Why doesn't my life make sense - part 3

Christians divorce at the same rate as non-Christians because their expectations for marriage are the same as non-Christians.

I'm not saying that finances don't play a role, or that marital infidelity isn't a problem. What I am saying is that there is a deeper, more fundamental issue which underlies the visible problems in modern marriages. There is a set of expectations that our culture provides for us which have no basis in reality. These expectations come from a typical modern "romantic" storyline which we will now examine.

Most people likely believe that the romance story must be at least as old as the Romans, since that's where the name comes from. They would be wrong. The modern romance was invented about two hundred years ago by a woman named Jane Austen. Before that time romance stories were called comedies. Not because they were funny, that's just what they called stories with happy endings.

Those love stories may not have been funny, but they also weren't realistic. Writers who wanted to write love stories with happy endings tended to set the story in make-believe worlds. The extreme version of this is the fairy tale. Love stories didn't have to have fairies and dragons, however, but they almost always had ridiculous characters and even more ridiculous plot twists. When writers set their love stories in a realistic world the stories were usually called tragedies and -- like the name suggests -- they didn't end happily ever after. Romeo and Juliet is a well known example of this. Romeo and Juliet is not romance about two people finding happiness together. It's a tearjerker about two obsessed teenagers and the cultural constraints that keep them apart, ultimately bringing about their deaths.

Ms Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, etc.) changed the rules. She set her books in a very realistic version of England, and had her characters finding happiness together even when the cultural norms of the time should have kept the lovers apart. In her stories love conquered society. Now I'm sure that somewhere, someone had already written a story in a realistic setting where love conquered... something. But Ms Austen was the right person at the right time. She was an extremely talented writer, and her books were published just as something called 'The Enlightenment' was taking hold. The Enlightenment was the first truly widespread materialistic worldview since the ancient Greeks ruled the Mediterranean. The Enlightenment envisioned a world without God, where people lived for this world, not the next. And when God was stripped from people's lives, they began to look for something else to fill the void. Over the next two centuries they would try and fill the longing with everything from money and status, to good deeds and... well... romantic love.

You see, in Ms Austen's books love didn't really conquer all, like I said, just social boundaries. But later romance writers would take this first small step and apply it to everything else. In modern romance stories love conquers hate, love conquers death, love even conquers circumstances that try and keep it apart, almost as if a malevolent creature -- a God or something -- wanted to throw a damp blanket on the lover's happiness.

Today, every time you watch another 'chic flick', or for that matter, another action/drama where the lover fall breathlessly into each others arms at the end, you are being spoon fed a worldview that says that romantic love conquers all opposition. You're seeing, and learning to accept, the idea that true fulfillment can be found in romantic love. It's a lie: a lie that is as widely accepted among Christians as anyone else. A lie that sets up a husband and wife for disappointment and divorce.

Here's a smattering of false beliefs that I've encountered on the subject in Christian circles. All these are based on a worldview that is built around romantic storytelling (some I've heard from conservative teachers and pastors).

1)There is a "special" person that God has set apart as your life partner.

And a few years into the marriage most begin to wonder if they married "the one". But in the Old Testament when a group of Israelite women asked permission to remarry God told them, "They may marry anyone they please as long as they marry within the tribal clan of their father." -- Numbers 36:6. Not "They may marry the special man I've prepared for each of them."

2)The distinguishing feature of the marriage relationship is love.

It better not be. Jesus commanded us to love everyone. Even our enemies. The distinguishing feature of marriage -- the thing that sets it apart -- is the marriage covenant, a contract that basically says, "He meets her needs, she meets his." And that they meet each other's needs before they start trying to meet the needs of anyone else.

3)Your marriage partner is your soulmate.

Jesus is your soulmate. Your soul was created with the expressed purpose that it would one day be united in fellowship with it's creator, not with a single human being.

The fact is, if you are waiting on your spouse to meet your deepest spiritual needs you will be sorely disappointed. Divorce may even begin to seem like a valid option. After all, your spouse is not doing what you expect them to do, and everything you've seen and heard has led you to believe that this is a reasonable expectation. 'But my partner doesn't make me happy'. No one can make you happy. True happiness comes as a byproduct of a life lived for God and God's purposes. Marriage can be wonderful. But it will never take the place of God in your life. Seek God first. The satisfying marriage can be added.


The "romance" story is a story invented by a world that wants desperately to find something to replace the central role of God in their lives. We believe it because we've grown up watching realistic simulations of it on television and in the movie theaters. But it's a lie. A fiction story that builds marriages on a foundation of sand.

And that's how it causes divorce.

Next, we'll finish with some general observations on how modern storytelling can make life seem confusing, and why it's important not to read Revelation through this kind of storytelling.

Why doesn't my life make sense - part 2

Why doesn't your life make sense sometime? It's the same reason that scholars want a Jonah - part 2. You see, scholars want to look at Biblical stories the same way that they do modern stories. The problem is that the Bible uses a totally different system of storytelling. It sounds like a little thing. It's not.

