Hollywood and Hellenism: Satan's Strategy Today (PART 1)

23 centuries ago, a Greek empire conquered God's people without ever firing a shot. They didn't use swords at the temple. There were no soldiers in the synagogue, just schools, sports, shops, and a stage. And it worked so well that by the time the people they were impacting realized it, it was too late. The whole world spoke this conqueror's language and worshiped at his buffet table by the time Jesus is born into the world. And the sad thing is they didn't even know it. They didn't realize it. Now I want you to look around. We've got a city of our own that exports its gods through screens that we watch. It sets the menu for what we laugh at and what we long to see on the big screen at the movie theaters. And it disciples our children every night while we sleep down the halls from them. We don't call it Hellenism, we call it Hollywood. And here's what should stop you right now. The pull that grabbed an entire generation of believers back in Jesus's day is actually grabbing many Christians and they have no idea it has a grip on them. Welcome back to Get Into the Word. My name is Robbie Gallaty. This is part one of a two video series that I'm gonna do on the topic of Hellenism and the impact it has on our culture

and we don't even know it. You're probably thinking, what does that have to do with my 21st century life? Well, Hellenism today is called Hollywood, the American culture in which we live in. So be looking for that episode. I wanna start by introducing you to a man named Alexander the Great. Arguably the most brilliant military mind who's ever walked the planet. He was bright, promising as a kid, about 20 years old when he took over for his father, Philip of Macedon, who was assassinated, believe it or not, in 336 BC. And in less than 10 years, this young man, Alexander, conquered the whole known world at that time from Greece on the left, all the way to the edge of India. And he dies at the age of 32, but he leaves behind a legacy that we still feel today. Now here's what every other conqueror before him missed and even the Romans after him. Alexander understood something the Assyrians didn't, the Babylonians missed, and even the Romans failed to realize. They led with one weapon, and it was the weapon of fear. Bow to the emperor or die. Worship the crown or you'll get killed. And a man can hold a sword to someone's throat for a while, but eventually people push back and start to rebel. Fear, in a sense, has a shelf life. Alexander asked a smarter, more dangerous question

than everyone else was asking. Not how do I make them obey me by force, but how do I make them want what I want by offering options? There's an old story told about him, and I don't know if it's true or not, but I've heard it and I've read about it in a few places. But the story goes like this. He marched a small company up to a heavily walled city and demanded for the king above, who was looking over the edge, to surrender. The king laughed down the wall. Surrender? How are you gonna get up here? We're outnumbering you. You have no threat posing toward us. What are you gonna do? So Alexander decided to line his soldiers up in a single file line, and he marched them straight toward a cliff that dropped hundreds of feet below to rocks. One by one, his men, without hesitation, walked right off the edge in single file line to their death. After 10 had fallen, he called back to the rest of them. Hold one minute. At that moment, the king of the city surrendered. Now, that's not an illustration. That's an event that people have talked about. But the picture about it is something I want you to zoom in on because it says everything about this man who was leading the empire.

This was a man who knew he didn't need to defeat your army. He just needed to break your will, and you will change your mind. And that's exactly how he conquered the world that Jesus came into. So this is the world Jesus arrives on the scene to. When Alexander the Great reached Jerusalem on his way to Egypt, he met with the high priest who came to meet him at the border, expecting to be massacred. Instead, Alexander said, I'm not here to destroy you. I've come to offer sacrifices to Yahweh, your God. As you can imagine, the Jewish leaders were stunned. They look around. What is he doing? So he marches in to the city. He walks, sounding humble. He's reverent. Man, this guy's a friend of the Jews. That's what they call him even later. This man was a friend to the Jewish people. And before you lower your guard against this pagan ruler, you have to understand, that humility that he was displaying was on purpose. It was actually his strategy to win the people over. Because Alexander the Great never said, stop worshiping Yahweh God. He just said, keep worshiping God, just add a few more gods to your religious repertoire. Built right into the Greek worldview was this acceptance, if you study history,

