#69 When History Meets Theology: Pagan Myths and Plagues + Dr. George Grant

The Problem of God in History and the Rise of Pagan Myths

Are, is God actually present in events like the Holocaust, 9 -11, where was God in that?

Jupiter and Zeus, Marduk and Baal are all the same character, just with slightly altered names.

When you were like, when you understand it out of context, it's wild, but then you put it in context and that makes so much sense. There's not a person alive on the planet.

Who does not have moments where they look back and say, where was God in this?

What are some of the gods in your opinion that still exist today that maybe we don't acknowledge? Hello, hello. Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

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I'm your host, Cassium Blino. This conversation is going to be all over the place, but I guarantee you that these are some of the you've probably asked yourself as a curious and confused Christian, such as looking at world history and wondering, are these events random or is God actually present?

I mean the real events, like the Holocaust, 9 -11. Where was God in that? Was that part of the plan? Was that the enemy at work? It feels like we're in Exodus, but what if those events are carrying a deeper spiritual confrontation and we're just completely missing this?

So today we're going to go into a few big questions like multiple gods and the source of paganism and where did that really come from? Like what if the stories of Zeus and Jupiter, they're not myths, but they're echoes of something that actually existed and still exists.

Something that began, and this is something we've talked about on the show, the Tower of Babel. So we're going to go back into this with a new perspective because I've got a fresh new guest today. Today my guest is Dr. George Grant.

You are many things. You are the pastor parish of Presbyterian Church, PCA. You're the founder of Franklin Classical School of the Chalmers Fund and the King's Meadows Study Center. You're the author of multiple five dozen books, just a few, and your teaching career has taken you from the D. James Kennedy at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church to lecturing now at Knox Theological Seminary, and you were featured in Is Genesis History, which this is a dream for me to be interviewing you because when I saw that documentary, that was at the very beginning of this podcast of like, ah, yes, people that are talking about faith in a very modern way that makes it relevant, not so far distant like this ancient Bible, but today, and talking about it with archaeological facts and fossils.

We've had multiple amazing guests on the show. So it's such an honor to have you on the show, Dr. Grant. Thank you so much for being here. How are you today?

I'm wonderful, and it is a delight. I love your show, and I'm grateful for the work that you have done, the wide variety of things that you have covered. So this is a delight.

Thank you. Yeah, the Bible's not bland. It really reaches every aspect of reality.

It is not bland. You're right. You're right.

I know. I'm so blessed that God let me do this and gave the idea and let me do this because to me, it's like job security. It's like this will never run out of topics, and we've already discussed Tower of Babel and the source of multi-gods.

We talked about Dr. James Sedlacek and Dr. Joseph Miller, and to have you here, it's going to be slightly different because I think recognizing God's hand within these events and recognizing other gods within that, I think, we were talking about this before the show of like, God still exists today, and we're just so modernized that the Bible and gods and paganism seems like something of the past.

It seems almost like lore or medieval stories, but it's very much so present today. So I'm really excited for you to bring that to the forefront and really explain it in a way that's easy to understand because in my head, I know it's there, but I can't really put my finger on it, and maybe some people aren't even aware that it's there.

Hopefully, this conversation brings us closer, but one of the things that I want to start with in this conversation is how did you even get here? How did you come to know about paganism, cults, multiple gods?

Where did your interests in life,.

How'd they lead you here? Well, I've been a Christian for more than 60 years, and so I've had a lot of cultural experiences along the way in my life that have shaped my interests and my passions. I love history.

I've taught history, studied history, written books of history, and so the historical perspective and the application to present-day cultural events has always sort of been at the forefront, but early on in my Christian life, I was involved with ministries to cults and particularly Eastern cults.

When I was in college, I was fascinated by the Middle East, and I went to the University of Houston, which has a tremendous amount of emphasis on the petroleum production world, which in the 70s was so centrally located in the Middle East, and so I became fascinated with Islam and Zoroastrianism and all of those kinds of things, and then just as a student of the Bible, simply finding a way to get all of those things connected to what we see in the scriptures in a way that made sense.

