The Lost Empire
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Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome. Today we’re talking about the lost empire of Assyria. We’re in Isaiah, in terms of our grand march through scripture.
Last week we talked about conspiracy theory, and Assyria, as it turns out, is one more conspiracy in history. We’ll talk a little bit about the new world order that it was trying to form, but first let’s place it in history. Where did Assyria come from? Take us back to the beginning, won’t you Greg? All the way back to Genesis, not quite chapter 1.
All the way back to Genesis. We never get away from it, do we? After the story of Noah that most people are at least vaguely familiar with, certainly Christians ought to be, there are two chapters that very often we sort of skip through. One of them, chapter 10, contains what’s called the Table of Nations. It’s a list, sort of a genealogy of whose children Shem, Ham, and Japheth’s were. Who did they begat, and then who did they begat, and what nations came of this?
That’s the one that most people say, “I don’t know these names, and there’s obviously nothing of spiritual value here, so I will skip to chapter 11,” and then you run into the Tower of Babel, which most people are familiar with, and that takes up less than half of the chapter and then you get more genealogy, so we skip ahead, brother, and run into Abraham and now we’re on familiar ground. But the Table of Nations does form a sort of literary visual background for everything that follows in the Old Testament.
You remember in the old days when you went and watched a movie – well, in your case when you watch an old movie on new technology – and all the credits are up front? There was a simple reason for that. If you put them at the back, guess what people will do?
Yeah. I don’t know if you’re among those – I know the Farschmans and the Uttingers and a few others are among those who are committed to staying until the last bitter end of the last credit that rolls, as recognition that all of these people were involved. You get to see what babies were born.
I didn’t used to be, and then I had a friend in college who would always stay. It wasn’t like he stated an expectation that we would always stay, we just always did and that stuck with me.
It entirely depends upon the movie in question. Obviously, I think Marvel trained us all very well to stay through the end of their movies, but mainly what I have here is an idea of a dig against bad movies. I will not sit through the ending of credits of movies I did not enjoy seeing.
That’s perfectly reasonable. It’s like tipping the waitress. If she did a good job, you should be nice, and if she didn’t, stiff her.
The analogy there is you put those up not merely to give credit where credit was due, but often your cast of characters would show up. So-and-so is playing so-and-so. So-and-so is playing so-and-so. So then as it begins you would have some idea of who to expect to see.
That’s sort of the function of the Table of Nations. Yes, it’s great for those who study ethnography and ancient geography and all those kinds of things, but in terms of just the story of the Bible itself we get to find out what peoples are related to what peoples, and sometimes that becomes really important later on for interpreting the Bible.
For instance, it’s only by reading the Table of Nations that you find out that the Philistines were descended from a tribe that was descended from Egypt. In other words, the Philistines were an offshoot of Egypt. They were an Egyptian colony. So when we get to the later parts of Genesis and beyond, every time we see Philistines we should think, “Oh, these are neo-Egyptians” and interpret the text in terms of that. God is bringing Egypt forward in the person of their avatars, and that’s kind of important.
Yeah. And then when the ark of the covenant goes into Philistia in captivity and then destroys its gods and brings plagues we should say, “Oh, we know this. These are Egyptians and God is replaying the exodus on a smaller scale.” We get that. That helps tie things together.
There are a few nations that really do not show up at all until you get to Ezekiel. You can think here of Magog, for instance. Anybody who studies eschatology knows Gog and Magog. Originally Gog is the prince of Magog, but the very fact that it doesn’t put in an appearance after the Table of Nations until Ezekiel means it wasn’t one of the immediate neighbors, and therefore we’re to understand in Ezekiel the immediate neighbors God has already dealt with. Now the further-off threats are coming, and God is going to deal with those, too. Some of those names are not so much chosen to say this or that nation is coming, but God’s got everything.
He took care of the close threats, he’s going to get the distant threats. He’s got all of the nations. Any nation that can rise up against you, God knows about, he’s cataloged it, he’s got it in check, and when he’s finally ready to release it on you he’ll be right there to deal with it, too. So there’s that and other things.
Also, I forget in which psalm this phrasing shows up, but I love it. “The nations are as dust on the scales.” It’s not even that, “Oh, I’ve taken account of it. I’ve got my accountants ready. We’ve allocated the proper resources.” It’s like, “We’ll just send an angel at one point, if it becomes necessary.”
It’s so little it doesn’t even show up on the scale. You can just run a dust cloth over it and it’s fine.
Unto Shem also, the father of all the children of Eber, the brother of Japheth the elder, even to him were children born. The children of Shem; Elam…
The Elamites – that’s the area that Persia will come into and take over. These are not Persians but it’s what will become Persian territory.
That’s the Aramians who spoke Aramaic, which was the language that the Jews used when Christ came to earth. And then some others. There’s not a lot of nations that descend from Shem, but one of them is this people called Asshur.
An interesting thing. If we back up several verses we run into Ham’s children. One of Ham’s children was Cush. That’s the Ethiopians who began to settle in Arabia, but eventually crossed over and went into Africa and became the nation that we know as Ethiopia, or Abyssinia at one time. Then Cush begat Nimrod.
I think there’s only one other reference to Nimrod beyond this passage, and in that context (one of the minor prophets) it does call Assyria the land of Nimrod, and this is why.
