Babylonian Pattern - Part 2 — Winkie Pratney

We're going to look at a kind of a part two. We've looked at this whole thing about a God, the Bible God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. There's a scripture called the Godhead. At the heart of reality is not just power and not just eternal things and hugeness, vastness, size, awesomeness.

Those are all there and very real. But there's also love and there is friendship and there is relationship and there is communication. You can't have any of those things if there's not more than one. Do you see what I'm talking about?

You can't have communication unless there's two different people to communicate to. Can't love unless you have an object in which that love can be expressed. You can't show friendships if you have no friends.

The Triune God and the Relational Nature of Reality

And the heart of this is that we have right in the heart of the biblical picture of God, something no other faith either emphasizes or really deals with. Islam is not about friendship. Islam is about power.

Hinduism is not about personality. Buddhism is not about personality. Buddha would turn over in his grave if he saw statues of him. That's absolutely opposite. To get out of this, this is the problem.

Everybody knows that. Marx said the problem is selfishness. He thought it was economics. Buddha felt the problem was self. If you got rid of that self, where's my thing? Take that self out of the picture, all you'd have left is ishness.

He was brought up as a very sheltered person and going out first time coming across a dead body so shocked him he renounced everything, left his wife and his child to go out and discover what love was.

When you think about it, it's a bit strange. But that whole deal, no major religious system focuses on these things. Love, friendship is not the heart. Sex is or violence is or, but you don't find the gods of the past.

Remember, atheism is a relatively new kid on the block. You look through human history, it's hardly any person who called themselves atheist in those days, it was just stupid. The question was not, do you believe in God, but which God do you believe in?

And so we have in the gospel a unique and quite wonderful thing. So let's say this, before any other institution was ever introduced, God made the home. Was established before there was a church, before there was a government, rich or poor, whatever our culture and whatever our background or our country we call someplace home.

And that's built right into the heart, the human heart and core of every civilization and I believe the foundation of every society. If you take that out, you're gonna have disaster in all these other areas.

The Home as God's Foundational Institution

Because the home is foundational pattern of spiritual reality, the main target of evil is the home. The attack will be made on that trinity. I wanna show you tonight from a little bit of very early history and a lot of this is hidden in the sort of dark places, but in the early chapters of scripture, if you have a quick glance at two passages in Genesis, these passages take place after the fall.

Remember, God made a beautiful world. By the way, it's not good that man should be alone, does not mean lonely. You know the difference between the two? It's possible to not be alone, but be lonely. It's possible to not be lonely, but be alone.

Loneliness is, you can be lonely even if you're surrounded with people. You may be sleeping in the same bed with somebody and still be lonely. But it is not good that man should be alone, does not mean that Adam was lonely.

It means that there should be somebody there, like him, different from him, that he could experience what the Godhead did. Question is, why did the Godhead make us? Mankind wasn't brought in because God had a problem figuring out how he's gonna design the universe or something.

Perhaps I need a little counsel on this. He wasn't lonely. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. We even say two's a company, three's a crowd. There's never been loneliness in the Godhead. So God didn't make us because he was lonely or he needed us.

None of those are the basis of a home. Not I am lonely, therefore I should have somebody. I'm lonely, therefore we should have a child. None of those are the basis of a home. Basis of a home is to extend the existing happiness to somebody else that can share in a tiny way what that happiness is.

God made us for his entertainment, for his pleasure. Scripture says, that's why all those things about entertainment, God is an entertainer. Amazing one. We are his entertainment and he is to be ours.

That's the song around the throne is you are worthy, oh Lord, you're worthy. For you have created all things and for your pleasure. They are and were. So both the past and things he's making now. By the way, he hasn't stopped creating.

He can still do stuff. He's not out of practice. I always think of that blind guy, been blind all his life. They were asking for arms. He didn't actually need arms, he needed eyes. But as they're going past this poor guy to whom the whole world is just sounds and tastes and smells, that's his whole world.

And as they're going past Stevie Wonder there in the corner there, the disciples are having this argument. Who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind? That's a weird question, isn't it?

Maybe it's reincarnation. He sinned in a previous life, came back into this one to suffer the punishment of what he did wrong in the last one, which is Hinduism. Maybe it's his parents, his parents screwed up.

