Living Water of Washington DC. A Christian Outreach Ministry.

The Beginning of the End of History

As a little boy, I was told the story about how Adam and Eve ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and how all humankind in the history of the world has suffered because of it. Honestly, the story baffled me. I mean, what was the big deal? I knew it was bad for Adam and Eve to disobey God, but if the fruit looked good, tasted good, and made you smart, why was there such a big problem in eating it? Isn’t fruit good for you? Lots of vitamin C and calcium?

The attitude that I had as a young unregenerate child is the attitude that many grown adults have now today. They are “wise” and “learned”, “knowing good and evil” even better than God does (they think), and they judge the world according to their own erudite standards, their own wisdom –not by God’s immutable Truths. They blame God for all of the world’s problems and insist that they could do a better job of running the universe if they were in charge. They detest the Bible, slander God as a patriarchal buffoon, and denigrate the holy Book as a book of myths. They are like over-grown adult children, or worse, like over-grown adolescents fully equipped with raging hormones and the wherewithal to do real damage. They insist that disobedience to a mythical God is good thing.

Their message is, “Trust in yourself, not God.”

It is fallen man that says, “I’m too smart for that Jesus nonsense, I’m educated and the Bible is backward, ignorant, darkness.” Man’s wisdom attempts to better the world but yet destroys it. And the real hope for the world, the Absolute Truth of God's Word, is being systematically taken from us –taken out of our schools, our language, our consciousness, our minds, our lives.

What does all this have to do with Adam and Eve?

The lies of Serpent and the devastating effects of ingesting the forbidden fruit continue to this day. People insist that their wisdom and their understanding of good and evil are better than God’s. They fault God for things of which they have no understanding, no real wisdom, no truth.

It is of the Truth that Jesus speaks when He says to the Father: “Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent.” (Matthew 11:25 KJV)

Apparently, the Serpent’s lie about humans becoming wise as God (Genesis 3:5) has been a smashing success. The critical history that occurred in the Garden of Eden has gotten short shrift through the ages, maligned as a trivial children’s allegory, and has even been used to portray the Almighty God as an unfair, obtuse, and arbitrary dictator. Just as with Adam and Eve, the words of the Serpent continue to resonate in the itching ears of many people the world over, whether they profess Christ or not.

But we hope to set the record straight, with God’s help.

Not only did personal sin enter the world from the fatal event in Eden, but full-fledged anti-Christian worldviews entered as well. What are the roots of these worldviews? The Bible tells us:

“Then the serpent said to the woman, ‘You will not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’ So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.” (Genesis 3:4-6 NKJV)

“You will not surely die”

You can hear the voice of the Serpent “you will not die” echoed in the remarks of unbelievers every day. The quest for immortality proceeds at a feverish pace. In our own culture, perfect health is treated more as an inherent right than as a blessing. Beyond the deluge of messages for drugs for every imaginable woe, no matter how small, we witness the pursuit for an elixir of life through experiments in genetic engineering, advances in cloning, embryonic stem cell research, and a formidable array of pharmaceuticals designed to stop or even reverse the effects of age upon the body. In this postmodern era, we’ve become accustomed to hearing about remedies not just for the body, but for the “body, mind, and soul”, ubiquitously touted by marketers. Not only are humans purposing to conquer death by relying on their own wisdom through medicine, but in this postmodern age there are spiritual paths to immortality being taught (outside of salvation in Christ Jesus), such as reincarnation, etc.

Imagine a world where there is no disease, no war, no pain, no tears, etc. Does this world sound like heaven? John Lennon challenged us to “Imagine there’s no heaven,” as he sang about a heaven-like world brought about solely through human effort and human goodness. Can man reach this peaceful “utopia” through his own wisdom, or is the blessed hope of the glorious appearing of our Savior Jesus Christ necessary to establish the New Heaven and New Earth, free of trouble and turmoil?

Mankind has bought the Serpent’s lie and has been working to make the Serpent’s “promise” of “you will not die” a reality. He has set out to build his own tower reaching heaven on earth, and seeks to conquer death without intervention from the One who conquered death, our great God and Savior Jesus Christ. The anti-Christian point of view is that Jesus is not necessary for world to reach this stage of eternal bliss. The anti-Christian says that through progress, technology, and human understanding, we can reach the harmonious utopia that we have “earned”. When this happens, the earth will be rid of all illness, pain, and strife. Death itself will be conquered by man’s own know-how. This is the modernist point of view, false to the core. Our Lord is nowhere in this picture.