And Cush begat Nimrod. He began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD: wherefore it is said, Even as Nimrod the mighty hunter before the LORD.
And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and Calneh, in the land of Shinar. Out of that land went forth Asshur and builded Nineveh and the city Rehoboth and Calah…
And there’s some more cities. The margin note on verse 10, where the name Asshur appears, says he (that is Nimrod) went out into Asshur, into Assyria, and built Nimrod. Again, Assyria and Nineveh is called later on the land of Nimrod.
First of all, who’s this Nimrod guy? The ancient world obviously knew. When you’ve got nations you’re dealing with, multitudes of people covering a long period of time, and you pick out one single person and say, “And of course there was this guy, Nimrod,” obviously he was really important and the whole world knew, “Oh, him, yeah. Mighty hunter. Sure was. Empire builder, yeah.”
And that’s where we get the saying, “Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord.” It’s in their idiomatic expressions.
Yeah, it had passed into idiom. The problem is the secular histories don’t know him by that name. That doesn’t mean they don’t know him. There are a couple contenders who he might be, or who in fact might all be the same person. But if you look at secular history and say, “Who was the first major empire builder in Mesopotamia?” they’ll say Sargon of Acad.
Okay. That one I don’t know. Or if you look at who built Nineveh you’ll find one Ninus, who may also be the same man.
There was a time when archeology took the Bible very seriously. I have Sir Walter Raleigh’s The History of the World. He was a very good scholar for his time and place. He took the Bible very seriously, and as he’s writing he’s arguing with other scholars who had written before him about who’s who and what’s what and where’s where.
He has substantial arguments about where the Garden of Eden was located. He’s completely wrong because there’s some things he doesn’t understand, but he took it seriously and he believed that everything that was in the Bible was relevant and that came first, and then you fed in the archeological data which they had, which at that point was not a lot because archeology as a science really didn’t get started until the late 1800s. But this was common. When archeologists would come and try to figure this out, and there were real discussions of who this Nimrod was, and who some of these other characters were, and were they the same character or were they related and did one came after another, was one father and one son –
For instance, at Babel at the tower there are two characters were who named Bellus. Bellus simply means lord. In American history if you talked about President Bush – obviously he must have endured through a few administrations. He must have been the first guy who was in for six terms, because he’s serving here and then he’s still serving over here. Had we lost all the historical information except a few headlines from the New York Times, that would be easy to conclude until you realize, “Wait. One’s a father, one’s a son, and there’s all kinds of stuff that happened in between.”
As we look at the Tower of Babel, there seems to have been two leaders, a father and son – Cush, who was sort of the prototype for Hermes or Thoth or Mercury, the god of language, the one who interprets language or misinterprets, as the case may be, and then his son Nimrod or the second Bellus, who marries Semiramis, the beautiful white lady who was the prototype for all the mother-type goddesses, and these were two of the first dead monarchs to be deified.
This was my original point. There’s so much material there, but there are also so many holes, and archeology today doesn’t believe the Bible so no one is going to go back and say, “But wait. Let’s start with the Bible and use that as a framework, and then try to fit the data into that.” It’s more, “Well, this is my theory and I can prove it with selective ordering of archeological detail, and the Bible of course is irrelevant to archeology, and then we can build our arguments.”
It’s not even just, “Oh, we’re not going to use the Bible as a framework.” It’s, “We’re not even going to count it as a primary source.”
No, it doesn’t count as a primary source, because in the minds of most secular historians it wasn’t written until after the time of Ezra. Anything that it records before that was oral tradition or myth or maybe a few random documents that some scribe found and put together, but it was not contemporary history written when the things happened.
Historians consider the Bible a relatively modern book usually, so Christians have not really been in a place to rethink archeology and to do the investigations and to say, “Look, here are the holes that we need to fill if we’re going to make sure our answers are right. Start looking. Start reading. Keep your eyes open. Look for the new inscriptions that are just being translated. Look for side references in old books that everyone’s ignoring. Let’s see if we can’t put this together.”
In the meantime, for our purposes at least, it seems that this people following their father Asshur moved into the area around the River Tigris, what the Old Testament calls Hiddekel, and having settled there, along comes Nimrod and conquers it and imposes upon it what he started at Babel, which is a vision of a one world order symbolized by the ziggurat, whereby man can attain deity. “We can build a civilization, a society, a culture that will get us to where the gods are.”
Yeah, way back at the beginning we did, so if anybody is interested they can go back and listen to that one. It was the one on the Tower of Babel.
So from the beginning, although the Assyrian people were a Semitic people descended from Shem, very early on they get stamped with Nimrod’s vision, and from there on out they pretty much maintain it. They never are able to pull away from it except for one brief generation that listens to this waterlogged bleached prophet, and for a little while says, “Oh,” and they return to the God of their great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, and then they have enough and they go on. They adopt Asshur as the chief of the gods; otherwise, they pretty much have the Babylonian pantheon.
The Assyrian culture gets drenched in magic. When the ruins of Nineveh were discovered and explored, there were – as Thornton Wilder says in Our Town – lots of slave contracts and wheat bills, but beside that, probably half or more were spells and magic. It was how to cast spells, how to deflect spells, and warnings against taboos. The Assyrian culture was full of taboos. “Don’t do this or the demons will get you. Don’t do this or the gods will be offended. Don’t do this or a curse comes,” so magic became the way to help protect yourself against these things.