Therefore he got punished. Jesus said, in effect, neither, you're asking the wrong question, that's stupid. But that the works of God might be manifest in him. I must work the works of him that sent me.

While at his day, the night comes when no man can work. And then he does something that must have been strange for the guy sitting there hoping somebody's gonna give him something. And he hears this. Somebody just spat.

Right beside him. And now is going, making mud pies out of this. See that? And you're there like, see in that second without, excuse me, do you mind if I do this? Somebody puts mud right into your eye sockets.

Like, you know, if you do that, American Medical Society would not be impressed. And the scriptures say, he doesn't even know who Jesus is. See that? He says, now go wash in a pool of Siloam. And he does.

And he's, he's, he can see. First time he can see. And within 30 minutes, he split the church in half. Arguing about, is this really, who did this to you? Who, how, are you really that guy? Yes, I am.

But he's blind and you're not. That's right. A man called Jesus. I don't know who Jesus is. He, he, he put this mud in my eyes and then he told me to wash and I can see. Well, you are born in sins and you are teaching us.

We know it can't possibly be him. He's some awful person. We don't like him very much at all. Well, whether he's awful or not, I do know this. I couldn't see, now I can. I mean, when Oral Roberts first went to Australia, he had to put a tent crusade up.

And right from the very beginning, he had some tremendously powerful healings in his meetings. Well, good chunk of the church in Australia didn't believe that God healed today. We've got the Bible now.

We don't need healing anymore. We can, you know, dispensational it into a different block and say, we don't need it anymore, we've got this. There was a boy, I think he was born crippled. He couldn't walk at all.

And he got instantly, totally healed. He had to learn how to walk, but he could run and everything. There was such huge division over who Oral Roberts is. Half the church said, this is a demonic guy. He's coming in, he's doing demonic stuff.

And this is all the power of the devil. Others said, no, this has got to be God. All these people are getting saved. It was a huge split, see? Just like the man born blind. One pastor bought a gun to shoot him dead and probably thought he was doing God a favor if he killed him.

I took out this antichrist that's come into our midst. Can you imagine? So naturally, you felt you were not welcome when people are bringing guns in to shoot you dead like Benny Hinn when he had that crusade in India about a year and a half, two years ago.

There were huge pictures of him, posters all over India with his head and a big target drawn right on it by the militant Hindus. And he was targeted to be shot when he flew out. So, you know? So as Oral is leaving in the airport, one of the secular newspaper reporters is interviewing him.

And he said, in the light of all of this controversy that you've caused in the churches, do you think it was a good idea, something of God, you said, to come to Australia? You know what Oral said? Why don't you ask the little boy?

Nobody thinks about the little kid, see? Just think about your reputation, what you believe and what your thing is. And God, the messy God who comes in and just screws up everything that you, and one who takes mud, see that?

How did he do it? I don't know, but I know the last record before that of God touching clay is when he made man. You know what I think? I think he rolled him some eyeballs. I think he got some new one and put him in.

Can I go wash off this stuff? And away he goes, you know? The attack that comes is gonna come on the home. That's the way it always comes. The main target of evil is the home. So in this book, which is out of print now and you can't get it, so sorry about that.

But there is the different ways. This phrase, devil take the youngest, is taken from a quote by William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army. There's a whole shelf full of stuff up there. Booth and his wife, Catherine, William and Catherine were the most radical people of their generation.

Catherine Booth, this is about the time when Marxism was laying its foundations and there were anarchists in those days. The terrorists in England, those days were not Islamic. They were British. Karl Marx wrote in the British library when he did Das Kapital.

His sister was converted in a revival in the Rhinelands. He, Covenant Boyles in the British Museum wrote his diatribe against religion. But the early anarchists blew you up. That's what they did. Just like the bombers in, you know, Ireland and the terrorist bombers on the trains and stuff.

Now they blew you up because their base was different from yours. So here's Catherine Booth, launched this amazing stuff. There's a book on the library shelf there called In Darkest England and the Way Out.

I've showed some of you, it's a rare one. It's got a map, sort of a whole fold out thing in the front. It's Booth's description of the way to completely remodel a nation and it would have worked. It's just, and his travel was 100 years before its time.

