Come on, buckle up. Always good when a preacher starts that way, right? Maybe it'll actually be exciting this time. In his absolutely riveting book, Hitler's Monsters, Erik Kurlander delves deep into the occult connections of the Third Reich and Hitler's fascism. The book details, among other things, the Nazi fascination with Nordic and Indo-Germanic deities, that is, guys like Odin and Thor, as part of Arianism and Theosophy, which sought to revive ancient gods as racial archetypes. Christianity would no longer have the monopoly on spirituality, he says. In fact, the modern German Lutheranism had ironically de-supernaturalized the world and the Nazis promised to re-enchant it through, quote, a new cosmic cultural history enabling miracle weapons, Wunderwaffen, like superhuman soldiers to make the Aryan race supreme throughout the world. It is vital to realize that their racism was deeply tied to their occult theology. Broader sciences such as astrology, parapsychology, dowsing, the world ice theory and quest for Aryan artifacts, even magic, were not woo-woo to the fascists, but living intuitive alternatives to the soulless Jewish-influenced sciences of the mainline. Himmler and Hess and Rosenberg were fervent believers. Goebbels' propaganda machine amplified supernatural imagery to the people, depicting, for example, the German werewolves defeating Slavic vampires. And as for Hitler, I have a fairly long quote here that helps you understand him a little better. It says, numerous witnesses compared Hitler to a medium, magician, or medicine man. who could manipulate mystical forces, which humans cannot avoid. Hitler is only in his element when he has a crowd in front of him. On the platform, he's more like a medium, the unconscious tool of higher powers. Hitler was a master magician, for whom other Nazi leaders were merely lower-level mediums, whose genuinely demonic powers made men his instruments. Of the two kinds of dictators, the chieftain type and the medicine man type, Carl Jung explained Hitler is the latter. He is a medium. German policy was not made, Jung suggested, but revealed through Hitler. He is the mouthpiece of the gods of old. Hitler was all in on this to the point of even replicating Pergamum's throne of Zeus that we will talk about later. which the Germans had literally stolen from Turkey and had moved to the Pergamum Museum in Berlin in 1930, calling this place the Zeppelin Field Grandstand, from which he would deliver countless bewitching speeches, seemingly channeling the God before the German people. Eighty years later, Barack Obama replicated the exact scene in Denver's Mile High Stadium, right under the Bronco horse known as Thunder, for his 2008 inauguration speech. Drawing from Hitler's favorite composer, Richard Wagner, and the final opera of his ring cycle, Gotterdammerung, which itself was inspired by the Old Norse apocalyptic story of Ragnarok, the fascists used the twilight of the gods to describe the apocalyptic framing of World War II's end, where the gods perish in a fiery redemptive battle, paving the way for a new world order. This reverence for the occult, and Germanic paganism was not peripheral, but rather a core component of Nazism's rise and character. If you don't understand this, then you do not understand German fascism, nor its modern iterations, which in many respects are the exact opposite political spectrum as what you've been taught. Fast forward now some 80 years to Barbie. Sorry, kids. From Hitler to Barbie, you say. Really? Yes. In fact, we don't really need to do that fast forward quite yet because actually Barbie has her roots just 10 years after the war in a West German doll named Build Lily, whose cartoon version you'd often find sitting in a fortune teller's tent while the toy was sold in sex shops as a call girl gag doll. Mattel acquired the rights to build Lily in 64, where it became Barbie, meaning foreigner. So America effectively imported this foreign doll. And a fascinating expose on the recent movie Barbie, Jonathan Cahn, who calls this, quote, the most widely distributed anti-man movie ever made, cites Barbie herself, who says, in a children's movie, by giving voice to the cognitive dissonance required to be a woman under the patriarchy, you robbed it of its power. What? I've seen a lot of kids' movies have four girls. I can't remember any that, as Kahn says, talk about the patriarchy and cognitive dissonance. This is propaganda easily ripped right out of the playbook of something like Joseph Stalin's Revolutionary Council or the arts for the propagation of Marxist doctrine. Khan takes us through a fascinating and deliberate opening scene of the movie, which is a direct rip-off of the opening scene of 2001, A Space Odyssey. That opening scene recasts Kubrick's masterpiece shot for shot. The apes smashing skeletal skulls with other bones are replaced by little girls smashing the heads of their dolls against one another as they learn to rage against motherhood. The giant monolith is replaced by a giant goddess, Barbie. Barbie comes with a magical wink to transform the ape-like primitive girls who are dourly playing with their dolls like wannabe mothers into enlightened feminists who hate men, as they should, of course, since men are, at best, blithering idiots, and at worst, are actually just pure evil. But I'm not even to the crazy part yet. At one point in his expose, Kahn asks the question, what does Barbie in the movie have to do with an ancient Mesopotamian goddess, Astaroth? also known as Inanna or Ishtar. Well, Ishtar was the goddess of sexuality, but she was often depicted as taking roles traditionally assumed by men. In fact, she is described as androgynous transsexual. One of the ancient lines of her text says, when I sit in the ale house, I am a woman, I am an exuberant young man. Not coincidentally, in the movie, one of the Barbies is transsexual. Like Barbie's origins, she too was a kind of pornographic figure, rarely associated with marriage, often as a prostitute. Little girls would play with her little figure Ishtars, like modern girls play with Barbie. In the Bible, she's indirectly linked to child sacrifice. She had a kind of boyfriend, the passive accessory god, Tammuz, who directly parallels the