The moon-god has been getting away with murder for more than five thousand years.
Ask a Christian today why the world is such a mess and we may blame Satan. Or maybe not; recent research reveals that about 60 percent of American Christians don’t believe the devil is real, so we may put the blame on Hollywood, lack of jobs, or the opposing political party. If we’re aware of the deep state or hold a conspiracist view of history, we might hold secret societies such as the Freemasons, Jesuits, or Illuminati accountable. We might blame occult systems based on the Roman sun-god Sol Invictus or the dark god Saturn.
Sometimes we blame Nimrod. Sometimes we conflate Nimrod with the sun-god or the storm-god, Baal. Sometimes we really confuse things and mix them all together.
The Bible makes it clear that the gods of the ancient world are real. The prophets and apostles knew it, and what they wrote makes a lot more sense when we view the world through their eyes.
“But there is only one God!” you say. Yes, only one capital-G god.
There are, however, a boatload of small-G gods—at least seventy, accord- ing to the Bible, and a couple hundred more if you accept the testimony of the pseudepigraphal Book of 1 Enoch.
Where are those seventy gods in the Bible? Start at Deuteronomy 32:
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.
Deuteronomy 32:8
Your English translation may read “sons of Israel” instead of “sons of God.” This is based on the reading in the Masoretic Hebrew text, which was compiled between the seventh and tenth centuries AD. The ESV and several other newer English Bibles follow older Hebrew texts—copies of Deuteronomy found among the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, which was completed about 200 BC. The original sense of the passage was rendered out of the Masoretic text, which is what most English translators have used until the last half-century or so.
The bottom line: When God divided the nations after the Tower of Babel incident, He assigned to those nations bǝnê hāʾĕlōhîm (“sons of God”) as divine intermediaries, or small-G gods.1 Count the number of names in the Table of Nations in Genesis 10, and you find seventy.
Not coincidentally, the Canaanites who lived alongside the ancient Hebrews believed that their creator-god El held court on his “mount of assembly,” which was almost certainly Mount Hermon at the northernmost point in Israel, with his consort Asherah and their seventy sons. Similarly, a ritual performed at the ancient city of Emar, in what is now northern Syria, sacrificed seventy lambs for the chief god Dagan and all the gods of the city.
It shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that the number of bulls slaughtered at the annual Feast of Tabernacles, or Sukkot, was exactly seventy.
Does this mean that precisely seventy angels abused their authority to rule the world since the days of Nimrod? Not necessarily. In the ancient Near East, seventy wasn’t always a literal number. It represented a full set, the complete amount, not one left out. The sacrifice of sevEnty bulls at Sukkot represented Yahweh’s promise to deliver Israel from the gods of all of the nations, regardless of the precise number. In other words, the festival is a commemoration of “Yahweh’s victory on behalf of his people over the totality of the powers of darkness—every other supernatural being.”
Now, if you were brought up in a typical Christian church, the use of the word “gods” probably makes you a bit uncomfortable. But God calls them “gods,” so we’re on solid theological ground here. In fact, our traditional understanding of pagan gods as nonexistent makes the First Commandment kind of silly, if you think about it. God did not say, “Thou shalt have no imaginary friends before Me.” No, He said, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me.”
There are other gods, but only one capital-G God, and He is Yahweh, Creator of heaven and earth. He created the other gods and placed them over the nations, and they rebelled—for which they have been judged and sentenced.
God has taken his place in the divine council;
Psalm 82:1–2, 6–7
in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
“How long will you judge unjustly
and show partiality to the wicked?” Selah...
I said, “You are gods,
sons of the Most High, all of you;
nevertheless, like men you shall die,
and fall like any prince.”
The day that their sentence is carried out is still in the future. We have some difficult roads to walk between now and then, and that’s partly because those small-g gods are still at work.
In this book, you’ll learn how the moon-god of the ancient world has influenced human history far more than you ever imagined. We’ll profile the moon-god and his colleagues from ancient Mesopotamia to show you how God responded to the religious system established by the moon-god’s followers—a system so wicked that the Hebrew prophets used it as a symbol of the false religion of the fearsome end-times enemy of God and Israel.
To be clear: This book is not intended to bash Muslims. “We wrestle not against flesh and blood.” Our enemy is not mortal, it’s supernatu- ral. It’s hard to remember that when our spiritual nemesis hides behind a human face. But Jesus died for Muslims, too. If we allow ourselves to be baited into responding with anger, we build the stumbling block between them and the gospel even higher than it already is.
Previous analyses have tended to identify one spiritual source behind the teachings of Muhammad—Satan, usually, or the moon-god, because of the crescent moon that overshadows Islam’s holiest space. However, it’s generally assumed that the moon-god isn’t real, which is, to be blunt, unbiblical.
We’ll examine Islam and its teachings to show you why it’s the super- natural equivalent of a corporate merger, a partnership formed by the old gods who were caught off-guard at Calvary. As Paul wrote, if “the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away” had understood what was happening, “they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”
While the crescent symbol of the moon-god looks down on the Ka’ba in Mecca, the moon-god is not alone. The Fallen have joined forces to create a bloody religion that could become the largest on earth before the end of the twenty-first century.
But this army of darkness won’t be enough to save the rebel gods from their fate on the great and terrible Day of the Lord.