He laid out a blueprint for the complete rebuilding of a nation. So here's Catherine Booth and the anarchists challenged her. They said, we dare you to come and visit us. They gave an address you could come to, like 3 in the morning at some ungodly time.

So Catherine Booth, without a bodyguard, without anything, it's like, come into the headquarters of Al-Qaeda and we want to say some things to you. She arrives there and these guys sitting there, they were shocked that she came.

They thought she would, a man wouldn't come, let alone a woman. And they began to tell her what they had plans to do to the world. They were going to change the world. So Catherine sat and listened for about an hour.

She didn't say anything, just listened. And then at the end when they ran out of things to say, she said, gentlemen, you and I are alike in many ways. You have suffered from many things for what you believe and so have I.

You have spent time in prison and so have I. Matter of fact, she was in prison one time and she couldn't serve another prison sentence because she was in another country serving a prison sentence in that one.

So it eats your heart out, Jersey. But she said, you've suffered and you've been in prison. She goes through like this. She said, you're against poverty and so are we. You're against this and that. She said, but there's a difference, gentlemen, between you and I.

You're talking about it and we're doing it. So the Salvation Army was the only church denomination officially banned in the Soviet Union. It was too much like the real thing. So this quote from William Booth, Devil Take the Youngest.

The War Against Childhood and the Family

This looks at a war that is launched against not just children but childhood. And there's a whole deal in here. But I've got war on the womb, that's abortion, war on the family, divorce, kidnapping, and the newest one, the hot button now, is white slavery or human trafficking we call it now because it's right across the world.

That's old. That's been around there every long time. The slaves that came to this country, brought over, that wasn't just a new thing. They were taken from other nations by sometimes their own people sold them to slavery.

But child abuse and incest, war on the street, throwaways, runaways, and child prostitution, child pornography, war on the mind. It goes through. And the problem with this is the statistics are almost out of date by the time you even get them collected.

And then it ends with child rights and public schools, the hidden agendas that are given to kids, and finally the war to the death, child and teenage suicide. So all of those areas actually have common root and they all go back to the attack on the family.

Suicide, Despair, and God's Compassion

Here is a letter. This is a real letter. I mentioned this at the start of the library things. I never got a chance to read a bit to you. But I get a bunch of emails, about 100 a day. Not all of them, thank God, that are five-page things.

But this girl wrote and she said this. My Christian friend committed suicide. She loved God and had a lifestyle that wasn't in sin but she somehow got depressed and killed herself. Is she in heaven? Do Christians who commit suicide go to heaven?

In Corinthians it talks about God destroying those people who destroy their own temple. Does this mean suicide too? It's a real letter, not a theoretical one. So here's a little bit of the answer that I gave.

It was about five pages. I'm not going to give it all to you. Dear, I'm not giving you a name, so sorry to hear about your friend. No one can live with pain and it sounds like she got overwhelmed by a lot of hurt and disappointment in a very short time.

Depression is a very hurtful thing. There are so many things that can worry us and scare us today that in some way all of us will one day have to know how to get help to get out of it. I'm so sad to hear you lost someone close to you.

It is true God does not allow us the freedom to take someone's life even if that someone is us. Life is very precious to him and each one of our lives is special, unique and irreplaceable. The reason why he gives us the command, do not murder, it's not just the word kill, it is the word murder, is because he loves and cares for us all in a way no one else ever could do.

We love and appreciate people because we see some of the things that make them beautiful to us. God sees not only those but all the things our lives can be in the future, not only to us but to countless others if we walk with him.

His laws are not made up but are true descriptions of connections between things in the most important areas of our lives. God's laws are descriptions of reality from an infinite perspective. Remember they're not made up, not inventions, they tell you the reality of things.

Friendships and family are high on God's list of important things. Most of all, the Ten Commandments are simply to tell us how not to hurt our relationship with God and with others and ourselves. And then when Jesus took the Ten Commandments and told us what, in an even more basic and simple way, he said, Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as you love yourself.

A neighbor is anyone close to us or within reach of our influence. When Jesus said love your neighbor as yourself, he said, paraphrasing what love is, seek the highest value for those you can help or influence in everything just as you would want the same for your own life.

So love means I always seek your highest good, whatever that is, whatever that's really best for you, that's what I'm after. That is why it's hurtful for you who really loved and cared for your friend.

