The "Mark"

As I get into it. Today we're going to talk about history, as well as the present, as well about the future, and tie it into the season that we're in. Now, those of you, some of you may have listened to the sermon that I gave in Orlando last week since it's up on our YouTube station. So, as I begin here, don't think you've heard it all before because it often happens when you give the sermon the second time.

I was not intended to talk about something else today, but as I thought more and more about the season that we're in, and what we are doing, and what we've all been a part of, at least from afar in the society we live in, it just crystallized more and more in my mind. And, you know, we need to remember who we are, what we are, and how the world is set up.

So, with that in mind, I do want to talk about Christmas, and I do want to talk about New Year's, and I do want to talk about the customs that are there, not to just down them and talk about many of the things that you all know, but how the world has been set up. Because I'll say this year, as I went back into it, it dawned on me just what the world is like, and what God talked about, and what was established way back whenever. So, with that, let me, and as some people will say, well, where did Christmas come from?

Where did New Year's come from? And, you know, all the things that we deal with all the time all go back to the beginning of the Bible. We can find mankind's history and what we do today back in Genesis. And so we'll see that here in a minute. But as we go, as we start in Genesis and look at some Scriptures there that we haven't turned to in a long time, let me just remind you of the history, you know, that we all know very well. God created the earth, right? God put Adam and Eve on the earth, and He put them in the Garden of Eden.

And He intended that they would be there. He was going to provide for them. And His wish for them was that they would choose His way, that He would give them eternal life, and He would be their God. But in that Garden of Eden, He did set up the choice. And to Adam and Eve's, you know, detriment, I guess, they listened to the serpent, and they chose Satan's way, and to follow the Satan's way over God's. And when they did that, they set up the course of history for the rest of mankind for the time that they were on earth. They chose, we will do our own thing, we will follow this way, we will be in opposition to God.

That's what the choice was made for humanity. And God took them out of the Garden of Eden, took them and guarded the way in and said, you're not going to come back in here again. And then we see the history of the earth for the 15 to 1600 years from that time forward. Mankind, you know, Adam and Eve populated the world, and they, from them came a society of people that were evil and corrupt and violent, so much so that after 15 or 1600 years on earth, God said, you know, this people is so violent, they're so corrupt, I'm sorry I even made man.

I'm going to wipe all of life off of earth. All of mankind will die in a flood. All of the living creatures will die except Noah, the one man on earth, the one man on earth who was following God and who, in spite of the entire society around him, you know, being against God, in opposition to God. You know, he followed him, and God said, I'll save him and I'll save his family, his sons and his wives, through the flood and the animals that are on that.

And everyone that lived on earth was totally wiped out, and so that was the end of that society. And it tells us in Genesis 8, Genesis 9, then through Adam's, or not Adam's, Noah's three sons, the world was populated. This time, this time the world was populated from a man, from a man and a family that chose God. Not one who had rejected God in the Garden of Eden, but who chose God and who survived the flood because of his obedience to God.

Would it be any different this time? Would it be any different this time? Well, God knew what the heart of man was. He knew the spirit that was in man, and he knew that apart from his Holy Spirit in us, we couldn't overcome Satan. And Satan was still extant on the earth, and man would be influenced by him.

And it did take a while. But as you look at the few hundred years after the flood, you get the feeling that mankind, they did remember what God had done. You know, as you can imagine, if we could put ourselves in place, if we're the only ones who survived the world, the flood, it would be a good reminder, there is a God, there is a God, and the reason that we are alive is because we obey God.

And that was a reminder for them for a long time. But eventually, evil came into the world again.

Let's go over to Genesis 10.

Genesis 10, and in a chapter that we may just overlook sometimes, because it is a genealogy of all the sons of Noah, we find a man in Genesis 10 that was the beginning of things that defined the world then, defined the world we live in today, and that gives us a glimpse into what the future will be like under Christ's rule.

Let's pick it up in Genesis 10 and verse 6.

Of course, you remember the three sons of Noah were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the youngest of the three.

And in verse 6, it gives us his genealogy. It says, The sons of Ham were Cush, Misriam, Put, and Canaan.

And you know that in those three sons, we have Misriam, who is commonly believed to be the father of the Egyptian nation, Put, Livia, Canaan.

We read about the land of Canaan with Abraham and the descendants who live in that land.

And it says, the sons of Cush were these other people in verse 7.

And then in verse 8, it says, He began to be a mighty one on the earth.

And so while we have the rest of these descendants, through their name is there, when we get to Nimrod, there's something said about him.

And through these verses, we're going to learn a lot about who Nimrod was as we look in the Bible.

Cush begot Nimrod, he began, notice the word began, he began to be a mighty one on earth.

There was something different about Nimrod than those other sons and grandsons that were there.

He began to be a mighty one.

When we have people who want to become a mighty one, there's something about them, right?

God's way is marked by humility, but in Nimrod, there was a spirit that he was a mighty one.

In chapter 9, he was a mighty hunter before the Lord.

Therefore it is said, like Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord.

And there we have, in that verse, God repeating something twice.

He was a mighty hunter before the Lord.

Therefore it said, like Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord.

Now this is an occasion where when you go into the Bible and you look at those words and you think, well, is that, did God bless? If you read some commentaries and it'll say, you know what, God blessed him.

He was a mighty hunter. He was the one who showed, you know, he could provide for the people and whatever.

Did God bless him with this gift?

And then when it says before, the Lord doesn't mean, you know, he walked with God and God blessed him that way.

But then you look at it and think, that doesn't make sense when you see what God repeated things twice and then you read the succeeding verses, which we will in a minute here.

You go back and you look at what the Hebrew words that are translated there mean, and you get a different picture. For instance, the word that's before the Lord there.

We have one connotation when we hear the word before today.

Today I'm standing before you. There's nothing wrong with that.

You know, people before me were standing up before you. Nothing wrong with that.

But Nimrod, we don't get the sense that he was just standing before God in worship of him.

And when you look at the Hebrew word, it can be, as it is 17 times in the Old Testament, translated against.

Against the Lord. Nimrod began to be a mighty one on earth. He was a mighty hunter against the Lord.

He began to be a mighty one on the earth. We look at mighty hunter.

That's listed there twice in verse 9.

And when you look at that, it comes from Hebrews 1368.

It really means a warrior and a tyrant.

A mighty hunter. He was skilled in that. It was a mighty hunter. And in a little bit I'll read something about what that means.

But he was a warrior and tyrant on the earth.

So when we go back and we look at the words that are translated there in that verse, it doesn't have the innocent meaning that we might see.

He certainly was a skilled hunter.

But twice as we read about this man who's different, and the Bible demands some verses about him, because from him comes things that happen in the rest of the earth. When the word began is used there in verse 8, and then repeated again in verse 10, it means something was beginning with Nimrod that was going to define the rest of society of man right up until today's time.

So we could read verse 9 and say, here's a warrior. Here is a tyrant against the Lord.

Now we know what spirit is against God, right? All of our spirits without God's spirit are against God.

We're opposed to God when Adam and Eve made that choice. We stand in competition with God. We're not yielded to him until we have God's spirit to bring us into submission.

And so we read then in verse 9 something about this man, and then in verse 10 it says, the beginning of his kingdom. So we learn something about Nimrod.