The king then was relatively all-powerful but checked again and again by, “Sorry, sire. It’s the 13th day of the month and you know we can’t do anything or the earth will open and swallow us.”
“Oh, of course. There’s nothing wrong with the…wait wait wait…yeah, the 14th is clear. We can do that.”
The thing about Assyria is its lifespan. It is probably the most ancient and most long-lived of the great empires. It’s like Dracula who keeps coming back from the dead.
If you read the histories we know, it goes back to the time of Abraham and before, and then it kind of recedes in power and influence, but by the time we get to the later history of the kings of Israel and Judah it’s back again, and it’s had some ups and downs along the way. It’s never completely gone out of existence.
Now, you can almost say the same thing for Babylon/Babel, because we run into Babel here at the same time, but first there’s the whole tower confusion of tongues thing that doesn’t go well. It gets taken over by various other peoples from time to time, and finally the Assyrians just slap it down hard. In fact, they destroy it.
You remember the story of Hezekiah? This is about where we are. You remember that when Hezekiah is having to deal with the Assyrians he gets sick and he appeals to the prophet Isaiah and Isaiah says, “Hey, God says you’re going to die. Get ready for it.”
Well, he turns to the wall and pouts a little bit and prays to God, and God says to Isaiah, “Alright, go back and tell him he’s got 15 more years,” then we have the whole, “I want a sign!”
It’s at this time the Babylonian ambassadors show up and say, “We just saw the sun move in the sky, because we watch the stars and that, and we heard you were sick in your bed. We just wanted to offer our hearty congratulations, our concerns for your well-being, and maybe there’s a possibility of some alliance here because Assyria is really mean and nasty and they don’t like us, and they probably aren’t going to like you either.”
“That would be nice,” so Hezekiah shows them all his treasures. Isaiah is off doing something, and he comes back and sees the Babylonian ambassadors leave. “Who were these men?”
“Oh, they were ambassadors from some small town far away, someplace called Babylon.”
“I showed them everything. There is nothing of all that I have I did not show them.”
And this is why Jesus said to be cunning as serpents, as well as innocent as doves.
Yeah, this is where you open your fake treasures and show them the cobwebs. “We used to have so much, but…”
“This is not a place we really want to come. What were we thinking?” but you know, the Babylonians being stargazers see the sun move. “Whoever has a god who can do this, that’s someone we want on our side.”
The king those ambassadors worked for was a man who is called Merodach-Baladan. He was a perennial troublemaker for the Assyrians. He took over Babylon and tried to raise a ruckus, and they chased him out. Then after a while he came back and tried it again, and they chased him out. Then he came back and tried it again, and finally – I don’t remember if they actually caught him and killed him, but they made sure he never came back, and they completely annihilated the city. They wiped it out.
“We’re not playing this game anymore. You’re gone. There’s nothing there anymore.” So for a generation or two it was just sand, but then in the days of Esarhaddon, the king who comes after Sennacherib and after Hezekiah and the kings we know, Esarhaddon said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a city there? Let’s build one, and we’ll get these people called Chaldeans to run it. It’ll be great for trade and all that,” so Babylon gets rebuilt and thus becomes the center of the Neo-Babylonian or Chaldean empire.
Meanwhile, Assyria has kept ticking, and in this revamped image that we find in Hezekiah’s story, and before that the Ahaz history and the things that follow in Isaiah’s whole Christmas sermon, it’s getting mean and nasty. It is a war machine. It’s very successful. All of its funds are dedicated to war and aggression, and they’re being moved by this Babylonian philosophy that they’ve been permeated now with for centuries, except now they feel that they are the ones to carry the torch and lead forth the banners and create a new world order.
Again, it’s going to mean a unified humanity, like the Tower of Babel, which means a unified religion and philosophy, a unified worldview where everyone will share Assyria’s take on things, and unified political control through an expanded and powerful all-seeing all-knowing bureaucracy.
In order to accomplish this, we need first of all to destroy all local loyalties, so if a nation just happens to really love us and say, “Ooo, we all want to be just like you. We too are Assyrians,” say, “Okay, we’ll see how that works, but anyone who dares oppose us, that’s not going to work, so we’ll take their populations and scatter them abroad throughout our empire.”
I believe I said this maybe last time, that what’s going to happen – and what happened to the northern tribes – is one day you wake up in your new locale and you find your neighbor on the right is Egyptian, the neighbor on the left is Syrian, the guy across the street is a Philistine, the guy around the corner comes from someplace called Greece or something. You don’t speak the same language. You don’t have the same culture. You don’t worship the same gods.
You have one thing in common – you are citizens of the Assyrian empire and you work for them and they make the rules and there’s no two ways about it. There’s no nonsense about democracy or self-determination or any of that. Your homeland has been destroyed. It does not exist as your nation anymore. Your nation is gone. In that sense, mass genocide because God must be one, so unity becomes absolutely essential to this Assyrian worldview. Diversity? No, there’s no need for that.