They were the one who died, we die a little with them. Feel especially bad that in some way we might have been able to see how much hurt they were going through and try to help them. We ask ourselves, why didn't I see this coming?

Why didn't she tell me it was this bad? How come she didn't ask me to stop her when it became too hard for her to handle things alone? And behind all of this is often a deeper question, what if this were me?

Suicide is a sin in the Bible. It is really wrong to selfishly take a life, any life, even if it is your own. Our bodies do not belong to us to do what we want with them, even if the consequences may seem right to us at the time.

The basic thing of God as a right on our lives is that we do not have ultimate rights even on our own lives. He is the rightful owner of the human race. Whether we love Him, follow Him, serve Him, die or go to hell without Him, He is still our rightful God.

That is why every knee will bow and every tongue confess. It means everybody gets saved in the end. They will say it's right, you are the rightful ruler of the world, of everything. So, I'm very sure your friend felt there was nothing else she could do to end the pain and both you and I feel terrible about what happened because we think, if only I had known, if only I had listened more carefully, if only I had been there for her, if only...

So, Elijah was a real man of God. He loved God like very few people in history have ever done. Even today, many centuries later, we recognize him as one of the greatest prophets in all of Bible history.

He wanted so much to please God, he probably made for himself an inner vow that he would be the best prophet who ever lived. Remember when he said, I am no better than the prophets? Tells me he had a whole list of comparisons between what they had done and what he wanted to be with God.

But even after seeing one of the most powerful events in Israel's history, this is where the cows all burned and stuff, you know, the rocks melted and that, a whole nation turned back to God. Elijah got afraid when an evil woman ruler put a contract on his life.

Remember that, who did this now? And he ran away to hide. Disheartened and depressed at his inability to be brave and stand up to this evil. He could see no way out of his situation, his own deep painful sense of failure.

He went to God and he asked God to kill him. That's what he asked. Oh Lord, take my life, he prayed. I am no better than my father's. So how did God answer him? If I'd been God, I probably would have been very short and straight with him.

I might have said something like this. What in the world are you doing? Are you dumb? Are you dumb? Didn't you see what I did with the sacrifice and the rocks when I showed up in person to call back the nation?

What are you, stupid or something? Now get your prophet butt back to the city, take on that witchy Jezebel, or what I did with the cow and the rocks and went up in flames might happen to you. Thank God I am not God.

So what did God do? He built a fire and baked him a cake. He told him to have a sleep and then get to talk later. He baked him a cake and gave him a break. And later on he did it again. What kind of God is this that when we ask him to kill us, because we find we screwed up so badly, he bakes us a cake and gives us a break.

The real God. The God who loves us even more than we love ourselves. The God who understands the real reason why we want to do anything in our life, including how we think it should end. Sometimes we don't need counsel or a convention or another church service when we're feeling absolutely lost and horrible and alone.

Thoughts of suicide can come to even the most spiritual. Sometimes our mind plays tricks on us and even prayer seems worse than senseless. God knows what is really going on in our lives. Sometimes we don't need a sermon.

Sometimes we just need a cake and a break. Or pizza and eggnog. Even the godliest people in the world sometimes wish they were dead. Sometimes they hurt so bad they want to die. Sometimes they even ask God to kill them.

But he never came to earth to hurt us. He came, as he always comes, to save us from ourselves. He is the intervention when we are overwhelmed by our own pain. He came to stop us from suicide. In almost every known suicide, there are stories of how they tried to stop what was happening to them.

They may tell a friend how awful things are becoming. They drop hints of what they're thinking about doing and sometimes even outright might tell those they trust as if they want them to give a good reason why not.

They go over and over in their mind what people may say or think. If they do what they're thinking, they have to do. They're afraid of death, but even more afraid to have to live the way they feel. Maybe these sad cries for help come from a still, small voice deep inside saying there is a way that seems right to a man, but the end of that way is the way of death.

And they need not go down this road, even if it seems the only way out. No one in their right mind wants to die. What we want most is some way out of the ugly truth of what has happened to us. When Jesus was dying on the cross for the sins of the world, for all the evil things we've done to ourselves, others and worst of all to God, two men were crucified on either side of him.

