What Has Religion Done For Mankind?

CHAPTER VII

Further Revelation on the Sacred Secret

INTEREST in the sacred secret given out in the garden of Eden was universal. The terms of it had been carried through the flood by Noah and he taught it to his sons and grandsons after that world catastrophe. Who was to be the seed of the woman whose heel the Serpent would lie in wait for to wound it mortally? How would he recover and turn around and crush the Serpent's head? Who would be the Serpent's seed with whom the woman's Seed would be at enmity? Noah's blessing upon his second son Shem indicated that the seed would come through the Shemitic branch of the human family. For none but a selfish reason apostate men tried to crack the secret and work out their own man-made answer to it. The Serpent, the archdeceiver, was out to pervert the true secret and to block its true unfolding. He had many ambitious men and women on earth to draw into his conspiracy and become his children, the visible seed of the Serpent. They would eagerly play or assume to play the role of the woman and her seed, the mother and child. In this role they could glorify themselves and extend superstitious power over duped mankind. These

could be turned aside from the true Seed of the woman. For fooling the whole world on this, the original Serpent is spoken of in the last book of the Bible as "the one called Devil and Satan, who is misleading the entire inhabited earth". —Revelation 12:9,NW.

² The evidence is that Satan began twisting the application of the sacred secret with his first visible kingdom and his first organization of apostate religion at Babylon, the city ruled by the first human king, the mighty hunter Nimrod. He was Ham's great-grandson and hence not of the Shemitic branch whose God was Jehovah. But that did not matter to Nimrod or his backers. They would work out the secret their way and not wait on God's way. After getting the people to look to him for protection and salvation as the "mighty hunter before Jehovah" or "in defiance of Jehovah", Nimrod came to his end. Just how the Bible does not state. The agreement or similarity between the many legends and traditions that have been recorded by ancient pagan historians is that he met a violent death. Whether this was due to the power and influence of Noah acting in the "image of God", that is, as the executioner representing Jehovah God, we do not know for certain. But his death was violent. For this he was greatly bewailed by his followers. Every year they mourned for him on the day of his death under the figure of Tammuz. To give an instance of the religious apostasy of the Jews in his day, the

prophet Ezekiel gives us a peek into the desecrated temple and says: "Behold, there sat the women weeping for Tammuz." (Ezekiel 8:14, AS) Yearly, wailing was made for Tammuz the same as for the Grecian god Bacchus, whose name means the "Bewept One" and who is another figure for Nimrod. His death was looked on as a calamity, an injustice, and Noah or the persons responsible were considered wicked representatives of the Serpent; they were the seed of the Serpent.

³Take note, now, of the deifying of the false seed and his mother. Nimrod's mother was named Semiramis. In Chaldean this name is "Z'emir-amit", and is made up from Ze, meaning "the" or "that", and emir, meaning "branch", and amit, meaning "bearer". So, when its parts are put together, the name means "The Branch Bearer". At the time that the flood waters subsided, the bird which Noah sent out from the ark and which returned bearing an olive branch was the dove. So the name Semiramis was applied to a wild pigeon. Nimrod's mother, who was said to have been turned into a pigeon,* was given the name in a mystical sense. She was held to be the mother of that human branch who is the woman's seed, the crusher of

the Serpent's head. This was nothing but a devilish trick to divert the attention away from the true Seed whom God's prophecy was later to declare to be the real Branch and whose name was to be called "Jehovah is our righteousness". (Isaiah 11:1; Jeremiah 23:5,6, AS, margin; Zechariah 3:8; 6:12,13; Revelation 22:16) This was a big step forward toward false worship, apostate religion, a falling away from the truth. With such views of mother and son it was simple to make a goddess and god out of them, to glorify falsehood.

⁴ The evidence is that the first woman to be deified after the Flood was Semiramis, at Babylon. The name of the Babylonish goddess was "The Dove", or Branch Bearer, which is also the meaning of the name of the Roman goddess Juno, the Romans' "queen of heaven". In the sculptures which have been discovered at the ruins of ancient Nineveh the wings and tail of the dove in a triune emblem represent the third member of the idolatrous Assyrian trinity. This agrees with the fact that Semiramis, under the name of Astarte, was worshiped as an incarnation of the spirit of God, by which spirit the promised seed was to be born. So, too, the first man deified after the Flood was Semiramis' son, Nimrod, and this doubtless at the inspiration of his mother. She maintained that at his execution he had not died, but had been transported to the skies as a god. The constellation Orion stands for him deified, for that name is the

one given to the giant and mighty hunter by the ancient Greek poet Homer.* The Hebrew word translated "Orion" in the Bible is k^esil and means "stupid fellow; fool"; that is, impudent, defiant, godless, adjectives which well befit Nimrod, the mighty hunter. —Job 9:9; 38:31; Amos 5:8.