The other thing that went with this, and I’ve hinted at it, is they were ferocious. They used terror as one of their main weapons. If you opposed them, when the battle was over they would often go out and find all the dead bodies (presumably dead, although I don’t think they were picky about it) and then skin them. Then they would take those human skins to the next city they were planning on attacking and nail them to the wall of the next city as a message: “This is what’s coming for you unless you open your gates right now and surrender to us.”
Yeah, doesn’t it? I mean there’s only so many wicked horrible things you can do. Assyria pretty much did them.
As we follow biblical history from here through Babylon to Medea-Persia to Greece and to Rome, the same vision maintains, but with slightly different emphasis. The Babylonians don’t try to destroy national cultures. They make use of them. They take the best and the brightest, send them to their version of Yale and Harvard, educate them in the ways of Babylonian thought, and then send them back to be the leaders of the people, except now they’re brainwashed and they work for Babylon.
The Persians were much nicer. They basically said, “You can have everything you’ve always had. Just pay our taxes and provide men for our war machine. We don’t care about anything else, just behave yourselves,” which is why the Bible actually does look upon them with some favor.
Greece – “You know, we all need to be good Greeks.” Alexander didn’t have much time to do with that. He was too busy fighting and then died, but his followers kind of insisted on, “Yeah, Greek philosophy” – not so much the religion but the Greek philosophies. They were religious philosophies.
Rome comes along and says, “We don’t care about much of anything. You can do whatever you want. There’s just one provision – you need to put a pinch of incense on this altar and say, ‘This only works because Caesar is lord.’ So you can have your religion, your churches, your whatever once you get a license from the State. Once you admit the State (Caesar) is in control of everything by divine right, that’s all we really need from you. We don’t need anymore. Just get the 666 tattoo on your forehead and we’re cool.”
This new world order, this vision of one controlling worldview that’s backed by politics and bureaucracy and armies, but also works subtly – not so much with Assyria, but later – works subtly through education to mind-shift the population, this is what God’s people were living through.
When we look around today, some of these things should sound real familiar, like yesterday’s headlines or tomorrow’s. We need to understand that God’s people have seen all this. They’ve seen it come and go. They’ve seen it in five different flavors, and at no point was God out of control. In fact, as Bryan said earlier, the nations don’t count. They are dust and less than dust.
Again, I appreciate the angle Bryan was taking. It’s not simply that God says, “Oh, there’s a threat to my people. I must do something.” It’s that God has set this up for the good of his people. Assyria came for the good of God’s people. Babylon came for the good of God’s people, ultimately for the good of the gospel, for the good of bringing Christ into the world. It was absolutely essential in the way that God had planned things that these nations rise to power and then fall, on his time schedule, and God’s people had to learn to accept that.
As you read particularly through the minor prophets, but the latter parts of Isaiah, of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel most certainly, this is an ongoing theme, and when you get to the gospels it’s assumed. The gospel is open and here’s this new empire that we hadn’t heard of before called Rome, and it’s got Judea under its thumb. How could God possibly bring the Messiah about? Well, read the gospels. He needs Rome to be there, because somebody has to declare him righteous and then kill him, and then someone has to destroy Israel and execute God’s wrath.
And the stone has to come rolling down from Babylon to knock down the statue.
Exactly, so God’s people had to learn to walk by faith in the face of this. When we get to Isaiah and the Christmas sermon, Assyria is the political backdrop. A couple episodes ago we saw that it is the Assyrian threat to the north that leads the northern kingdom (Israel) and their former enemy, Syria (Arran), to try to make a league and try to include Judah, and Judah won’t go along, so they decide they’re going to attack Judah, subdue it, put in a puppet king, unite with Egypt, and form a large political block against Assyria.
The Christmas sermon begins with, “That’s not going to happen.” Isaiah comes to tell King Ahaz, “God’s going to get rid of these two nations to the north, and you just need to trust me, and if you don’t then that’s something else then, isn’t it. But if you want a sign, I’ll give you a sign anywhere,” and Ahaz says, “Ah, I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord.”
“That’s really arrogant. The Lord himself will give you a sign. A virgin will conceive and bear a son and call his name Emmanuel.” In other words, God at this point is bypassing the Davidic line. “Yes, somehow the Messiah will be the seed of David, but apparently not yours because we don’t need you, King Ahaz. We don’t need your seed. We don’t need your line. We don’t need your political kingdom. All the things you think that God somehow finds necessary in you, you are out to lunch. God has this all planned and you are no longer part of the plan.”
Then he brings up Assyria. “Assyria is coming and it’s going to take out Syria, it’s going to take out Israel, and then it’s coming for you.” Then we have the break and we come back and then the whole conspiracy thing.
They’re not listening really, because God is saying, “Don’t worry about Israel and don’t worry about Syria, but Assyria? Assur? Yeah, they’re going to be a problem.”
“But we’re still scared of these two powers that are next door. They’re confederated against us. They’re conspiring against us. Conspiracies rule the world!” and we saw last time, no they don’t. That’s not to say that they can’t be effective in a limited sense, because God needs them to be effective sometimes. Sometimes not so much.
He ordains that they’re effective despite themselves. Sin is stupid and sinners stab each other in the back routinely. God will let them prosper long enough to get done what he needs to get done. It’s one thing for Satan to work with broken tools. He can’t very well, but he tries really hard. God can use broken tools all he wants because he can just hold them together until he’s done, and then he lets go and they fall apart.
