Okay, so we are continuing our discussion on the dispensations. And to recap, we had sinlessness, which is the first one. We had a failure of the will. We were unable to control our own sin, nature, as evidenced by Cain. In fact, everybody actually failed, except for Noah and his three sons. However, after the cataclysm, They demonstrated that sin didn't indeed survive the flood. So here we are today on society. Since self-control of sin is possible, impossible, is it possible to make laws? Now who is the first one to make laws? To make a community. Yes, Cain. He went to the land of wanderers and he built the first city. Exactly. And when you have a city, when you have a bunch of people living together, You got to have some rules other than survival of the fittest. But survival of the fittest was the main rule of that day because right after that they talk about the Nephilim, the heroes, the soldiers, the warriors, the mighty men, cream braids, if you will. And how did that work for them? It didn't. didn't work for him at all. So they had the cataclysm, as it's called in the Hebrew, and the continents were developed, the whole topography of the earth was rearranged, which meant everything was rearranged, weather patterns and all this. They come out of the ark, Noah and Ham have a little issue, whatever that is is unclear, the Bible doesn't go into any great detail and a lot of people have waxed eloquent on it, but here we are now. Can society control our sin nature? Hmm. What were they supposed to do? during this time period. What did God tell Noah to do when they came off the ark? Well they did that, that's right. That in fact is the first description of a sacrifice. an altar and the Olam or the ascending sacrifice. We don't know what they did pre-flood. What kind of sacrifices they had. We can wax eloquent, but the Bible just flat does not tell us. And so from Noah doing the Olam or the ascending sacrifice, he was also told, him and his descendants were also told to do something else. Well people do that on their own, you don't have to tell them about that, but what are they supposed to do when they multiply? Spread out. Now if you're a fan of Schofield and his dispensations, their failure to spread out is what caused God to come down and judge them at Babel and then God dispersed them on his own. I want to put forth the idea that that is probably a very simplistic view of what, in fact, is the problem. If we turn to Genesis chapter 11. Oops, I didn't mean to touch that. Sorry, in verse 1. Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as the people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And this talks about the building of the tower, which we have come to call the Tower of Babel. And we'll go into more detail in that. But if we drop down to verse 6. And the Lord said, Behold, they are one people, and they all have one language. And this is only the beginning of what they will do, and nothing they propose to do will now be impossible for them. And if we go back up to verse four, here, I think, is the danger. This is the real issue that God wanted to prevent them from doing. And they said, come, let us build ourselves a city. Well, obviously, they had those in the past, so that's not a problem. And a tower. Nothing wrong with towers. We build lots of them today. We call them skyscrapers, among other things. We're this top in the heavens and let us make, and here's the problem, a name. Let's make a name for ourselves. lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth. And thus God says nothing that they propose to do now will be impossible for them. And whatever sense he means that, we can, he doesn't describe, it could be in every sense, it could be in the religious governmental sense. But here we see at the Tower of Babel, we see the beginnings of making a name for ourselves. What's in a name? Possession. What's that? Possession. Possession. Elaborate. Identification. Identification. Ownership. Explain. Ownership. If you're the one naming something, then you have possession of it, you have control of it, you have say... Well, they're making a name for themselves. They're going to be different. Couldn't be. If we turn to Philippians chapter 2 verse 9, we'll see another name. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed upon him Ah, the name that is above every name. So that at the name of Jesus, what shall happen? Every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Christ is Lord to the glory of the Father. What's in the name? Everything is in the name. Salvation is in the name. Everything is in the name. It is all about the name. What are the three sons of Noah? What is Shem? What does his name mean? Well, I just told you. It means name. His name is name. Because it's all about the name. And thus, Noah called him, once again in Hebrew, you gotta love him, name. Gotta love these people, it's imaginative. What's your name? Name. Can never forget it. But everything is in the name. So when we say that they're going to make a name for themselves, I'm