Nahum 3:10: Dashed To Pieces

All right here we go. We're going to read Nahum chapter 3 verses 7 through 16 and then begin to study. And it will come about that all who see you will shrink from you and say Nineveh is devastated. Who will grieve for her?

Where will I see comforters for you? Are you better than Noamon which was situated by the waters of the Nile with water surrounding her whose rampart was the sea whose wall consisted of the sea? Ethiopia was her might and Egypt too without limits.

Put and Labim were also her helpers yet she became an exile. She went into captivity. Also her small children were dashed to pieces at the head of every street. They cast lots for her honorable men and all her great men were bound with fetters.

You too will become drunk. You will be hidden. You will search for a refuge from the enemy. All your fortifications are fig trees with ripe fruit. When shaken they fall into the eater's mouth. Behold your people are women in your midst.

The gates of your land are open wide to your enemies. Fire consumes your gate bars. Draw for yourself water for the siege. Strengthen your fortifications. Go into the clay and tread the mortar. Take hold of the brick mold.

Their fire will consume you. The sword will cut you down. It will consume you as the locust does. Multiply yourself like the creeping locust. Multiply yourself like the swarming locust. You have increased your traitors more than the stars of heaven.

The creeping locust strips and flies away.". Again, these are heavy words for the Ninevites to hear. Again, they're designed to comfort Israel. Israel is going to know that Assyria and Nineveh are going to get what they deserve.

Everything that they've done is going to come back on them for sure. So, real quick recap. Internal evidence places the writing of the book of Nahum between 663 BC and 612 BC, and the scholar Meir suggests a more precise date of 654 BC.

It's definitely within those two date ranges, and according to him, more precisely at that 654 year. The rhetorical question, are you better than Thebes or Loaman, is designed to show Assyria that they too will be destroyed.

Thebes was bigger and better. So, he's taking a bigger, better city and comparing Nineveh to it and saying, I took that city down. What do you think's going to happen to you? You're no comparison to Loaman or Thebes.

Much, much stronger, well more fortified city than you are. Loaman refers to the god of that city, Ammon. Okay, again, back then they would name their cities after the gods or have a god that was kind of like the the patriot of the city.

So, god is basically telling, the true god is telling them that I'm going to defeat all the false gods that you guys erect that think are going to protect you. The comparison between Loaman and Nineveh shows the Egyptian city is more beautiful, artistic, cultured, strong, allied, and historic.

So, Thebes, Loaman in Egypt is a much more cultured city, a much more popular city, a much more likable historic city. So, if that's the case, again, what are the people thinking about Nineveh and what is God going to do to Nineveh as compared to what he did to Thebes?

The harlot Nineveh cannot compare to Thebes. She will be overthrown. Again, when God says, I will, he does. There's nothing God says, I will, that he doesn't accomplish or do. So, that should bring comfort to his people, but that should be bring terror to his enemies, right?

You always have to ask yourself, am I one of God's people? Am I trusting in Jesus for my salvation? Am I trusting in his son or am I trusting in me and what I've done or something else that's going to help me to escape the judgment of God?

That's what differentiates the people of God from the people of the world or the people of Satan. All of the factors that humanity trusts in for success and security are nothing in God's sight apart from faith in him, right?

Jesus says, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one gets to the Father but through me. You must come through Jesus. You need a mediator. There's one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.

You have to come to God on his terms, not your own. You're the sinner who violated his law. You are in no position to start laying down terms for God. Well, I'll do this if you do that. It doesn't work like that.

You've violated the law of the true king of the universe and you must bow the knee to Jesus Christ. That's the means of surrender. You don't start setting terms and dictating to God what you will and won't do.

If you do, God will simply give you justice for your sins. God will bring justice to the proud and the haughty. Again, if you don't bend the knee to Jesus Christ, it's basically because you want to do it your way, which is pride.

Okay, so let's get into today's text. Yet she became an exile. She went into captivity. Also, her small children would dash to pieces at the head of every rock, at the head of every street. They cast lots for her honorable men, and her great men were bound with fetters.

So, despite Nineveh's strategic advantages, I'm sorry, despite these strategic advantages, Thebes was taken by the Assyrians, sacked and destroyed, its inhabitants either slaughtered or taken off as exiles.

