“The time has come,” he said. “The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!” – Mark 1:15

Who was ruling things down here back when God created the world? Of course mankind was given that mandate, but what else was going on?

I wrote about the gods that seemed to have authority over nations, maybe given to them at the Tower of Babel, when the nations were scattered.

That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth. – Gen 11:9

Here’s the New Testament affirming calling them gods:

• Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are gods’? If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be set aside—what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’? – John 10:34-36 (I took out the quotation marks the NIV put in around “gods” because they’re not in the original Greek)
• For even if there are those called gods, whether in heaven or on earth (as indeed there are many gods and many lords), yet for us there is but one God – 1 Co 8:5-6 (my translation, as the NIV changed the original Greek)

The Bible often depicts nations as female (wives, daughters) and their spiritual rulers (gods) as male. For example, Yahweh is Israel’s husband (Hosea 2:19-20), and Christ is the Church’s bridegroom (Ephesians 5:25-27). Rebellious nations are called harlots (e.g., Babylon in Revelation 17:5), reflecting their unfaithfulness to their spiritual ‘husbands.’ This aligns with the idea that male divine beings influence their ‘female’ peoples, whether faithfully (Yahweh/Christ) or corruptly (fallen gods in Deuteronomy 32:8-9).

One peculiar situation is when the sons of God had offspring by the daughters of men.

When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the Lord said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.” The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. – Gen 6:1-4

And the rest of the giants. Also descendants of the sons of God? See especially Goliath, the last bullet.

• All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them. – Nu 13:32-33
• The people are strong and tall—Anakites! You know about them and have heard it said: “Who can stand up against the Anakites?” – Dt 9:2
• The Emites used to live there—a people strong and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites. Like the Anakites, they too were considered Rephaites, but the Moabites called them Emites. – Dt 2:10-11
• That too was considered a land of the Rephaites, who used to live there; but the Ammonites called them Zamzummites. They were a people strong and numerous, and as tall as the Anakites. – Dt 2:20
• Og king of Bashan was the last of the Rephaites. His bed was decorated with iron and was more than nine cubits long and four cubits wide. It is still in Rabbah of the Ammonites. – Dt 3:11
• In the course of time, there was another battle with the Philistines, at Gob. At that time Sibbekai the Hushathite killed Saph, one of the descendants of Rapha. In another battle with the Philistines at Gob, Elhanan son of Jair the Bethlehemite killed the brother of Goliath the Gittite, who had a spear with a shaft like a weaver’s rod. In still another battle, which took place at Gath, there was a huge man with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot—twenty-four in all. He also was descended from Rapha. – 2 Sam 21:19-21
• A champion named Goliath, who was from Gath, came out of the Philistine camp. His height was six cubits and a span. He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore a coat of scale armor of bronze weighing five thousand shekels; on his legs he wore bronze greaves, and a bronze javelin was slung on his back. His spear shaft was like a weaver’s rod, and its iron point weighed six hundred shekels. His shield bearer went ahead of him. – 1 Sam 17:4-7 (Interestingly, the Hebrew word translated “champion” is actually “between”, like maybe he’s between being a man and a god.)

Last month my wife was away for the weekend with a friend and I binge watched the entire Netflix series “Ancient Apocalypse”. I don’t agree with everything he’s proposing, but there are a crazy amount of unexplainable structures dated from before humans could build those things.

Stones way too heavy to lift, like dozens of tons, high up off the ground and cut to fit each other so precisely we’d have trouble doing it today. Or way too many, like 50,000 of them in one place that weigh a third of a ton each and are miles up the hill from the quarry. And the structures are really similar all over the world.

Many of the structures are pyramid shaped. The Hebrew word translated “tower” in Tower of Babel is derived from the root verb גָּדַל (gādal), meaning “to grow” or “to become great.” I think it was less like a high-rise and more like the pyramid shapes we see in the ancient world. Otherwise, how would they get inside or stand on the roof? And noses or breasts are shaped more like pyramids.

• Inside the city, however, was a strong tower, to which all the men and women—all the people of the city—had fled. They had locked themselves in and climbed up on the tower roof. – Judges 9:51
• When the lookout standing on the tower in Jezreel saw Jehu’s troops approaching, he called out, “I see some troops coming.” – 2 Ki 9:17
• Your neck is like an ivory tower. Your eyes are the pools of Heshbon by the gate of Bath Rabbim. Your nose is like the tower of Lebanon looking toward Damascus. – Songs 7:4
• I am a wall, and my breasts are like towers. – Songs 8:10

The ancient myths speak of giants. We call them “myths” these days, but for thousands and thousands of years before humans could write, they were the primary way of teaching and remembering history. Believing giants built these things seems easier to me than the backflips we’re doing trying to give them more recent dates.

What if the myths of other cultures are actually based in fact? What if we could affirm that they used to have gods that did incredible things for them? Then we could explain that there is really only one God over all of these, and he delegated authority to them to rule the nations. Their people believed in these gods as they should have, but in Jesus the kingdom of God has begun.

This sounds like what Paul was saying in Acts 17-24-31

The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.