You'll remember the modern system of storytelling from high school English. It goes like this:

Introduction -- here's where we meet the main character, the protagonist. In this phase the protagonist encounters a problem. This is called the conflict.

Rising action -- in this stage the protagonist tries to overcome the conflict, fails, and tries again. Here the writer uses elements of his or her craft to increase tension, build suspense, make the reader feel a connection with the protagonist.

climax -- finally, the protagonist resolves the conflict, win or lose. But something else happens here. This is the moment where -- no matter what happens to the protagonist -- the writer is vindicated. I'm going to say that again because this is the crucial element I want us to be aware of: the climax of the story is the moment when the writers says, "See, I told you so." If you know what to look for you can tell a writer's worldview simply by reading their stories. You can do this for anyone (There's one exception to the rule here, but he died four hundred years ago and this isn't an English lit course...).

Falling action -- a brief look at the protagonist after the conflict is resolved. The place for tying up loose ends in the story.

The above system works great for most stories. Even some Biblical stories can be made to fit the mold. For some of them like Job and Jonah, however, it just can't be done. That's because Biblical writers used a different system for story construction. It looks like this:

Introduction -- This is where the reader is introduced to a covenant. No, not a person, a covenant, a relationship between two people or, more commonly, between a person and God. The Bible never introduces you to its people. Think about the apostle Paul, for example. What was his marital status? Did you answer "single". Not so fast. Paul was a member of the Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin didn't accept unmarried men. Paul had to have been married at one time. Apparently he had children too, since he makes an offhanded reference while writing to the Corinthians, "I speak as to my children" (2 Cor. 6:13). What happened to his wife? He's clearly single by the time he's writing epistles. What happened to his children? The Bible never tells us. That's because it's not about the people, it about the relationships these people have with God and each other.

Decision -- here is where the member of the covenant not named "God" decides how to react to the terms of the covenant's contract. They can either accept or reject. For God there is no decision. He upholds His end of the bargain to the letter.

Consequences -- there is no climax, not for anyone except God. There are, however, consequences based on how a person reacts to the covenant. If they accept it, we see them thrive. If they reject it, the Bible stories will often give us a glimpse of the fallout. Again, there is no climax for a person. If the Bible follows a person throughout their life, the way it does with someone like David, it goes intro, decision, consequences, decision, consequences, decision... on and on. When David's decisions are good we see the joy and fulfillment. When his decisions are bad we see pain and regret.

This is how Jonah looks using the Biblical model:

Intro -- we are told that Jonah is a prophet. A prophet's job is to deliver God's mail. God gives the prophet a message. The prophet passes the message to the intended recipient.

Decision -- But Jonah wants to dispute the terms of the contract. He wants the covenant to read, "You only have to deliver the mail to Israeli zip codes. When God sends him to Israel's enemy, the Assyrians, Jonah balks.

Consequences -- fish food. Jonah gets swallowed, then regurgitated. This has the effect of motivating him to deliver the message.

But he's still not happy about it. You see, he didn't want God to forgive the Assyrians. The Israelites deserve God's mercy in his mind, not the Assyrians. Jonah heads east, then sets up shop to see what will happen to the hated Assyrians. A plant miraculously grows and provides shelter. The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away; the plant dies. Jonah gets angry over the fallen plant. And here the story ends. God finishes with a statement that basically says, "And that's the difference between you and Me, Jonah. You care about the plant. I care about the people!"

It doesn't matter how Jonah reacts to this statement. The point is made. The covenant is explained. His prophets are to go where, and to whom, He sends them. Not just to their favorites. God cares for all people. Not the Israelites alone.

So, what happens when you use the modern system of storytelling to try and explain your life. I'll show you. Next, we talk divorce.

Why doesn't my life make sense?

Wanna play a game?

It works like this: I'm going to list a series of facts, at first blush it's going to look like a random collection of thoughts, history, theology, and plain old nonsense. But every one of the facts has an underlying cause. When you understand the cause, you'll have what you need to understand the book of Revelation. Ready?

1) I once taught a lesson where I started by listing a group of well known Bible scholars. I don't want to post their names on the net, but let's just say that each one of them has written a number of books that you might find in the average Christian book store. Then I asked, "at the height of their ministries, what did each of these men do?" I got some pretty fair guesses, "they all started radio programs." "They all rededicated their lives to Christ," etc. Then I told them the answer -- "They all got divorced."

In spite of professing belief in a book that says "I hate divorce", a book which claims to contain the key for success in personal relationships (Agape love), Christians get divorced just about as frequently as non-Christians.

2) Suicide is a leading cause of death among the young people of today. But go back a hundred years and it's barely even mentioned. Go back two hundred and it's miraculously rare. Any time before Shakespeare's Hamlet and its non-existent in written literature.