emasculated kin in the movie. In these ways, Kahn argues rather persuasively, in my view, that the new Barbie movie is basically bringing back a return of the gods to a culture that long ago worshipped them, and the goddess in particular, but then the worship of Christ surpassed her. But now that we have thrown off the shackles of Christianity as a culture, like the windswept house of the demon-possessed man, the demon comes back to roost once he finds the house empty. Let's go just a little bit deeper as we look Link back to Hitler's Germany. In the ancient text, Ishtar is described as having eyes that are, quote, multicolored and iridescent. Iridescent comes from the Latin root iris, which means a rainbow. Another place, she is said to have, quote, stretched herself like a rainbow across the sky as a sign of war. What flag became the subversive culture war emblem of the LGBTQ movement in 1978 as it co-opted Noah's sign? The rainbow flag. And this in turn morphed into the progress pride flag in 2018 with its six rainbow colors continuing horizontal, but now with five more colors specifically representing transgenders, non-binaries, and even more. These five colors are put into the shape of a horizontal triangle. But a curious and I think most certainly not coincidental thing happens when you put the four left corners of the triangle together as perpendicular directions facing north, south, east, and west, like the tribal flags of Israel in Numbers 2, you get a swastika. Want to see it? I'll show it to you. Think that's a coincidence? It's quite deliberate. Either by someone or something. Now enter into this war that I'm describing using the fascists and Nazis as examples. of supernatural evil, the Reformation. I'm not going to focus too much here on the typical parts of the Reformation that we Protestants like to think about this time of year, nor am I going to talk about how Hitler actually drew some inspiration from him, rightly or wrongly, in his hatred of Jews. I'm going to focus on its fearless leader, Martin Luther, via the most famous song that he ever wrote, Ein Feste Berg, written in 1529 and translated into English as A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. This hymn is steeped in war language. In particular, stanza one tells us, for still our ancient foe does seek to work us woe. This foe refers to Satan, and it emphasizes his ongoing intent to cause us harm. He is the enemy of humanity. It continues, his craft and power are great and armed with cruel hate. Luther is thinking here about Satan's cunning and powerful malice in spiritual conflicts. He is a dangerous supernatural adversary. In stanza two, he says, on earth is not his equal. This indicates Satan's unmatched power among earthly beings, emphasizing his supernatural strength and mind, and it contrasts him with our great need for divine intervention. Stanza three then adds, the prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him. Satan acts in fearless defiance, but Luther aims to give us confidence in God's victory over the devil. His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure. Luther acknowledges Satan's anger, but he assures us that God's will, and he will already, and has ultimately defeated Satan. How has he done this? One little word shall fell him. Satan can be defeated by the power of God's word and Christ's authority. And so stanza four answers that Jesus is that word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth. God's word prevails over all opposing forces, including Satan, and this reinforces God's divine supremacy over supernatural evil. This is precisely why we spent a full sermon out of these five at the beginning, exploring this cosmic war by talking about our God. If you do not know him and the kind of God that he is, especially in his eternal and changing attributes, then you will not be able to sing this song with Luther. Amazingly, Martin Luther was a German, the same place Hitler and Bill Lilly originated. And this goes to show you just how far that people, and in fact, all we peoples who once received such glorious excellencies, have fallen, and why it's so imperative that we learn again about this war in our times, thinking about it in particularly relevant ways to our culture, so that we might reengage the battle as we are called to do by taking up the spiritual weapons of war as we fight not against flesh and blood, but against the supernatural enemies in heavenly places. So to that end, if last week we talked about God, today I want to talk about the gods. Who or what are they? And who cares? Well, I think it's important to begin at the foundational law of Israel for this. This is what we call the first commandment, you shall have no other gods besides me. For most people, I speak from personal experience with this, when they read this command, they immediately think of idolatry. And thus the command for them means you shall not have idols before God. The problem is, idolatry is the focus of the second commandment, not the first. You shall not make for yourself a carved image. Carved images are idols. Thus the second commandment forbids idolatry. Therefore the first must forbid something different. So what does it forbid? Well, a clue is found in reading the command literally. It literally reads, you shall not have any other gods before my face. You're like, I've never heard that before. That's because nobody ever translates it because they think it's a figure of speech. That is, God doesn't literally have a face. However, Paul clearly teaches us. God, who said, let light shine out of darkness, has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. As Matt and I detail in our Angel of the Lord book, face in the Old Testament is one of those terms that's synonymous with the angel. The eternal second person of the Trinity, God, Israel's God, who assumed a real angelic identity while never changing his immutable deity. In this way, the commandment is saying that those other gods whom the nations worship must not be put before the God angel whom Israel worships. And yes, it's more since God is triune one in three, but it's not less, not some Unitarian Monad God of modern Judaism. It has to include Christ. Jacob makes this clear when he says this in