The End of the Empire (1)

The king reflected and said, “Is this not Babylon the great, which I myself have built as a royal residence by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?”  Daniel 4:30  NASB 1995

I myself – “Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God” (Thomas Sowell).  Nebuchadnezzar has the same mental illness.  In common parlance, we call this “pride.”  It tends to be seen best in symptoms displayed by the powerful.  God’s solution to the problem during Israel’s sojourn in Babylon was a radical identity change.  The king lived as an animal in the field.  That doesn’t seem to be the correction these days, but if it were it would certainly help us distinguish real leadership from inflated egos.  Rome also suffered from leadership psychosis.  If we pay attention to what happened in Rome (and Babylon), we might recognize something in our own society.

1. Intellectuals began to raise serious and difficult questions about the foundational beliefs of the society, not because they were necessarily interested in the truth but rather because they could achieve popular acclaim and status for themselves.
2. The environment of easy-going tolerance of alternative views allowed these intellectuals to continue their critique of the society without consequence to themselves but with demoralizing consequences to the general populace.
3. This disturbance caused the society to fragment into groups all claiming authority and bolstering that claim by asserting that anyone who did not join them was a heretic. This was particularly true in religious circles and led to restricting contact with those outside orthodoxy.
4. Once orthodoxy gained enforceable authority, subsequent disputation and rational discussion was replaced with doctrine and dogma, leading to further justification by the intellectual “heretics” of the closed mindedness of the orthodox community.
5. The society then fractured into opposing groups all of which sought dominance by whatever means available. Dissenters were dealt with as enemies of the state.  What at one time had been a society of open discussion became society of myopic intolerance. Accusation replaced listening.
6. Powerful figures garnered support of the masses for their particular vision at the expense of discourse and unity. Success was determined by popularity.  Persuasion became more important than truthfulness.
7. Justice devolved into popular acclaim. What mattered was the intensity of the applause, not the correctness of the statement.
8. Dictatorship followed, whether by the state or by the Church. A society cannot exist without some form of authority and when God is removed as the authority, human institutions, religious or otherwise, quickly move into His place, followed by excommunication and/or elimination of dissenters.  The society collapses into a political “dark age.”

Have we learned anything?

Topical Index: empire, authority, religion, Daniel 4:30