The whole existential breakdown bit is a fairly recent phenomenon. Sure, suicides took place to avoid capture at the hands of an enemy, or to avoid an even worse death from something like starvation, but that's not what I'm talking about. The fact is, when it comes to the kind of malaise that surrounds today's youth, the "There's no point to any of this $%&! anyway," mindset, it's a product of the modern age.

It doesn't exist in earlier times. It's like the thought just never occurred to them.

3) Scholars have long questioned whether or not the book of Jonah is a fragment of a longer work. The reason is that the conflict between Jonah and God never gets resolved. Jonah runs, then does what he's supposed to, then sulks about it. God asks him a question about his attitude, and then... nothing. What was his answer? What happened to him after being sent to Nineveh? Where's the ending of the story?

4) The book of Job is just plain weird. In it, Job loses everything over some sort of bar room bet God has with Satan. Job's family is killed, his wealth and reputation lost, his health deteriorates until he just lays in a pile of ashes all day, his skin covered in sores. The only thing he gets to keep through all this is a nagging wife and three "friends" that try and convince him all this is really his own fault.

At the end of all this Job has the gall to question God's goodness. That's it. Nothing more. He doesn't even say, "This proves there is no good God in the universe." He just thinks that maybe God owes him an explanation or something. That little bit of skepticism earns him a spotlight-in-the-face interrogation session from his creator. And from that one might conclude that Job has been terribly wrong about something, and three "friends" who have been debating with him over his attitude toward God might be right. Except that God never says that Job was wrong. On top of that, he demands that the three friends have Job pray on their behalf for God to forgive them (thus placing them under Job's spiritual authority).

Like I said, weird.

5) Most, if not all Christians go through a time when their lives just don't make sense. One moment everything seems so clear; we can see what God is doing and all our choices appear obvious. Then all of the sudden the path disappears. We stop, look behind us, and say to ourselves, "It was here just a minute ago". We begin to question the choices that seemed so clear to us only a short time before.

We think, "I must have sinned," and then we wait and pray and wonder why God is so silent.


So there you have it. Five facts that all have a common cause. Think you know the answer? I'll give you a hint: it's got nothing to do with sin. Well, not directly anyway.

The answer comes in the next post, along with the answer to why the book of Jonah ends the way it does.

What does Babylon mean - part 3

For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn away from the truth and turn aside to myths. -- 2 Timothy 4:3-4


This week, New York Times financial guru Paul Krugman stated that the recession is almost over. The worst is behind us. GDP -- which stands for Gross Domestic Product: the measure of all the goods and services we produce in case you're new to this -- should start to increase again later in the year. In doing so Krugman added his voice to a growing list of economists who see recovery right around the corner.

Unfortunately it's a lie; a lie based on one of those myths about which Paul warned Timothy. It's also the very heart of the belief system which the Bible refers to as "Babylon".

Here's the myth -- the world economy and standard of living will always grow. It may have it's little ups and downs, but thanks to human ingenuity and knowhow the overall trend line will always be up.

Here's the reality -- our world has a certain amount of resources and no more. Once the limitation of those resources is reached, the limitation on the total amount of goods and services will also have been reached.

And here's the problem -- if our beliefs about the economy don't square with the reality of the situation, we run into one of those dead ends I talked about in the last part. "There is a way that seems right to man, but in the end it leads to...." Remember? Now, if an individual is unrealistic about economic realities he tends to accrue all sorts of debt he can never repay, eventually going into bankruptcy. For an individual, like I said before, it's a tragedy. When every nation on the earth denies reality it becomes a catastrophe. What we are seeing around us right now is the catastrophic destruction of the last century and of half of industrialized living. In a few short years we are going to be faced with hardships that seem unbelievable to us now, growing up the way we did, with all the expectation of comfortable living and even more comfy retirement.

The reason why is simple -- limits. Four years ago we reached the maximum limit on the amount of oil we could extract from the earth. Two years ago we reached the maximum amount of copper and phosphorus. Grain was last year. Coal is coming soon. These are things that our way of life needs the same way a healthy body needs food and water. Without these we stop growing, and since our bodies must replace -- or regrow -- their cells when they wear out, if we stop growing we die.

In the same way, our economy is faced with the imperative, grow or die. You see, most of the money that makes our economy work doesn't actually exist yet. It's an imaginary sum that exists right now in the form of debt. Think of a mortgage on a house. A bank loans someone $200,000 to buy a house. Now, the homebuyer hasn't made the $200,000 yet to pay off the loan, but the bank acts just like they already had. The bank takes the house note and in turn sells it for less than $200,000, and another financial institution buys it, packages it with a bunch of other mortgages, and then sells the whole lot as an investment. These institutions buy, sell, and trade these things just as if they were real money, but they aren't. They are the expectation of a sum of money that hopefully will be made some day in the future. And since the these sums include interest, the overall expectation is that the world economy, its GDP, will keep growing forever and ever.