Lots were cast, right? It's like dice. The Assyrian soldiers casted lots to determine who would get the more highly prized men with their education and skills as slaves. So, they're basically playing a game of dice to see who's going to get the best of the men.

Despite the great power Thebes had enjoyed, she was carried away. She went into captivity. This, the Assyrians would know very well because it was their own armies under King Ashurbanipal that had captured Thebes and exiled its people.

So, this is going to hit home to Assyria. He's comparing them to Thebes. Thebes is the city that Assyria took over, and exactly what they did to Thebes, which they would know and had bragged about, is now going to happen to them.

Today's English version makes it explicit that she refers to the inhabitants rather than the city by saying the people of Thebes. So, this is about the people. It's not just the city, it's the people in the city that this is concerned with.

The Hebrew actually uses two verbs, carried away and went into captivity. Exile means being forced to live in another place, usually a distant country. Other ways of translating this sentence are, yet their enemies carried away the people of Thebes into exile, or yet their enemies led off the people of Thebes as prisoners into a distant country.

The rest of the verse describes what the Assyrian soldiers had done when they captured Thebes and carried the implied threat that the same sort of things will be done to the people of Nineveh. Assyria's goal was to dilute the people in the nations that they were taking over and assimilate them into their culture, basically eroding the culture that they grew up with.

So, if Assyria could take over and assimilate everybody into their culture, it would make things easier, right? Because Assyria would now have more control over them and get other people to look like them.

So, the Assyrian crimes, what were they? Nahum 3 .8 -10 condemns Assyria for its crimes against the people of Thebes. These verses recall the opening two chapters of Amos, which passed sentence on various peoples for similar crimes.

For instance, for three transgressions of the Ammonites and for four, I will not revoke the punishment because they have ripped open pregnant women in Gilead so that they might enlarge their border. So, I will kindle a fire in the wall of Rabah and it shall devour her strongholds with shouting on the day of battle, with a tempest in the day of the whirlwind, and their king shall go into exile, he and his princes together.

So, you can see Amos lists the sins that the Ammonites committed, right? This is similar to what's going on with Nahum with the sins that the Ninevites committed. This passage from Amos shows that God will judge acts of cruelty committed against others.

Nahum says that Assyria will receive a fate similar to that of Thebes, partly because of the atrocities committed in Thebes. We've gone over that ad nauseum, how they used to flay people and crucify people and pile their heads up in front of the gates of the city like a pyramid.

They were brutal, brutal people. Thebes had everything in its favor, yet in 663 BC, it fell before the forces of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. The Assyrian soldiers were merciless. Helpless infants were slaughtered.

There's a couple of verses there, Hosea 13 .6, Psalm 137 .9, which we're going to take a deeper look at, Hosea 13, Hosea 10, at the most conspicuous places, which is what the head of every street means, and it means it was done in the public square.

They gambled for the prized slaves, the Theban nobles, and put in chains the city's great men. The citizens were then marched off into exile. Such atrocities, could there be any doubt that Nineveh must be destroyed?

So I want to take a look at Psalm 137 .9, because although this isn't specifically about Nineveh and Assyria, it's definitely something that we need to know. So Psalm 137 .9, O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed, blessed shall he be who repays you with what you have done to us.

Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock. Ouch, right? Have you ever heard a skeptic say, oh, you're pro-life, aren't you? But look what your God says. Blessed is he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock.

How would you answer that? Well, we're going to go through it. What makes this even more compelling is when they say, oh, Jesus repeated those words. So you can't even say, well, Jesus didn't repeat that, you know, kind of a bad argument anyway.

Jesus doesn't have to repeat anything in the Scriptures. It's all true. He repeats it in Luke 19. We will tear you down to the ground and you and your children within you. Right? So yes, sir, certainly.

And actually, as we go through this, I think the words that he speaks are heavy, but it's actually going to be worse. Right? Okay. Let's think about this. Did our God kill all the firstborn in Egypt? Those were babies, right?

God killed all the firstborn. How do you get around that? Do you get around that? Should you get around that? Right? I mean, if God killed all the firstborn, is he allowed to do that? Yes, he's, he's the giver of life.

