ANTICHRIST                                                          MYSTERY BABYLON - #2 False Religion Began Before the Flood

The next verse says that The Whore is "drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus". Right from the start, and by this we mean the time from Man’s fall, this mother of all false religion has been the bane of those who would worship God in spirit and in truth. By her sorceries and witchcraft Mystery Babylon has cast a spell over the inhabitants of the earth. She has been the great persecutor and killer of the saints. Her spirit has tried to destroy the true religion, and where she could not destroy it she tried to muddle or confuse it. One of her main purposes has always been to put just enough of a twist on the true instruction and word of God so as to nullify its desired effect. This is why she veils her religion in mystery. God is just the opposite; He does His work in the light. It is open for all to see and all to accept. Satan always does his work in the dark. He never reveals the true intentions or real purposes of his religion. Confusion, mystery and secretive, fraternal rites are some of the telltale signs of false religion. (Break down the words - Mystery: secret and Babylon or Babel: confusion - and one gets secret confusion.) Her ultimate purpose is to get men to be exclusive and secretive about God by hiding their devious religion under a pile of confusion, secret initiation rites, occult rituals and carnal sacraments. Thus, Mystery Babylon has been the plague of true worship from the very start. Interestingly, the title Mystery Babylon was not conferred on The Whore until just five chapters short of the Bible's end. At first glance it would appear that Mystery Babylon's origins are in the Tower of Babel, which was built by Nimrod around 2100 BC. But to find The Whore's source we must go back even further in antiquity. Back we must go. Back as far as the very beginning of civilization. Back further than the first known cultures of the Sumerians, Hittites and Egyptians. We must go further back than Noah and The Flood. We must consider the days when giants and fallen angels walked the earth and the world was entirely shrouded in wickedness and rocked with violence. It was a time when God said, "the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." In fact, to find the origins of lies and false ways we must go back to the first confrontation between Satan and Man. We have to go back to the Garden of Eden and man's fall from grace.

Opposition of True and False Religion Began Right Away

All of the commands and promises of God have been connected to the coming Redeemer who would save Adam and Eve - and their seed - from the effects of their fall from grace. Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree, thereby showing their capability and willingness to disobey God. God had given them control and jurisdiction over every creature and part of the Garden. For their own good He denied them access to the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”. His command was simple. “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” In this respect, true religion in the beginning was no different than today. Trust God, take Him at His Word and obey Him. So too, false religion has remained basically the same since that day in the Garden. Satan perverted God’s purpose in keeping Adam and Eve from the tree of knowledge by telling Eve that God was jealous and wished only to deprive them of becoming gods, because He did not want them to become like Him. The Serpent told Eve that God was a liar and that she would become like God if she ate the fruit. Eve was beguiled by this subtle deceiver and believed his perversion of the truth. Adam knew better, but fearing his wife, went along with the Devil’s lies anyway and ate the forbidden fruit. The two foundations of sin were seen in Adam and Eve; one was deceived, one sinned willfully. That very first confrontation between true and false religion was only a temporary victory for Satan, however. God had already drawn up a plan to save the day. From the very start God's plan was to create a tried and tested creature that would never be swayed by evil even though they had a full knowledge of its temptations and deceptions. God’s plan of salvation began immediately. The Lord declared a curse on all three of the parties.

First He dealt with the Devil,

“And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:  And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel." (Gen. 3.14-15)

Then the woman,

"Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." (Gen. 3.16)

Then the man,

"And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field;In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” (Gen. 3.17‑19)

In verse fifteen God promised to send them a champion, a hero, who would restore them to their former relationship with God and return them to a paradise even greater than the Garden of Eden. Their offspring would be bruised by the Devil but ultimately would entirely destroy the serpent and punish him for his lies and blasphemies. This was the promise of a Savior, the promise of God's only Son, the promise of Jesus. To believe this Adam and Eve required faith. They now had to do what they had failed to do in the Garden. They had to believe God and trust Him. They were required to believe what righteous Job would testify to centuries later, "I know my redeemer lives”. They simply had to perform what the lifelong search of the preacher from Ecclesiastes finally uncovered, "hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man." However, until the promised Redeemer came to cover them once and for all with His own shed blood, God had to cover their shame and sin with the skin of an innocent animal. That was done when God took an animal from the Garden and slew it to make clothing for them. Innocent blood from then on had to be shed to make atonement for any and all disobedience and rebellion.
 