Traditionally, these interest levels have been in the six to ten percent range. To get an idea for just what it is that the world is expecting, think of it this way: the DOW -- the measure of the 30 largest companies in the United States -- grew by an average of 5.1% from 1901 to 2000. For it to do the same thing for the next 100 years, the Dow would have to rise from its current level of around 9,500 to just over 3,200,000. That's 3.2 million. Over 300 times its current size. Can you even imagine what a company like Walmart would look like if it were 300 times larger than it is right now. There's already a Walmart in every town. What are they going to do? Put 300 Walmarts in every town? Put them in Zimbawe? The Arctic circle? The insanity is mindboggling! And yet, this insanity is at the foundation of our current economic outlook.

If it continued for very much longer, we would see more unemployed people, then employed; we would see row after row of empty strip malls; we would see highways and suburbs overrun with potholes and garbage. But I don't think it's going to continue for very much longer; a few years at the most. The trick is, when a country like the United States, or Russia, or China begins to collapse for lack of assets, their is really only a couple of things they can do. The most obvious one is to seize other countries that have the needed assets. And since countries normally don't like being "seized", that leads us to the next worldwide round of wars. And that leads us to the end times.

Soon, I want to examine the Bible's doomsday clock. The signs for the coming of the great tribulation. The problem is that I don't think it would make sense to very many of you. Not that the signs themselves are difficult -- some are, some aren't. It's that Biblical storytelling itself is so different from the modern variety that going straight to the conclusion of the story without first explaining why the conclusion is, in fact, the conclusion would lead to more head-scratching than anything else. So we need a quick lesson on Biblical storytelling.

That's why the next series is called, why doesn't my life make sense.

What does Babylon mean - part 2

It wasn't until recently that mainstream scholars accepted that there even was a ruler of Israel named King David. This isn't just that he was a larger than life giant-killer/poet/king -- it was his name. You see, the name "David" in Hebrew means, "like God," and it just seemed a little too convenient that the person called 'the man after God's own heart' should have a name that literally means 'someone with a heart like God's'. It seemed even more contrived that the man David replaced as king was bumbling disaster on two legs named "Saul", since the word Saul means 'failure'.

Then they found an ancient artifact that referred to Israel as "the house of David" and that pretty much settled it; David really did have a name that described his nature. So did Saul. So do a lot of Biblical characters. To the ancient Jews a name was more than just a way of separating one person from another, it was an adjective used to describe the person or something particular to their circumstance, sort of like a very expressive nickname.

We see this clearly when Jesus changes one of His disciples names from Simon to Peter, and then explains that He is going to call him Peter, or "the rock", because Peter is going to serve a role to the early church like a foundation stone. In Revelations we are told that we will each be given a new name, written on a white (symbolizing pure) stone (symbolizing permanence). Our identity is going to change.

Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth." -- Revelation 11:4

Now if I told you that I wanted to make a name for myself what I would be saying is that I wanted to do something that drew attention to me, that earned me some honor or glory. That's not what it means here. Here it means something else entirely. It means that they wanted to change their identity. Still sounds harmless, you say? Consider: I told you what it would mean if I said I wanted to make a name for myself, but what would it mean if I told you that I wanted to change my identity?

This is from an August 2nd article by Satoshi Kanazawa in Psychology Today -- "First, modern feminism is illogical because, as Pinker points out, it is based on the vanilla assumption that, but for lifelong gender socialization and pernicious patriarchy, men and women are on the whole identical. An insurmountable body of evidence by now conclusively demonstrates that the vanilla assumption is false; men and women are inherently, fundamentally, and irreconcilably different. Any political movement based on such a spectacularly incorrect assumption about human nature – that men and women are and should be identical – is doomed to failure."

This is identity changing, the desire to cast off a tradition identity or "name" -- in this case "women", and replace it with an identity or name that more closely corresponds to "men". I bring it out here because it's such a blindingly obvious example. I'd love to explore it further too, because feminism is largely a response to mistreatment at the hands of men. Men had control (I'm painting the brush broadly here, I know. Go with me.) and they devalued women and used them badly. See the analogy. They acted like Nephilim. Some of the women responded by going for a name change.

But as much as I want to I probably shouldn't. It's not a core influence in the church today and I'd likely just make a hack job of it anyway. No, instead I want to talk about something that most certainly has penetrated the modern church: pornography. Christianity has done a wonderful job of marketing porn. it doesn't mean to, of course, but it does it just the same. It does this by holding to the puritanical virtues of making sex taboo. Puritanical, not Biblical. Have someone translate the Song of Solomon from Greek or Hebrew for you. It's a good strong R rating, at least. We tone the book down with Euphemisms "He held her"; that word doesn't mean "held". Nice try though.

We make sex seem intrinsically deviant, and in doing so wind up pushing our young men into the arms of the porn industry. Pornography may be deviant, but if all sex is deviant....