Genesis 48. The word God used by Jacob is the same word used in the first commandment for gods. The word is Elohim. Now Elohim is a word that's plural in its form. It's like our word sheep. or dear. To know if it's singular as with Jacob or plural as in the commandment, you have to read the context. Clearly, Jacob only worshiped one God while the commandment forbids the worship of things that are not the one God. So what are these other gods? Well, first and foremost, it's vital to say that they are not the one true God. Never used to think I would have had to say this, but in modern days it's becoming clearer that you do. When we talk about gods in the Bible, we're not talking about some ancient polytheism that put God on a level of being as his creation, ever. It was massively important to discover who God is last time for this very reason. Cults and other religions go astray here. For example, Mormons believe, as the famous statement by Lorenzo Snow, the fifth president of the LDS, said in 1840. He said this, as man is, God once was. As God is, man may become. No. No. God was never like us, nor will we become God. The gods are not on a scale of being with God or the angel who is God in his essence. There are several creatures beside God who are called Elohim in the Bible. These include the members of Yahweh's council. We'll talk more about that next week. The gods and goddesses of the nations, very similar to the first. Also demons, now importantly demons here is the word Shedim. It's not referring to the unclean spirits of the New Testament. Also, the deceased Samuel is called an Elohim, and angels, or the angel of Yahweh, are also called by the same word. So that's a lot of different kinds of creatures called Elohim. It's important to note, for reasons that we will look at in a week or two, living human beings are never called gods. Reinforcing that gods are spiritual created beings, distinct from Yahweh's unique deity, except when the second person is involved. So what does it mean that these entities are called gods? Well, looking at what these creatures all have in common, I think we can identify two things that they all have in common. The first is that they are all properly residing in the spiritual realm. And second, they all share some kind of delegated authority. Neither of these is ontological in its nature. That is, their essence is not divine as God is divine. They are functional ideas. So to understand this better, it's helpful to look at the etymology of our English word God and related terms to it. We mentioned these a little bit last week, but I think it's helpful to really wrap our minds around this. Our English word God translates words from various other languages. The word Elohim that we've been looking at in the first commandment means might or power. So what is an Elohim? It is a being that is mighty or powerful. We translate Elohim as either God or gods. The Greek word theos is its parallel. It derives from the meaning of sacred or shining. So a theos is a sacred or a shining thing. We translate theos as God and theoi, the plural, as gods. Same as Elohim. The Latin word deus derives from sky, and of course, the Latin translation, the Vulgate from Jerome, has been extremely influential in church history, so it's important to know the word derives from sky, so a deus is something from the sky. We translate deus as God, and dei, the plural form is gods. Even our word God derives from the word meaning invoke, or libation, as in a sacrifice. It was never originally a proper name. Now, as you can hear, these are not terms that describe the essence of these creatures, but their functions. They are mighty and powerful things. What does Luther say? His craft and power are great. They come from the heavens. What does Luther say? On earth, he is not their equal. They appear luminescent. Ironically, Luther calls him the prince of darkness. grim, yet the Bible says he masquerades as an angel of light. People worship them, but we tremble not for him. And yet, God's does not tell us precisely what they are in their essence. Perhaps the word spirit or fire are better biblical words to describe that, Hebrews in the psalm says he makes his angels spirits and his ministers a flame of fire. But to me, even this is uncertain if it is what they are in their essence. I don't know. And you might wonder why I use that verse from the psalm to talk about other gods. Why did you mention angels when you're talking about gods? Angels are gods? Well, remember, God is not a term that actually describes the thing's essence, unless we capitalize it in English, and then, of course, it does. It describes their function. Angel is the exact same thing. An angel is simply a messenger. That's what they do, not what they are. They deliver messages. So even humans are sometimes called angels. Matthew 11, 10 calls John the Baptist an angel, a messenger, getting it from Malachi. The fact is, during the time of the New Testament, the Jews were starting to become hesitant of identifying the gods with the same term used for God, even though their own scriptures did that. It can seem offensive, if not outright blasphemous, to call created entities the same thing we call the creator of the universe. Many can't get past this, and they say it's a heresy that the gods are real, thinking to themselves that only a Mormon or polytheist could do that, even while they simultaneously fail to understand the difference between the first and second commandments, and that the Bible itself literally does this, calling them the same things, and not in a joking or a mocking way all the time, because it knows full well that the gods are totally different from their creator. They share this title as a delegated function. But this is precisely where the word angel can be, I think, so helpful, even as Jacob demonstrated. Because angel became a term that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of our Old Testament, used to translate the word elohim. But it doesn't always do that, only sometimes. Sometimes it translates elohim as theos, like in the first commandment. But sometimes it translates it as angel. In Psalm 97, 7, it reads, Worship Him, all you Elohim, all you gods. But the Septuagint becomes, Worship Him, all