“You will be like God”

The importance of the Serpent’s words, “you will be like God”, cannot be overemphasized. Their influence on fallen humankind’s attitude is clearly manifested today. Genesis 3 sums up modern humanist arguments against the biblical God (as well as postmodern arguments for belief in other “gods”). Humans were led to believe that their knowledge of good and evil is supreme and unchallenged, superseding God's quaint old-fashioned truths about good and evil. They therefore had no need for God since they themselves had become “like God”. This is the Great Lie of Eden, fatal to its adherents, because the imperfect wisdom of man is not equal to the infinite wisdom of the Alpha and Omega.

Friedrich Nietzsche made the famous statement, “God is dead”. So if God is dead, then who is god? We know from Genesis 3 what the answer is (“You will be like God”). If we are gods, then the only laws that are supreme are our own. As gods, we are only limited by the laws we create. As it turns out, Nietzsche and the Serpent in Eden give the same Great Lie. Today this Great Lie is being transmitted insidiously throughout the world with modern and postmodernism modes of thinking.

It sounds pleasing to us that we are gods, as it certainly sounded pleasant to our ancestors in Eden and was central to their temptation. It’s exactly what itching ears want to hear (2 Timothy 4:3). Although it is true that we are God's creatures, created in His image, we are not the Creator. Although created in His image, we fell utterly in Eden, dispossessed of any spark of divinity whatsoever. There is no spirit in humans except that which indwells. Without the indwelling of the Spirit, we are only dust (Genesis 3:19, John 3:6).

“Desirable to make one wise”

This is the sort of “wisdom” that comes from disobeying God, which is exactly what happened in Eden. By relying on the wisdom gained upon eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, people have re-defined good and evil based on their own weak standards of morality, replacing God’s eternal Truths. This is the age-old rebellion of humanity which began in Eden. It has been with us since the Beginning. It’s not going away anytime soon.

“Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him.” (Proverbs 26:12)

The secular “religion” of pure reason is reliance on man’s own wisdom. If there is no God, then people are gods themselves in their knowledge. If there is no omnipotent God, then we as humans are masters of the universe; we are greater and smarter than any mere impersonal creative deistic “force”. Atheism is a religion unto itself.

Remember that in Genesis 3, the lie of the Serpent was for people to trust their own wisdom, not to blindly follow the dictates of the serpent. To get humans to sin and err does not require the devil to come up and whisper to them . It only requires the human to simply listen to himself and his own heart. If a man does not believe in the sovereignty of the Almighty God incarnated in the Lord Jesus Christ, then by following himself he follows Lucifer because he acts upon the serpent’s suggestion.

By trusting in his own imperfect wisdom, man made himself the final judge of good and evil. But history has made it abundantly clear what inevitably happens when man makes himself the final judge of good and evil, and it isn't good. The Great Lie has waxed and waned upon the face of the earth throughout history, but has never disappeared from Creation. It held sway in the days of Noah (Genesis 6), again at Babel (Genesis 11), in the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, and in Rome when Rome flourished under the Caesars. Although it has been around since Eden, it seems to have picked up considerable speed during the last several decades.

Modernity and Postmodernism are fancy words for ideas that could be easily understood by studying the Bible. Genesis 3 explains a great deal about the origins of these ideas. It addition to being a chapter in the Bible, it is a critical chapter in the history of humanity.

Modernity is the bogus concept that humans are perfectible (like gods) and that through progress, technology, and an expanding base of knowledge, they can eventually reach a state of perfection through their own effort. It is Humanism.

Postmodernism gives rise to, and is a result of, Modernity. Postmodernism refers to the fully-stocked smorgasbord of poisonous pagan ideas and religions resulting from human imagination. Postmodernism can simply be understood as paganism. Since we are all as gods according to the serpent, why stop there? Suddenly, all of Creation is teeming with gods.

Some people define Modernity as the way of the present age. It is the human wisdom behind “enlightened” human-centered systems of morality. But humanist morality, for all its benefits, cannot last. It is intrinsically flawed and contains the seeds of its own destruction. Humanist morality and God’s laws, for all their similarities, are ultimately irreconcilable. You can bet that God’s laws win every time in the end.

Postmodernism is here now and isn’t going away. Some people might defend Postmodernism as the way of the future. This isn’t true, because there’s nothing new about Postmodernism. It should rather be called “PRE”-modernism, since it was around long before Modernity. It is a throwback to ancient pagan worldviews. It is a revival of pagan thought and practice, of mystical things, and of the occult. It is neither new nor futuristic.

Postmodernism is old. Very old.

