, now. This is coming. But it's as important to us today as it will be then. Revelation 18 and verse 4. I'm going to go back to verse 1. After all these things, I saw another angel coming down from heaven having great authority, and the earth was illuminated with his glory. And he cried mightily with a loud voice, saying, Babylon the Great is fallen, is fallen. That system has finally fallen apart. It's finally been toppled and has become a dwelling place of demons, a prison for every foul spirit and a cage for every unclean and hated bird. For all the nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth have become rich through the abundance of her luxury. Verse 4. And I heard another voice from heaven saying, Come out of her, my people. Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues. For her sins have reached to heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities. Come out of her, my people. As we recognize, this passage is an end-time fulfillment, and it's a final destruction of the Babylonian system. But it's as true today as it will be then. We are admonished to walk away from this system, not walk towards it, not dip a toe in the water and see how the water feels, to walk away from this system, to come out of her, to come out of this system, to come out of its idolatry, to walk away from false gods and the worship of false gods. You know, when you talk to people in society today, they don't really have a clue why they do what they do. You know, they just keep Christmas because they've always kept Christmas, or you know, they just keep New Year's because they've always kept New Year's, and just it is what it is. They really don't fully understand all the time. The curve of forgetting has struck them too. They kind of go along with the motions of keeping Christmas the New Year's because everybody else does. In some ways it's institutionalized into their culture without them really understanding where it comes from. When it reaches that point, though, people stop asking questions, or they start ignoring the answers. I think you've probably all had conversations with people, you know, the conversation ends, and they go, yeah, I know it's pagan. I know it's pagan, but I mean, the kids love it. So why, you know, it's not that big of a deal, except that it is. It is a big deal. You know, ancient Israel was given land by God, and these lands that ancient Israel was given, they had prior owners. It's not like this was bare land that had nobody on it at that point in time. You know, it had people that were there.

And in each of the circumstances when Israel went into that land that God had provided for them and put together for them, they were instructed to drive those people out of the land, to dispossess it, as the Scripture states, to displace them. In some cases they were given commands to destroy every last woman and child, which for us is hard to read. It's really hard for us to read that today.

But that was what they were told to do, to dispossess and displace the peoples from that land.

And why? Because God knew the human proclivity to absorb culture from other places, to seek after what they do and to participate in it. Let's go to Deuteronomy 12. Deuteronomy 12.

And we'll go ahead and pick it up in verse 29.

Deuteronomy 12 and verse 29 says, When the Lord your God cuts off from before you the nations which you go to dispossess and you displace them and dwell in their land, verse 30, take heed to yourself that you're not ensnared to follow them after they are destroyed from before you and that you do not inquire after their God, saying, How did these nations serve their gods? I will do likewise. Verse 31, You shall not worship the Lord your God in that way for every abomination to the Lord which he hates they have done to their gods. For they burn even their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods.

You know, when you read pagan worship practices, they're disgusting. It is absolutely disgusting what the pagans did in worship of their gods. There was ritual prostitution, there was human sacrifice, idolatry, cutting of the flesh, marking of the flesh. Deuteronomy 12 essentially is telling ancient Israel, You just came out of a system full of this garbage. You just walked out of Israel or out of Israel, out of Egypt.

I delivered you from this garbage. Don't follow. Don't go back into it. Don't follow their lead. Don't ask about how they worship their gods. Try to work that into worshiping me. Don't bring their filth into my worship service, God tells them. Don't choose a 12-day festival marked with drunken debauchery and promiscuity. Don't try to honor me. Of course, the next argument that we often hear is, one, I'm not doing it in worship to God, so yeah, well, God doesn't want you to worship Marduk or Janus either.

So that's a moot point. It's a moot point. It's not a huge stretch of the imagination. Let's go to Jeremiah 10. Let's go to Jeremiah 10. God is very clear about the way that he wants his people to worship him. It's outlined. It's right here. We can read it. We can see it. Jeremiah 10, he gives him a warning as to how they shouldn't do it. Jeremiah 10, verse 1, says, hear the word which the Lord speaks to you, O house of Israel. Thus says the Lord, do not learn the ways of the Gentiles.

Do not be dismayed at the signs of heaven, for the Gentiles are dismayed at them. For the customs of the people are futile. For one cuts a tree from the forest, the work of the hands of the workmen with the axe. They decorate it with silver and with gold. They fasten it with nails and hammers so that it will not topple. They're upright like a palm tree, and they cannot speak. They must be carried because they cannot go by themselves.

Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, nor can they do any good. He's making the point, look, these false gods that these Gentile peoples are propping up, it's just wood. There's nothing to them. It's just wood. You know, you don't be afraid of them, but he was telling him, look, avoid these things outright. You know, in fact, what we see described here seems like it's describing the various sorts of things that we see during this time of year.

Cut a tree from out there, bring it in, decorate it with gold, with tinsel. That's the kind of thing that we see in the world around us at this time of year. The point God's making is, don't learn their ways. Don't participate. Don't get involved. Come out of her, my people. You know, I find it, I will say, I find it very interesting. By and large, in the churches of God, we wouldn't be caught dead saying Merry Christmas.

We would not be caught dead saying Merry Christmas, but yet we'll throw Happy New Year's all over social media. What's the difference? It's the same festival. It's the same background. It's the same pagan traditions. What's the difference? I don't see a difference. Jeremiah, at this time, was talking to a largely Jewish audience before and in some ways during a national captivity. You know, Jeremiah is still going as the waves of people are being deported.

You know, Jeremiah is doing this work that he was doing. And when you look at what the great sin was that led to their captivity, it wasn't, you know, it's easy to say it's idolatry. Honestly, it's deeper than that. Idolatry was a symptom.

The sin that led to their captivity was an outright rejection of God, was an outright rejection of God, which led them to a place where they had largely forgotten Him and the practices that He commanded His people. They had an outright rejection of God as time went on. His ways, His law, hadn't been taught. Such that sometimes we see within Scripture, actually, it was completely forgotten. In fact, let's go over to 2 Kings 22 as we turn to the last Scripture here today.

2 Kings 22.

We'll go ahead and pick it up in verse 8 during the reign of Josiah.

2 Kings 22 and verse 8.

3 Then Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe, I found the book of the law in the house of the Lord. Found it.

Like it was just kind of sitting off to the side somewhere collecting dust.

And Hilkiah gave the book to Shaphan and he read it. So Shaphan the scribe went to the King, bringing the King word, saying... Notice how Shaphan comes in here. I love this.

Your servants have gathered the money that was found in the house, and they've delivered it out of the hand of those who do the work who oversee the house of the Lord. Oh, by the way!

Oh, by the way! Then Shaphan the scribe showed the King, verse 10, saying, Hilkiah found this book. Found this book here. And then Shaphan read it before Josiah.

So here I did this task you asked me to do. And by the way, found this book. I want to hear what's in it. They went ahead and read it. And it says, Now that happened when the King heard the words of the book of the law, that he tore his clothes. This was unknown previously at this point. It had fallen far enough out of understanding that by and large it was not in practice.

This is a return to something. Now, what's ironic about this whole thing?

The law of God at this point had by and large been completely forgotten.

The specific holy requirements that God had given Israel had been set off to the side, gathering dustgumware such that they found it later on, kind of going through what was there.

This was less than a hundred years after Hezekiah's reforms. Three generations. Hezekiah restored all these practices, right? Hezekiah did all these amazing things. Then comes Manasseh, then comes Ammon, and somewhere in there, by the time we get to Josiah, nothing. It's gone.

By Josiah's time, the law had been largely forgotten. Brethren, the curve of forgetting is very real. What we don't talk about, what we don't teach, will be forgotten due to transience.

Ebbing's house research showed this. In recent years, as I stated at the beginning of this, I've observed a number of young people in the Church of God whom I love and I respect.

I love and I respect that are celebrating new years in some capacity or another. Personally, I don't believe that's something that's spiritually healthy. I don't think it's something that's spiritually healthy. History and the Bible are clear. January 1st is not the actual new year, as set up by God Himself. Nowhere are we commanded to celebrate the new year. Our traditions and our customs of today's new year are rooted in ancient Babylonian, Greek, and Roman mythology. It's pagan to its core. God tells His people again and again and again, come out of her in reference to this Babylonian system. Don't take on the customs. Don't take on the practices of those people whom have conquered these people in the world around you. And that admonition continues today. We are to come out of this system of worldly pagan holidays and instead turn to God. We cannot allow ourselves or our brothers and our sisters to become casualties of the curve of forgetting.

We must all continually study the Word of God and prove all things.