⁵ By thus deifying the dead Nimrod his mother Semiramis taught the immortality of the human soul in defiance of God's law, "The soul that sinneth, the same shall die." Under the name Ninus, meaning "male child or son", Nimrod was worshiped as the son of his wife.† From that comes the thought that Nimrod was the husband as well as the son of his wife; he was his own father and his own son. His real father Cush was put in the background, and Nimrod's mother was thus represented as being a virgin mother. In this way three forms of divinity took shape, the father, the mother, and the son, and they constituted a triad or trinity. The mother and son have always been given the prominence in all the similar forms of trinity worshiped among the pagan nations, even to this day. The father was always put in the background. It was a glorification of the false woman and her seed, to blind men's minds to the true Seed of God's woman. This is true also of the trinity

taught by the clergy of Christendom, who push Jehovah God the Father into the background.

⁶ It was understood that the lying in wait for the Seed of God's woman and the bruising of his heel meant his death, from which he would be recovered. And so at his death Semiramis had Nimrod glorified and worshiped as the woman's promised seed, "Zero-ashta," or, more modernly spoken, "Zoroaster," meaning "the seed of the woman". Not only was a day set aside for bewailing his death, but a day was established for celebrating his birthday. This date was December 25, the very day which has been adopted by the clergy of Christendom for their religious purposes, but without a single bit of support from the inspired Scriptures. The very name with which Christmas is sometimes called in Christendom, namely, Yule Day, proves its pagan or Babylonian origin and its association with Nimrod, the counterfeit seed of the woman. In Chaldee the name Yule means "infant" or "little child". The pagan Anglo-Saxons celebrated it as Yule Day or "Child's day" long before becoming Roman Catholics, and at that time they celebrated, not the birth of the sun deity, but the birth of the moon-god, for among them the sun was feminine but the moon was masculine. Likewise in India the moon is

masculine. The moon worshipers of Arabia also celebrated the birth of the Lord Moon at that time. Even today we speak of the "man" in the moon. It is evident, therefore, that the 25th day of the tenth month (December means "tenth month") was celebrated, not because of the winter solstice of the sun, but because it was from ancient time the accepted birth date of Nimrod, the false seed of the woman. The Holy Bible indicates a different season for Jesus' birth.

⁷ The Yule log which was stripped of all its branches and which was dragged to the fireplace and burned the night of December 24 pictured the executed Nimrod, prone in death. The decorated and adorned tree that was seen standing on the morning of December 25 represented the slain Nimrod come to life again in a new incarnation, to triumph over his enemies and to bless mankind. In Rome this tree was a fir tree and was set up on December 25 as the day Natalis invicti solis, "the birthday of the unconquered sun." In Egypt the symbol of the reincarnated Nimrod was the palm tree, whose leaves were used to symbolize victory. It is quite significant that at Isaiah 14:4-20 (AS) Jehovah speaks of the fallen king of Babylon, the "day-star, son of the morning," as being a tree that has been chopped down to the earth. So Nimrod evidently was, and so, too, his distant successor, Belshazzar, was chopped down, when mighty Babylon was overthrown at Jehovah's appointed time. —Daniel 5:22-30.

⁸ While the great Deceiver, the Serpent, was thus developing false ideas and false worship respecting the seed of the woman, the great Father of the true Seed was proceeding with the unfolding of the mystery or sacred secret in his own way. In the very neighborhood where the mother system of religious falsehood was built up, God made a disclosure of further truth to a man of faith, Abram, at the city of Ur of the Chaldees in the plains of Shinar or Mesopotamia. Though Abram, who was later called Abraham, lived in the Chaldean city of Ur less than two hundred miles from Babylon, he was not a Hamite like Nimrod. He was a descendant of Shem whom Noah had blessed. He had come through the line of Eber. So Abraham was called a "Hebrew", a descendant of Eber, and his God was Jehovah, true to Noah's blessing upon Shem. Showing that Nimrod was a false messiah or seed, Jehovah appeared to Abraham at Ur and said:

⁹ "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing: and I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed," —Acts 7:2,3; Genesis 12:1-3.