of anything or anyone you wanted to believe in. A whole pantheon of gods waiting at the table. Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, and Dionysus, and the list goes on. There was a god back then for every situation and every occasion. Who doesn't love a buffet of gods? How close-minded do you guys have to be? You're gonna worship one god when there's a whole table to choose from. And that's the move that changed everything. He didn't attack the faith of God's people, he diluted it. He made the God of Israel just one more dish on a crowded table. And he made the people who insisted on one god feel so small and rigid and archaic behind the times. There's a word for this, it's called syncretism. It's the idea that you blend the beliefs and the practices into one comfortable mix. It's kind of like putting vegetables and fruit in a Vitamix and mixing them together to become one. You don't have to give up anything, just make room for more. And it's so subtle, you don't even realize you've been infected until it's too late. Now, the same pull grabs us today, whether we know it or not. The enemy doesn't come kicking down our doors and demanding us renounce Christ.

No, what he does is he offers options. He presents a buffet from a thousand quiet invitations to just add a little more. Keep your faith, just add the horoscope. Keep your Bible, you can still read that. Just let the culture set the menu for everything else. No one asks you to bow down, they just keep handing you plate after plate after plate. Now, why does this matter? When we study the New Testament, this is the world Jesus was born into. I'll say it this way. By the time Jesus came and was born in Bethlehem, this banquet table of options had already been presented 300 years before he even arrived. And the very language of the New Testament was translated or written in Greek. Think about this, that was the language of Alexander's empire. But Alexander didn't infect the world with a sermon. He decided to do it through four specific open doors. Four everyday, ordinary, even good-looking things that he turned into a delivery system, a means to an end of infiltration. And once you see this, you're gonna see it everywhere in that culture and you're gonna start seeing it in our culture today. So let's take the four doors and I wanna break them down one by one. Door number one was the door of athletics,

sports, or the games. The Greeks actually invented competitive sports as we know it even today. The Isthmian Games was the forerunner to our Olympic Games. They were such a fixture that even Paul the Apostle, when he was trying to come up with an image to describe the Christian life, he decides to borrow a word from the games. First Corinthians 9.24. Don't you know that the runners in a stadium all race, but only one receives the prize. Run in such a way to win the prize. Now, who is he talking to? Paul is writing to the city of Corinth, precisely the same city that hosted the games. These people spoke fluent athletics, if you will. To enter, you abided by three rules when you participated in the games. Number one is you had to be a freeborn Greek citizen. Number two, you had to compete by the rules that were set. And then number three, you had to swear to an oath. Before the gods, that you had trained leading up to the games for at least 10 months. And the goddess they invoked for the games, you ready for this? Was Nike, N-I-K-E. It was actually pronounced Nike, the winged goddess of victory. Yes, the shoes on our feet are named after the god of conquest.

But here's the part that was scandalous to the Jews. Most competitors trained and competed naked. Our word gymnasium today is a word that comes straight from the Greek word gumnos, which is the word for naked. To the Greek, the human body was the crowning jewel of the universe. That's why they ran naked. That's why their statues are unclothed. However, the Jewish people had a very different perspective of the human body. They know from God's word that the last time a man was naked, he was in a garden because of his sin. And what does God do with nakedness? He covered it up. Nakedness wasn't glory, it was actually shame that needed to be covered. Athletics smuggled in something into that Jewish world that they needed a category for. They called it competition. A faithful Jew would have asked, why would I compete against my brother? He labors beside me. He labors on the same team. Why would I make him my enemy? He's on my team. You will never find back in the ancient world a Jewish book of world records. Why? Because they don't exist. The games started to root in their heart

this deep competitive spirit where now I'm gonna compete against the person who lives next door to me. And we see this even today. It gotten so bad, it was so bad in the first century that the priest could not perform the daily duties in the temple because they were sneaking away to cross the Jordan River to the Decapolis, you're gonna love this, to watch the competition. The men went to watch other men running naked and so the temple suffered as a result. The men assigned to serve the altar would rather be in the stands. By the same way, this is the one reason I think the Essenes started their community. If you know anything about the Dead Sea or the Qumran community, they were sick of the corruption of the priesthood and they said we don't want any more of it. By the way, the next video I'm going to cover this very topic, you're gonna be blown away by how the priesthood went from being given down through the family to being bought for a price. Now, don't miss the pattern here. With every door, the tolerance of the people starts to lower, it starts to slip which leads to door number two and that is media, information if you will. Alexander the Great set up an outpost in every town for dissemination of information. He started to share about art, music, news,

