Hello again everyone who is joining us on the Methodist Voice podcast. As we get closer to the finish line of what is called Primeval History, which is Genesis chapters 1 through 11. Today we are going to be covering one of the main characters in Genesis 10 because he is the prototype of the figure who will be referred to much later in scripture as the Antichrist.
That's right, Nimrod is the first Antichrist and he's the template for the game plan that Satan and other rebellious divine beings run in their corrupt governance of the affairs of human beings. When we use the term like Antichrist, it's important to think about and define what we mean when we use that word.
There are several different terms to describe this character in the New Testament, but the specific word Antichrist according to Strong's Concordance means either one who puts himself in the place of or the enemy, the opponent of the Messiah. Other terms of this figure portraying himself as a false political savior or a false religious teacher.
The New Testament also teaches us that there will be many of these figures appearing on the landscape of history, as well as one final manifestation of this agenda that will be more powerful and concentrated and evil than any other previous appearance. I'd reference 1 John chapter 2 verses 18 through 20 on that. So let's begin to explore the idea of Nimrod as Antichrist by first looking at what the text has to say about Nimrod and his kingdoms.
That's going to be from Genesis 10 starting in verse 8. Cush fathered Nimrod. He was the first on the earth to be a mighty man. He was a mighty hunter before the Lord, therefore it is said like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord. The beginning of his kingdom was Babel, Erek, Akkad, Kalna in the land of Shinar. From that land he went into Assyria and built Nineveh, Rehoboth, Kala and Rezin between Nineveh and Kala, that is the great city.
Okay, so texts like this are very difficult to render correctly. So I'm going to rely upon some expert advice from Douglas Petrovich. Douglas Petrovich, his letters are PhD, MA, THM, MDiv, lots of degrees, is a professor of biblical history and exegesis at the Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas. He also serves as epigraph for the Shiloh excavations in Israel.
His PhD from the University of Toronto includes a major in Syro-Palestinian archaeology, a first minor in ancient Egyptian language and a second minor in ancient near Eastern religions. So texts like this are his expertise. I'm going to be drawing from his book Nimrod the Empire Builder, Architect of Shock and Awe. Utilizing his insights, I'm going to paraphrase this passage from Genesis that we just read to help tease out a better character sketch of Nimrod and then the cities that he built.
So here's my kind of interpretation. Nimrod's name means we will rebel. So this harkens back to the Garden of Eden and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Adam and Eve were tempted to become like God. The temptation was to depart from obedience to God in order to follow your own desires. I want to be my own master. So to rebel could be rendered. Let's stop being oppressed by doing what God wants and demands. Let's follow the desires of our own hearts and get what we want out of life.
In Nimrod's rebellion, he became blasphemous against God. In this pursuit of being his own master, he became blasphemous against God. When the text refers to Nimrod as a hunter, perhaps a better rendering according to Petrovich would be butcher or slaughterer. The text immediately transitions to the kingdoms he developed, the implication being through warfare. Nimrod was the first mighty conqueror of other human beings.
The motivation for such activity can be found in the following chapter where it says of Babel, one of the contexts of the story in Genesis 11 for, then they said, Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens and let us make a name for ourselves.
So when the text refers to Nimrod as mighty, this not only describes his accomplishments, but also his motivation to be great in the eyes of other people and to dominate them in forced subjugation to his own selfish desires, purposes and wants. Working from the might makes right principle. Nimrod engaged in unrestrained selfishness, bending other weaker humans to his will. He was full of selfish ambition. Here's how Petrovich puts it.
The whole point of the Nimrod story is to document the utter evil that can be unleashed when a city appoints a king, who, when he gives himself over to a lust for conquest, can invade other sovereign cities, decimate innocent residents through warfare and bloodshed, then incorporate those cities into his own dominion that was pieced together by a craving for unlimited power. Nimrod was the forerunner and role model of many subsequent conquering empire builders in ancient history.
Many if not most of those subsequent conquering kings of the ancient Near East demanded worship as a god. Whether they got that from Nimrod or not is unclear, but for example, many scholars want to identify the ancient Akkadian hero Gilgamesh with Nimrod, who was deified upon his death. Petrovich himself identifies Nimrod with Sargon the Great of Akkadia. World History Encyclopedia says this about Sargon.