He's the sustainer of life. He can bring, take that life back at any point in time that he wants. Right? I think it's, it's James White who says, when you realize that your sin is, when you realize God could take you out at any point in time, because your sin is so heinous.

Now you're onto something. You recognize that the very, the very breath you're taking right now is by the grace and the mercy of God. Right? When you, if you, if you're, the thoughts of your heart were to be exposed to the people around you, and even to yourself, because your heart is deceitfully wicked, who can know it?

If those were disclosed to everybody around you, you would agree, I should be taken out, taken out right now. Right? So I think this is actually going to be worse for what the skeptics actually say. All right.

And then it's our turn to tell the skeptics, you too will stand before God and give an account of your life. So let's just take a look. All right. This passage of holy scripture has been attacked as fiercely as any words in all of the Bible.

One modern commentator says the ironic, bitter beatitudes of verses eight and nine are the very reverse of true religion and are among the most repellent words in scripture. Now someone, uh, one 37, I should say, um, is an imprecatory Psalm.

Does anybody know what the word imprecatory means? Are you raising your hand? No, I told you. Okay. Imprecatory means curse or malediction. So some people even, uh, dispute whether we should pray the imprecatory Psalm.

Should we be calling for God to curse people who are his enemies? And I think this is something we're going to talk about today. This is the one I just wanted to take a quick detour to go through this.

So some say we shouldn't even pray the imprecatory Psalms because they contain curses or maledictions on people. This is just one multitude of such comments. The widespread misinterpretation of these verses has caused many to react with feelings of repulsion towards this Psalm.

It has been misrepresented as, as filled with malice, vengeance, and delight in the sufferings of others. Now I specifically made this a little bit bigger because we, in the book study on Wednesday night, we went through the book War Psalms of the Prince of Peace.

This is several years ago, written by James Adams, not J Adams, James Adams. And we went through the imprecatory Psalms and why we should be praying these things. Again, it has to be done with the right heart attitude.

Okay. But this is God's word. So if we shouldn't be praying the imprecatory Psalms, why would God put them in the Psalter for us to sing? Doesn't make sense, right? But we should sing them again with the right heart attitude.

If we focus our attention on the last two verses of this Psalm, we see the setting of the people of Judah in captivity. Their sorrow and grief are intense and the nostalgia for their homeland overwhelms them.

As the Psalmist reflects on the many cruelties they had endured, he begins to pray and ask God to bring justice to the wicked. And so we come to this text, Psalm 137, which has been so misunderstood and frequently rejected even by Christians.

Okay. So again, it's going to be the correct heart attitude. We're not going to name people that we want God to curse, but you've heard us pray from the pulpit many times. And on Wednesday nights, if this person remains your enemy, Lord God, remove them and replace them with someone who's going to rule according to your law, according to your precepts.

Yes, Jerry. Exactly. Exactly. And again, if you're harboring a grudge against a specific person, you have to deal with that in your own heart first. You don't want to be praying curses upon someone who you don't know.

Maybe God's going to save that person. Maybe your prayers for that person will end up being what God uses to get through to them. So again, God's thoughts are not our thoughts, right? We are to love our enemy, but also pray that God's will be done, right?

We don't know who God, I mean, we do know who God's enemies are right now when you see it out there, but we should be praying for their hearts to be changed, that God would have mercy on them and save them the way he saved us, but we should also pray that God should have victory over his enemies, okay?

So it's a hard attitude. Before we see how these verses are to be properly understood and how they apply to us today, there is some necessary background information from the text and the original language.

The final and most offensive words of the text, dashes your infants against the rocks, are the only words from this entire psalm chosen for repetition in the New Testament, and in what context or setting do we find them?

Our Lord Jesus speaks them in Luke 19 .44. The verb that we have translated here as dashes from the Greek occurs only twice in scripture, first in the Septuagint version of the verse, Psalm 137 .9, and then in its New Testament citation in the lament of our Lord over Jerusalem, okay?

I just want to let you know, all this is coming from the war psalms of the Prince of Peace. You know, I always cite the commentators that I've been using, but this all comes from that book. This isn't even a commentary on Nahum.

Like I said, I think I just want to get into your minds this particular section where it talks about dashing infants against the rocks. The reserving of this particular verb for this specific use in all the scripture shows how our Lord deliberately referred to this psalm.

