Why Did Peter Sink?

The theme of Spiritual Warfare is all over in the New Testament. Even the word “Gospel” means to bring news of victory. Gospel is a proclamation of victory over the enemy. Most people do not realize that there is a war happening, so they are not aware of the skirmishes around them. The Great Commission that Jesus gives his followers is to go and “make disciples of all nations.” To be commissioned is a military action. How is this to be accomplished? By telling the story of Jesus, the man without sin who was unjustly condemned, crucified, and rose again from the dead before ascending into heaven. This message is not to be brought by the sword or the gun, but by awakening people to the truth about how they can be set free from the slavery of the powers that whisper in their ears, crouch at their doors, and rule the nations.

To be unshackled from these bad spirits it to stomp out the fire of competition in your heart and kindle the fire of the Holy Spirit in its place. Stop looking at other people as the enemy, and start seeing them as POWs. They are prisoners in the greatest war of all, a war that makes all human war look like a game of patty-cake.

There is a way to set people free, and it’s not by strong-arming, mocking, selling, tricking, or bribery. We cannot “compel them to come in” because Jesus said that “no man can come to me except the Father draw him.” That means God is working on people in his time. We who have found Christ and are fighting the demons must also resist the urge to play God. If we try to force people, we instantly revert to the language of Babel, which is competition, envy, pride and wrath.

The strange solution that we must use to fight the spirits that seek to dominate our lives and our nations is this: we opt out. We reject them. We stop fighting. We stop taking offense at every little thing. In order to gain control, you must give up control. In order to go up, you have to go down. The great paradox here is that in order to gain control over the spirits, you must give up control to God.

Surrender to win.

The Tower of Babel story is about control. It’s about winning. It’s about playing God and making God surrender to us, which is impossible. The building of the Tower is man’s attempt to control God, which always fails.

The miracle, however, is that our failure to pull God down leads to him coming to meet us. Through Abraham, through Mary, we get Jesus. God reverses the ask of the Tower builders, and he comes to us when he is ready, no gate needed, no bricks and mortar. We don’t control God, we just live in his world. He comes to us when he is ready, and however he sees fit.

In the man named Jesus, he comes down. Under terrific spiritual attack, God is then raised up on the Cross, and by surrendering, God wins. The same works in our lives.

He defeats death. He allows fallen humans to think they have overpowered God once and for all on the Cross. Then Jesus rises again on the third day, proving them wrong, stunning the world, the flesh, and the devil. In our own daily battle, we surrender, giving up control, and only then can we fight the Spiritual Combat. We must let go of our self and put our entire confidence in God, because if we try to go halfway, we are still allowing spirits to guide us. Going only halfway allows the whispers to still be heard and sin is still crouching at the door.

If we only go halfway, we haven’t left the competition. We are still speaking Babel. If we do not fully hand over our hearts to Jesus, we cannot fight the spirits, because they will always find a way to chase us once again away from the herd. The shepherd comes for those who seek him, and for whatever reason, he chooses who he draws and chooses when he draws them to him. On God’s time, people are drawn, but in our daily spiritual battle, we can pray for those souls who we know, and even don’t know.

This is a mystery.

Accepting that not all are drawn right now, today, should give no cause for anger or alarm, because God’s ways are not ours to understand, and the moment we get angry at another person, then we have lost our way. We’re playing at God, into the hands of the spirits. Never forget that sin is crouching at your door.

We are commissioned in the service of the Lord to “Go and make disciples of all nations.” That means that while God will draw people on his own time, we can pray and teach and speak and spell the story of Christ and the Cross. We are God’s instruments, and his weapons, but we are weapons of kindness, not those of fear.

So why are the nations still at war? Jesus has ascended, but the story is not finished. His victory over the nations is complete, and we merely await his return now. In the meantime, we are his arms and legs, his voice, so we need to tell the story of Christ today, with full charity, to those who don’t know of his death and resurrection. We can imitate Christ while God works out his plan of salvation. Billions are unaware of this combat that encompasses them. They are locked into ways of life that enslave them, and they do not yet know that there is a way out.

This naturally raises the question of “Why all the drama?” Why doesn’t God simply snap his fingers and fix the nations? Why is there a need for Mary and Jesus and this drawn-out solution to the problem? Doesn’t it seem like God allowed this to happen at Babel by letting the demonic powers rule the nations in the first place?

We are in the Messianic age, the last age, and God will again make himself known, on his time, when he wishes. Do not try to be the potter at the wheel, just be the pot. Let God shape you, do not try to shape God. This is a great time to be patient and pray, especially when it may seem like the whole world is caving in to the temptation of pride and wrath around you.

Some notes from the Catechism can guide you here on how to swim and, better yet, how to float peacefully when the waters rage and the storm hits:

670 …We are already at "the last hour". "Already the final age of the world is with us, and the renewal of the world is irrevocably under way…

671 Though already present in his Church, Christ's reign is nevertheless yet to be fulfilled "with power and great glory" by the King's return to earth. This reign is still under attack by the evil powers, even though they have been defeated definitively by Christ's Passover. Until everything is subject to him, "until there be realized new heavens and a new earth in which justice dwells, the pilgrim Church, in her sacraments and institutions, which belong to this present age, carries the mark of this world which will pass, and she herself takes her place among the creatures which groan and travail yet and await the revelation of the sons of God." That is why Christians pray, above all in the Eucharist, to hasten Christ's return by saying to him: Marana tha! "Our Lord, come!"

672 Before his Ascension Christ affirmed that the hour had not yet come for the glorious establishment of the messianic kingdom awaited by Israel which, according to the prophets, was to bring all men the definitive order of justice, love and peace. According to the Lord, the present time is the time of the Spirit and of witness, but also a time still marked by "distress" and the trial of evil which does not spare the Church and ushers in the struggles of the last days. It is a time of waiting and watching.

673 Since the Ascension Christ's coming in glory has been imminent, even though "it is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority." This eschatological coming could be accomplished at any moment, even if both it and the final trial that will precede it are "delayed". (CCC 670-673)

Be prepared then. Love God, and love your neighbor by knowing they are suffering prisoners in this great spiritual war. See Christ in them and pray for the whispering and the crouching sin to leave them alone. Stay with the Church, stay with the faith. Stay with Christ. Fight the urge to strike back, the need to win, and surrender your will and intellect to God, and you will have victory. Hold fast to the ship in the storm. The weather is about to get bumpy. We can pray not to be brought to the test, but the final test is yet promised for the Church.

Before Christ's second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the "mystery of iniquity" in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth…

Then will the conduct of each one and the secrets of hearts be brought to light. Then will the culpable unbelief that counted the offer of God's grace as nothing be condemned. Our attitude to our neighbor will disclose acceptance or refusal of grace and divine love. On the Last Day Jesus will say: "Truly I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me."…By rejecting grace in this life, one already judges oneself, receives according to one's works, and can even condemn oneself for all eternity by rejecting the Spirit of love. (CCC 675-679)

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Let’s recap and roll through the cast of characters, the who’s who, in the three falls of man, and see if we can identify who is the baddie.

First, Adam and Eve lose paradise by allowing the whisper of a demon to enter their thoughts. This is the “shiny one,” the tempter, the accuser. A demon guides her actions by suggestion, planting thoughts and deceiving her about who and what God is. Who is the enemy here?

A spirit. A bad one.

Next, Cain lets sin master him, being told that “sin lies in wait at the door: its urge is for you, yet you can rule over it.” But he submits to that demon by not battling it, not ruling over it. This is the first mention of the word sin in Genesis, and we think of it as an action we take. But consider this way of thinking about the word sin:

This description of sin is striking. The Hebrew word translated as “crouching” in Genesis 4:7 can indicate lying down, as in resting, but also refers to lying in wait like a predator lurking for its prey. The same verb is associated with an ancient Semitic term for demons that were believed to guard entrances or doorways to buildings. Thus, the text characterizes sin as a demonic presence or a predatory animal waiting to pounce on Cain.

So in the second fall, who is the enemy?

A spirit. A bad one.

Then we get to Babel, which means “Gate to God.” The nations already exist in chapter 10 of Genesis. But in a few places in the Old Testament, we learn that each nation has its own ruling spirit, that God has assigned angels or demons to the nations. Divine beings exist, literally called “sons of God,” also called members of the divine assembly. These creatures are assigned to oversee the nations. But these spiritual “sons of God” are creatures like us, with intellect and free will but not bodies. What seems to happen is that the creatures become the “local gods.” Humans begin to offer worship to these gods instead of the real God, God Most High.

The tower is a ziggurat, which is a holy place where pagan gods are worshipped. And just who are the pagan gods? They are not God. They are idols. I would have believed that they are figments of the imagination, but Jesus seems to imply, repeatedly, that these ruling demons are real. These fallen spirits are overseers employed by God to watch the nations. Somewhere along the way, people rejected God, and started worshipping the overseers. Worse yet, the overseers starting accepting worship from humans, and also rejected God. After all, they are under the same Commandments as we are.

The Gate at Babel is not meant to send humans up to heaven, it’s meant to pull God down from heaven. But in Babel, the people have been tricked. The watcher, the guardian, has become a fox in the henhouse. The nations have been duped by egotistical fallen angels who crave worship. The Tower is built to these demons, not God. Humans that build towers to anything but God Most High have been sucked into a power play, fooled by vending machine gods. And thus the being set to guard and watch the nation has become corrupt itself. He or she or it has fooled the rulers into idol worship. Who is at fault once again?

A spirit.

A bad one.

Not only can we be fooled by spirits at an individual level, but we can as well at the group level. Trying to replace God, usurp God, or disobey God at any level leads to division and strife. This is the daily battle for ourselves, and for the nations that we occupy.

The war that we are in is not against other people. It’s not even against other nations. It’s against spirits. Other people are not the enemy. This will come as a shock to internet users. The real enemy of Democrats is not Republicans, and vice versa. If you understand this properly, it may open a door to understanding suffering, understanding the state of our world, and understanding Jesus.

Observe in the Gospel how Jesus reacts to those who treat him terribly.

If someone attempted to kill me, I would probably get upset. But Jesus does not get angry at the people that try to throw him off a cliff. Nor does he get angry at the soldier who punches him or the plural soldiers that scourge him. All of the mockery? He just takes it. The cruelty pours over him like water and he utters not a word in self-defense.

Why?

Because these people are the lost sheep. They are the ones fallen into ditches and ravines. Under a constant spiritual attack they struggle, but their time has not yet come to ask for help. The shiny one is whispering in their ear. Sin is crouching at their door. A false idol has their attention. They don’t recognize Jesus right in front of them, but he is inviting them to see him. In other words, all of these people need saving. Jesus is here to save them. That’s why he doesn’t get angry at them.

He shows us how to save people. It’s not by competing with the cruelty of others, returning jab for jab, wound for wound. He shows us another way. By not competing, he appears to be losing, but he is winning for us all, and showing us how to win.

Those throwing insults are the ones following the advice of the demons. Jesus points the way for us on how to opt out, how to to reject their game, how to cancel our subscription to the whispers. He doesn’t lash out at the demoniacs, he doesn’t lash out at those who beat him, he doesn’t lash out at those who mock him.

However, he does lash out at those who reserve God for themselves, who block the “little ones” from coming to him, and who, in Peter’s case, try to impede his path to the Cross. Of all people, he lashes out most at the Pharisees, and he tells us why they are scolded. He holds them to a higher standard because:

“Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.” (Lk 12:48)

His sustained anger at the Pharisees suggests that they have been entrusted with much, but they have failed to live up to the demands. This is a bit terrifying to read. Anyone who lives in comfort today should read this “given much” phrase and immediately see themselves as the recipient of much. If you have a house, you have much. If you have a refrigerator full of food, you have much. If you have faith, you have everything. And if you have faith, “more will be demanded” because you have been blessed with a gift like no other.

Jesus expects that those with the gift of faith will give that gift away, because it is a bottomless gift that keeps giving, like the basket in the story of the loaves and fishes. However, if you hold the gift of faith to yourself, then it is pride and greed that do you in. The whisper of righteousness is coming from a spirit, and you are not fighting back. If you have the gift of faith, then you are a warrior intended to help turn the tide back toward God in this long saga of salvation history. In our small role in the great war, we all have a part, and the only weapon we need. Faith can guide free will to the right place. We are the gatekeepers of our thoughts and must slam the gate shut when evil attempts to enter. If the evil thoughts have already breached the castle walls, then you have to turn to God, pray to heaven, and fight off hell to re-take the castle. This is another great trick of the devil. He takes several angles at defeating us, like an army testing the lines of the enemy, checking for the weakest spot. First, he tells us that demons don’t exist. Next, he’ll tell you that your desire is not really a sin, but a culture of oppression or a phobia invented by man. Then he convinces us that we are “born this way” and helpless to our sins. Worse, he will throw Bible verses at us, and you can see plenty of Christian preachers today acting as his puppets, advocating for the sins of pride, greed, sodomy, adultery, lust, and sloth.

The demons are real. God allows us to be tempted. That is our test, to stand up to them and keep our eyes fixed on Christ.

St. John of Damascus reminded us long ago that we are not helpless in this battle.

But while the liberty to attack man has been granted to them, they have not the strength to over master any one: for we have it in our power to receive or not to receive the attack. (De Fide Orthadoxa, Book 2, Chapter 4.)

It is always worth repeating the question: Why did Peter sink? We know why. He looked away.

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The reason I found it impossible to understand anything in the Bible when I was fallen away is because of one simple fact: I did not really believe in God. Once I had re-admitted that God was real, I still did not really believe in spirits.

This blocks all understanding of what Jesus is up to, in nearly every interaction that he has. It’s not surprising people get nothing out of the Bible today, since our Present Bias considers spirits to be the mere superstitions of uneducated fools. Our long march through the Enlightenment left our souls behind, and now we have to turn the bus around to go back and retrieve the other half of our selves.

