Rambling thoughts...

Tonight we are liberating Falluja in the most important battle since the American invasion of Iraq 19 months ago - Operation Phantom Fury. As conflicts peak within this Mesopotamian Desert of Iraq, my thoughts and prayers go back to when history was still a blank slate. Our origins began here... ***

This area once centered the earliest and most powerful nations which are long extinct. Iraq has arguably a greater wealth of truly significant ancient sites than any other country. Today, it's hard to believe that along these bloody-green banks of the Euphrates River (within the dusty, impoverished town of Qurna, where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet) was the idyllic Garden of Paradise a.k.a. The Garden of Eden.

* The Moslem locals call this Garden of Paradise "Janat Adan". The few remaining local Christians here are Chaldean and Syrian Catholics who are being viciously persecuted by Islamic terrorists. Catholics were targeted there last August when five churches were struck and today when two more were car bombed as was the local hospital. Their churches were also bombed on the second night of Ramadan in a hateful campaign to oust these aboriginal inhabitants of Persia (Iraq) and Assyria.

"The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground, trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters…. The Lord God took the man [that is Adam] and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it." (Gen. 2:9,10,15.)

It was here in the land of plenty, a cornucopia of fruit and animals, that Adam & Eve started strifes by eating of the Forbidden Fruit. "And the Lord God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for [in the day that] you eat of it you will surely die." (Gen. 2:16,17.)

God warned Adam that disobedience to His command would produce death. God loved the man He had created; thus He warned him in unmistakable words, saying: Adam, if you disobey Me, you will die because My holy law requires the death of "the soul that sins." (Ezek. 18:20.) "Sin is lawlessness." (1 John 3:4.) "All wrongdoing is sin." (1 John 5:17.) "Anyone…who knows the good he ought to do and doesn't do it, sins." (Jam. 4:17.) Sin is going your "own way." (Isa. 53:6.) Sin is anything that does not agree with God! The Word of God says, "The soul that sins must die!" (Ezek. 18:20.) And in another verse, it says, "the wages of sin is death." (Rom. 6:23.) In the Holy Scriptures, death signifies separation, NOT an end. Death is only separation from this mortal life. Now let us ponder this fuller declaration from His Word: "The wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life…!" (Rom. 6:23.)

The best thing that ever happened here in this Garden of Eden ('Eden', which is 'adanim' in Hebrew, meaning luxury, pleasure), was that God Himself would visit the garden in the cool evenings so that He might talk with the man whom He had created in His own image...

As it happened, God came walking in the cool of the day, and called out to them, "Where are you?" He could not find their love which He craved. Instead He encountered their rejection and pride. And Adam, ashamed and hiding, answered, for himself and his wife, "I heard You walking in the Garden, and I was afraid…" Because Adam & Eve ate the fruit of the forbidden tree, their eyes were opened, but not as they had planned! Not upon the greedy co-godliness they had coveted and been promised by the devil, but instead their eyes were opened to their own shame - the guilt-trip shame they now put between themselves and their loving Creator. (cf. Gen. 3:8.)

[Therefore, the First Sin was also against Our Father Who Art in Heaven. So who can possible doubt that God grieved more than any parent has ever done for the child they might have "lost", or see becoming lost, in one way or another? Mothers & Fathers can take solace from knowing that our God relates to their pain and will comfort it. For those very same children are more His than theirs. They are only loaned to their biological parents for temporary raising and safekeeping -- and to Him they must answer for any dereliction of duty or lessons untaught. So, Moms & Dads, don't feel so alone when your kids reject or disrespect you. Your pain is His Pain. God's been there and done that too. Just be patient and remember that God is never in the past or future, but always in the present moment. When things go contrary to our will, we must believe that God's Will is the better way. Pray for the grace to TRUST in Him to remedy it and open their hearts to The Lord's -- even if such trust may require a heroic sense of acceptance. (Pray the FULL "Serenity Prayer"). But first you must empower your children with lessons taught only by your example. Enable them now -- while you still can..]

Almighty God visited Adam because, if you recall your "Baltimore Catechism No. One", God created man for fellowship. God's intention was that He and humans might fellowship together, talk together, rejoice together, and spend eternity together with unified minds and hearts. God wanted mankind whom He created in His Own Image (humans) to grow in a deep and wonderful relationship with Him forever. However, He also gave His mankind the Gift of Free Will... The Original Sin could not be undone. Our intended nature was changed until the end of time comes. But God relented by giving us new Hope and sending us His Only Begotten Son to be born, to live, to suffer and to die, just as we all must now do. God sent Him to us to die for our sins.

