Let's pray. Father, we thank you again so much for the opportunity to study your Word, and I just pray that you'd be honored and glorified by what is taught. We pray that we would achieve accuracy and that you would apply this to us, because we know all Scripture is God-breathed and is profitable for teaching, correcting, rebuking and training in righteousness. And so we pray that you would accomplish that in our lives this morning. We pray that you'd bless the reading and exposition of your word. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, so I wanna start with this being somewhat of a shorter passage than we've been covering. I wanna read it in its entirety. I always like to do that because that's how it was intended to be read. And we get the flow of thought, we get the context involved. And so picking up in Genesis 11, starting in verse one, It says, now the whole earth had one language and one speech. And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar. And they dwelt there. Then they said to one another, come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They had brick for stone and they had asphalt for mortar. And they said, come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower whose top is in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves. lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower which the sons of men had built. And the Lord said, indeed, the people are one and they all have one language. And this is what they begin to do. Now nothing that they proposed to do will be withheld from them. Come, let us go down, and there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city. Therefore its name is called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth. And from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth. So kind of playing off of the Pledge of Allegiance here, of course, we say one nation under God, but this is one nation under Satan. And I want to get the point across of really what's going on here in this, what some commentators have called the first United Nations gathering, where there was one world. And out of this, I'd like to spend some time, maybe not necessarily today, but one of the things that we see out of this is nationality is an ordinance by God. In other words, I would make the argument, it's not wrong to be patriotic. Now, if you're idolizing and maybe putting all of your hopes in your nationality and in your nation, then you've gotten out of alignment. But we see in Genesis 11, that the dividing amongst the people first by language, and then they became nations, we see that this was a, Divine ordinance, and I think it's intended to restrain evil, because if you have one government, one headquartered civilization, God's assessment of this, and we'll cover this more in detail, is that nothing they propose to do will be withheld from them. And I think we're starting to see, interestingly enough, maybe a little bit of what that looked like. Of course, there's still some restrainment there. So the first heading that I want to cover is, first of all, they had one language, one language. We see this in verse one. Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. Now I wanna first direct your attention to the word now. This is a reoccurring phrase and as we think about the context of Genesis and I've mentioned in past, but just to go into it again, I believe this was written by Moses and it was written to the generation that was surviving the wilderness wanderings. the disobedient generation that took the advice of the spies that said, oh, we can't go in there. There's no way we can win. We're gonna be defeated. We're like grasshoppers in their eyes. They heeded their words and they didn't trust in God. And so God, as punishment, caused them to wander in the wilderness until that disobedient generation died. And now this new generation is coming along. They are trusting the Lord. They are going to be entering the promised land that God promised to Abraham. and reaffirmed to Isaac and Jacob. And they need to know who their God is. So it makes perfect sense that the first five books of scripture, Moses is really capturing that thought. And then of course, within those five books, some of that is narrative of their actual travels to the land. But for example, the book of Deuteronomy, which is literally second law. If you've read through the books of the Bible, you might've read through Exodus and then you get to Deuteronomy and you're saying, I've read this before. Yes, you have. And the point was, as they were about to enter the land, they needed to hear the law, the Mosaic covenant that their fathers entered into. And they were gonna enter into that because that was going to be essentially the determining factor of whether they would be living and be blessed in the land or not. The land was given to them unconditionally, contained within the Abrahamic covenant, which we're gonna get into a couple of weeks from now in Genesis 12 and so on. But it's interesting going through Genesis, this recurring phrase of now. And so what I take this to mean is, Moses isn't giving an exhaustive history of everything that took place from the beginning. He's strategically flowing the narrative along with a specific thing in mind. And I think that's an important observation because it's going to, I think, give us really good fruit, which I think is emphasizing the line that Jesus Christ is gonna come from. And so Genesis 2.10, for example, says, now a river went out of Eden to water the garden. And from there it parted and became four riverheads. Skipping down to 3.1, now