He, the commentaries will tell us, was the first king on earth, or the king, at least the first king, if you will, who saw himself as king in the time after the flood, and the beginning of his kingdom.

Meaning it was just the beginning. It wasn't the end. And as we'll see, the end of Nimrod's kingdom isn't even today.

The beginning of his kingdom was Babel. We know what Babel, that's the Hebrew word.

The Greek word for Babel is babylon. In chapter 11 we read about the tower of Babel.

We're all familiar with that, and I'm not going to go through that today. We can talk about it a little bit in the Bible study if you want, because there is one of those places where, again, when we read the account in Genesis 11, we might think, well, it doesn't sound so bad what those people were doing, but when you see these sentiments, and you see the attitude with which they were building that tower of Babel, you begin to see what the beginning of this kingdom was like, and the marks that this kingdom had on it. And as we talk today, we'll see the marks of Nimrod's kingdom. And as we go through it, we'll see that those marks are still evident in the world around us today.

And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Achead, and Kelna, and the land of Shinar.

And in chapter 11, we know it's Nimrod who went over to Babel because it's named, and he was the land of Shinar where they went over and built this tower.

From that land, he went to Assyria and built Nineveh, Reebok, Ur, Cala, and Rezen between Nineveh and Cala, the principal city.

So we see the beginning of a kingdom called Babylon. And Babylon is still with us today, right?

If we go back to the book of Revelation, we see Babylon is still there at the end of time. Christ returns and he defeats the kingdom of Babylon.

And so whatever is extant in Babylon at the end of time began back here with Nimrod when he was doing his things.

And we know the history of Babylon. Babylon was against the people of God, right?

It was Babylon who conquered Judah. They were a world-ruling kingdom.

In fact, when God gave the vision to Daniel of the statue, the first of the world-ruling kingdoms was Babylon.

But before them, it wasn't a world-ruling kingdom, but a very cruel kingdom that was also against the people of very much of a warrior and tyrant-like position was the kingdom of Assyria.

And we read in verse 11 here that Nimrod was the beginning of that.

From there he went to Assyria, and he built those cities. And where his spirit was, we see things crop up that define that civilization.

We know the Assyrians. The commentaries in history tell us the Assyrians were a cruel and a vicious people.

So much so, they conquered Israel. They were against the land of God.

So much so that Israel was, and the peoples all around, feared them because they were so cruel and vicious.

The spirit began with the king of that time who began that kingdom.

We see Babylon, and even though Nebuchadnezzar knew who God was, we see him still subservient to his gods, still wanting people to worship him, still wanting to be that tyrant that people bowed down to.

He wanted to dictate everything that people did. That began with Nimrod, an attitude that was ingested into those kingdoms that was there.

And indeed, that attitude is a mark. A mark of those kingdoms.

Now, you read about...you don't read the name Nimrod too often in the Bible. We read it here in Genesis 10.

And the next time...it's interesting that as you go through Genesis 11, it doesn't mention Nimrod, but we know it's him who was there because he was in the land of Shinar, and the beginning of his kingdom was in Babel.

But then we read about him again in 1 Chronicles 1.10. You don't need to turn there. All it says in 1 Chronicles 1.10 is what it says in Genesis 10.10.

He began to be a mighty one on earth. But you notice that God says that in 1 Chronicles 1.10, in a genealogy.

And as we look at commentaries sometime, we can find some of the background that's in these verses that fill in the blanks for us, because the Bible gives us the history. The Bible gives us what we need to know.

But to understand, sometimes we have to go and look at some secular sources that will fill in the blanks.

And so, commentaries can be very helpful in that. And without that, we might read over Nimrod and say, Nimrod...you know, Nimrod...he's only mentioned a couple times.

But listen to this from the Adam-Clark commentary. Now let me mention Josephus, too. Josephus...you've all heard of Josephus. He's one who gives us an insight into the Tower of Babylon.

What exactly the attitude that was there? And you see the attitude of Nimrod was one of rebellion against God. In fact, Nimrod comes from the Hebrew word that means, He rebelled.

So we know sort of what His was, and with that in mind, you can see through the Tower of Babel what the people were doing to do. We will build this Tower. We will overcome God. He will never again flood us because we will position ourselves in a way that God can never handle us again the way He did before.

But here's what the commentary on 1 Chronicles 1.10 says from the Adam-Clark commentary.

It says, Nimrod began to be a mighty man in sin, a murderer of innocent men and a rebel before the Lord.

The Jerusalem Targum...and when you hear the word Targum, it's kind of like our modern-day commentaries. As Hebrew began to wane from existence and the people began to speak more of the Aramaic language, they would have their commentaries like we do.

And people would put the history of what they know, kind of like you might study a verse and you might write down.

These are my thoughts on this verse, and this is how it applies to other parts of the Bible.

That's what the Targum is. It was their commentary, if you will.

So it says, the Jerusalem Targum says, He was mighty in hunting and in sin before God.

For He was a hunter of the children of men in their languages, and He said unto them, Depart from the religion of Shem.

Don't do this. Don't do what Shem's doing. We don't need God. We need to do our own thing.

Depart from the religion of Shem and cleave to the institutes of Nimrod.

The Targum of Jonathan Ben-Israel says, From the validation of the world, none was ever found like Nimrod, Powerful in hunting and in rebellions against the Lord.

The Syriac, another one of those commentaries, calls him a warlike giant. The word, the Hebrew word, T-S-A-Y-I-D, which re-rendered hunter, signifies prey, and is applied in the Scriptures to the hunting of men by persecution, oppression, and tyranny.

Hence it is likely that Nimrod, having acquired power, used it in tyranny and oppression, and by rapping and violence, founded that domination, which was the first distinguished by the name of a kingdom on the face of the earth.

So here we have a kingdom, and it fits the word verses in the Bible, the first kingdom on earth.

And what is it marked by? It's marked by a man who sees himself as superior to everyone else, a man who wants people to bow down to him and to worship him. He wants to be their provider.

He wants people to follow his way and discount the religion of Shem, Shem being one who was following God.

And it was marked by violence and oppression and persecution of people.

You might say he was a giant on earth in those days.

And you might think when I use that term giant on earth, back to Genesis 6.4, which is a verse that's there before the flood.

Remember in Genesis 6.4 it says, there were giants on earth in those days.

So before the flood, in a time when all of man, except for Noah and his family, were against God, were living in violence, we have giants on earth in those days. People who became the tyrants, people who became the warriors, people who would hold other people under their rule and suppress people, persecute people to get them to go their way.

Now we can look at that, and those are some marks of Nimrod's kingdom, right?

Those are marks of Babel. Those are marks of Assyria. As we read in the Bible about Nebuchadnezzar and the kings who succeeded him.

As we read about Sennacherib and the kings before and after him in Assyria, we see that presence.

And in the history of the world, the kingdoms have been marked by that way.

If I'm king over you, I get to dictate to you what I do, right? We don't live in that world.

There's a couple periods in history where that rule hasn't been intact.

One of them we live in now, where we've had a time of democracy and we don't have kings lording over us and telling us what to do.

And saying, your neck is on the line if you don't bow down to me, if you don't do what I say.

I'll make your life miserable and I'll end it.

But all of history, people have lived under that domain except now. And in the time that Jesus Christ was alive, they call it the Pax Romana, the Peace of Rome.