So all of those things sort of worked together to pique my interest and to sort of prod my professional career along. That's amazing. I think history is the coolest.

Part about the Bible. I think that it happened and the way that it played in with other global events is just the most interesting thing to me because I think when we understand the history, we understand the context, and with that, we understand the meanings behind why certain things are said and why they're said because we're just not privy to the conversations or the cultural happenings that were happening at that time.

We take it out of context, and it doesn't make any sense to us, and then you put it in context, and you're like, oh, yeah, if I was.

There, I would have done the same thing. Yeah. Well, three-fourths of the Bible is history, and part of the way that the redemption story plays out is it plays out in space, in time, in history with real people, with real stories and real drama across the backdrop of multiple cultures so that you get to see God's hand across the whole spectrum of human experience and human history.

So it's really, really important that we understand where we have come from, how we got here so that we can plot the trajectory to the future. Otherwise, we're just wandering in the dark. Absolutely, and great segue into the first.

Genesis, the Flood, and the Unrecorded World Before Abraham

Topic, which is pre-recorded history, what was happening in the world because I think as a Christian, we think logically. We like to think that we do, and it starts with Adam and Eve. It starts with the first people, and then it goes up until Jesus and the Gospels, and then it talks about the ending, what's to come, revelation.

As a Christian, it's really hard for me to say, okay, that's the beginning of time, and now we're relating it to today. Obviously, the Bible doesn't end in 2025, obviously, but it is like what happened before the written history.

We're kind of looking back in the Bible. We're looking back in time. So what was happening before all this was written down? Could you tell me, catch me up, first person to know. I'm just kidding, but how do we talk about that without it being written down?

Well, the first two chapters.

Of Genesis provide us with God's perfect design for the world. There are 20 creation ordinances in the first two chapters, and those 20 creation ordinances tell us what God intended his perfect worlds to be and how it's to function.

Those 20 ordinances begin with a pre-existence, altogether sovereign God, in the beginning God, and then it starts working its way through everything from the creation of matter, Genesis 1 -2, the realization that there is a separation between the creator and his creation.

In other words, there is a distinction between matter that God creates and this pre-existence sovereign God who creates that matter ex nihilo, out of nothing, and then it proceeds through everything from the creation of linear history to the swarming of the various kinds of flora and fauna in the world.

Those creation ordinances give us a picture of God's perfect plan. That plan is disrupted in Genesis chapter 3 by the fall. Adam and Eve stumble and fall into sin, and that creates havoc in all of creation.

At that point, the Bible's story is the unfolding of God's purposeful redemption. So, in a sense, the Bible is not a history book, although it contains a lot of history. What it is, it's a narrative of God's providential works, glimpses of God's providential works, across time, revealing his redemptive plan.

And his redemptive plan, according to the New Testament and much of the prophetic Old Testament, is to restore every broken thing. This is why in Romans chapter 8, we're told that even creation groans for the day of redemption.

And by the time we get to the last chapter in the book of Revelation, we see that this perfect restoration has occurred. In other words, what God is doing in history is he is using his people and his purposeful providence to restore that original design that was disrupted by the fall.

So, if we want to know what God is going to do, where he is taking history, we have to first look at those 20 creation ordinances so that we can see what God's original plan was for men, for women, for families, for the work in the world, the call to guard and tend the garden.

So, all of that is set forth in the first two chapters. We have disruption in the third chapter, and then in the fourth chapter of Genesis, all the way through Genesis chapter 11, we have that sort of before much is recorded in history stuff going on.

We have Cain and Abel and Lamech, all the way up to Methuselah, and leading to the flood of Noah. One thing that's really interesting is that all of those 11 first chapters in Genesis are organized around the Hebrew word, toldoth, which means generations.