When you get to chapter 10 (skipping 9 for the moment), Assyria again is brought to the fore, and let me read a little bit. This is how God describes Assyria. He turns to Assyria and says –
O Assyrian, the rod of mine anger, and the staff in their hand is mine indignation. I will send him against an hypocritical nation [Judah], and against the people of my wrath will I give him a charge, to take the spoil, and to take the prey, and to tread them down like the mire of the streets.
So God says, “Assyria is just a rod in my hand so I can discipline my people, and it’s really going to hurt.” However, the Assyrians, that’s not what’s in their minds.
Howbeit he [Assyria] meaneth not so, neither doth his heart think so; but it is in his heart to destroy and cut off nations not a few. For he saith, Are not my princes altogether kings? Is not Calno as Carchemish? is not Hamath as Arpad?
They’re comparing cities that they have conquered with cities they want to conquer.
As my hand hath found the kingdoms of the idols, and whose graven images did excel them of Jerusalem and of Samaria; Shall I not, as I have done unto Samaria and her idols, so do to Jerusalem and her idols?
Wait, Jerusalem is not supposed to have idols, but the king is saying, “I’ve done my research. All these towns one by one have fallen, and Samaria is not much better than Damascus, and Jerusalem is no better than Samaria. In fact, their idols aren’t as impressive. They’re not as big. They’re not as colossal. They don’t have so much gold. Jerusalem’s idols are rather poor and pathetic anyway. (Jerusalem wasn’t supposed to have idols.)
Wherefore it shall come to pass that when the Lord hath performed his whole work upon mount Zion and on Jerusalem, I will punish the fruit of the stout heart of the king of Assyria, and the glory of his high looks. For he saith, By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom; for I am prudent: and I have removed the bounds of the people, and have robbed their treasures, and I have put down the inhabitants like a valiant man:
And my hand hath found as a nest the riches of the people: and as one gathereth eggs that are left, have I gathered all the earth; and there was none that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or peeped.
Shall the axe boast itself against him that heweth therewith? or shall the saw magnify itself against him that shaketh it? as if the rod should shake itself against them that lift it up, or as if the staff should lift up itself, as if it were no wood.
God’s response is, “Wait, I said you’re the rod in my hand, you’re an axe. Axes don’t turn around and start chopping the people who are holding them. The people who hold them are in charge, and I’m holding you and I’m going to use you for a purpose. I’ve used you for a purpose, but when I’m done watch out.”
Therefore shall the Lord, the Lord of hosts, send among his fat ones leanness; and under his glory he shall kindle a burning like the burning of a fire. And the light of Israel shall be for a fire, and his Holy One for a flame: and it shall burn and devour his thorns and his briers in one day; And shall consume the glory of his forest and of his fruitful field, both soul and body: and they shall be as when a standardbearer fainteth.
The image here is between what Assyria does and what’s going to happen to it through the agency of God’s providence and his people, the whole Middle East, once this beautiful forest in a figure like Lebanon is going to be left so there’s hardly anything, the image of a standard bearer fainting – the guy who holds up that big flag or banner that marks where the Emperor is.
Imagine you see it, and it begins to totter and to sway, and eventually – boom! – falls down. That’s how the trees – the great kingdoms of the Middle East – are going to look. You look and, “Oh, look, there’s one! Oh wait, it’s tottering, it’s tottering! Oh, it just fell down. And there’s…no, it’s gone already. Oh, that one’s on fire.” They’re going to look across the Middle East and there’s not going to be much left.
And the rest of the trees of his forest shall be few, that a child may write them.
And he goes on in that theme for a little while. The Middle East is a forest. Assyria is coming along as an axe and chopping things down, but he’s getting cocky so God takes the axe and turns it on itself and takes down the whole forest until there’s hardly anything left at all. The Middle East is going to be a wasteland.
But how can God possibly fulfill his promises now? In chapter 11 then we come to the pinnacle of the Christmas sermon. He bids us look out over this forest, this bunch of stumps, and he says –
And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem [stump] of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots.
“Look, see that stump over there in the middle of Judah? Out of the very root – not out of the decapitated trunk but out of the root – something’s growing, something’s green, something’s coming up there. What is that?”
And the spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of the LORD; And shall make him of quick understanding in the fear of the LORD: and he shall not judge after the sight of his eyes, neither reprove after the hearing of his ears: But with righteousness shall he judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the earth: and he shall smite the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked. And righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins.
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. And the sucking child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the cockatrice' den.
They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea. And in that day there shall be a root of Jesse, which shall stand for an ensign of the people; to it shall the Gentiles seek: and his rest shall be glorious.
So there’s God’s plan and there’s the first Christmas sermon of any length, and it runs right through this thing we call Assyria. God has a plan for Assyria. God has a plan for this new world order thing. God has a plan for this massive empire that is one vast war machine that seems to be taking over everything everywhere, and nothing could possibly stop it. God will stop it when he’s ready.
