2.1—The Principle (14 min video)

Transcript

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Hi, I’m Dave Raymond, and this is the second history lecture. This is actually the first time we’re we’re going to take a look at a historical topic. And those are the civilizations of Mesoamerica, or Middle America. And these are the civilizations such as the Aztecs, or the Mayans, or the Olmecs, or the Incans. And these civilizations, which existed over thousands of years, all the way back to the time of the judges in Old Testament Israel, the time that the Spanish came over here and conquered most of them and actually some of their languages have still survived to this day.

But these civilizations are amazing. However, before we actually take a look at some of those details, let’s talk about our title. And our title is called “The Banner of the Sun,” which I hope you see below you here right now. And remember, the banner of the sun, whenever you see something on the screen here like this, you should write it down. Not only should you write this term down, but you should also say something about it. You should actually record something on paper or in your notes that I’ve actually said about that idea. So with the banner of the sun, the reason why we’ve called it that for this lecture and the reason why we’re actually using that term is because the sun was essentially the banner or the flag that represented all the things that were good and holy for the Mesoamerican people.

The sun provided life for them, the sun provided light for them, and so therefore they always felt that the sun god had to be appeased, and that often meant sacrifice.

And so you’ll be actually seeing how that worked in these individual cultures throughout this week’s lesson. But with these actual cultures, most of the time when historians look at them, they just see how amazing these civilizations were. They kind of forget about the whole human sacrifice, at least for a little bit, because the Mesoamericans did build amazing pyramids. The Mesoamericans did build amazing works of engineering that we still don’t understand. We don’t know how to recreate them using the tools that they had. The Mesoamericans were brilliant mathematicians. The Mesoamericans were brilliant at looking at the stars and understanding how the stars and how the planets and how the moon all worked and interacted with each other.

Not only that, but the Mesoamericans were brilliant at keeping track of time, at being able to make accurate calendars, and having those calendars actually show how our Earth moves around the sun and how we can actually keep track of an entire year’s worth of time. And so often, when historians look at these cultures, they think, “Wow, these people were amazing.” But the other thing they start to wonder is, “Well, these people have culture and they they had ideas and they built buildings very similar to say the Egyptians or very similar to say the Babylonians or very similar to say the Persians.

And of course when you start to look at that you start to wonder well how is it that they all had similar technology? How is it that they all built essentially what are fake mountains? What are these pyramids or these tower-like structures? And they always had something to do with the heavens or they always had something to do with gods themselves. And of course, if you’re a historian who does not believe in the authority of the scriptures, you might assume, “Oh, well, maybe they sailed around and they were able to exchange ideas.” Or you might assume, if you take a more fanciful route, that there was once indeed a great island in the middle of the Atlantic called Atlantis.

That’s actually what some people believe. And Atlantis started all these ideas and spread them out to the four corners of the world. Or you might even go off on a limb, the X-Files limb and you actually said, “No, it was probably aliens who went around the different parts of the world and built these different structures.” The problem with all of those ideas is that none of them really have any evidence behind them. None of them really explain why we as people like to build huge structures. So to understand that, you have to understand our principle, which is something you need to note. For our principle, essentially looking at the fact that there are two cities in this world. You have the city of God and you have the city of man. And this is not an original idea of mine. It’s an idea actually that Augustine coined, Augustine of Hippo, not the hippo the animal, but the city in North Africa. And Augustine coined this idea way back in the days of the Roman Empire. He actually wrote a book called The City of God in which he talked about if If you look in Genesis, you will see these two cities that exist from the fall of man.

In fact, they exist from the very first murder, which if you are familiar with Genesis, you should know is the story of Cain and Abel.

And if you remember, Cain became jealous of Abel because God accepted Abel’s sacrifice, but he didn’t accept Cain’s sacrifice. And so therefore Cain, out of jealousy, decided to club his brother out in a field one day and then try to play stupid when God actually confronted him over the whole issue of murder.

Well, of course, Cain gets found out, Cain gets banished, and what’s really interesting is once Cain is banished, he goes and he builds a city out in the wilderness, out far away from everything else.

And then if you look, if you kind of look through the different genealogies, the different names who appear in Genesis, you’ll notice that almost all those people end up building cities. And those cities and those cultures become all the great civilizations of antiquity and often become the people that Israel was enemies with. That’s because they are city of man cultures. And one of the reasons why all of those cultures, including the Mesoamericans who are all the and the other side of the world. The reason why all of those cultures built these pyramids or built huge towers, like say the Tower of Babel, was because they wanted to return to God.

They wanted to somehow return to Eden. So maybe they didn’t so much want God, but they certainly wanted the Garden, and they certainly wanted Heaven, and they certainly wanted eternal life, they just weren’t sure about actually having to submit to Yahweh. And so they tried to build these fake mountains as a way to meet God on their own terms. That’s why you see pyramids, and that’s why you see towers or huge mountain-like structures in every place from India to China to Mexico to Egypt. It’s a common impulse of man to somehow return to the garden and to somehow make it to heaven. But with these city-of-man cultures, what’s interesting about all the cultures that come after Cain, not only do they build these cities, but we find out that these cultures and what what the names of these guys mean is completely the opposite of the city of God cultures.