And so, it's a very orderly sort of structure for us to understand first the generations of creation, and then the generations of man, leading all the way up to Abraham. And what's really interesting is that we actually have a specific numbers given for the lifespan of generations.

And if you add up those numbers, you quickly realize that some of the last characters in those generations actually died in the flood. Methuselah died in the flood.

Wait, what about the numbers indicates that?

You just add up their ages, and you figure out, subtract Noah's 500 years old when he starts to have his family, and his wife gives birth to Shem, Ham, and Japheth. So, if you then look at how old Methuselah was when he gave birth, when Noah was born, you start to realize, oh my goodness, you do the math, and you realize, okay, this is a very orderly, well-prepared, well-preserved chronology.

Genesis is not a history book, but it is filled with history, and it's accurate history. It all.

Adds up. You know so much more than me. You're like, it makes so much sense. I'm like, oh my.

Gosh. I know, I know. And what we know about hydrology and the structure of the geological formations of the earth, we can look and we can see that there is substantial scientific support for the fact that there was a global flood.

We know, for instance, just recently, because of the floods in Texas, in Kerrville, they have now uncovered again, just like they have in Glenrose, Texas, dinosaur footprints in the stone right next to human footprints.

So, you have dinosaur footprints and human footprints in the same stone, in the same, you know, seabed. And that seabed in Texas is limestone, so it's really easy to see how both a dinosaur's footprint and a human footprint could be in the same piece of, same strata of stone.

But all of that to say, between the time of Genesis 4 and the time of Abraham in Genesis 12, we have a lot of human history that is not recorded. We have this very thin timeline where we have some evidence, and you have these huge events, the flood and the Tower of Babel, that sort of demarcate that period.

So, what's going on during that time? Well, the Bible gives us a little glimpse of the development of human culture with Jubal and Tubal Cain and a host of other characters who begin to fashion iron tools and musical instruments and a host of other things.

Linguists have been able to trace the patterns and the pathways of language trajectories. Dr. Joseph Kikasola, for instance, has written a marvelous book in which he has traced backwards all of the human languages as they have traveled across the earth and has demonstrated that almost beyond any shadow of a doubt, all human languages were once centered in a single place in the Middle East between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, the Tower of Babel.

So, we know from linguists that we can trace back to the Tower of Babel and we can follow the remarkable structures of languages because while the languages split, there are ghost elements of that original human language that show up in all languages as they begin to morph and shape, as they distance themselves further and further from the Fertile Crescent.

And all languages are polyglot in a sense. They all have bits and pieces. It's hard to imagine that America... I'm sorry, what?

English. Oh my gosh. English and Chinese have any similarities whatsoever.

But they do. They have these root stems that are very, very similar. They are vastly different now because of isolation from one another and unique cultural circumstances, unique environmental circumstances.

One of the things that we tend to forget that languages are never static. I have a podcast on just grammar and vocabulary and language. And one of the things that I repeatedly say is languages never stay still.

They're constantly morphing and changing. So, you can find etymological roots of words and they tell remarkable stories. So, Dr. Kikisola was able to demonstrate that there is this pathway, this journey that all of these languages have followed.

Unfortunately, anthropologists have not been able to do the same thing with the migration of tribes and peoples as accurately.

Oh, you'd think that that would go hand in hand.

You would, you would. The problem is that there are all of these disruptive events that occur, everything from earthquakes and volcanic eruptions to shifts in the plate tectonics of continents and all of the rest.

But what we're able to do is we are able, through the combination of anthropology and linguistics, sort of trace some of the stories that have emerged in human society. And this is where we get to the gods and to the myths.

In a sense, if the Bible, if we posit that the Bible is true and that there was an actual Tower of Babel event and that from that event the peoples were scattered across the earth, at one time they had a common set of stories.

They had common knowledge of events that had occurred prior. So this is one of the reasons why the story of Noah and his flood shows up over and over and over again in the mythologies of the peoples that scatter.