Porn works through identity changing. In real life (warning! Broad brush strokes again!), whereas men have a relationship with a woman so that they can have sex with her, a woman has sex with a man so that she can have a relationship with him. Not in Porn. In a porno the women are reduced to robots. They don't have emotional needs, so really, what's being done to them isn't anything like abuse. Even the men are caricatures. They don't yearn for meaningful relationships. They don't experience regret.

An entire generation is growing up influenced by this. It's changing their names. Some slightly. Some more drastic. Fifty years ago some parents wouldn't let their teenagers go out on a date without a chaperon. Now it's the "hookup" culture. A woman's physical affection was once worth a human life (committed to her in marriage). When I grew up it's value had dropped to a few dinner dates. Now it's worth a drink or two.

This is what happens when we change our names. Our identities are very sensitive things.

There is a way that seems right to man, but in the end it leads to death. -- Proverbs 14:12

The modern man says, "I can be whatever I want to be," and there is a kernel of truth here in that the ability to change, for better or for worse, is a part of your God given identity. But no, you can't be whatever you want to be. You have limits. Boundaries. No amount of wishful thinking can change this. On the individual level a drastic "name" change leads to a kind of living death, a life devoid of fulfillment. It leads to a tragedy. On the Nation-level it leads to catastrophe.

Somewhere in our history, when humanity was still a collection of small tribes, mankind was already well on it's way to mass suicide. Here we see the first of a series of divine interventions. God stops the disaster. Not by dominating the people's will, that isn't in His character. He did it by changing the list of available options. Causing the language shift, either miraculously quick or slow over time (the passage doesn't say), has the effect of taking the eggs out of a single basket. Cultural extinctions like the Mayans and the natives on Easter Island will now be isolated incidents. Some will fail. Some will thrive. But the overall population will continue to grow. Mankind will survive, for now. The course toward mass suicide was averted. But not forever.

You see, the name Babel means "confusion". It comes from bah, bah. It's baby talk. Babylon literally means "land of confusion". When the people of God forgot their Lord they were carted off to exile in Babylon. They forgot God and went to the land of confusion. It's telling us that a life apart from God is necessarily a life spent in a state of confusion.

Now, the ancient nation of Babylon fell in 539 BC, but in the book of Revelation it makes a comeback. In fact it is already here. This time there is no stopping it. The only way would be for God to turn the men and women of this age into robots, caricatures, and He won't do that. For His it's unthinkable. This time the mass suicide takes place, in a series of cataclysms called the bowl judgements. You may have thought that the "judgements" of the end times were something that God does to us, not something that we do to ourselves.

You thought wrong.

Part 3 is next.

What does Babylon mean - part 1

Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole Earth. But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so that they will not understand each other." So the Lord scattered them from their all over the Earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel -- because the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From their the Lord scattered them over the face of the Earth. -- Genesis 11: 3-9


A modern reading of this passage shows God at His most nasty, curmudgeonly, neurotically patriarchal best. Mankind unites to do something big and God, since all human achievement is apparently to be stifled, kicks over the sand castle and sends most of them off to go live in places like Greenland and Borneo. Three days later He invents the cubicle, and ever since mankind has been able to serve out his meaningless days in harmless futility, all so that he can die and fulfill his one true purpose: serving as fertilizer for God's favorite kind of flower -- Begonias.

There's just one little problem with that interpretation. That passage wasn't written in modern times. It was written in a different age, to a different culture, for people with different expectations about how the world works. It made sense to them. For us, I'm guessing it will take me three sittings at the keyboard or more to tease out the intended meaning.

The first problem is the writing style. The first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis are written in a style called "creation stories". Every religion has them. Creation stories work like a child's mobile of the solar system, where little paper mache planets circle a bright yellow tennis ball. They show you the basic workings of the world, quick and dirty.

An example might help to illustrate. In the story of the flood, we are told that mankind is going to be destroyed because of its wickedness. Only a few will survive this judgement. One man will be responsible for their salvation, and the only way to be saved is to be counted a member of this savior's family. After the time of destruction these few will emerge into a new world, with all the earlier wickedness having been washed away.

Now, in one sense the Biblical flood account is recorded as a historical event, yet in another sense one can take the basic outline of the story and see that it is a clear presentation of the Biblical plan of salvation, with Jesus taking the role of worldwide savior and Heaven filling in for the boat. And so a calamity becomes a 'teachable moment'.

But it's another creation story that we need to serve as the prologue for the Babel account. You see, in our culture its all the rage to speak of a unified world population as a good thing. Here's a quote to show what I mean:

"For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination. We learned to talk and we learned to listen. Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankind's greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesn't have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking"

That's from Stephen Hawking, the brilliant theoretical physicist and wheelchair-bound ladies man. His statement could serve as a modern update for the people of Babel and verse 3 "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole Earth." All we need is to undue the gulf of understanding; to keep talking. We all want the same things, so the logic goes, peace and prosperity, love and compassion. If we could only get past our fears and see our similarities, things like genocide and concentration camps would all become a thing of the past.