¹⁰ This was plain notice that the promised Seed

was to come through the Hebrew Abraham. This was substantiated after he entered the land shown him and Jehovah said to him: "Unto thy seed will I give this land." In the light of this further revelation Abraham worshiped the true God: "And there he builded an altar unto Jehovah, and called upon the name of Jehovah." —Genesis 12:7, 8, AS.

¹¹ God's blessing continued with Abraham. An expression of this came when Abraham was returning after rescuing his nephew Lot from foreign invaders and plunderers. He came near to Salem, which became later the city of Jerusalem. The king of Salem worshiped Jehovah God. Besides being king, this ruler named Melchizedek was also a true priest of God. How he came by the priesthood we are not told, but God accepted him and used Melchizedek in a prophetic way.

¹² The inspired account tells us: "And Melchizedek king of Salem brought forth bread and wine: and he was priest of God Most High. And he blessed him, and said, Blessed be Abram of God Most High, possessor of heaven and earth: and blessed be God Most High, who hath delivered thine enemies into thy hand. And he gave him a tenth of all." (Genesis 14:18-20, AS) When Abraham gave him a tithe of all the spoils of victory it proved that he recognized Melchizedek as God's true priest.

¹³ According to God's covenant with Abraham, Melchizedek was to be blessed for blessing Abraham. This he was, for God preserved the record

of him in the Bible and made him a prophetic picture of the Promised Seed in the capacity of a King-Priest of Jehovah. At Psalm 110:4-6 the writer King David was inspired to address the head-crushing Seed of God's woman and to say: "Jehovah hath sworn, and will not repent: Thou art a priest for ever after the manner of Melchizedek. The Lord [Jehovah] at thy right hand will strike through kings in the day of his wrath. He will judge among the nations, he will fill the places with dead bodies; he will strike through the head in many countries." —AS, margin; Ro, margin.

¹⁴ During a temporary stay in Egypt on account of the famine in that land of Canaan Abraham's wife Sarah was put in danger of being defiled by the Egyptian ruler, Pharaoh. By divine interference she was preserved from defilement and was restored to her husband in whom all families of the earth were to be blessed. Sarah grew to seventy-five years of age without a child. Her bearing a child to continue the line leading up to the Promised Seed seemed hopeless. So she turned over her Egyptian servant girl to Abraham to bring forth a child by him and which she, Sarah, might adopt. Ishmael was born to this Egyptian or Hamitic girl Hagar. But God showed that He, and not man, was working out the line of the Promised Seed. He rejected Ishmael and promised Abraham a son by his Shemite wife Sarah, to be named Isaac. When Isaac was weaned, Jehovah

declared his will definitely to Abraham, saying: "What will be called 'your seed' will be through Isaac." (Hebrews 11:18; Genesis 21:12; Romans 9:7, NW) So the Seed must come through Isaac.

¹⁵ When Isaac had grown to be a lad, Jehovah God seemed to work against his own purpose and his covenant with Abraham. He commanded Abraham to go and sacrifice his only son by Sarah on Mount Moriah near Salem. This command was to put Abraham's faith and true worship to the test. But Abraham was not led into temptation by this and enticed by selfishness into disobeying his God in order to spare his only son for the sake of the Promised Seed. Without delay he traveled with Isaac to Mount Moriah, built an altar and prepared to offer Isaac as a human sacrifice to Jehovah. The evidence was now plain that Abraham had the clean and undefiled religion. So Jehovah's angel stepped in and held back Abraham from killing Isaac and said: "Now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, from me." Jehovah miraculously provided a ram to be sacrificed as a burnt offering instead of Isaac, and hence "Abraham called the name of that place Jehovah-jireh [meaning, Jehovah will see, or, provide]: as it is said to this day, In the mount of Jehovah it shall be provided". —Genesis 22:12,14, AS.