Notice that whenever Jesus heals someone, he cures by removing something and/or making something whole. He often drives out a spirit. And spirits are everywhere in the Gospel. They seem to not only rule the nations, but they overtake people. A general observation of mental health in today’s world suggests that little has changed since the time of Jesus.

These healings happen without full explanation, but there is clearly something spiritual at work, something supernatural. Let’s run down the list:

Jesus drives out a spirit in Capernaum, he drives spirits into a herd of pigs, he heals a demon-possessed child, he heals a boy with an “unclean” spirit. That’s just for starters. He re-infuses the spirit into dead people, re-animating them. He does this to Lazarus, Jairus’ daughter, and a widow’s son; garden-variety miracles of resurrection for Jesus, not the Resurrection that Jesus does to himself that conquers death.

Next, consider the numerous healings of blindness and deafness. There are seven of these alone. Plus, he heals deformities, skin diseases, and even paralysis. Then there are the mystery illnesses that, like Peter’s mother-in-law who has a fever, the chronically ill woman in the crowd, the many healings at Gennesaret, the dropsy cure on the Sabbath, and the healing of the official’s son in Galilee. None of these medical cures require a scalpel or a prescription. He even re-attaches an ear in a split second without any plastic surgeon in sight (or proof of insurance).

Without understanding that Jesus came to a spirit-filled world, how can you possibly understand or relate to anything in the Bible? I don’t think you can, because the awareness of God, spirits, angels, and demons is fundamental. In our disenchanted scientific model, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, we live in the boringest of all possible worlds. No wonder every libertine becomes so dull as they age and end up looking botoxically ridiculous in their luxury cars.

Our scientific obsession has sliced our ability to understand scripture by shifting our thoughts into a pancake-flat rationalism, into “nature” alone, ripped clean away from the spiritual life. We’ve lost a whole dimension of understanding by cancelling our souls and God. The funny thing is that cancel culture cannot cancel what is true, and God and souls are real. We can hear them knocking on the culture now, quite loudly, while we put our fingers in our ears and try to talk over it.

Oddly, in our collective transition from beings with body and soul into just a body and mind, we have become less and less connected to nature. This may be the greatest irony of all: in our obsession with nature as the answer to all things, we have moved further and further from the woods. We believe nature is the only thing that is real, but in our actual lives we mostly experience nature on TV, not outdoors. And if we do finally get outdoors, we make sure to bring plenty of hand sanitizer in order to quickly makes ourselves clean again. You can’t make this stuff up. I think the ancient Israelite cleanliness rituals have nothing on today’s materialist germophobes. Covid protocols doubled the fear for those already afflicted. The bright side of Covid is that people started to realize that nature must be experienced, not merely narrated by David Attenborough. The exodus from cities and throngs of people cramming into National Parks attest to the fact that a change in mood about those “flyover states” and rural living is happening. There is a transition happening as the candle of the Enlightenment has begun to flare out, particularly as its pursuit of “truth” through pure materialism and liberalism has led us directly into postmodernism, the poster-child of relativism and antithesis of truth.

Let’s briefly revisit the pre-Enlightenment era, known as the the Dark Ages.

First, you need an Enlightenment propaganda decoder ring. It’s pretty simple:

Christendom = Dark = Evil.

Modernity = Light = Good.

The name alone, Enlightenment, broadcasts the propaganda as much as “woke” implies that the pre-woke world was “sleep.” We have the same game being played out again and again. Marx tried to do a takedown of the bourgeoisie, with his villain as Christianity and the class system. In the Enlightenment, the enemy was the same: Christendom. In the latest manifestation of Marxism, guess who is the enemy? Christianity. The long-term Nazi plan was to stamp out Christianity. Is anyone yawning yet? We can keep going if needed, all the way back to Julian the Apostate to Marcus Aurelius to Nero. The common enemy of worldly power is Christianity, always. And guess who remains after all of these ideologies flame out? Jesus. I’ve heard people say, “We are finally getting out from Christianity and the patriarchy.” Today men, and white men in particular, are the enemy. It’s hard to tell these true believers that, no, Christianity is not dying. Jesus is the ruler of this world, the presidents and prime ministers are just renters.

The misapplication of the doctrine of original sin happens ad nauseam, as the underdog and the oppressor fable plays out. This is why we cannot get to the Kingdom of God, because the whispers of the evil one keeps this loop of pride happening.

If we consider the era of the Enlightenment, which is now being replaced, we can track the language of “Dark Ages” rather easily, all the way back to Petrarch in the 1300s, but the label really took off with the French Revolution. See, people were not free until they rejected God. Here’s another clue for your decoder ring. Freedom = Rejection of God. That’s how the story goes. Ignorance and error only comes with obedience to God, or so we’re told, and given that we want to taste all the flowers of life, we are easily sold.

But that story is always a lie. It’s the wrong kind of freedom. People find this out in their own falls and redemption just as nations do. Repeatedly. Israel itself found this out the hard way, repeatedly, until it finally was kicked out of the promised land entirely for 1900 years. Choosing the freedom of the self versus the freedom of obedience to God takes you down very different paths. This is the story of the decline of Christian values in the west. Taking the easier path is the lesson of Lot going to live in Sodom instead of taking the less arable land that Abraham chose. In our current state, we constantly choose the easier path, and have done so with massive encouragement from writers and media, from the Renaissance era right up to the iPhone today. The perceived gains in efficiency and leisure come with a cost. It’s been long observed by writers like Neil Postman that we are Amusing Ourselves to Death. But not only does entertainment take our eye off the road of life, it breaks our connection to nature entirely, to the point that people become disconnected from even the sources of food that we eat.

During the “Dark Ages,” we lived in far greater connection with nature. When we had no radios or phones, when we shivered near wood stoves, when we lived near animals, near the woods, near pastures, we had a far better idea of “spirits” than we do today. I suspect it was far easier to talk about spirits when you could hear the blizzard whipping at night outside the hut, or even the castle, than it is today where we watch TV in our Snuggie in front of the gas fireplace amid the humming white noise of forced air furnace heat and walled within airtight spray-in insulation and drywall. No, they did not have hot tubs or cold beer or vibrators, but they had something much greater, and that was a spiritual sense of life.

The many advances that came through engineering and science proclaimed that unending progress in technology would bring freedom. Now, I don’t want to experience a Minnesota winter without a forced-air furnace if I don’t have to, but a furnace does not bring salvation, and faced with the choice of losing God or losing my furnace, I would choose to remain with God, and ideally, I pray, avoid living in the eternal furnace.

My point is that people were far more in touch with nature and its awesome power, and likewise were more connected to the world of ghosts. We don’t experience either now, as we lean over Chromebooks and live out the myth of Narcissus, staring into the mirror of a screen. Unless the storm breaks into our lives somehow, we don’t get to recognize our weakness and need for something greater than ourselves. And God still does find a way to invade our lives, it just takes longer than it did in the “Dark Ages.” God still has a way of breaking in to our world, even with all of our engineered comfort. A storm can strike even while you lay on the couch and the sun is shining outside. Jesus climbs into our boat, invading us with Grace. How you react to it will be the climactic moment of your life. Never coercive, God lets us choose, and we do. One way or another, we say yes or no to God, whether we think we have or not.

Many people today say, “Nature is my church,” and I know why. Those who spend time in the woods sense something out there, something awesome. You don’t need a sequoia tree to appreciate the awesomeness of nature. A sapling will do. An acorn or a pine cone will do. You can spend time in amazement looking at a blade of grass if you hold it close enough.

My point is that we do not experience nature reading papers in the journal Nature. Knowing how nature works is not an experience of nature. We experience the awe of nature by participating in nature, being out in nature. Being able to summon from memory the Latin names of plants is not experiencing nature, it is bottling nature for our consumption. A child jumping in a pile of leaves understands nature far better than a naturalist collecting beetles in jars. There is more nature experienced in slapping a single mosquito around a campfire than reading an entire book on microbiology in a library.

This is exactly how the prayer life works as well. It’s how speaking a foreign language works, or playing a musical instrument. You don’t experience things from books, you experience things by participating. I have a book about the science of swimming, but I don’t take it with me swimming.

The reason people feel churchy in nature is because they are no longer watching Planet Earth on the discovery channel, they are discovering earth and creation itself. When we disconnect from cities, books, screens, traffic, noise, ego-dramas, TV shows, and every other pornish eye candy we have invented, something incredible happens. We become more whole. When we become whole we become more spiritual, because we are both body and soul, and whenever we deny the soul we becomes less human. We become only half of the image and likeness of God when we downplay the soul.

Whenever I am on a hiking trail and come across someone blasting music on his smart phone, I say to myself, sarcastically, “You know what this walk in the woods is missing? Top 40 music. Thank you, Justin Beiber. You’ve made it complete.” The silence of the woods - the bird songs and the babbling streams - recalibrates the soul to the tune of God. Bieber does not do that. By no coincidence, fairy tales mostly occur in the woods, since that is where spirits are felt. Being in nature re-enchants us, giving us a sense of the spiritual.

We feel whole in the woods, and thereby a sense of holiness. Here’s a hint: these two words are related.

The reason the woods doesn’t need Justin Bieber is because it is already complete by itself. What people find in the woods is creation, and like God when he finished making it, we all can see: “It is good.” Even if we come across death in the woods, of plants or insects or animals, we can see the circle of life without the need for Elton John to sing about it. Like the woods, we feel more whole because a spiritual presence can be felt, and it can be stifled and ruined by simply pulling out your iPhone to take a selfie. Gadgets and phones in the woods is the guaranteed way to lose the wholeness, because they have all the temptations of the city, the world, and the nations. All the falls of man are present in the phone, so that every time you place a screen before your nose, you are less whole. This is because the self gets in the way of the soul. The mind is meant to connect body and soul, but the mind becomes the self, and even the word “Selfie” gives away the essence of the problem.

We can even sense that our bodies are good in nature. I don’t think a hiker looking at a grove of trees is likely to think, “I need to lose weight” or “I should inject botox into my face this week.” But if they are taking selfies, holding up the mirror to their face, those ideas leap to the forefront of the mind. Or maybe I’m wrong. Carrying a mirror of our thoughts everywhere we go doesn’t give us connectedness, it reduces our wholeness.

In the woods, the wholeness seeps in, the joy of something profoundly close touches you in the brush of a fern, while the sense of something higher and unreachable calls out to your soul. This is the paradox of the transcendent (farness) and the immanent (nearness) nature of God. The reason nature feels spiritual is because God made it, and he made you. Of course it feels spiritual. In the woods, you are closer to home than ever. When out among creation, you are reminded of your own creation.

The spirits identified by the ancients are still in the woods. They are still everywhere but we ignore them, walled in by the sound and light produced by artificial gadgets. Distraction is the best angle the devil has to make us forget not only God, but to make us forget the devil, too. He is counting on us doing that, and every time your reach for a device, he is rubbing his hands in lieu of taking your soul on the last day.

Through our obedience to science we have decided angels and devils are too childish to accept. Those ideas were for the primitive minds of people before the year 1500. Those ideas are for the fearful, we think. Surely, we are more sophisticated. Our sophistication is our paper shield against all superstition. Hence the need for cartoon Tinkerbells, Caspars, and red devils. It assures us that there is nothing to fear.

But there is something to fear, and we all know it, and it’s called death. The whole reason for the walls we build is to push that fear aside, down the line, away from our present. Our society reviles death to the point that open casket funerals are nearly a thing of the past. No one wants to see a body. A neat cremation is preferred - it’s cleaner - much like our dinosaur chicken nuggets that bear no resemblance to the once-living chicken.

This is the irony of our alleged sophistication. It isolates us from the reality of life and death. We openly mock those whose lives still occupy the spaces of nature. The hillbilly with his trout, the hunter that we call savage, and the farmer who delivers piglets all have a far closer relationship to nature than the billions who live in cities. We mock what we fear.

Having had a chance to work on farms, I have noticed that those who live among palpable nature, with daily chores that involve blood and manure, who see life and death as daily occurrences, have an understanding of things that books can never provide. This is why I turn the volume down whenever someone from Silicon Valley offers instructions for living. I have gained more in five minutes watching a calf being born, delivered by a farmer with an eighth grade education, than I have ever gained from one hundred hours of human resource training videos on how I should think. The birth of a calf, let alone a human being, is watching a sacred miracle of life bursting forth. Watching an HR training video is a mandatory brain-death march at the bayonet of my paycheck.

The spiritual flatness we have allowed into our lives is stunningly obvious to an increasing number of people, but the pleasure of making money lures and keeps us in this trap. I was nudged, even coached into the office life, despite the movements of my heart telling me from my very first hour in a cubicle: “This is a birdcage. Escape now!” The language of Babel kept me there. After all, I speak Babel. “God helps those who help themselves.” “Get rich or die trying.”

This wall against the possibility of spirits is built and shored up with mockery as mortar. We’ve forgotten that spirits can pass through walls. Disney is freezing spirits in time every time they portray another fairy tale. By bringing fairies to the screen, fairies becomes less believable. Science has decided what is reasonable to believe and Disney has killed our imagination. Disney is in the business of turning imagination into a science, even calling their engineers, “Imagineers.” They are quantifying and qualifying the intangible. Cinderella was once a fairy tale for each of us to imagine, and now she is cast into a single image, in her blue dress, as if her image was hammered onto a stone tablet in Orlando. Science and Disney have denied the spirits by reducing them to engineered cartoons. In the former we downplay it, and in the latter we play it up as quaint fantasy.

So I’ve taken a huge detour into the woods here, but now let’s bring it back to the desert, to Jesus and that third temptation.

Jesus has three temptations in the desert, and in Genesis there are three falls: Adam, Cain, and Babel. (Again, I’m skipping the Nephilim story in chapter 6 of Genesis. There is a fall there as well, but I’ll stick with Adam, Cain, and Babel, or this series will never end).

In all three falls, spirits are involved. In all three temptations of Christ, spirits are involved. The falls all occur due to our failure to accept God. In all three falls, humility before God is lacking. Pride reigns. Pride cometh before the fall.

