This past week, I was told sticking to creation ex nihilo (from nothing) and using the Big Bang to do so is straw-manning.

Atheists are so confident the Big Bang doesn’t show nothing-to-something they practically accosted me on X when I dared say otherwise.

Well, it just so happens they’re all wrong, and I think it’s because atheists don’t understand what Christians mean when we say creation ex nihilo.

Prior to the beginning there was God and nothing else. Whatever could be contained in God as the eternal standard is what was. The immaterial or spiritual.

He was, is, and always will be because he has no beginning and no end. Therefore, the only something was God and his perfect nature, the ground of all being.

Ex nihilo, then, describes the formation by God of the tangible thingness of the objective material universe. From no thing to some thing.

And when we examine the Big Bang, that’s precisely what we find.

Cosmologists have only been able to measure up to what’s known as the Planck era. A split-second sliver in time where all space, time, and matter came into existence. Which means, whatever was before was spaceless, timeless, and immaterial. Dispossessed of what we could consider tangible thingness.

In this article, you and I are going to walk together through what’s known by cosmologists, the theories atheists have provided to explain the pre-Planck state of reality, and determine why God’s miracle of creation ex nihilo remains the reigning champion of explanations for the existence of the cosmos.

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First A Word On Cosmology

Cosmology isn’t an exact science, and atheists tend to gloss over this.

The field rests on imaging of space, interpretations of photographs and video data, and the application of mathematics, all of which require the tools of logic and reason rather than direct observation.

Empirical method, by definition, requires direct observation, controlled testing in a lab, model-building, interpretation of results, and the ability to repeat experiments. The study of cosmology is only indirectly observable, able to be modeled, and capable of interpretation, but it can’t be tested in a lab or repeated…with the exception of samples collected from other nearby planets. But the latter sample-testing only tells us how our solar system is now, not how it was in the past or what other solar systems are like.

Therefore, it’s more accurate to label cosmology rigorous philosophy employing scientific tools.

Does that mean cosmology can’t be trusted? Absolutely not.

But almost every finding in the field is filtered through interpretation. Again, without repeatable testing. Cosmologists interpret the findings of other cosmologists, who interpreted the findings of those before them, and so on and so forth.

The whole shebang gets more complex when you realize all cosmological theories are unfalsifiable in the sense of empirical study. Because they’re dealing with the proposed history of the universe.

What this means for you is models are highly speculative, can be wrong, require revisions, and, even then, can still become entrenched via broad academic biases, which is what happens for materialist explanations (those that deny immaterial or spiritual realities) of the Big Bang.

As a reminder, here is what cosmologists, both materialists and intelligent design advocates, broadly agree on:

Spaceless, timeless, and immaterial. Write those three words down, because every atheist alternative hypothesis has to contend with what they mean.

Keep all this in mind as we walk through their explanations against creation ex nihilo.

1. Stephen Hawking Needs an Architect

Stephen Hawking proposed the pre-Planck state consists of imaginary “content.” Specifically, imaginary numbers.

Imaginary numbers are hypotheticals, potentialities, represented by the lowercase letter i. Their actuality, as in their real existence, is established only by solving complex equations.

So, they represent possibility, not fact.

The strength of Hawking’s hypothesis is its having acknowledged the possible and produced a working cosmological model for the universe.

But it suffers from an insurmountable weakness. It doesn’t answer the question of what came before the Big Bang.

Since potentialities are not actualities, they’re an effective nothing. You run into the enduring question of how the actual and tangible came from the abstract intangible.

Also, what Hawking’s framework describes is a pre-Planck state made entirely of information. A blueprint encoding the instructions needed to assemble the universe. And blueprints or programs aren’t self-existent. Such specified information, by all we’ve observed in this universe, comes from minds. From designers. From programmers.

Therefore, Hawking’s model, by its own logic, implies a Mind behind the pre-Planck state. Hawking spent much of his career resisting this conclusion, but his model points there regardless.

Atheist proposals only get stranger from here…

2. Source?!!!

Some atheists have proposed energy as the answer to the pre-Planck riddle. They say energy is eternal and serves as the uncaused foundation of everything.

As you’ve surely guessed, problems abound.

First, we don’t know energy is eternal. What we know is that energy is neither created nor destroyed within our observable universe.

It IS however generated, and generation requires sources.

In our cosmos, those sources are material forces functioning as emitters.

• Solar energy traces to the sun.

• Hydroelectric energy traces to water-fueled power.

• Light energy traces to solar bodies and other heat-emitting sources.

• Gravitational fields and magnetic fields are forces tied to physical bodies (planets, asteroids, stars, comets, etc.).

Every form of energy ever studied has a source. So, to assert that energy is eternal means asserting an eternal Source. And proposing that Source to be nothing doesn’t work because a nothing-source is just nothing.

Beyond the source problem, eternal energy runs into the issue of infinite regress: an unending chain of causes with no beginning. A chain with no beginning never starts, which means nothing ever changes.

Especially in the case of inanimate matter or forces.

Energy has no agency. Energy doesn’t decide, initiate, create, move, or act on its own. Energy just is. An infinite chain of impersonal, non-agent energy would therefore remain infinite, impersonal, non-agent energy.

But atheists don’t want to fess up to that flaw because of the implied resolution.

The only category of thing ever observed producing, creating, and changing is sentient agents. So the eternal source of energy, if you follow proper methods of observation, has to be eternal, immaterial, personal, and sentient.

Or…you know…God.

But what about black holes? Do they solve the riddle of the Big Bang without God?

3. Swirling Vortex of Death

The third hypothesis materialists love suggests the universe originated from a black hole.

Pop science and science fiction have given this idea enormous exposure. As soon as I started this section, you thought of films like Star Trek and Interstellar where black holes are wormholes jumping through or twisting spacetime.

Such portrayals might fly in science fiction, but the reality of black holes is much different.

A black hole is a rip in the cosmos caused by catastrophic gravitational collapse from a dying star. Black holes pull everything within reach into permanent nothingness. They ERASE matter, energy, space, time…anything…including themselves. Like demonic vacuums to hell.

Time dilation theories have kept fictional representations of black holes alive, like revolving universe models and the multiverse theory. Also popular in fiction but found nowhere in reality.

However, let’s play devil’s advocate and say multiple universes do exist.

In that case, the multiverse hypothesis doesn’t explain how all these universes are popping into existence, since each would have its own pre-Planck state if it began. What came before remains a mystery.

And black holes only muddy the water.

Since a black hole destroys existence itself, none has ever been witnessed making anything. Also, for a black hole to form, gravity must exist first, and gravity depends on material sources. But:

• No material existed prior to the Planck epoch

• No material means no gravity

• No gravity means no black hole

Hence, we have an unresolvable chicken-or-the-egg scenario. Rendering a black hole implausible as the origin of our universe.

Atheists have one more cop-out, though…

“I Don’t Know” Isn’t An Option

One particular atheist thought he was clever in my comment section by saying, “We don’t know what happened prior to the Big Bang, and neither do you. Get used to it.”

Agnosticism. Say “I don’t know” and be comfortable leaving the question open.

But that’s intellectual laziness.

Agnosticism feels like neutrality but is really indifference, and indifference seeks no answers because it’s indecisive. If pushed into a corner, indifference would curl up and die like a weak-skinned armadillo.

Lack of curiosity and adventure kills.

Imagine our ancestors had collectively settled for indifference on the hardest questions. Nothing would’ve been accomplished. Barbarians would still govern every corner of the earth with minimal technology and zero civility. The same unanswered questions of our origin and purpose would hang over every generation with no forward progress.

You and I are taught progress matters. Are we just tossing that out the window now?

The reason some atheists suggest embracing agnosticism is because they don’t like where the answers lead. The destination. They would rather stay locked up in a comfortable, lukewarm materialist cage than consider the option of God Most High.

Indifference is where knowledge dies.

Discoveries, on the other hand, are driven by creative decisions by those who believe there’s a destination and are ready to accept whatever that destination may be. By people who refuse to accept “I don’t know.”

Lewises and Clarkes roughing and toughing wild terrains with sleepless nights, endless imagination, insatiable hunger for the truth, and a willingness to accept and overcome whatever costs may arise.

So far, the people in history with the biggest spine for adventure, who have made the greatest contributions ever known, have been Christians because we know the Maker, love him, and crave to learn more and more about the incredible universe he’s created.

Ball’s in God’s Court

Since the alternatives have been examined and found wanting, only one option remains: A spaceless, timeless, immaterial, personal, intelligent, powerful God made the cosmos with purpose and intelligibility. Built a readable universe for the sentient creatures inside it (us) to explore, study, comprehend, and relish.

By design.

Why is anything legible at all unless the intent was for someone to understand the creation? The universe didn’t have to be ordered. Laws of mathematics didn’t have to describe reality with precision. Human minds didn’t have to be capable of understanding cosmic structure.

The fact these things align points toward a Mind who made the cosmos to be known. Especially by those minds mirroring his own Mind. His own imagers.

Atheists rage and resist said conclusion with ferocious energy like rabid dogs because a God fitting the description derived from cosmological study matches the God of the Bible. The Christian God. Christ Jesus. Whom many have despised with fierce and genuine passion since his incarnation into human history.

Like Greco-Roman pagan counterparts, they hate the eternal King because a personal, transcendent his existence means good and evil are real. Moral obligations are non-negotiable. And since no one defines stable ethics on personal grounds, we can’t just do whatever we want. We don’t get to be God.

Humanity violated God’s law in the Garden of Eden, and the consequence was sin and death unleashed into a creation. Chaos into order. Nothing into something. Entropy. The slow erosion of everything, perverting and consuming from within, starting at the depths of the human soul. Consumed by pride and coveting his holy throne.

A miracle made the cosmos. A curse slowly kills it.

And from this curse, we all need a Savior.

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You’ve been here before, your friend holding an innocent captive behind the blackened barrel of a silver Glock. His father’s. Faint rings of white powder crust around his nostrils like crystalized sugar, and his shoulders sag. It takes all his energy to lift his right arm, the pistol snagging gravity like a bell weight.

But he stands firm, the clerk mesmerized by those glazed eyes.

He switches hands and bumps your shoulder. “I told you he would cry, Hopscotch.” He laughs. “See.”

Hopscotch is your nickname. They gave it to you the first day, after fists beat you to the ground. The way your arms protruded and your legs were in an upside-down V made it look like the children’s game. Trevor said it was honorable, but you don’t feel it. It’s drowned out by the streams of water running the clerk’s face.

He’s Arab…or something like that. Maybe Indian. The sun-dried brown skin says so. He has yet to speak. He sinks back against display cases of cigarettes and tobacco cans, gaze fixed on the threat. He reached under the counter earlier. There’s a silent alarm sign outside. You don’t know if he tripped it, but the door won’t budge.

“Hey…Jimmy…man,” you say. “Maybe we should let him go. Just get outta here.”

He scoffs. “Come on, man. Don’t you wanna be in?” He licks his lips and wipes the sweat out of his eyes. “Jeremy was clear, man. We go back without em, he’ll hang us dry.”

Jeremy. Darkest dealer in Detroit. Some call him Fuller, the name of the street he operated from in high school, out of an abandoned shack with F*** OFF written on the side. He parks his carcass in a rundown gray wood slum east of downtown. A suburban block littered with lowly souls enduring the torture of pre-afterlife. Drugs go quick in those parts, the bodies flooding in and out of that crapshoot apartment like an assembly line. How he keeps things discreet no one knows, but some suspect it’s the abortion clinic just down the street. The pro-lifers seem to draw attention with their protesting like a bear tramping through a Dollar Tree.

Trevor got you and Jimmy stuck with Fuller. Said he had connections, could get you anywhere you wanted to go. You were wary at first, though. Trevor is really good for nothing except wiping his own pearly white cheeks, though he probably even needs a guidebook for that. But for a teenage kid whose single mother battles stage three cancer and can’t see her own reflection in the mirror, much less her only son, the idea of going somewhere was salivating to you.

Fuller sized you up that first day. Wasn’t sure a puny, Caucasian runt from San Francisco could run with the big dogs. After you survived the barrage of fists (his first test), he’d pinned you to the floor and shoved his shiny revolver between your split lips. This is what life is, kid, he’d said. The doorway to death. All it takes is a little…

He pulled the trigger. Your heart cracked.

He rolled off you, laughing hard, holding his sides. When done, he helped you up and patted your back. You got guts, kid, unlike the rest of my worms.

He sent you to the drugstore a block down, claiming the owner had failed to pay up. You weren’t sure exactly what that meant, but you agreed anyway. He promised you entry into his clique as a bagman. Said he had one on every corner of the city. They collected fees and were the best of the best, so you had to be…if you wanted him to get the word out to all his larger clients. Wealthy brokers who dealt under the table to protect their billion-dollar name tags. They were always inquiring about young protégés like you.

He only let Jimmy come along because you asked. Thought he was a danger to the operation but let it slide. Jimmy asked too many questions and seemed like the sort who would back down from confrontation, but Fuller didn’t know him like you do. It was his idea to get the Glock, his idea to walk inside and point it right at the clerk’s face. You were the coward, but you weren’t going to admit that. Not a chance in hell.

“Man, this is ridiculous. This guy hasn’t done–”

“You chickenin out on me?”

You shake your head. “I’m just saying, Jimmy–”

He points the gun at your forehead, periodically glancing at the clerk to make sure he stays put. “Get over the counter and pop the register.” His breath is fast. “Don’t you dare ruin this for us!”

You comply, reluctantly. You put your right foot on a box of candy bars and push up. They crackle under your shoe and go flat like flounders. You can picture the pieces squishing against each other, shattered. But when you look down, they still have their puff, only fractured, like your arm when you fell off your ten-speed in seventh grade.

You land beside the clerk. He’s watching you, wide-eyed. The dark stain on his blue uniform is growing. You want to tell him it’s okay, that everything will be fine, but you can’t. Not with Jimmy. With him, you never know.

Your mother never liked him. Told you he was bad vibes. But since she was always wrapped up in that mystical crap, you paid her no mind. You should’ve listened, but you couldn’t let him go.

You’ve known Jimmy since Pre-K. He was the wily sort then but never got into much trouble. It was the years that changed him, brought out his worst. His father beat his mother bad. Jimmy would come to school sharing stories with you of how he’d thrown her into the cabinets or slammed her head into the table or smashed her jaw with his wooden slugger. You asked him why she never got out of it, and he said they were coupled, whatever that meant. He just stared at the cherry trees flanking the playground, kicking rocks.

The fights always got worse. And when his father lost his job at the insurance company…

You and Jimmy were sophomores then. It was late. You heard the knock at the door, but not until it became banging. Your mother was yelling, rambling on about the ruckus in the neighborhood and how the black family next door (she called them Negros, but you never liked that word) could never keep it down. But when you opened the door, it was Jimmy. His face was covered in tears, shining as if it waxed. He was sobbing, heavy gasps that forced him to lean against the doorframe for balance.

He fell into your arms and you pulled him to the couch. He lay there heaving, water darkening the fabric, while your mother ran over, frantic and yelling Is he hurt? Where’s he hurt? You saw the first-aid kit in her hands.

You turned him over. It took effort, but he slowly rolled, still shaking. What happened? you said.

He sucked in deep. The slobbery panting of an overworked hound.

She’s dead, he said. He shot her.

Your stomach sank as he told the story…

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God is real. Angels are real. But we’ve been conditioned to ignore them.

My wife and I live two hours away from my family and used to spend every other weekend at my grandparents’ house. Have family dinners, go to the beach, visit theme parks. Normal stuff. Before our son was born.

Boring. Yet bliss.

We’re starting to get back into a similar rhythm since our son is old enough, but that’s beside the point.