Abel ‑ True Religion/Cain ‑ False Religion

         Blood sacrifice was God’s one command to Adam and his sons Cain and Abel. In anticipation of the coming Savior, which would be fulfilled in Jesus some sixty generations later, they were to sacrifice a blood offering of an innocent animal. The act of blood sacrifice would show their faith and belief in God’s promise of restoration and salvation. It also showed an admission of their own sinful nature and an acknowledgment of the fact that they deserved to die but God had allowed an innocent life to shoulder their guilt and take on the sentence of death in their behalf. No works of their own hands, no words, no payment, no penance or good deed could make atonement for their sin. This impossibility of being able to save oneself by good works or righteous merit was at the heart of true religion then and has remained so ever since . Without believing in a coming Savior, one who would shed His blood for the forgiveness of sin, a Savior who would come through the seed of the woman, man’s search for God and his return to Him (his religion) would be vain. This truth became painfully obvious in a showdown between true and false religion when Cain and Abel brought offerings to God. They both knew to bring offerings and to present them to the Lord. They both understood the meaning of this religious act and that it was needed in order to have communion with God. But one man did the right thing, the other invented his own religion. God accepted Abel’s offering of the firstlings of his flock. God rejected the older brother’s offering of the fruit of the ground. Abel had been true by acknowledging the only covering for sin, the shed blood of an innocent life in place of his own blood. But God had cursed the ground for man’s sake and now Cain was offering the works of his own hands from a cursed earth to God. A characteristic of the whore was born in Cain when he took elements of the truth and put his own spin on it. It was an open show of rebellion and human pride. Cain’s offering spoke of his own prowess and goodness and self-righteousness. It was a “strange” offering. It perverted God’s original and righteous instructions. Cain was sacrificing to God, but it was not the divinely prescribed sacrifice. Abel’s offering, on the other hand, was humble, obedient and according to truth.

Again, just as in the Garden, false religion seemed to win out over the true way. Cain rose up in the field and slew his younger brother. But God again saved the situation when he gave Adam and Eve another son, Seth, one who could succeed the righteous Abel.
 

“And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew.  And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the LORD.” (Gen. 4.25‑26)

Seth would become God's priest and an ambassador of the true religion, but more about that in future chapters. First, if we are to truthfully chart the growth and evolution of this harlot called Mystery Babylon we must talk of the great world‑wide conspiracy of false religion that Satan hatched during the 1,600 years of man's existence before the Flood.

Satan's Grand Antediluvian Strategy

After the murder of Abel, Satan devised a plan to provoke God into destroying all of mankind. It almost succeeded. By the time of the Flood, false religion had so permeated every part of the human race that all of humanity was corrupted. Genesis 6.1‑2 reveals Satan's fantastic, but effective, strategy.

"And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,

  that the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose." (Gen. 6.1‑2)

Demons Took On Human Form

God had given the command to, "be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it" (Gen. 1.28). Families and villages began to overspread the earth. Agrarian communities under patriarchal leadership and guidance sprang up in southeast Europe, throughout the Near East and south into the northern part of the continent of Africa. But Satan figured out a way to disrupt the migration of mankind and corrupt both its body and soul. Certain legions of fallen angels, who the Jewish priests and fabulist have called The Watchers , somehow left their first estate in the heavenlies, took on the likeness of human flesh and began to have children with the women of earth. Jude refers to them in this passage of scripture: "And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the great day." (Jude 6)