And there’s a simple reason for that. The city of man cultures serve themselves, and the city of God cultures serve Yahweh. In fact, Augustine used an old Greek term to describe this idea. He called it antithesis. That’s a word you need to write down right now. An antithesis literally means two ideas that are opposed to each other, two cultures that are complete opposites of each other and therefore they cannot mix, they cannot get along with each other, they’re at war with each other. So it’s kind of like life and death. You can’t be alive and dead at the same time. It’s kind of like water and oil. You cannot mix water and oil. It’s kind of like lightness and darkness. You cannot mix the two. If you have light, the darkness flees. So therefore, these two cultures do not get along with each other. But today we’re really looking at the Mesoamericans. And what’s interesting about the Mesoamericans, kind of like the Egyptians or kind of like the Mesopotamians and all other city of man cultures, is they didn’t have a solution for death. That’s something you need to note. They didn’t have a way to actually deal with the fact that we die in this world. That from the moment that we are born, our bodies begin to decay. Even though they grow while we’re young, they begin to decay. And we actually begin to harm ourselves through sin. And so because the Mesoamericans didn’t have a final solution for that, they tried lots of things. Primarily, they tried human sacrifice. And that’s not original. That’s been around all throughout world history. It’s around through all of the ancient civilizations. And what the Mesoamericans were trying to do was they were trying to somehow conquer death or even as they sometimes say, they were trying to eat death, which actually shows up throughout all of literature.

They’re people who think if I can somehow swallow death alive, I will be able to stay alive forever. And the Mesoamericans were no different in that way. But because they tried to consume death and because they tried to conquer it, they ended up strangely worshipping it. They ended up strangely seeing death as the greatest thing out there, because death was the most powerful thing to them. And so as a result, the Mesoamericans had a lot of interesting beliefs. The first one you need to know is what they called the chain of being. The chain of being, you can imagine this, say you can imagine a long chain, or you can even imagine a tall pyramid, that’s also a good idea to think of, or look at what’s on the screen right now. But with the chain of being, the whole idea was that the very top of the chain, or at the very top of the pyramid, those are the most important people.

Say that’s the king, or say that’s the chief, or say that’s the emperor. Then below him you have his nobles, or you have his dukes or his earls. Then below him you have, say, his governors. Then below them you have the mayors. Then below them you have the middle class folks who do something like stone carving or something like weaving for a living. Then below them at the very bottom you have slaves. Then below all of them you might actually have children. Just kind of depends. But either way, in a chain of being type of idea, or in that kind of pyramidal system, you believe that whoever’s on top is the most important, and whoever’s below them is by degrees less and less important. And think to the very bottom, and those slaves, and even children, don’t really have much value. They’re not really worth anything unless they’re belonging to the right people. So that’s idea number one you need to keep track of with the Mesoamericans. The other idea about the Mesoamericans is what we call fate. You’ve probably heard about fate, or you’ve probably watched a movie where they’ve talked about it is your destiny to do this. In fact, Star Wars is big on this. But the whole idea of fate is that things just happen, you can’t stop them from happening, and that’s just how it is for you. And fate might be a god, but more likely fate is just a force. It’s just kind of like, say, gravity. There’s no person, there’s no face behind it. It just happens. Well, as Christians, we’ve always believed that there is something personal behind it. In fact, there’s someone behind the reason why all things happen. That’s Yahweh himself. But the Mesoamericans didn’t really have a picture of the one true God. So they believed that things just happened. And there was nothing you could do to change them. As a result, all of these cultures, what we call fatalistic, they just did things. They just lived without any kind of hope. And whenever they saw something strange in the sky, like a solar eclipse, or if they saw something odd like the transit of Venus, which just happened here recently, they would say that these things happened because the gods were showing them a sign of what fate was going to happen.

But any more than we can change the sun, the earth moving around the sun, or the moon moving in front of the sun and the earth, the Mesoamericans felt, well, they couldn’t change their own destiny. As a result, all of these cultures didn’t really value life. All of these cultures, the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Olmecs, the Incans, they were all brutal. They were all fierce people. They all heavily worshipped death, and they all heavily practiced human sacrifice. It’s one of the dark stories that we have to look at. But in order to understand the whole history of America, we have to start here. Because these are the people that were here when the Spanish, and then later the Portuguese, and the French, and the English, and the Germans all came.

These were the cultures they encountered. And even though the Europeans weren’t always heroes in all the decisions they made, or all the deeds that they did, they did at least have a worldview that made sense.

They did at least have a value of life, even if it wasn’t always practiced, that made sense. As a result, when the Spanish came here, they saw a darkness and an evil that they knew had to be dealt with. And they did deal with it, albeit harshly, but in many ways we’ll see that the reason why these Mesoamerican civilizations fell was not because of the brilliance of the Spanish, it was because of how absurd their own worldview and their own lifestyle was.

But we’ll take a look at that in the next video.