One night in 2018, we experienced something we still can’t explain to this day. Something which can only be accounted for as supernatural.

All was well. We had the car packed up. Said our goodbyes.

My wife wanted to drive home since I’d driven there, and I obliged. Buckled snug into the passenger seat. Waved to my mom, dad, sister, and grandparents, who were still standing on the porch.

Suddenly they started to panic. Tried to get our attention. Because a danger was close neither of us saw.

I heard the car click into gear and my wife place her hands on the wheel, as a rumble zipped close from behind. She was about to pull out parallel into an oncoming SUV.

I went to warn her, but she didn’t budge. She must’ve seen it, I thought. Waited.

Then she turned to me and said, “Did you touch my shoulder and tell me to stop?”

Confusion set in. I hadn’t even known about the SUV until my family warned me. And I was looking the other way until it blew past us.

When I told her no, she went pale as a ghost. Here’s what she said…

Angel in the Backseat

After putting the car in gear, a hand touched her shoulder. She felt it press down, clear as day. Then someone whispered in hear ear. “Wait.”

She felt a warm draft like breath on her cheek. No one else was in the car but us and our little dog in the back seat.

She froze. Just long enough for the danger to pass.

Had she merged, she would’ve died right there. Our dog would have died. And I would have been severely injured.

Atheists want you to think my wife is delusional, imagined the hand and voice, or deliberately lied to me. Because they can’t comprehend anything beyond this mortal coil. Refuse to.

But that night still haunts us to this day.

We spent the whole drive back in shock and silence.

While a believer in Christ, my wife was not one to accept the supernatural without question. She grew up a skeptic in a family of skeptics.

My family was more open-minded, so I’ve always been more accepting of the possibility of the spiritual. But what happened puzzled us both for weeks.

We sifted through the usual answers.

1. Hallucination (but it was too real).

2. Conscience (but she was thinking about the drive home, sad to leave family again, running through tasks she needed to get done for the next day, she didn’t even notice the SUV).

3. Stranger (but there was no one else in our car; we did a thorough search, and even if someone was there, they couldn’t have gotten out without us seeing them).

Eventually, we realized any attempt to explain the hand and voice was pointless unless it involved the supernatural. Anything else required too much preposterous blind faith.

It had to be an angel.

What a Great Cloud of Witnesses

I shared this story yesterday on X and to Allegiant Faith newsletter subscribers. Worried the atheists would swarm. Mock. Slander. Browbeat. Demean me and my wife as they always do.

The exact opposite took place.

1.4 million views

9.5k likes

832 shares

467 comments

And growing. Most of them positive.

Some atheists showed up, but the majority of the responses between X and our newsletter community were people with similar encounters. Stories not easily explained away.

• ALadyofHistory said: “When my son was 19 he was driving home when a length of wire from an old fence wrapped around his car tyre. The car flipped over a drain and ended up on its roof, when my husband and I arrived on the scene they were just getting him out. I was sure he would have serious injuries. He told me in the ambulance on the way to the hospital that he felt Joe wrap his arms around him the moment the car flipped. Joe was my uncle who died in 1948. My son walked away with a scratch on his hand.”

• DandyDonnie said: “Many years ago driving home from work I was rocking to the radio when a voice clear as day said ‘put your seatbelt on’ not once but twice. I never used a seatbelt ever in my life. I reached for the seatbelt and buckled it. I remember thinking how weird wearing the seatbelt felt. A few minutes later my car was destroyed from the backend. I didn’t think about it until after I left the ER that night. To this day I still get chills thinking about that voice.”

• Funsize Hurricane said: “I was a young college grad and newly married back in early 2004. I had a very vivid dream about my beloved grandfather who had passed in early 2003. This man was my person. Losing him destroyed me. He very clearly sat down on the edge of the bed and pointed at my chest and said “You need to get that fixed girlie”. He always talked like that. I woke up immediately and told my husband. My first heart surgery was completed in 2004. I was only 28. He had 5 heart attacks, a ruptured aneurysm, fought in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and had been shot 3 different times. COPD took him from us in his late 80s. The man was tough as nails. I knew he meant it in my dream. He was right. I’ve only had one other dream of him, and it was shortly after I almost died in the ER prior to my second heart surgery at 48. He told me to quit being stubborn and fix it. He was right again. Maybe he is my guardian angel?”

• Agora Radio said: “I was walking fast while talking to myself with my head down about to step in front of speeding bus when something grabbed the back of my collar and pulled back onto the curb. When I turned around there was no one there. I caught a momentary glimpse of woman who disappeared.”

• Cole - Modern Dad Survival () said: “My wife and daughter had a similar situation about 4 years ago. They had a green light and started to go at the stop light. The car ignored… yes, it ignored my wife’s foot on the pedal. They don’t really do that. There was no mechanical symptom indicating a misfire/engine lugging or other similar system failure. No check engine light popped on after it or anything…nothing at all. About 2-3 seconds into her confusion, a massive utility vehicle, bucket truck level or higher (10k+ lbs) blew through the light at full speed. As soon as the utility truck was gone, she out her foot on the pedal and it behaved as normal. The car was only about 4 years old, low miles, no maintenance issues, and in excellent operating condition.”

• Chris Larson () said: “4 years ago next month I was in the midst of a multi car crash. Busy street at a higher traffic time, and kids decided to cross the street there and not go up to the light and crosswalk. I was the 3rd car back in the line that stopped. I looked up into my rear view mirror and saw a car coming up fast, braced myself and simply said “Lord, protect us!” That car smashed into the car behind me and took out his own right front quarter panel, and took off. He pushed her car hard into mine, taking out her front left quarter panel. Her car was totaled from the damage. My car… a 2” scratch and barely a dent with that. We didn’t move the cars at all. When the police arrived, one officer kept looking at my car and me, eyes wide, said it wasn’t possible, and that my guardian angel had to be standing between the cars as mine should be badly damaged too. I agreed with the officer and said a prayer of thanks.”

The stories are never-ending. And I fast realized God is alive and active everywhere. Seen, felt, heard, adored…awesome in power and love. People have witnessed his glory and grace.

And atheism is dying.

Atheists, with their obsession over strict empiricism and observation have lost touch with reality. They cry out that the five senses are all that matter, but they don’t mean it.

How quickly they dismiss personal encounters of the divine the moment you claim to have felt the presence of God.

They rather live in closed-minded denial…

Pure Skepticism or Closed-Minded Denial?

Feelings alone are not substantial proof of anything. Granted. Human experience is subjective, so personal claims should never be accepted without scrutiny.

But the atheist’s knee-jerk denial of spiritual experiences, without any serious study of the vast historical record or any attempt at open-minded examination…that’s blind, cultic opposition.

From ancient times to the present, millions of people across every culture and continent have reported encounters with something beyond the physical universe. People of varying degrees of intelligence, from the most illiterate to the wise philosopher. Moments of a clear sense of divine guidance in crisis, verifiable visions filled with knowledge that couldn’t have been gained without otherworldly revelation, transformative encounters with higher beings, and so much more.

Near-death experiences have added another layer, documenting cases in which people report vivid, coherent awareness during periods of clinically measurable brain inactivity. Details later verified by outside sources.

• A woman on an operating table sees a sticker on the upper side of a fan blade while under anesthesia

• A clinically brain-dead man at an accident scene recalls the exact conversation of his paramedics when revived

Such stories are common and inexplicable. Not by nature alone.

The sheer volume of these accounts makes fabrication or mistake an implausible universal explanation. Witnesses are separated by centuries, cultures, landmasses, and oceans. No way to coordinate their stories.

Blanket dismissal becomes absurd.

And all roads point to God…

All Things Are Possible with God

Serious examination of spiritual experiences doesn’t require abandoning reason but applying the same empirical curiosity atheists claim to value. Without limit.

When curiosity operates freely, the cumulative record of unnatural encounters that transform lives becomes a wealth of research into the possibility of the beyond.

They would prefer to call you and me liars and idiots than deal with God. It’s all about rebellion.

The Christian perspective welcomes questioning because the material and the transcendent are part of the same picture. That our universe began to exist and must have a Cause proves one miracle already occurred. Making every other claim to miracles possible.

And the only way to find out is by treating encounters as eyewitness stories until proven otherwise. Innocent until guilty.

My wife and I didn’t set out to face an angel. In fact, I didn’t face it. She alone felt the hand and heard the voice, but her face wasn’t that of a liar.

She looked like everyone who has experienced something that rocked them to their core. Completely altered how she sees the world. An event horizon. Dawning a new day. Through inescapable shock and awe. Something she knows beyond doubt was real and outside the bounds of nature.

I believe every word.

Because I know her, I know the astounding track record of miracle encounters in history, I know we didn’t come from nothing, I see the testimonies from you, and I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.

God is real. Angels are real. Stop ignoring them.

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Religion is integral to humanity. Your beliefs and how you react to them are inseparable.

Your entire life is driven by thought and reaction, and you craft rites and rituals based on your beliefs.

You can’t escape religion.

Yet many bend themselves into pretzels trying to separate religion from reality. When you look deeper, though, you quickly learn religion is more complex than realized.

Definitions exist to distinguish, categorize, and explain identities. And the best definition for religion that fulfills all three roles is:

Religion is worldview put into practice.

Atheists hate this definition because (1) they think it’s not specific enough and (2) it keeps them from elevating their own beliefs above everyone else’s.

It also doesn’t let them elevate themselves above everyone else as if they have a monopoly on intelligence.

And, to be fair, scholars have not settled the definition of religion. They continue to debate and debate and debate. I know because I’m a graduate of religious studies from a liberal arts university. I also went to seminary. And I’ve heard every definition of religion in the books.

Let me tell you, it’s all a bunch of goodwill conversation devolved into muddled confusion and nonsense.

The ONLY clear theme that keeps rearing and bucking in every debate is worldview put into practice.

From my definition you can go further and distinguish between personal religion (individual beliefs/systems around which personal rites and rituals are formed and practiced) and collective/organized religion (communal beliefs/systems accepted by a crowd around which rites and rituals are formed and practiced).

Yet “worldview put into practice” still acts as the foundation.

And rather than befuddle, religion as worldview put into practice provides the best available understanding because of what we already know about the world and human psychology.

Everyone craves to and will worship something.

I state the above definition after years of thinking over the complexities scholars, both conservative and liberal, saw in the term “religion.” And I know it will help you grasp what religion is, why it’s everywhere, and why it matters to everyone, including you.

So let’s explore it deeper…

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Worldview is Destiny

Everyone has a worldview. You do. I do. It’s the collection of beliefs and preconceptions one uses to interpret reality.

No matter how much you might try to avoid having a worldview, such lenses are inescapable.

The wise man accepts this fact and keeps his worldview open to reshaping. Instead of attempting to do away with worldview, he considers available evidence and subjects his worldview to rigorous testing and re-testing.

If his worldview seems inadequate, he changes it to align with his findings. He does so repeatedly, even if that means discarding elements of his worldview he adores and hates parting with.

A fool clings to his worldview, his religion, regardless of counterevidence. And this applies to everyone, not just a select few. Anyone can become so obsessed with his worldview that he loses any sense of self-critique.

The practices one performs under his worldview (the choices he makes, his rites and rituals of worship) form his religion. And just like everyone has a worldview, everyone also has practices they perform in servitude to that worldview.

Some atheists have argued this means anyone who has an opinion is religious. But that’s not the case.

Anyone who has an opinion is a believer in something. So, the existence of opinions proves we can’t escape beliefs. But only worldviews (the systems of beliefs/preconceptions we each use to analyze reality) about the cosmos (its origin, how it works, and our purpose within it) that lead to corresponding behaviors, rites, and rituals in accordance with said beliefs qualify as religious.

We all meet that criteria in some way, shape, or form, which means...

…everyone is religious.

Despite how obvious all the above is, atheists still revolt...

The Divinity Mistake

Atheists refuse to call religion “worldview put into practice” for several reasons.

One is because they falsely assume religion must involve a deity or the supernatural. But that’s also not the case. There are plenty of examples of religion not involving gods or the supernatural.

Here are three primary world religions from history without gods or the supernatural:

Buddhism

The central tenets of Buddhism are about escaping the world. One sheds off earthly existence to escape suffering and find peace, though meditation and willful detachment. The result is merging with the eternal energy or Nirvana, also known as “enlightenment.”

No gods are involved. In fact, Buddhism suggests that true enlightenment transcends the supernatural, as in the Hindu gods and religion.

Confucianism

Confucius constructed an honor cult. He argued Heaven is sacred moral principle, not supernatural, and one attains Heaven by practicing the 5 virtues: sincerity, wisdom, propriety, righteousness, and benevolence.

The gods, if they exist, offer no guidance and no salvation.

Taoism

Adherents of Taoism sought to unite themselves with the Tao, which was defined as an endless state of flux underlying reality, similar to Buddhist Nirvana.

The world and universe in Taoism are a relative and random illusion.

One becomes united with the Tao through meditation, astrology, qijong, feng shui, and internal alchemy. Cultivating the self and the Tao and seeking harmony were the end goal.

These examples all exclude the supernatural from their religion, yet people and scholars consider them among the chief religions of the ancient East.

Ergo, religion does not require gods or the supernatural.

But you know that doesn’t stop atheists. They still resist...

Just One Among Many

Another reason atheists refuse to accept religion as “worldview put into practice” is most of them think they’re the elite arbiters of reason. They pretend to hold a monopoly on factual knowledge.

To be considered a religion would, in their minds, link them to delusion.

Atheists, from this vantage, are immersed in an illusion of power they refuse to relinquish. Like Dorian Grey, they obsess over their feigned superiority, while suppressing truth. And whenever challenged, instead of dealing with the content of any proposed objections, most of the time their immediate reaction is to consider their opponents stupid or less educated.

An atheist who told me my definition of religion isn’t complex enough is a case in point. He wanted me to “educate myself.” Another one under a clip from an interview I did said I was “unusually stupid.”

Not only is that disrespectful, derogatory, and demeaning, it’s also what’s known as an ad hominem, attacking the person rather than the argument. A logical fallacy modern atheists enjoy immensely.

To be fair, the one who called me stupid did accompany his ad hominem with a meme dealing with my arguments, to which I responded. But afterward, when he continued to curse and demean me, I refused to go further.

Acting like animals is part of their rites and rituals because in their worldview, their collective religion, which relies heavily on naturalism or the theory of evolution, we humans are just animals.

Thankfully, we don’t have to play their games because atheists ARE NOT the arbiters of factual knowledge.

Philosophy and theology are where all other modes of knowledge originated. Factual knowledge began as belief. People tested beliefs logically with data, they regularly retested it, and at every level the findings had to be interpreted through the tools of logic and reason provided by philosophy.

Defining religion as “worldview put into practice” forces atheists to look at their portrait and deal with their poor choices.

Do you think they do that? No, they most certainly do not...

Denial

Pure and utter denial is another reason atheists don’t enjoy defining religion as “worldview put into practice.”

I encountered an example of such denial recently. An atheist said this:

“The important difference is that my ‘lack of belief in god’ is not the foundation of my worldview in the way that your belief might be for yours. Many Christians don’t seem to understand this. It’s just a thing I don’t believe, it’s not the anchor of how I see life”

The argument presented in this quote is quite common. Atheists honestly think they just “lack belief in gods.”

But all negatives have implied positive opposites.

Their negative “lack of belief in gods” is the opposite of the positive belief that “the gods are made-up fictions and the material universe is all that exists.”

There are no real atheists. Only materialists, or naturalists, as philosophers call them.

Since every negative is the opposite of a positive, everyone needs to prove every claim beyond a reasonable doubt to consider it factual knowledge. There’s no getting around a claim by stating, “It’s just a lack” or “You can’t prove a negative.”

