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.