There had been two major confrontations between true and false religion. Satan had gotten Adam and Eve to sin and he had provoked Cain into murdering the righteous, obedient Abel. The Devil had reason to believe that both schemes had been at least partly, if not entirely, successful. But to Satan’s disappointment neither scheme had stopped God's plan of salvation. As men began to multiply on the earth Satan needed a grander, more desperate strategy. He now launched a full-scale assault on the truth using his demonic angels to corrupt "the seed of the woman". The sinister plot was designed to ravage the world in such a total way that God would have no choice but to abort His whole relationship with Mankind. You will recall that God’s first promise to man was given to Adam and Eve when He promised to send them a “champion” who would deliver them and their children to come from the effects of their fall from grace. Having failed in his first two attempts, Satan decided competition and corruption to be the better course of action. As his angels cohabited with women they began to sire Satanic “champions” to compete with this fundamental prophecy of salvation. Satan hoped for two things in his new strategy. He hoped to derail the true religion by getting mankind to worship the progeny of these unholy unions; and he planned to so thoroughly infect the bloodlines of the human race that no pure descendent of Adam would remain from which the Messiah could be born into this world. If no pure channel of uncorrupted human flesh could be found then the Messiah could not come. At first glance this conspiracy to corrupt man may seem far‑fetched. But when the history of false religion is taken into account it becomes the most plausible explanation for Satan’s motives. Genesis 6.4 makes this very interesting and revealing remark and can give the Biblical historian a whole new perspective on the world and the fact that mystery religions, obtuse and perverse in their forms of worship, existed in powerfully developed ways in the 1,600 years before the Flood. We are told this:

"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown." (Gen. 6.4)

Superhuman Giants Like Hercules Did Walk The Earth

         What this means is that these "sons of God", or Nephilim as the Jews called them, were fallen angels who came to earth and begat superhuman beings. The word actually means giant bullies, or tyrants. Though the history of these beings was washed away with the Flood we have been left with a vast record of what these extraordinary beings must have been like. The Jewish historian, Josephus, makes this remark about these giants in his Antiquities, “For seven generations, men continued to believe in God as the Master of the universe, but then they fell into vice and depravity. Some, born of angels who had consorted with women, resembled the audacious giants of Greek mythology” . The mythological religions and histories of nearly every civilization are more than fairy tales told to inspire men to greater heights of courage and national pride. The legends grew and were embellished by classical poets like Hesiod, Homer, Ovid, Horace and Virgil; were glorified in the Greek tragedies and plays; and fictionalized in much of the Jewish tradition recorded by the Pharisees, rabbis and Levitical priesthood in fabulously fictional books such as, Adam and Eve, Enoch and Jubilees. The Scriptural truth is confirmed by our classic past and archeological finds in the Middle East and Mediterranean countries. That these “giants”, who were both man and angel, existed should not be denied by any Bible believing Christian. We know they existed in the Antediluvian world because Genesis tells us so. The traditions that grew up were surely based on actual accounts and facts - though admittedly greatly exaggerated in many cases - and these super human mortals were endowed with the strength and power of the angels who were their crafty and lustful fathers.
        The book of Jubilees and The Book of Enoch were written in the second century B.C. by Jewish priests trying to build a case for the eternal establishment of the Mosaic Law. Though they wrote these tales from the most thinly veiled ulterior motives, they indicate the Jewish acceptance of the truth of the Nephilim. Fantastic stories abound in every culture about these progeny of heavenly beings. Among the Arabs they are genii and the Greeks painted them as Cyclops, for example. Jewish tradition says that some of these giants stood as tall as 300 feet and that after they had ravaged the stores of man and eaten the best of his crops and herds that they turned on each other, and as cannibals, seized control of tribes of men and led them in wars against neighboring tribes which were controlled by a rival Nephilim. The Scriptures merely say that violence filled the earth, it is reasonable to assume that this violence was led by the “champions” who were endowed with heavenly powers and great size. As late as second century (150 A.D.) pagan worshipers from Italy and other parts of the Roman Empire were making pilgrimage to a site north of the Adriatic Sea in the Balkans to see the skeletal remains of a giant reported to be 22 ells or 80 feet tall. Though this may be nonsense, or the size exaggerated, the pilgrimages and its site is documented and undisputed, showing that the world, even as late as 150 A.D., believed the truth of the legacy of giants.

