Midnight mass on the island of St. Lucia is much more than a yearly obligation to fulfill. It is more like a pageant. Audience participation is mandatory with the intent that you cannot walk away from it without being spiritually moved. One of the features of this pageant was that after the traditional hymns were sung with a figure of the baby Jesus prominent on the stage, the lights were turned off and the crowd became silent in reverence.
One by one, candles were lit to illumine the podium area in a faint glow. Then as a dramatic contrast to these faint lights, one bright spotlight illuminated the podium area and into it was wheeled a 10 to12 foot statue representing the virgin Mary.
As this icon moved to the center of the podium, the worshippers singing moved from being relatively reserved to one of ecstatic utterances and fevered emotions. It was clear that the object of worship was not only the Christ child but His mother as well.
It was 1982 and my third year of living on the island. Although I was raised in the Roman Catholic faith, I had never attended Christmas mass in this Roman Catholic cathedral before. In fact, I had not attended any mass for many years.
What made this year different was that it was the first Christmas since my fathers death earlier that year and my mother had come to visit me on the island. Attending midnight mass was a family tradition that my mom and dad celebrated together every year that they were married. Understandably, she did not want to go to Christmas midnight mass alone.
There are times in each of our lives that God's grace allows the scales from our eyes to fall off. Satan works hard to affix reptilian-like blinders through our training as children. Blindness to spiritual realities comes through the indoctrinations of our education systems and especially through our religious traditions. These elements often work together to isolate us from discovering the truth of God's Word.
The apostle Paul is a perfect example of this. Before he became a Christian, he was known as Saul, a Pharisee of the Pharisees. He was steeped in the Jewish traditions and determine to punish apostates from that faith tradition.
His position as a Pharisee required him to know the first five books of the Bible, the Jewish Torah, by heart. Yet for all of his intelligence and learning, he never knew the Messiah of whom those very Scriptures spoke. So he was zealous to kill and imprison any Jews who claimed to be following a Messiah. The followers of those who claimed Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ were especially loathsome to this young Pharisee.
So when Messiah revealed Himself to Saul on the road to Damascus, the encounter physically blinded Saul. He recognized that it was Adonai, the Jewish Messiah that was speaking to him. Saul was shocked to his core when Messiah showed Himself to be Jesus whom Saul was persecuting.
His physical and spiritual blindness was removed "when there fell from his eyes as it had been scales" after he received the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 9:17). After that dramatic experience, the Pharisee Saul was moved from being a persecutor of Christians to became the apostle Paul, an evangelist for the Christian faith.
While not nearly as dramatic, I had a similar experience a few months earlier after attending meetings where the gospel was preached. There the Lord revealed Himself to me as my personal Savior, and not just an abstract figure of religious tradition that asserted Himself to be the Savior of the world.
When I told my mother that the Lord saved me and that I had been baptized, she was terribly upset, believing that she had lost her husband and her son in the same year. So her visit with me on the island was filled with trepidation. She was concerned that I had become involved in a cult. It was very important to her that I accompany her to midnight mass that year.
By the end of her visit with me, she was relieved to learn that I was not a part of a religious cult. However, our attendance at that midnight mass revealed to me that I had just been delivered out of one...The cult of mother-child worship.
Satan's Schemes
Mesopotamia is often referred to as the cradle of civilization. The Sumerian culture in the Land of Shinar in particular is the place of Satan’s first recorded attempts to establish a one world government at Bab El.
Satan's first attempt at corrupting the human gene pool failed when God sent the flood. Yet satan persisted with his strategy to manipulate mankind into removing the image of God from the human gene pool. His goal was to prevent the seed of the woman from ever being born. In the meantime, satan could find a man to be his own 'seed of the serpent' through whom he can centralize his authority in the earth.
Mother child cult-worship was thriving in Ur of the Chaldees where Abram lived with his wife, Sarai, his father Terah and Lot, the son of Abram's deceased brother Haran. Abram and his family were steeped in the religion of Mesopotamia.
This form of worship began with an individual named Nimrod. You might say that he was satan’s first candidate for the role of antichrist. According to Bab-El history, he was married to Semiramis and they had a child named Tammuz who was killed and resurrected. This led to the mother-child cult of Semiramis and Tammuz.
The information that the Holy Spirit gives us about these ancient civilizations is that the Bab El Kingdom was built by Nimrod, the son of Cush. (Cush was one of Noah's three sons that survived the flood.)
"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." - Genesis 10:8-10 KJV
The word 'began' describes one who profaned himself, or prostituted himself. The result of this is that he became a 'gibbor'; a mighty man, a hunter. The implication of the word, gibbor, is that he became a tyrant and a hunter of men as well as animals.
This led one Biblical commentator to suggest:
“When Nimrod became a gibbor , he unwittingly gave up his rights to be himself. His lust for power, fame and longevity ended in his essence being extinguished. Just as Nimrod became a gibbor , so too, Satan became Nimrod. They became one and the same for as long as the man’s body continued to live.”
Hamp, Douglas. Corrupting the Image 2: Hybrids, Hades, and the Mt Hermon Connection (p. 138).
The Epic of Gilgamesh appears to be a legendary story describing the the life and character of Nimrod.
In Genesis 10:9-11 we learn that the kingdom that Nimrod built in Babylon expanded north through one named Asshur who built the city of Ninevah. The Assyrians would eventually become the perpetual enemies of God’s people, Israel. (So what we see in our world today is a continuation of this spiritual battle for world domination.)