you angels. In the Greek, the same is true of Psalm 8, 5. God made man a little lower than the Elohim. And it becomes, He made man a little lower than the angels. And Hebrews even quotes this. Okay, so how is that helpful to realize this connection between angels and the gods? Well, the whole point of this is to show you that the gods of the first commandment are real entities. They're not things you make up with your imagination. They're not idols. They're not the Denver Broncos on Sunday, although you can certainly worship them too. But the reality is they are powerful, shining entities from the sky that people wrongly worship as our words teach. They have other synonyms throughout the Old Testament and New Testament. For example, Deuteronomy 17.3 forbids the Israelites who go and serve other gods and worship them, the sun or the moon or any of the host of heaven, which he commanded them not to do. Now you can hear here that sun and moon and the rest of the hosts of heaven are forbidden to be worshipped, and it's parallel to gods. And yet, lest you think that these are for the balls of fire and dirt in the sky, the hosts of heaven are spiritual entities. 2 Kings 22 says, I saw the Lord sitting on his throne and all the hosts of heaven standing beside him on his right and on his left, and they began to talk. Nehemiah says, the host of heaven worships you. And thus we sing in the doxology, praise him above ye, heavenly host. And we sang it even in the psalm today and had it as an opening for our worship. Praise him, all you gods, because these are real spiritual entities in heavenly realms and earthly realms. And there are lots of them. Now, believe it or not, another synonym is holy ones. God is to be feared in the counsel of the holy ones, the counsel that is in the skies and in the heavens. You might say that this could only refer to holy angels, and in the sense of them being righteous, that is true. However, as Job says, behold, God puts no trust in his holy ones, and the heavens are not pure in his sight. How could some be holy and yet evil? That seems like a contradiction. Well, the parallel on earth is the priests of Israel, who were set apart as holy, but they were also often quite sinful, and even in some instances, positively wicked. In fact, even we Christians are called holy, even though we are sinless. Now, our holiness comes through a different way, through imputed righteousness, and our great desire is to be free from sin in heaven, and thus holy in a perfect sense. and yet we're still called holy even now. Amazingly, Jude 8 calls them glorious ones, and in his usage they are fallen entities that people even blaspheme, even Satan being among them. Another term for them is a watcher. This is used in Daniel 4 to describe a heavenly being equated with the holy ones. They come to Nebuchadnezzar with a judicial pronouncement that they have decided with God's permission to turn him into a wild beast like a man until he should repent. Watcher, what's that? Well, it's obviously a functional term. It describes what they do. What do they do? They watch. This is described in Randy Jackson's Zebra song in 1983. Well, Zebra's the band, but the song is called Who's Behind the Door. Amazing guitar, is what he says. Looking out into the stars, think about who you are. What do they think of you? Animals in their zoo. They watch us all. They're only making sure that we don't trip and fall. Now they look so hard, but they can't tell us why they're here and just what's for because they don't know who opened up the door. There's other terms as well, and what many people do not realize is that there are many synonyms for them in the New Testament. I can distinctly remember memorizing Romans 8, for I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor rulers nor things present nor things to come nor powers nor height nor depth or anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And I thought to myself, what in the world is a power? Well, we distinctly find them in other lists. 1 Corinthians 15, then comes the end when he delivers the kingdom of God the Father after destroying every rule, every authority, every power. Ephesians 1, far above all rule, all authority, and power, and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age, but also in the one to come. In other lists, Paul adds things like cosmic powers, spiritual forces of evil, thrones, and other things. Each of these and more in their own way contributes something to what we understand about these gods, for they are in their own way each synonyms. The main thing I want you to see from them here is that many of them imply a kind of culture in heaven. Multiple levels of bureaucracy, power, authority, and rank. I very much believe that this parallels our own world of politics, governments, and nations. The host of heaven truly is a host of heaven. I believe there's more than one kind of creature up there. Some of them might be called seraphim, others cherubim. However, even these words are, again, functional. A cherub is a guardian, while a seraph is also a guardian, but the word also focuses on their shining, fiery appearance. I think it's important to remember, very important, that not all of these creatures are evil. Many remain loyal to the Lord and still serve him in heavenly places. That's where we get the holy seraphim idea, right? In Isaiah 6. If Revelation 12.4 can be taken literally at all, we have reason to think that two-thirds of the heavenly hosts, the stars, in fact did not fall. There's two other words I want to bring up here as we think about these entities that populate the spiritual realm, and especially as we think about those that fight against us all at Ephesians 6. The first of these words is the word demon. This is a fascinating word. From the time of Homer onward, the word seems to have meant a divinity of some kind. He derives it from a word that means divine. Plato derives it from a word that means to know. Eusebius, the church father, derived it from a word that means to fear. Modern scholars think it comes from a word that means to divide destiny. So, what's a demon? Well, a demon is an intelligent, fearsome, otherworldly creature that can claim a stake on your soul. Most people think that