In an unusual, couple-year period of time then, where people were allowed, even under the Roman Empire rule, to kind of live their own life as long as they lived it in peace.

And so when Jesus Christ was on earth, you have the Roman Empire allowing the Jews to practice as Jews.

You have the Roman Empire letting them do their thing. They weren't saying, you've got to worship our gods and whatever.

They allowed them to do that. And it's as if God, in fact it is indeed that God, allowed those periods of time where His Word and His principles and His purpose could be done.

Under an austere Roman Empire, where there was a king who was dictating everything, would the apostles have been able to develop? Would Jesus Christ have been able to do things?

So certainly God can work anything out. But it was a period of time that they were able to come on earth and make the statement they did.

If we lived in an autocratic rule, would we be able to preach the message to the world that God wants us to have?

Now it's in a society where you don't have this autocratic kingdom, self-centered, it's all about me kingdom that has marked the world from the time of Nimrod and likely even before the flood.

And so when we look at kingdoms of the world and we look at what Nimrod began, we can look at warlike tyrants who dictate.

And we can go down through history and we can see in the history of the Bible, those people, those kingdoms had that.

Now the other place that Nimrod is mentioned is in Micah 5 verse 6. And there it talks about the kingdom of Assyria and it talks about in Nimrod's land.

And so if you look at that and think, well why is Nimrod's land mentioned here in conjunction with Assyria? You go to a commentary here.

And Barnes' commentary says this about that phrase there in Micah 5 verse 6. It says, Assyria is called the land of Nimrod, as indeed he founded it in Genesis 10 verse 10.

But therewith he was also the author of the Tower of Babel, which was built in rebellion against God, from which his own name is derived.

Assyria then and the world empire which succeeded stand as representing the God-opposed world.

So we have a couple things going on in the kingdom that Nimrod began. That was the beginning of kingdoms of all those cities that we saw.

Marked by a tyrant, marked by a warrior, marked by someone who saw himself as superior and wanted his name and people to bow down to him, and they are opposed to God.

We saw that with Nimrod earlier, but it's a God-opposed world.

Now again, if we just look at the history of the Bible, we can see what was Babel on. They were opposed to God.

Even though Nebuchadnezzar knew God and saw him, he never yielded to God. He completely yielded to his gods over and over.

The Assyrian empire always was their God. They were opposed to God, and they were always opposed to the people of God. So when we look at marks of the kingdom that Nimrod started, warrior-t tyrant, all about self-domination of other people, and opposed to God.

Opposed to God. Those marks define that kingdom.

That kingdom.

Let's go back to Revelation 13.

Revelation 13. Because after the period of time that we live in, a time where we are living in a time that the vast majority of mankind who has ever lived have no idea of the freedoms that we have today and what we're able to do and what's able to go on.

They have lived under oppression, and the millions who have been persecuted, oppressed for what they believe.

Let's look at Revelation 13 because there's a time ahead of us that talks about a world-ruling kingdom that's there.

Let's look at the marks that Nimrod had on his kingdom. It's the extent there in our history, but also what lies ahead for the world.

Chapter 13. Let's begin in verse 1.

John, in a vision, writes, he said, He said, He said, We've got this creature rising out, and what is one of the marks of him? He's against God. He's against God. He's got a blasphemous name.

The beast I saw, which I saw, was like a leopard. His feet were like the feet of a bear, his mouth like the mouth of a lion.

The dragon, now we know from Revelation 12.9, who's the dragon? Satan, right?

The same spirit that we find in Nimrod, that's all about us, that all about, I want the power.

It's there in verse 2.

He lords it over mankind. It's not the system we live in today.

It's the system that goes back, that at its beginnings in Nimrod, that most of the world has lived under.

Let's drop down to verse 4.

They worshiped the dragon. They weren't worshiping God. They worshiped the dragon, who gave authority to the beast.

They worshiped the beast, saying, Who's like the beast? Who's able to make war with him?

Many of the things they might have said in Nimrod. We have to follow Nimrod. Who's like him? Look what he provides for us. And of course, if we understand the world at that time, when it comes out of the devastation that it's been in, where an economy has failed, and all of a sudden, out of the sea rises this beast, that all of a sudden it's providing economic security that is powerful and that can lord it over men.

Who can stand against him? And he was given a mouth, speaking great things and blasphemies.

And he was given authority to continue for 42 months. He opened his mouth and blasphemed against God to blaspheme his name, his tabernacle, and those who dwell in heaven.

It was granted to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them.

And authority was given him over every tribe, tongue, and nation. A world-ruling empire.

With a tyrant, a king, one who's opposed to God, and one who goes to war with God's people, opposed to God in every sense of the word.

The beginning of that kingdom was back with Nimrod.

All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb's Lane from the foundation of the world.

Everyone will. As we can imagine, as we would if we didn't know the truth of God.

Everyone whose name isn't written in the Book of Life from the foundation of the world.

All those who know God and who know and know the marks of a false kingdom, an evil kingdom, that we as God's people must stand against.

Just as people back in Nimrod's time needed to stand against him when he opposed God, so we were going to find ourselves in the same situation.

Verse 9, a warning to you and me, if anyone has an ear, let him hear. Let him hear.

Let's go back to Isaiah.

Isaiah 14.

You know, we've talked about this kingdom and down through history the kingdoms that had their beginning in Nimrod.

And we see in a king who rules different than Jesus Christ, right? Jesus Christ, when he talks about being a king, he tells his disciples in Matthew 20, verse 25, they've been schooled under kings, and kings kind of tell you what to do.

They've got authority over you. It's your way, their way, or the highway, right?

And he says, no, you won't be like the Gentiles. They lord it over them.

Your king served you just as Jesus Christ, king of kings, came to serve, but not to be served.

It's different under God's kingdom, but that's not the way of the world. It's different. It's different, and it's the opposite of what Jesus Christ will be.

But in the kings of the world who have the same attitude that Nimrod has, we see it mentioned here in Isaiah 14.

And often we'll just go right to the chat, verse 12, here in Isaiah 14, where it talks about Satan and what happened to him.

But let's back it up here to verse 3 and read through some of the context of here, because in both here in Ezekiel 28 and the other place that God talks about Satan in his beginning, we see that he ties it to kings of the world and a king in the attitude that they have.

He says, It shall come to pass in the day that the Lord gives you rest from your sorrow, talking to Israel, talking about the time when he returns, and Israel is delivered from their captors and brought back to their promised land, as you see in verses 1 and 2.

It shall come to pass in the day that the Lord gives you rest from your sorrow and from your fear and a hard bondage in which you were made to serve.

Well, that was Israel. That was Israel, but it will be Israel in the future, too, hard bondage under a fierce king, that you will take up this proverb against the king of Babylon.

Now, he's clearly talking about a time in the future, but here's the king of Babylon, still extant on the world, there at the time of the future that he's talking about. You'll take this up lament against the king of Babylon. How the oppressor has ceased? The golden, or as your margin probably says, the insolent city has ceased.