The atheist above doesn’t understand how his own positive belief that the gods are made up and the material universe is all there is affects every single decision he makes. His interpretation of reality determines how he operates just as much as every other human on the planet.

He lives based on what he believes. Ergo, he is practicing his worldview, making it his personal religion, derived from the collective religion of atheism.

Still, atheists fight and gnash their teeth...

Nihilism

The last major reason atheists won’t acknowledge religion as “worldview put into practice” is because deep down they know there are serious flaws with their materialist worldview.

Materialism taken to its honest end leads to nihilism, the belief that nothing matters and when we die, that’s it. Poof. Gone.

The effects of nihilism are hopelessness and depression from lack of purpose and mission. Nihilism has eroded and destroyed more lives than any other belief on the planet because it’s amoral. If nihilism is true, then anything goes. It’s an every-man-for-himself world. Dog-eat-dog.

Most atheists realize if materialism is true and leads to nihilism, then one of them must be false because of how horrific an end nihilism is. So, they take one of two routes to cope:

Steal from God

Many adopt Christian morals and then claim a materialist world produced them through millions of years of human communal evolution.

Problem is, humans throughout the ages have never aligned on anything. Certain cultures think it’s good to eat other humans (still today), rape and pillage, and do any other number of heinous acts. And from a communal evolutionary perspective, if those acts work for those societies, then those acts are “good.”

So communal evolution is a very poor explanation for morality.

Also, “good” and “bad” are nouns, nominative, meaning they’re objects, and that is the case in every language. If they are objects, what are they? What specifically is being described?

Every offer from atheism to answer those questions has come up wanting.

Just the Brute Facts, Bro

Prominent figurehead atheists like Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Dawkins have taken the brute facts road by claiming that materialism and evolution are just brute facts, and you have to get over it.

Nietzsche was at least honest that nihilism is the end product of atheism, and it abhorred him. But he didn’t want God to exist, so he refused to recant from atheism.

Dawkins is also honest about nihilism, but he tries to play both sides. For him, atheism is true. But it’s also true that society needs Christianity and its moral principles to function and thrive.

In other words, Christianity isn’t true, but it IS good, if that makes any sense.

There’s another factor to consider with point two. “Just the facts, bro” is exactly the same as a Christian saying, “The Bible says it, so I believe it, and that settles it.”

Neither of the two routes provides any solid ground for atheism to stand on. Defense of the atheist position is merely deflected and/or dodged, while materialism and evolution are clung to as gospel.

And by stealing from God or saying, “It’s just the facts, bro,” atheists only prove that they follow a faith-based position. A religion.

Top of the Hill

Religion is worldview put into practice. That definition stands strong because it best incorporates all faith-based systems and their practitioners, is simple, and holds up to scrutiny.

As seen, objections to the definition have been offered from emotion and not by reason. Atheists don’t want religion to be worldview put into practice because then they can’t escape being grouped in with other religions and will be forced to admit they have no monopoly on factual knowledge. And to admit they are human interpreters just like everyone else.

Accepting the definition would also mean they must grasp with the deficiencies of their own position and provide adequate defenses in order to claim it true. They would rather mock and deride opponents, cancel them, or force them to defend their own positions, while pretending atheism is self-evident or “just a lack of belief.”

Nevertheless, they have a worldview: the view that the gods are made up fictions and the material universe is all that exists. And they live their lives according to their worldview (unless they steal from God). This means they are religious, whether they like it or not. And they must abide by the same standards of testing claims as all other faith systems.

Otherwise, they should never be taken seriously.

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I want to tell you a story.

A shop owner from a small town decided he wanted to expand his business. His popularity exploded among friends and family, and they all agreed it would be a good idea to branch out. See if he could help others with his wares.

What he offered was so life-changing, it just had to be shared.

He read online about a neighborhood in a nearby big city with people he knew would love his product. But it was in a shady place. Gangs. Endless crime. You name it.

Seemed every other day there was a fresh tale of some poor soul ripped from this world too soon.

Still…he had to try. He knew his product would change hearts and minds. Revolutionize life itself.

So he set off in a rusty rental van, filled to the brim with his gift of life. Crossed hills and plains of green, gold, sapphire, and orange. Little traffic. Only beauty and fragrance for miles.

Until he arrived…

The towering monoliths of the city swallowed the horizon. Color and beauty sapped away at the first gray city block. Somehow all light hit the buildings and streets and eroded into shadow.

He made it only two intersections before an envoy of faded brown sedans circled and blocked his van. Eight big men with bitter glares and splintery bats circled like starved vultures.

He heard the rough roar of the trailer door right as scabby hands yanked him into the stale eve and threw him to the concrete.

They beat and kicked

He recoiled and fought

But they kept going until the fighting stopped.

He lay there. A still, blooded corpse.

It took all of ten minutes. The bandits peeled away with his wares, leaving the merchant to rot.

Why is what they did wrong?

You might think that a simple question.

• “Because they killed a man”

• “They stole and murdered”

• “They preyed on a helpless, innocent guy”

Responses like that are probably flooding your mind. But those are just explanations of what happened.

Why is what they did wrong? What is wrong? What is right?

We all know what the men did is abhorrent, but few in this age can justify why. Because without God, there’s no standard.

In an atheist world…anything goes.

There MUST be an objective morality beyond us. And here’s why Christianity is the only worldview that can provide objective right and wrong…

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The Curious Case of Subjective Madness

If morality lacks an objective anchor, as atheism implies, then strong condemnations of others become nothing more than personal preferences.

Humans make up right and wrong. There’s no stable definition. No foundation. Only a never-ending slippery slope upon which we are driven and tossed by the wind.

As I’ve written elsewhere, atheists get one thing right: Value is in the eye of the beholder. The problem isn’t acknowledging subjectivity. It’s stopping there. If humans are the sole makers of morality, based on shifting value judgments, then ethics is built on ground no one controls. Anyone with enough power can redefine what is right to suit his own agenda.

The men who attacked the merchant were just dancing to their DNA. Living their true selves. Following their hearts. Carpe diem!

Without a transcendent standard, ethical claims reduce to expressions of emotion, cultural preference, raw power dynamics, or shifting social consensus. And cannot be challenged. Because rights are mere privileges granted or revoked by those who hold control, leaving the weak without protection.

You can appeal to justice or human dignity, but your appeals will have no force. Because competing opinions don’t equate to binding obligations. What one generation deems good, another deems evil, and there’s no end to the madness.

A secular world is a dog-eat-dog world. Where people become mere animals.

Atheists don’t see a problem with that because in their minds we’re just animals anyway. “Survival of the fittest!” they shout. But their view doesn’t lead to any good.

You see it everywhere online. They post memes about how Christianity is allegedly responsible for all evil while in the same breath cursing, spitting, foaming at the mouth, raging, and calling anyone with beliefs contrary to atheism idiots.

History shows that, given the opportunity, they’ll happily become the gangsters in the faded brown vans…

Take a Look at that Body Count

The worst outcomes of subjectivism have not played out in religious societies. They’ve played out in explicitly atheistic ones.

Because leaders and movements rejecting fixed moral norms have repeatedly justified widespread harm by redefining ethics according to ideological whims.

The death toll from communism and socialism stretching from the French Revolution through the end of the 20th century numbers in the tens of millions. Jack Prosobiec and Joshua Lisec summarize the death-toll estimates in their book Unhumans:

• French Revolution: 100,000

• Hatian Revolution: 345,000

• Soviet Union: 20,000,000

• Spanish Civil War: 500,000

• Maoist China: 50,000,000

• 1960s U.S. Cultural Marxism: 1000+ deaths; 4.5 million ethnically cleansed

• Soviet-Sponsored Wars: 4,000,000

• Communist Africa: 50,000+ deaths; 1.5 million ethnically cleansed

Those figures don’t include the millions more who were tortured, abused, stripped of their homes, and robbed of their livelihoods. The atheist communists/socialists first went after Christians, and then everyone else, through executions, engineered famines, forced labor, purges, and systematic oppression. And the numbers are backed up by demographic studies, archival records, survivor accounts, and international comparative analysis.

Religious conflicts have caused real suffering. No one denies that. But their scale is notably smaller when measured against the industrialized mass killings carried out under explicitly anti-religious political systems in the last century alone.

By a long shot!

Add to the above tallies the billions of babies slaughtered through the genocide of abortion since the 1960s Sexual Revolution, and the overall impact against human life from atheist regimes proves to be the most extensive in recorded history.

Because humans can’t figure out “don’t murder Dave” on their own…

Don’t Murder Dave

In a strict material universe, the idea “don’t murder Dave” is mere vapor. It can’t exist as truth or binding obligation. No “oughts” or “ought nots” can exist at all.

Prohibitions exist only as social agreements, and social agreements shift with changing majorities and systems of power. In a universe reduced to blind matter and chance, moral obligations become chemical reactions in brains carrying no binding authority beyond convention.

Arbitrary.

Atheists understand this, even though they deny it. And they reveal their understanding when they engage in victimhood, oppressor-vs-oppressed narratives.

Victimhood paradigms are all we’re capable of developing if there’s no set universal standard of morality because they are the outward expression of “survival of the fittest,” strong-vs-weak.

Communists and socialists (who always go atheist or emerge from atheism) pretend they want the weak to win, but that’s always turned out to be a ploy. An engineered distraction devised so the “enlightened” few can gain control over the “idiot” many.

That secret knowledge (Gnosticism) should sound familiar. It’s exactly what atheists do: Pretend they are the only rational ones, and anyone who disagrees with them is stupid.

And in a world without universal right and wrong, who’s to condemn them?

The issue is exacerbated by misunderstanding the problem of evil…

The Nothing of Evil

Evil has no standalone existence. Evil is the absence of good. A corruption or lack within what is fundamentally right.

Sure, there may be additional causes (criminals, viruses, bacteria, etc.), but what is evil is the effects, the corruption of true and good.

Apologist Frank Turek uses the analogy of a rusty car. Rust can’t overcome nothing. You can have the car without the rust, but you can’t have rust without the car. Because rust (decay) is the slow dissolving of the creation (car).

In the cosmos, the same phenomenon is sometimes labeled “entropy.” Atheists want you to think it’s built into the system. But if entropy is built into the system, then it’s there as part of the program and not an error. A feature, not a bug. Which doesn’t make sense since, based on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, entropy would have caused a heat death of the universe by now. Yet we’re still here.

What also makes little sense is for us to despise entropy. Yet we all do. We hate that everything decays in this world and eventually comes to an end, and we want to change it. Humans even think we can change it.

You do

I do

But if it’s part of the system, then it doesn’t need changing. It just is. No value judgment can coherently be ascribed to the entropy we face…unless it is the corruption of the very-good design by an ultimate Designer. In which case it is absolute evil.

The Bible provides the best explanation. Adam and Eve rejected the perfect Maker, ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil before the appropriate time, and their rebellion destroyed the barrier against chaos and disorder (nothingness). They tried to take a shortcut and ruined everything.

Their turning away from good allowed the absence of good to spread into what God had made (the nothing to consume the something). Sin and death. Entropy.

What the atheist calls evidence against God, the presence of suffering and disorder, is precisely what the Bible predicts follows from human rebellion. The symptoms and the diagnosis match.

We can debate how the presence of evil relates to the character of God. But without a transcendent God, without an ultimate good, the entirety of truth, existence, and morality collapses…

Laws and the Lawmaker

Objective values require a source beyond human opinion. Philosophers across traditions have long recognized this.

Laws defining right and wrong require a Lawgiver whose character defines goodness itself.

God’s transcendent (“above all else”) perfect nature is what makes the cosmos and morality possible. The eternal, personal source of right and wrong derives from the source of reality itself.

Without a transcendent Lawmaker, ethics collapse into preference and coercion. Narrow opinions. Either morality is grounded in something or Someone beyond everything else, or the strongest in the room wins. Might makes right.

Some have tried to argue that since God is the most powerful Being, he too makes morality via “might makes right,” but if his perfect character is what defines reality, then he’s not making up right and wrong from arbitrary opinion. Truth is solidified (objective) in his necessary Being.

“Might makes right” is only a problem if the mighty is part of the creation, not the Creator. Because then the imperfect and unnecessary tries to enslave what doesn’t belong to him with co-opted, pseudo-authority. Stealing from the Almighty.

Christianity offers the only coherent worldview. Morality is real and grounded, not merely a cultural artifact, because the everlasting Beholder who designed the universe established the moral order within the cosmos based upon his holy character.

The man who insists he is good without God deceives himself.

God made us in his image, gave us free will so we could relate to and commune with him, and we rebelled. Broke the very-good creation.

The universal human intuition pointing toward certain acts as wrong (not inconvenient or unpopular) and the persistent failure of pure human systems to uphold justice consistently across time find their place inside a biblical world alone.

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Tell me if this sounds familiar.

You’re in a debate with someone online about something. Anything. Take your pick.

You and your opponent give each other powerful arguments.

You see the pros and cons of each side, have tons to think about, but neither of you has taken the ultimate victory. In fact, there’s still room for enough doubt you could choose either side with a measurable degree of confidence.

Suddenly, your opponent flushes red and blasts out, “You can’t prove I’m wrong! That means I’m right!”

Does that help or ruin his case?

When we let emotion get the best of us, it’s easy to shoot off thoughtless quips. Done enough times, others begin to think we’re careless, mindless fools. And that’s exactly what happened in the 90s and early 2000s when Christians said to atheists, “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist.” Most would use it without providing a positive case for God.

While true (atheists can’t prove without a doubt God doesn’t exist), that statement isn’t a defense for the existence of God. Relying on it alone makes us Christians look insane because it’s an argument from silence.

Silence tells us nothing. In the absence of evidence, speculation fills the void, and any speculation that beelines to a conclusion without support is mere noise.

Christians quickly abandoned the tactic. However, it didn’t stop atheists from slipping the claim “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist” into their moth-ridden pockets to abuse as a smear. Many of them still believe it’s one of our only options to argue for the existence of God.

Here’s why they’re wrong and why you must tear down their petty straw man whenever you see it.

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Gavel for Your Thoughts

By outright portraying the Christian as someone clinging to unprovable assertions, the atheist skeptic positions himself as the rational one from the start. Allegedly standing on evidence while his opponent operates on blind faith.

His move is effective in casual conversation, hollow under scrutiny.

Naturalism (the atheist position that the material universe is all that exists) is no neutral default. It’s a worldview making specific claims about the fundamental character of reality, and it deserves the same rigorous critique you would apply to any other position.

Presenting materialism/naturalism as self-evident while demanding exhaustive proof from the Christian is an equivalent argument from silence. And it doesn’t make much sense.

The logic goes like this:

You’re dumb and have no evidence for your position

SO

You have to prove it, and I don’t have to do anything

That kind of “reasoning” (if it can be called so) doesn’t even work in a courtroom.

Imagine you’re accused of a crime, spend the night in a musty jail, are then dragged before the judge by brawny bailiffs, take your seat beside your attorney and see they have mounds of impeccable evidence to prove your innocence, but the prosecutor across the aisle is disheveled, filthy, and holding a scant manila folder with one measly piece of paper. He then says to the judge, “They’re the dumb one accused of the crime. We don’t have to argue anything.”

Does the judge accept their case? Of course not!

Read more

Atheists love to cite things like trees and photosynthesis, and then laugh off Intelligent Design…as if whatever they select is a sure-fire testament to simple, random, unguided evolution.

But that’s just lazy acceptance without evidence.

There’s nothing remotely simple about trees or photosynthesis. And the deeper you look into nature, the more and more complex lifeforms and their processes get…while simplicity becomes suspect.

