By C. Eldon McNabb

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 5000 to 5800 years ago, or was it between 4000 and 5800, the question of the origin of mankind began to be considered, by a sage group of well-educated, civic minded citizens of a country which was hundreds of miles east of the eastern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. They lived in a country called Nod. (It is just possible that the modern name of that land could be Iraq or Iran. Scientific excavations unto the very deepest [about 80 feet below the next deepest], and most ancient ruins, in Mesopotamia, typically showed no evidence of any kind of worship.) I could be a little off in my timing, but, with the scientific evidence - scientific by the admitted system used by the "science community" today - I am very much in the ball park.

Perhaps I should more correctly call my subject "The Evolution of Evolution." The theory of evolution has been around for a very long time, as men looked for every excuse to not worship the God of the Creation, and has evolved greatly over the years. We have a testimony, "historical proof" of its existence as far back as the tenth century B.C., when David, the son of Jesse, was the King of Israel. David said, in rebuttal to this absurd theory, "Know ye that the Lord he is God; it is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves. We are His people, and the sheep of His pasture. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise! Be thankful unto Him, and bless his name! For the Lord is good, His mercy is everlasting; and His truth endures to all generations" (Psalm 100:3-5).

Among the Greeks, in the fourth century B.C., such men as Aristotle and Theophrastus, were accumulating data for future study and conjecture on the subject. It seems that our Gentile forebears found it useful to worship a variety of gods, but they had no knowledge of the God of the creation.

When the Apostle Paul was in Greece, in the first Century A.D., his hosts took him to the Areopagus: the Hill of Mars. While they had him there, they asked him, "May we know what this new doctrine is whereof you speak? For you bring certain strange things to our ears, and we would know therefore what these things mean." Paul answered them there on Mars' Hill, saying, "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious [that is to say "very religious"]. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription: 'To the Unknown God.' Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, Him I declare unto you. God who made the world and all things therein, seeing that He is Lord of Heaven and Earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands. Neither is He worshiped with men's hands, as though He needed anything, seeing He giveth to all life, and breath, and all things. And He hath made of one blood all nations of men, and caused them to dwell on all the face of the Earth, and hath determined their appointed times and the bounds of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might feel after Him and find Him, though He be not far from every one of us. For in Him we live, and move, and have our being. As also certain of your own poets have said, 'For we are also His offspring.'

"For inasmuch, then, as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold or silver or stone, graven by art and of man's (imagination). The times of this ignorance God overlooked, but now He commands all men everywhere to repent, because He hath appointed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness by that Man whom He hath ordained. Of this He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised Him from the dead."

Some of the Greeks who were there that day, probably the most sage and knowledgeable, mocked Paul when he had finished speaking. Apparently his doctrine was even stranger than they had supposed. Remember, the Greeks already had almost 400 years of Aristotle's kind of thinking. They seemed to think it was a good idea to have something like the Roman Pantheon for all of their gods, but the idea of a God which had created them was obviously so foreign to them that the Apostle Paul went to some length to try to convince them of the truth of the matter.

When Cain killed his brother Abel, God sent him away from his father and mother, and all of the rest of his kinfolks. Cain's extended family must have been quite numerous by that time, because God had commanded Adam and Eve, and they began early to "multiply and replenish the earth." Cain himself was married, and his occupation was that of a farmer. We can only guess as to how many sons and daughters he had. Abel, on the other hand, had become a cattleman. Although we are not given his marital status at the time of his death, it is justifiable to assume that, at nearly 130 years of age, he also was married and had children. Abel's progeny are not mentioned, because God proceeded to count the succession of the genealogy through, the yet-unborn, Seth. It is certain that man's numbers had grown to the extent that specialized careers had already developed.

Cain was not just a good man who had a bad day now and then. John, one of Jesus' Twelve Apostles, said of Cain that he "was of that wicked one;" meaning "the devil and Satan." When he was driven out from the influence of those who loved God, he only became worse. There was such a difference between those who stayed with Adam and those who went with Cain that, in Genesis 6:2, the descendants of Seth were called "the sons of God," whereas the women of Cain were called "the daughters of men." Those descendants of Cain continued in his wickedness, rejected God, and began to live in a manner which they had devised for themselves.

Is this merely conjecture on my part? Nay, verily, those descendants of Cain were so repulsive to God, and had so corrupted the "Sons of God," that God conceived and executed a drastic plan to repair the damage to His creation. He sent a universal flood which destroyed everyone except those few who remained in the ark with Noah.

Due to the fact that the "Almighty Creator" gave to Moses a revelation of the creation and progression of human civilization, we have received some insight into the fact that Cain was not the "one and only" human who was "of that wicked one." Noah had three sons with him on the ark, who, shortly after the flood, began to bring forth children upon the earth: Shem's first son was born just two years after the flood. We must assume that the other two set about to accomplish the same thing in a similar fashion. Noah's son Ham begat a son, in the land of Mesopotamia, and named him Cush. After the confusion of the languages at Babel, Cush later moved South and developed the land of Ethopia, but his son Nimrod stayed in Mesopotamia and created a kingdom which included at least eight prominent cities, including Babel and Nineveh.

It was Nimrod, that great-grandson of Noah, who, on this side of the flood, first and famously, demonstrated that same character trait as Cain had. He lived in defiance of God, and became a great champion to the people, as he proceeded to protect them from the perilous effect of a temporary imbalance between the animals which hunted for prey, and those which were the prey. Some of those beasts of prey began to be a threat to the human population, but Nimrod saved the day, as "he began to be a mighty one upon the earth, and was a might hunter before the Lord."