Pagans, gods (lower case “g”), wiccans, wizards, warlocks, witches, soothsayers, necromancers, astrologers, familiars, things that God has called abomination (Deuteronomy 18:12) are returning in full force. They’re baaack! There are enough of them to throw their weight around so that Halloween 2004 had to be banned from the school district of Puyallup, Washington (as well as areas in California), in order to not offend the large populations of practicing witches that live there. The witches in those areas complained that images of witches at Halloween time negatively stereotype them. Pagans now have political lobbies that enjoy significant clout.

Modernity (Humanism) and Postmodernism (Paganism) both conflict with the biblical Christian worldview.

In Modernity, we find the hope of the ultimate assimilation of all races and of all religions, into a uniform, collectivist, and decidedly impersonal society of perfect equals –a worldwide religious and economic utopia. We find the hope for elimination of nations, cultures, and marks of personal identity. Instead of the strife and warring among nations that has occurred throughout history, utter dissolution of nations is attempted. Socialism is a natural result of modern thinking. Modernists/humanists say that we are now entering a Golden Age (some postmodernists call it the “Age of Aquarius”) in which peace, harmony, and understanding reigns. Francis Fukuyama writes in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992) that it is a time when the spirit of the community, the non-ideological blend of the emotional and rational and the resistance to categories and forms will emerge through the forces of anti-nationalism to provide us with a new kind of society. The entire world would join hands and forget about differences.

All of this is fine, except for one very important point: this envisioned international rapprochement (last seen at Babel) would be based on man-made compromise, not on the perfect love of the Lord.

As it turns out, the utopian vision from Modernity is an illusion. Without the Lord, it is an impossible vision to attain. The modern system which Fukuyama calls “liberal democracy” inevitably fails because it rests on the incontrovertibly false premise that man is inherently good, that man is perfectible, and that if humans try hard enough, they can save themselves and their endangered planet. We know that man is fallen and inherently sinful, and has zero hope of redemption through his own effort or intellect. Only through redemption in Christ can lasting peace come to the fallen world.

International terrorism has caused some modern-thinking persons to re-think their worldview.

In Postmodernism, the self holds sway rather than the global community. This has also always been the unspoken rule of Modernity, its dirty secret, which is why Postmodernism (i.e. Premodernism) has never gone away. This sovereignty of the self is a fatal flaw of Modernity buried under the veneer of “brotherhood”, “equality”, “liberty”, etc. Therefore, in Postmodernism, the distinguishing characteristics of the individual, such as one’s culture, race, religion, opinions, aspirations, etc., are preeminent. This is the stuff of nations, nationalism, and local (rather than “global”) communities. The postmodernist takes pride in his heritage, culture, and race. He pursues self-determination, independence, and autonomy. This scarcely helps the cause for one-world government.

As the creation of an impersonal modern utopia is attempted, postmodern ideology generates a great deal of drag. Utopia is being exposed as the extraordinary pipe-dream that it is. But Postmodernism doesn’t give us the answer either. If anything, the abundance of gods for every occasion creates a lot of distraction and competition to the One True God of Christianity, and a lot of noise that tries to distort the clarity of biblical Christianity. But through it all, we must hold fast to the Truth that there is no salvation outside of the Lord Christ, and that there can be no lasting peace without Him.

Modernity, the system of human wisdom, science, and morality, sets the stage and collapses into Postmodernism when the weaknesses of its foundations become evident, which is happening right now. Disaster necessarily follows from the principles underlying Modernity/Humanism, because without absolute standards, the difficult weighing of one person's moral system against another's becomes a thoroughly academic and problematic power struggle, and that is exactly how postmodernists view the world. It soon becomes apparent that because human standards conflict from one person to another and from one people to the next: where there is no absolute right and wrong, no person or group is ever absolutely right or wrong.

Can everyone be “right” at the same time?

We are being taught in schools today that the answer is “yes”. Questions of “right” and “wrong” no longer deal with modern morality, but with “what works for me”. Similarly, questions of truth and untruth no longer deal with accuracy, but with “whatever works”. Where there are no absolute standards of good and evil there exists only what Nietzsche calls the “will to power” to guide one’s conduct. What that means is that there is no absolute standard of right or wrong, only the “standards” of right and wrong that each person defines for himself.

But what happens when the desires of two people, each “right” in his own mind, conflict? If one person's “right” conflicts with another person's “right”, then who is right indeed? The solution for a couple hundred years was the modern humanist solution, in which the aggregate good was the absolute good, and this seemed to work in practice. In other words, the right thing to do is always for the common good.