The irreducible specified complexity within everything (living and non-living, though mainly focused on living) raptures attention. Irreducible complexity identifies systems made up of many precisely arranged parts, each one essential for the whole to function at all.

No credible ID advocates rest their case on a walk in the woods. Our argument entails vast and incredible systems of specified, complex information systems, the likes of which make AI and computers look like tin buckets.

But what exactly is irreducible complexity? And why does it point to a Designer?

Let’s find out.

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Get with the Program

A system is irreducibly complex when its components express specificity (intelligible information) and are so precisely arranged and mutually dependent that removal of any single piece causes the whole mechanism to collapse.

Not degrade. Not slow down. Die!

These systems appear throughout the living world as deep as molecular ecosystems. Every known system in every known organism operates with complexity, with layers of interdependent parts whose coordination produces functions none of the parts produce alone.

Centuries of work across biology, chemistry, and physics have reinforced that such specified complexity (complexity which carries functional information like blueprints, messages, codes, etc.) resides everywhere in nature. And irreducible specified complexity has only been observed to originate from intelligent agency.

No researcher has documented undirected natural processes generating information-rich structures. Not once.

Look at a few examples…

Special Examples of Complexity

A single living cell contains machinery sophisticated enough to challenge the most advanced engineers.

• Molecular motors transport cargo along cellular highways

• Error-correcting mechanisms proofread genetic code with pristine accuracy

• Regulatory networks coordinate thousands of simultaneous chemical reactions without a central processor

Recent extra-high-definition imagery depicts the interworkings of a cell to be akin to the largest high-traffic city on the planet. One can also imagine digital city-scapes from the Tron movies. A vast, sophisticated program of hardware producing an equally advanced software (life).

ALL parts of every cell fail in isolation.

Each depends on the others in a tightly integrated cohesion, and the absence of any piece wedges a wrench in the entire operation.

Consider other kindred complexities:

• The blood-clotting process preventing fatal bleeding, another example, requires multiple proteins, each with specific roles, fulfilling set obligations and working in tandem to fully seal wounds.

• The eye processes light into meaningful vision through layered membranes, vessels, and nerves, whose partial formation would confer no survival advantage at any perceived intermediate stage. In fact, any absence would guarantee blindness.

These curiosities are representative samples of a pattern found at every level of biological organization. The higher the resolution of the microscope, the more coordinated and complex the machinery appears.

Which makes slow, random evolution through trial-and-error mutations for survival highly problematic…

Dunce Cap for Darwin

Intermediate stages in any evolutionary scenario would lack the coordinated functions needed for survival, leaving organisms vulnerable at the exact moments when partial development occurs.

A system whose function depends on all parts being present offers nothing to natural selection until all parts exist. And, since survival of the fittest is the alleged name of the game, that's a death shot at evolution, no mere handicap. Because no thing, now or ever, would be fit.

Mathematical models shove the knife deeper. Mutation rates, population dynamics, and required waiting periods have been studied in detail, and the calculations consistently show the alleged duration of Earth’s history falls dramatically short for producing observed complexity through blind mechanisms. Even when tallied at millions of years!

Probabilities fall into the range of practical impossibility…without something directing the process. Without a Guide.

And no attempted atheist “loophole” fixes that issue…

A Moldy Excuse

Some atheists bring up mold as evidence that a careless or malicious designer has done something unintentional. Their argument intends to show the universe must be random and unintelligent, otherwise Somebody made big mistakes.

But mold examined seriously instead of dismissed as a biological uh-oh turns out to be incredibly sophisticated.

Mold organisms produce enzymes capable of breaking down a wide array of materials, generate spores engineered for dispersal across diverse environments, maintain internal regulatory systems responding to changing conditions in real time, and operate with genetic instructions precise enough to reproduce said coordinated functions reliably across generations.

Far from a crude accident growing on last week’s expired bread, mold displays the same hallmarks of design found throughout nature, scaled down and thriving in conditions most organisms find uninhabitable.

Atheists choose mold as an example to argue against design because they find mold repugnant and dangerous. And it is, to some extent. The real question is: Why would mold exist in a world created by a perfect Creator?

It’s a worthy question to ask. One philosophy and the Bible both have answers to. But to even get to that argument, one has to presume the existence of a Creator, or the entire question is unintelligible. So…atheists shoot themselves in the foot.

This particular backfire is worth noting because the same foot-shooting occurs across nearly every counterexample critics reach for.

Such examples become especially easy to explain when one steps beyond complexity into fine-tuning…

God’s Eternal Fingerprint

The design argument extends well past specified complexity. Astronomers have documented the fine-tuning of physical constants across the universe with astonishing precision.

Laws governing matter and energy, the ratios between fundamental forces, and the initial conditions of the universe appear calibrated within margins so narrow, slight variations in any direction would produce a cosmos incapable of sustaining stars, planets, complex chemistry, or life.

We live in what’s known as the Goldilocks Zone of the cosmos. Because our own placement, planet, and its interrelated bodies in this tiny corner of the Milky Way meet 100s upon 100s of requirements necessary for life. Requirements so precise that even microscopic change threatens the whole solar system. It’s as if we were put here BY DESIGN.

Don’t believe me? Take a look at these:

1. Cosmological Constant: Determination of the precise energy output required to ensure formation of galaxies. On the Planck scale, it factors to 1 in 10^122. That’s 10 with 122 zeroes after it. Any increase between the Big Bang and now and the universe would move too fast, preventing formation and/or continuity of galaxies; any decrease, and the universe would implode.

2. Gravitational Force: Responsible for elemental formation and planetary stability. Tuned to 1 in 10^34 (10 with 34 zeroes). Slightest increase stars burn out quickly and planets become unlivable hellscapes; slightest decrease and no stars or heavy elements can form at all.

3. Strong Nuclear Force: Ensures universal chemical balance. Tuned to 0.007. If it reaches 0.006 or lower, no anatomical bonds besides those of hydrogen can form because all other nuclei are destroyed; 0.008 or higher and hydrogen is wiped out, alongside carbon and oxygen.

These are only three of the many constants we find finely tuned throughout our own planet and the cosmos.

DNA adds another layer. Information theorists have noted the genetic code functions as a genuine language system, complete with syntax and semantics. Encoded instructions for building proteins with a specificity no known natural process has been shown to generate from scratch.

It’s the precise, finely-tuned direction system and blueprint for all living things, and each organism has its own specific DNA.

A language system without a speaker doesn’t happen. Period. The origin of the code itself remains one of the most pressing unsolved problems in biology, and materialist explanations haven’t closed the gap.

Physical constants and genetic code combined with mountains of specified complex structures point in only one direction: Design by a master Designer.

You’re in God’s World Now

The Intelligent Design perspective rests on a consistent pattern observed across multiple scientific disciplines.

Biology, astronomy, chemistry, and information theory don’t coordinate their conclusions. Their convergence comes from independent lines of inquiry, and all of them find favor in divine creation over blind assembly.

Attacks against a weakened version of the design argument, one built around trees and emotional appeals to suffering, avoid the strongest evidence on the table. At every level, from subatomic constants to the architecture of the eye, the findings exhibit purposeful arrangement, not accumulated accident.

Though the Designer’s identity isn’t found in science, specified complexity and fine-tuning powerfully support the inference that a Mind stands behind the cosmos rather than nothing at all.

You’re in God’s world.

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Yet it drove many others away from faith in Christ.

Why?

Because instead of answering hard questions, it dodges them.

Few serious Christians use the slogan anymore when speaking to skeptics. For the precise reason atheists outline: It’s circular.

The mantra assumes the Bible is the ultimate authority without first establishing why. It skips the foundational questions any thoughtful person, believer or not, should wrestle with before accepting any document, ancient or otherwise, as reliable.

In everyday conversation, it comes across as the crass refusal to think it is, and skeptics rightly push back against it and any other shortcuts that refuse to provide evidence.

BUT atheists also mistake “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it” as the only explanation Christians have for placing trust in Scripture. And THAT is a false straw man easily debunked.

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Corpus Christus

The Bible isn’t just one book. It’s a series of books written over thousands of years with multiple authors from different walks of life across many nations and three separate continents.

Our biblical anthology spans roughly 1600 years or more, with contributions from at least forty individual writers who lived in distinct and divided cultural settings and social positions.

Some were kings and rulers. Others were shepherds tending flocks in silent hills. Still others were fishermen plumbing the depths of a wicked sea, a tax collector handling Roman accounts, a trained physician, prophets who spoke in and defied royal courts, and scribes who detailed the experiences of their people in times of terror, exile, and disaster.

These writers composed their works in three languages, drawing from their own realities. The earliest writings reach back far into the second millennium before Christ, while the latest books in the collection come from the first century after Christ. Materials originated across the Ancient Near East, extending into parts of Africa and even touching early Europeans via the spread of the early church.

Generations of human experience, observation, and reflection shape the collection, all while maintaining a strikingly coherent, interconnected story. No other documents compare.

What best explains this phenomenon?

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Jacob Wrestles Angel, Alexander Louis Leloir

Atheists and liberals conditioned you to treat the Bible as meaningless fiction. But even today, it resists their hostility.

Its interconnections between millennia of documentation always form a coherent story of God on a rescue mission to save humanity and creation from certain sin and death. Verified by external witness and archaeology.

No other collection of documents compares.

And the stories of Jacob seeing the throne room of God and wrestling with God in human form stand as a precipice, where the interconnections of the Bible converge and root God’s loving salvation in a prophetic lineage that stands the test of time.

Long before Moses views the burning bush, stands on the mountain of God, face shining, tablets in hand, a desperate fugitive receives something more astonishing: Two distinct, overwhelming encounters with the living God. A breathtaking vision of a massive stairway bridging heaven and earth, angels traversing its massive steps, and a fierce, all-night battle in darkness with God himself, who loses…on purpose.

Jacob sees and feels God, receives the covenant promises in fresh power, renames the very ground beneath his feet for God, and walks away forever marked…a new name and a lifelong limp. As God’s chosen one.

What begins in fear, deception, and midnight struggle unfolds into the blueprint for Israel’s election, the coming of the true Israel, and the final victory over sin, death, and the powers of darkness through the Son of Man.

Jacob’s story fuses together the election of God’s own nation with the sacrifice of Christ Jesus, God-made-flesh, in incredible ways you’ve never noticed before.

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Forgotten Prophet

Many traditions name Moses as the first prophet. The Jews saw him as the father of prophecy, and his encounters with God at Sinai cemented the reputation across generations.

But Moses wasn’t the first. Jacob was.

Throughout the Old Testament, prophets receive visions of God and the heavens. Abraham comes close to qualifying. He met the Godhead in person shortly before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, a face-to-face encounter of extraordinary weight. But Abraham received only a personal visit, with no vision of the highest heaven.

Jacob receives both. A vision of God’s throne and a separate, physical encounter with God in human form. Two distinct modes of divine contact, two separate occasions.

After each one, he names or renames a specific location in Canaan, the same creative task God assigned to Adam in the garden: Name creation and rule the earth with God Most High.

No other figure in Genesis gets double interactions with God akin to Jacob’s, and the implications of this must be fleshed out.

God’s Anointed Stairway

The vision most people call Jacob’s ladder was not a ladder. The Hebrew word evokes a stairway. And the most immediate parallel from the ancient world is a ziggurat, the massive stepped temples built to connect heaven and earth, with priests ascending toward the gods. Jacob most likely saw a symbolic ziggurat linking the heavens to the ground beneath him.

Two points of meaning emerge from the image, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first connects back to Babel. When humans built the great ziggurat at Babel, they were attempting to reach the heavens by force. Temples across the ancient world were understood as intersections between the divine and the mundane, and movement within and about them almost always ran in one direction.

Humans ascended toward the gods. The gods did not come down.

Jacob’s vision reverses the pattern. The angels in the vision don’t just ascend, they also descend.

God Most High dispatches spiritual beings into the world to carry out his purposes. He sends his loyal messengers wherever he requires, from both the unseen and the seen world.

Melchizedek is one example from the seen world, stationed in Salem, the city of peace and future Jerusalem, known as priest of God Most High, famous for breaking bread and drinking wine with Abraham long before the Last Supper of Christ.

The God of Jacob sends his representatives down, and the question of why any god would choose descent over making us come to him continues to be an awkward puzzle for the world.

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His Holy Throne Room

Jacob’s vision has a direct parallel to Isaiah 6. Placing the two encounters side by side reveals something incredible.

In Isaiah’s vision, the throne room of God opens before him. Seraphim circle the throne and issue continuous praise, covering their faces against the brightness and holiness radiating from the One seated overhead. Isaiah’s immediate response is to bend beneath his own inferiority. An overwhelming recognition of his smallness and sin in the presence of sheer perfection.

The Hebrew word seraph means “fiery one” or “shining one.” Depicted as serpentine figures in the ancient world, tied to the nachash of Genesis 3. With dual possibilities of nachash (serpent) or nochesh (diviner), the creature who deceived Adam and Eve is most likely a seraph.

The serpent of the garden, later identified with Satan, fell and corrupted creation, whereas the others Isaiah witnesses retain their status as throne room guardians of the highest heaven, loyal to God Most High. And Jacob saw them too.

Jacob’s experience at Luz follows the same arc as Isaiah’s. He sees what are seraphim moving up and down between the physical and spiritual realms. God grants him access to himself and the highest heaven at close to their full intensity, and he survives. Stamping into reality the eternal significance of the covenant promises, upon Jacob’s mind and soul.

A fugitive, a man driven out by his own failures the way Adam and Eve were driven from the garden. From his homeland.

God restores and resolves what is lost.

From Stars to Dust

When God speaks to Jacob at Bethel, he introduces himself as the God of Abraham and Isaac and repeats the covenant promise. The land and its inheritance belong to Jacob’s children who will bless all nations. With one crucial change.

God told Abraham his descendants would outnumber the stars (shining ones, aka the sons of God). In the ancient world, stars were widely understood as representations of divine beings, celestial powers, the gods themselves. The promise to Abraham was vast and celestial, focused on the spiritual and physical resurrection and realignment of the cosmos.

To Jacob, God says his descendants will be like the dust of the earth.

The shift from stars to dust isn’t a demotion. Dust points toward the land itself, the ground of Canaan and the physical substance from which man himself was formed and fashioned into the image of God. Where Abraham’s promise pointed everywhere, Jacob’s points downward and outward, into and from the soil (from dust you were made and to dust you shall return).

Jacob’s descendants will become not only numerous but embedded in the earth as God’s representatives, his priests unto the whole world, through whom salvation will arrive. Upon the ground beneath his feet, salvation for all creation from sin and death is to come.

Jacob wakes, anoints the stone on which he slept, and names the place Bethel (“house of God”).

Archaeologists has identified the Bethel in northern Israel, west of the Sea of Galilee and south of the former city of Dan. Close to Nazareth, where Jesus would one day enter the world, and the exact location of Jacob’s Well, where Jesus sat with the Samaritan woman in John 4 and declared himself the “living water.”

Promises of the covenant become prophecies of the Savior.

Abraham and Isaac staked God’s claims in the south and middle of Canaan divine providence. The anointed stone at Bethel extends the claim northward. And the promised land is surrounded by God, stone by stone, infused with the grand mission of cosmic rescue.

And then comes the dogfight with God…

Dogfight With God

The Jabbok River runs 60 to 80 miles through the central Jordan basin. Its banks are dense with vegetation, its waters blue and severe as the river winds like an angry snake between the Dead Sea and the Sea of Galilee.

It splits the Gilead highlands: Israel to the west, Jordan to the east. Along its length, multiple fords narrow the river enough to cross, and archaeologists have identified two twin mounds called Tulul adh-Dhahab as the strongest candidates for Peniel (ash-Sharqi) and its sister camp, Mahanaim (al-Gharbi).