the serpent was more cunning. So you see how he's kind of making these jumps here and he's inserting these details as needed. Genesis 4.1, now Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain and said, I have acquired a man from the Lord. 4.2, then she bore again, this time his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep. So that word now should be a signal to us that, okay, pay attention. Now, of course, we wanna pay attention to all of scripture, right? But that now is signaling to us that something is about to be shared that is pertinent to the unfolding drama that we see in God's word. And this, of course, continues on. But when we come to Genesis 11, it says, now. And I think that this now is introducing a topic that's not just explaining why we have divisions in the nation. I think it's much deeper than that. In fact, I think this is the cosmos, the introduction to the cosmos, the world system that we know Jesus said, Satan is the prince and the power of the air through his apostles. And so, This is something we want to pay attention to as we get in. So it says now, and then the next phrase, the whole earth. So that is, you know, everybody is included in this gathering. They all have gathered together. Now what's wrong with that? Isn't unity good? Explicitly, right? He just told them that go forth, and subdue the earth. And they didn't go forth, they gathered and they subdued Shinar. And it wasn't to the glory of God, it was to the glory of who? Themselves, man. So we see kind of the introduction to humanism here, right? Now it's not necessarily beginning here because I think a lot of this has its roots in the pre-flood world. I think a lot of these things are part of the reason why they were destroyed. Not the sole reason, but part of. And I think this is ingrained within sinful man, that man is man-centered. We're selfish. We are worshippers of ourselves. Then it goes on to say, and had one language and one speech. Now language is literally lip. They had one lip. So in other words, they had one language, common language. Speech is literally words. So they not only had the same language, they had the same vocabulary. They said the same things. So an example I would like to share with this is, I come from Utah, and if you've ever talked to Mormons, they'll say, oh yeah, we're Christians. Yeah, we believe in the atonement. We believe in this and that. The problem is what they mean by those terms is not what you mean. In fact, it's no longer, I think, just Mormons that we see this vocabulary discrepancy. I think we see it across Christendom. That's why you can't just... say, oh, I'm this title, or I'm this banner, I'm this belief system. You have to say, OK, so what do you mean by that? And really get to the heart of the issue. What do you mean by what you say? And so another interesting point here that's listed by Arnold Fruchtenbaum, take it for what it's worth. I thought it was interesting. I'm not sure if I'm necessarily convinced, although it's a powerful example, but Arnold Fruchtenbaum argues that Hebrew was the original language spoken in Eden. And so he says, although there were no Jews around until chapter 12, all names such as Adam, Eve, Noah, Lamech, Methuselah, et cetera, are Hebrew names and have meanings only in Hebrew. Non-Hebrew names first appear after the Tower of Babel, such as those in Genesis 14. The second reason is that all the word plays before Babel only make sense in Hebrew, such as those in Genesis 2.23, 3.20, 4.1, and 4.25. This shows that the language man spoke in the Garden of Eden was the Hebrew language. Third, the naming was the first exercise of man's dominion, and whatsoever the man called every living creature, that was the name thereof. man begins exercising his dominion over the animal kingdom with the act of naming the animals. The ability to name or rename is the exercise of dominion and authority." So he brings up some interesting things, although I don't necessarily, do you have a hand wanting to shoot in the air? Go for it. I was just gonna bring up, I don't know if anyone here has seen the documentary, Patterns of Evidence, but during the Moses as far as written language is concerned, that Hebrew was probably the written language at the time before Phoenician Egypt. Sure. And there's a man, Douglas Petrovich, I've mentioned him before. He's done a book. In fact, he was doing research on the origins of the Hebrews, and he kind of stumbled upon all of this evidence that, Hebrew was the first alphabet. And so really fascinating stuff. And so it very well could be the case. One thought I had, you know, I always like to view things critically, is that, well, if Moses is writing, he could just be using the Hebrew variation of those names in order to communicate that origin. Or it very well could be the first language, don't know. Yeah, Bernie and then Dan. Charlie clump in his little series points out that 20 for at least 20% of every language in the world Yep right Yeah, in fact, I was just reading about that and how he points out that of all these historian linguistic people, they pointed out that a lot of these words have semantic or Semitic origins. And it's really fascinating to think about those things. So I thought I'd mentioned that. And Arnold Fruchtenbaum jokes in his Life of the Messiah series, he says, if you get to heaven and you're calling out to Jesus and he doesn't answer you, say Yeshua, and then he'll turn. So. Well, it's just interesting you just talked about our alphabet. Yeah. Alphabet. First two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Right. Which