going to say that we are implying that they are doing something totally different than what was done before the flood, but kind of based on what was occurring in that time frame. Now, if we go back up to Genesis chapter 10, and we want to discuss in verse 8, Khush-fathered Nimrod. Now this little paragraph here, it's a short blurb right here, and it's put here because he's discussing the genealogies, and the writer does not want to stop discussing the genealogies to explain all about Nimrod, so he goes through the genealogies, then he goes into detail in chapter 11 about what was important about Nimrod. Now the name means rebellious. And as Jim brought up last week, it may have just been given to him after the fact because he was rebellious. He was a mighty man before the Lord. Who comes before God? No one. But Nimrod had placed himself before God. He was the mighty one. Let's say that Nimrod was the first one to say and develop this whole idea of authority in one person based upon power. That's why he's a hunter. Power. And what do you need to legitimize your government? It's a foreign concept to us because we have, in this day and age, we have taken our concepts and we have separated them out and we pretend that they're not related. Friends, they are very much related. What is the source of your values? Your worldview. Your worldview is based upon? As anybody. We'll go back to the 60s. What was the V word in the 60s? Wasn't victory, that was World War II. Values. It was all about values. You got to have the right values. You have the right morality. But where does all that come from? For the Christian, where does it come from? The Bible. It comes from your Religion, faith. I don't use the word religion except as a system of works. But in fact, it's only found one time in the New Testament, in a Greek word that's only found one time in the New Testament, whose meaning is very obscure. That's in Peter. Pure religion and undefiled is this. I'm not sure I would have, as a translator, I would use that word. Because religion, in every other time it's used, around us is a system of works. How I can make a, gosh, name for myself. That's what works is all about. Making a name for ourselves. So here they are. They developed a society to control man's sinfulness. How'd that work for them? It worked very well. Absolutely worked very well. Oh, you have all these bricks, and now we need to do something. Oh, we're going to build this temple, this ascending temple, so we can go up and I will be your messenger between the material and the spiritual, between you and our God, who happens to be me. You've got to be very smart. Absolutely. This is not something you cobbled together in a day. Now we need to come out of this a moment. And I want to show you something here. Where's the name Bevel come from? Babel is a Hebrew word that describes the tower, and it means confusion. Is there such a word in the Hebrew as Babylon? It's not there. Every time you read in your translation the name Babylon, it's not there. It was put there by the translators. In this case, they wanted to prevent confusion. Unfortunately, when you go back and read it in the Hebrew, you're confused because Babylon isn't there. It's there in the New Testament because it's a Greek word. But where did they get that word from? Because the problem is, scholarship has confused Babel with Babylon. And we talked about this a little bit when we went through Genesis. This is the area of South Turkey, Northern Iraq. Iraq was, let's see, Ararat was up here. They actually built Bebel, the tower, here. Where's Babylon? The city. It's going to be way, way, way down here. And we discussed at the time that the reason they couldn't build it there was because It's underwater. This is the ancient shoreline. Babylon is built down here. They couldn't build Babylon in those days because what had not yet occurred after the flood that's going to make all that water suck up? The Ice Age. The ice ages post-flood. It did occur. There was one. They estimate between 300 to 500 years after the flooding, if that long, and it lasted for about 500 years. But all that moisture, because remember I said that not only did the topography change, but also the weather changed. after the flood. They did not have a homogenous weather pattern anymore. Warm, humid, hazy all day, all night. They never had rain because the water was so close to the ground that it came up to water the ground. Don't have that now. And so Babylon at this time is under water so he couldn't build it there. So where did they get the word Hebrew word that's in there for Babel that's actually translated Babylon. The reason I'm going into great detail here is because it actually ends up in Revelation. So we got to have a clear understanding of the difference of them or we're going to miss the significance of it. And here's where similarities can hurt us because the languages, if I can find it again here, yeah. The languages are similar but they're not the same. So in Hebrew the word bevel means confusion