The Bible respectfully disagrees.

The Biblical position on the nature of human "unity" is found in another creation story, that of the Nephilim.

From Genesis 6: 4-5 -- The Nephilim were on the Earth in those days -- and also afterwards -- when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. The Lord saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.

Unfortunately this story has been saddled with a dump truck load of late medieval mysticism and now is often taken as a story of demons having sex with women who then gave birth to giants. I won't even justify this with a rebuttal. The ancient Sumerian texts that touch on this subject give us a different, less fanciful explanation. (Sumeria was the ancient kingdom around modern day Iran/Iraq and the location of Babel)

When mankind was living in tribes it was common for the biggest and most brutal to command the tribe. But mankind has this funny little trait called pride -- a word that our generation constantly confuses with dignity. Dignity says that people are intrinsically valuable. Pride says that other people are valuable... but not nearly so valuable as you are. Leadership wasn't enough for the Nephilim. They began to claim divinity, to be descended from the gods, a ploy that kings would imitate for thousands of years after them. The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh is a story that records something called the 'right of the first night', a privilege that these 'sons of god' claimed giving them the right to bed any virgin before her wedding night ("lay with the daughters of man"). It's presented as an example of human depravity. Notice that the Biblical comment on "men of great renown" comes just before a comment on human wickedness. If you want to get the right mood for the "renown" statement, spit when you say it.

In the Biblical view, you can talk until your blue in the face, arms, legs, and netherregions, and you will never get peace or prosperity. The hearts of the people involved won't allow for that. Words become tools of manipulation in the arsenal of wicked man, a way to try and get what he wants while giving up as little as possible. And should they ever get power, men will oppress each other in the most hideous of ways, fashioning themselves into little 'gods' and turning other people into drones without rights or intrinsic worth.

It's a bleak view, but its got six thousand years of recorded history backing it up... and counting.

Next, in part 2, we will look at what it meant to the ancient Hebrew to say that someone wanted 'to make a name' for themselves.

What does 666 mean - part 2

Money? It can't be money. If it were money then the passage would literally read "no one could buy or sell without money." But they couldn't buy or sell without money back in Biblical times either, right?

Wrong. Coin money first came into use in the 7th century BC in one of the Eastern Greek provinces. By the first century AD coins were everywhere; but the old system was still everywhere too. The old system was barter, and if they had wanted to, someone in the first century AD could have gone their entire life without ever touching a coin. That's because first century merchants still accepted trade in kind (a bushel of grain for a skin of wine, etc.) as well as gold and silver by weight in the form of bars, ingots, or dust.

Money today is a radically different animal than the coins they slung around in ancient times. Our money is called 'fiat' currency, from the Latin meaning "let it be". It has no intrinsic value. Gold, on the other hand, had value to the ancient apart from its use as a trading instrument. It was shiny and malleable and you could make an idol out of it that looked more worshipful than some oddly shaped lump of clay. Basically, everyone wanted it. That made it valuable.

Fiat currency has value because we say it has value. There's no gold or anything else supporting its worth. It works like a share of stock. One dollar could be likened to a single share of the company called the United States of America. If the country somehow becomes less valuable than the shares become proportionately less valuable. Also, if the number of shares (dollars) increase, then they become less valuable since each one represents a tiny percentage of the overall nation. The more shares, the smaller the proportion that each dollar represents.

A "mark" is another name for a unit of currency, like the dollar. You and I can't buy a thing without some form of a "mark". Ah, you say, but I could still sell something without a mark. Actually no, you can't. Not legally anyway. if you traded for something else like a sofa you would still have to report the transaction as "barter income", with the sofa equalling the fair market value of the item in dollars.

With that in mind, the riddle is now solved -- almost. There's only one piece of the puzzle left and it's not specifically addressed in the passage. It has to do with what makes the beast so wickedly ravenous. Careful now. Like it says, this calls for insight.

An empire is an economic construct. It's a machine designed to take wealth from outlining areas and transfer that wealth to a central core. In Roman times this meant that the provinces were taxed with the proceeds going to a geographic center: the city of Rome. In modern times this means that the current empire draws wealth away from the majority and transfers it to a wealthy elite. But that's not the last the puzzle piece. It's background information.

The Mosaic law forbade Jews from charging interest to other Jews. Charging interest was called usury and it was looked upon as morally sinful by the church for ages after the Bible was written. Oddly, Jesus used the earning of interest as an analogy of a for the faithful use of one's resources in his parable of the good and bad stewards. And the Mosaic law itself rarely possessed double standards for Jews versus non-Jews, and never for issues of moral rightness. Jews were not allowed steal from, kill, or otherwise abuse foreigners. The only variations had to do with practical issues of society and economics. In this case, if Jews had been able to charge each other interest, the nation of Israel would have been left with a peculiar problem -- how to pay for it. Israel was a small nation bound on all sides by the ocean and well-established, often hostile, nations. This is a difficult concept to our modern minds, but without understanding it, a proper understanding of the mark of the beast is impossible.