But for those who vigorously sought deeper truths, it became apparent that humanist systems of morality were bound to fail. This is because without the Lord God, even the “common good” theories are little more than matters of personal perspective or preference. Interestingly, this conclusion was reached by both godless thinkers endowed with great human wisdom as well as faithful believers who loved the Word of God. Among the brightest of thinkers in the Modern Age, Christian or not, Modernity is therefore observed collapsing into Postmodernism.

French revolutionaries of 1789 cried “liberty, equality, brotherhood”, but their stubborn atheism made “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” translate into Bloody Reign of Terror. “Liberty, equality, brotherhood” actually meant “off with his/her head”, and the demands of the revolutionaries saw unprecedented use of the guillotine.

The Bolshevik revolutionaries also cried “liberty” and “equality” when they established a state of “equals” and murdered all members of the royal family. So much for their liberty, equality, brotherhood, and the “common good”.

Yes, in the Soviet Union, everyone was equal – equally poor and equally miserable!

	Left:Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov a.k.a. Vladimir Lenin Right:Lev Davidovich Bronstein a.k.a. Leon Trotsky Below: The doomed Russian royal family of Tsar Nicholas II

Nietzsche showed that removing God, removing His laws, and removing all externally “imposed” morality led to the definition of goodness based on one's own preference. A person is good if the person is good in his own mind. It follows that the person or people who is the stronger is in the right, since there is no real right or wrong to contradict their conceit. Also, there are no boundaries, no rules, and no laws to protect the weak.

Without faith in Christ, the terms “liberty, equality, brotherhood” ring hollow. In the postmodern world without the absolute standards and love of the Lord, they only lead nations in conflict to ask, “Whose liberty? Whose equality? Fraternizing with whom?”

"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." - The Pigs from George Orwell's Animal Farm

There cannot be a perfect world without Jesus Christ. It is not going to happen without Him, and we cannot make it happen. We can only put our faith, trust, and hope in the Lord. We can trust the Lord that events will unfold exactly the way the Bible tells us.

The Backlash: Flight back to Modernity

In the chaos of Postmodernism, some people find it comforting to cling to the older human “standards” of Modernity/Humanism and secular egalitarianism. In the backlash against postmodern chaos and immorality, some who hope desperately to hold on to some semblance of law and order have adopted man's fallible “truth” as the “absolute truth”. They make the mistake of looking at the modernist/humanist worldview as the Christian worldview. It isn’t. The modernist view of goodness and decency, absent of biblical God, is precisely what is needed to pave the way for consummate evil, disguised as good, to gain a foothold on the earth and for the Lie to come to the fullness of fruition that God has allowed in accordance with His perfect plan for salvation and the coming of His kingdom. The utopian religion of the West is “enlightened” Modernity/Humanism. It lays the foundation for the eventual revelation of a “savior”, who is more like an anti-Christ, since the True Christ has already been revealed in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

The collapse of Modernity and its love for the “truth” is imminent, because Modernity/Humanism abandoned biblical Truth and adopted an inferior substitute: the flimsy “truth” of man’s wisdom (science, philosophy, and secular education). Unfortunately, with the advent of Postmodernism (or equivalently, the return of Pre-modernism), there has also been a sudden rush in Western thinking to embrace the supernatural and the irrational, whether or not it has anything to with the Bible. More unfortunately, with the revival of interest in the occult, doors to pagan “churches” have been flung wide open. Tying in closely with the whole self-esteem preoccupation these days, even among professing Christians, it is an insidious, cleverly disguised form of the Great Lie: the substitution of oneself for God. Practitioners believe the second of Jesus’ commandments, but substitute the Self for God in the first of His great commandments. Today, people are praised for wanting the best for themselves, and are called courageous and heroic for following their dreams and fulfilling the deepest desires of their own hearts. Selfishness has become a virtue, “greed is good”, and achievers now boast of their success through selfishness and through their own effort –though their own “will to power”.

In a sardonic twist of events, many professing believers have reverted to seemingly less threatening manifestations of the Great Lie in order to escape the increasingly evident evils of Postmodernism. They appeal to the false ideas of Modernity/Humanism in their fight against Postmodernism.

A great deal of discussion occurs about the need to bring freedom, democracy, and progress to areas of the world that do not enjoy these things as the West does. But from the standpoint of eternity, these hallmarks of Modernity (“civilized” Western culture) are worthless, vain, and even destructive without a firm conviction in the Deity of the Lord Christ. A person needs only to reflect on the decadence and downfall of great and “mature” civilizations of the past to understand this. The temptation for proud man to arrogate achievements to himself and civilized humanity without proper ascription to the blessing of our sovereign God is irresistible.