Because the Jabbok offered the most accessible crossing of the Jordan River, it served as the same route when Joshua later led the Israelites from Transjordan into Canaan. The Ark of the Covenant ahead of them, Jericho waiting on the other side.

Jacob arrives at the Jabbok in fear, after years away on northern Mesopotamia. He sends his family ahead into Canaan toward what would become Mahanaim, dividing his camps because he’s terrified of his brother Esau. The man he wronged years before. His mother Rebekah helped him steal Isaac’s blessing through deception, a pattern echoing what Eve set in motion with Adam in the garden, but this time in a mother-son dynamic.

Jacob never faced Esau again after the theft. He stands now on the eastern bank, alone, between the life he built and the reckoning he avoided for years.

At Bethel, Jacob was a young man in flight, a fugitive shaped entirely by deception. Years in Paddan-Aram, the region of northern Mesopotamia/Assyria, changed him. He served under his uncle Laban, was deceived by his own kin, endured loss after loss, but came out the other side with wealth and something much more valuable: Wisdom earned through suffering.

He wrestled with men and won.

Now, at Peniel, God initiates a new encounter. In human form. Struggles with Jacob the entire night until daybreak. This time Jacob secures blessing not through deception but through refusal to quit. Sheer, exhaustive endurance.

He doesn’t know who he’s fighting. He asks the man to tell him his name, and the question is met with a question in return: Why do you ask? The man’s question implies Jacob should already know. Because he’s already seen God before. But he doesn’t know. Jacob likely believed he was facing an angel. One of the messengers (seraphim) who descended the stairway. Which, while still unnerving, lessened the impact.

God renames Jacob Israel. Because now he has struggled with God and with humans and has overcome. The name (“he who wrestles with God”) serves as the badge of his election, the everlasting namesake of God’s mission of redemption. And Israel’s third and final forefather names the location Peniel (“face of God”).

Jacob’s descendants would spend generations like their forefather, falling and returning, wrestling with the God who chose them from the nations. And the face of God (Peniel) would one day enter the world through his people.

God strikes Jacob’s hip and leaves a permanent mark. A limp that will not heal. Evidence the election of God’s own nation through Jacob will be the permanent vehicle by which he intends to rescue the rest of the cosmos after intense pain and torment.

He (God) shall struggle with humanity and lose, yet emerge victorious…

God Lost…On Purpose

The wrestling match at Peniel raises an obvious question: If God is all-powerful, why did God not simply overpower Jacob?

Atheists love to read the text as evidence of divine limitation. God wrestled Jacob and did not win outright. Therefore God is weak, beatable, and worthless. But that reading ignores everything established before the match began.

At Bethel, God arrived to a young fugitive’s campfire. At Peniel, God arrived to a strong, wise man bred from years of overwhelming toil and struggle. The logic of both events is identical. Jacob saw, fought, and conquered, just as God would latter see, fight, and conquer through the Son of Man. Allowing Jacob to win was the point of the encounter and no concession to Jacob’s strength.

God works with cause.

Jacob had to feel the weight of his election in body and soul, not merely in understanding. The permanent limp he carried afterward was the physical sign of the real fight, in flesh and bone, that had taken place and would resurface when Christ again wrestled in the final victory against gods and men.

Jacob’s descendants would feel the weight of their election through centuries of struggle, defeat, exile, and return, culminating in a full overcoming of the forces of darkness in the seen and unseen realms. God would again lose on purpose, lay down his own life, and rise again to destroy forever the stranglehold of sin and death, chaos and corruption, and re-establish access to the Tree of Life for all creation.

A full-fledged restoration of Eden.

With Peniel east of the Jordan and Bethel to the north and Abraham’s and Isaac’s markers in the south and middle, Canaan was now surrounded. God’s stakes covered every side. The cosmic conflict between the God of Israel and the fallen sons of God who held ancient claim to the land and all nations would center on this people (Israel) and this territory (Nephilim land).

His Everlasting Salvation

In the dust of Bethel and the midnight shadows of Peniel, a forgotten prophet rises, and the entire story of redemption snaps into focus.

Jacob’s story is no footnote. He stands as the first to receive both a heavenly vision and a physical encounter with God Most High. A towering stairway where angels descend at God’s command (reversing the arrogant climb of Babel), a throne-room glimpse of fiery seraphim striking fear and awe, and a weary wrestling with God himself after years of conflict with humanity.

From stars to dust, the covenant promise shifts from celestial vastness to earthly embedding. Jacob’s descendants will take root in the soil of Canaan as priests for the world. He anoints stones, renames places, and leaves markers across the land that prophetically encircle the future battlefield of cosmic rescue.

God then “loses” on purpose so Jacob can gain the name Israel (“he who wrestles with God”) and a lifelong limp as proof God’s election is forged through struggle, not comfort.

We are made witnesses to God’s divine strategy through his story. Meeting a deceiver on the run, transforming him through suffering and perseverance, and staking claim in the very ground where the Son of Man would one day walk, become living water for outcasts, and finish the fight against sin, death, and the fallen powers and principalities of darkness.

Each of us lives in this story because it belongs to us.

Divine election works through weakness and makes it strength. The same God who sent angels downward still descends to meet you in your wilderness. The permanent limp of struggle becomes the badge of belonging. And the promises made over dusty ground still stand.

God embeds His people in broken places to bring blessing to the nations. When life feels like an endless night fight, perseverance wins the blessing. When you feel unseen or unworthy, the God of Bethel still opens heaven over ordinary stones.

Without him, there’s no purpose. No way. No meaning. Only hopeless, pitiful randomness and annihilation. We all know it, even though so many pretend they don’t.

But for those who hold fast to Christ, God-made-flesh entered the world through Israel, took on gods (the fallen sons of God) and men, defeated sin and death, and brought to completion what the covenant, law, and prophets foresaw. A full resurrection of the cosmos to eternal life.

The war behind the war at Peniel became your salvation.

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Is God the villain?

Ask many people in our world, and they’ll blast a resounding, “YES!!!” But their absolute hatred for him comes from misreading and mistreatment of the Bible.

The stories of Hagar and Ishmael at the wells are a case in point. In Genesis 16 and 21, modern readers find what they think is a ready-made smoking gun of divine evil: Abraham, the patriarch, and God and the “oppressive” system they represent.

Hagar and Ishmael are helpless victims, atheists and feminists say, crushed beneath the weight of male power and ancient patriarchy. The victimhood feels familiar, almost comforting in its simplicity.

But the full context of Scripture tears their script apart.

Sarah, mother of the son of promise and the very heart of the covenant line, is the one who introduces Hagar as a surrogate, then turns on her with ruthless contempt once she conceives. Demands the expulsion of mother and child. Even as Abraham himself resist.

Raw human jealousy and possessive fear unleashed, the Fall again on an intimate and devastating scale.

And the abuse which starts the saga doesn’t reign supreme. A runaway Egyptian servant, scorned and cast out, suddenly stands at the center of divine attention. Names God. Receives blessing.

Sovereign God works breathtaking mercy through the very failures and fractures caused by those closest to his promise.

Blesses

Arranges

Prepares

Delivers

The Living One…through living waters.

What begins in cruelty and exile becomes the path to cosmic restoration.

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Servants and Masters

Throughout both chapters, the Hebrew term for Hagar is shifchah (“maidservant” or “handmaid”), not the word typically associated with chattel slavery in modern imaginations. In the ancient Near East, shifchah often described female household servants or indentured workers who provided domestic or agricultural labor in exchange for support.

Biblical usage across Genesis and beyond shows it as a relational term of service under a household head. Distinct from the harsher connotations of perpetual ownership.

Abraham saw Hagar as family.

Second Temple sources, including traditions reflected in Josephus and later Rabbinic writings, suggest Hagar entered Abraham’s household as part of the wealth Pharaoh bestowed on him after the events of Genesis 12 (when Abraham, in fear, passed Sarah off as his sister). Some Midrashic expansions even portray Hagar as a gift or high-status Egyptian attendant, though the biblical text itself leaves her former life a mystery.

Feminist readers have long highlighted the stories of Hagar and Ishmael at the wells (Genesis 16 and 21) as stark examples of patriarchal abuse. But is that what we really see?

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The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is one of the most epic tales in the Bible. Fire falls from the sky, a woman turns into a pillar of salt, and God decimates two wicked cities in a fit of divine wrath.

It’s one of the most retold and examined stories in history, and most people treat it as a settled, cautionary tale about sexual sin. End of discussion.

But there’s so much more.

The cities are real. The event that destroyed them was so violent it turned pottery into nuclear glass. And six major threads emerge from their demise that add significant layers to understanding God’s Word:

Who were the three men who visited Abraham in Hebron? Why does God warn Abraham of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? Does God not know the evils they were committing and make a best guess? Why barter with Abraham over the righteous in the two cities? What was the major sin committed by the men of the cities? And how does the calamity link to the Passover?

These questions all have incredible answers. And you’ll love where they lead.

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Cities of the Plain

Scholars still like to debate the location of Sodom and Gomorrah. But it’s mostly opinionated bickering over minor details.

The chief candidate for Sodom is Tall el-Hammam, east of the Jordan River, directly north of the Dead Sea within the Kikkar Valley.

The site matches the biblical description and experienced an extraordinary cataclysmic event. Almost the entire plain was super-heated to 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit for a matter of seconds, decimating everything.

Scientists know because pottery shards found there fused into green glass on one side. Trinitite. The same glass discovered in the Mojave Desert after the Oppenheimer nuclear tests during World War II.

Tall el-Hammam went uninhabited for over 700 years after the catastrophe, while surrounding societies continued to flourish and grow. And Ancient Near Eastern sources describe the place as cursed, a wasteland of mourning.

No better explanation has been offered for the catastrophe besides divine conflagration.

The only dent in Tall el-Hammam is dating. Recent archaeological discoveries place the Israelites in Egypt prior to 1400 B.C., posing a problem for conventional timelines.

Scholars date the destruction of Tall el-Hammam to around 1700 B.C., but if the Israelites were truly in Egypt for 400 years after Joseph, that timeline collapses. The real timeline for the catastrophe in the plain would be sometime prior to 1800 B.C., likely around or before 2000 B.C.

The dating itself is what must be wrong, though, because the weight of the other evidence discovered there suggests it IS the site of ancient Sodom. Without question.

The cities are real, were destroyed as described, and their significance goes beyond archaeology…

Three Men, One Lord

The first two of the six threads found in Genesis 18-19…the identity of the three men and God’s revelation to Abraham…are intertwined.

Contrary to common critiques of Genesis 18, the men who visit Abraham aren’t separate figures from the Lord. They’re one and the same.

The opening verse functions as a blanket statement, the same literary move made in Genesis 1, where God creates the heavens and the earth without a timeframe or method.

All we’re provided is the general “what.”

Details come after.

In 18:1, “the Lord appears to Abraham” sets the scene. God, three-in-one, comes to Abraham in human form, familiar and accessible. Tangible.

The Trinitarian reading finds confirmation later in the chapter when two of the party leave toward Sodom while the Lord (the Father) continues speaking face to face with Abraham.

Genesis gives no number when they depart Abraham, but chapter 19 opens with only two men approaching Sodom, where Lot meets them at the gate. The narrative flows without interruption from the previous chapter, making plain that these two belong to the original group.

God grants Abraham a full vision of his unity. Why?

The visit occurs immediately after the formalization of the covenant and the granting of the covenant sign of blood: circumcision (Genesis 15-17).

Up to this point, God had revealed nothing of his plans to Abraham beyond the promise of a great nation and a blessing on all peoples. The covenant now sealed in flesh becomes the reason God grants Abraham deeper knowledge of the future. Abraham is God’s official elected lower-case messiah.

There’s also a dimension of witness in Genesis 18. When God pronounces judgment, he does so openly, with Abraham watching.

So, the question of the three men and the subsequent revelation is really about what kind of God shows up in human form, eats a meal at a stranger’s table, and then destroys two cities. Genesis doesn’t provide a comfortable answer…

Big Crimes Court

God’s phrasing in Genesis 18:20-21 confuses readers who move too quickly. Or without proper context.

Then the LORD said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great and their sin is very grave, I will go down to see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me. And if not, I will know.”

Atheists think God speaks as though going down to see whether the reports match reality because he’s uncertain of their crimes…or reality…or both.

Wrong.

God knows full well the Sodomites’ crimes (and reality) and sets up a trial for their benefit. Because it’s his desire that none should perish.

God performs a similar operation in Job. There, the satan, a title meaning “accuser,” moves back and forth across the earth and reports on human affairs to the heavenly council. This figure witnesses and accuses, receiving limited power to enact tests where God permits. Despite God’s oversight and full knowledge.

In other words, God is communal. He seeks participation in his affairs from his creation. Especially its sentient members.

In Genesis 18, outcry against Sodom reaches God. A report rises from the heavenly council, an accusation lodged by an accuser(s).

God gives Sodom and Gomorrah one last opportunity before destruction, as he gave humanity time before the Flood. The Nephilim and their violent human counterparts pushed the world to a breaking point before God resorted to annihilation.

Sodom takes the same trajectory at smaller scale.

Involving Abraham in the last act of patience shows God’s communal desire stretches to the earth. Abraham enters the trial as the covenant elect. Lower-case messiah appointed by God. A position not earned. Witness and mediator.

Having dealt with Sodom before during the kings’ wars in chapter 14, Abraham also knows firsthand how bad Sodom is. Got a taste of their depravity. And is in a position to know the truth.

As messiah, Abraham must provide their defense…

Ten is the Lowliest Number

Atheists also read the bargaining between Abraham and God as evidence of divine uncertainty. But God is no more undecided here than he is unknowing of Job’s innocence or Sodom’s crimes.

The back-and-forth between Abraham and God is the courtroom proceeding itself. Abraham as advocate, God as presiding judge.

Abraham builds his case based upon the nature of God. He appeals to divine mercy and to God’s desire to uplift the righteous and destroy the wicked and successfully whittles the number down to 10 righteous men. The threshold that would prevent Godly destruction. Then stops there.

Genesis 18 offers no explicit reason. The implication is Abraham reached a threshold below which no argument for mercy holds. If ten righteous people are not found in Sodom and Gomorrah, the cities are consumed by demonic evil and will receive a just judgment.

Think about how vile and corrupt they must’ve been that they couldn’t even meet that requirement.

Yet the limitation set by Abraham isn’t as far as God will go.

What Abraham doesn’t know is God already accounted for the only righteous household in Sodom. Lot and his family were never going to be swept into the judgment (except Lot’s wife, who chooses to look back in disobedience and becomes a pillar of salt).

Understood as courtroom proceedings, the bargain makes much more sense. It serves to contrast God’s own goodness and generosity against a kingdom so wicked not even ten righteous men compose its ranks.

Genesis 19 then solidifies their depravity and condemnation…

Sexual Perversion and Violence: A Pre-Flood Reversion

Lot is sitting at the gate of Sodom when the two men arrive. In the Ancient Near East, the gate was the seat of civic authority, the place where elders judged disputes and held influence.

A righteous man had standing in the most corrupt city of the Trans-Jordan, where decisions were made, and still the city was beyond saving. How deep the rot had to run for a righteous elder at the gate to change nothing.

He prevents the strangers from going to an inn at the town square because knows how grotesque and depraved the men of Sodom are. And like it or not, the number one sin highlighted is same-sex relations.

Not lack of hospitality. Not mere violence.

Same-sex relations. Specifically same-sex rape.

The men of Sodom demand to have sex with the two visitors. By force.