To support the point one only need refer to the Bible and the giants who were present in the land of Canaan after the Flood. Notice that the verse from Gen. 6.4 says that giants walked the earth in those days before the Flood, "and after that". Scriptures only make a brief mention of Nephilim in the days before the Flood but these mutated beings do play a prominent role later on in the Old Testament when Israel took possession of the Promised Land. The giants, Goliath and his brother, were the sons of new Nephilim who apparently had tried to resurrect the conspiracy of polluting the human seed, or had just succumbed to their lust for earthly women, after the Flood. Goliath represented the last vestiges of this "race" of abhorrent half‑man, half‑angel creatures, or as the Bible puts it, The renown men of old. The recurrence of the "Nephilim" conspiracy in Canaan is perhaps one primary reason why God demanded that the Israelites totally destroy the Canaanites who lived in the Promised Land. The seed of the Canaanites had been corrupted again by fallen angels. After the Flood, God confined this renewed conspiracy to the area of Canaan, but before the Flood these giants had appeared wherever the seeds of civilization had been sown. This explains the legends, fables and myths, and the otherwise bizarre religion surrounding mythological gods, that were so much a part of all of the peoples and ancient civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome, India, Japan, China and every minor tribe and culture in the most remote lands of the earth.

Nephilim Were Worshipped

These Herculean beings were half‑man, half‑god. They were supernatural mortals of flesh and blood, but with great and extraordinary power. They had the supernatural strength and wisdom of the ages given them by contact with their demonic fathers. Genesis' statement that "these were the men of old, men of renown" swells with a world of implications. The legends of mythology are not concoctions of unsophisticated barbarians, but are of genuine historical fact having very real basis in truth. This was understood and acknowledged, and undisputed by men everywhere until the fourth century B.C. when the original rational movement among the so-called Greek skeptics and cynics gave rise to philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle which in turn caused the rejection of all former history as handed down from Noah and his sons. As the teachings of the Age of Reason (so-called) and the false science of Darwinism and Evolution has tried to undermine the literal truth of Biblical history and the truth about Creation as told in Genesis, so the rational movement among the Greeks was used by Satan to obscure the truth of man’s origins and the truth about the Greek gods having their origins in the conspiracy of the angels to defile the bloodlines of mankind. But prior to the Greek philosophers and sophists, respected historians like Hesiod and Homer took for granted the historical reality of these men of old, the "men of renown". Homer accepted without question that men like Achilles, for example, were the offspring of a god and an earthly woman who had been seduced.

Worship of the demi-gods: Beginning of Mystery Babylon
These renown sons of "gods" grew to manhood in a time when men, if they were not cut down by war, a wild animal or murdered, lived five hundred, six hundred and even as much as nine hundred years. During that time we must believe that the strongest of these mortal Nephilim (bully “gods”) created dynasties and kingdoms of their own and were in direct competition with other such realms. The patriarchal system of villages and tribes must have succumbed to the despotism of these mighty men and their submissive followers. Cities were built, like the city in the land of Nod where Cain found sanctuary after his murder of Abel. Armies likely were raised, and wars and conflict became commonplace. The Bible tells us one of the main reasons for God bringing on the Flood was that, "the earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence." (Gen. 6.11) God had intended man to live quietly, in family and tribal groups while seeking Him and calling upon His name, but the advent of the Nephilim caused perhaps the most profound societal change that man will ever experience outside of Christ’s Second Coming. The son of a particular fallen angel would become the lord over a province or region and become, as Goliath was to the Philistines, a champion to a people. Competition, jealousy and war became fierce and commonplace.

Is it hard to understand that eventually these heroes, along with their father and mother, were idolized and became that people's deity. They were the sons of gods and they were worshiped as gods themselves. This is the true origin of all polytheism on earth. Hinduism, Buddhism, the ancestor worship of the Shinto in Japan, the mythology of the Scandinavians, wherever multiple gods are worshiped, they have their origin in the Age of the Nephilim. The worship of many gods found its reality with the progeny of the fallen angels who took women as their wives. Their spouses and their sons were worshiped as mythical and legendary heros and heroines.