demons are fallen angels. Now, I've kind of slightly changed my way I talk about this with people. I'm willing to answer right now that that is sometimes correct. For example, Deuteronomy 32, 17 says they sacrificed to demons that were not God, to gods they had never known, to new gods that had come recently whom your fathers had never dreaded. But the thing is, the word for demon in Deuteronomy 32, 17 is shedu, and a shedu is a territorial guardian that is a god. Paul quotes from this verse in 1 Corinthians 10 about being partakers with demons. But you need to understand something. Most people, when they think of demons today, are not thinking about these gods, rather they're thinking about the evil or unclean spirits of the gospels. And as we'll see next time, these critters are most definitely not the gods of the nations, at least not according to any of the ancient writers. The second word is stoicheia. Paul talks about how we are kept slaves to the stoicheia, the ESV translated as Elementary principles in Galatians. This word derives from the word stich, meaning a row or a rank. So again, this is a functional term. These are creatures that have rank. It could refer to impersonal cosmic principles, philosophical concepts like the laws of nature, impersonal ritualistic systems, semi-personal cosmic powers, and even fallen angels. The Greeks use it in many ways. Paul tells us that these are not gods by nature. And thus, like the unclean spirit demons, these are likely something different from the gods that we're talking about today in the spiritual realm. But nevertheless, they mean you harm. Now, I wanna get back to the heart of the great enemy of our faith and talk about the creature that Luther identified in his song. Now, legend says that Luther threw ink at him while in seclusion in the Wartburg Castle. A third of the stars seem to have followed their leader, whom John identifies as the dragon, the serpent, the devil, and Satan. Now, we use each of those as kind of proper names for him. But again, each of these is really telling you something different about his function. A dragon explains his ferocity. A serpent hints at his guile and his cunning. The devil means a slanderer while Satan means an accuser. Importantly, Paul talks about someone called in 2 Corinthians 4, 4, the God of this world. Remember that verse? Who has blinded the minds of unbelievers. Now amazingly, many fathers and even recent scholars have argued that the God of this world is actually God. Probably the biggest reason for this is that it is God who hardens hearts and brings blindness in certain passages. So yet from Tertullian to Calvin, many others have said, no, this is Satan who is the God of this world. Why have they said that? I give you lots of reasons. We can't hear them all today because you're not ready for it, but I will give you three of the most important I think you can understand. The first one is that, yes, God blinds minds. However, he does so, as our confession teaches, as the first cause, but he often uses instruments, including sometimes even the person himself, like Pharaoh. Remember that whole thing, God hardened his heart, no, Pharaoh hardened his heart? Well, which one is it? The answer is yes. In other words, you can have two beings blinding in two different senses. God is the ultimate decreer, but Satan can be the active evil agent. Second thing, he isn't technically the god of this world. I don't like that translation. He's the god of this age, Aion. This age refers to the present evil age as opposed to the age to come of Christ. It's an eschatological term, not a geographical one. And as such, this points to the devil. Finally, we have a virtual parallel in John where Jesus calls Satan the prince. of this world. Now, when he says world that time, he does say the world down here. Ruler of the world is the word archon. And in fact, archon is one of these terms that substitute for the gods. In fact, it's used of the Prince of Greece and the Prince of Persia in Daniel 10 in the Septuagint. We will see a little more next time. In fact, the very center of John's gospel is the first of these uses. It says, now is the judgment of this world. Now will the ruler of this world be cast out? Please don't tell me you think that's God. That's the devil. And then it says, when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself. Guess what? This exactly parallels the very center of the apocalypse of Revelation, when it says the great dragon was thrown down. The ancient serpent is called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world. He was thrown down to the earth and his angels were thrown down with him. And I heard a loud voice in heaven saying, now the salvation and power and kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come for the accuser of our brothers have been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before God. It's the exact same thing. in John and Revelation. Now, just here, I want to give you something concrete to help you tie Satan back to those who are forbidden to be worshipped by the first commandment. First, you should have already seen that the God of this age is the same language used as the commandment. You should have known that God's before me. Satan is identified as a God. Why, though? Well, we usually think of him as a fallen angel, don't we? Of course, remember, angel is just one of those terms that used to describe God, so it's not a problem that you do that. But the answer lies in uncovering two other names that this creature has gone by as the terms devil and Satan show you. Those are, again, functional terms that show him to be a slanderer and accuser. And today, yes, we call him the devil and Satan, and it seems that even the New Testament uses that akin to a proper name, but there are other names for him that many people have never considered actually are him. This line of thinking first struck me as I was wondering to myself, why is it that we read so much about Satan in the New Testament and almost nothing about him in the Old Testament if he really is the great enemy of humanity? I think that's a fair question, right? But then I read Matthew 12, 25 through 27. And so what Jesus says, every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand. And