How Our Culture Borrows the Mindset of Ancient Kings.

Chaos & the Elevation of Man

While most people recognize ancient civilizations for their pagan nature, many do not realize how modern cultures have adopted beliefs that stem from ancient philosophies. How is it that we have taken a page from ancient cultures and adopted their ideologies into our own thinking?

Ancient kings, like those of Babylon and Assyria, claimed legitimacy, power, and unrivalled wisdom. One of Assyria’s kings, Shalmaneser, titled himself as the “Great Dragon,” synonymous with, “Giant Snake.” It’s interesting to note that the Bible uses these terms for Satan. This is made plain in Revelation 12:9 which says, “And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan…”

For Assyria, this person, the “great dragon,” was the inspirer of terror, who ruled by his will alone without rival. Though this thinking was used by ancient kings, it is used in our culture today; the rejection of God, declaring oneself as king of their own future, ruling by their will alone without God or anyone else to challenge their self-made authority.

In pagan religions and modern atheistic thinking, man’s iron will is the antidote to our problems, the only way to build paradise on earth and build a counterfeit to God’s kingdom. Ancient kings, like those of Assyria, believed chaos and domination–not Biblical stewardship–was the only way to progress in life. Their line of thinking goes as follows: the world is chaotic, therefore, we must assert our will to attain order and supremacy. This is reflected in socialist thinking, whereby dominating the ‘chaos’ of the free market, we can eliminate poverty and wealth. So, in other words, we will all equally suck. Of course, the government has to take control of the production and consumption of commodities before finally producing a modern utopia of stability. This thinking that out of chaos there is order, is inherently destructive. We can look at Sodom and Gomorrah, and how through their wickedness and anarchy from God’s law, they were destroyed by His wrath. The same will result for those who take on a similar mindset of chaotic enterprise.

Chaos is the undeniable answer to both ancient and modern civilizations. We can see in the worldview of evolutionists, that the universe began with chaos and shall end as such. If you’ve ever seen videos like ‘Timelapse of the Future’ it’s a pretty bleak video to see. You can witness the worldview of chaos in action where computer models have predicted the eventual demise of our universe where all the planets erode and the sun dies out and all that is left is darkness and chaos. This worldview incentivizes a victim mindset. If the universe is hopeless, then why bother doing anything other than that which pleases us? God, however, created the world out of order, not chaos. In pagan culture, often what happens is there is nothingness and chaos, and out of it a god appears. In Greek mythology, Gaia–the earth–appeared suddenly out of nowhere. By what power is not made clear–maybe she’s a really good magician. After Gaia and the sky bring forth the first gods–the Titans–chaos ensues afterward as the most famous of the Greek gods–Zeus, Athena, Hermes, and the other Olympians–are brought into being, battling the Titans and eventually gaining power over the chaos. However, all pagan gods are human-like in nature, which inherently elevates man to a god-like status since gods and man have the same nature. Modern and ancient men’s elevation of chaos is an attempt to mitigate the need for God and make ourselves the ruling authority.

If there is chaos, then something must be above God, since if He cannot control the chaos, He cannot control us. Then man rises to take control of his destiny. This is where the evolutionist and pagan take their stand: out of chaos the world was made, and from the chaos, man will emerge as a god-like figure, ‘controlling fate’. How can there be an all-powerful God if there is chaos, current, past, or future? However, since God created the earth out of order, there can be no chaos. Genesis 1 states that before the universe existed, there was God. He wasn’t some primordial essence that came out of nowhere. He was before anything there ever was. He is, therefore, all-powerful. Everything that ever happens is dictated by Him. He predestined the course of our lives, history, and the universe in all its totality. He is in control and there is an order and reason to everything. He made all the events in history to be exactly as they are. There is nothing chaotic about it since he ordained everything to be as He wills. Since God is the sovereign ruler of this universe, we can trust that he is in control and has ordered everything in a reasonable way, which includes our lives, and history as we know it.