Sargon of Akkad, and note that's one of the cities listed in Genesis that Nimrod is supposed to have established. Sargon of Akkad was the king of the Akkadian Empire of Mesopotamia, the first multinational empire in history, who united disparate kingdoms of the region under a central authority.
Sargon, also known as Sargon the Great, true king or legitimate king, was according to his own autobiography, the legend of Sargon of Akkad, born an illegitimate son of a changeling and never knew his father. And so let's talk about what that word means. What is a changeling? That's explicitly what Sargon says of himself, that he was an illegitimate son of a changeling. What does that mean?
Well, according to Wikipedia, a changeling was a substitute left by a supernatural being on kidnapping a human being. Sometimes the changeling was a stock, a piece of wood made magically to resemble the kidnapped human. More often, the changeling was a supernatural being made magically to look like the kidnapped human. Now, that's not too out of bounds because the Bible says sometimes angels appear as humans to other humans. So that's not too far off.
So continuing now with the world history encyclopedia. His mother could not reveal her pregnancy or keep the child. And so he was set adrift by her in a basket in the Euphrates River, where he was later found by a man named Aki, who was a gardener for Ur-Zababah, the king of the Sumerian city of Kish. From this very humble beginning, Sargon would rise to conquer all Mesopotamia. Interesting. Now, this is just my take here.
Now, if that description reminds you of Genesis six and the sons of God having marital relations with the daughters of men, which produced mighty men or men of renown, then you're on the right track. Continuing with world history encyclopedia, scholar Paul Krewasek sums up the impact of Sargon, the impact Sargon had on later generations in Mesopotamia for at least 1500 years after his death.
Sargon the Great, founder of the Akkadian Empire, was regarded as a semi-sacred or a demi-god, half man, half God figure, the patron saint of all subsequent empires in the Mesopotamian realm. So with that brief character sketch drawn, let's now turn our attention to the cities associated with his leadership and the Tower of Babel story. Let's first talk about economics. The world's first banks can be traced back to ancient Babylon.
This is where we trace the origins of fractional reserve banking and a debt based currency, which is nothing more than a subtle form of enslavement. It produces massive amounts of wealth for a few individuals and massive amounts of debt for the majority. This is a big reason why Babylon is a prototype for evil throughout the Bible and especially the book of Revelation. These types of corrupt economic practices are condemned and forbidden in the Old Testament law.
But given that it further consolidates power and control into the hands of the ruling class over not only its own citizens, but also over its rivals, the morality of that system does not factor into its utility for those who are behind it. Blind ambition doesn't bother with silly questions like right and wrong. If governments really wanted to create prosperity for its people, they would provide government issued debt free currency, which is the Austrian system of economics.
Every time this has happened in history, it has created massive prosperity for the many. But Satan likes control. So do people who are full of selfish ambition. Satan likes control and he always worms his way into governments, especially powerful governments. Now let's talk about religious practices. Most any scholar will tell you that the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11 was a Mesopotamian ziggurat or a species of pyramid building.
I'm going to read to you an excerpt once again from the World History Encyclopedia on ziggurats. The ziggurat was an artificial mountain raised for the worship of the gods to elevate the priests toward heaven. Now pause. The Genesis six scenario where the sons of God came down and saw that the daughters of women were fair according to the ancient book of Enoch, that event happened on Mount Hermon, a mountain. And so this is why a ziggurat is thought of as an artificial mountain.
It is a meeting place, a symbolic meeting place with those beings. So continuing with the excerpt from the encyclopedia, the people of the Ubaid period, that's roughly 5000 to 4100 BC, are thought to have come down from the mountains to the plains of Mesopotamia and influenced the Sumerians, or they were the Sumerians, the first to build ziggurats as religious sites mirroring sacred high places.
During the Sumerian Urak period, that's 4100 to 2900 BC, ziggurats were raised in every city in honor of that community's patron deity. The ziggurat temple was not a public house of worship, but the earthly home of the god of the city, who was attended by the high priest and lesser priests of the temple complex.
The most famous ziggurat in history is the Tower of Babel associated with the great ziggurat of Babel known as Etemenanki, the foundation of heaven and earth, or the link of heaven and earth. Herodotus, the famous Greek historian, discusses this purpose of the ziggurat, claiming that the god Marduk of Babylon, referred to by Herodotus as Zeus, was believed to come down to the temple at the top of the city's ziggurat to sleep with a woman who lived there.