Nimrod's idolatry became so great, and his debauchery so vile, that Shem led a campaign against him, and brought him to trial. Nimrod was convicted and summarily executed, and parts of his body were distributed to the nations with a warning. To this day, the "faithful" weep for him by various names, depending on what language is spoken in their country. They may call him Tammuz, or Baccus: The Lamented One, or Nimrod: Ninus: The Son , or Osiris. It was not long until he, his widow, and their son, by the efforts of his widow, became the gods of almost all of the nations of the world.

When the languages were confused at Babel, the people scattered upon the face of all the earth; taking their gods with them. Not only the Greeks and the Romans, but also the Ancient Phoenicians, of what is now Lebanon, and Pergamus, the great center of that ancient Babylonian worship in Asia Minor, which the Apostle John declared was, "where Satan's seat is." In the fourth century A.D., when Caesar removed all of the trappings of the Babylonian religion from the Roman Government, it took the "Christian" church only about twenty years to adopt all of those pagan rituals, and priestly dress which Caesar had imported from "Pergamum," and which the Catholic priests faithfully and diligently continue to use to this day. They even adopted the forty-day fast,which was originally for that character known as "Baccus:" the son of Cush, during what they call the lenten season. And when Catholic Spain sent their ships to South America, on those expeditions for gold, they found that even the Incas and the Mayans worshiped the same gods, with rituals very similar to the ones which the Catholic Church used.

God began to speak to Abraham, beginning the progression of events which will eventually lead to the time when the son of God: Jesus Christ of Nazareth, shall become the king of all the nations of the world. Satan used Pharaoh to try to stop it, before Israel could get out of Egypt, but God delivered them out of his hand. Satan used the rulers of the Jews and of Rome to kill Jesus, but He arose victorious over death. Now we stand here, on the eve of the coronation of Jesus Christ the King. Very soon Satan will make another fierce, and strong, effort to crush this Gentile Kingdom of God, as we fulfill the prophecy which God uttered in Isaiah 59:19, saying, "When the enemy shall come in like a flood, the Spirit of the Lord shall lift up a standard against him."

Satan has tried to thwart God's purpose to establish control of the world many times. He could not do it with the Egyptians, nor could he do it with the Romans, nor will he be able to do it with the G-Ten of the United Nations (Rev. 17:12-14).

"The world loves its own," but still today, Israel is rejected by the whole world, because God chose them to be His people. It is really God who they are against, which the world well proved when they modified their hatred of Israel to include all of the followers of Jesus Christ, whether they be Jews or Gentiles.

It is this alienation from, and rejection of, God which has made the world's pursuit of an alternative to the God of all creation so important. They have gone to extremes from atheism to pantheism and back to atheism, in their efforts to free themselves from the "burdens" imposed upon them by the great God, and Father of us all. The nations of the world have proven the Word of God, in Jeremiah 2:ll, to be true, "Hath a Nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? [No, they have not.] But My people have changed their Glory for that which does not profit." They have faithfully kept their gods, but Christians have forsaken the true God, and have adopted the idolatrous ways of the world.

Early in the second Millennium A.D., Satan launched a new strategy in his own scheme to conquer the world. Art, literature and music would be the thrust of his strategy. It is popularly called "The Renaissance." Not too long thereafter, God began a reformation in Christianity; a 500 year journey from the skirts of her who is called "Mystery, Babylon the Great," to the "Glorious Church without spot or wrinkle."

About the middle of this millennium, God "poured out His spirit upon all flesh," and the sciences began to flourish. By the middle of the seventeenth century, Satan began to pervert that wonderful new development to convince the world that "man created himself." By the middle of the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin made some wonderful scientific observations which Satan quickly pounced upon to skew enough to use it as the primary tool to deceive the world, with this new, heady, intellectual wine, and man's foolish arrogance, into believing that "It is we that have made us, and not God himself." And, in 1896, God began to pour out His Spirit also "upon (His) servants and on (His) handmaidens."

The Gentile world has determined, as did Israel, in the days of Jesus and Paul, to "not retain God in their knowledge." The obvious fact of the creation is now, almost totally, rejected by the nations of the world, and America, which was "weaned" on the Bible and Foxe's Book of Martyrs, is now in the final stages of making the worship of the true God a crime. They took God and Truth out of the schools in 1963-64, and today, the error of the theory of evolution has become the hallmark of "education" in their schools.

All this is working together with the purposes of a, so-called, new age movement which adamantly proclaims that the final step in the evolution of mankind is the breeding out, of the human genes, all belief in God. Their intent is to eliminate, from the world society, everyone who does not evolve into that mutant stage of which it is written in God's holy word, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: there is none that doeth good" (Psa. 53:1). Satan will try one more time, and again, he will lose in dishonor, and spend the next thousand years in God's "prison."

I know that these things sound so distant, whether past or future. However there is a passage of Scripture which should give a little pause to us all. In 1 Thessalonians 5:1-3 [Which is an extension of chapter 4], the Apostle Paul warned us, saying, "But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you. For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape. But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief."

Almost all of our Christian ministers today insist on assuring us that we will have "peace and safety," no matter what happens to the rest of the world. Well, Paul told us the truth about the fact that when they say that, "sudden destruction cometh upon them." That is not about the world. The world will not be destroyed, but apostate Christianity will be, and it will come unexpectedly, and all of those blind preachers, and those who are blindly following them, shall be destroyed from the Earth.

But to those who wake up, and begin to search the Holy Scriptures, God said, "It may be that ye shall be hid, in the day of the Lord's anger" (Zephaniah 2:1-3).