I've been practicing. I'm taking Hebrew this fall, and so I've got the alphabet down. I won't recite it to you now, but it goes with a tune, and so that would require me to sing, and I'm not going to do that. Keeping a finger in Genesis 11, I wanna go back to Genesis 1.5. And this is, I'm glad you mentioned Charlie Clough, because he mentions this. And I think it's easy for us to just kind of gloss over these things. And I think it's gonna have a really profound influence on your evangelistic efforts. And I'll explain why. So first of all, Genesis 1.5, says God called the light day and the darkness he called night. So the evening and the morning were the first day. So a question, what does this, God is naming things, right? He's calling the light day and the darkness he called night. What does this imply about language? It's important, what else? Where does language originate? God established it. And furthermore, Charlie Clough points out that because God established it, there is a set order to everything, to language. It's categorical, in other words. Meaning, and he uses the example, you know, when you're a young child, you start learning nouns, and you learn dog, you learn cat, and you start to learn that, you know, a fox is not a dog or a cat, it's something else. And he said, how confusing would it be if overnight the child goes to sleep, wakes up the next morning, everything's shifted? Could you learn anything? No. And so the point I wanna make is that language is God designed. And so really when we have these arguments with those who wanna attack Christianity, they wanna attack the Bible, what are they using? They're borrowing or rather stealing what God made, right? Because only certainty comes from God's word, right? Jesus, when he's praying to the father says, sanctify them by the truth. What is truth? Your word is truth. And you know, this is, we're in this confusion age, which I don't think is new to our age necessarily, where, you know, that's just your truth. That's just my truth. No, that may be your understanding of the situation, but that's not truth. And so it's something important to consider. A couple more questions on that line. What does this imply about meaning? What does it imply about meaning? If God has called something this and everything is categorizable, able to be categorized, what does it imply about meaning? He designed the meaning. And I think that's really important as we study the word. We're looking for what God meant, right? Not what it means to me, not what it means to you, not what it means to a well-revered theologian. What did God mean? And furthermore, the fact that we have God's word tells us what? He wants to communicate to us. And this is another doctrine aside to this is the fancy word is the doctrine of perspicuity, which is kind of funny because you'd think they'd have an easier word to define that. Perspicuity means that God wrote in such a way to be understood. Again, what does that imply? He wants you to know Him. He wants me to know Him. He wants your kids to know Him. He wants their kids to know Him. Why? Because when we stop wanting to know Him, we end up in the Genesis 11 foolishness, where we abandon our Creator, and we worship ourselves, or we worship, as we've been discussing in Romans, right? We exchange the glory of the Creator for images like birds, animals, and creeping things. And so lastly, what then does this imply about knowledge and truth? This is getting into some deep stuff, right? Epistemology, the study of knowledge. What is knowledge? Well, I make the argument, and it's not a popular argument in our day and age, that God's word is the source of knowledge. In fact, God is the source of wisdom and knowledge, right? Because the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Do you see how these things flow together? In other words, if you're claiming to be wise, but you don't have a fear of the Lord, You're not wise. Why? Because he is the creator. And I fear our world is trying to explain everything apart from God, and you can't do that. So I adopt, and I know there's a lot of apologetic theories. I adopt the presuppositional apologetics, meaning that we're not gonna have a conversation. If you are starting out, because they have a fundamental presupposition that God doesn't exist, So everything they have to say is trying to move away from that, right? Well, I have a fundamental presupposition that God does exist. Furthermore, I have other presuppositions that God has communicated. He's communicated in such a way that he wants to be understood. And that's what leads us into how we study the Bible, which I would argue is the literal, historical, grammatical interpretation of scripture. We look at scripture in its context. We look at the grammar and what is being communicated here. All of these things are going to help us single in what God intended to communicate. And you know what? There's gonna be passages, sometimes you apply that even rigorously, and you're still scratching your head like, I don't know what this means. And I wanna say that's okay. Don't try to fill in the gaps, because then you're gonna go off in the weeds, right? Let it soak for a little bit, study the rest of scripture, and sometimes years later, you'll study a pastor and be like, wow, how did I not understand this before? And it's an amazing thing, and I think the Holy Spirit also is a part of that process through the process of illumination. So we see that they had one language, and I wanted to spend time talking about that, because language is important, right? Language is very important, not just