All of a sudden, his kingdom is gone. His kingdom that looked like it was so good, so powerful, it's gone. The Lord has broken the staff of the wicked, the scepter of the rulers, he who struck the people in wrath with a continual stroke. He was an evil king. He was a wicked king. He made people do what he wants, and he didn't let them rest. He who struck the people in wrath with a continual stroke, he who ruled the nations in anger, is persecuted, and no one hinders. The whole earth is at rest and quiet. They break forth into singing. When Jesus Christ returns and breaks the yoke of Nimrod's kingdom that has spanned the history of mankind's time, and a good, genuine, righteous kingdom comes in. The whole earth is at rest and quiet. They break forth into singing. Indeed, the cypress trees rejoice over you in the cedars of Lebanon, saying to this king, Since you were cut down, no woodsman has come up against us. We're free from the tyranny. We're free from the heartache. We're free from the bondage we were in. Hell or the grave from beneath is excited about you, to meet you at your coming. Glad to see you dead, and your days come to an end. It stirs up the dead for you. All the chief ones of the earth who were like you, the kings who preceded you, who had the same attitude, who were led by that same spirit. It is raised up from their thrones, all the kings of the nations. They all speak and say to you, Have you also become as weak as we? You thought you were so mighty, you thought you were a god, but look, you are nothing more than a man. Have you become like us? Your pomp is brought down to Sheol, or the grave, and the sound of your stringed instruments. The maggot is spread under you, and worms cover you. Men who think they're something, but men who realize God is supreme, and they die like everyone else. And then God goes right into where that spirit in those kings comes from. He tells us in verse 12 how you are fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, Son of the Morning. How you are cut down to the ground, you who weaken to the nations. Because the ways of Nimrod, the ways of the kingdoms of the world, aren't the way to strength. They'll pretend to be strength, but the strength is in God, the strength is in truth, the strength is in the kingdom of God. And those who have strength are the ones who follow God, who let His Holy Spirit lead us, guide us, and make us aware of the marks of the kingdom we never ever want to follow. And we want to understand the segregation between God's people and Nimrod's kingdom. For you have said in your heart, Satan, I will ascend into heaven. Look at the same attitudes that are in the kings of the nation. I won't take the time to go through Ezekiel 28, but you can see the same sentiment there as it talks about the Prince of Tyre and the King of Tyre. You have said in your heart, I will ascend into heaven. I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. I will sit on the Mount of the Congregation, on the farther sides of the North. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will be like the Most High. God says, yet you will be brought down to Sheol, to the lowest depths of the pit. The same attitudes that Satan displayed before man was ever on earth, when Adam and Eve said, we'll follow him instead of God, those same attitudes came into people. And there were some who were mighty, who became kings, and after the flood in Nimrod, that spirit began there, and he became a mighty one on earth.

And he was the beginning of the kingdom of Babylon, that's there in prophecy ahead of us, the kingdom of Assyria, which is in prophecy ahead of us. And those things, and those things, those marks that we see in history, and those marks we see in the kingdom that lies ahead of us, that many of us, if it's God's will and his timing, may live to see.

And we'll see those marks of that kingdom, and live under it.

The beginning, the beginning of the kingdoms of this world, that are marked by the same attitudes throughout history that Nimrod demonstrated back then. So we look at the governments of the world, we can see the marks of Satan then, we can see the marks of Satan ahead of time, before Revelation 13 we read. But let's go back to Revelation 13, because the kingdom, while it's marked by a government that's not of God, and kings who don't rule, like the king of kings will rule, but live in the way of the spirit of Satan, I will be great, I will be the one you look to, I will replace all the other kingdoms on earth. That won't be the attitude of Jesus Christ. But as we read in the commentary from Micah 5 or 6, and you read of Josephus, as he reads about the power of Babel, my religion, it's not just a government, a physical government, but there's a religion that's involved, that people are forced to believe. So we find that in Revelation 13 as well. We've read through the first nine verses there, and we see this kingdom, this warlike tyrant who people bow down to, speaking against God. Verse 11, we see there is a religious end of this kingdom as well. Verse 11, I saw another beast coming up out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb, sounded like a lamb, sounded like Christ, but he spoke like a dragon. His words weren't the words of God. His words weren't the kind words, the gentle words, the hopeful words, the true words of Jesus Christ. It sounded more like the words of Satan. And he exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence, and causes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. So he's got a mission on earth. This is where you're going to bow down to. This is your God. This is who you worship, this kingdom. You bow down to this beast. And he performs great signs, like you would expect of a religious leader. He performs great signs so that he even makes fire come down from heaven on the earth and the sight of men. And he deceives those who dwell on the earth by those signs which he was granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who was wounded by the sword and lived. He's not saying worship God. He's saying make this beast. Why don't you worship this created being? Why don't you worship this man? Why don't you worship this image that represents this kingdom? Now we know those aren't the words of God, right? At all. He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed.

So there's this religious side of the kingdom as well. Bow down to my gods. Bow down to what I say. And if you don't, I'm opposed to any who don't. We will kill them of what we...if they don't obey what we say, much like Nebuchadnezzar wanted to put Shadrach, Meshach, and Ben-Nigot to death because they wouldn't bow down to the image. Daniel was thrown into the lion's den because he was praying to God, and not to the images of the kingdom then. And in the future, the same religious system begun under Nimrod. Where could it be? Could it be Nimrod that these images and this religious side of the kingdom emanated from?

Well, the answer, of course, is yes, because we know that Nimrod was a man. Legends has it, and the Bible doesn't tell us how Nimrod died. You can look in the commentaries, and there's any number of ideas of how Nimrod died. Likely, he was killed by someone, but we don't know that for sure. And so, just like it said in Isaiah 14, as it says in Ezekiel 28, his kingdom came to an end, and it was shown he was a mortal man. Just like we read about in Isaiah 14, you would read it in Ezekiel 28, and his kingdom came to an end. But was that the end of Nimrod? Because the Bible says it was the beginning. He was the beginning of kingdoms. That included a governmental end as well as a religious end. And indeed, we find, through legend and through history and through archaeology, that there is something about Nimrod that succeeded his death.

Now, let me remind you, we talked about the first kingdom before the flood came, the first period of the world before the flood. And that lasted somewhere between 1500 and 1600 years. And then God destroyed the earth and it started all over again. So somewhere around 4000 years ago, around 24-2500, somewhere in that area, Nimrod was there. The first 100 to 150 years, perhaps, the worth continued to worship God. But Nimrod, somewhere around 100 years after the flood, began to rise in power when you look at the generations, and he was the grandson of Ham. And then we see the beginning of earth. And if we date back, it's interesting how they put things together, you know, in archaeology, and why it's valuable to see how things fit together. That dating back to 2350 BC. 2350 BC. That's the time right after the flood. 4000-some years ago, you know, there's a poem that came out of the early Babylonian period. And in that poem, we find some clues about what's going on. Now, some of this is legend, and I'm not going to say it's absolutely doctrine, but you put things together in history. And there's a poem called The Epic of Gilgamesh. G-I-L-G-A-M-E-S-H. And all the archaeologists say it dates back to 4000 years ago. And if you remember from history, you may have remembered this from history that you've seen in TV, or what you've learned in college, or history in high school. A lot of times when they would have tales that they would do, plays that they would do, they would talk about things in history. And they would make a play out of it, or write a poem about it. And from those poems, you can learn something about history. And such it is, is with this epic of Gilgamesh. It's a story about the beginning of a god, and it's about this man Gilgamesh, that several say, it's talking about Nimrod, and what happened at that time back around the time Nimrod would have been killed some 4000 years ago. And Nimrod had a wife, you know, they say her name is Semiramis, but she, in this play, when the king died, she made the claim that he was still alive.