but bebil is not a Hebrew word. And you think, well, how did they confuse the two? Well, they didn't. When you read in Hebrew, how many consonants are on the page? None. Not a single one. You, the reader, fill those in. And so they're spelled exactly the same, B-D-L in our language. Sounds like a call sign, right? There's no vowels, excuse me. Not consonants, vowels. Thank you. That's right. Thus, when you read in the Old Testament, the word for Babylon, for Babel, the tower is BBL. When you read about what we call is Babylon, in the Hebrew it's spelled BBL. But the words are different. Hebrew, it means Confucian. In Akkadian, which is where they think this comes from, it means gate of God. Babylon is the plural form of that, and the Greeks came along and said, we're going to transliterate that. In other words, we're just going to spell it in our language, and it became Babylon. Do you know that the modern site of ancient Babylon today is called Babel, just like in ancient times? Why is this important? Why spend the time on this trivial, piddly information? What they were doing at the tower is They were developing a government based upon their own religion, because values, what you believe is right and wrong, is not some abstract. It's not something you pull out of the air. It's what you believe. It is your faith. It is your, so to speak, religion. Therefore, even atheists have religion. It's just they, secular humanism, they are the answer to their own God. Gee, that's not much different from what Nimrod was doing. So when God came down and said, nothing that they want to do can be withheld from. In other words, they've come together, they've unified, they've agreed to believe in this, and what's going to happen to the gospel message? It's going to disappear. Which is exactly why God brought the flood to begin with, to prevent the gospel message from disappearing. So God, well, we can't, let's see, it's not time for the fire cell yet. And I can't do the flood thing anymore. I told him I wouldn't do that. Dust storm's not going to quite do it. Instant language day. For all you who ever had a problem learning a language, that was your day. You needed to be there. Because you got a new language quick. That's like, you know, that's like the movies. Okay, I can speak it now, I'm good. Boom! Here we are. And they dispersed. Where do you find ziggurats at in the ancient world? What? Everywhere! Where do you think that happened? They dispersed. They took it with them. What did they learn from Babel? Probably nothing. Can't go too high. They learned nothing. The Egyptians, with help probably from Abraham, according to one author who came and showed them the right way to build pyramids, because they were struggling there, so to speak. You find ziggurats in Central America, Mexico, you find them in the Orient, in India, you find them everywhere. Why? Because they took that technology with them. And what did they do? They built them to worship whom? perversions of Nimrod's faith. Not the true God. So what does this tell us about people? That's right. What does it tell us about us? That didn't change them one bit. And if they'd been allowed to stay there, the very gospel would have been quashed again. So God dispersed them. There was a godly line that saved the gospel message, probably through the line of Shem. But also, God had to go call somebody. And he was, what was Abraham? He was an idolater. He worshipped in idols. So what did they learn at Babel? Nothing. They got that. They got language. I love those people. They got language. I was looking at the bookstore, you know. Yeah, you know, gosh, you know, I can immerse myself in a language. No, I just need a dose of the Holy Spirit and I got language. And so, but somebody did learn something that day. And that would be Satan. Because part of what's going to happen from here on out in the dispensations is you have this worldwide dispersal, but now you have this worldwide coming together. And what's the glue that binds them? It's what we call today Gnosticism. Gnosticism is actually the basis for Pantheism and Panentheism, which covers most of the Orient. We're going to see toward the end of this quarter Gnosticism in Christianity, it entered the church early on. Gnosticism in Judaism, it entered there before it entered the church. Gnosticism in Islam. Because if you're going to have a false prophet, who's going to bring all the world religions together, you've got to bring them together without elevating one over the other, otherwise they're going to kill each other. Because there's no voting in this. I want to be top dog and if I got to eliminate you. Not unlike what's happening today. Not unlike what happened a thousand years ago. Not unlike what's always happened. Because remember, when you look at ancient warfare, It's all about ethnicity. In fact, there has been only one faith on the earth that has not been tied to a specific culture or ethnicity. And that would be? Christianity. I know you know. You sit at the table and listen to