Isaiah prophesied in 1316, the Lord's wrath upon Babylon, whose infants will be dashed to pieces. In Psalm 137, we hear the psalmist yearning for the Lord to fulfill his prophecy. Jesus in Luke 19 prophesied similar judgment upon the city that rejects the Lord's anointed one.

Who's the Lord's anointed one? Jesus. That's an easy question, right? We need to see or read Jesus's New Testament understanding of this passage. When we see it in that light, it will be transformed from sentences of doom and malice to words of triumph and encouragement.

Okay, so let's see how he steps through this. First, he asks, who is the daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction? Which is what Psalm 137 is about. She, Babylon, represents all that is hostile to God.

The climax of the history of Babylon is her destruction, as pronounced in Revelation 18, 2. Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great. This cry for her destruction is an echo of God's promise in Jeremiah 51.

A destroyer will come against Babylon. Her warriors will be captured and their bows will be broken, for the Lord is a God of retribution. He will repay in full. And in Isaiah 13, an oracle concerning Babylon.

Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes. Their houses will be looted and their wives ravished. Babylon, the jewel of kingdoms, the glory of the Babylonians' pride, will be overthrown by God like Sodom and Gomorrah.

Who are the infants that will be dashed to pieces? This is where the words kind of change a little bit. The Hebrew word here means children. It doesn't specify as to age, but relationship. All those who are followers of the evil kingdom, the children of Babylon, will be dashed to pieces.

Psalm 2, Jeremiah 19, Revelation 12 and 19. Oliel in Hebrew and Nepios and Technon in Greek do not specify age, but relationship. So when it talks about the infants of Babylon, it's really the children of Babylon.

Like all of us here, if your faith and trust is in Jesus, you are children of God, right? That doesn't mean that we're necessarily infants, but we're his children. We're his offspring. Same thing with Babylonians.

The infants or the children of Babylon are their offspring. Are Christ's enemies your enemies? Here's another good question. They were certainly to the psalmist sworn enemies. He so closely identified with his God that it was natural for him to loathe intensely those who were set against God.

He speaks under inspiration of the Holy Spirit, not harboring a personal grudge or expressing a personal vindictiveness against his own enemies. It is true that wicked men hate God and their hatred is an evil emotion.

So again, if we're praying the imprecatory Psalms, we're not naming specific people who we don't like. Oh God, curse so-and-so. Bring your wrath down upon that person. We're praying that God would destroy the powers of darkness and remove them from his kingdom moving forward.

So this is, again, it's not a personal grudge. This is in general. We're praying, like when we pray for our government, we pray that God would remove anybody who would be an enemy of God and replace it with somebody who's one of God's people.

The psalmist's hatred is like God's hatred, reflecting a supreme desire that the purposes of God's kingdom will flourish and wickedness will be destroyed. Psalm 139, again, gives us the spirit of the psalmist with clarity.

If only you would slay the wicked, oh God, away from me, you bloodthirsty men. They speak of you with evil intent. Your adversaries misuse your name. Do I not hate those who hate you, oh Lord, and abhor those who rise up against you?

I have nothing but hatred for them. I count them my enemies. Now, we see this a lot of times when we're standing in front of Planned Parenthood, when we're standing down at Port Jefferson, people start hurling out, you know, profanities at us.

Why? We're just standing for what we believe, right? And yet they want to curse us. Now, do we say specifically, Lord, curse that person? Say, no, Lord, do away with your enemies. Maybe this person will stop and have a conversation and we'll be able to speak to them and give them the gospel and see the Lord do something in their mind and their heart.

So we're not cursing specific people, we're just cursing in general the enemies of God. And we should hate the enemies of God in that sense. We don't want to see that the kingdom of God harmed, if you would.

We don't want to see people, Christians, martyred. We don't want to see that. Obviously, overseas, we see Christians being killed by Muslims and stuff like that. We don't want to see that. Well, we shouldn't anyway, hopefully, right?

You don't want to see things like that, but that's what happens. So we're praying against the forces of darkness that is behind Islam or any of the religions that would persecute Christians. Then the psalmist prays, search me, O God, and know my heart.

Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me and lead me in the way of everlasting. Here's a perfect hatred expressed against the enemies of God. It is the hatred each of us should have to properly honor our holy God.

You need to ask yourself right now, are Christ's enemies my enemies? If they are not, you do not love the Lord as you should. What does James tell us? Friends with the world is at enmity with God, right?

We should not be friends with the world system. Obviously, the inhabitants of the world are image bearers of God. We want to see them come to know the Lord. That's why we've been given the ministry of reconciliation.

Hopefully, we could speak the gospel to them and see them reconciled to God and part of God's people, the church here on earth. So our heart shouldn't be towards any one specific person in hatred towards them.

It's hatred towards the system. Okay. Right. So we're either in Adam or in Christ. If we're in Christ, he is our head. All right. That's who we're to have allegiance to. Not man and man systems. Yes. Not against flesh and blood.

Right. Right. Excellent. Okay. Good. Good points. Excellent. All right. So what is the rock that will bring destruction? And here's, here's the key to the whole thing. This is surely metaphorical language and not literal since Babylon is built on a flat alluvial plane.

Alluvial means sedimentary soil without cliffs or rocks. No intelligent dweller in Babylon, heathen or servant of Jehovah could fail to understand the metaphor of Babylon's being hurled from her exaltation in pride and power for the literal interpretation is ridiculous.

No cliffs or rocks or mountains being anywhere near in Babylon. It's a plane. The Hebrew text has the word rock in the singular, not plural as reflected by the American standard version. Notice the correlation to Jesus's words in Matthew 21, as he teaches concerning the future.

Have you never read in the scriptures, the stone their builders rejected has become the capstone. The Lord has done this and it is marvelous in our eyes. Therefore, I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit.

He who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces, but he on whom it falls will be crushed. And that's Daniel chapter two. So when it says, um, your, your children, your children are going to be dashed against the rock, not the rocks, the rock is talking about Jesus.

Okay. So anybody, I think you'd be, I mean, from a worldly sense, from, I should say from a spiritual sense, I think you'd probably rather be smashed into a rock than stand before Jesus as his enemy. This is the same word for rock used in numbers chapter 20 verse eight.

This is the rock from which the apostle said the forefathers drank. And he tells the Corinthians plainly that rock was Christ. Okay. I think in a sermon, Oh gosh, last year I had gone through, uh, the rock throughout the whole old Testament and showed how each one of the, each, each instance that was pointing to Jesus.

So it's important because there's, there's others, other, other religious denominations that would say, no, the rock is pointing to Peter all throughout the whole old Testament. That rock points to Christ.

He's the rock of our salvation. He is the rock upon which we build our lives. All right. The church is built on the rock of Jesus Christ, not the rock of Peter. All right. Daniel chapter two, as you looked, a stone was cut by no human hand, right?

This is Jesus. And it struck the image on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, the silver, and the gold altogether were broken in pieces and became like chaff, like the chaff of the summer threshing floors and the wind carried them away so that not a trace of them could be found.

But the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and fill the whole earth. The stone is Jesus struck the image. That was, that was each of the kingdoms that came before it before Jesus and became a great mountain.

And as Lawrence has labored, labored for months through the book of Michael, what is a mountain? Yes. It's a meeting place between God and man. And what else is temple, right? It represents a religious structure, right?

So the great mountain is the kingdom of God. That's going to be the mountain that covers the entire earth, right? The, the, the knowledge of the glory of Lord will cover the earth as the water to cover the sea.

That mountain is going to grow to become the greatest mountain here on earth. This is what Daniel is all about. Actually, one of the things it's about. So why will this happen? The daughter of Babylon and her infants or children have rejected Christ, the rock, the curses that will come upon Babylon.

The great will be returned, will be a returning to her of the torture and grief she has given to others. Jeremiah recorded the cry of God's people so long ago that God's prompt of God's promise may the violence done to our flesh be upon Babylon, say the inhabitants of Zion.

May our blood be on those who live in Babylonia, says Jerusalem. Therefore, this is what the Lord says, see, I will defend your cause and avenge you. I will dry up her sea and make her springs dry. Sounds very much like the Israelites who said, may I'm speaking of Jesus, may his blood be on our heads and our children's heads, which is who bad Babylon is in the book of revelation.