The whole Bible is about mastering yourself by tamping down pride. To keep from being deceived, we have to ignore the questioning whisper that suggests to you that God is lying, that he is not real. To keep sin from pouncing on you, like Cain, we have to mash our pride into a slurry and send it down the disposal. To keep from trying to manipulate God, we must offer him gratitude and praise, not sacrifices for a transaction.

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The entire Old Testament after Babel is the preface to God’s return, with the pivot point being Mary. Through the Incarnation, we learn that God will restore his rule, and remove the evil powers. Tolkein fans should recognize this immediately because we are living in part three, “The Return of the King.” We are living in the Messianic Age now. Also, for anyone who wonders why Mary is such a big deal to Catholics and Orthodox folks, it’s because without her there is no return of the king. She is the turning point in this story, the Mother of God. She’s kind of a big deal, as in, the biggest deal ever, as she is the true gate that brings God to us.

Christ came to do several things: to take away our sins, transform our suffering, destroy death, and ultimately defeat the demonic powers. He came to wrest power away from those spirits that rule our lives and the nations. Again, he did not come to remove all suffering. We still have to deal with that for now.

As for the pain and suffering that doesn’t make sense, the only God that ever came down and suffered with his subjects is the God of Israel, the God who came to us. This is how and why suffering is transformed in Christ. A common question is: How can God allow suffering? How could he do this to me? That is exactly when we can look to Jesus, to God himself, who came here in the flesh and suffered a brutal and terrible death on the cross. Until you understand this, and how Christianity works, suffering will probably never make sense to you. You will cry out, “Why, God, why?” even as you stare at a crucifix with Jesus looking right back at you.

Not only Christ suffered, but his own mother did as well. Those closest to him suffered. His immediate followers, his chosen twelve, almost all suffered horrible deaths. They were so hungry that they ate barley right out of the field. Mocked and scorned, they had to hide and endure prison. Millions of his followers have suffered, not in fear or self-pity, but with strength, and some even with joy. All of the saints have imitated Jesus and experienced profound meaning in that suffering, giving incredible hope and rebirth to people who were once spiritually dead. That is why Christianity does not die, nor will it ever. The only God of any religion that came here to suffer like one of us is that of Jesus Christ who voluntarily carried his cross and showed us the meaning of redemptive suffering. This is the only religion that even makes sense when we can see how much pain is in the world. It is only the person of Christ who can turn a cross into a gift. Self-salvation is a fool’s game. The Under Armor marketing team almost has it right, even though they just shoplifted their slogan from Christianity. The t-shirt and shoe company assures us that “The only way is through.” The way to what, Under Armor? A trophy? A scholarship? Forget such trifles.

If you want to get to heaven stop trying to construct a gate or a tower of yourself. Stop chasing drugs and sex. Quit wasting your time on something that will impress your peers or massage your lonely ego for a few hours. The original saying is from St. Rose of Lima and a hundred other Christian writers. The only way is through the cross. Says St. Rose of Lima: “Apart from the cross there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.” (CCC 618)

We will all get to learn on the last day where the gate we are looking for is located, and it is not a gate or a ladder or a tower. The cross is the narrow gate, and following Christ is the way.

The spiritual rebirth found in Christ happens every day. These are modern miracles. You can watch it happen when the penny finally drops and everything connects. Our modern mental health crisis has a single cause: it is taking the exit off of the Via Dolorosa to hit the drive-thru at McDonalds. The cure is to be re-enchanted with life, with struggle, with purpose, and the therapist needed is available for free, any time, any where, and so is his mother, who can take notes for you and deliver them to the therapist for you.

When people are released from their bondage of self, something happens, and you can hear the reborn person tell you, “Something was lifted off me,” or “I don’t know how to explain what happened to me, but I am no longer the same.” What they are describing surpasses science, as no pill or therapy can explain what has happened. But once you see it enough times, you know there is something spiritual happening, and when these miracles occur, a prisoner is being released from the enemy, returned from exile to the side of God.

What we don’t realize in our day to day movements is that we are in the middle of a war.

This is difficult to accept for modern people because much legwork has been done to confuse and steer us away from this fact.

We are in a war. This is a war far bigger and longer-lasting than any human war. And this war has claimed billions of people already. We have been in a war our entire lives, just as your parents were in the same war, and your parents’ parents were as well. The sooner you recognize this, the sooner you can do something to change not only your life, but your entire “language” of life. Once you recognize this war, the lens through which you see everything changes dramatically.

This war is not with people. In other words, people are not the enemy.

If you were lucky enough to be baptized, you are already armed for this battle. But the battle is not against other people. In fact, if you think the war is against other people, like Democrats or Republicans, or Packers fans versus Bears fans, you don’t yet understand how this war works. You are still in the darkness, being distracted, diverted, divided, and deceived by a spirit. The prison still has you.

Consider this question: When and why does Jesus get angry in the Gospels?

He does not show anger at the lost, the mentally ill, the blind, the diseased, the fools, or the poor. For us today (take note Republicans) that means: Jesus shows no anger at the crazy, the ignorant, the legitimate people in need, the immigrants, the addicts, the prostitutes, and the working poor. But notice (take note Democrats) that Jesus also doesn’t get mad at the middle-class, nor does he talk down to the uneducated, or those who carry swords, or those who work in construction.

Even if no one wore collars in those days, we know that Matthew maps to a businessman today while Peter maps to a tradesman. Jesus lives among both the wealthy and the poor, the soldiers and the pacifists, all within his Chosen twelve apostles. That alone should speak to you. The women of his inner circle - take Joanna, Martha, and Mary for instance - were all different, with varying personalities, wealth, and backgrounds.

Jesus shows sadness for those who suffer. But he only shows anger at certain people.

Most obviously, he shows anger at the religious hypocrites who love their self and reputation over God. He gets angry at the money changers who defile God by using the Temple like a Wal-Mart. He also tends to scold the wealthy often. And he shows anger at Peter, even calling him Satan, when Peter tries to stop Jesus’ from going to the Cross. In light of this, it’s not surprising that Jesus doesn’t get mad at Judas when he learns of his betrayal. I guess it should go without saying that Jesus, fully divine and fully human, knew everything that would happen.

Given that he knows everything, and reads everyone’s heart, when Jesus gets mad at someone, he is sending a message. Notice that he doesn’t stay mad at anyone either, but only rebukes them.

So what is it that Jesus gets angry at? Is it the people? Does the Pharisee, who is a body and a soul, anger him?

No.

He is angry at their failure to fight the spiritual combat. He expects more of them because they have been given much, but have been led astray, blinded by worldly things. First, he wants them to love God, as they do strive for, and second, he wants them to help the orphan and the widow, to care for the weak and the poor. They have caved into pride, and pulled the old trick of worshipping the self while calling it God. It’s so easy to do, and most tempting for those in the elite or wealthy classes of society. Here’s the thing: God loves the Pharisee just as much as the tax collector and the prostitute, but he expects the educated and comfortable Pharisee to do more, to reach out, to go all-out Mother Theresa on this world.

The spirit of darkness has overtaken those at whom he expresses anger. They have failed to convert daily to God in their Spiritual Combat. Jesus does not mince words in saying that those who are given much will have much demanded of them. The Pharisees are those blessed with intellect, education, and the ability to interpret scripture and preach God’s word, but they have forgotten their own orders: to be servants. That is the problem. They serve themselves under the guise of loving God.

They are Ben Franklin saying, “God helps those who help themselves.” That is the spiritual lie whispered in their ear that they have not rebuked and cast out. The Pharisees can cast demons out of others, but the ones that Jesus’ scolds have not yet cast the demons out of the themselves, because they are not fighting the spiritual fight. Jesus can tell immediately who is lying, because he knows their hearts. He knows all hearts. Those who have not been given much - the poor, the refugee, the addicts, the mad - don’t have the capacity to serve, because they can barely survive with what they have. But the Pharisees and the wealthy have the capacity to serve, and choose not to.

The people that Jesus scolds are supposed to know they are living in a combat zone. He gets angry at those who have been granted the gift of faith, but do not share it with others. They reject their duty as servants, trading up for the fool’s jewels of ambition, reputation, honor, and glory. Pride is the root cause of everything that goes haywire in the Bible, from the Garden to the Cross.

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Through insights from the saints we can come to understand the nature of angels and demons. We cannot learn anything from Dan Brown, who clearly channels demons when he writes the endings to books like Angels and Demons. But from writers like St. John of Damascus, we can understand just enough about spiritual beings to realize our need for armor.

First, about angels:

The angel's nature then is rational, and intelligent, and endowed with free will, changeable in will, or fickle. For all that is created is changeable, and only that which is uncreated is unchangeable. Also all that is rational is endowed with free will. As it is, then, rational and intelligent, it is endowed with free will: and as it is created, it is changeable, having power either to abide or progress in goodness, or to turn towards evil…

…They are not hemmed in by walls and doors, and bars and seals, for they are quite unlimited. Unlimited, I repeat, for it is not as they really are that they reveal themselves to the worthy men to whom God wishes them to appear, but in a changed form which the beholders are capable of seeing.

…they have not a bodily form by nature, nor are they tended in three dimensions. But to whatever post they may be assigned, there they are present after the manner of a mind and energize, and cannot be present and energize in various places at the same time…

They are mighty and prompt to fulfill the will of the Deity, and their nature is endowed with such celerity that wherever the Divine glance bids them there they are straightway found. They are the guardians of the divisions of the earth: they are set over nations and regions, allotted to them by their Creator: they govern all our affairs and bring us comfort. And the reason surely is because they are set over us by the divine will and command and are ever in the vicinity of God.

(De Fide Orthadoxa, Book 2, Chapter 3)

On the first pass, that sounds like terrific news. The angels guide us and our nations, govern our affairs, and bring us comfort. They guard us, and saying the “Angel of God” prayer is a good reminder of what they are actively doing for us at all times. When this prayer is said, take heart to consider what it means.

Angel of God, my guardian dear,to whom God’s love commits me here,ever this day be at my side,to light and guard, to rule and guide. Amen.

So we must pray for their intercession, their guidance. We ask the angels and the saints to pray for us, just as we ask Mary to intercede and pray for us. We are in a spiritual battle, so enlisting help must be done daily. There is no such thing as a one-person army (which made the U.S. Army’s ad campaign of “An Army of One” very odd to me, as it targeted the self over the team). This is also why “spiritual but not religious” makes you a one-man-band as opposed to a member of a massive force of people and angels working together. As Pink Floyd asked, “Did you exchange a walk on part in the war, for a lead role in a cage?” The cage is your self, and that is what you trade when you give up the community of faith for the solitude of “I’m spiritual but not religious.” A bird in a flock makes sense. A bird in a cage does not.

Unfortunately, many have been driven from the church, thinking that it feels like a cage, when it should feel like a flock. This is evidence that we have failed to teach the faith well, especially key things like the joy, the mystery, and the aim of holiness and humility before God. This has chased the baptized out so that they look for holiness in other places, like concerts and fitness centers, and they will never find what they are looking for in those places.

Being a standalone believer, with a “lead role in a cage,” makes for easy sniping for the devil and the demons. As any addict knows, the devil wants you alone. He wants you isolated so that you pick up again. Whether it is a drug, a drink, a porn site, sports gambling - or whatever unhealthy attachment haunts you. Never forget that the devil is the divider, the accuser, and solitude is what he requires to re-employ you for his work.

What does St. John of Damascus have to tell us about demons? Can he help us articulate what they are and how they came about? He can.

He who from among these angelic powers was set over the earthly realm, and into whose hands God committed the guardianship of the earth, was not made wicked in nature but was good, and made for good ends, and received from his Creator no trace whatever of evil in himself. But he did not sustain the brightness and the honor which the Creator had bestowed on him, and of his free choice was changed from what was in harmony to what was at variance with his nature, and became roused against God Who created him, and determined to rise in rebellion against Him: and he was the first to depart from good and become evil…along with him an innumerable host of angels subject to him were torn away and followed him and shared in his fall. Wherefore, being of the same nature as the angels, they became wicked, turning away at their own free choice from good to evil. (De Fide Orthadoxa, Book 2, Chapter 4)

St. John of Damascus has more to say about this, and this should probably scare and encourage you at the same time. God lets the demons prevail when he sees it working for our salvation:

…they have no power or strength against any one except what God in His dispensation has conceded to them. But when God has made the concession they do prevail, and are changed and transformed into any form whatever in which they wish to appear.

This makes for a profound claim, because it re-introduces the old line, “The devil made me do it” and seems to suggest that we do not have free will after all. This is the timeless question about free will: If God wills all things, then whatever I do is willed by God and I have no agency, no free will. Likewise, if God lets the demons prevail over us, then we cannot be culpable for our actions. This plays into the hands of the Lady Gaga “Born this way” argument and also the classic plea of “The devil made me do it.”

But how about an option that treats you like a grown-up instead of some damsel in distress? Is there an option that makes for a hopeful sinner instead of a helpless sinner?

Yes.

God gives us trials that lead us to the truth. We are tested. As fallen beings, we are compromised but not broken. We may be born with the urge to sin, but we do have free will. I would think today’s gamer culture would love this option to level-up. For all the motivational speeches, from TED Talks to Peloton commercials and Nike ads, the idea of “born this way” seems a bit pathetic. We are told to achieve our goals, to strive, to work toward progress, in just about everything - except for holiness. Receiving a trophy or showing off fleeting six-pack abs pales in comparison to the pursuit of partaking in the divine nature and seeking eternal life. Once you awaken to the fact that what you want in this world is rather pitiful, the joy of pursuing a life that imitates Christ becomes the only career that even makes sense.

Trials we face become different when seen in the light of Christ. Once you realize this path forward is guided by the Holy Spirit, all tests and trials suddenly become fortifiers of your faith:

The Holy Spirit makes us discern between trials, which are necessary for the growth of the inner man, and temptation, which leads to sin and death. We must also discern between being tempted and consenting to temptation. Finally, discernment unmasks the lie of temptation, whose object appears to be good, a "delight to the eyes" and desirable, when in reality its fruit is death.