Not just things like the Gilgamesh epic, which you would sort of expect because it's in the same.

Region. Yeah, that's like, yeah, top of mind. But what else? What else has a flood?

Marduk. You start to see parts of the story of Noah show up with Ra in Egypt. Parts of the story wind up in old Icelandic narratives. I feel like the first thing that people think about with that.

Is like, well, then how do we not know that Ra was the correct one and Christians copied theirs?

Sure. And that's a great question. Which came first? And what we can do is we can trace through both the linguistic pathways and the anthropological pathways. We can trace all of them back to the Fertile Crescent.

So we know that the Fertile Crescent was the seed bed for all of those stories, all of those languages, all of those root words.

The Tower of Babel, Shared Memory, and the Distortion of the Ancient Gods

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Thank you so much. Now back to the show. So that much we know. Again, the Bible is not a history book, and so it's not giving us a timeline, and it's not giving us a perfect chronology and sequence. It's telling us the story of God's redemptive and providential purposes.

And so there are gaps and skips, and obviously there's a whole panoply of other individuals and civilizations that the Bible does not touch on. Its purpose is to give us a glimpse of how those 20 creation ordinances are going to eventually be fully restored in the new heavens and the new earth through God's redemptive plan.

But what we do have in the Bible is enough for us to start to realize precisely what Matthew Henry, the great Puritan commentator, said frequently, which is, the devil has no stories. Meaning that all of the myths, they are really just distorted, twisted, inverted, or sometimes plagiarized versions of the one true original story.

If we presuppose that the Bible is the very Word of God, and that it is inerrant, that it is perfectly preserved across time by the power of the Holy Spirit, then all of this starts to make a lot of sense.

And we're able to see, we're able to see in all of the mythological structures remnants of original stories.

Wow. Okay. So much from languages. That's not at all how I thought this would go, which is so glad you're here, Dr. Grant. But when it comes to... So stories that I've heard in the past, or I don't want to say stories, but explanations that I've heard in the past from other scholars have always said Tower of Babel was really just the... I want to say dissemination of demons.

When he sent out, he cast out everybody from the Tower of Babel. They were cast out. They changed languages. He separated people. The angels that ruled over those separated nations of different languages, those angels took worship for themselves.

Those are the fallen men. And that's kind of where it's like, well, we're worshiping a God because it has power. It's supernatural. It's an angel. We just thought it was God, but it was actually an angel.

It was subpar version. That's where we get Ra. That's where we get Baal. And that's where we get, I can't think of any other ones, Asherah, all those other ones. And would you say that that's in the same direction that you're going aside from linguistic remnants and copycats of the original story of Christ and of creation and of a loving God?

What element of supernatural,.

Like demonic activity do you see in this? Well, that's something that history doesn't record for us, but we can posit it. So the answer to your question is yes. Yes to all of it. There are metaphysical forces in the world at work that we don't see, but we can see trace elements of.

One of the ways that we see that is simply when you compare the Greek, the Roman, the Babylonian, and the Canaanite pantheon of gods, you start to realize that Jupiter and Zeus, Marduk and Baal are all the same character, just with slightly altered names.

They have the same powers. They have the same authority. Do they have the same creation story? They come from the same story. And again, they're distorted. Over time, they morph. They're elaborated. It's like the fisherman's story.

It starts out as a fish this big and then it gets... So you have those exaggerations. It's a good way to put it. Yeah. But Hera, Juno, Ishtar, and Ashtera, they're all the same character. It's one story just told through four different lenses.

Athena, Minerva, Nabu, and Tabala are all the same character. Hermes, Mercury, Shalat, and Namtara are all the same character. When you look at Ares, Mars, Ashur, and Esham, they're all doing the same thing.

Each one of them is the god of war. They have a certain appearance and certain powers. So what that means is there is this sort of root. The root is all men are inclined to idolatry. John Calvin says every human heart is an idol factory.