He was still alive. So let me just read from this, from the, according to legend, as they translated this epic of Gilgamesh, she claims she saw a full grown evergreen tree spring out of the roots of a dead tree stump, symbolizing the springing forth of a new life for Gilgamesh, they say it's probably Nimrod, each winter he would revisit at the time of the winter solstice. And that's in that poem dating back to the time of early Babylon.

Now again, you know, Nimrod died around that time, and we know that there was a god who emerged around that time that marks, okay? Note the word mark, because we're going to call this sermon the mark, the mark of the religions at that time, all the religions of the pagan world or the gentile world that the Bible calls the gentile word, all had a sun god. And this sun god emanated from this legend, they say, because at the winter solstice the world was dead, and this queen who claimed her husband came back to life, and the sign was out of a dead stump, right? Dead stump representing dead life, an evergreen tree just shot forth, indicating life. Out of death, he is still alive.

And so it began a system that worshiped a sun god. Now let me read from our own UCG Bible commentary here, what it says, okay? It says about the winter solstice. It says, The winter solstice was observed by the pagan world because the sun reached its lowest zenith on that day, the shortest day of the year. It was believed that worship, fires, and sacrifices were needed to encourage and boost the sun god back to his higher station. Afterward, the people celebrated the rebirth of the sun. Indeed, the sun god was understood to have been born of his mother goddess around the time of the winter solstice, in fact, by the reckoning of various ancient cultures on what we call today December 25th. Evergreen plants and trees were used in this particular worship because they seemed to retain life through the winter months.

So we leave the question. Nimrod was likely the first king on earth. He was the beginning of the kingdoms of Babel and Assyria. And the Marx that we talked about those kingdoms was Nimrod the first sun god. The answer is likely, but we can't say that for sure. We have to go by this poem that's there. But it emanates out of history that dates back to that time. And to a queen who would have had people believe, oh no, Nimrod's dead, but he's still alive. Look what happened at this time. And so we have a religion that defines the world throughout the world in the ancient times before Christ. Every single one of those civilizations had a sun god. In Israel, he was known as Baal with the nations around him. We read about Baal. He was a sun god. In Egypt, it was raw. As you go through history, you see that every one of those civilizations had a sun god. They had different names, but of course, God confused the languages. So they had different names, but they all had a sun god. And it dates back to this time and this poem that claims by legend to be where it began. All back to Nimrod, it's pointed. The beginning of the kingdoms of Earth, marked by a sun god, marked by a false god, marked in this case by an evergreen tree that's associated with coming back to life and the life that Nimrod had out of a dead stump.

And so we see some marks of a civilization that you see throughout the world that define the religion of this kingdom begun by Nimrod. And we can turn back to Romans here, Romans 1, verse 25.

Well, you know, let's begin in verse 22. Romans 1, 22.

Supported, and maybe gives new meaning to us of these verses that Paul wrote here to the Romans as he was writing to the world, a church that had Gentiles in it and explaining to them what happened to them and where their beliefs came from. In chapter 1, 22, it says, In verse 22, it says, Of course there was a sun god, and people looked at the sun as coming back to earth, the food would be produced, but then it evolved into other gods as well. Therefore God gave them up to uncleanness in the lusts of their hearts to dishonor their bodies among themselves, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie. The same thing that Adam and Eve did, the same thing that Nimrod did, who exchanged the truth of God for the lie and worshipped and served the creature or the created rather than the creator, who is blessed forever. And so in a religion marked by Satan, you find the worship of people, you find the worship of things, you find the worship of the created.

It marks a kingdom and a religion that had its beginnings back 4,000 years ago. And we know, I don't have to repeat, in the true Church of God, there are no idols. There are nothing we worship. We worship God in spirit and truth, and we follow every single commandment of which you can understand why in that world God has commandment number 1, 2, 3, and 4. Don't worship me like the Gentiles do. Don't bow down to an image. Don't make yourself raven images. Worship me.

And trust me, you don't need the images to remind you of me. Just worship me. But the people then needed a God. They knew there was something more than them that was there. And they worshipped a sun god. And all the world has a sun god. All the world had a sun god.

Now, this is also a quote from a professor down at the University of Sydney among hundreds of quotes you can find, because the origins of the Christmas tree and the evergreen tree at this time of year are kind of well known. People discount them and kind of just say it's not that big a deal. But he says this. He says about evergreen trees that became a symbol of life, an enduring life.

The idea of bringing the evergreen into the house represents fertility and new life in the darkness of winter, which was much more of a pagan theme than a Christian one. So he says it pretty succinctly as he does that. And so we see this custom that might have begun, right, with Nimrod? I mean, we can't say absolutely, but all the evidence points to it's the beginning of kingdoms. And we can take our marks and say, look at what we see in the Bible in history, look at what's going to be at the end of time, and we see the same marks of a kingdom opposed to God that draws its power and spirit from someone other than God. And then we can go back and read Jeremiah. Jeremiah 10. A series of verses that I know you're all familiar with. But given the background of Nimrod and the epic of Gilgamesh and what his queen, or a queen back then, was reported to say and what was in that play, it talks about this in Jeremiah 10. Let's begin in verse 1. Hear the word, hear the word which the eternal speaks to you, O house of Israel. Now remember, on all the earth, right, it was God's people in Old Testament time. Israel was God's people. The rest of the world were Gentiles. They worshiped different gods that God talks about and warns Israel over and over. Don't follow them. Don't look to how they do things. They were a people alone in the world opposed to what the world's religions and kingdoms were like. They were supposed to be someone different. Sort of like God's people today. His people follow Him.

Chapter 1. Thus God says to the house of Israel, thus says the eternal, Don't learn the way of the Gentiles. Don't be dismayed at the signs of heaven, for the Gentiles are dismayed at them. It could be talking about astrology here and watching how the stars align and all those things people can look at and say, This means this and this means that. For the customs of the people are futile. One cuts a tree from the forest, the work of the hands of the workmen with the axe.

They decorate it with silver and gold. They fasten it with nails and hammers so that it will not topple. Well, that sounds very much like a custom we have today. Go down and cut a tree out of the forest, put it in your house, make sure it doesn't fall over, decorate it. Sounds very familiar. They are upright like a palm tree, but they cannot speak. They must be carried because they cannot go by themselves.

Don't be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, nor can they do any good. They are powerless. They are just trees, is what God is saying. Now, many who read those verses in the world say, That's not talking about the modern-day custom of Christmas trees. They're talking about an idol that the people worship that they put in their house to worship. That could well be. And I'm not going to stand before you and say, I think that everyone who has a Christmas tree up in their house worships that tree.

But it is a symbol, and it is a mark of a kingdom that believes those things that dates back to history that's there. God tells Israel, Don't you learn their customs? Don't you be like them? Don't you follow those things? Those are marks of a kingdom that you're not a part of.

They mark a kingdom, a belief system, a religious system that is apart from God, that is opposed to God, that is in rebellion against God, that has been from the beginning of Nimrod's time and likely before the Flood, but we know very little about what happened before the Flood.