Other passages of Scripture verify that there were many sins the Sodomites committed, but only one is called “abomination” and/or “strange flesh” (see Ezekiel 16:49-50; Jude 7; and 2 Peter 2:6-8). God’s Law also names same-sex acts an “abomination,” the same category of language used for the sexual perversion and violence of the Nephilim before the Flood.

The connection is deliberate. Jesus himself, the ultimate Messiah, notes it in the Gospel of Luke:

For as the lightning flashes and lights up the sky from one side to the other, so will the Son of Man be in his day. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation. Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man. They were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all. Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot—they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day when Lot went out from Sodom, fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all—so will it be on the day when the Son of Man is revealed. On that day, let the one who is on the housetop, with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away, and likewise let the one who is in the field not turn back. Remember Lot’s wife. Whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will keep it. I tell you, in that night there will be two in one bed. One will be taken and the other left. There will be two women grinding together. One will be taken and the other left (17:24-35).

Careless frivolity.

Sodom’s condemnation (and soon the world’s) goes beyond a single instance of wickedness. Like the pre-Flood world, they were consumed with twisted sexual perversions, chief of which was same-sex rape, and violence…all…the…time. Every second of every day.

An endless “party” in which the weak and innocent were the “plaything” of the strong and most brutal. Until they too became perverted by the same twisted desires.

The whole crowd of men comes to Lot’s door demanding the visitors be released to them. For forced defilement. Lot calls the act despicable, understanding the grotesqueness of what they are demanding. He offers his daughters instead, a disturbing move (a failure from fear he shares with Abraham and Isaac).

But nowhere near as debased as the Sodomites’ demands.

The men of Sodom want to use members of the Godhead as objects of sexual violence and degradation, a deliberate contempt for both God and his creation. “Demonic” is too small a word.

When the mob refuses to relent, the angelic visitors strike them blind. The sentence the city earned becomes visible in a single instant. And leads to an astonishing connection you never saw coming…

Bread Baked for a Fast Break

Lot makes bread for the two men when they arrive. No yeast. The text treats this as a practical detail: quick bread for unexpected guests. But it opens into something much larger.

Around 800 years earlier, Lot and his household are rushed from Sodom for the same reason Israel is rushed from Egypt. To escape slavery and live.

In Exodus, God commands the Israelites to bake unleavened bread on the night of the final plague, the death of Egypt’s firstborn. They eat in haste because they are about to be rushed from the land. Bread without yeast becomes the bread of urgency.

The Pharaohs, in their cruelty, enslaved God’s people and killed their children, threatening to obliterate them into oblivion until they ceased to exist as a people. Ruining God’s plans for creation.

Sodom and Gomorrah enact the same hatred on a more concentrated scale. A regime given over to crushing what God built and violating those God called his own.

The Passover carries the echo of Lot’s bread, baked without yeast, on the night the fire came down, and unites it with God’s later deliverance of his people through the death of the firstborn.

Both stories end with what comes after the fire. God’s patience and God’s severity work toward the same end. His glory and the rescue of the righteous.

From the world. And from themselves.

First with grace, then with power.

The Paradox of Deliverance

In the smoldering ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah, where pottery fused into nuclear glass and an entire plain was scorched by heaven’s fury, we encounter the breathtaking complexity of a God who is terrifyingly just and relentlessly merciful.

The story is far more than a cautionary tale about sexual sin.

You saw real cities reduced to ash; you saw God step into history, sit down with his elect, speak face to face, then judge without error; you watched a courtroom unfold where nothing was hidden, where mercy stretched further than anyone expected, and where even ten righteous men could not be found; you followed the thread of corruption from private vice to a public system that fed on the weak and celebrated violence; and you traced the quiet detail of bread baked in haste, the quiet, unleavened bread linking Sodom’s daybreak destruction to Israel’s deliverance and the greater Passover to come.

Archaeology confirms the cities of the plain were real. The Bible reveals why they fell. And the living God shows us how he governs with both mercy and judgment in perfect wisdom. Never guessing, never uncertain, but always longing that none should perish.

Yet even as the fire falls and Lot’s wife becomes a pillar of salt, the story refuses to end in ashes.

The ruins of Sodom still speak.

They warn us. They humble us. They invite us to examine our own cities, our own hearts, our own desperate need for the God who saves the righteous while refusing to leave evil unchecked.

Perhaps most powerful of all, Sodom’s story leaves us hungry for the rest of the story.

It points forward. To a greater Messiah who would one day stand in the place of the guilty. A greater Deliverer who would break the bread of urgency with His own broken body. A final Day when the Son of Man is revealed like lightning across the sky, judges the wicked once and for all, and restores fallen creation.

God’s justice is real. His mercy astonishing.

And the best chapters of his dealings with humanity are yet to unfold.

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A cowardly husband calls his wife “sister” and hands her over to a foreign king to save his own skin.

Sounds like a soap opera. Or some ridiculous Bravo TV show.

Yet it happens in the Bible. Twice with Abraham, once with Isaac.

Feminists carry Genesis 12:10-20 and chapters 20 and 26 around in their Gucci bags as fodder to beat down men, destroy the family, and castrate God’s church.

Bible defenders squirm. Critics sharpen their pens. And the whole fiasco gets filed under “proof the patriarchs were horrible men God should have fired.”

But such a reading misses about 90% of what is happening. Buried inside three of the most uncomfortable passages in Genesis is a prophetic architecture so precise it should stop you cold.

These stories aren’t just about human failure. They’re about which nations would spend centuries trying to destroy Israel, why they failed, and how God embedded the entire trajectory of that conflict into a series of domestic scandals before the nation of Israel even existed.

To prove that where humans fail, God redeems.

Abraham lies. Isaac repeats the lie. God protects both of them anyway because the promises he made required it. And the foreign kings caught in the middle? They walk away from each encounter knowing something unsettling: There’s a force at work in this family the world can’t outmaneuver.

What follows is a close look at all three episodes, what they share, where they diverge, and why the details most readers skim over paint the picture of a God who cares, fights for, and defends his own…including you.

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The Doom Cycle of Fear

It’s easy to fixate on what Abraham and Isaac did to their wives in Egypt and with Abimelech. Calling them sisters and handing them over as if they were property to be traded.

It was wrong. No one’s defending it.

As noted, skeptics, especially those of a feminist persuasion, love to use these passages to portray men as patriarchal oppressors and blame God for not stopping Abraham and Isaac. Before they betrayed their wives and almost caused international meltdowns.

Their criticism is understandable on the surface. But it requires ignoring context entirely.

We know their behavior was despicable because we live post-Christ, in a world revolutionized by Christian morals. Abraham and Isaac lived in a radically different time.

It wasn’t uncommon for humans to participate in acts God would later reveal as sins.

Ancient kings had a tendency to kill foreign men and take their wives and children as slaves. Violence everywhere, all the time, a continuance of pre-flood bloodshed. It was enough to instill fear in even the most courageous of men.

So, the fear of the forefathers was understandable. The choices made? Not so much.

Abraham and Isaac had God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth on their side. That intimate connection with the eternal Maker should’ve butched them up.

Instead, they folded like unwrapped Slim Jims. And nowhere does God endorse their deceptions. He doesn’t applaud Abraham for his cunning or reward Isaac for following his father’s playbook.

What he does instead is intervene at the precise moment the lies threaten to dismantle his holy mission through total loss of his elected children.

God bestows grace.

Human fear, left to its own devices, drifts toward self-preservation at someone else’s expense. And God moves to protect Abraham, Isaac, and the nations from the fallout of one man’s fear.

The Allegiance of God Most High

There’s a theological current running through all three stories, and once you see it, the individual episodes feel less like embarrassing footnotes and instead reveal a deliberate pattern.

Read more

You’re told to treat the resurrection like a comforting story.

Because skeptics want to keep their own comforting illusion of meaningless existence alive and well.

But a dead man walking out of his grave is a claim that breaks history open and challenges everything built upon it.

Nothing comforting about that.

If Christ remains buried, then Christians are most to be pitied. We’ve either been duped by a lie or participate in the most scandalous event the world has ever known.

So what really happened three days after the cross?

Below are 7 reasons you can and should trust your Savior lives.

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1. Brand New World

Christianity did not spread through comfort or power. It moved through pressure, loss, and resistance.

Where it took root, things radically changed.

A God who loves. A moral law grounded in something higher than preference. The idea that every person has value. Systems of thought that led to freedom, scientific pursuit, and the abundance of art and beauty.

These grew out of a worldview centered on Christ. Remove his root and the fruit withers.

Bad ideas decay. Good ones produce order and life. And the Christian vision has shaped societies in great ways no competing system has matched.

Throughout history, societies built on it’s foundation saw the development of institutions that cared for the vulnerable, hospitals that treated the sick regardless of status, and legal frameworks that emphasized justice rooted in the dignity of every individual.

The emphasis on a personal relationship with a loving God encouraged exploration of the natural world as something orderly and discoverable rather than chaotic or arbitrary. Such perspectives contributed to environments where inquiry could flourish and creative expression could reflect both human struggle and divine order.

The lasting impact of Christ remains visible in social stability, charitable work, and intellectual advancement emerging where the Christian message took hold and endured.

Because he rose again.

2. The Savior’s Roadmap

Jesus told his followers what would happen.

• He spoke of suffering.

• He spoke of death.

• He spoke of rising again.

When he was crucified, every expectation should have collapsed. It did for other Messianic movements in the Second Temple period. Their leaders died, and they disbanded.

The same started to happen with the disciples. Every one of them, except John, disappeared when the Pharisees’ guards arrested Jesus and put him on trial, for fear they would be next.

Their teacher was executed in the most shameful way known to the Roman world. A cursed man nailed to a tree. Movements built on men like that do not survive.

Yet this one did.

Not slowly, not through careful rebuilding, but through sudden conviction. The same men who fled in fear began speaking with certainty that their leader had risen from the grave.

They believed he kept his word.

The pattern of prediction followed by fulfillment stands out because the events unfolded exactly as described. Even when contradicting every cultural expectation of victory or earthly power.

Rapid change in the behavior of those closest to Jesus points to an experience that overturned their despair and replaced it with bold proclamation.

The promised outcome emerged as foretold.

3. Master of Life and Death

Before his own death, Jesus raised others. Lazarus is the most notorious example. Dead for well over a day, and then walked out of the grave upon hearing the Savior’s voice.

These resurrections weren’t secret acts. They happened in front of witnesses, in public settings where doubt would spread fast if anything felt staged.

The disciples saw it. Others saw it. Jesus demonstrated his everlasting power over death.

So when he later died, the idea of him rising again didn’t come as a surprise. Overwhelming and incomprehensible, but not a surprise. They’d already seen what he could do.

Public demonstrations of authority over death created a foundation of observed reality instead of abstract hope. Witnesses from different backgrounds could easily challenge any exaggeration. The consistency of the reports and the continued presence of those who experienced them firsthand reinforced the credibility of the later claim.

The disciples noted not only the restoration of life but the immediate return of Jesus’s body to normal functions, removing any suggestion of temporary revival or illusion.

Imagine he walked in on them still torn apart, bleeding all over the floor. Clinging to life by a thread.

They would’ve thought him insane and sent to get him medical attention. Which would’ve tipped off the priests’ guards and then the Romans. And the latter would’ve finished the job, since they’d receive the death penalty themselves if word got out someone had survived the cross.

But they saw him fully revived and returned to his pre-cross state, minus the scars from the nails.

The prior resurrections and his glorious appearing (healed and whole) made the resurrection claim a logical extension of what had been displayed openly and defies reduction to invention.

4. No Reason to Lie

If the resurrection was invented, the question becomes simple.

What did they gain?

The disciples followed a man the world cursed. They preached a message many found offensive or foolish. They refused to back down. For that, they were mocked, beaten, imprisoned, and slaughtered.

People lie for power, wealth, and/or to protect themselves. Christ’s first followers achieved none of those.

Yet they retained the Gospel message. Preached his resurrection wherever they found the opportunity.

Instead of recanting under threat, they maintained their testimony even when it led to loss of social standing, physical harm, or execution.

Fabricated stories designed for personal advantage collapse when real costs arrive. Here the opposite occurred. Commitment only strengthened under pressure, suggesting the claim rested on something actually experienced, not invented for gain.

The absence of any material benefit or protection, combined with the willingness to endure hardship, stands as strong evidence that their persistence came from genuine conviction.

Hallucination theories are the only alternative, but each of them begs the question: How does a large group of people experience the same hallucination in detail and insist in its truth under pressure?

Eventually, someone will fold and recant. Play it off as mistaken identity or delusion.

But no one among the earliest followers of Christ (the ones who were in a position to know the truth, have it verified or torn apart by other witnesses) recanted. They chose to die instead.

Because Christ had risen from the dead restored and revealed himself to them.

5. Attached to Real Life

The accounts of Jesus and the resurrection appear early. Not generations later after legends had time to grow.

Within reach of the events themselves.

Some creeds describing Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection trace back close to the time of the crucifixion. Scholars think one creed Paul cites in 1 Corinthians dates back to a few weeks or months after April 5th, 33 AD, the date the resurrection of Christ is thought to have occurred.

The timing of the written records places them close enough to the original events that many who lived through them or knew those who did could still verify or challenge the reports.

Extra-biblical sources also align with key details.

Jewish customs required burial before the Sabbath. The timeline in the Gospels reflects that urgency.

A member of the Sanhedrin, Joseph of Arimathea, takes responsibility for the body and places it in a new tomb.

We know it was new because it was a single chamber, likely the beginning of a tomb Joseph was carving for his family. Wealthier Jews would fashion such tombs into the rocky hills with multiple chambers to fit the dead for their whole families, and Joseph was wealthy enough for such a project.

He forsook his family’s grave to honor Christ.

And the involvement of a known public figure of Joseph’s statue adds a layer of specificity that would’ve been easy to disprove if inaccurate.

The women returned early the next morning to complete mourning the practices, under known customs. Which is why they were the first witnesses. Aside from the priests’ guards who fainted when the stole rolled away on its own.

Any fabricators would’ve known to remove the women as the first witnesses because their testimony wouldn’t be credible in the eyes of the Roman world. So, the only reason the writers would keep them in the story is if it were true.

The empty tomb and the repeated insistence on personal encounters with the risen Christ form the unchanging core of resurrection testimony from the beginning.

6. Men Who Thought for Themselves

The disciples may not have been elites, but they were still men with brains. And highly intelligent, even if allegedly illiterate.

Practical men accustomed to evaluating evidence in everyday matters of business, family, and community life.

They lived in a world full of competing ideas. They worked, traded, and made life or death decisions daily. And as Jews, they were required to attend synagogue (where readings of the Old Testament were performed and discussed on the regular) and make periodic trips to the Temple Mount for festivals and sacrifices.

As fishermen, they also had to know the common languages of the Roman world for trade.

In their Jewish and Greco-Roman environments, resurrection wasn’t the easiest answer available. It was the hardest one to accept.

Yet they embraced it.

Then there’s Paul. A trained Pharisee. Educated. Influential. A man who opposed the new Way movement with bloody zeal.

Are we to suppose he just drifted into belief in Christ?

No. He turned after an encounter he could not dismiss. A sharp and overwhelming experience of the risen Christ that permanently altered his reality forever.

In a diverse intellectual environment filled with many philosophies and religious options, the apostles chose a path that brought them in conflict with prevailing expectations. Their decision required them to rethink long-held assumptions about power, victory, and the nature of God’s work in the cosmos.

None of the above could happen unless Christ Jesus really beat the grave.

7. Our Only Hope Against Suffering

Every person faces the same end as the disciples and Paul. Has craved for immortality since the earliest eras of history.

We know something is wrong but are powerless to overcome.

No one succeeded in eating from the Tree of Life. We were banished from it for our rebellion. Cursed with the plague of evil and entropy.