The king spoke, saying, “Is not this great Babylon, that I have built for a royal dwelling by my mighty power and for the honor of my majesty?" While the word was still in the king's mouth, a voice fell from heaven: “King Nebuchadnezzar, to you it is spoken: the kingdom has departed from you!” (Daniel 4:30-31 NKJV, emphasis mine.)

Many nation-building experiments are explained in terms and language such as “triumph of the human spirit”. But freedom and liberty are meaningless terms unless properly understood as blessing from God. When we take God out of public dialogue, we run the risk of glorifying man and the “triumph of the human spirit” (whatever that means). It is not the “human spirit” that should be glorified for freedom and liberty. We must also be reminded that there is no eternal salvation outside of the Lord. None.

Modernity/Humanism failed and continues to fail, giving way to cleverly disguised postmodern victories. What the dismal Soviet experiment showed clearly is that the pursuit of modern egalitarian ideals of equality and democracy, absent of the biblical God, guarantees victory for utterly selfish, deceitful, and unregenerate forces.  In order for the socialist charade to work at all, knowledge of God and His Word must be totally extirpated from the state. Although denying God and becoming our own “god” in charge might sound like a great idea, where does it actually lead us? Iniquitous men take advantage of the weaknesses of Modernity for their postmodern purposes. They use modern means for postmodern ends. They masquerade as egalitarian humanists, while fully comprehending the flaws of their professed belief-system, to hoist autocrats (who are types of the biblical Anti-Christ) into positions of power.

In the postmodern world, “might makes right”. Many people have bought into this type of thinking, and why not? It’s preached all around us. We are told that we can do what want, when we want, and anything that infringes upon our desires is an evil that must be overcome. We are told to summon the strength within us, not to be humble and depend on God as our strength (Exodus 15:2; Psalms 28:7, 118:14). We are told to do things simply because we can. We see that the poor and the oppressed, furthermore, are used cheaply for the benefit, glory, and adulation, of the powerful or “wise”.

Jesus knew about these things, and was not pleased. He assured us that blessed are the poor, the hungry, the mournful, the persecuted, and they who are hated and called “evil” for the Son of man’s sake (Luke 6:20-23). But flying in the face of God, the messages all around us say: “blessed are the rich, the sated, the proud, the greedy, the adored, the vain.” They have cursed the qualities that are virtues before God, and have made virtues out of the contemptible vices of man. But if you are your own god, then you are taught to love yourself first, in a perverted rendering of Jesus’ Greatest Commandment where “yourself” is substituted for “God”. Thus, the serpent's words “you will be like God” lead to the commands: “love yourself first, and then love your neighbor as yourself.”

The first and Greatest Commandment is to love the Lord God, not ourselves. The God of the Bible transcends the human ideas of goodness embodied in human systems of morality and is the only absolute measure of goodness, and likewise of evil. We must love and respect our neighbors as we are guided by God's Word and by His love first and foremost.

“This is My commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12 NKJV)

Conclusion to Part 1

The assurances of the serpent about man’s godly nature have led to systems of morality throughout the world making Man the standard of goodness and perfection. We have seen what happens when Man makes himself the standard: his wisdom becomes his undoing. If one accepts the premise of the perfection of human wisdom, postmodern “morality” (or rather, “amorality”) is the inevitable result. In this form of “morality”, it is believed that no absolute standard of goodness can be discerned. Moral relativism abounds. This thinking is prevalent today.

But as Postmodernism and its occult appeal gather enthusiastic adherents throughout the world, many continue to cling even more tightly to the modernist/humanist illusion of world peace accomplished by perfected mankind and his brand of justice. According to the Great Lie, the inevitable result is that the wisdom of humanity will open the eyes of all the nations (formerly living in darkness) along with a false, mundane form of salvation (“you will not die”) for all the peoples of the earth to enjoy – with no need for Jesus.

For Christians, the Lord Christ is the Wisdom and the only way to eternal salvation. Christ will rule the world in perfect Wisdom when He returns. The wisdom of this world, on the other hand, is foolishness with God (1 Corinthians 3:19).

There's not much we humans can know about on our own. Even secular humanists observe that the more we know, the more questions we have. But thankfully God has revealed His Truth to us. God's Word will obliterate the ungodly wisdom that entered into the world when humans first ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, tempted by the serpent’s lies. That was the beginning of history. Victory over ungodly evil is assured because the Word will subdue the Enemy of God and the Great Lie that entered the world at Eden. That’s the Truth. And that’s the End of History. ¦