Now, let me read this again from the United Church of God Bible commentary that comes from these verses. Evergreen trees, it says, were employed as idols of Astrath. You remember Astrath. She was a queen that the goddess in old times. Evergreen trees were employed as idols of Astrath, such trees being referred to as Asherah, A-S-H-E-R-A-H, in the Hebrew Bible. God forbade them from being placed near his altar as if to honor him, as he did not want his worship system corrupted by them. So, we have God saying, you know what? They're beautiful trees. I don't want them anywhere near my altar. I don't want to see any evergreen trees near me. Keep them away. And when we read the word Asherah in the Hebrew Bible, we know what God is talking about. He's talking about these trees that are a symbol of this false religion. So let's go back to Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy, and look at a few verses here, where Moses is warning the people, as they are about to cross over into the Promised Land, don't learn the way of the Gentiles, remain true to God, remember who you are, remember what you've been taught, and see if he mentions anything about these Asherah in the words that we see. Let's start in Deuteronomy 12, verse 2. I'm going to read verse 1 as a reference here, just to lead up to verse 2. These are the statutes and judgments, Moses says, which you shall be careful. Notice the word careful. Oftentimes when you read about the commandments of God and statutes of God, Moses reminds them, be careful, be diligent how you obey them. These are the statutes and judgments which you shall be careful to observe in the land which the Lord God of your fathers is giving you to possess all the days that you live on the earth. You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations which you shall dispossess serve their gods on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree. Notice the tree that's in there. Every green tree, he says, watch out what's going on with that. Okay? Let's keep that in mind and go forward to chapter 16. Chapter 16, verse 21.

Chapter 16, verse 21. You shall not plant for yourself any tree as a wooden image near the altar which you build for yourself to the Lord your God. Now, in that verse is the word asherah. A-S-H-E-R-A-H. You shall not plant any of these trees near my altar. They translate it as a wooden image, but it really means these evergreen trees. Don't plant near my altar any asherah, any tree that these pagans are using in their worship of their gods. I don't want them mixed with that because he knew what the people would be like. If they see that and what they saw the things of the world around them, they would begin to think things that they shouldn't think. And he said, I don't even want you to have those near me. So many times when you read through Deuteronomy and you see wooden image, it really is the word asherah. A-S-H-E-R-A-H. Which is these cut-down trees that people would have. Now going on from the Bible commentary, the UCG Bible commentary, it says, In direct disobedience to God, the Jews under King Manasseh actually set up an asherah in honor of Baal, the son and husband of Asherah. Indeed, such was used in surrounding cultures to honor the son God Baal and his mother on the birthday of the son, December 25. And we can see that in 2 Kings. Let's turn to 2 Kings 21 and verse 3. Evil King Manasseh, so evil that even though Josiah succeeded in God, said what Manasseh did with Judah was so evil you're still going to be punished. Chapter 21, 2 Kings 3. He, Manasseh, built the high places which Hezekiah his father had destroyed. He raised up altars for Baal, the son God, and he made a woman image, an asherah. One of those trees that are there. In fact, in your margin as it does in mine, it says that that wooden image is the Hebrew word asherah. He raised up altars for Baal and made a wooden image, or an asherah, as Ahab king of Israel had done, another wicked king, and he worshiped all the hosts of heaven and served them. He didn't worship God. He worshiped all these other gods. He worshiped all these created things. He worshiped the planets, the sun gods. Did the things like the nations around him. Just like Nimrod, or the legend of Nimrod, would have done. Just like the religion that defined the ancient world with their sun gods, their trees, defined the entire world except Israel. Just like we see today. Even in non-Christian lands, that there are these winter solstice festivals marked by evergreen trees, marked by these things that are just worldwide.

And so we see all this throughout history. Let's notice a couple things here because we mentioned Asherith. Israel even went to the point where they were worshipping a queen of heaven. There's no goddess that God has given us to worship. Let's look at Judges 2. So we have the several marks of Nimrod's kingdom and religion that we see. And one of them is these goddesses. Throughout the ancient world we read of goddesses. You know, Ephesus had Diana, they had Ishtar, they had all these goddesses that they worshipped. And often they were women of ill-repute, right? They were very loose in their moral standards. And so we saw the Gentile world descend into the same type of morality that they had. And some of the legends and commentaries and histories would suggest that Nimrod's wife was quite immoral after he died. And some other things that I won't get into today, just for lack of time on the birth of her son and what she claimed he was. So let's look at Judges 2 in verse 13. They forsook God when there was no longer Moses and Joshua to keep him on the strait and narrow, if you will. They forsook the eternal and they served Baal, the sun god, and they served the asherests, the goddesses. They departed from God. They fell prey to the world around them and they began to worship those things and all that that meant.

In 1 Kings 11.

In 1 Kings 11 and verse 5.

Even Solomon. Solomon, the wisest man who lived besides Jesus Christ, he started his kingdom off so well, so wise, yielded to God. But as he became involved with the nations around the world, as he married all these wives who brought their beliefs in with him, he began to lose his beliefs. He began to soften. He allowed those in. And in verse 5 of chapter 11, it says, Solomon went after Ashereth, the goddess of the Sidonians, and after Milchim, the abomination of the Ammonites. He got too close. He led it. He led it too close to him. And God said, it was a warning to us, don't get close to the world. Don't be like them. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6, 14 to 17, come out of her. Don't be like them. Don't even touch those things that are unclean. You are a special people to me. On the face of the earth, you are the ones who are following me, who yield to me. Recognize it as the blessing it is. And don't become encumbered or infatuated with the world around you. Don't even touch it.

God says. But Solomon did. If we go on and we see after Jeremiah, in Jeremiah 7, we see that even the people after Israel fell, and after Jeremiah was warning the people of Judah at that time that if they didn't turn back to God, he would send captivity on them. He told them the kingdom from the north, Babylon will come in. You will be conquered by them. You have to remain true to God. They didn't listen to him. They didn't listen to him. And here in Jeremiah 7, verse 16, God says about that people who weren't listening to Jeremiah, He says, don't pray for this people. Don't lift up a cry or prayer for them. Don't make intercession to me, for I will not hear you. Don't you see what they do in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. The children gather wood. The fathers kindle the fire. The women need dough to make cakes for the Queen of Heaven. They worship these goddesses. They worship these goddesses. And they pour out drink offerings to other gods that they may provoke me to anger. They continue to do it. But without God's spirit, they were powerless against the appeal of Satan and the allure of Satan and his world. They became like the nations around them, something God warns us to not be like, to stay away. That he warned Israel over and over, but they didn't have what you and I have, the Spirit of God, to keep from doing that. And the whole world before Christ, the whole world before Christ, worshiped this way. They had kingdoms. They had kings. They had tyrants. They lived under untenable circumstances that you and I can't even imagine because we just haven't been part of that. It all marked the kingdoms of the world. It all marked the kingdoms of a world and a government apart from Satan. But then Jesus Christ came. Then Jesus Christ came with the huge, unspeakably huge witness he was of God's way of life. And that he was the truth, and it spread about him who he was. And many of the Gentile nations we see, as Jesus Christ died, began, or many Gentiles began to come into the church. God opened the truth to those who would call from every nation, tribe, regardless of ethnicity. And so the Gentile world, they were faced with this magnitude of a person, the Savior called Jesus Christ, and it spread around the world. And many had to question who their son-gods were and their goddesses were. And as God called Gentiles, they were torn sometimes. And Paul, you'll read, you know, this is what your old religion was like. You have to do away with it. And for them it would have been very difficult. The entire lifestyle, everything they knew, had to be put away, and they had to relearn from the beginning what God's way was like and put all that apart from them. But we see that Satan wasn't going to give up at that time. And when Jesus Christ was a powerful witness, Satan was still at work. He would still have his way on earth because God did not remove him at that time. And so I'm going to read a couple things here from this book called Babylon Mystery Religion, written by Ralph Woodrow. And I don't know if it's in print anymore. I kind of inherited this book from my father. And in it, you know, there are some things that aren't well-documented, but what I'm going to read to you is well-documented from other sources of literature in history.