And the apostle John heard a voice from heaven, say of Babylon, the great, her sins are piled up to heaven and God has remembered her crimes. Give back to her as she has given pay her back double for what she has done.

Mix her a double portion from her own cup, give her as much torture and grief as the glory and luxury she gave herself in her heart. She boasts. I sit as queen. I am not a her plagues will overtake her death morning and famine.

She will be consumed by fire for mighty is the Lord God who judges, right? These are serious words. Let all who are enemies of God read their doom in the ashes of Babylon. When we see what what's going to happen to Nineveh and we see how he, he quotes the Psalm about being dashed to pieces against the rock.

All of the enemies of God are coming against our Lord, our king, and he's going to do away with them. He's not going to be merciful. The time for mercy is now there's going to come a day where he rules with a rod of iron and the rod is, is, is iron.

It doesn't bend. So we're all be judged by that standard. If you're found in Christ, your sins will be forgiven. You'll be welcomed into heaven. If not, you're going to be exiled, which is what is going to happen to Nineveh exiled.

There are curses pronounced upon all who forsake the Lord. Psalm 137 pronounces God's curse on anyone who forgets Jerusalem and the Lord who gave meaning to the holy city. Even the Psalmist himself is not exempt from the curse.

He says, may my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth. If I do not remember you, all who depart from the Lord are part of Babylon. There are only two families in the world, the children of Satan, Babylon, the great and the children of God and Christ's kingdom will surely dash to pieces Babylon and all the kingdoms of darkness.

It is essential that you know which kingdom you are part of. If you are in the kingdom of Satan, your doom is sure. Unless you become part of the kingdom of Christ, you will be among those destroyed in Christ's final victory.

And we've gone through this over and over and over again. You're either in Adam or you're in Christ. You're either trusting in Jesus alone for your salvation, or you're trusting in something else aside from Jesus, whether it be your good works, whether it be religious practices, ordinances, things that you do that are going to make God pleased with you, or you're trusting in Jesus, who is the propitiation, the satisfaction of the wrath of God on our behalf.

The Apostle Paul declares, if anyone else thinks he has reason for confidence in the flesh, I have more. He then proceeds to list his Jewish pedigree. Nahum similarly challenges Nineveh's confidence in the flesh by demonstrating that a city with much more reason for confidence, Laman or Thebes, has been brutally desecrated.

Nahum ends his section on Thebes by describing the fate of its great men. The noblest men in the noblest city meet an ignoble end. They became prizes and games of chance and left the city chained and on display.

If they survived the torturous journey back to Assyria, they faced a demeaning life of slavery doing the will of their new masters. They were taken away and made slaves to the Assyrians. In synonymous parallelism with the honored men of Thebes are the great men who were bound in chains.

Now the prophet indicated that all of the prominent men of the city experienced this fate. Whether their greatness was achieved through hereditary wealth, skill, or wisdom, they were equally subjected to enslavement.

The noble men of Thebes became slaves to their attackers. The invaders cast lots to determine who would obtain which slave. Those who ruled the city became the object of gamblers. Casting lots for the inhabitants of the city is often found in the Old Testament.

Anybody know what the word for lot is in Hebrew? Pur. Does that give you a hint of what holiday that came about? Purim, right? Where they cast lots and the Jews were saved from Haman and the Babylonians.

The casting of lots possibly referred to writing the names of persons on stones with the stones placed in some kind of container before being cast to the ground. The first stone hitting the ground indicated the person chosen.

In other words, their lot. Let me just ask you the question. Have you heard the question, what is your lot in life? This is where this comes from. The outcome of their lives was literally a roll of the dice, the casting of a lot.

Think of all the prominent kingly men in Nineveh with power who ran things. Their lives will now be decided by a game of dice. Now even this is in the sovereign hand of God, right? A lot is cast into its lap, but it's every decision is from the Lord.

From an earthly perspective, their lives are basically chance. Whatever the dice is rolled, that's who I'm going to have to serve for the rest of my life. Thankfully for us, like when we celebrate, well not we celebrate, but when the Jews celebrated Purim, God sovereignly brought them through to be saved, to continue their lineage because of the opposition against them.