me. Christianity. You can sit in the back of the room. Christianity is the only faith that is not tied to an ethnicity. It's not tied to a culture. If it was tied to a culture, it would never have gotten out of Israel or Judah at the time. But it went everywhere. It went to the Orient. It went to the West. It went to the North. It went to the South. It went everywhere across ethnic lines. But every faith other than that is ethnic. Well, there's one that's kind of not. That'd be secular humanism. Because that's really the foundational one of all of these, is this man shall be God. And so in all of this, The foundational belief here is that the material is bad, and the spiritual is good. But we're all material because we've got bodies that break down and hurt, and we get sick, and you get these growths and stuff, and you get cataracts, and you hurt your foot, and you get septicemia and die. It's just bad juju. So how do you overcome that? Well, let's see, in 20th century America, we said we just evolve. And we're going to evolve until we're disembodied energy states. Like, that made it any different than Hinduism, where we all go back to nirvana once we've stopped making mistakes and we don't have to reincarnate into bugs and stuff. Reincarnation is not a reward. Only Westerners think of it as a reward. It's not. It's a punishment because you didn't make it. Why did not the Hindus build hospitals? That's right. You deserved it. You messed up in your past life and you got reincarnated as a lost caste Filthy scum of the earth with teeth rotting out, bathing in the Ganges. Well, you deserve that. Why am I going to help you? Look at me. I was good last time, because I'm better now. A lot of mercy there, right? False religion has no mercy. All this began here. This is the key to understanding this. Now when Nimrod left Babel, he went to Nineveh. He built Nineveh. Nineveh is almost due east of this. He couldn't go down to Babylon. It's underwater. So he goes in and he builds Nineveh and two or three of those cities over there. But when Babylon was built, it was built in memory of Babel. That's why it has the name Gate of the Gods. And we go to Revelation, and we will in May here, we're going to see that the Babylon, the mystery religion, the great harlot, comes right from here, Bebel. Everything is right here. This is probably more pivotal to understand than about the law. The law is interesting and obviously it takes up most of the written scripture in the Old Testament. But this here is really the key to understanding everything that's going to transpire and everything that's going to be occurring in Revelation. because that is the summation. That's kind of like the final exam of all the scripture is the understanding of revelation. So we have to start right here at the foundation of it. We don't know what happened before the flood. If they wrote I assume they did. It was voiced away. Did they build cities? Well, we know they did. They were voiced away. And even if we uncovered any of them, what would they look like? How do you know that you actually uncovered one and not one from this time period? How would you know the difference? We grade things by technology because that's not how we think, is it? The more technology used, the more advanced you are, the smarter you are. Isn't that how we think? Absolutely. If you can build a rocket to go to the moon, you must be top of the pile. The fact that you use that rocket technology to destroy millions of people in one time, that's a small matter. Why do we think that way? Why do we have the worldview we have? I think it goes back to self and the elevation of self. I don't mean that as a psychological thing, but it just makes sense. We're always comparing ourselves to others. Or I'm better than you are. trying to make our name. Jim's right. 2 Corinthians, I think it's chapter 10, says they are not wise who compare themselves basically among themselves with others. And yet we do it all the time. But if I'm going to compare myself with others, I'm doing the comparison, I get to make the criteria so I come out on top. That's culture. Now, if I'm Islam, I'm going to pick a different set of criteria because obviously I'm not going to use your criteria because I'm not going to look too good. So I use my criteria and I look very good. That's why it's really impossible, not impossible, very difficult to understand why people do what they do because we're still looking at it through a certain worldview. defined by our Western culture. But we need to try to break free from that. I, on the other hand, was raised all over the world, equal to spies in almost every culture I was in. Because when you're in somebody else's culture, you're already a second class citizen. In the 60s, well, 50s and 60s, in the military, under the status of forces agreement, if you're in an auto accident in Germany, guess whose fault it is? Wouldn't have been an accident if you hadn't been stationed there. It's automatically your fault. Because you're not German. Wow. Is that true