The land that birthed Abram was named Ur of the Chaldees. It meant fire and indicated that form of worship which required human sacrifice. The satanically evil practice of sacrificing children to the god Molech was an attempt by men to gain access to the heavenly realms by appeasing demons.
Nimrod attempted to establish a one world government and create a portal to the unseen realm by building a tower to the heavens. This interaction with the unseen realm was a perpetuation of the sin of Eden and not the means of blessing the peoples of the earth. This sinful practice became prevalent throughout the lands that Abram and his seed were soon to be promised.
It is outside of Biblical information to speculate that by Nimrod prostituting himself with satan, he may have have had his genes manipulated. However, the appearance of giants in the land after the flood suggests that Nimrod's offspring may have somehow been genetically altered to produce 'gigantes', or giant hybrids. Would such genetic manipulation remove the image of God from their gene pool?
The historical record shows that the long lifespans before the flood began to diminish but persisted for awhile after the flood. So, Nimrod could have lived perhaps four centuries or more and fathered many children. This means that when Abram left Ur of the Chaldees, Nimrod would likely still have been alive and through his offspring spread the mother child cult throughout the known world.
This spreading of the Mother child cult is the source of human mythologies where mankind looks to superhuman gods as a means of interacting with the unseen realm. When we look at cultural mythologies, we see that every culture had some form of a mother-child cult worship.
God would not allow this project of a one world order of politics, economics and religion that excluded God completely to go unanswered. So God thwarted these plans by confusing their language and causing human government to be decentralized.
The dispersal of human families into distinct people groups established sovereign nation states. These would serve to act as an impediment to thwart the evil desires of future tyrants to establish a one world government.
The cult of Semiramis and Tammuz has persisted in different forms even to this day. It was referred to by the prophet Ezekiel many centuries later as the cause for Judah to be carried away into captivity. (Ezek 8:14)
Abram's Call
God countered satan’s schemes by calling out a people that would be separate from every other nation infected by the mother-child cult spawned from Nimrod. God's promises to Abram would establish a people separated unto God in order to restore God’s rule on the earth through a King of His own choosing. God would use a portion of Abram's descendants to restrain these demonic practices of Canaan.
“Beyond doubt, then, there was a universal purpose in God’s election of Abraham, and therefore also a universal dimension to the very existence of Israel. Israel as a people was called into existence because of God’s mission to bless the nations and restore his creation.”
Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative p. 251.
God revealed Himself to Abram while He was still in Ur (Acts 7). Abram was told to go to a distant land that God would show him. So, Abram and his family traveled north toward Babylon and stopped in a city called Haran.
However, It wasn’t until Abram left Haran, that God showed him the land of promise from which God would eventually bless all of the peoples of the earth. (Abram's father, Terah was 145 years old and lived 60 more years after Abram left.)
The personal cost for Abram to obey God and leave Haran must have been great. Abram could have lived comfortably as a king in the land of Nimrod, but God called him to live as a prince among the cursed descendants of Canaan.
It took awhile for Abram to act on what God had revealed to him at Ur. This teaches us that when we get stuck in our faith journey, it is often because we consider the cost of acting on our faith to be too great. Yet, God is patient and will not let us rest easy until we follow His Word.
God revealed to Abram that the means of blessing the world would come through Abram's seed. Many centuries later, that seed could be traced to a young virgin named Mary. She would become the surrogate womb of the Christ child and confess that her holy child was also her Savior from sin. This was the fulfillment of God's promise in Genesis 3:15, not the satanic counterfeit that elevated the woman to the status of deity.
This mother-child relationship of Mary and Jesus was not focused on the woman but on the seed of the woman. It reveals the willingness of Almighty God to be found in fashion as a man, humble Himself to death, even the death of the cross. Even though He took on the form of a servant, He was revealed to be the Son of God with power by the resurrection from among the dead.
When it comes to placing our faith in Christ, the cross of Christ reveals to us the nature of God that is very different from the gods of the world. The world demands self-sacrifice to obtain the promises of abundance…but God demands the sacrifice of self. In other words, it is not enough to give God all that we do, faith demands that we give God all that we are.
The cross of Christ reveals God’s love and Grace and justice. Based on that revelation, our response to the cross of Christ demands that we either deny God or that we deny our own nature. It is only in the moment that we submit to God and place our trust in Christ, that we receive the promise of fellowship in the Divine.
This fellowship requires a daily commitment take up our cross and count ourselves to be dead to an idolatrous world system. We read in Heb 13:12-14; “Let us therefore go forth to Him without the camp, bearing His reproach” We are unconditionally guaranteed a place of blessing inside the veil, where the glory of God appears. Yet, we can only enjoy nearness to God when we commit to separating ourselves from the world and going unto Him outside of the camp.
This was Abram’s choice when he left Haran to go to the place where God had chosen to place His Name. It is where God would fulfill His promise of land, seed and blessing to Abram and his descendants. There is likewise a full inheritance of everlasting life reserved in the heavenly realm for whosoever will trust in Christ Jesus to deliver them from this present evil world.
Abram's calling is your calling...all that you have to do is ask God to save you and give Him the permission to make you who He wants you to be. "Whosoever will call upon the name of the Lord, will be saved."
smc