No statue of Marduk was kept in the temple, only the woman. This custom, as Herodotus suggests, was in keeping with the belief that the god would have sexual intercourse with a chosen woman to ensure the fertility of the land.
The structure may also have served as an observatory, a claim made by the historian Diodorus Siculus 90-30 BC, who notes how Babylonian astronomers used the ziggurat to make their observations of the stars, whose risings and settings could be accurately observed by reason of the height of the structure. Burtmann observes that the ziggurat could have been used for all of these purposes, and no single reason given for the structure rules out any of the others.
The ziggurat was built out of sun-dried mud bricks from the center outward with no internal chambers. The structure was then faced with kiln-baked brick, ornamented and painted. Initially the high priest oversaw the operations of the temple as well as administrative duties in the city, but in time this seems to have become too taxing for a single individual and his assistants, requiring the creation of a secular leader, the king.
The position of the king developed from the concept of the lugal, or strong man, the head of a clan or tribe, who had proven himself an effective warrior and leader. After the creation of kingship, the high priest could devote himself completely to the service of the god, while the king, whose authority was established through military conquest, plentiful harvests and care of the people could deal with the day-to-day administration of the city.
And continues, the priest would have thus been the local god's representative on earth, managing the temple lands and the people who worked them. A second office, that of king or governor, arose, whose duty it became to manage civic affairs, law and order, commerce and trade, and military matters, while the priest continued to manage the business of the temple. Now, that's the end of the encyclopedia entry.
What we have constructed here with this sketch is the foundation upon which the Antichrist false prophet harlot-Babylon motif is built in the book of Revelation. We have a political, military leader, working in conjunction with a religious leader, operating under an oppressive, satanic, corrupt economic system, which enriches them beyond all measure. All of these systems are working together to build human civilization in rebellion to obedience to the one true uncreated god.
The people at the top of this system are motivated by selfish ambition, not serving other people. Like the opposite, they are using and exploiting the people they conquer and rule for their own selfish ambitions. They want to become like god. That is, they want to have unilateral authority, tyrannical power, to call the shots and have everyone obey them. With this sketch, we have just explained the history of all human civilization and governments everywhere.
It doesn't matter what kind of government or economic system we're talking about. There are beings in the unseen realm looking for talented people with unbridled selfish ambition to empower over others who will enslave and exploit the people of the earth to make themselves great. Now, in closing, let's draw some parallels and distinctions. First the parallels. At the end of the day, this is a plagiarized version of God's plan.
The messianic profile in both the Old and New Testaments is of a chosen man who will be empowered by God to militarily conquer the nations of the earth and to establish a centralized global government. In his military conquests, he is destroying these satanic antichrist systems built upon human ambition. He's destroying those governments. The headquarters of that new government will be the political, economic, and religious capital of the world, Jerusalem.
The antichrist motif is a plagiarization of this plan which originates with God himself. Now the distinctions. The antichrist motif is a satanic inversion of God's plan. A pyramid, think about it, is a symbol that represents a tiny minority at the top supported by a massive structure at the bottom. It makes the masses slaves serving an elite minority. The kingdom of God, on the other hand, can be represented by an upside down pyramid. It's an inversion.
The elite, it's still a minority, but they're at the bottom serving the masses. Remember what the Bible says, the son of man came to serve, not to be served. And Jesus says of those who are going to be called great with him, the one who is great among you must be a servant of all. God's chosen man proved his commitment to this plan by submitting to a brutal beating and death on a cross to sacrifice himself as a ransom for many.
He proved he's in it for others and not his own selfish interests and ambitions. That's why the return of this man to the earth is called the blessed hope of the church. All of the systems of this world only function to serve Satan's purposes and keeps the masses of humanity subjected to a life of quiet futility. It's cliche, it's cliche, but true. There is no political solution to a spiritual problem.
And the spiritual problems, we'll say problems, resides in unseen high places, which we're going to talk about next week. And that will be the final episode of this series. But these final episodes naturally lead us into what will be the next series that will begin together after that, which will be, you guessed it, the book of Revelation. So that's all for today. Hope to catch you next time for our final episode over Genesis 11. We're going to go deeper into the Tower of Babel.
Stay blessed and I hope to see you then. Thank you for watching.