For the last century and half or so our world economy has grown dramatically. We have been able to charge interest without causing widespread poverty because every year we produced more goods and services than the year before. You see, if you charge someone 8% interest you are saying in affect, "I expect you to create 8% more goods and services every year." As long as that's possible, through factors such as improved technology and a growing population (more workers to make more stuff), then you can pull the trick off. When that fails you have a problem. The Israelites could not have afforded to charge each other interest without forcing the majority of its people into debt slavery. After the reign of King David the country never grew, and technology in that day improved by only the tiniest of increments. It's people could not have sustained interest payments because the country itself had no good way of sustaining economic growth.

And there it is. The key element that makes the beast so detestable in God's eyes. Did you see it?

We are so deluded by images of a red devil with horns and a tail (images taken mostly from Greek paganism) that we can't recognize true evil when we see it. Israel couldn't grow because it's size was limited. It wasn't realistic. But Israel isn't the beast. The beast is a different kind of nation. It cares nothing for limitation or issues of so-called "reality". It wants what it wants. And what it wants, it takes. The beast wants to grow and expand and cover every corner of the earth. A God who calls a promised land good but then fixes boundaries on how large it can be? No! there is no God to the beast. No one tells the beast to stop. No Mosaic law. No law at all. The beast obeys no law but one -- that the beast must be given what it desires. And just as the Jews attached tiny parchments with the ten commandments in leather boxes called phylacteries then tied the phylacteries around their right arms on on their forehead, so the beast calls everyone to take its mark on the arm and the head. For the Jew, the phylactery was a visible symbol of the call to bind the law to their head (their thoughts) and their arm (their actions). To us it's called the American dream.

Many modern students of the end times believe that the mark is a sort of tatoo that can cause even a believer to go to hell. But the passage never says that the followers of the beast "lose" their salvation, only that they don't have it. It says this because saving faith and being marked by the beast are truly and completely incompatible with one another. You cannot worship the beast and God. You cannot make monetary wealth the sum goal of your life and still accept Jesus as lord and savior. yes, we all want to prosper, but if that is what defines you, if it's the most important thing in your life, then you may as well make a phylactery stuffed with money and credit cards and tie it to your forehead. The beast owns you.

No, the beast of the apocalypse is not the United States. The beast of the apocalypse is what the United States is about to become. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Right now my explanation for the beast is still a somewhat flimsy thing. You may think the US is corrupt to the core and already fits the beastly mold, or you may love the US and think that such a thing could never happen here.

But that's only because you don't understand Babylon.

Next we look at the Genesis chapter 11 and the question, what does Babylon mean?.

What does 666 mean? - part 1

He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless he had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name. This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is a man's number. His number is 666. -- Revelation 13: 16-18.

A third angel followed them and said in a loud voice: "if anyone worships the beast and his name and receives his mark on the forehead or the hand, he too will drink of the wine of God's fury, which has been poured full strength into the cup of his wrath. He will be tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment rises forever and forever. Their is no rest day or night for those who worship the beast and his image, or for anyone who receives the mark of his name." -- Revelation 14: 9-11

"Money makes the world go 'round." -- from the movie, Cabaret (1960)


What would you do if one day you awoke to find that your money was no good? You couldn't buy anything and no one could buy a thing from you. You'd probably eat through everything in your pantry in a few days, then what? Beg from neighbors who had more than you did? Steal it?

The mark of the beast plays out like a riddle. You can almost hear Vincent Price rattle it out in the old King James, "let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast -- dramatic pause -- for it is... a human number. It's number is six hundred and sixty-six." What on earth could that mean? It's number?

If you're in any way a follower of end times theology you've probably heard every explanation from a veiled reference by the apostle John to the Roman Emperor Nero, to a vague symbol for incarnate evil, to the number of letters in former president Reagan's name -- Ronald Wilson Reagan. All the scattershooting on this one mystifies me, because this is one of the few images in end times prophecy that provides its own definition. It's the identifying mark of the 'beast'. In Biblical prophecy the 'beast' can refer to either an empire or an individual ruler of an empire, and this nation or individual acts, well, beastly. In the case of the beast in Revelation chapter 13-14, the beast bears the chief hallmark of a prophetic empire, in that it has more than one horn -- the horn being a symbol for an individual ruler.

With that said our job becomes easy. You see, the identifying mark of an empire isn't an individual ruler, it's not a flag (which wasn't used as a national symbol until renaissance times anyway), and it's not even a written manifesto. It's money.