goods from all over the world and here's why this matters. Today, it doesn't bother us but before this, the Jewish people cared very little about the world around them. They were by design a set apart people from the world and suddenly, they're flooded with this information. Imagine the Greek times today or the Roman news outlet landing on their doorsteps with rugs and furs and fine pottery and exotic commodities and spices from all over the world sold and traded in Greek controlled stations all across the community. Now, I want you to hear me. There's nothing wrong with a rug. There's nothing wrong with art or music or news. There's definitely nothing wrong with spices. I love Tony Sashory's from New Orleans. Can I get an amen? But this is the door that looks the most harmless and I want you to get this and that's exactly why it works because the danger wasn't in any one single item. The danger was in the slow fade or the gravitational pull of one's eyes. A thousand new things to look at, to want, to acquire, to keep up with, to make sure you get ahead by and one by one, the Israelites began to drift. They drifted in their focus from God

and they started to focus on endless distractions that were all around them. Not an outright rejection of God. They didn't openly rebel but a relocation of their attention. You don't have to renounce the word, Alexander said. You don't wanna lose that. You just have to keep them busy. You have to keep them distracted. Sound familiar? You have to keep them interested, informed about everything and everyone except the one thing that matters most, God and his word. The parallels to today are staggering. When you start to see this, it opens your eyes. People didn't renounce God all at once. It was a slow shift in their lives over time just like what happens to you and me. Door number three was entertainment. Alexander the Great's instrument to really distract was the theater. The Greeks invented tragedy and comedy. The Greeks invented all art forms of present. and the very layout of our modern theaters today traces back to theirs in the ancient world. Here's a detail that'll change how you read the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus actually condemns the hypocrites in Matthew chapter six.

You remember this. Don't be like the hypocrites who love to stand on the street corners and pray, or they love to fast and make their faces look dirty. Jesus is borrowing a word, this is crazy, from the Greek theater of his day. The word hypocritos, or hypocritos, was the word for actor, specifically one who wore a mask in a play. What would happen is they would walk to the edge of the stage before they would perform, and a lot of people played different parts. They would pick up from a box a mask on a stick. They would put the mask on their face, and they would portray a part to the audience. Then they would walk off stage, and they would exchange one mask for another to play a different part. A hypocrite, in a sense, is a person pretending to be someone they're not. And Jesus reached into the world of Greek entertainment to name the disease of the religious heart. And the content of the plays? Well, Herod the Great built a great Greek theater in a land near where Jesus lived in Nazareth. The town was called Beit She'an. And at the end of the first century BC, they were performing all these plays with vulgar and language, lewd sexual activity. It was an open display for anyone to come and watch.

It was for all to see. They were invited. And the plot, you're gonna love this, was always the same. It's crazy. A couple, just like yourself, struggling to get by, or a couple who's young and can't have kids. Then they exhaust these parents every option they have before calling out to the Greek God for help. And the God steps in and saves the day, and the couple goes on to worship this Greek God forever. They played this narrative over and over until it was ingrained in the hearts of the people. Now, I want you to compare that to how God's people worshiped. The Jews, in contrast, had something called festivals or feasts. And these were feasts that they participated in as a community of faith. You see, Greek entertainment was opposite. You sat by watching passively and individually. You wanted to feel how this affected you personally. You never participated. You just sat in the dark and absorbed the information. The Jews, on the other hand, they worshiped. They sang. They recited scripture. They memorized it. They taught it to their children. Does that sound familiar today?