language, but vocabulary, right? Because if you don't have the same vocabulary, I would also argue you can't communicate. And really studying this out, and mind you, I'm by no means an expert. It's very superficial, but it's so fascinating to me. Communication comes from the root word common. And so it's literally the idea of how do I transfer what I'm thinking, what's in my brain to you? How do I do that? Well, it helps if we speak the same language, right? It helps if we have the same vocabulary. That allows the learning process to take place where I'm able to transfer what's in my brain to you. Now, hopefully what's in my brain is sourced in what God's revelation is. And so that's another, as Christians, you know, we have the benefit of studying God's word together and we can acquire and build an understanding of God's creation from what he's revealed about himself. And so we'll kinda come back up from the depths a little bit. So for those that this is kind of new to you, I don't necessarily apologize, but just keep on it. It'll come as you continue to go over these types of things. Section number two, one people. So not only were they one language, they were one people. And so we see this in verse two. And it came to pass as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar and they dwelt there. So first we see they were moving from the east, then they dwelt in Shinar. And I wish I had a map, but if you could picture a map in your head and you can think of Israel, let's see. So we've got the Mediterranean, you've got Israel right here, and then you've got a desert, and then towards the northeast quadrant of that desert would be the land of Shinar. In fact, north of there is the Caucasus Mountains where Mount Ararat was and allegedly the ark landed. And so landing there, they kind of come down, they find this beautiful valley. And it's got rivers and streams and usually in those types of cultures and civilizations, it helps to build next to water sources, why? Because water is a basic necessity of life, right? We're kind of experiencing that in Denver, right? Water is important. And so they dwell in Shinar, and then we see in verse three that we see their fellowship. Fellowship comes from the word, again, related to common, equinomia, or that's economy, excuse me. Koine Greek is common Greek. And so it's related to that idea of commonality. They had something in common. Verse three, then they said to one another, come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly. They had brick for stone and they had asphalt for mortar. So you see this kind of this collective idea. They were one in thought. And so we see their common idea. Let's make these bricks, let's build. And verse four, we see their common goal. They said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower, whose top is in the heavens. Let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. Now, that last phrase is interesting. Why would they say that? Lest we be scattered. Right. Yeah, as Gracie mentioned, this is explicit rebellion, right? God told them to scatter, and they said, lest we be scattered, let's set up shop here and let's build, and we'll make a name for ourselves. There's been some thoughts, I believe Josephus mentions this, that early interpretations of the tower reaching the heavens was to perhaps escape the flood. You know, if God sent another flood, they could escape by going to the top of their tower. If that were true, Do you see how foolish it is? Why is it foolish? Is God gonna flood the earth again? How would they know? So they don't listen, right? But before we beat them up too much, aren't we the same way? So again, it comes back. What did God say? And when we understand what God says, we respond and we practice life appropriately. And so we're seeing, right? And ironically, if that were true, why did God bring the flood? Because they're rebellion. And so, hey, let's just keep rebelling. They didn't learn the lesson. And so we see their reason. The reason to build is lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth. Now, verses five through six, we see God's assessment. And he says in verse six, the people are one. Number two, the language is one. Number three, this is what they begin to do. And so I have a note here that the people being one and the language being one is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. But notice what he says. He says, this is what they begin to do. So they're one, their language is one, and this is what they begin to do. Interesting. And then he adds, number four, nothing that they propose to do will be withheld from them. Now I mentioned in times past, when we were dealing with the New World Covenant, now again, not to be confused with the New World Order, not to be confused with the New Covenant. Others call it the Noahic Covenant, but it's essentially the covenant God made with creation after the flood. What did God say about he who sheds blood shall shall die essentially, right? Capital punishment. And we talked about the institution of human government. What does this imply about the ability of government's ability to restrain evil? that it's imperfect, right? And so I think that's one of the reasons this passage is in there is, one, I think God instituted human government because he promised not to flood the earth, but as a restrainer of evil, he says, there's gonna be human government, right? If man sheds blood by man's hand, he should have his blood shed. And so capital punishment is instituted, human government is instituted, and I think it's a restrainer of evil, but I think Genesis 