Our First Parents were expelled from this Garden of Eden after their "Fall". However, they were not created to remain there forever. Had they not sinned, and after passing years of trials on earth, they and us would have been taken directly to heaven without suffering death. -- ("Baltimore Catechism No. 3", Ques. 255.)

Fittingly, now the original site of this garden is enclosed by concrete walls, with cracked tile flooring and a decrepit fountain. It has been rebuilt four times since the 1950s, the last time just after Saddam first came to power. It is now trapped between the banks of the Tigris and a row of collapsing mud-brick houses. Children in brightly colored clothes play in the rich agricultural gardens along this great river among fields of potatoes and corn maize. Men in long white dishdashehs climb up from the water's edge carrying fragrant bundles of water cress. But further along, the waters are now polluted with sewage and dead fish, filthy sheep scavenge among the few tufts of surviving grass atop the baked earth and sparse date palms.

...Another "peaceful" garden comes to mind where bloody warfare also surrounds it -- the Garden of Gethsemane in the Holy Land (Matthew 26:36) where our Lord Jesus Christ began His Passion for our sins. And also fittingly, "Now in the place He was crucified, there was a garden." (John 19:14.)

Southern Iraq is therefore the cradle of civilization, the birthplace of mankind where man invented agriculture, alchemy, astronomy, botany, irrigation, cities, civil law, mathematics, weights and measures, maps, medicine, metallurgy, zoology, writing (Cuneiform tablets), and the wheel, etc. This ancient land of Mesopotamia is home to the biblical cities of Ur, Babylon** and Ninevah, with wonders of the world, such as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the Tower of Babel. (Reverse Babylonians in Europe are trying to build an upside down "Tower of Babel" called "Esperanto".)

** And according to those kooky, fundamentalist, evangelical, pentecostal end times Protestant nut-jobbers, their impending "Tribulation", "Armageddon" and "Rapture" (order known but by them) is also expected (by them) to occur here as "foretold in the scriptural Revelations. These approx. 200 years old bad trip delusions are novel and condemned by Catholics and Orthodox Christians.

Elsewhere in the Book of Revelation, Babylon is the name of a whore who rules over the kings of the earth and rides upon a seven-headed beast, whose number is 666. So, in response to our repudiation of them, they consider Catholics to be "the Whore of Babylon" as supposedly contained in Revelation 17 and 18. They argue that this Whore of Babylon "is a city built on seven hills," which they identify as the seven hills of ancient Rome. The Anglican bishop, Alexander Hislop (‘The Two Babylons", 1916) and Herbert Armstrong, et al also claimed the same thing.

This ancient apostate city of Babylon which means "babilu" (or "gate of god") was located in the Plain of Shinar some 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of modern-day Baghdad, Iraq. Babylon was founded by Nimrod (Gen. 10.) who developed the world's first organized system of idolatry, which God condemned (Gen. 11.) Nothing remains today of Babylon except a series of widely scattered mounds to study.

[Biblical Babylon is NOT to be confused with the 11702 town near here on Long Island, N.Y. The only Satanic semblance of its former lucifrian self is conjured up in Jack Chick publications and the Pittsburgh, PA night-club as based on the "Queer As Folk" HBO cable TV series. But then there's always the more notorious "Babylon" in Bangcock, Thailand where a camaraderie of "discreet and discriminating" pederast prelates are said to party with their exotic catamites. Where's bin Laden or his henchmen when he's needed out there now?]

The City of Ur was founded around 6,000 years ago and was the thriving capitol of the Sumerian empire by 2000 B.C. Great temples were erected in honor of the gods. But because of the Patriarch man who hailed from Ur, those gods would disappear and give way to One. The Prophet Abraham, the father of all three monotheistic religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- who lived in nearby Ur, is said to have come to visit this Garden of Eden to pray 4,000 years ago.

However, the last tourists came to Adam & Eve's Garden of Paradise in 1980. Will there be anything left for them to return to?

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*** Genesis 9:18-19 and Genesis 10 contains the Table of the Nations. All of the people alive at the time of Babel were descended solely from the three sons of Noah. Consequently, Shem, Ham and Japheth are the fathers of modern civilization. As Noah was a virtuous man in the eyes of God (Gen. 6:8-9), it is reasonable to presume that the commandments of God were passed on to his sons.