What do you and I love to do? And I'm not knocking movies. I've been to many of them throughout my life and still go. But think about it. We sit idly by in order to be impacted and trained by the culture of our day. The final one is the door of education. And this is where it gets really hairy because this one has infiltrated all of us. Alexander's final move or final door was indoctrinating the people. Everywhere he conquered, he built schools. And on the surface, you're probably saying, what's wrong with a school? That's not bad. But you have to understand what learning meant for a Jewish child before you understood what learning meant for the Greek child. There was no option to study in the Jewish culture anything outside of the Torah. You didn't really study biology. You didn't learn astronomy or arithmetic, really. You learned one text, one word, the Torah, the word of God. And at the age of five, every Jewish boy and girl entered a school called the Beit Sefer, S-E-F-E-R, or in English, the house of the book. And they began to memorize large portions of scripture. They didn't have notebooks. They didn't have iPads. They didn't have moleskins.

They had their minds. And just as a child's memory absorbed the breath of God, it changed their life. And this wasn't dry academics like you sit in a class today. When the scrolls were opened and the Torah was brought out of the closet, the people in the audience or people in the synagogue on Saturday, they would stand and clap. People would run around in excitement. They would weep and dance. Why? This wasn't just letters on a page. This wasn't just a document to be written. No, this was the breath of God. Feel the weight of this. It was the voice of God. God hadn't let us on our own. God hasn't let us down. He hasn't left us to figure it out ourself. He told us what he expected. So Alexander the Great comes in and he doesn't forbid the Torah. You can still read that old archaic book. But instead, let me broaden your mind. Don't be so closed-minded. Let me expand your. or horizons, so what does he do? He builds libraries right next door to the synagogues.

I remember going to Asia Minor a year and a half ago and right next to the synagogue was the library in one of the churches of Revelation. He stocked those libraries with Greek books on philosophy and mythology, Greek accounts of the real creation story and how all things end as the world is destroyed. He didn't take the word away. He just made it one shelf among many to choose from, just one option on an equally weighed menu of buffet options to eat from. Now, do you feel and understand how subtle this is? Nobody's persecuted, nobody's imprisoned, nobody's arrested or even killed. The kids are actually still allowed to read the Bibles themselves. They've just been quietly taught that the Bible is one option in a marketplace of opinions and most of the people back then, just like today in our culture, we never realize it until it's too late. Alexander presented every door as a gift. Education, expand your mind. Athletics, celebrate the body. Information, you wanna know about the world, don't you? Entertainment, you need to be amused. You need to be entertained and no one ever asked anyone to renounce God. They just kept lowering the standard to make you immune and calloused to the culture around you,

one degree of comfortability at a time. I wanna make this personal and I wanna bring it close to home. I want you to imagine a young boy who's a shepherd boy back in the first century. His name is Yokonon, John in English, and he lives just outside of the thriving Hellenistic city called Beit She'an. I mentioned Nazareth is not far from there, so let's just say he's from Nazareth, the town Jesus was raised in. He's in this city and every Friday night he is preparing for Shabbat, but the sound of the city starting to ramp up on Friday afternoon carries through the fields. And as he sits on the side of this hill, he hears the music. He understands there's a crowd gathering. He starts to see the lights, the hum of the town starts to pull him in toward a system that is pulling and built upon everything other than God, everything against what God says in his word. And he has a choice. Do I give into it or do I stand firm and rebel? You see, the boy is the whole point because the four doors didn't conquer enemies, they conquered kids on the edge of town, one ordinary decision at a time. And that's the exact pressure you and I are feeling

and being tempted by as believers and every one of our children as well. But here's what should trouble us more than anything, and it's what I'll explain in the next video. The buffet options to turn from God and to look for other ways didn't stop with the culture. It actually didn't even stop with the school. It didn't stop with the sports or the theater. It actually climbed up the temple steps and walked into the house of God until the very priesthood, it's gonna blow your mind, the very priesthood itself was for sale. False messiahs popped up everywhere and the glory of God departed from his temple. But it didn't stop there. It began to cross the ocean and it landed in the place we call America. It landed in England, it landed in Britain, Australia, and it's everywhere. And every person in here has a choice of which door they will walk through. Here's what you need to remember. Sometimes God presents an open door in your life not for you to walk through, but to walk past. It's up to us though, through prayer and discernment, to decide where each door leads. Somebody needs to hear that today and I hope it's encouraging to you. If this video has helped you to learn something new, make sure you share it and like the video.

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