God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings.... There is a certain usefulness to temptation. No one but God knows what our soul has received from him, not even we ourselves. But temptation reveals it in order to teach us to know ourselves, and in this way we discover our evil inclinations and are obliged to give thanks for the goods that temptation has revealed to us. (CCC 2847)

Not only do we have choices to make, but so did the angels, and some of them chose poorly. Yet we can fight. We have a role to play, like the smallest character in the saga of Middle Earth, we are cast in the great play, and we can stand in the light of Christ or hide with our fig leaves in darkness. This is powerful knowledge.

And we are culpable. We are responsible. One of our mistaken thoughts is to assume that we alone are the center of the universe, and that God’s will is only for us. There are billions of people here on earth. God’s plan is for all people and all nations. Tim Keller uses a great metaphor in Rediscovering Jonah about how a general commands his army in battle. He doesn’t go to to each soldier and have a sit down about what the battle plan is, and he doesn’t encourage each one with a therapy session. The general sets the plan and says, “Charge!” and those on his side go, while those against him desert the regiment or join the enemy. His plan and ways exceed our understanding. We know the rules of being in his army, and to follow him we need to turn (recall that to repent just means “to turn”) our eyes back to Christ. He is the general. There is no such thing as an “Army of One.” An Army of One is an individual, not an army.

When we turn our eyes away, we slip up. When we fail to surrender, we try to win alone. This is what the demons count on, and their whispers to us cause us to slowly turn away from God, often even telling us that we are looking at God when they are just holding up a mirror to our faces. The devil can quote scripture and coax us into bad ideas, bad patterns of living, and he can do it repeatedly if we don’t do daily battle in prayer and with others in the faith. Demons suggest that we worry, they make us afraid, and they tell us to wall ourselves in. A quarter they like to put in the arcade of our minds is: “You are not good enough, you are not lovable.” They remind us that we are naked and exposed and vulnerable, so that we need to gather fig leaves from the bushes of wealth, power, pleasure, or honor. They speak Babel to us, telling us that we must fight, flee, or freeze, and we know that common language all too well.

More from St. John of Damascus on demons:

God reveals the future to the angels and commands them to prophesy, and so what they say comes to pass. But the demons also make predictions, sometimes because they see what is happening at a distance, and sometimes merely making guesses: hence much that they say is false and they should not be believed, even although they do often, in the way we have said, tell what is true. Besides they know the Scriptures.

All wickedness, then, and all impure passions are the work of their mind. But while the liberty to attack man has been granted to them, they have not the strength to over master any one: for we have it in our power to receive or not to receive the attack. Wherefore there has been prepared for the devil and his demons, and those who follow him, fire unquenchable and everlasting punishment.

Note, further, that what in the case of man is death is a fall in the case of angels. For after the fall there is no possibility of repentance for them, just as after death there is for men no repentance. (De Fide Orthadoxa, Book 2, Chapter 4)

I’m not sure if this is a terror or a comfort to know, but knowing that demons have been granted “the liberty to attack man” means that our trials have meaning. The seemingly trite comment from your aunt or crazy Christian friend that “Everything happens for a reason” becomes less crazy the longer you live. As experiences stack up and hindsight comes into view, the trials make sense, but only if you repent - that is, turn toward God. Trials make no sense when we are turned away.

By surrendering to God, we become citizens in a new nation. As immigrants must take a test to become “naturalized” in America, we merely need to turn over our hearts and minds to become members of God’s nation. By giving up all control to God, he takes us under his watch, with St. Michael as our bodyguard, and a guardian angel to follow us everywhere we go. This becomes a far better defense than the U.S. Army. You have protection and overwatch at all times. I can think of no good reason why the Prayer of St. Michael should not be said daily, like a pledge of allegiance to God Most High, where we ask for help from the warriors, the elect, the angels.

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle;be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil.May God rebuke him, we humbly pray;and do thou, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God,cast into hell Satan and the other evil spiritswho prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

People today are uncomfortable with this language, because it is taboo to talk about spirits. This is exactly what the devil wants. In the movie, The Usual Suspects, this quote says it all: “The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” That’s where we are at, where polite society shies away from any kind of Jesus talk. Why? Because polite society has rejected him and winks at every story where he “casts out a demon.” They have turned to other answers, like psychology and medicine as the only answer for the mental illnesses healed in Jesus’ ministry.

The word Jesus is now a litmus test to find out where someone is at, of which side they are on. This is a door that must be open or closed. God does not allow the door to be halfway open. If the door to sin is cracked open at all, the door is considered fully open. Given our endless battle against evil thoughts and spirits, we can only shut the gate to hell with the grace of God. Grace stops sin in its tracks. The door to hell is heavy, and only with God’s strength can it be closed. The reason the door to hell is usually portrayed as a gaping mouth is because sin will eat you, it will swallow you, like a dragon or monster. St. George can only slay the dragon and not get eaten because he fights with God at his side. How does he do that? Before George kills the dragon with one thrust of his sword, he makes the Sign of the Cross and asks for God’s help. That’s how it’s done.

When Jesus said he was a sword, he wasn’t kidding. His name splits groups in half, with those who believe on one side, and those who become uncomfortable hearing the word on the other.

After Babel, God allowed spirits to rule the nations, delegating control to them. This is something we gloss over today, because we don’t really believe in spirits, and for most cherry-picking Bible readers, because we don’t even really believe in God, if we’re honest. Remember, we don’t just speak English, we speak Babel. We want competition and pleasure all the time. Ain’t nobody got time for nonsense about spirits, angels, and demons. In fact, if someone were to admit in a business meeting that they believe in angels, they would be considered an idiot. Fortunately, this is one of those promises from Jesus, that being mocked for faith in Him and all that comes with Him is a sure sign of being on the right track.

This denial of spirits is why we miss so much of what is happening in the Bible. Our modernist ears and eyes are so disenchanted that we give more credence to Harry Potter magic spells than to the religious truth of the Bible, because whenever a spirit enters the story, our reason drives our belief out. This is a shame because there is far more going on in the epic story of the Bible than what’s happening at Hogwarts. But you have to believe in God first, and believe in Jesus as the second person of the Trinity, to really understand what is happening. It’s much easier to accept the fantasy Harry Potter because we know he’s an invention sprung from a writer’s head. Choosing to believe in Christ as the living son of God means changing every single aspect of our life. So to play it safe, we put words like Jesus, God, spirits, souls, etc. all on a shelf.

When you read Genesis, it’s important to understand these points about “the nations”:

* the Tower of Babel is the last thing that happens before we meet Abraham.

* The formation of the people of Israel begins with Abraham.

* The nation of Israel is in a world that is fully fallen and lives among nations that are ruled by demonic powers.

* The nations dislike Israel because they will not bend the knee to false gods (Well, some of the Israelites won’t bend the knee, but plenty do - repeatedly.)

* The remainder of the Old Testament is God guiding and leading the Chosen people from Abraham to Mary.

* All people will be “blessed” through Abraham’s descendent, meaning Jesus. All people = All nations = Both gentiles and Jews

A lot of death and genocide happens in this journey as the sole people of God Most High must fight, scrap, and survive among the 70 nations, which are ruled by demons, or another way of saying it is that the nations worship false gods. For those who dislike Israel’s warring, they forget how many times the nation of Israel is on the receiving end of brutal warfare, and experiences enslavement and genocide on the wrong end of the gun, so to speak. As for the hard sayings in the books of Joshua and Judges, regarding total war and the genocidal commands of God, I would refer you to look into a book by Michael Heiser called Unseen Realm. The commands to the Israelite army in the conquest of the Promised Land is unique and strange. Joshua and company cannot simply waltz into the Promised Land because there is something already there, something much darker than what we can easily discern from the text. Nations that worship fallen angels, a.k.a. demons, are the only targets of God’s heavy-hammer of genocidal war. The doctrine of Just War applies only to these specific clans in Palestine. How God deals with enemies in Joshua and Judges must be compared with how he deals with other nations. Reasons for the brutal warfare in these books are alluded to regarding what these nations are doing. An ethnic cleansing is the literal reading here, as the Chosen nation of the God Most High works vigorously toward the fulfillment of the covenant to take the land. This occupation of the land is a pre-requisite to the Messianic age that we are living in today. If you cannot stomach the Promised Land struggle, I would suggest combing through the Six Approaches on the website Reason and Theology. Much ink has been spilled on this topic, but I feel like Heiser and others, like Fr. Stephen de Young, are catching onto something deep and important from texts unearthed with the Dead Sea Scrolls that we are only beginning to understand, and it requires reading the book of Enoch alongside the Old Testament. I can’t dive into this here because it would requires another set of articles and episodes of its own to fully explore.

One thing is certain: it is a lonely world to be staying true to the one true God. The same is a fact today, as anti-Jewish and anti-Christian sentiments are rising in America. But like any life lived with conviction, Israel’s formation as a nation requires great sacrifice, struggle, and often battle for both establishment and survival. You cannot get to Mary without the conquest of Canaan. Later, when Israel squares off against the mega-armies of Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome, they fail to win. Being the only nation that worships Yahweh makes for difficult passages wherever they go, but amid this whole story there is an all-important plot playing within the larger narrative.

This huge story is zeroing in the entire time on a path to the home of a teenage girl, where:

“In the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, “Hail, favored one! The Lord is with you.” (Lk 1:26-28)

Gabriel comes to Mary in the fallen world where the nations are still ruled by demons. All of the nation-building narrative, all of journeying in the desert, the wars, the kings, the captivity, all of that is preface to the moment with Mary. The chaos, the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, are preface to Abraham. Genesis from chapters 1 to 11 are explaining how the fallen world came to be the way it is. From Abraham to Mary: that is the story of how the nation of the chosen people delivered and lasted through centuries of struggle to protect and guard the lineage that brought forth the Mother of God.

And that’s where the story starts to get really interesting.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit whydidpetersink.substack.com

Clearly, the construction project at the Tower of Babel went sideways, as in, the biggest disaster possible. When the people tried to put God on a leash, instead they unleashed demonic powers. Think about that next time before you try to make a deal with God. You may be in for a surprise. An ancient salesperson could have sold t-shirts that read, “I built the Tower of Babel, and all I got was this lousy demonic power.”

The devil doesn’t hide the fact that the nations are ruled by him and his demons. So given that the “scattering” happens at Babel, we come to learn through various books of the Bible that the nations are currently ruled by demons at the time of Christ. When Jesus goes out to the desert we hear this directly from the devil in the third temptation. Here’s how it reads in Luke:

Then the devil took Jesus up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant. The devil said to him, “I shall give to you all this power and their glory; for it has been handed over to me, and I may give it to whomever I wish. All this will be yours, if you worship me.” Jesus said to him in reply, “It is written: ‘You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.’” (Lk 4:5-8)

This story of unintended consequences of performing transactional rituals of sacrifice may sound familiar to some, but it seems fewer and fewer people know the stories of Genesis these days. For a modern retelling with some elements of the Tower of Babel, recall Ghostbusters from 1984, where rooftop worship goes bad. The plot climax hinges around a gateway on an apartment tower rooftop from which demons are summoned. Hmm…sounds familiar, except in the Tower of Babel the builders were at least pretending they were trying to leash the one true God. So they thought. Put simply, that’s why you don’t muck around with demon worship. In Ghostbusters, Ray says, "The whole building is a huge super-conductive antenna that was designed and built expressly for the purpose of pulling in and concentrating spiritual turbulence. Your girlfriend, Pete, lives in the corner penthouse of Spook Central."

Ok, enough about Ghostbusters, since that era marked the beginning of the end of belief in spirits for Americans. Surely the cute and cuddly cartoon Slimer didn’t help, because like Caspar the Friendly Ghost, we stopped fearing spirits altogether, and then just forgot about them entirely. Dawkins must have loved it. Carl Sagan would have been pleased, too, since his book The Demon Haunted World sought to rid our culture of such nonsense as spirits of all flavors, friendly and slimy. Surely if we all just stopped believing in demons the utopia would arrive much faster. It’s always the Christians holding us back, saith the venerable Sagan. We need just to give up our belief in the spiritual world, saith esteemed Dawkins. They sound much like Screwtape giving instructions to Wormwood:

“Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves…I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that ‘devils’ are predominately comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.”

Before I go too far afield with Ghostbusters and Carl Sagan as two screws in the coffin of our beliefs in spirits, I need to reel it back to Babel and Jesus in the desert.

It is really important to understand that the overarching story of the Bible is about the comeback of the one true God, the Most High God (or God Most High, however you like it). God is returning to restore his creation, which is this world and ourselves, or at least those open to his grace. Spirits are like us in that they can choose to follow or reject God, so their fates will be similar, or so the Catechism tells me so.

Because of our “falls,” we invited the demons in.

In other words, the demons are real. All those structures around the world to pagan gods - those “gates” did what Ghostbusters was talking about.

The real shock can come when you realize that God, who controls all things, allowed it to happen. Why would he do that? He loves us, right? God is love?

God’s will is being done, so if we are allowed to choose, he knew beforehand what would happen, but the people and spirits that rejected God did not. Free will is hard. But it’s much easier if you adhere to this line:

“Thy will be done, not mine.”

The key to living in this fallen world is that line. We can ask questions all day long why things are not the way that makes sense to us, but when we ask, we must remember that we are not God. His ways are not our ways. So you can complain about it, or conform your will to God’s will. Some people see this as defeatist, but it is anything but. The way of the Cross is the path to true freedom. To suffer and endure is to follow Christ, who defeated death for us. I’ve heard it explained this way: God is playing seven billion chessboards at once, and we are somewhere among them. Just as Joseph went into Egypt as a slave, that hardship led to the saving of his people, and ultimately the nation of Israel, whom Moses led out of Egypt. Likewise, the numerous hardships of the people in the desert led to the Promised Land. And so on, and on and on. Mary could not have given birth to Christ without all that prelude, with all its tears and glory.