When we were talking before we started recording, I did mention there was a time when God did put it on hold for a generation. That was when Jonah went to Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital, and for one generation Nineveh repented because that was part of God’s plan. He needed for the judgment to come not quite yet. He needed one generation, and so he converted an entire people and saved horrible, horrible people, and then he let them go back to their ways in the next generation. So this whole thing of Assyria is taking us through 2 Kings, 2 Chronicles, and Jonah.
Nahum also describes the final downfall of Assyria when there is no repentance. And when it’s all done and all gone, it just evaporated from history. Nineveh was abandoned and buried. The other major Assyrian cities were lost. The deserts reclaimed them, so that by the time we get to the late 1800s liberal critics of the Bible were saying, “Assyrians? There were never any such people. We’ve never heard of them. There’s no significant reference anyplace, except people maybe quoting the Bible. The Bible made this one up wholesale. These people did not exist. This Nineveh place – it’s a figment of religious fanaticism from just before the time of Christ. It didn’t happen, didn’t exist.”
And then one young man, a dilettante on his way to the far east at the height of the British empire to look for a job, stumbled across this town called Mosul and was told, “On the other side of the Tigris, that big mound over there, don’t go there. The demons come out at night. There are weird things there. You don’t want to go there, Englishman, it’s scary,” so of course like any good young Englishman about 20-something he goes there and starts digging around, and in time begins to find artifacts.
He then eventually hires native diggers and they start uncovering huge statues, winged lions with the heads of kings and so on. He discovered Nineveh. The man’s name was Austen Henry Layard, who I’ve mentioned on other occasions, and whose biography I’m going to recommend in our recommendations.
By the time they were done excavating – and I’m tempted to say looting – the ruins, most of the stuff went to the British Museum, which is where I first saw a lot of this stuff, and some of it eventually went to the Louvre, because fortunately Nineveh is not around to ask for it back. The Assyrians had a library of clay tablets that they left behind. Cuneiform was discovered and translated. We now probably know more about Nineveh and the Assyrian empire than we do about most other empires of that time, because the desert sands just preserved it all until the time was right for God to say, “Look at this.”
In “things the Bible got wrong,” you don’t see that one anymore. It’s gone the way of lots of things. Time and archeology have shown that the Bible knew exactly what it was talking about.
In terms again of personal piety, I have lived through a couple generations now – the one before mine and my own and seeing a little bit of it in the generation that you are at the head of, and my students are somewhere in the middle – this fearfulness of conspiracies, of power blocks, of a new world order.
I mentioned before that my father was a conspiracy theorist, or at least he read all the literature that came out of those circles, and that’s where I got to know things that I probably or maybe would be just as well not knowing about. Hopefully God will use it in some sense, but there was this constant thing of, “The other side is powerful. There’s conspiracies. There’s armies. There’s a will to win, and the American people are soft and stupid. If we could only educate them, but they won’t listen.”
I don’t know how many times I was told as a young man growing up that I would live to see the fall of the United States. It was just sort of a foregone conclusion, because the other side was strong and we were weak. We wouldn’t stand up to them, and sooner or later either simply by inner corruption, the Communist conspiracy putting people in progressively higher places until they could just take the government, or by outside threat. They had more missiles. All they had to do was knock out ours in one round and then hold us hostage. It was that way or some other way. I was told I would see the United States fall during my young lifetime.
You know what it’s like to grow up in the shadow of that? If I hadn’t been studying biblical prophecy from a very different perspective at that time, that could have been very traumatizing, very frightening, like “Well, this is the end of history. Why should I do anything? My life’s going nowhere. I’m never going to live in a free land or have children in a free land. Let’s just give it all up.”
There are still people today who look at modern conditions and say, “Well, let’s just give it up. The only solution is for Jesus to come back.” They actually cannot conceive of any alternative to the bad guys winning, taking over, and sending us all to slave camps or execution chambers, but the return of Jesus.
There are some who are willing to admit that Jesus may not come until after all that’s happened. There are others who say, “We’re America, we don’t suffer. We’re obviously out of here real fast.”
Our friend Josh, who teaches at the school, walked into our drama classroom, which might have contained his 5th grade class – he wasn’t sure, he was looking for them – “My 5th graders have all been raptured. I don’t know where they are! I went in my room and there was no one there, and now you guys are here and they’re not. I don’t know what’s going on.” And he went out saying something like, “So Kirk Cameron was right all along.”
Yeah, I forgot. I’ve never seen that, have you seen that particular version?
My mom was reflecting on that phenomenon recently. She says, “When I was a kid, all the news was Russia’s got the bombs. We’re going to hide under our desks. We’re going to do the drills and everything. And then we went out and played and had a normal outside childhood.”
People don’t do that anymore, so the terror that the next generation lives in isn’t as mitigated even as it was in your day.
The media and the government pushed that. I don’t know if you remember the expression “Better Red than dead” – better Marxist than dead – and the conservatives responded, “Better dead than Red,” that freedom was something worth dying for. Here we’re talking about the late ‘50s on into the ‘60s, which brings us to the student revolution, the flower children and hippies and all that. These were young people who were afraid to die.
We’re seeing that again in our generation with the whole Covid thing. A lot of what happened was that people were afraid to die. I mean they were afraid that they would die, and they were going to do whatever they could to not let that happen, to ridiculous extremes at times.