if Satan casts out Satan, he's divided against himself, how then will this kingdom stand? And if I cast out demons by Beelzebul, by whom do your sons cast them out? So in the passage, Satan is Beelzebul. But who's that? Well, the word comes from the Old Testament in 2 Kings where it renders it as Beelzebub instead of Beelzebub. The word Zebub means flies while Baal means Lord. So Baal Zebub is Lord of the flies. And yes, that's exactly where William Goldberg got the name of his book from. But notice that Matthew reads Zibul, not Zibub. So some scholars think Zibul is a kind of Jewish mockery of Zibub. Some think it means a house. Others think it means a prince. So Prince Baal. Uh-oh, does that sound familiar? Frankly, all of these are possible and they each point to the main God that we identify as Baal or somebody else I'll tell you about in a minute. For example, the house connection is actually right here in this text when it talks about a house divided. It's a word play on Beelzebub. In verse 29, the house returns again as someone entering a strong man's house after he first binds the strong man. Well, not coincidentally, that's the identical language used of Jesus binding Satan in Revelation 20. Second, Baal is called the Prince throughout the Canaanite story called the Baal Cycle, who not coincidentally ends up building a house for himself. And we've just seen how Jesus calls Satan the Prince. of this world. Later, Paul will call him the prince of the air, who's now at work in the sons of disobedience. At work doing what? At work in blinding them. So if Satan is Baal, then Satan actually is talked about a lot of times in the Old Testament, and you never knew it. As for flies, this one takes us to the second important name. In Revelation 2.13, we read Jesus telling the church at Pergamum in western Turkey that they dwell where Satan's throne is. What in the world is Satan's throne? While scholars give various options, the only one that makes sense to me is the thing that was there that looked like a giant throne. It was called the Altar of Zeus, and guess what? We've already seen how Hitler and Obama channeled its energy for their bewitching speeches. This seems all the more conclusive when you understand that the altar's main depiction is the mythological battle between the giants and the Olympian gods known as the Gigantomachia. where Zeus defeats the giants, becoming their ruler, exactly what Jesus says of Baal, the prince of demons. So how does this relate to flies, you wonder? Well, a verter of flies was a name given to Zeus in several Greek sources. So vitally, nearly all scholars recognize that Zeus is in fact Baal. Both are the storm god whose weapon was the lightning bolt. Hence, Obama replicating Zeus' altar under the bronco name Thunder in Mile High is crazy. Also, this is likely why Jesus saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. What I'm telling you is that Satan is Baal, is Zeus. Now, if that's true, that puts a different perspective on it, doesn't it? because you heard that Zeus isn't real all your life. And now I'm telling you that he is literally the enemy of our faith. One of the main reasons for explaining all this is epitomized by Daniel Defoe under the author of Robinson Crusoe. In one of his writings, he starts to discuss Elijah as the prophets of Baal. He calls these priests the devil's priests. That's so fascinating. He's so much more right than he even knows. They were summoned by Elijah to decide the dispute between God and Baal. The priests came, he rightly notes, because the devil had no idea what was going to happen. He couldn't foretell the future. But then he says, for Satan was not such a fool as not to know that Baal was a non-entity, a nothing. Defoe is saying what almost everybody I know believes about Baal. He doesn't exist. He's a no thing. Why do we think this way? It's because Baal was worshiped through idols. But idols, as we all know, have no real existence. And that's true. I'm not being sarcastic when I say that. Idols have no real existence. But since we confuse gods and idols, therefore Baal has no real existence. Taking us back to idols for a minute. And the second commandment. What so few understand is that the idol was a house. While the overlay of gold or silver was viewed as the flesh of the gods. On the ladder, a hymn to Osiris. An Egyptian text reads, the body is a bright and shining metal, and the brilliance of the turquoise encircleth thee. Another Egyptian text says, from the Middle Kingdom on, the flesh of the gods is of gold, and their bodies of the most precious materials. Augustine explains that the ancients like Hermes taught that idols were, quote, the bodies of the gods. Leviticus mocks this in the covenant curses when it says, I will destroy your high places and cut down your incense altars and cast your dead bodies upon the dead bodies of your idols and my soul will abhor you. But friends, that doesn't mean the entity represented by the idol doesn't exist. Here's the old understanding. The priesthoods of the ancient Near East distinguished between the cult statue fashioned by human hands and the divinity which it was believed could be made to reside within, but not only within, the cult statue. John Frame explains it this way. He says in paganism, the relationship between the image and the god is more than merely pictorial or even representative. something of the sanctity of the God attaches to the image itself. In other kinds of paganism, the relation between the image and the God may be thought of as a sacramental conduit of divine influence, or as a representation of the divine, in which case the image deserves reverence because of what it represents. So the entity was united to the idol by inviting the spirit to enter it. Sort of like unsuspecting kids do when they play with a Ouija board. But then through secret dark arts and with the help of herbs and gems and odors, the idol would become inhabited. Then it was said that the statue could speak, engage in prophecy and other things. Because it was an idol, people thought that they could control the entity. One scholar puts it this way, when a non-physical being manifested in a statue, this anchored the being in a