Suffering. Death. Loss that no human effort can reverse.

Human failure brought sin and death into the world, and no system built by human hands has resolved that destruction.

The resurrection, however, does.

It says death is defeated. Not symbolically, but in reality. Tangible. It offers a future where what was broken is restored.

That’s either coincidence beyond reason or a truth worth facing head on.

Your Savior Lives

Don’t let doubt shaped by culture or pressure wear you down. Your Savior walked out of the tomb.

It’s empty.

If he were still inside it, you are most to be pitied. Because your faith is false. But the evidence resounds with affirmation that Christ Jesus left the grave.

You were not placed here by accident. You were not called to blend in with a world crushed beneath its own iniquities.

In Christ Jesus, you are made new. Sin no longer controls you, and death has lost its sting.

When you follow the Savior, you join a movement that has revolutionized everything for the better. The kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

And while the powers of darkness still rage and war, you can rest assured that your victory is sealed. Because the cross and resurrection solidified their fate.

They are destined for eternal hell. You for eternal life.

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Jesus’s death doesn’t let you off the hook so easily. It was a death so thorough and so carefully verified that so-called “swoon theory” becomes a ragged fable.

Skeptics want you to think he was scourged, nailed, speared, declared dead, yet fainted and later revived?

Insane.

The Romans perfected crucifixion as a public art. Slow. Certain. No survivors.

Once you look closely at what actually happened on Good Friday outside Jerusalem, comfortable alternate theories collapse.

The cross is no tragic mistake or clever escape. It’s the place where death itself bled and died.

Get ready to journey through the brutality your Savior suffered to save your soul.

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Never Cross Rome

Crucifixion stood at the top of Rome’s list of punishments. Not only for what it did to the body, but for what it said to everyone watching.

Everyone who knew of it abhorred the practice because of its intense brutality. Yet like the later coliseums, soldiers and onlookers when it happened found it entertaining.

Crucifixion was a statement: “You don’t challenge Rome and live to tell about it.”

Cicero called crucifixion the most cruel and disgusting penalty. Josephus described mass crucifixions where soldiers rotated positions for their own amusement. To get better views.

Crucifixion was routine, refined, and feared across the empire.

Victims were stripped of dignity, then of life. Erased in full view of the entire known world.

Jesus, already battered and broken, entered that machine, built to ensure demise…

Flogged Till Flinching

He was first whipped until flesh dangled from his body. Red rags of muscle and tissue.

The flagrum tore through skin with embedded bone and metal. Eusebius records victims of the cat-o’-nine-tails whose veins became exposed to the elements. Muscles, blood vessels, and organs visible through rib cages like port windows.

Many died before reaching the execution site.

Yet, Jesus endured this and then carried the patibulum through the streets. Gawkers lined up to see him lead coagulating streaks of pus-filled gore.

No wonder he collapsed, and another had to take his place up the hill. Victims in severe shock do not survive long without intervention. Blood loss, dehydration, trauma…all stacked high with Golgotha a mile away.

By the time Jesus reached “The Skull,” he was a crumbling ragdoll. The idea that someone in that condition could later revive stretches beyond the limits of human physiology.

But it happened.

And the worst was just beginning…

Hammer, Nail, Asphyxiation at Scale

Crucifixion killed through strangulation. No nooses involved.

When a body hangs from outstretched arms, breathing becomes a fight. To inhale, the victim must push up on pierced feet and pull with pierced wrists.

Each inhale a thousand needs through the heart

Each exhale a hurried rush to relief

All while stings and cramps ripple through every joint and bone.

Medical analysis, including works published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, detail the gruesome end. Exhaustion plus zero oxygen made for a beeline to death.

Sometimes the spectacle lasted days. To speed things up, knees were sometimes smashed with clubs until shattered.

Jesus died before this step. No bone in his body broken. But that was a small consolation…

Crushing the Human Spirit

Only slaves, the worst criminals, and noncitizen enemies of the Empire lucked into crucifixion. Rome wouldn’t go so far as to disgrace its own citizens, even if they were criminals, with such a horrid demise.

Onlookers made up of mixed crowds gathered in droves. Few family and friends (they too despised). Mostly haters. In many cases crowds spat upon the cursed as they dangled overhead.

Victims were stripped naked. Bared to the elements. Insults flew freely. A titulus displayed the charges above their heads. Formed execution into a public warning.

The Gospels record all the above…

• Mockery from soldiers

• Taunts from passersby

• Religious leaders joining in

• A plaque blaring “King of the Jews”

Pain isolates. Shame degrades. Together they crush what remains of human strength.

Yet even here, Jesus remained composed enough to speak, forgive, and endure with clarity. They saw him as a criminal, but he would always be King…

The Crown, the Sponge, the Spear

His crown was instrument made symbol. Thorns many inches long buried deep in scalp and skull. Some surely reached his brain, but Jesus remained alert and coherent.

Adam’s curse pounded into the only One who could bear it.

That part of the head is one of the most vascular areas of the body. Bleeding would have been enormous, and trauma to the head bred the insult of shock.

Then he was offered the vinegar on a sponge. A Roman latrine sponge. Used to wipe feces from filthy behinds. The risk of infection was astronomical from that one quick taste. Which was unimaginably horrid.

But at that point, his misery was at its end.

Jesus willingly gave up his spirit. A soldier drove a spear into his side.

The Gospel of John records blood and water flowing out. Liquids in the chest cavity. Pleural effusion. Blood cells had separated and congealed.

Jesus was dead.

And his guardians knew it. Their own lives depended on finishing the task, guaranteeing his end. A living prisoner removed too soon meant death for the soldiers and their families.

There’s no record anywhere of a Roman execution squad failing. Not one.

No one walked away from the cross.

The single record of someone being removed from a cross comes from Josephus.

He tells of three acquaintances he successfully petitioned cut down. Despite immediate medical attention, two still died. And they endured only a partial crucifixion.

No whip

No spear

No broken legs

With the exception of the third, Jesus endured the full process.

Which leads to another absurdity. A severely wounded man would need to move a massive stone, avoid guards, and travel on pierced feet. Then appear to his followers not as someone clinging to life, but as the conqueror of death.

In three days!

Imagine Jesus limped into the disciples’ presence bleeding across the floor, gasping for breath and mustering up a crackly “pep-talk.” Not exactly the spark of eternal movements.

Yet the early Christians became an unstoppable force…

Can’t Contain God Most High

Something happened after the crucifixion that changed everything.

The disciples didn’t speak like men protecting a weak leader who barely survived. They proclaimed a risen Lord who defeated death. Fearful followers became public witnesses, willing to suffer and die for what they were certain they’d seen.

Paul records appearances to many, including a group of over five hundred. Large groups are harder to dismiss. Collective experiences resist hallucination theories and demand better explanations.

People don’t give their lives for what they know is a lie. They don’t stake everything on a man ripped to shreds and bleeding out on the stone floor. And every one of the earliest believers in Judea was in such a position to determine the truth.

So there’s only one conclusion…

The Death That Secured Life

Jesus died and rose again. For you.

The methods were too severe, the verification too careful, and the aftermath too powerful to explain any other way.

The Messiah bled, surrendered his own life, and conquered sin and death. He returned, not broken, not hiding, but alive with purpose. To take over rightful rulership of the heavens and the earth.

He is why the cross still stands at the center of history.

Not as a symbol of defeat, but as the foundation of the final victory and the everlasting life it brings.

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Bread and wine. Body and blood. Eternal symbols of the Eucharist, the last meal of Christ, that originated with our Savior. Or did they?

Two millennia before Jesus, a meeting occurred that most people skip over. A meal shared in the desert in the aftermath of war that quietly shifts the entire structure of the Bible.

In Genesis 14, a priest-king appears out of nowhere to meet with Abraham, the patriarch of our faith.

No lineage

No origin

He brings bread and wine. Body and blood. Abraham recognizes him instantly. And from that encounter, a line is drawn that runs through King David, through Jerusalem, and straight into the final meal of Christ.

Fates intertwined by design.

Once you understand Abraham’s meeting with Melchizedek, you stop reading the Bible as disconnected stories. You see it as a single thread moving through war, covenant, kingship, and sacrifice.

This article will show you the significance of their meeting, who Melchizedek really was, and how a peaceful meal after warfare became the most significant turning point in human history.

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Human War, Cosmic Conflict

Abraham, still known as Abram in Genesis 14, finds himself caught up in a conflict between Canaanite kings and clans of Nephilim descendants. Another rebellion. Not against God, but men against men.

Led by Sodom, multiple kings take up arms against Kedorlaomer, a conqueror who subjugated many lands and made the people cower beneath his rule. Abraham’s nephew Lot, who had already split from his company, gets captured as a prisoner of war. Forces Abraham to act.

With only 318 trained men, he routes the armies of Kedorlaomer, rescues Lot, and saves Sodom from destruction...for now.

But what looks like a military skirmish is something far greater. Kedorlaomer is King of Elam, based east of Babylon in Mesopotamia, near where Babel occurred. Abraham’s former home attacks the Nephilim descendants.

The Battle of the Valley of Siddim is interdimensional.

The eternal Creator enters where the sons of God had once rebelled and the Nephilim were born. And asserts his dominance over the ruling gods of the land.

Yahweh. On the scene. On a mission to restore justice and righteousness to creation.

He never left. He was always there but became obscured in the muddle and confusion of gods. The sons of God, given charge over the nations, worked tirelessly to steal every ounce of worship away from God Most High, El Elyon. Yahweh before Israel.

Few humans still worshipped him. One of them shows up at the precise moment of Abraham’s entrance into the political and religious disputes of early Canaan:

Melchizedek.

Melchizedek confirms God held the line. And so much more…

Priest-King of God Most High

It’s become commonplace to envision Melchizedek as a theophany (appearing) of Christ Jesus in the Old Testament, based on how the writer of Hebrews connects the two figures. And how some Second Temple texts interpret Melchizedek.

• Josephus recognized Melchizedek as the first builder of the temple.

• Philo expanded on the story of Genesis, picturing him as the Prince of Peace and the administrator of a great banquet over Abraham.

• Fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls connect Melchizedek to prophecies in Isaiah, Daniel 9, and Psalms 7 and 82, framing him as the anointed bringer of good news in the Spirit. Who will both restore, atone for, and liberate humanity, while simultaneously judging the nations and the fallen sons of God.

The connections are true.

The theophany false.

Confusion arises because we’re provided little detail about Melchizedek’s background. There’s no explanation for how a Canaanite city-king came to follow El Elyon (God Most High) and no inclusion of Melchizedek in any biblical lineages. The priest-king of Salem is a genuine mystery.

But as far as we know, Melchizedek is a real human being, living in the land of Canaan, encountered early after Abraham arrives and makes it his home. Any assessment that makes the priest-king godlike is speculation.

Genesis tells us he’s king of Salem. An antiquated short for Jerusalem. The city central to the later Israelite kingdom, where Solomon would one day build the Temple.

His name, Melchizedek, means “My King is righteous.” While utilized as a proper name in Genesis, it’s also a title. Representation of the priest-king’s God. Wherever Melchizedek went, people knew the God he served was the source and embodiment of righteousness.

And his God is the same God Abraham followed to Canaan. Our God.

Who establishes a foothold in the heart of Nephilim territory. And is about to work wonders...

Only God Will Be King

Melchizedek approaches Abraham after the victory against Kedorlaomer. The text doesn’t say why, or mention anything about the priest-king’s involvement in the war, if there was any.

Some scholars think his appearance in Genesis 14 is a later addition because of its odd placement. In the preceding paragraph, the king of Sodom is the only king said to meet with Abraham in the Valley of Shaveh (Valley of the Kings).

But Melchizedek’s entrance flows with the story and sets up a sharp contrast between him and the king of Sodom.

Melchizedek asks for nothing. Abraham gives him a tenth of everything anyway, because of Whom he represents. A spontaneous act of reverence later formalized in the Mosaic Law. The 10% tithe.

To the king of Sodom, however, Abraham refuses to give or take any gain.

The king of Sodom proposes a trade: He’ll take the prisoners of war, and Abraham can keep the loot. Based on what we see of the Sodomites in Genesis 19 (the abominations they practiced which led to their decimation by heavenly fire), we can assume all prisoners of war were destined for heinous abuse.

Abraham, having already sworn an oath to God Most High, denies even a thread or a sandal strap from Sodom. He instructs the king of Sodom to divide the spoils among Abraham’s Amorite (Canaanite) allies, the ones who accompanied his family into battle.

His denial is a complete rejection of everything Sodom represents, and an early recognition of the covenant God Most High would inaugurate with him in chapter 15. Abraham’s lineage would, both materially and spiritually, replace the post-Babel nations and the gods who had abandoned their Creator.

Abraham chose the priest-king of righteousness over a damned king of this fallen world. Every generation since has been asked to make the same choice.

A request sealed in blood...

Libations for the Fallen

Melchizedek hosted Abraham and the king of Sodom on behalf of El Elyon, near the mountain of God. Moriah. Showing ancient hospitality to the victors.

Their meeting spot, the Valley of the Kings, is our clue. It’s the same location where David’s son Absalom later sets up a monument to himself in 2 Samuel 18:18. Close to Jerusalem.

A great feast is prepared in honor of the slain. Bodies fell, blood was spilled, but victory was attained because of Abraham and his God.

Two unique items are highlighted amidst the mix of mourning and celebration.

Here’s what the passage says:

“And Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High. And he blessed him and said, ‘Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Possessor of heaven and earth, and blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your enemies into your hand.’ And Abram gave him a tenth of everything.” (Genesis 14:18-20)

Bread and wine. Body and blood.

El Elyon would no longer be one option among many. He was actively moving. He would re-establish himself as King over the heavens and the earth, taking back the rights that duly belonged to him.

The king of Sodom and his men are brought forth to participate and bear witness to his sacramental blessing. To acknowledge the supremacy of God Most High and the man (Abraham) he chose as his instrument of salvation.

Melchizedek’s meal also looks forward to the near-sacrifice of Isaac. Where Abraham’s faith is tested, and God provides the sacrifice of his own design. A foreshadow of the final sacrifice. On Mount Moriah…the Temple Mount.

Bread and wine. Body and blood.

Sound familiar? It should…

The Last First Supper

Abraham is God’s people pulled from the nations. Melchizedek is God’s people among the nations. And Christ is the intersection.

Psalm 110 shows evidence that during and shortly after David’s rule in Israel, there was an effort to inaugurate kings who would double as priests. Modeled after Melchizedek, the first priest-king of Jerusalem:

1  The Lord says to my Lord:

“Sit at my right hand,

until I make your enemies your footstool.”

2  The Lord sends forth from Zion

your mighty scepter.

Rule in the midst of your enemies!

3  Your people will offer themselves freely

on the day of your power,

in holy garments;

from the womb of the morning,

the dew of your youth will be yours.

4  The Lord has sworn

and will not change his mind,

“You are a priest forever

after the order of Melchizedek.”

Other surrounding kings and nations could also function as priests, but most were considered gods in the flesh or demigods like the Nephilim. Melchizedek was not.

Only Israel held the anticipation of a King of kings, Lord of lords, Priest of priests, who would become the Messiah of God. Merging the lines of David and Melchizedek.

And then comes Jesus.

He makes direct reference to Psalm 110 in Matthew 22, when the Godhood of the Messiah is contested:

41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question, 42 saying, “What do you think about the Christ? Whose son is he?” They said to him, “The son of David.” 43 He said to them, “How is it then that David, in the Spirit, calls him Lord, saying,

44  “ ‘The Lord said to my Lord,

“Sit at my right hand,

until I put your enemies under your feet” ’?

45 If then David calls him Lord, how is he his son?” 46 And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did anyone dare to ask him any more questions.