Right. Did I tell you this joke – if it counts as a joke? My wife and I were watching some standup comedian. He based his routine on statistics, which has got to be a weird way of doing standup comedy, but it was mildly humorous. He was looking at how marriages end up in divorce and he said, “You know, 40% of all marriages end in divorce.” I don’t know if that’s a true statistic, but it’s the one he gave, and everyone said, “Yeah, yeah…”
“But wait. Think about it backwards. That means 60% of all marriages end in death!”
No one is getting out of this world alive, but you know what? My generation thought they would. Mine was a generation that was absolutely convinced that Jesus Christ would come back in their lifetime, to the point of not going to college, not getting married, not pursuing careers, because why? Jesus was coming back.
I mean it was like Nicene Creed, Formula of Chalcedon, and Jesus is coming back before 1980. It was seriously believed, and if you didn’t believe it then “I’m sorry, you’re one of those kinds of Christians. I didn’t know you were liberal,” because a literal interpretation they thought meant inevitably that Jesus was coming back within my generation.
It would be interesting to go to some of those people now and say, “Has your eschatology changed?” Oftentimes it hasn’t. They just keep blindly pushing the goalposts. “Okay, so it wasn’t 1980. It’s 2000…no, 2010…no, 2020. Well, sometime within my generation, and a generation maybe isn’t 40 years, it’s more like 70 years. Maybe a generation is like 100 years. Maybe it’s generationally-something-ish.”
But the one certainty is that it’s not worth investing in a retirement fund.
The young man who visited our Bible study the other day seems like a very nice young man. He’s from a Slavic country, Slavic background, Slavic church, and he very much appreciated our Bible study, but at the end as we were just asking questions about his own background, which was quite interesting, he began to pick up the traditional dispensational line about the future of Russia. Russia is going to rise and be a major power. It’s going to invade Israel. Israel is going to respond, and this is what’s described in Ezekiel and in Daniel 11.
It was amazing to see this thing that was brewed in America mostly, then got transported across the seas to non-American and non-English-speaking nations and put roots there, and then these people have come back and they’re as sure of our stupid ideas as we are. It’s very sad, rather than the hope we could have given them.
He described the time when the Iron Curtain came down and the Soviet Union fell, and the Christian churches in surrounding former satellites were sending in missionaries. I did not know that had happened. Praise God. But they’re sending in missionaries who again have a basic dispensational mindset, which means this is temporary, and one day Russia will rise and invade Israel and set off the sequence that leads to Armageddon.
I don’t know if we’ll ever get as far as talking about some of those things. Maybe we should. Maybe someplace there should be something people could point to and say, “Here’s an alternative exposition of Ezekiel, and it doesn’t include Russia,” because most people say, “No, that’s what that’s about, right? Magog? That’s Meshek. Meshek is Moscow. Tubal is Tobolsk.”
No, they’re not actually, but it’s not enough for me to say they’re not because it’s very deeply engrained in people who study prophecy from that perspective.
The good news to that is it’s so deep that you can correct it before you get there in a sense, if you have time. That’s the struggle, is having time. But eschatology is the ultimate things, not because it’s the end of the world things but because it’s the last thing you get to.
It’s the last thing you get to, except that it’s the first thing you get to. I mean eschatology is simply God wins. We make that joke. “I’ve read the end of the book. God wins.” Yes, and what does winning look like? When we know that, then suddenly everything that leads up to it makes sense.
If you read the final script for some future Star Wars movie and it said, “And the galaxy all died that day,” we would say, “What? No, wait, what? No, that’s not the story.” Or if we read a Jane Austen novel, “So all of the sisters took poison and died together.” No, Jane Austen doesn’t end that way, and neither does the Bible. The end is in the beginning, and the beginning is in the end, and the whole question is what kind of God do we have anyway?
Does God abandon the plan he set before humanity? Or does he find an even cooler better neater way to bring it to pass in an even bigger way than he originally said? Or did God just give up and say, “Eh, let’s save some souls for heaven – it’s close enough.”
So eschatology does matter, but it’s the fruit of your soteriology and your theology. What kind of God do we have? And what exactly is this salvation business? If we know that, then that’s going to lead us into the resurrection and it’s also going to show us where history is going.
This was something I was going to ask you all about, and I’ll ask you another time, but I think at some point we probably should stop and just talk to our audience and say this is why we think we’re doing what we’re doing. I think that would be a great podcast, so maybe not next time or the time after, but sometime before too long let’s think about doing that.
We all have our different perspectives. By the way, audience, we’ve never sat down and said, “Here’s our plan. This is what we’re doing.” We just said, “Hey, we’re friends. Let’s talk about this stuff.”
Yeah, is there a plan? I kind of have one, but I’ve never tried to impose anything on you two or any of our visitors.
One of my daughters was trying to figure out her calling and whether or not she’s called to be a Christian school teacher and such, and she was kind of getting frantic and her mom said, “Why don’t you ask your dad why he’s a Christian school teacher, or at least why he does what he does?” At first she wasn’t going to. I don’t know if she didn’t care or if she thought it was embarrassing or something, but finally she did, and this is what I said. I don’t think she understood. I said, “I’m fighting for the life of the world.”