The twelve tasks of Hercules and his defiance of the "gods" is a perfect example of the legends that were built during the millennium of the Nephilim's tyrannical rule of the earth. The world most likely became intoxicated with these men of "renown", marveling at their incredible feats. The phrase about the men of old and the men of renown from the Scriptures surely implies that these super humans did mighty exploits just as mythology claims. It is not hard to believe that mankind started to worship these mighty champions as "gods" in their own right. It is equally easy to believe that their mothers were also revered and worshipped. Mother and child worship was a natural spin off of this conspiracy to corrupt true religion and seduce man away from worshiping God in spirit and in truth. Naturally, the fallen angels, who Jude tells us were imprisoned for their unlawful transition into flesh, were also made into icons of faith. They were venerated as the departed "gods" who supposedly ruled from afar (but actually had been imprisoned for their outrageous transformation into flesh), on some heavenly perch symbolized by a place like Mount Olympus.

Mythology's Stories Tell A Tale of Demonic Rebellion

The petty jealousies and intrigues among the gods in the stories of Scandinavian, Teutonic, Greek and Roman mythology were actually demons who were vying for man's worship and earthly power through their offspring. This polytheism, pantheism, or worship of many “gods”, was one of the greatest factors in God's decision to flood the earth and kill all its inhabitants. A religion of rebellion had been spawned by this conspiracy. Man and rebellious angel, with Satan at its head, and man in second command was created in the 1,600 odd years before the Flood. Understanding that these superhuman beings actually existed, not just in the imaginations of men, but in all reality, sheds new light on the spiritual and religious teachings of mythology. For example, when we find in Germanic/Scandinavian lore that the subservient gods led by Odin kill their creator and make a new earth, we see the fallen angels and their progeny telling mankind that God has been defeated and that they are fashioning a new world. This tale is told again in Greek mythology when Cronus, the father of the gods, is exiled by his son Zeus, who together with a cast of other "gods" takes over the earth and sets up rule on Mt. Olympus.

The New World Quickly Corrupted by Nimrod's Mystery Babylon

When Noah and his three sons stepped off the ark onto dry ground, a pristine world full of wonderful possibility lay gloriously before them.

Only one righteous man and his family remained in this wonderful possession that God had given to Adam and his seed 1,600 years before. The old corruption and evil had been washed away. As Noah looked at the first rainbow hanging in a blue sky above this bold new world he must have had great hope for the future.

The first thing Noah did after he strode down the gangplank was to build an altar and sacrifice an animal offering as a covenant of his desire to be obedient and righteous before God. The true religion of looking for redemption through the atonement of blood by a Messiah was immediately reestablished in this new world. At his side were his three sons: Japheth the elder, Shem, and Ham, the youngest. Shem was destined to be blessed, Ham would be cursed by God and Noah for his insolence and rebellion. (Gen. 9) Both of them would be used by their respective God to bring their religion over the gulf of the Flood and into the new world. Shem was to bring the religion of his father, and Ham would bring the false religion of Nephilim worship with him . Polytheism, the essence of Mystery Babylon's false religion, had already been firmly established. The Whore would never give this up. Whether it came in the form of the many gods of Hinduism, or the many prophets of the Muslims, or the saint worship of apostate Christianity, "mystery" religion would keep the worship of many gods alive and prospering in many different forms. Eventually the heart and soul of the idolatry of polytheism found its identity in the worship of the god and goddess of fertility. This probably came from the early respect that was given to those who procreated and multiplied man on the earth. Having children was vitally important during the first millennium of creation and greatly desired. These demigods brought forth children and the women who became known for having many children were venerated and made into goddesses. Ashtoreth and all the variations on the name (including Astarte, Ishtar, Aphrodite, and Venus which are the same goddess in Philistine, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman mythology) became the primary goddess of fertility after the Flood. Satan took the command of God, "Be fruitful and multiply" and made a god out of fertility itself. As usual the Devil took a truth and perverted it by twisting it to serve false religion's purposes. Madonna worship and the Easter Bunny are just two examples of the lingering corruption that was begun in the evil Antediluvian world when grotesque bullies filled the earth with violence. The man who would begin the new system of polytheism after the Flood was a descendant of Ham named Nimrod and it was this mighty one who would redefine the worship of the Age of the Nephilim and shape it for the new world. V