Like an individual soul, a nation can conform to God’s will and be humble. Or a nation can reject God and try to go it alone. Abraham was born into that fallen world, as were we, but now God is restoring his world and his creation to how it is supposed to be, how he intended it to be.

In the meantime, we live in nations ruled by demons. Yes, that’s what I said: every nation is ruled by demons. So when we say, “One nation, under God,” this creates an interesting dilemma. Many of us want to think of America as “under God”…but is that what Jesus said? Whatever the case, it makes sense to pray. We’ll wade into these waters of angels and demons a bit here, but not all the way, because the most important thing in the spiritual battle is to do the one thing that helps, and that is to pray.

If you believe that Jesus is the son of God, the second person of the Trinity, you get a bonus package of all that comes with him, and Jesus believes in angels and demons very much. He spoke of guardian angels who never take their eyes off God and are always ready to hear our prayers. Jesus said, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven always look upon the face of my heavenly Father.” (Mt 18:10)

The Jewish tradition believed in angels who stayed with God and demons who rejected him, and these beings have a large role to play, larger than we can comprehend, and one appears at Jericho before battle. This may be the most truly badass moment in the Old Testament, if you like badassery, as most Americans seem to (a current bestselling book on how-to-self-worship is titled: You are a Badass).

Joshua and the army are camped near Jericho, having just celebrated Passover. The drums of war can be heard in the pages, and suddenly this happens:

While Joshua was near Jericho, he raised his eyes and saw one who stood facing him, drawn sword in hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, “Are you one of us or one of our enemies?”

He replied, “Neither. I am the commander of the army of the LORD: now I have come.” Then Joshua fell down to the ground in worship. (Joshua 5:13-14)

This commanding angel of the army of God flat out says “No” when Joshua asks him which side he’s on. Neither Arnold Schwarzenegger nor Sylvester Stallone could play this role. Is this an angel? Is this God himself? The entire Bible has angel footprints all over it. So what are they? We don’t get a hint in Genesis about when they were created, but Jewish tradition and the church fathers seem to think it’s somewhere between “Let there be light” and the creation of Adam.

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The question still arises as to why God would come to us without fixing this problem of the tension between nations. Why would Jesus, God himself, come to earth through Mary and live for thirty-three years if he didn’t intend to fix this problem of the warring nations?

Well, he did. He has. He’s doing it right now. But we have to keep going. There’s more to understand. Let’s resume:

In the desert, the devil says that he rules all the nations and can give them to Jesus. I don’t know about anyone else but that always jarred me when I came across it, even as a kid. The devil owns the nations?

Then the devil took him up to a very high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in their magnificence, and he said to him, “All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me.” (Mt 4:8)

Jesus doesn’t disagree, nor does he rebuke the devil and cast him into the sea. I was kind of hoping Jesus would just use his hand and make a crushing motion and the devil would wither and die, just like I imagine he did to the fig tree. But that is not at all what happens in the desert on the third temptation.

Jesus responds without argument about the devil’s claim to owning the nations. He doesn’t deny that the devil rules all the nations, or has the power to give them away. This is kind of mind-blowing when you grow up singing “God bless America,” and pledging “One Nation, Under God.” There is some interesting reading around this where the nations were granted oversight by demons.

Before Jesus is arrested, he mentions this again. “I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming, and he has nothing in Me.” (John 14:30)

There are various places where this message is said in both the Old and New Testament.

The LORD said: Listen to whatever the people say. You are not the one they are rejecting. They are rejecting me as their king. They are acting toward you just as they have acted from the day I brought them up from Egypt to this very day, deserting me to serve other gods. (1 Samuel 8:7)

There seems to be ample evidence that what was happening with the Ziggurat at Babel has happened worldwide, among all the nations. And while I have been saying that the rulers are just telling a big lie to coalesce their power and authority, there is more happening here. God is saying in the Old Testament what Jesus is saying in the Gospels: that this motion by people toward evil is more than just a rebellious power move. God and Jesus both say that the nations are actually ruled by evil spirits; that these false gods are actually demons that rule the nations.

This is a chilling thing to consider, especially for materialists, who only see demons as ridiculous cartoon devils, or men in tights who carry pitchforks.

Jesus’ reply in the desert suggests that, yes, without a doubt, it is a fact that the devil controls the nations and has power over them. Instead of crushing the devil, Jesus quotes scripture to him, which makes the devil fold up like a lawn chair. As always, the devil’s game is to create competition and lust for power, honor, wealth, or pleasure.

Jesus doesn’t enter into the game. That’s how he wins. That’s how we win. This is important. Having authored the Ten Commandments, not to mention all sacred scripture, Jesus simply reminds the devil that the Commandments also apply to devils, and throws some Deuteronomy at him.

At this, Jesus said to him, “Get away, Satan! It is written:

‘The Lord, your God, shall you worship

and him alone shall you serve.’” (Mt 4:8-9)

Wait.

Wut?

I read that various times in life without really thinking about it, but then it struck me. What this response from Jesus suggests is that the devil has free will just like people do, just like you and I do, and so it seems the granting of power over the nations was a kind of employment for angels, who failed the leadership test and became demons. Or, more likely, as punishment for rejecting God in the Garden and at Babel, God placed fallen angels, a.k.a. demons, over the nations on purpose because we could not behave even when we had our “common language.”

When the devil is reminded that he is also subject to God’s law, and commanded to love and serve God, he flees. This is kind of a stunning moment when you stop and consider it, for multiple reasons.

This means that the Commandments are not only for people, but also for angels and demons. Spirits are also created beings, and therefore must adhere to the same regulations as other creations, such as people. Animals and plants just do what they do because they don’t have the same type of souls as us, but we have free will and intellect, like angels and demons.

We can’t leave this point behind yet.

If we know that demons rule the nations (and we do based on the conversation in the desert) and we also know that these demons have free will like us, then it seems that some spirits might follow God more closely than others do. This should also scare the hell out of you, because then the Tower of Babel story is more than just a big lie meant to scare the citizens or to give them meaning. No, instead, the Tower means that the nations worship actual demons. The people are literally selecting to worship a real demon instead of God. This means that not only is the demon fallen, but he is taking down the nation with him, starting with the rulers of the nation, the elite. This does seem to match reality, since it is always the affluent, the famous, the popular who reject God, while the poor, the outcasts, and the weak tend to embrace God. In the Gospels, the Romans, the Sadducees, and the Herodians are all more interested in their little fiefdoms than they are in God. Most interesting is Jesus’ interactions with the Pharisees, where he gets more angry with them than any of those other groups, because the Pharisees are supposed to know better. It’s like he writes off the other groups as lost sheep, but the Pharisees get scolded for failing to be shepherds.

In light of this, is it any wonder then that Jesus has come for the poor, the outcast, the diseased, and the weak? They are indeed the only ones who know the one true God. They are the ones that hear the voice of God first, because the sheep will know his voice. The rich, popular, and powerful cannot hear any voice but their own, because they worship pleasure, power, honor, and wealth.

If you understand that what happened at Babel is not just symbolic of worshipping demons, but is the actual worship of demons, it becomes a much bigger story and problem than just some ancient Napoleon telling the “Big Lie” to the masses through large public works projects. No, if the demons rule the nations, this means the nations are not “Under God” or blessed. They may only be using the word God, like Franklin and Jefferson, to amass power, to make themselves look better. I recall when I was fallen away from faith how I admired Franklin and Jefferson, but after being called back, I think they need our prayers far more than any admiration.

Free will implies that spirits can choose to follow God or reject God. It seems conceivable that if the demons that rule the nations are anything like us, then their pride will get them into trouble, just like us. Every now and then, it seems that one nation gets quite full of pride and starts bullying others, and like individual people, this bullying usually goes on until the bullied either fights back or other people step in to assist and knock down the bully. The rise and fall of nations plays out like the rise and fall of prideful people, and to those full of pride, humiliation hits hardest. This is why America in its current state seems poised for an ungraceful dive and splat.

Likewise, if demons are like people, then they may go into depression, despair, and indifference. They may want to be alone for periods of time, or even periods of self-destruction.

Where am I going with this?

There seem to be two main ways that people reject God, both stemming from pride, and nations seem to follow this cycle as well. One way of rejecting God is through presumption, and another is through despair. The two brothers in the parable of the Prodigal Son represent this pattern. One brother is elevated by his self-righteousness and legalism, and the other is brought low through self-destruction and lawlessness. People go through these cycles, just as nations do. Germany went from Weimar debauchery to full fascism due to a wild imbalance of spirit. It will happen in the United States now, as Weimar America is obviously underway. There are forces at work that can be sensed in the winds of change, if not openly observed as we stare into the widening mouth of chaos. The world of our common language is one big zero-sum game, where if I win something, you have to lose something. We can observe this happening all the time, not only at the national level, but all the way down to toddlers on the daycare floor grappling over a bottle.

What’s interesting here is that the Tower of Babel story doesn’t explicitly mention this hand-off of the nations to demons. But clearly it has happened, or Jesus would argue the point. So when did this happen? Where? How?

When the Most High allotted each nation its heritage, when he separated out human beings, He set up the boundaries of the peoples after the number of the divine beings… (Deut 32:7)

So God separated the nations, and set boundaries according to the divine beings. This is pretty clear declaration that spirits are assigned to nations. The books of Moses say so, Jesus says so, and Paul says so. In fact, Paul states plainly that other people are not the problem at all, but the world rulers and evil spirits.

Finally, draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power. Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the devil. For our struggle is not with flesh and blood but with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens. (Eph 6:10-12)

That’s an incredible bit of information.

Here’s some more. I’m sure that Psalm 82 and 58 have caused people’s heads to explode over the centuries when they grasp what is being said:

…the pagan gods are seen as subordinate divine beings to whom Israel’s God had delegated oversight of the foreign countries in the beginning (Dt 32:8–9). Now God arises in the heavenly assembly (Ps 82:1) to rebuke the unjust “gods”, who are stripped of divine status and reduced in rank to mortals. They are accused of misruling the earth by not upholding the poor. (from Ps 82 footnote)

…the Bible sometimes understands pagan gods to be lesser divine beings who are assigned by Israel’s God to rule the foreign nations. Here they are accused of injustice, permitting the human judges under their patronage to abuse the righteous (from Ps 58 footnote)

Now, this is a place where you can really go down a rabbit-hole and start digging. Instead of doing that, you should go sign up to help the poor, or pray, or fast for God. But since I started digging, I will continue…

Be advised, this tidbit of information about the “sons of God,” the Divine Council, being assigned to the 70 nations goes deep and requires a lot of reading. You even have to go into other books of Jewish history to really understand it. So unless you can quit your job and focus on it, you may want to just take Jesus’ word for it, that yes, spirits have been granted power over the nations.

This is one of those places where you can learn about scripture and get farther and farther from the kingdom of God. Whenever I reach these points, I have to step back and recall that I do not need to know everything, but I do know without a doubt that evil exists and that God apparently allows it to happen. Rather than get lost on the mechanics of it, I return to my standard home base, which is in Jesus’ instructions to: be baptized and believe, and keep my commandments. Serve the poor and heal the sick. I even made a little poem to help me remember it:

Repent and believe and sin no more.

Pray and fast and feed the poor. 

But I do think that to understand anything that happens with Jesus, you have to realize that there is more to this world than just chemistry and physics. The dragons are real, and they are driving this world, and they cannot be defeated without the help of God. This is the paradox of control. You have to give up control to get control. You have to admit your weakness to slay the dragon, because you cannot do it alone, but you can with God. And that goes for temptations in your own life or enduring injustice in the world.

We can’t possibly know the “why” of everything, and this is the classic blunder of those who reject God. Wanting to know the mind of God leads to bad patterns and pride. The problem of pain and suffering is the obvious perennial question that people ask about God, causing millions to turn away. However, if you come to see that Jesus is God, then his every word becomes fact. His every step to the cross becomes the answer. There is no other answer, or not one that satisfies. Forgiveness and transforming suffering into good just simply works if you work the program, if you believe when it is hardest to believe. We are allowed rage prayers, so let it out. Psalm 88 is one for those days where nothing makes sense.

If Jesus agrees that the nations are ruled by evil spirits or the devil, then the believer agrees. That is the act of faith in action. Yes, this is a stumbling block for those just dipping their toes in the baptismal waters of the Christian life. But surrendering your self to Christ requires this leap.

However, I don’t think it’s that difficult of a stretch to believe that something evil drives the nations, that something is rotten in the state of Denmark (and all the others). The unending treachery and division among nations makes for a permanent game of chess, and where one nation oversteps, another is all too pleased to play the victim whilst the victim does the same overt or underhanded work elsewhere. This is, after all, the common language of all people - competition and greed, anger and wrath. We all speak Original Sin. We all speak Babel.

If spirits are subject to the same laws as we are, the same commandments, then it would seem that some nations might have a more balanced spirit guiding them than others. Or if these spirits are warring, then we are within that war. The lesson is something strange, but something liberating and powerful, because it gets you fully outside of the box, the wall, and into the fullness of time and space, and even a bit beyond without going cuckoo.

We are living within a Spiritual War.

The seasons of a person’s life can lead to great heights of presumption, or self-righteousness, which can then lead to great, public falls. When a truly self-righteous, presumptuous demon rules a nation, can’t we almost see it? Don’t we even kind of celebrate it? They are all the nations that we talk about the most in terms of history. Ancient Egypt, the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the Macedonian Empire, Rome, Nazi Germany, the British Empire, the Soviet Union, the First French Empire, the Spanish Empire, Imperial Japan, North Korea, America, and now rising China. We don’t seek out Polish history like we do the Roman Empire, even though Poland has been in the middle of many wars. Could it be that the ruling spirit of a nation is real? I always thought it was just lazy titles, but when The Economist runs a story every two years with the title, “The Battle for Latin America’s Soul” (or England, or Mongolia, or Canada) they may actually be correct. A spirit is in fact ruling each nation, and like people, these demons are playing out the same zero-sum games that we do.