11 appears here to show that The restraining of evil ability that government has is imperfect, meaning we shouldn't trust in it. It's imperfect to restrain evil. In fact, it's a powerful tool to promote all sorts of evil, right? So then we see God's solution in verses seven and eight. He says, let us go down and there confuse their language that they may not understand one another's speech, verse seven. And so this is interesting. We could go into detail, but for sake of time, we won't. This could be a subtle mention of the Trinity. Let us, you know, the Godhead, three and one, come down and confuse our language. Other commentators say, well, he's talking to angels there. Interesting to observe. Based on what we see in verses 10 through 16 of chapter 11, we start to go through the line of Shem. We haven't gotten there yet, but based on the numbers there, the Tower of Babel probably happened 101 years after the flood. 101 years after the flood. This is looking at verse 10. It says, this is a genealogy of Shem. Shem was 100 years old and begot Arphaxad two years after the flood. after he begot him 500 years and begot sons and daughters. Our facts that live 35 years and begot Salah. And so as you go through those numbers, it amounts to 101. So 101 years after the flood. It's not that long ago, right? And it just shows how fast we can change when we're left to our own devices. Point number three, one leader. And this is kind of the bulk of our study that I wanted to focus on. One leader, and that's Nimrod. Now, how do we know Nimrod was the leader of this situation? Look at Genesis chapter 10, verses eight through 10. going through the descendants of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, in verse 10, excuse me, verse eight, says, Cush begot Nimrod. He began to be a mighty one on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Therefore it is said, like Nimrod, the mighty hunter before the Lord. And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erech, Akkad, and Kalneh in the land of Shinar. So it's kind of a community area that became one with Babel as kind of the headquarters. What does it say after that? From that land, he went to Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboat, Ere and Kala. Now, why would he leave those lands for Assyria and Nineveh and so on? Babel, right? And so this is kind of what we see in the Genesis text is there's some foreshadowing and some details kind of inserted there that will then go over more detail. And this is an example where in this genealogy list, we see some different points there where Moses is kind of telling the broad sweep of the events. And then we see Genesis 11 that explains, you know, Peleg when it talks about the, In his day, the lands were divided or the division. And then we see this example of Nimrod. Now, why would it be important to insert Nimrod there? Because he wasn't a good character, right? He was leading this rebellion against God. And so just a few points about him. He began to be a mighty one on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord. Now, interestingly, some Jerusalem targums, which are basically ancient commentaries, take it for what it is. It's not infallible truth. But some of the interpretations said that he was a hunter of man and beast. So when he said he was a mighty hunter, he would hunt men and beast. which is interesting in light of he who sheds man's blood, right? Yeah. Sure. Sure, and it could be. So a lot of these details I submit to you, I think you could build a strong case. But we always need to be careful after all this talk about the importance of God's word, right? We need to keep to the text itself. So I guess that's to say, hold less tightly to those things that aren't explicitly taught in scripture. However, I think based on these occurrences, we can build a case here that Nimrod was not a good, good man. So he was the leader in Babel. And then after, the Tower of Babel division, he goes to Nineveh. Now we've talked about Nineveh, what about Nineveh? Was it a good town? Far from it. In fact, I think I have this book here by one of my professors, Dr. Andy Woods. He wrote his dissertation on Babylon and he says, it's the bookends of prophetic history. And if you have spare money, I would encourage you, it's a fascinating read. And he, in his revelation, if you want a free version, you could listen to his two-part message on the book of Revelation, where he deals with mystery Babylon there and how it has its origins right here in Genesis 11. And I think those origins are the beginning of Satan's plan. Because what do we see God doing in this narrative, right? With the line of Shem, and then we see Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and God brings about the Israelites and creates a new nation in which the Messiah, the savior of the world is gonna come. Not only the savior of the world, but the king of the world, who's gonna accomplish everything Adam was supposed to. Well, Satan is building his empire. And so I think we see that in Nineveh, right? And so I think we see some strategic capitals, if you will, where Satan dwells today. You see a little bit of that in, I think, Revelation, when Jesus is talking to one of the churches, he says, where Satan has his throne. Taken literally, that could mean that that's kind of the headquarters at that point in history that Satan was dwelling. and operating out of. And so I think we see examples of this. If you're familiar with the book of Daniel or Old Testament history in general, Nineveh eventually took the Northern kingdom of Israel into captivity. Babylon