Death would come to them all that day, God himself who entered our world to love it and save it and the two men who lived the same ugly way that brought down death on us all from the first fall in the Garden of Eden.

One thief cursed Christ when he was dying. In his own agony he challenged Jesus that if he really were God he could save himself and spare them from crucifixion. The other saw Jesus and knew that whatever he was dying for was not for his own faults and that he was more than an ordinary man.

He said he was sorry for the way he lived and he prayed a simple prayer, Lord remember me when you come into your kingdom. I don't know what your poor friend thought of in the last few moments of her life, but I know what Jesus told that man who told him he was sorry for the way he lived and asked to be remembered.

Jesus said I really meant it when I say to you today you shall be with me in paradise. He has never changed. We must learn what we can from sad things that happen to people we love. Set our hearts always on trusting God for our own lives and future.

We can trust him that the judge of all the earth will do right. We can trust him he always has our highest good in his mind and heart. Here's the reply three weeks later. Thanks Winky. The friend who died isn't real, but I really was talking about myself.

Thank you for answering. I'm told the Israelites went around in circles in the desert because their heart wasn't right before God and they needed to adopt a thankful attitude in order to inherit God's promises.

What I meant is very real and hasn't changed. I have no other option to at least try thanking God even though it hurts deeply and I have to hope for change or suffer, even wake up crying sometimes. You're a true Christian.

Thank you for taking the time to answer me. Do you know how many times, millions of times letters like that are never get written? The war is real and I've given my life to make the premise of that book not come true.

The best, I have comments and say the best comment I ever had on this book was from Betty Elliot, Jim Elliot's wife, the one that, you know, that was martyred and this is what she said. Dear Winky, that is a terrible book.

I hated reading it. Thank you for writing it. So I'm going to show you very quickly now in these last little blocks of time. In the book of Genesis, very early and I gave you eight, I want to read to you the story of the first kingdom in the Bible and it's found just Genesis 8 and actually we'll go.

Nimrod, Babel, and the First Godless Kingdom

Now let's go a bit further. All that front part is what happens to the world and then Noah, Noah finds grace in the eyes of the Lord and the whole earth begins again and then this starts. In verse, there's a list of people in verse 6 of 10.

Just make a note of this. These are sons of Noah. In verse 8, one of those sons of Cush. Cush beget Nimrod. He began to be a mighty one in the earth. He was a mighty hunter. King James says, before the Lord.

Wherefore it is said, even is Nimrod the mighty hunter before the Lord. And then the beginning of his kingdom was Babel. That little phrase there, Babel. You'll see this word Babel appear in different ways all the way through from this early part of the Bible right to the end because the capital city of that was called Babylon.

And you'll see it here in chapter 11. The whole earth was of one language and of one speech. This is verse 1 of chapter 11 of Genesis. And it came to pass as they journeyed, they found a plain in the land of Shina and they dwelt there and they said one to another, let us make brick and burn them thoroughly and they brick and they said, let us build a city and a tower whose top.

Now this is a strange phrase. King James puts in italics this may reach unto heaven. It's not actually, they weren't actually trying to build some big ladder out of bricks to go up into the sky. They weren't that stupid.

What they actually were building, I have a picture of it here. That tower was an astrological construct. You know how witches and others use symbols, a pentagram for instance. The idea of the sign or the symbol, it becomes like a lens to focus psychic energy.

That's how they use it. Stand in the middle of the circle almost like being in a telescope to focus spiritual power. And this is used widely in occult circles. They use harmonic resonance or they have all these different things.

The idea is to tap into the powers that hold the universe together and some way focus them so you have control of them. That the whole heart of it is to find out how nature operates, how it works, get your hand on it so you can run it.

You can control the thing yourself. So what it appears, each one of these was dedicated to different deities. The whole, it was like a telescope in a way, an astrological telescope. What they were trying to build is a way that they could tap into the power.

You know, like today in astrophysics. If we want to find out what matter looks like, we look out there. We don't look here. We look out at the stars and stuff. We try to analyze what's going on there to give us a clue about what reality looks like here.

And it's the same way. The worship of the sun and the stars and the moon and all that wasn't just, they were like some beings, like a big being in the sky called the moon. There were powers and structures and principalities.