Well, this is hard to deal with at first, but, if you believe that Jesus is the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, then the exchange in the desert with the devil must be taken as fact.

And that is yet another life changing revelation from the scripture. I used to think people were crazy to believe that praying the Rosary could help our country, or help stop a foreign war. But no longer. Now I believe it’s crazy not to pray, because once you believe in a soul, in God, in Jesus, you know that there is much more happening in this world than what we can see. Hamlet knew as much. He told Horatio that the ghost was real, and Horatio’s rational Enlightenment mind was blown apart when he saw it.

We know that we have guardian angels, who, we certainly hope, are good spirits. The word angel implies that it is a spirit in God’s army, not aligned with the devil. Demon implies “evil.” Ain’t nobody want no demon watching over them. If anything, the demon waits for our guardian angel to look away and hopes we slip.

Now, if spirits have free-will, then the spirit that is appointed to each nation can make a huge difference in the direction of that nation. A nation who is ruled by a demon that rejects God should then be easy to spot. Furthermore, if spirits are like people, they may go through phases, or periods where they follow God’s commandments more closely than at other times. Like drunks that fall off the wagon and get back on, spirits may be able to slip and recover. But given that the word demon implies “evil,” I think it’s safer to bend negative here. I would like to believe that some nations have a gentle guardian watching them, like Egypt or Poland who keeps getting steamrolled across the centuries. Could it be that the nations we do not talk about are cursed? Or are they rather like lambs, ruled by more meek and humble spirits, while the superpowers are ruled by “those who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls,” as we say in the prayer of St. Michael?

The idea of a “national spirit” will never be the same again to me because of the Tower of Babel and Jesus’ dialogue in the desert.

All of this brings up the next point, which actually begins to explain where I fit into this “hierarchy.” I thought I held a higher rank, like a Captain, or at least a Sergeant, but I didn’t realize that I am not even a Private in this story. There is something far bigger happening around us than that what we can see with our five senses.

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As I mentioned, this story of Babel can read like a fable or “just-so” folktale to explain where languages and nations come from. But there is far more in this brief story than what the literal reading offers. I’ve said it before: literalism kills. That type of fundamentalist reading will slam the door on modern readers getting anything out of the Bible. Every story, every verse must be read using The Four Senses of Scripture to even get started on unpacking the meaning. These senses are: literal, allegorical, moral, and lastly, anagogical, or how it relates to Christ.

Those who stop on the literal reading think the earth is 6,000 years old. Now, let me pause to say - you can believe the earth is 6,000 years old, because it really doesn’t matter for your daily life. You can also believe the earth is flat and it won’t change much in your real life. The church doesn’t say you cannot believe those things. But if you only use one of these Four Senses to read scripture, you will miss out on a lot. In addition, faith and reason are the two wings that make us fly, as St. JP II said. So it’s best to take in what reason, including science, has learned, so that you don’t flap in circles with only one wing. Those arguing purely for reason vs those arguing purely for faith is the battle of two flocks of birds flying in circles due to their single-wingedness.

You may get what you need with the literal reading, but it’s like looking at a two dimensional picture. If you use all four senses of scripture, it suddenly become three dimensional, more alive and real than anything Meta can fake with a VR headset.

This is why study bibles are important. The footnotes help a great deal in getting the at literal, allegorical, moral, and Christ-facing points. My recommendations are: The Word on Fire Bible, The Didache Bible, The Navarre Bible, The Ignatius Study Bible. For Protestants, there are some terrific study Bibles as well that are faithful and useful (the ESV and the MacArthur). There are others, but if you struggle to read the Bible and want to heave it across the room, you may want to try one of these. Read the notes as you go. There will be difficult passages to your modern ears, but that’s good. That’s where you can put a question mark and come back to it. I have learned more from the Hard Sayings than from the easy parts.

Now, the bad news. Even if you read with the “four senses of scripture” and use a study Bible, you will hit dead ends because of translation issues on specific words. So let’s talk about one of those words: “gentiles.”

A major point of understanding that I whiffed on for years was that “the gentiles” refers to “the nations.” While this may seem insignificant, I believe it makes an enormous difference to our modern ears. The origin of the nations came from this scattering event in the Tower of Babel story, but when Jesus is alive he speaks of “the gentiles” and my mind always just assumed that this meant “The Romans.” When the “gentiles” means all “nations,” like Ethiopia and Egypt and Libya and the Irish and the Chinese, I can start to see how the event at Babel overarches the Bible as whole. This event at Babel speaks to a larger theme than just scattered tongues. Rome is just the dominant nation at the time Christ is born, but there are many other “Romes” along the way that ram into the nation of Israel.

Obviously we have linguistics and anthropology and archaeology to help us understand where languages and nations came from. We know of the Indus River valley and of Mesopotamia and of Mesoamerica. We have lots of scholarship and science to help us with those things, and I’m glad that we do. Thank goodness for the Enlightenment, as they spent two hundred years finding reasons to deny the Bible that are oddly, repeatedly, confirming events of the Bible. Science seems to be working in mysterious ways.

But I do not go to Genesis for science. I don’t know why anyone would. Sure, the Big Bang fits right in there with “let there be light” but to expect Genesis to fit with modern linguistics is ridiculous and it blocks readers from seeing the deeper wisdom of these words. I go to scripture for understanding the soul, and if I really want to know how one language morphed from one place to the next, I’ll enroll in college courses. They key to remember is that the wisdom of Genesis is about the spiritual and physical world, whereas the finite studies of scientific research remain in the physical. Science is stuck in this world by design. Science, when done correctly, does not attempt to build a “Gate to God,” but focuses on observable nature and repeatable experiments. That is its strength and usefulness.

Ok, now back to the words gentiles and nations. What the outcome of Babel is describing is our constant state of tension that we have in the world between nations. Every time the word gentiles or nations is used, it’s referring to this scattering of people. The separation of languages leads to separated groups of people who misunderstand each other. Misunderstanding leads to fear and fear leads to…oh hell - let’s just let Yoda say it:

“Fear is the path to the dark side…fear leads to anger…anger leads to hate…hate leads to suffering.”

You nailed it, Yoda.

That’s what the Bible is telling us here, because the Tower of Babel is the third fall of man. Maybe the fourth. There is a sexual fall of man that clearly happens with the Nephilim story, but I’ll never finish this if I add that one in here as well. So I’m sticking with three falls for now: Adam and Eve fall, Cain falls, and Babel falls.

This third fall is the origin story of the separation of peoples, and the confusion that drives a wedge between people is the inability to understand one another. Pride swells up quickly when misunderstanding gives offense, and between peoples or nations this is the cause of violence and war. We still have the “common language” however. No, the common language did not go away. In the post-Babel world, we still understand competition and greed and envy and anger. We still know that “God helps those who help themselves” whether we say it in Akkadian, Greek, or English. The common language came from our first two falls with Adam and Cain, and if you add in the sexual fall into immorality from chapter 6, you get the full recipe for disaster that leads to the Great Flood. Then the world gets reset. Truly, “The Great Reset” was not Covid, but the Great Flood. The problems, however, being soon after the flood when Noah gets hammered with liquor. I dare to say there is a fall there, as well, but that puts my up to five falls. Perhaps we should call Noah’s fall a stumble.

When we finally get to Babel, the idea presented is that people who work together in a common language can have harmony, or at least it seems that way in the story. But a key problem stands in of the story like an elephant in the room. The common goal of “making a name for ourselves” reeks of the smell that came from the prior falls of Adam and Cain. To “make a name” for oneself is to reject God. To desire one’s name to be spoken in awe is a temptation that hardly differs from the shiny one’s temptation in the garden when it tells Eve that she “will be like gods” if she eats the fruit. Moreover, if everyone intends to make a name for himself, then everyone wants to be a god. This results in too many gods, and ultimately chaos, because gods don’t like to be told what to do. This should sound familiar because that it the state of America today, where we used to say, “For God and Country!” we now focus on the individual, as in, “Don’t tell me what to do!”

The common language of fallen man can build an empire, but it cannot hold the peace, nor can it join us together in endless song, because power attracts others who might also like a taste of it. In fact, the empires that have “made a name for themselves” have done so through violence and coercion, not love. This is why Jesus is so radical, and unlike Babel, his radical self-emptying becomes the very thing that conquers the world. In not trying to make a name for himself, he makes the greatest name in history.

This rejection of God repeats over and over, causing further problems, and as far as Biblical messages go, that is the Old Testament in a nutshell. Adam and Eve’s pride lead them to reject God. Cain was mastered by sin that was “crouching at his door” because he failed to rely on God, and tried to rely on himself. Finally, we get scattered into nations that distrust one another. Our fig leaves just keep getting bigger. We went from using fig foliage at first, to drones and cyberwar in today’s U.S. Army.

Once again, pride brought about the plan to build a Tower to overtake God, and as punishment, just as we were banished from the Garden of Eden, and Cain was kicked out to wander, in Babel we are separated from one another, and therefore pushed further still from God. Another way to think of it is that God retreated from us for our arrogance. We are in this state for a reason, as he waits to return and set things right.

Just like Adam did, nations also have fear. When they build armies and play games of espionage, they are like Adam, saying to God in the garden, “I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid.” The nations hide behind guns and tanks and jets and missiles, because being open to our neighbors is terrifying. If tomorrow Russia and the United States said, “Let’s just dismantle all the bombs,” and they actually did so, they would then be naked and afraid because they are not the only countries with nukes. The only way the nations stop hiding behind defenses is if all nations decided at once, without pretense or falsehood, to defuse all bombs.

Now, aside from divine intervention, does anyone believe that will happen? The disarmament talks stalled and even if the superpowers said they had defused all bombs, they would surely have their fingers crossed behind their back while announcing it. Is anyone so naive as to believe that either nation would actually get rid of all the missiles?

Throughout history, the nations constantly resort to violence when squabbling over territory and resources. Many modern readers cannot stomach the Old Testament because of the violence. Brutal and ruthless warfare is described in a good chunk of the Old Testament. It confuses modern people that the sacred scripture would contain so much bloodshed, which is odd because we can literally watch it happening on TV today. We can watch World War II or Gulf War or Iraq War footage. We can see newscasts from Ethiopia or Sudan or Syria. It has not gone away, it’s just gotten more impersonal. I used to say that gunpowder killed the classics because in a swordfight you could have some dialogue and drama. No one ever has a good conversation in a gunfight.

In the Old Testament, there are even places where the Most High God, the living God, is instructing his chosen people to commit atrocities. In light of this, it seems the single nation before the Tower of Babel would have been better, right? Scattering the people into nations seems to have led to a lot of awful, disgusting butchery that could have been avoided. This is a huge stumbling block for readers today who look at the bloodshed and ask, “How could a living, loving God allow it?”

Keep in mind that the story of the Tower of Babel and all that follows in the Old Testament is telling us about the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.

The origin of “the nations” is probably less important than realizing that the state of the world that Abraham is born into is one that already has “the nations.” A fact is presented to us. The world of Abraham is full of warring nations already, and the first 11 chapters of Genesis are describing how the fallen world came to be. Imagine a voiceover that splits chapter 11 and 12 saying, “We now join our fallen world already in progress.” Much time has passed since Noah and Babel. We are joining the story in the middle as soon as Abraham is introduced in chapter 12. Living among “the nations,” he is called out to form a new nation.

The LORD said to Abram: Go forth from your land, your relatives, and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you. All the families of the earth will find blessing in you. (Gen 12:1-3)

To understand what is happening here, we have to remember that this declaration is the first thing we hear about Abraham (who is still named Abram at this point). We have just left the “scattering” of peoples into diverse nations, which describes how the world became a bunch of warring tribes and states, and the very next thing is God telling Abraham that he will form a new nation, one that will eventually bring all families under God’s blessing once again.

Every bit of the Old Testament that follows is the process of forming that nation, all driving us toward Mary, where she can give birth to Jesus. The walls between the nations do not move until Jesus comes, and really not until Pentecost, when the inversion of Babel happens.

However, Jesus doesn’t ride out to the nations and shout down the walls, as it happened in Jericho. In fact, Jesus’ ministry is very much confined within the walls of God’s nation, the nation of Israel.

But in chapter 8 of Matthew, we see something significant happen where he first goes outside the nation, just a little bit. Jesus heals a Roman centurion’s son, who is not a card carrying member of the nation of Israel, but he did help build a synagogue. The elders lobby to Jesus for healing, on behalf of this man. Upon hearing the centurion’s faith, Jesus performs the healing of his son. (Lk 7:1-11)

This is quite radical, as he is now healing outside of the lines of the nation of Israel.

Then in chapter 15 of Matthew, we see Jesus take another step outside the wall of the nation. He heals the daughter of a Canaanite woman because of her faith in him. At first, he tells her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” This line tells us a great deal about his ministry.

In a kind of test, she passes by persisting in asking for help. She calls to Christ for help and won’t let him go. She is a model of faith, of daily conversion, for after having been called, she will not depart him. In other words, she persists, endures, perseveres, and as we know, Jesus tells us that “by our endurance we will gain our soul.”

This is a great lesson in prayer and perseverance, but for our purposes here, the Canaanite woman’s persistence almost seems to open the door to all nations. At that point, even though Jesus has just said he only came for the children of Israel, he seems to be healing people from all over the place. No, it doesn’t say this explicitly, but right after the Canaanite woman’s daughter is healed, he heals crowds of people, and it doesn’t tell us if these people were all Jews or if it included those from “the nations.” Lastly, to top it off, at the end of chapter 15 in Matthew, he feeds four thousand people with the loaves and fishes miracle, and the only pre-requisite to getting some bread seems to be hunger - no passport or ID needed. But again, here it does not list out the members of the crowd. We get the Table of Nations in Genesis but we don’t get a Table of the Hungry in the loaves and fishes miracle. For these Gospel stories, we don’t get the luxury of a Book of Numbers where long lists of names are presented. In any case, everyone who comes to Jesus is fed, and those who need healing and persist in asking for him, Jew or non-Jew, is healed.