here? Like in the U.S.? No, we'll take money for everybody. In Korea, you could not own land because you're not Korean. You couldn't own a business. You marry a Korean and that's your front person, but you cannot do that. Well, 30 years ago we were saying the same thing about the Japanese. What boogeyman are we going to chase next? We need to stop that. We need to look at what the scriptures are saying and understand the commonality of it and not chase the stage dressing. Because Satan will just manipulate around so that the next buggy man will be, huh. ISIS now. Yeah, there you go. It's like Hydra. Remember the Avengers? You know, the little movies going around? Cut off his head, two more take its place. You think Satan's playing that game? You stomp out one little group and two more pop up next door. It's reached the point now that we are arresting people and putting them on trial for what they think about doing. We used to wait until after you're actually guilty of something. That's how much it has changed us. We don't even wait for you to be guilty anymore. Now if you just have the intention. Conspiracy. What's that? Conspiracy. Well, I don't know if it'd be a conspiracy, but there are people who do do that, and I've gone through a lot of their literature. Because when you get into eschatology, you really get into a lot of that stuff. And I don't know that I can say all of it's wrong or some it's right. It's like trying to grab a cloud when you get into this stuff. And you really want to just step from one stone to another to another. So I tend to not teach about those things. Though we'll skirt on the border of that once we get into the Gnosticism. So this dispensation here ends when God disperses, but the danger doesn't go away. It's like mercury. For those of us who played with it in school and didn't get brain dead. You hit that poppin' mercury and it went everywhere. Today you call it hazmat. Back then, you played in it. But God has always preserved a remnant, always a tiny, tiny remnant of the truth. How about the church? Has the church Does it? The Church. Exactly. I'm glad you asked that because I caught my error here. When I say the Church, I mean specifically the invisible Church of Jesus Christ composed only of born-again believers down through history. It's not here, it is just His Church. Other than that, it's churches or denominations. Now, there are some who consider themselves the church. In fact, I'm in a dialogue with one guy now. He's a new Catholic. But I've yet to understand how that's distinctive from an old Catholic, because he keeps quoting the same books. He's in a different light. Yeah. Well, it's the Catholic Church. It's made a name for itself. It's become the God. So it's horrible. But isn't that exactly what Judaism did? And all the others? The persecuted church became the persecuting church. There is nothing that we as sinful human beings cannot pervert with the best of intentions. Even the scriptures. What keeps us on the path? Has to be the scripture. But it has to be because the scripture changes us every time we approach it. Hebrews 4.12. For the word of God is... The word of God is sharper than any... Actually, in the Greek it doesn't say that. Any two-sided sacrificial knife. Because in the verse or two just below that, Christ is the high priest. He is the one doing the sacrificing. And you, according to Romans 12, are supposed to be what? Living sacrifices? Paul says, I'm being poured out as a drink offering. Every time that you pick up that book to read it, it should cut you. If it doesn't cut you, if it doesn't separate out part of your worldview and error, what are you doing with it? Maybe the most important word, not most important, but for the Word of God is living. And I think that kind of like puts all everything else in perspective. It's living. But we can resist it and kill it. Church after church after church. And if we don't believe that, then we turn to Revelations and in chapters 2 and 3 we read Christ's letter to seven churches and five of them are killing the Word. We in this classroom, though, being the elders, need to be living examples and take that Word out. upstairs, everywhere. It should be changing us. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, it is just amazing just how utterly, desperately, wickedly sinful we are even after salvation. The flesh is so very strong. And it never gives up. According to Romans 8, it continues to fight, even after the battle is lost. And it will never give up until it is done away with or replaced. Let's not fall victim to it. And in our own power, we definitely will. And do. There is so much that we sin that is just totally under the radar, beyond our understanding, because we do not truly understand how desperately wicked we really are. Help us, Lord. This is the whole point of reading your word and walking your path. And so like Enoch, we walk in your light and see ourselves as you see us and understand how desperately we need you and walk in your strength. In Christ's name, amen.