One of the things that he talks about when he identifies the Babylon Mystery Religion that we read about at the end of Revelation is the thing on what happened with these goddesses that pagans would worship. Because they really liked their asterisks. I mean, it's like they worshipped the asterith and Ishtar and those Diana more than the sun god, even. They were just enamored by these goddesses. Let me just read from him. I'm reading from page 21.

It says, perhaps the most outstanding proof that Mary, okay, Satan found the figure in somewhere in Christ's history and in his life that could become the queen of heaven. That the pagan world could look at. Perhaps the most outstanding proof that Mary worshiped developed out of the old worship of the pagan mother goddess may be seen from the fact that in pagan religion, the mother was worshipped as much or more than her son. This provides an outstanding clue to help us solve the mystery of Babylon today. True Christianity teaches that the Lord Jesus, and He alone, is the way, the truth, and the life. That only He can forgive sin, and that only He of all earth's creatures has ever lived a life that was never stained with sin, and He is to be worshipped. Never His mother. But Roman Catholicism, showing the influence that paganism has had in its development, in many ways exalts the mother also. One can travel the world over, and whether in a massive cathedral or in a village chapel, the statue of Mary will occupy a prominent position. In reciting the Rosary, the Hail Mary is repeated nine times as often as the Lord's Prayer. Catholics are taught that the reason for praying to Mary is that she can take the petition to her son Jesus, and since she is His mother, He will answer the request for her sake.

The inference is that Mary is more compassionate, understanding, and merciful than her son Jesus. Certainly, this is contrary to the Scriptures, yet this idea has often been repeated in Catholic writings. And as you go through the rest of this chapter, which I won't do, but you can find it on the Internet, you can see that in the Catholic writings themselves, they will acknowledge Mary worship can't be found anywhere in the Bible, and it wasn't part of their religion until hundreds of years later, as they tried to assimilate the Gentile world into their religion. Now, we can turn, for instance, to Luke 11. Luke 11, 27.

And, you know, having the first 100 years of my life before my parents came to the church, I was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school, went to Mass every single day. And I can say, you know, the Hail Mary, when you went to confession and you were told to pray, we did the Hail Mary much more than we ever did our Father's Prayer, as we said.

As he says here, how often they pray to Mary, and today, you know, some 50 years down the road, Mary is more prominent in their religion now than it was then. Luke 11, verse 27. Here's an occasion where Jesus Christ is faced with someone who is blessing Mary, right?

Because Mary was a good woman. We're not going to discount that. Mary was a good woman. God chose her because he knew that she would raise Jesus in the right way, that she would be loyal to him. But here it is in verse 27. It says, it happened as Christ spoke these things, that a certain woman from the crowd raised her voice and said to him, Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breast which nursed you.

Now, here's an opportunity for Jesus Christ to say, you know what? Yes. Deify Mary. She is a good woman. Bless her and keep her in your prayers. Notice what he says? But he said, more than that, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it. No indication that Mary is to be worshipped in any way, shape, or form.

She was a human being like you and me, a very dedicated one to God, led by the Holy Spirit. She lived her life well. Not an object of worship. Nowhere in the Scriptures do you find anything about the worship of Mary. Now, let me read from page 13. Because, of course, we know Mary is indelibly tied to Jesus Christ. If you go over to the Vatican and really in any Catholic Church you go into, you're going to see a statue of the Virgin Mary standing by herself.

You're also going to see statues of Mary with the infant child in her arms. And throughout the pagan world you find these statues that they've, through archaeology, dug up in the Babylonian world, in the Assyrian world, and in every world, a statue of a mother with a child. It's one of the features of Christmas, a mother and child. Not so much anymore as the world moves past Jesus Christ and Christmas and worships the God of economy more than the God who is supposedly named after or whatever.

But let me read this from page 13. It's one of the most outstanding examples, he writes, and this is the title of this chapter, is Mother and Child Worship. One of the most outstanding examples of how Babylonian paganism has continued to our day may be seen as the way the Romish church invented Mary worship to replace the ancient worship of the mother goddess.

The story of the mother and child was widely known in ancient Babylon and developed into an established worship. Numerous monuments of Babylon show the goddess mother Semiramis with her child Tammuz in her arms. And that's quoted from a book of religions and antiquity. When the people of Babylon were scattered to the various parts of the earth, they carried the worship of the divine mother and her child with them. This explains why many nations worshiped a mother and child in one form or another centuries before the true Savior Jesus Christ was born into the world. In the various countries where this worship spread, the mother and child were called by different names, for we will recall, language was confused at Babel.

Then he goes through and he names all these mother and child configurations in these various nations. But then, a few pages later, he begins to talk about how it was assimilated. And as we had a Christian world, or we had Jesus Christ come into the world, and people were understanding who Jesus Christ was, because the message, you can imagine back then, was riveting as the apostles would speak it as it would go into the Gentile world.

Here's a Savior. Look at what he did. Look what was prophesied of him. Look who he is. Satan had to find a way to pervert the true religion, and indeed he did. So let me read here from page 15. Apollo began to be assimilated into what was called the Christian Church at that time. It says, It was during this period—let me skip that one. One of the best examples—I'll skip a paragraph here that talks about Christ being born and his effect on the world.

One of the best examples of such a carryover from paganism may be seen in the way the professing church allowed the worship of the great mother to continue, only in a slightly different form and with a new name. In the end, the Christian Church was a very different form. It was a very different form. The professing church allowed the worship of the great mother to continue, only in a slightly different form and with a new name. You see, many pagans had been drawn to Christianity, but so strong was their adoration for the mother goddess they did not want to forsake her.

Compromising church leaders saw that if they could find some similarity in Christianity with the worship of the mother goddess, they could greatly increase their numbers. But who could replace the great mother of paganism? Of course, Mary, the mother of Jesus, was the most logical person for them to choose. Why, then, couldn't they allow the people to continue their prayers and devotion to a mother goddess, only call her by the name of Mary instead of the former names by which she was known?

Apparently, this was the reasoning employed, for this is exactly what happened. Little by little, the worship that had been associated with the pagan mother was transferred to Mary. But Mary worship was no part of the original Christian faith. It is evident that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a fine, dedicated, and godly woman, especially chosen to bear the body of our Savior. Yet none of the apostles or Jesus himself ever hinted at the idea of Mary worship.

As the Encyclopædia Britannica states, during the first centuries of the church, no emphasis was placed on Mary whatsoever. The point is admitted by the Catholic Encyclopedia also. Devotion to our blessed lady, in its ultimate analysis, must be regarded as a practical application of the doctrine of the communion of saints. People got together what they could do as they reasoned it out. Saying that this doctrine is not contained, at least explicitly, in the earlier forms of the Apostles' Creed, there is perhaps no grounds for surprise if we do not meet with any clear traces of the cultists of the Blessed Virgin in the first Christian centuries.