Scriptures even talk about angels as if they're stars sometimes. It's like huge brilliant beings with power and personalities behind them. The symbol scripture record is that early man, and this is not, you'll see in a little while, this is not under God.

This is actually in the face of God. That little phrase used of Nimrod, it's not the symbol, the idea of before the Lord can mean this, you know, I bow. But this one is like this. It's in your face, this thing.

You know that thing? That's the before the Lord. I am the hunter. I don't care who you are. I am. And this is the building of the first non-Christian or non-godly kingdom. Apparently Nimrod was a hunter.

The early little towns or villages really, when the restoration of the world came, man had began to kill everything, including the animals. And God put a fear of man in animals' hearts. When people like Darwin first went into forests where there'd never been man at all, no man had ever been, they remarked often how much like a cathedral it was like.

It was like a church because there wasn't a sense of fear or anything. When he first was going to kill a seagull, the seagull had never seen a human being. And it just walked up to him and he took it in his hand and he wanted to kill it to take it as a specimen.

But when he pricked it in the throat, it looked at him like, what are you doing? And it was that whole thing. We miss that today because nature has gone crazy now. And God put a fear of man in animals' hearts, otherwise they'd all be gone.

We talk about the loss of animals today. There would be no animals today. They'd all be killed. My favorite animal in Latin is koala. I love koala bears. You'll tell my bungalow because we'll have a couple of koalas hanging right there.

Koalas are really, they just sit there and eat, I think, 12 different kinds of eucalyptus leaves and the oil goes right through their whole bodies and perfumes them. And when you get one, in Brisbane they have a, you ever hugged a koala?

They're really cool. Brisbane, they have an animal sanctuary and they have koala bears and you put your hand like this and they pick a koala up and they put them on your hands and he just hugs you. He thinks you're a tree, I think.

But he just hugs you. You can't hug them because they've got big claws and you'll break their bones if you hug them too tight. But they hug you, see. And they really, they have no real defensive weapons.

They don't attack people or anything. They just sit up there. So a bunch of people, hey, and they just shoot them up the trees and almost wipe them out. They have no natural defenses. No animal will eat them because it's like eating perfume.

It's like a good chew on a deodorant stick. You can't, you know, and they don't even smell like an animal. They smell like a perfume teddy bear, more like a monkey, a marsupial, not a bear. But I only live on those leaves.

All they do is sleep a lot of times, hug trees, and have bunches of little koalas. That's it. So left unguarded, they'd be wiped out in a generation. People would just shoot them to death. So the early animals, the ones that could defend themselves, hunted men like the Sabertooth, get a taste for men, and they would kill people.

And Nimrod used his hunting skills to protect villagers. So what he apparently did is put all of the villagers together into one thing under his guardianship, protectorship, and made the first kingdom, an arrangement of villages, and he became its first king.

Now I'm going to take you back into an area. The Bible doesn't tell us everything about history. You saw how big that thing was, okay? It just high points places where he, it says that it was so dangerous that what man did there that he intervened and he scattered the languages.

Azusa Street and the Gift of Tongues

In Azusa Street, here is William Seymour, or Willie Seymour as he was known, a black one-eyed middle-aged man at a time when racial prejudice was the highest in all of America's history. God used Willie Seymour to give him a vision for the bringing together of all the nations on Earth.

So you don't think God has a sense of humor. You have to explain a one-eyed guy by the name of Willie Seymour. He saw what nobody else saw, that the unique gift of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament that isn't at all in the Old Testament is tongues.

The weirdest, strangest, most embarrassing spiritual gift there is. Even interpretation of tongues is in the Old Testament. Remember the writing on the wall and Daniel was given an interpretation of what it really meant.

But tongues is a truly new New Testament gift. And when it came, it embarrassed people. Remember, this isn't a stable. And Willie Seymour spent the first three or four years with his head in a paper bag, like Charlie Brown and Snoopy with the holes in the paper bag.

And kids would come up and look underneath to see what he was doing. I think it was the only place he could get somewhere on his own. But the glory of God came. Like they said, like mist or rubber. And kids, little kids would play in it.

And one tried to put it in a bottle and stuff. And fire on the roof that everybody could see, not just a few spiritual people. The fire engine kept coming down and there was no smoke, just flames on the top.