Idolatry is where we go when we rebel against the one true God. So if it is our natural inclination to run to anything and everything but the one true God, because it's our fallen nature, because we're all about ourselves, we're all about our pleasure, we're all about self-satisfaction and self-esteem and self-everything, then it's an easy play to have the stories all comport across all cultures.

Now the further we get from the primeval age, the stories tend to elaborate more and more. So by the time we get to the Norse gods or the Celtic gods, they're slightly altered, but they wind up being the same characters.

They are the same characters. I feel like that is relatively recent compared to Exodus level, like Canaanites. It's like, oh, what is the one of the ocean? Poseidon? Poseidon, yeah. That seems more recent than Baal.

Baal.

Well, yes and no. When you look at Baal and you look at some of the ancient Canaanite gods, there was a god of the sea who was a son of Baal, like Poseidon is a son of Zeus. And he had similar powers and he unleashed storms upon his enemies and he acts like a Marvel superhero, just sort of an enlarged human being.

And so you get a lot of comportment and congruency between the stories, even across vast spans of time.

Modern Idols, Ultimate Concerns, and the Self as a False God

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But you said that they become more, what is it, manipulated, more evolved?

Yeah. Exaggerated. Yeah. If you've ever watched, for instance, a cartoonist who creates characters, if you look at the original Mickey Mouse, the original Mickey Mouse was very rodent-like. Walt Disney created this character and over time it becomes more and more cartoonish.

Well, the same thing happens with our stories. They are a little bit more realistic at the beginning, and then they start to become more and more cartoonish over time. And so that's one of the things that happens with the stories.

So by the time we get to Thor or Odin, you have a much more Viking-like pantheon of gods as opposed to the gods of Mount Olympus or the gods of Ur from the Mesopotamian Valley. But all of this, the thing to realize is that one of the things that the Bible does over and over and over again is it exposes the fraudulence of these idols and exposes them as demonic forces.

And so when, for instance, we get to the story of the Israelites in captivity in Egypt, one of the things that is declared in the book of Exodus is God is going to bring judgment. Now when we think about, say, the ten plagues of Egypt, we tend to think that God is judging Pharaoh and God is judging the people of Egypt.

But that's not what the Bible says. The Bible says, I will surely pass through the whole land of Egypt, says the Lord, and on every one of the gods of the Egyptians I will execute righteous judgment, for I am the Lord God Almighty over the whole of the earth.

So the purpose of the plagues was not to punish Pharaoh or to punish the Egyptians. It was to expose the gods of the Egyptians as fraudulent, as idols. And that's what each of the plagues actually did.

So, for instance, if you go through the pantheon of the Egyptian gods, you start to realize that each one of the plagues was tailor-made to expose one of the gods. So the goddess of the Nile, wore a red cloak in all of the portrayals of the goddess.

And this goddess, Hapi, was responsible for the fertility of the Nile. Well to turn the Nile red through the striking of, you know, the staff of Moses, was to expose the fraudulence and the impotence of this supposedly all-powerful goddess.

And it goes all the way down through. One of the gods is portrayed always as a human being with a frog's head. So the plague of frogs. Another was portrayed as a human being with a gnat's head. Another had a locust's head.

I mean, every single one of the plagues was aimed at one of the gods. In addition to that, the Ten Commandments, which were given later on Mount Sinai, all addressed the sins of those Egyptian gods. While the people were down in the valley at the foot of Mount Sinai, and Moses was up top, and they started longing after Egypt, God gave Ten Commandments that were specifically aimed at the sin proclivities of each of the Egyptian gods.

Again, exposing not only God's perfect moral order, but also the fraudulence of these idols. When you understand it in context, like.

Out of context, it's wild. Reading the Old Testament, it's like, what is going on? This is the most ludicrous faith. Why would I give my life to it in 2025? Valid, valid statement. But then you put it in context like you just did, and that makes so much sense.

It really is a proclamation of authority over something that they truly thought had power. God said, no, no, no, I have authority over that.