was the next great world empire. They took the Southern kingdom. Then there's Medo-Persia, then there's Greece, then there's Rome. These are all world systems, and I believe there's gonna be a revived world system based out of a revived Roman empire. And we'll leave that for another day, because that's a large topic. So now dealing with, lastly, the one religion. Now, where do we see religion in the text? It's not there, right? So we need to be somewhat careful. Although I think it's implied based on the rebellion, they're not worshiping God, they're worshiping themselves. But there's some interesting observations. First of all, the Hebrew and Aramaic lexicon of the Old Testament, one of the foremost lexicons of the Hebrew text, mentions that Babel literally is two words joined together that means the gate of God or gods. And so it kind of implies a little bit about maybe the nature of this. And there's works by, I believe, Mark Hitchcock and Charlie Dyer, who are pretty good experts on Babylon, that talk about what the nature of this tower, it was most likely a worship center, a center of worship for the ancient world. We see that, of course, in their mention of making a name for ourselves. And so we see a case building. Now this is interesting. This is an excerpt from Dr. Andy Wood's book. According to extra biblical traditions, Nimrod's wife Semiramis founded the secret Babylonian religion. She also had a son named Tammuz that was begotten through an alleged miraculous conception. Now that sounds familiar, right? According to tradition, Tammuz was killed by a wild animal and miraculously restored to life. It has long been surmised by skilled theologians and historians that because there was only one language governing the human race at the time of the Tower of Babel event, God's disruption of the language caused the destruction each resulting individual language speaking group to incorporate a version of this mother-child cult or mother-child system into their respective newfound people group or ethnicity. And so it's fascinating to look at the examples. And so there's a chart here where he lists the examples. And a lot of this is based on the word by Alexander Hislop, two Babylon's. And so Assyria, there's Ishtar and Tammuz. Phoenicia, there's Astarte and Baal. Egypt is Isis and Osiris or slash Horus. Greece has Epaphrodite and Eros. Rome is Venus and Cupid. Asia is Sibyl and Decius. India is Isi and Aswara. Israel, interesting, Queen of Heaven. And you see this mentioned in Jeremiah 7, 18 and 44, 17. And Tammuz in Ezekiel 8, it says that the women were weeping for Tammuz, kind of showing that they were worshiping these false gods. Roman Catholicism, Mary and Jesus. And then I added this one. I've gotten into my ancestry and from my mom's side, Her dad was Finnish. And so I was always curious about my ancestors and what pagan beliefs they had and how they departed from scripture. And so I was reading the Finnish Kalevala is what it's called, and it's a mythology. And there's a story about a man in the story called Leman Kanan. And it goes like this, it says, in one myth, he drowns in the river Twanila, the underworld, representing the underworld, in trying to capture or kill the black swan that lives there as part of an attempt, as Ilmurinen once made to win a daughter of Luhi as his wife. In a tale somewhat reminiscent of Isis' search for Osiris, Lemminkainen's mother searches heaven and earth to find her son. Finally, she learns of his fate and asks Ilmurinen to fashion her a rake of copper with which to dredge her son's body from the river of Twanila. Thus equipped, she descends into the underworld in search of her son. On the banks of the river of the underworld, she rakes up first Lemenkanen's tunic and shoes, and then his maimed and broken body. Unrelenting, she continues her work until every piece of Lemenkanen's body is recovered. Sewing the parts together and offering prayers to the gods, the mother tries to restore Lemenkanen to life, but while she succeeds in remaking his body, his life is still absent. Then she entreats a bee to ascend to the halls of the overgod Ukko and fetch from there a drop of honey as ointment that would bring Lemon Canaan back to life. Only with such a potent remedy is the hero finally restored. Why am I getting into this? Does it matter? Maybe not, I think it's interesting to see these belief systems. And if you compare the similarities of all these myths, it's the same thing that we kind of talked about with the flood, right? All these civilizations have the same flood myths, right? Now they change details. But there's usually a story about eight people being restored. There's stories about a global flood, and there's been a lot of work done on this, about the comparing of these early civilizations and these flood myths. Well, we see these myths take place as well, and we have to ask the question, where did they come from? And it's interesting to consider that perhaps they all came from the same source with Nimrod and the Babel system and that virus, if you will, kind of infiltrated civilization. And we see things throughout each society taking place. And another reason why I bring this up is I've heard accusations against Christianity saying that, well, see, Christianity is just borrowing from all these pagan myths. Is that true? No. Would it make sense if Satan were trying to muddy the water and make that allegation? Absolutely. We see the resemblance of a son born through miraculous birth. Hmm, interesting. We see the son die. We see the son resurrect. Interesting. And so with that, you know, of course,