controlled location where living human beings could interact with it through ritual performance. In order for human beings to interact with deities and to persuade them to create, renew, maintain the universe, these beings had to be brought down to earth. This interaction had to be strictly controlled in order to avoid both potential dangers of unrestricted divine power and the pollution of the divine by the impurity of the human world. While the ability of deities was to act in the visible human realm was brought about through the manifestation in a physical body, manifestation in one body did not in any sense restrict the deity, for the non-corporeal essence of the deity was unlimited by time and space and could manifest in all its bodies, in all locations, all at one time. That's what he's saying the ancients believed. And that's pretty wild stuff. And it's almost completely foreign to the way we think of idols today in the West. What's an idol for people today? Oh, I shop too much at the shopping mall. So this is why I wanted to make the connection between Baal, whom people think is a non-thing, and Satan, whom Christians believe is very real. They're the same thing. They're the same entity. And that puts a very powerful spin on both the first and second commandments. Now, importantly, again, what Jesus has been said about the things like these spiritual creatures being able to inhabit more than one idol, what has just been said about that being able to be in more than one place at a time, this is one of the reasons why it was so important to ground ourselves in the nature of God last time. Because we're dealing here with entities that are extremely powerful and very different from us. And yet, compared to God, they have no power. In fact, compared to God, they have no existence. Just like compared to God, we have no existence. For both of our existences, our existence and Satan's existence, is only at the good pleasure of God, who alone always exists in his life and himself. So even if they can do things on earth from various idols, my thought is, as a Christian, who cares? A lot of people don't want you to talk about Satan, or as we will see next time, about demons. They become very superstitious. They think to do so is to invite the thing into your life. Nonsense. These creatures need a deliberate act of your will to let them in, and merely talking about them and trying to understand them is not that. Otherwise, you would become possessed just by reading your Bible. But how can you fight your enemy if you don't know who he is? But also, how can you fight your enemy if you don't even know who God is? For it is God alone who is able to fight such an enemy, as is proven time and again in stories like Elijah and the Priests of Baal, or Jesus calming the storm as he shows his mastery over the sea and the storm. You say, well, how's that mastery over the gods? Well, the sea is the god Yam, and the storm is the god Baal, to the Canaanites who lived up there. And that's why I want to end this discussion of the gods today. There's many entities throughout history that have been worshipped as gods by the people, peoples of this world. Nearly every ancient culture has them. It is Christianity alone that gives you the means to understand them properly and to fight them, not by ignoring them and not to pretend by them coming back into our culture with a vengeance is just silly. I began today with three ideas. The first demonstrated how the Third Reich was deeply fascinated by the occult. They believed in the gods, even if you don't. If we had time, I could go on to show you that the Third Reich, in one sense, never ended. And that is directly related to our current war because it has deeply occult origins. One way in which it never ended appears in what I believe to be One of the darkest and most twisted turn of events after the war, when our own government, after the war was over, implemented a secret operation called Paperclip. at least part of which was declassified in the 1980s and 90s that showed how our elected and unelected officials actually assimilated at least 1,600 German Nazi scientists into our own institutions, such as NASA and our intelligence agencies. You know they didn't tell you everything about this assimilation. They justify this, of course, as needing help to continue to fight the Cold War against the communists. So what, you bring in 1,600 Nazis that murdered all those people in the war? I'm deeply skeptical that this was all there was to it, especially given the otherworldly obsessions of these fascists. How could I not be when Satan is involved at the roots? By the way, Thor is the storm god, and I've often wondered, Zeus and Thor, huh? Makes you wonder. Then we looked at how there is this hidden association between the Nazi flag, the ancient swastika symbol, and sexual deviancy of the especially political trans agenda and the recent subversion of our culture through an innocuous Barbie movie, a doll that had its own roots in the same Germany. The fascist ties are not incidental, and I believe one of the greatest lies that we have been told in our public school system for decades about fascism is how it is a right-wing phenomenon. This was never the case, ever. As a Nazi was literally a National Socialist German Workers' Party. That's what it was. That's what the word means. I wonder why might we have been lied to about that given Operation Paperclip? Last week, I grounded this spiritual war and idea that it is fought to a large degree on a battlefield of the mind, particularly through ideas and philosophies that come through institutions and people who have been taken captive to do Satan's will. Again, Paul tells the Colossians, see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty to see it according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, the stoichia, and not according to Christ. And I said that part of our war is that, quote, we destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God to take every thought captive to obey Christ. This refers both to opinions raised against the gospel and those raised against God's law, including natural laws like biological male and female. And yes, I'm saying that these ideologies of the trans and woke