¹⁶ What was the point, then, in having Abraham

go through this dramatic performance? Not merely to prove Abraham's faith in Jehovah to be unwavering, but also to give a preview of how the coming Seed of God's woman would be actually sacrificed but how Almighty God would resurrect him from the dead to triumph over the Serpent and his seed and to bless all the families of the earth. This is not our own private interpretation. It is the inspired one written down for us at Hebrews 11:17-19 (NW), where we read: "By faith Abraham, when he was tested, as good as offered up Isaac, and the man that had gladly received the promises attempted to offer up his only-begotten son, although it had been said to him: 'What will be called "your seed" will be through Isaac.' But he reckoned that God was able to raise him up even from the dead; and from there he did receive him also in an illustrative way." In this prophetic drama Abraham pictured Jehovah God the Father, whereas Isaac pictured his only-begotten Son the Word. The aged wife Sarah who had been barren till ninety years of age before she bore this only son of hers pictured God's "woman" who produces the Seed. Did Jehovah, then, know his works in connection with his purpose, from the beginning of them to the end? From this further revelation it is clear that he did. —Isaiah 46:9,10; 14:24-27; Acts 15:17,18.

¹⁷ Now to strengthen not only Abraham's faith but also that of us who trust in the Promised Seed, God gave his oath on his own supreme

name to his declaration of purpose. "And the angel of Jehovah called unto Abraham a second lime out of heaven, and said, By myself have I sworn, saith Jehovah, because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son, that in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heavens, and as the sand which is upon the seashore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice." —Genesis 22:15-18, AS.

¹⁸ This promise corresponded with Abraham's name, meaning "father of a multitude". Because God did not give away the secret then of how many members would be included in the seed, Abraham's seed was left numberless like the stars and the sands of the seashore. But, for all that, Jehovah did disclose by this that his only-begotten Son was to have quite a number of brothers, children of the Greater Abraham, Jehovah God, to be associated with him in blessing all nations. That the promised seed was first to possess the gate of his enemies meant there would be a conflict with the Serpent and his wicked seed. But Jehovah's Seed by his "woman" would gain the victory over the enemy organization and its gates.

¹⁹ When Isaac was forty years old, Abraham sent and procured Rebekah as a wife for him

from his own Shemitic relationship. He did not take a wife for Isaac from the Canaanites who then occupied the Promised Land. The Canaanites were descendants of Ham and were under the curse which Noah had pronounced upon Ham's son Canaan and were to be servants to the Shemites like Isaac. First, twenty years later, Rebekah bore children to Isaac, the twins Esau and Jacob. Through which was the favored line leading up to the Promised Seed to be carried, through Esau the firstborn or through Jacob? According to man's rule concerning the firstborn it should have been Esau, but Jehovah indicated not so before the twins were born. Paul the apostle points to the case of Ishmael as against Isaac and says: "Yet not that case alone, but also when Rebekah conceived twins from the one man, Isaac our forefather: for when they had not yet been born nor had practiced anything good or vile, in order that the purpose of God respecting the choosing might continue dependent, not upon works, but upon the One who calls, it was said to her: The older shall be the slave of the younger.' Just as it is written: 'I loved Jacob, but I hated Esau.'" —Romans 9:10-13,NW.

²⁰ This shows where false religion has made its mistake and has deceived the majority of mankind. Men, acquainted with Jehovah's Edenic covenant concerning the woman's seed, might selfishly wish and presume to be that promised seed

and might do a lot of running like Nimrod in order to attain to that privilege. And as wished by Semiramis, false religion might be developed and it might name the one worshiped in that religion as the promised seed. Ishmael may have thought he was the favored one in line for the seed because he was Isaac's senior by fifteen years. But Jehovah rejected him. Esau thought himself rightfully in line for the seed but he turned hunter like Nimrod and was willing to sell what he considered his birthright for a savory red stew for his belly. Later he ran in chase of game in order to cheer his father Isaac into passing on the blessing to him, ignoring the previous sale of his birthright. But by the inspiration of Almighty God the blessing went to Jehovah's choice, Jacob. (Genesis 25:27-34; 27:1-30) The apostle Paul says Esau was a man "not appreciating sacred things", and God did not change his mind concerning Esau, neither did Isaac do so. It follows, then, that we must accept Jehovah's choice respecting who is to be the seed, and not man or woman's choice nor that of false religion in Oriental lands or Western lands. The divine rule stands unchangeable: "So, then, it depends, not upon the one wishing nor upon the one running, but upon God, who has mercy." (Romans 9:16 and Hebrews 12:16, 17, NW) For this reason we continue tracing the line of the true seed in the book of true religion, His Bible.