Money is a unit of exchange, it's a means of conducting a transaction between individuals and corporations, and every country can be identified by the way it handles its currency. Money flows differently in communist countries than it does in capitalist ones. It's moves differently in monarchies than it does in constitutional republics. Here in the United States we cherish our freedom; it defines us. It also seems to confuse a great many. Did you think the words 'free country' meant that you could do whatever you wanted? How many times have I had that thrown at me on the streets? After fourteen years of law enforcement, let me tell you the bad news, that's not what it means. Our penal laws are very similar to the penal laws you'll find anywhere in the world: no murdering, no stealing, no fraud, all the essentials that make a society run. No, the 'free' in 'free country' refers primarily to a marked absence of regulation of business and financial transactions. It's how we regulate our money that makes us unique. The same could be said for every other country.

Now, what does it mean to John and why should I care?

In Biblical times a writer had a limited number of ways to express himself. Writing at the time was done on crushed plant fibers (mostly papyrus) or animal skins (mostly velum, ie: sheep skin). It was done in a solid block of text, no paragraphs, no punctuation, no little smiley icons that hit each other over the head with folding chairs. For the ancients a repetition of three worked like a exclamation point (or a blogger going to all caps). It provided stress. Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty. Here, holiness is emphasized as the central characteristic of God. In Revelation 13-14, the number six is emphasized as the central characteristic of the beast.

In Hebrew numerology (the study of numbers and what they represent), the number six refers to evil. But here we have to be careful. The word 'evil' to a Biblical Jew meant something very different than the word we toss around these days. Now, when we say 'evil', we think of serial killers and pentagrams, monsters and movie villains. This idea comes to us from a different era than one in which John is writing. Someday, if I get the chance, I'll say something about the influence of Celtic dualism on modern day Christianity. For now, let me just say that the Jewish idea was radically different than the current one. For the Jews of the time, evil wasn't something they had to run from without tripping while horror music played in the background. It wasn't even something they had to do battle with on a day to day schedule. It was more like a virus. God and the presence of the Law of Moses gave them a kind of immunity, but if they violated the Mosaic law then God withdrew His hand of protection and they exposed themselves to a host of deadly symptoms.

The number six represented this violation. Well, it might be more precise to say that it represented the human propensity to commit violations. Six is one short of the number seven, the Hebrew number for perfection. Jews were required to rest after six days of work since their human frailty made a regular time of refreshing a necessity. When King David made his second attempt to take the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem his entourage took six steps at a time, stopped to worship, then took six more. Six represents moral failure. Six, then six, then another six, represents moral failure to the highest, or should I say lowest, degree.

Now, to pull it together. In part 2 we look at fiat currency, what it means and why it is that you really don't want to get it on your right hand or your forehead.

"When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and took note that these men had been with Jesus." -- Acts 4:13


Some years ago during an apologetics debate, my opponent decided to list his qualifications. He was a doctor of philosophy, a published author, yadda yadda. By that point we had already been at it for days, on a thread that was dozens of pages long. This was his trump card. If his credentials were more impressive than mine, if he had more trophies on the wall, then everything I had said up to that point would be questioned. I was being called out. So I answered:

(Paraphrasing) "I have a bachelors in history and a minor in biology. I write as a hobby and have never published anything of note. I have no official position at my church. Sometimes I teach my Sunday School class if they need a fill-in. I'm a police officer, and I'm posting this now from the laptop computer of a sqaudcar currently parked in a stripmall parking lot."

And so the debate ended. My opponent was cornered. It was like finding out in the fourth quarter -- of a tight game -- that your rival wasn't another professional team, but a collection of scrubs pulled from some sort of reality tv show. I can only imagine his embarrasment.


I offer this up in advance to protect you, the reader, from any such awkward moments. I am about to attempt the impossible. Well, not so much the impossible. More like the ridiculous. What I am going to try to do is interpret the Biblical end times prophecies. Interpret, explain, and finish the Biblical account before the final events actually take place (which could be a challenge in itself).

Now for the full disclosure: I have never set foot in a seminary. I have never taken an academic Bible study class of any kind. If you had 'Intro to the Bible' at a Christian middle school then you have more official Biblical education than I do. And it's not just an academic deficiency. It's spiritual as well; I don't have any special apostolic message from above to give you. There's no ethereal hand writing on the wall next to me, no angelic being telling me what to say. This is my own concoction -- a theological home brew drawn from years of personal study and few unusual moments of clarity.

Hubris means "arrogance brought on by excessive pride". I'm using it here to mean "writing about something without any good justification for why you're writing it, apart from a tin foil cap and a giant rabbit standing behind you... staring.... menacingly." The posts themselves will fall into one of several categories. Many will focus on the prophecies themselves. I will present these the way the Bible does, starting with the first in Genesis chapter 11 (that's right, I said Genesis), and moving through the book, front to back. Breaking up the overall narrative will be historical anecdotes, points of theological debate (not necessarily relating to the end times) and questions specific to understanding end times prophecies. It's the latter that I want to start with. Soon I will post my answer to the question, what does 666 mean?