movements are deeply satanic in origin, and I believe were called upon as Christians to fight against these strongholds, destroying them with the truth of God's word. Allow me a brief bunny trail here, as I recently heard a pastor, his name is Andrew Sedra, a man born in Egypt, who has suffered terribly at the hands of Muslims. He said something very interesting. When asked why he is so political, his answer was, I'm not political. Politics just became religious. Everything that used to be biblical is now political. Everything that used to be theological is now cultural. Everything that used to be spiritual is now social. And he's spot on. Friend, abortion is not a political issue, it is a moral issue. Same goes for so many of these other things you are being told is political and should stay out of churches. Ironically, by the very same people who have no problem bringing their political issues into their churches. Yet Christians fight this battle on many fronts of this war, and so I'm going to flip it on you. Here's another example that came across my path from a pastor friend of mine who's dealing with a kind of a knee-jerk racist reaction to current events. This person rightly seeing much bad fruit from, quote, the degenerate, gay, woke, communist civil rights activists, nevertheless turns around and says, the solution is found when, quote, the Christian white man rules and everyone prospers. Huh? What does being white have to do with anything? That's just racism. The kingdom of God knows no colors. My friend and president of the Reformed Baptist Seminary, Nick Kinnicott, said to me this week of this. Their version of Western civilization is based on European descent, not faith and reason. Huh, that sounds like the Nazis. They truly believe in the superiority of white people, that only white people can truly be civilized, sanctified, and rational. It's a disgusting, ungodly, evil-hearted repudiation of the gospel that is for every tongue, tribe, people, and nation. This is the opposite version of the same evil stuff we find in the leftist woke version of the false gospel. And thus I want to end with a verse that you may not have considered in quite this way until right now. Galatians 1, eight and nine, kind of thesis statement of that letter. Paul says not once, but twice, that even if we are an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary from the one we preach to you, let him be accursed. Have you ever caught that part before an angel from heaven? Have you ever believed it possible? What have I said today about the word angel, that it substitutes in for in the Greek? Elohim, with the Hebrew, the gods. Paul is saying that these gods can themselves send false gospels to the churches, infiltrating and bewitching them. Nothing Paul ever wrote makes him more angry. No wonder the apostles are constantly telling us to guard the truth. This isn't just a problem of culture, it's a problem that infiltrates our churches. Friends, politics are important, but you can't fight the devil with politics. You can't fight him with protests or marches or sit-ins. You can't fight him with info wars or commercials or news outlets. You can't fight him with memes or with a thousand different takes on what really happened to Charlie Kirk. You can't fight him with guns. You can't fight him with tanks. What happens in the Greek stories when humans try to stop Zeus? He swats them away like little flies. These creatures are older, smarter, craftier, and more cunning than you could ever imagine, and they are real. They are not make-believe. So how do we fight them? I'll give you more of this in our last week, but I want to end the way I started today. Luther told you, one little word shall fell them. And what is that word? That word above all earthly powers abideth. You know, I skipped a couple there, because I don't know if you've ever thought about this before. That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them abideth. What does that mean? It means they're trying to get rid of the word. But the word abideth. That word is Christ and his gospel, that we are saved and sanctified by faith alone, in Christ alone, by grace alone. He's the same yesterday, today, and forever. The King of kings and the God of gods and the Lord of lords. And we will see, as we will see in a couple of weeks, he has already fought and won the war. The spirit and the gifts are ours through him who with us sideth. Jesus fights now the battles for us, for he is on our side, on the side of his brothers who believe the gospel by faith. He's given us the spirit and the gifts so that we might overcome to the end. So let good and kindreds go, this mortal life also, the body they may kill. God's truth abideth still. His kingdom is forever. Lord, please help us to understand what we have heard today. I believe we are a culture and we are a church and we are reformed people in desperate need of recovering the supernatural worldview of your holy word. This is not biblicism. This is the truth of your word. It is what it says and we need to believe it. And we need to believe again the first commandment, what it teaches us. We are seeing the return of the gods with a vengeance in our society, in the West, and it's deliberate, and it is intentional, and they mean us harm. And we can fight them if we know who they are, and we know what our weapons are, and we know the truth of the gospel. May it shine forth from this pulpit, may it shine forth from the lives of the people who hear this word, and we may not shrink back and cower in the face of evil, for Jesus has defeated it. It is won. The battle is finished. And thank God for it. Thank you for saving us out of the realm of the domain and the dominion of the darkness of the prince of this world, of the one God of this world who has blinded the minds of unbelievers. If you did not shine the light upon us and regenerate us, we would still be in that darkness. But yours is the power to save and to sanctify, to free us from evil. And so please, Lord, Use these powers in our lives. This might be something that we hear that isn't just head knowledge, but that is transformative to our lives from this day forward until you call us home. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.