The key is to keep asking.

The origin of nations in the Tower of Babel story is a critical point to understand because references to “the nations” and “gentiles” are everywhere in the New Testament. “Gentiles” has to be one of the most confusing words in the entire Bible to modern ears, just like “kingdom” is to our ears as we abide in modern democracies.

For me, “gentiles” is much easier to read as “the nations” or “foreigners” or “non-Jews.” This helps me understand how radical the healings of Jesus were, because accepting foreigners was not something ancient people did. The family and the culture was your whole identity. Even until recent times, this was the case, and really still is for people who live in the real world and not in online in virtual groups.

Jesus starts chipping away at the walls between “the nations.” By accepting women into his inner circle, he’s chipping away at other walls, too. In our age of diversity celebrations, we have completely forgotten where this notion of acceptance and breaking down boundaries came from. It is from Jesus Christ, a carpenter who is God. Lest we forget: without Christendom, we do not get to our current buzzwords of diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Tip: none of those are new ideas, they are just repackaged parts of Catholic Social Teaching, and CST is far more comprehensive, if anyone ever actually read it. In our Present Privilege and Enlightenment Fragility, we ignore wisdom that was gained long before our era, so we have gurus who “re-discover” it. But there is nothing original in our modern moralists, except for that they drop God out of the equation and pin Original Sin on certain groups and excuse it from others. As Fulton Sheen said, “There are not over a hundred people in the United States who hate the Catholic Church. There are millions, however, who hate what they wrongly believe to be the Catholic Church — which is, of course, quite a different thing…As a matter of fact, if we Catholics believed all of the untruths and lies which were said against the Church, we probably would hate the Church a thousand times more than they do.”)

The origin of nations is important because it explains the state of the world that Abraham and the nation of Israel are formed within. This tension between nations is clearly the cause of massive suffering in the world, just as it is today. There are various important passages about who rules the nation with perhaps the most important one being when Jesus is tempted in the desert.

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The common language of those at Babel is the worldview that comes from a universe emptied of the oversight of God, and replaced by a lower-case god. As a result, the idea of sin gets a total makeover. The Gate is a big trick to turn ourselves into the god. This is not just how pagan worship worked, it’s actually how all habitual sin works. It works exactly the same today as it did for Sargon of Akkad. Perhaps I am Sargon and so are we all.

In a universe where we are the god, we can do whatever we like. In fact, in that universe, we’d be fools not to go get our full share of pleasure, power, wealth, and honor. You can make all the appeals to morality you like, but there is no reason for the lion to lay down with the lamb if the nature of the lion is to dominate the lamb. To dominate then becomes divine. History is written by the victors. The innocent lamb stands no chance because it is there for the taking, and it is delicious. All arguments about fair play and human dignity become academic. In the animal world, the lion will only eat until its full and content. But in the human heart, the lion cannot be contented; it wants all lambs that ever existed and ever will exist to be his own forever, and no one else’s. Animals do not have this problem. This is the broken spring in our machinery, as described in the Garden and in the wrath and envy of Cain. This is what Richard Dawkins’ doesn’t understand. The Selfish Gene in a four-legged mammal plays out very different from those of us walking on two legs who happen to suffer from Original Sin.

A universe that lacks a living God is one where sin makes far more sense than repentance. In that universe, man is above God, because God is no longer watching. If you frame your life in this language, you speak Babel.

And you speak Babel.

We all speak Babel.

The state of the world today is mostly the same as when the story of Babel was being written. I say mostly, because there is one major and all-important difference, from an event that happened to a construction worker who was executed around the year 30 A.D. Have you heard this one before? This man did not stay dead. He returned from the grave in a risen and glorified form that could be touched yet could also pass through walls. In other words, he defeated the ultimate secret fear that is sunk deep within every one of us. He defeated death. As a bonus, he takes away our sins and transforms our suffering.

That little event changes a lot of things for all of us who speak Babel, and it’s extremely important that we understand how the world of Babel was changed by the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In the Tower of Babel story, God observes people building a tower that will “reach the sky.” Once again, ancient people were not dumb enough to think that a Tower could be built tall enough to reach heaven, and anyone who thinks that’s what this story is about needs to put their Unconscious Bias aside. We have a lot of Present Privilege and Enlightenment Fragility that we need to face when we encounter the Tower of Babel story.

The Tower is meant to be a place where the supernatural can be pulled down to earth, like a magic act. Our presentism mindset asks, “How could anyone be so primitive as to believe that?” Yet, we know that millions of people today, if not billions, read horoscopes and pay for people to interpret Tarot cards. We have faith in many odd things today. We check our fitness watch “body battery” and go to GNC to buy pseudo-science fitness supplements. We get lost in our fantasy worlds of Dungeons and Dragons and Hogwarts. We watch sports and pray to the TV as the football soars through the air toward the uprights as time runs out. Suffice it to say, we have ample superstitions and spirit worlds circling all about us yet today, they just aren’t always as obvious as a Tower or a Ziggurat. Some of the worst examples are in our own backyards - literally; there are Catholics who bury a St. Joseph statue upside down in the yard to help sell their house (please stop this superstitious nonsense, Catholics, and immediately go read CCC 2111-2117).

At last, let’s get into the Tower story a bit more. Seeing this project underway, how does God respond? He confuses them. In trying to access heaven, he stops them from proceeding. What’s interesting is the approach to God. Because the builders at Babel are trying to manipulate God, he stops them. But God, uninvited, reveals insights into heaven later on in Genesis, and those who he offers a glimpse of heaven to react very different from the builders of the Tower of Babel.

This is the hilarious thing about our attempts to manipulate God. Whenever we yell, “Why God, why?!” he shows us later on. When we demand God listen to us, he ignores us on purpose, but when he wants us to know something, he reaches down and taps us. The difference between humility and humiliation is this: humility is when you voluntarily surrender to God. Humiliation is when God does it for you. This is gold in addiction recovery meetings, and everyone laughs together, knowing exactly what that means.

This stairway to heaven is being built for the people “to make a name for themselves.” Contrast the Tower of Babel to Jacob’s experience later in Genesis, chapter 28. Jacob is tapped by God, but he hasn’t built anything yet. In a dream, God sends him a vision. Jacob merely sees a ladder upon which angels are ascending and descending to heaven. Rather than build a staircase on a ziggurat and try to reach God, Jacob is freely given the vision.

What does Jacob do? He does not wake up and start building the ladder, or the stairway to heaven. No, what he does the very next morning is the opposite of what happened at Babel. Jacob builds an altar, to worship God, with humility. He even calls it the “gateway to heaven,” but it is not built to “reach the sky.” It is about three feet tall by the way it’s described. His response of humility is nothing like the builders at Babel. This act by Jacob happens at Bethel, which means “House of God.” Now, “House” has a very different connotation than “Tower” or “Gate”. There is very different symbolism in a house than in a massive Ziggurat. Jacob says:

“How awesome this place is! This is nothing else but the house of God, the gateway to heaven!” Early the next morning Jacob took the stone that he had put under his head, set it up as a sacred pillar, and poured oil on top of it… “This stone that I have set up as a sacred pillar will be the house of God. Of everything you give me, I will return a tenth part to you without fail.” (Gen 28:16-22)

Jacob sees the stairway to heaven, or the “gateway to heaven” that the Babylonians were trying to build! Also, notice that he is able to pour oil on the altar or pillar, so it’s short. He’s not trying to reach the sky. But he doesn’t try to build a tower, he offers what little he has, gives praise, and asks for nothing in return. He even promises to tithe, just for the glory of God, for the rest of his life. The difference may seem subtle, but this is central to the theme and story of the entire Old Testament and how it ties to Jesus in the Incarnation and the Resurrection. We bring what little we have, and God provides the rest. He comes to us, we do not lasso or wrangle or capture him. God came to Jacob, while the rulers at Babel tried to go up to seize God.

What’s happening at the Tower of Babel is not praise or worship of the one true God. It’s an attempted coup to replace the Most High God.

The Tower is an attempt to leash and control God, ultimately to dictate rules using God and thereby remove all “sin” from whatever those in power desire. The people are using their minds and hands to perform the ultimate merger of magic and science, so that they can get God to come down to earth. This would be like all the characters in Macbeth building a giant staircase to kill Shakespeare.

With that image you can recognize the absurdity easily in what Babylon was attempting to do with this Tower, or Ziggurat. It is a ludicrous project from the start. Even if Macbeth and Banquo and the rest of the dramatis personae were building a a tower in the story, the tower would be as flat as the page itself, and Shakespeare would still be the author who wrote the tower into the story. If anyone ever tells you they know the mind of God, prepare to run. They could be playing Babel games, or they might be a real prophet. In either case, be very careful. Remember, Iago seemed nice at first, too, before he ruined Othello’s life, and that was all done on purpose by Iago’s and Othello’s creator, Shakespeare. God knows our path, we do not. We must follow his will, or conform our heart to whatever outcome. Repeat after me: I am not the author, I am a character. I am not the potter at the wheel, I am the pot. I am not the Creator, I am a creature.

What the Macbeth characters would fail to understand is that building a staircase cannot escape the pages and the story they are inside. They live in two dimensional paper while Shakespeare lived in three dimensions, in our world. Shakespeare is on a different level, a different plane that cannot be ascended to, and furthermore, Shakespeare is the Creator, so anything the characters do was allowed by Shakespeare in the first place.

Likewise, the Babel construction company doesn’t realize that God cannot be pulled down, and what the people are actually doing is a self-destructive stunt that will pull the Tower down upon themselves because of their arrogance. The lesson here is that you cannot control God, because he created us. He’s not on the same plane as us, but he lets us know he is there in some mysterious way. But he doesn’t need us, we need him. We cannot reach up and pull him down, we can only reach up.

So the story of Babel goes on and gives us God’s response. Keep in mind that figurative language must be used here because the sacred writer is conveying something that goes beyond this Tower project.

Then the LORD said: If now, while they are one people and all have the same language, they have started to do this, nothing they presume to do will be out of their reach. Come, let us go down and there confuse their language, so that no one will understand the speech of another. So the LORD scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. (Gen 11:6-8)

This scattering is the origin story of where the idea of “the nations” comes from in the Bible. In the previous chapter, the nations were listed in the Table of Nations, so there’s this odd sense that everyone was living together in harmony until this event. But we already know that Noah’s sons were at each other like a family on Jerry Springer before that. This is one place where the sacred writer seems to be instructing us on a few things:

* The nations formed when they took up false gods. (Straight outta Lord of the Flies)

* The different languages created different cultures, triggering communication breakdown.

* Thus, the nations do not like one another.

* Instead, we have hatred, distrust, treachery, and war.

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Why were the people building the Tower of Babel? What was their goal? They were trying to “make a name for themselves” but more subtly, they are building a Gate to God. The root word of Babel means “Gate of God.” Think of Stargate or a science-fiction portal if it helps you.

The Tower is a gateway to bring God near, to control God, to pull him down to earth. There is metaphor here in the Tower, obviously, but metaphor is how we remember and re-tell stories of great meaning. If we were robots we could just use zeroes and ones, but a Tower or Gate to heaven is meant to invoke the image of man overtaking God, which is the reverse of humility before God. Since God made us in his image and likeness, with a body and soul together, God is obviously not a robot. Thank God for that. I, for one, am glad, because staring at code all day at work does not stir me like hearing a well-told story does.

Here’s the central theme of Babel. If we can pull God down, and lift up ourselves, then we can become god. We can then make God into a kind of pet.

That is quite a different idea of God from the great quote from St. Athanasius about why Jesus came to earth. “God became man so that man might become God.” That is a great quote, but wow, it can be easily misunderstood. This makes it sound like through prayer we can become God himself, and hardly sounds different than some of the modern meditation practices that are being used.

Karlo Broussard says of this quote: “According to the original Greek of St. Athanasius, the phrase, “that we might become God” is better translated as ‘that we might be deified.’…The idea of sharing in the divine nature means we share what philosophers and theologians identify as God’s communicable attributes (goodness, holiness, and love) as opposed to his incommunicable ones (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and absolute simplicity).

St. Athanasius could have made it easier for us and just said that we can become like God, with the full understanding that we can never become God. That distinction is enormous to gaining understanding of what it means to work toward sanctification and holiness in the Christian life. You can never be God. That’s off-limits and impossible. But, you can partake in God’s divine nature, particularly through prayer and receiving the Eucharist at Mass. But we never, ever, become God. Not with a million prayers or pushups or a perfect college entry exam score. The addition of the word “like” in his quote has critical meaning, because without it, we might as well be chasing after our divine selves in New Age religions. We are creatures, made like God - but must never forget that we are not God. That may have been the greatest discovery of my life. What a relief!

What Babel is attempting is to justify our behavior by making God into an idol that performs vending machine operations. This God has an LED screen that reads, “Insert two dollars. Press B12 for a sandwich. C36 for drunkenness. F25 for group sex. G31 for an orgy.”

At Ziggurats, the priests sacrificed people or animals, and had sexual “rites” with temple prostitutes. Why? What kind of odd ritual is this? It’s not as odd as you may think. When we see God as a vending-machine, we too can just use quarters and get whatever we want approved. It’s the same thing. People who assume prayer will direct God to take action are making the same assumptions of those at Babel. Prayer is powerful, but not if it’s meant to control God, or if it’s perceived as controlling God. Good works can be confused as quarters in the vending machine, but those should be done for the glory of God, not for personal salvation. “Repent and believe the Gospel,” said Christ. “Believe and be baptized and keep my commandments,” he said. “Do the will of God,” he said. But never forget, he also said, “Not everyone who says ‘Lord, Lord’ will get into heaven.” Do you see the issue here? God is not a vending machine. In fact, the atheist may be better off than this person who misunderstands prayer, because prayer used in this way could just as well be a child sacrifice to bring the rain or victory in war. What’s the difference? Both are attempts at controlling God. We can pray for requests, but we must pray for God’s will to be done, not ours. Hence, it is best to finish all prayers with “Thy will - not mine - be done.”