The worship of Mary being a later development, actually in 431, is when it became part of the doctrine of the Catholic Church. So we see something as the pagan world, as the Christian world, so-called, began to do something that fades back to the time of Adam and Eve. What did they begin to do? They had the truth of Jesus Christ, the undeniable truth of who he was, and they began to mix it with these pagan religions, exactly what Adam and Eve were watching not to do. Don't take the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

What Israel was told to do, don't look at the way other people worship their gods, do it the way I said, and don't pay any attention to that. But they did it. And they assimilated that into their beliefs. And over the time, they began to worship Mary, as it says, maybe even more than Jesus Christ, replacing the worship of the Creator with the created, a mark of a false religion.

Now, let me read this. We know well the history of how Christmas got assimilated and its trappings as well. But this comes from the Abbot-Conan dictionary of religious knowledge. Let me just read a portion of it here. Because there is a very interesting comment that this book makes, that this encyclopedia or document makes. Let me just read a little bit.

It is as follows.

So we see in the whole history things that are just the antithesis of what you read in the Bible, right? We can go through, and I hope you mark down some of the marks of a government and a religion that is opposed to God. Okay? We talked about a kingdom with tyrants that oppressed, that led people away from God, that was opposed to God. We talk about a sun god that came out of a legend of a mortal man who was supposedly, according to his wife, resurrected in the form of an evergreen tree.

From there, sun gods developed all over the earth. The evergreen became a symbol of the sun god. We saw how honoring the mother and the goddess was even more so than the god, Jesus Christ, or God the Father. And we see that a celebration of Christ's birth occurred, where the Bible never talks about celebrating Christ's birth, never gives us the date. Instead, it talks about celebrating his death, with Passover and observing that.

Everything opposed to that. All those marks that are there of a false church, a religion and a government that had its beginning in Nimrod. Let's go back to Revelation 13.

I read most of Revelation 13, but I didn't read verses 16 and 17. Speaking of the religion that would cause or bring to death those who would be opposed to that religion who would worship the true God. Verse 16 of Revelation 13 says, He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark. A mark on their right hand and on their foreheads.

Those who bow down to that idol, those who yield to that system, who take that mark upon themselves, that know better if they're in the church, those who get too close to the world and may fall asleep, He finds and receives a mark on their right hand and on their foreheads that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

In that society, no one does what we need to do unless you have that mark. You know what some of those marks are that we might accept. There's a very interesting quote in that last book that I quoted from. It was a band by a historian or commentator by the name of Crippen who wrote about that time. This is what he said about this Christmas festival. He said, At the time of persecution, Christians were detected. How? By not decorating their homes at the Saturnalia. Isn't that an interesting comment to make? Because you know what? We can live in our neighborhoods and we can keep the Sabbath every week. Some of our neighbors know we do, but it's not something we're posting on our front door and announcing to the world that Seventh Day is the only day and all of them are keeping the wrong day. But it is very noticeable when you drive through neighborhoods and your house is the only one not decorated. So perhaps in the world to come under that domination, people will be decorating their homes. And if we have a home at that time, perhaps we will be detected as we don't put out those things. All the marks of the religion—and that's Christmas. But let me close here. Let me close here because I'm sure I've gone overtime. Yes, I have, but that's okay. We're all here all day. Let me read about New Year's because we're just a little bit away from New Year's. Sometimes, you know, New Year's and sometimes we get it from young people and whatever that—you know, what's wrong with New Year's? What's wrong with going to a New Year's Eve party? It's just people celebrating. It's just a chance. There's nothing wrong with it. Well, there is something wrong with it. Just like Christmas has its beginnings in this rush of a new ride, so does New Year's. So let me just read this to you here straight from this website called ancientorigines.net. You can read it so many times on the internet or if you have encyclopedias. Just let me read through this because if there is any doubt that New Year's has—it's a mark of a false religion—this would let you know that. This comes—oh, this I said from ancientorigines.net. It says, the earliest recorded New Year's festivity dates back some 4,000 years to ancient Babylon. Isn't that interesting? 4,000 years. Just like the Epic of Gelubimash, right at the time Nimrod would have been right after the time of the Flood and after the period of 100 or 150 years post-Flood. The earliest recorded New Year's festivity dates back some 4,000 years to ancient Babylon and was deeply intertwined with religion and mythology.

During the atetus, the Aetetus and the gods were raided through the city streets and rights were enacted to symbolize their victory over the forces of chaos. Through these rituals, Babylonians believed the world was symbolically cleansed and recreated by the gods in preparation for the New Year in the return of spring. So they had it at the beginning of spring, which was according to the Bible, right? It's not first of Asia, but that time, that's the beginning of the year. Now, let's progress here to Roman times. Since the Roman New Year, all sulfur originally corresponded with the Herbal Deep Lowness. According to tradition, the calendar was created by Ron Willis, the founder of Rome in the 8th century BC. However, over the centuries, the calendar fell out of sync with the sun and in 46 BC, Julius Caesar decided to solve the problem by consulting with the most prominent astronomers and mathematicians at this time. He introduced the Julian calendar, a solar-placed calendar, which mostly resembles the more modern recording calendar than most countries around the world use today. As part of the history form, Caesar instituted January 1 as the first day of the year, partly to honor the month's namesake, Janus, Roman god of change and beginnings. Romans would celebrate January 1 by offering sacrifices to Janus in the hope of gaining good fortune for the New Year, decorating the Rome's of oral ranges, and attending August apartments. The stay was seen as the setting stage for the next 12 months, and it was common for friends and neighbors to make a positive start to the New Year by exchanging well wishes and gifts for the bigs of money they would find out. But January 1 had been set in the middle of the year, celebrating the company of the New Year, were considered pagan and unchristian life, and in 567 AD, 500 years later, the Council of Tours of the New Year, 500 years before, was the Council of Nicaea. However, the date of January 1st, listen to this, I have never seen this before. However, the date of January 1st was given Christian significance and became known as the Feast of the Circumcision, considered to be the eighth day of Christ's life, counting the first day as December 25th, and following the Jewish tradition of circumcision, eight days after were almost a child formally given his or her name. Isn't that interesting? I've never seen that before. So, January 1st has its significance, called in the Feast of the Circumcision, a thousand years later. A thousand years later, January 1st came back into insubou, by the quote of Gregory XIII. And it says in 1582, as he introduced us, although most Catholic countries adopted the Gregorian calendar almost immediately, it was only gradually adopted among Protestant countries. The British, for example, did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752. Until then, the British had fired, their American colleagues still celebrated the New Year in Washington. So Satan never gets up, right? He keeps doing and doing and doing, and eventually the world follows. And so we have today the celebration. You can mark that one. I'm not going to take the time for you. You're on me 1220 on 32. You know what God says there. What I say to you is that God will do it. Don't answer it. Don't take away from it. Don't seek after hearing the time to do what you will do if you will. But as we move into this season, what it means in the history of the world and processing, knowing those marks, understanding the brilliance of the world is God's people and the rest of the world that follows these ways is incumbent on us, the whole past, what we meant as authors. And I will never allow the world or its trappings to influence us and the people.