Grandiose? Hubris? Inflated ego? I hope not. I don’t mean that I’m going to make the change, but I’m hoping I’m part of an army, maybe a very, very tiny small part, but part of a gospel army whose goal is to change the world, to save the life of the world that Jesus has already saved. We’re working out the salvation he purchased by bringing truth to people. And the privilege of doing that is greater than any other I can imagine in this life and that’s my calling, and everybody has a different calling that spins around that somehow, or spins within that.
That’s something I’d like you to think about. Why are you doing this and what do you hope this is going to accomplish? If it’s just talking to good friends about our Lord, that’s still a pretty good answer. Anyway, I think that’s where we can leave it.
This stuff is practical. It does affect how you think about the world and how you read the headlines. It’s a question of what your faith looks like. Are you afraid of men? Are you afraid of nations and empires? Are you afraid of conspiracies? Are you afraid of takeovers? Or do you really believe that God is God and that he not only can deal with this, but they’re here because he wants them here. He’s got a plan for them, and when that plan is done he’ll get rid of them. They’re never the threat. The person we ought to be afraid of is God himself.
There’s even a whole verse about that. “Fear not the one who can kill the body, but fear the one who can destroy both body and soul.”
Alright, we should wrap up and do some rapid-fire recommendations. Greg, you already said you had one lined up.
Yeah, it’s the biography of Austen Henry Layard written by Arnold C. Brackman, The Luck of Nineveh: In Search of the Lost Assyrian Empire. It’s not about all the history we just talked about. It’s about the history and story of this one young man in the late Victorian era, an era when any good Britisher could make his fortune by going to the far corners of the British Empire, which as we know the sun never set upon, and could find an office working for some uncle or grandfather or something someplace, and make a small fortune and come back with tropical plants and settle in and appear in an Agatha Christie novel. But this young man didn’t. He got distracted by adventures and by archeology, and along the way discovered Nineveh.
He was also at various times a writer, a teacher, and a secret agent. He dealt with sheikhs and desert bandits. He sounds incredibly like the prototype for Indiana Jones, so if you like biographies, if you like adventure stories – they’re not super wild adventure, but stuff happens – I think you would enjoy this, The Luck of Nineveh: In Search of the Lost Assyrian Empire by Arnold C. Brackman.
Recommendation: The Luck of Nineveh: In Search of the Lost Assyrian EmpireAwesome. I’m going to recommend Phineas and Ferb, speaking of mummies and discovering something that wasn’t thought to exist.
It’s a very light kids’ show that is nevertheless highly entertaining. Every so often there’s a song with clever lyrics. The premise is Phineas and Ferb are two stepbrothers who have a summer vacation, and every day they’re like, “What are we going to do today?” In one episode they have a chariot race because they went to the museum and they’re like, “Let’s do this thing!” The humor is that it’s ridiculously to scale. The chariot race is across town and they’ve got spiked chariot wheels and the whole bit.
Recommendation: Phineas and FerbThe sister is always trying to tell on the brothers, saying, “Mom, look what they’re doing! They’re making a total mess. This is so dangerous! Get them in trouble!” But due to circumstances, it always vanishes by the time mom comes to actually look. There was a song about the chariot race and “my anachronistic wagon” and it’s fun.
I still think one of my favorite lines is a little throwaway line. They basically fill the pool with jello mix and made it into something bouncy, and at one point it gets hit, because part of the show’s other plotline is always about a secret agent platypus fighting an evil genius, and the evil genius always has some kind of -inator, so he has an evilinator ray and it hits the pool of jello, and it turns into a monster and walks off.
Phineas turns to the group of his friends and goes, “Alright, who added the evil powder?” and everyone looks at Raj, the Indian kid, and he goes, “It’s curry! It’s not inherently evil.”
Oh sure, if you’re giving Disney money, which is a fine thing to do. I just don’t. We bought it on Amazon.
I have two recommendations. The first one is I’m going to recommend that if you’re going to hold to modern doctrinal statements, you should also hold to historic doctrinal documents like the creeds.
It’s very much a sub-tweet. There’s a handful of people I can think of, and I will not name them right now, who throw a lot of shade at things like the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Constantinopolitan Creed, and the Chalcedonian Definition, “because they’re adding to scripture and you shouldn’t use them as standards.” But then they’re also out here talking about national statements and Chicago statements on inerrancy etc. Those things are all fine.
It turns out the early church was also facing problems and having to say things about them.
Yeah, they were and they should be listened to. So that’s my first recommendation.
The second one is I just finished listening to the audiobook which is read by the author of Carl Trueman’s Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self and it’s phenomenal. Very brilliant. He doesn’t really stop at any one point to be like, “And this is why it’s wrong according to Christianity.” It’s very much just a historical account of Descartes to Rousseau, through the 19th century Romantics, to the modern view of what self-identity is in the west, and it’s really interesting, so that’s my second recommendation.
Thank you, guys, so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure and I look forward to next week. Thank you also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.
Thanks also to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in. I hope you’ve enjoyed this show as much as we enjoyed making it. Thank you also to our financial supporters. We appreciate you keeping the show rolling. If you’d like to join their number you can visit our website, anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion. And if you’d like to get in touch with us for any reason – as my mother used to say, “Comments, questions, bouquets or brickbats,” or as my Greek teacher used to say, “Questions, comments, insults” – [email protected] is the best way to get in touch with us. Send us an email.