The vending machine god of Babel is just as powerless and useless as the absentee God of the Deists. While it probably looked exciting watching sacrifices on those altars at Babel, it was really just the denial of the one God, the God Most High. This is why when Jesus came, he corrected the record and said, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” What a statement! What about all those sacrifices in the Temple of Jerusalem? What about all that stuff in Leviticus and Numbers about the goats? I would like to go there now, but I’ll continue with Babel or I’ll never finish. (If this topic of sacrifice interests you at all, I highly suggest listening to the Lord of Spirits podcast - all of it, from the beginning to the end).

The builders of Babel, and the deists like Franklin, and the atheists like Richard Dawkins are all doing the same thing in the end. They are speaking the common language, but Dawkins is the only one who really puts all his chips in the middle and lays his cards on the table. Atheists don’t buy the bluff about Baal the storm god and know that the deists are just hedging bets on a bad hand. The only card player left for them is those who believe in the one God. The cool thing about atheists is that they are closer to coming back to belief in the one God than they ever realize, or would ever care to admit, because they’ve seen through all the smoke and mirrors of the meaningless and dead gods.

The reality is this: the builders at Babel are trying to appease a god that is a convenient projection of their own power and desire, while the Deists of early America are tipping their wigs at a dead or fully absent version of God. The ziggurats in America are courts and the Statue of Liberty. Next time you see the Statue of Liberty in New York, you can ponder our worship of “Liberty” and consider the Tower of Babel.

Dawkins just says what everyone else in power was thinking all along, which is this: God doesn’t matter. He is saying that the Emperor has no clothes. He is also like the Emperor Napoleon, when an officer suggested that “God willing” they would take Brussels in the morning. Napoleon allegedly said, “God? God has nothing to do with it.” That’s the same answer Dawkins gives. To Dawkins, the only towers or cathedrals that ever existed were in the mind of those built by mitosis. There is no God, or gods, living or otherwise, outside of our brains.

Of course, Dawkins’ grand bet on the selfish gene goes too far. He’s all in with all the answers, but he left out of the equation an important variable. He fails to solve for Y, as in “Y are we here?” That is the problem with this worldview, because in a world without meaning, you have to live in that world. So does everyone else, and everyone else is not necessarily an educated PhD who can spend a lifetime inspecting in all corners of science and history. Everyone else lacks the funds and leisure time to find meaning. Everyone else, for the most part, in the end, has to rely on what someone says is true. I take it on faith that germs cause disease and not fairies, even though I have never actually saw either of them infect a person. Dawkins and company can win arguments about how the world works, but what they cannot win an argument about is why a sunset is beautiful. When there is no satisfactory ultimate why, people spend a lifetime searching for that variable. In the end, what the world without a living God results in is someone else taking control by force and dictating that the value of Y must be what they say it is, simply because they said so.

So even though I’m not a Dawkins fan, at least he isn’t hedging his bets. He’s all in, and I actually think deniers like him are closer to finding God than the builders of Babel or the deists like Franklin ever were. Having the door half-open to God is like letting the heat out of the house in winter. At some point, you have to make up your mind to go outside or stay inside. This makes me realize, truly, that we should pray for Richard Dawkins. He may end up bringing more people back to faith in God than we could have ever realized. He is almost at the top of the circle, since when we run away from God, we often find ourselves running right into the arms of God.

At Babel, the builders may think there is a God at the end of their staircase, but if they think God can be extracted somehow, or pulled into the universe, then they have actually rejected God. They have invented something new that is not God, not the one true God. I will be coming back to this, because there is something happening at these temples, it’s just not what the builders think it is.

The God of Israel is outside of time and space. He cannot be accessed via a portal, or gate, or tower. The living Creator God is beyond our understanding. He is transcendent and immanent, near and far. We can know he is living, that his will is being played out at all times, but we cannot control or change God. I don’t know how, but even children can understand that God is alive, that he is real. What is being done at the Tower of Babel is the creation of idols, which replace God, reduce God, and substitute God with man-made ideas and desires. An idol is the god of a cynic, not of one who has the faith of a child.

When the concept of God nosedives from a living Creator God outside of time and space, it becomes nothing more than a local god that can be manipulated through a gate or a tower. What inevitably follows is that there is no longer sin, or rather, certain sins are approved while others are outlawed. It just depends on who holds power. This is happening before our eyes in America today. An elaborate ritual in a ziggurat is just a big ruse, a power play, but what is really happening is the attempt to control the concept of “God,” because gaining the upper ground on that idea is required to justify whatever behavior those in power want to dictate as acceptable behavior. In our case today, an already bad concept of God is being reduced further as Redditors and public school administrators go to great lengths to ensure that even the word God is removed from our mouths. You can’t even say God today at work or at school without potentially losing your job. Interestingly, talk of “sin” is becoming less common at church, which is a clear sign that there is a widespread lack of understanding of the God of Christianity, because you cannot understand your need for God unless you understand your own weakness in sin. The affirmation of sin is the voice of the culture today, and where sin is denied, ziggurats of the mind are constructed.

Today, we are witnessing the outcome of what happens when the ideas of Dawkins are taken to its logical end. The reason Dawkins is a fool is that he doesn’t understand what the builders at Babel and the deists like Franklin understood well. The emperors and Founders of history knew that people needed religion, and to pull that rug out from society would cause the city itself to collapse.

Dawkins has a middle-school concept of God that he never outgrew. He’s also operating as an autonomous speaker of “his truth” without a plan or concept of how to organize a world. He doesn’t have employees or mouths to feed or an economy to plan. In the walled-in academic world where the idea of “no souls” exists, Dawkins fails to realize something rather large. His theory of the “Selfish Gene” starts from the bottom, instead of the top, and therefore he cannot describe the whole. His answer of “Because of genes!” is too simple. A toe does not describe the wholeness of a person any more than a gene does, and genes cannot explain the totality of human nature. Dawkins is so smart, but he can’t understand what farmers and mothers with no education understand perfectly well. You would think an evolutionary biologist would be very equipped to understand the parable of the grain of wheat, but somehow he misses it completely.

We need religion. People need religion. Or they will find one. And it won’t be what you expect. In the clean, childless world of our universities, ideas sound good that lack depth. Dawkins’ answer is from the atomic layer, and he emerges from a quiet library to tell us that we are nothing but atoms. Meanwhile the bustle of the street doesn’t hear a word he’s said, because life is happening far beyond the atomic layer. When Dawkins’ burst forth from his library, he was telling a very different message from what the apostles told when they emerged from the Upper Room at Pentecost, after having received the breath of life, touched by tongues of fire. No, when Dawkins and his disciples emerged in their lab coats to tell us the good news, their message was that respiration is a selfish act to propagate our genes and that there is no meaning to any of it. The apostles had a message of eternal life, while Dawkins made us ponder suicide.

So while I commend Dawkins for his honesty, he is actually more foolish than the leaders of Babel. At least the leaders at Babel are offering something to believe in: “Look, here’s a tower. It’s a Gate to God. See?” And Jefferson and Franklin offer something, too: “Look, here’s a sacred document, a Constitution, where we make a nod to God - and also - over there - see the Statue of Liberty?”

Dawkins only offers the abyss. And our brains revolt at the idea. We all know the Big Empty is there, but we don’t really want to stand on the edge and look into it. We can’t. Not for long. The temptation to believe that Dawkins is right draws us all, as doubt is more natural to us than faith. So even if we dabble in disbelief, most move away from the edge in search of a Higher Power of some kind. The search for God, when thwarted or stifled or silenced, erupts like boils, in strange places and in uncomfortable ways. We are already seeing strange religions being born in America now, almost more strange than that of the pagan gods of Babel or America’s traditional worship of the rule of law, wealth, and the slippery thing called “Liberty.”

The Tower of Babel may be an expensive lie to justify power, but it is a better attempt at meaning than what Dawkins offers the masses. But again, Dawkins is the only honest one, which is why his idea is the most dangerous. He’s the anti-Jesus (I don’t want to call him the anti-Christ, because he lacks the charisma needed for that). Dawkins tells us that we are purely material beings without souls. He goes all the way.

Most people hold back and speak the old common language that dances around this fact, finding idols and obsessions to occupy or fence off the Big Empty. Dawkins has spent his life shouting this message and now we are seeing what fruit it bears, where we are in fact atomized, solitary beings - kind of like genes. When we are just chemical machines, we act like the “selfish gene” writ large. Again, not only is this message the polar opposite of Christ, but it’s brings the polar opposite result. Where people know Christ, they form communities, families, and fellowship. There is warmth amid the struggle. Dawkins inability to get past middle-school in his understanding of God leaves him out on the playground all alone. As we watch millions of community organizations and church groups fading away in America, we are clearly becoming more atomized, as people sit at home watching TV alone instead of joining the Lions’ Club or a bowling team. What is worrisome about this is that Hannah Arendt, who dissected the rise of 1930’s totalitarianism, said that loneliness, a.k.a atomization, is a first step toward totalitarianism, because isolated people without purpose or faith are attracted to a powerful ideology that delivers some kind of meaning.

So yes, Babel may be called a fool’s game, or superstitious nonsense, but in our “common language” we already play a fool’s game, and are happy to do it because Dawkins’ worldview makes Kurt Cobain or Morissey seem light-hearted.

We don’t want to mope about in atomized solitude knowing that we are nothing more than chemicals, a bunch of matter mixed together. Even if we suspect we are “just a clump of cells” we don’t want to live like a meaningless mass of molecules. We want meaning. We want to kick ass and take names. We want to win the Super Bowl and go to Disney World and sleep with all the cheerleaders. We want to fight, or at the very least, to watch the fight. We want stories, winners, losers, heroes, and goats. We’ll believe in that Tower of Babel or Statue of Liberty if it allows us some sport, some entertainment, a full belly, and a chance to get a little action on the side. Dawkins was honest, but even crazy Nero understood human beings better.

The Tower of Babel could be summed up in the saying, “If you tell them a lie, don't tell a little one, tell a big one.” This saying has been attributed to Lenin, Hitler, Goebbels, and various other dictators, but this saying precedes those infamous names by thousands of years - probably tens of thousands of years. The “Big Lie” is old; it was just perfected in the 20th century and is now being refined. To maintain power, great narratives must be upheld, and Franklin, Jefferson, and Washington knew this. They understood it better than any ruler in the time of Babel, but the ancient leaders also knew it or they wouldn’t have started building a Tower in the first place.

The pyramids in Egypt are probably the most famous form the big lie. They were not a Gate to God, but a tomb that said the Pharaoh was god. Caesar was known as a god and built great structures to prove the lie. The Eiffel Tower is a Tower built in an era of denying God, built to celebrate our modern obsession with technology and engineering. In an odd reversal of Babel, the Eiffel Tower is almost like a Tower to keep God away. You might say it was the next logical step after the Statue of Liberty. Then you have, finally, the degradation into modern art structures that have absolutely no meaning whatsoever, like the Bean in Chicago or the Cherry on a Spoon in Minnesota. These are as meaningful as the world’s largest ball of twine. The modern structures and buildings have no meaning because, well, you guessed it - there is none! The National Endowment for the Arts is on full Richard Dawkins’ mode. You can easily see how things get uglier in art and architecture as we move away from the era of Christendom. This can also be observed in modern churches, which Bishop Robert Barron has appropriately titled “Beige Catholicism,” in a lament at the drabness of churches built in the latter part of the 20th century.

Countries still build structures to symbolize their chosen-ness, their righteousness. They still try to convince citizens of blessings from above, even after they have stopped pretending that the power of the state is really just from the status quo. If you walk through the Washington D.C. mall or the Roman Forum, you can still feel awe at what the builders of Babel were intending to achieve. They were offering what the band Poison was searching for when Brett Michaels cried out, “Give me something to believe in.” Unfortunately, you will get spoon-fed poison if you are looking for some “thing” to believe in that is not the living Creator God, because he created all of the “things” that you might be offered.

If you have a Gate to God, then whoever owns the Gate can conceivably talk to the god and tell us what god wants. Oddly enough, the god always wants what the owner of the Gate wants. What luck!

But in reality, a Gate or Tower or Altar or Pyramid that grants access to God, like Delphi in Greece, is really a trick that those in power use to sell their claim to the crown. All of these structures are a way to kill off the true God, the Most High, the one true God, and replace him with a human who pretends to have the ear of God. What happens is that there is no longer a living Creator God. As long as the economy is looking good, most people don’t really care, and bread and circuses do nicely for keeping the masses pacified. Still, it’s nice to have some kind of feeling that the god has blessed the nation, even if you suspect it’s all nonsense. That’s the genius of the ancient kings, and that’s how the “Divine Right of Kings” went off the rails in Europe. The bogus claim to power as “God-given” was abused so horribly that the French Revolution was bound to happen. Louis XIV even called himself the Sun King while simultaneously claiming to be a practicing Catholic. I will resist the urge to comment on Joe Biden here, but I will say this: those who use Christianity in the same way that the pagans used their gods, are pagans themselves. In other words, paganism never really died. As for all who would like to say it simply moved into Catholicism, I would suggest reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church before repeating what others have said and judge for yourself.

The great casualty of this trick about god and power is that there is no redemptive suffering, no forgiveness, and no reason to love one another. If there is no living God, then of course there is no ultimate truth. The obvious answer is to take power for yourself and for your family. People who lambast the faithful for only behaving out of fear of hell suggest that believers would be robbing and looting if not for God. They argue that you can be good without God, but they are making that argument in the days of plenty, when famine and economic meltdown have not yet hit. The rise of atheism has coincided with the most bountiful era of food production and wealth in human history. That is not a coincidence. When the economic winds change and the grocery stores shelves are empty, we will see how “good” people are without God. After all, God helps those who help themselves.

Let’s now return to the Bible, to Genesis, to look at the world after the Tower of Babel story. There is a key difference in dealing with God in the post-Babel chapters, when Abraham and Jacob show up.

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