Right, right. Once we start to understand how God's good providence is worked out in history, exposing the fraudulent and elevating that which is right, and good, and true, and beautiful, we start to understand the flow of cultures and the character and nature of history.

Now, when we look at events really close to our time, it's a lot harder because we're so close to it, it's very difficult for us to make those kinds of assessments. As they were at the time. Yeah, yeah.

But when we look back at history, we can start to see the unfolding of God's providence and his purposefulness, even in the midst of man's rebellion, his treachery, his debauchery, his destructiveness to other human beings.

Even there, we can start to see the unfolding of God's.

God’s Providence in Tragedy: 9/11, the Holocaust, and COVID

Purposes. Because I feel like talking about more modern catastrophes, those are the things that people really hinge their atheism on, of how could there be a God when the Holocaust happened? How could there be a God with this war happening?

How could there be a God when innocent people died in 9 -11? Those are the things that people hinge their disdain for it. But you're saying that God.

Has a hand in that. Well, yeah. Part of it is just a misconception of who God is. Is God supposed to be our nanny who keeps us on a mall leash everywhere we go so that we don't wander into the wrong spot?

Oh my gosh. Is God Santa Claus? He's only good to be jolly and nice and hand out gifts at various times. I love it. Or is God a sovereign, just, and merciful God who is bringing redemption into the midst of a people, none of whom deserve his mercy or his kindness?

Yes. Yes. So when we look at the catastrophes of history, and there are horrific catastrophes, there's not a person alive on the planet who does not have moments where they look back and say, oh, where was God in this?

And the answer is, God is there bringing good out of bad. The bad is stuff we've done. God didn't make Hitler. God didn't make Stalin. God didn't make Mao. God didn't make Idi Amin. God didn't make COVID.

Those are things that we foisted upon ourselves through a whole series of bad decisions and horrific selfishness and foolishness. But out of that, God brings redemptive purposes, raises up heroes who champion the cause of what is right and good and true.

And so if we really want a God who's just basically a vending machine where we can pick and choose what it is that we want, we put it in our little faith quarter and we get our little treat, we've created one of the idols.

That's exactly what the pantheon of gods was for the Greeks, the Romans. That's the story that Homer tells in the Iliad, that Homer tells in the Odyssey. That kind of promiscuous and improvident God is what the gods of the world always are.

So when somebody says, where was God in 9 -11? They're basically saying, why can't we have a Zeus? Why can't we have a Jupiter? Wait, what do you mean by that? What I mean by that is a God who we can appease with our desires, our wants, or our sacrifices.

In order to do our bidding. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Wow. This is so beautiful. Because immediately before you made your last point, I was thinking, okay, but God does have power. God does let bad things happen for his own purposes.

I'm not saying it's up to me to determine, oh, that was bad. He shouldn't have done that. That's not on me. I don't want that job to determine that kind of thing. God did that. But there are things that are tough still done by God.

I think it'd be ignorant, and correct me if I'm wrong here, to say, well, God only does the good things. Everything else is the enemy. Because I think the word good is sometimes the hard things need to happen.

Sometimes the tough stuff needs to happen, and that's still God. But as Christians, it's like, oh, if it's not good and holy, it was the enemy. Holocaust, that was the enemy. But me winning a million dollars, that was God.

Sometimes.

Me losing that million dollars was God. Absolutely. Absolutely. Because the million dollars was going to steer me in a direction that I shouldn't have gone. There's a wonderful book by Arthur Pink, it's almost a century old now, called The Sovereignty of God.

In it, he makes the argument from the scriptures that God is altogether sovereign, that nothing occurs anywhere at any time that is a violation of his providence. That doesn't mean that he designed it, that he wanted it.

It's that nothing has taken him by surprise, and nothing occurs outside of his purview. He says this, he says, what do we mean by the sovereignty of God? Well, what we mean is the supremacy of God, the kingship of God, the Godhood of God.