Jesus then connects himself to Melchizedek, in all four gospels, through body and blood, bread and wine.

God and King.

At his last first supper with the disciples, our Eucharist, he celebrates final victory in the cosmic war with the sons of God and mourns the coming trial. His own death and resurrection, through which sin and death would be slain.

Jesus links to David as King, Melchizedek as Priest, and Abraham as chosen one of God Most High. Through whom all nations are saved and blessed.

The writer of Hebrews traces that connection in depth. Shows how Christ takes back the rightful rule of Yahweh over creation, as true heir of both the heavens and the earth:

15 This becomes even more evident when another priest arises in the likeness of Melchizedek, 16 who has become a priest, not on the basis of a legal requirement concerning bodily descent, but by the power of an indestructible life. 17 For it is witnessed of him,

“You are a priest forever,

after the order of Melchizedek.”

18 For on the one hand, a former commandment is set aside because of its weakness and uselessness 19 (for the law made nothing perfect); but on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God.

20 And it was not without an oath. For those who formerly became priests were made such without an oath, 21 but this one was made a priest with an oath by the one who said to him:

“The Lord has sworn

and will not change his mind,

‘You are a priest forever.’ ”

22 This makes Jesus the guarantor of a better covenant.

God’s first elect bound to God’s final elect through covenant and sacrifice. By which all nations may be saved.

God’s Eternal Offering

Christ took the journey into our world of his own accord with full intent to live a perfect life and lay it down upon the altar for us.

• To save the fallen and broken

• To forge an everlasting covenant

• To build a kingdom beyond this world, in this world, for this world

Through him, the rule of the gods is destroyed. The corruption of sin and death erased.

From Salem to Jerusalem, from Abraham’s tent to the upper room, the table is always set.

Melchizedek let us know dinner was coming. Christ served the victory. And you and I...we’re invited to the banquet.

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What do you get when you put millions of humans together in the same location, with the same language, and a single cause or identity?

That question’s no riddle. The obvious answer? A nation.

Modern progressives want you to think diversity is our strength. But that ignores the complexity of the human condition and also presumes all humans are inherently good, with righteous intentions.

Yes, civilizations with diverse populations have survived and even thrived. The Roman Empire and the United States are the two most prominent examples.

However, diversity was not the glue that held them together.

They both lasted long periods because they had a populace that could communicate clearly in a common language (Greek/English), communal respect for instrumental symbols (gods and Emperor/God and country), and a higher purpose (unite and civilize the ancient world/become a bastion of freedom for all men under God).

These features combined and strengthened them despite diversity and found greatest strength in locales with more homogeneity between peoples. Because humans have an inclination toward evil that they enact most viciously toward perceived opposition.

Historians dub the phenomenon tribalism. And its impact is lessened when clear, specified, and protected boundaries exist to keep humans from tearing each other apart over differences.

Many stories from history warn of the horrors bred by broken boundaries. We’ve already discussed three: the fall in the Garden of Eden, the first murder in human history, and the monstrous perversion of the Nephilim giants.

But no other story has presented the destruction of boundaries and its ramifications as starkly as the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11.

Most readers focus on the division of languages by God, as a judgment, and think that’s the focal point of the story.

It isn’t.

Today, we’re going to explore the real story of Babel, why it’s integral to the Old Testament, how it relates to Jesus and the kingdom of God, and how you can avoid the chaos suffered by those rebellious humans in your own life.

Heaven and Earth Collide

For any biblical story, geography and background are essential. And the Tower of Babel has a fascinating one.

In the Ancient Near East (all around the ancient globe, in fact), it was customary to build temples as sites of intersection between the heavens and the earth. Stairways for the gods.

Hence their construction as triangular monoliths with steps.

We call them pyramids today. Ziggurats were what the Sumerians and Babylonians called them. And it’s thought by archaeologists that one in particular fits the bill for the Tower of Babel: Entemenanki (“House of the Foundation of Heaven and Earth”).

Dating puts the earliest ziggurats between 4300-3500 B.C., approximately. Entemenanki among them. Dedicated to the god Marduk, whom we noted in our last article is a figure matching the Canaanite Baal.

Both fought the ancient sea gods and became rulers of the gods. The dedication of Babylon to Marduk meant it was his palace in the moral realm. With the expectation that he would enter and dwell there with his royal subjects.

But a nearby stele (“The Tower of Babel Stele” c. 600 B.C.) names Entemenanki the “temple tower of Babylon” and shows an honorary procession with a king ascending the steps toward the heavens, staff in hand.

A human enters the heavens.

The Akkadians, nearest predecessors to the Babylonians, would’ve called the temple babilu, “Gate of God.” Babel is a Hebrew wordplay stressing the Akkadian label, while also lamenting the confusion that transpired there.

Entemenanki has the name, story, and, most of all, location. Neatly centered smack dab in what the Bible calls the plain of Shinar...

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Way Off Par in Shinar

After Noah and his family left the ark, forgot about God’s commands, and let more fallen sons of God mate with human women, breed more Nephilim, and lead humanity astray, Genesis tells us they converged at the plain of Shinar.

Nimrod, who may have been one of the first Sumerian kings, builds the city of Babylon there. He’s called a “great hero” like the Nephilim.

But his father was Cush, and appears in the lineage of Noah as one of his descendants (Genesis 10, “The Table of Nations”). Nimrod was likely only a powerful ruler, perhaps with god-like ordination. In the eyes of the people.

Which could explain the purpose of the tower’s construction:

The humans who were not Nephilim wanted to become like Nephilim.

• Mixed blood of gods and men

• Revered by their peers and other humans

Genesis 11 states that they tried to storm the heavens in order to make a name for themselves. To become heroes.

They stormed the skyward castle of the gods. Where they could commune with and become part of the divine assembly. Invade the holy throne-room of God Most High. Steal godly status. Instead of going outward, multiplying and spreading across the face of the earth to rule over it (as God commanded).

A venture sure to kill them and destabilize the cosmos…again.

They almost succeeded with their unified purpose, language, and intellect. God confused their tongues so they couldn’t understand each other anymore and dispersed them out into the earth by force.

He could have annihilated them, but per his promise to Noah (Genesis 9), he refrained from destroying the creation anew.

Rather, he gave humanity exactly what they wanted...

According to the Sons of God

Deuteronomy 32 shares a unique insight into Babel. Verses 7-9 state God gave the nations their inheritance.

And what was that inheritance? He divided them according to the number of the sons of God.

The earliest manuscripts of Deuteronomy in the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Old Testament) all say “sons of God.” Later, in the Masoretic Hebrew Text (c. 1000 A.D.) the phrase is rendered “according to the number of the sons of Israel.”

The evidence suggests the Masoretic version is an alteration.

Working from the oldest texts, Dr. Michael Heiser has argued that the division at Babel was an intentional division in which God split up the nation amongst specific sons of God tasked to lead them back to God, and these “gods” failed by taking worship from the nations unto themselves.

However, Romans 1 provides the more likely explanation: Humanity was given over to their twisted desires to worship the creation instead of the Creator.

The fallen gods already spread across the lands. Other sons of God came down and mated with human women again after the Flood. Committed the same sin as the pre-Flood sons of God. Guaranteed their banishment from the heavens.

Even prior to Babel, they and their Nephilim offspring were revered. Everywhere. Humans, again, wanted to become gods themselves in the divine assembly. Coveted the throne of God.

So, the logical conclusion is God gave them over to their desires.

Humanity could worship the creation all they wanted. But it would be the twisted, vile, corrupted creation, not his holy heavenly host.

Post-Flood humans chose their masters…

Taking the Heavens By Force

Babel’s context explains God’s forbidding the Israelites from having other gods before him.

Through Abraham and his descendants (drawn out from Babylon to Canaan, pre-Flood Nephilim HQ), God made Israel a nation for himself to be the vehicle through which the Messiah would rescue and reunite the nations within the kingdom of God.

Israel was holy. Set apart. Intended as a nation of priests.

Though they failed that mission, God still brought Jesus into history. Used them as a vessel for his own entry into history.

And it’s significant that when speaking with the crowds of people about John the Baptist, Jesus mentioned Babel.

In Matthew 11, after John the Baptist sends his disciples to confirm Jesus is the Messiah, and Jesus sends them back with affirmative evidence, Jesus then says something profound:

“Truly I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John, and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come” (11:11-14)

Jesus’s reference isn’t explicit, and since he places it within the context of John the Baptist, Elijah, the prophets, and the law, there’s a definite dual meaning.

But the key verse (I’m sure you caught) is “From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force.”

Prior to Israel, the kingdom of God/heaven was in the actual heavens. And when the Nephilim arose, the cosmos was plunged into violence and wickedness everywhere, judged by Flood, and then a new violent race of men (Noah’s lineage) tried to take the heavens by force at Babel.

When God chose Israel and began building his kingdom on earth through them, the nations went to war with them until they were exiled. Led by the fallen “gods.” Elijah, a precursor to John the Baptist, faced off with Baal and his worshipers, as did other prophets.

Then, upon their return from Persia, endless conflicts overtook the Jews.

Jesus is telling the people in Matthew 11 that the culmination of the cosmic war they’d always been part of was at the threshold. Stage set by John the Baptist. War waged by Jesus, the eternal Creator.

Mount Hermon, the gates of hell, in Galilee is where Jesus spent most of his time. Resisting Satan, healing, being transfigured, exorcising demons. In the land where the sons of God had originally rebelled and caused the Flood.

The kingdom of heaven, from the heavens, was about to enter the world through the actual Son of God in ways they’d never before dreamed...

No Love Lost at Pentecost

Jesus’s death and resurrection beat sin and death, broke the stranglehold the sons of God had on the world, and opened the door for all nations to come back to God.

The only mission left was to spread the good news. Build the kingdom.

Pentecost is the beginning of that movement. Of the spread of the kingdom of God across the globe. It’s also an immediate reversal of Babel.

Second Temple period Jerusalem was a tourist destination. The Temple, a wonder of the Near East. People from all over...Gaul (France), Italy, Greece, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Jordan, Persia, Arabia, Egypt, you name it...came to witness the magnificent sites.

What was the confusion at Babel? Language. When the disciples were touched by the tongues of fire, the Spirit moved, and they spoke, what happened? Everyone heard the Gospel of Christ in his own native language. His own tongue.

No confusion

No obstruction

Just the Truth made plain for all to hear, ponder, and embrace.

When everyone who heard returned to their home countries, they surely shared about the mysterious wonder encountered and what the twelve men preached.

Seeds were planted. The ground prepared for Paul and his ministry to the nations.

And, not coincidentally, he, his followers, and some of the other apostles went to every location listed in Genesis 10. To the lost nations of Babel. With Israel, the contested Canaan and former home of the sons of God, as the headquarters for the movement of salvation.

The Ever Eternal Kingdom

Christians allegiant to Jesus are now the body of Christ. The kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven.

Holy

Set apart

Like Israel

We’ve inherited the mission. To bring the world back into the fold. Under the rule of the King.

That means the commandment to have no other gods before God Most High, Jesus Christ our Lord, is more important than ever.

The gods of this world, the fallen sons of God, are the enemy. Many people of the nations remain enslaved to them, and Jesus is their only path to freedom.

Those demons want us to keep violating God’s boundaries. The real cause of division. Whereas the kingdom of God unites us in the good and holy.

If you’re allegiant to Jesus, then you too have an obligation to spread the Gospel, fight evil, and destroy falsehoods in the name of Christ. Protect boundaries. Live and bleed Christ everywhere you go.

Because, even though victory is assured, the powers and principalities of darkness cling to this world with their filthy claws and do everything they can to pull every soul imaginable down into eternal torment.

God’s kingdom…in Christ our Lord…is the only blockade.

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Modern scholars try to pawn off the Nephilim in the Bible as heroes because of the way they’re described in Genesis.

But ancient Jewish writings agree that the Nephilim are the corrupt giant offspring of the sons of God. And they were FAR from friendly. In fact, they’re a main cause for the Great Flood.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, it’s found in Genesis 6:1-4. Here’s what we’re told:

“When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. The the Lord said, ‘My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.’ The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown” (Gen 6:1-4).

No other part of Scripture has been discussed more in recent times than this passage.

Because, rightly understood, the story of the Nephilim explains most of the mysteries in the Bible.

And that raises important questions: Who were they? Why were they unfriendly? Were they just humans or more? Who were their fathers, the sons of God? Why did they cause the Great Flood?

We’re about to answer these questions with a look into Genesis 6:1-4, other biblical texts, and extra-biblical sources that formed the Hebrew worldview, and construct a narrative to help you understand the Nephilim, their importance, and your place in the story of God.

Get ready for a wild ride.

Sons of the Sons of God

It’s hypothesized that Nephilim comes from the Hebrew word naphal (”to fall”). Other possible words of origin are nephel (”miscarriage”) and/or pala (”extraordinary”).

I personally think it’s derived from a combo of all three because of who fathered the Nephilim.

The bene ha’elohim (sons of God) are divine beings in Genesis 6:1-4, and there’s no way around that.

The only two alternatives of any popularity in recent years have been the Sethite view and Divine Kings view. Both suffer from the same flaw.

Proponents of the Sethite view (which used to be my view) say the sons of God were the descendents of Seth who remained loyal to God, whereas the daughters of men were the descendents of Cain, who had been severed from God because of the murder of his brother Abel.

The former co-mingled with the latter, and that led to human corruption.

Only problem is, Cain was human just like Seth and both were sinners, whether or not one had an additional curse of banishment. There is no violation in Seth’s descendants mating with Cain’s descendants, not even incest, since there was less genetic variety in their world (see our last Wednesday article on Cain and Abel).

Furthermore, Cain’s ultimate curse was separation from the Spirit of God, mirroring the serpent’s own banishment. God remained with humans after the fall, but not with the serpent, the devil. Because he murdered God’s creation, unleashed sin and death upon it through deception.

Divine kingship suffers the same flaw as the Sethite view. Even if the sons of God were divine kings, elected by God, they were still human at their core, and their mating with human women wouldn’t have been against God’s design. Yet, as noted, ancient Jewish writings saw the Nephilim as corruptions by their nature and association with the sons of God. In fact, they’re considered abominations in Second Temple writings.

That goes beyond human sin.

God considers certain acts, like homosexual behavior, abominations in the Bible, but never humans themselves. Because abominations directly dissolve God’s design.

The only viable conclusion is the sons of God were spirit beings created by God in the heavens. Part of God’s divine assembly, which appears throughout Scripture. The heavenly host. And the Nephilim were their demigod children.

While the nations honored them as great warriors, biblical and extra-biblical evidence suggests they were unruly, cannibal giants. A blend of the bloodlines of the heavens with the bloodline of man. Causing corruption of mind, body, and soul…

Twisted Demigods: A Quick Mythological Detour

How could spirit beings mate with humans?

Simple. They took on human form. In the ancient world, there’s plenty of precedent for human-god mating.

Of Titans and Men

A prime example from Greek mythology is Zeus. He took many forms, sometimes not even human, in order to mate with women he found desirable. His two most famed demigod offspring are Hercules and Perseus, but many of his demigod children became abominations.

Perhaps that’s why when Greek became the chief language of the Mediterranean Basin after the conquests of Alexander the Great, and the Old Testament was translated into Greek, the translators found an easy parallel between the Greek demigods and the Nephilim giants.

The Titans especially. They, even in the Greek stories, were perversions led by their youngest and most unhinged brother, the evil god Kronos.

Son of earth (Gaia) and air (Uranus), Kronos castrated his father and led a rebellion against the most ancient gods to take control of the heavens and the earth. A long war ensued, and Kronos was defeated by his son Zeus, who soon proved to be another form of chaos, just as vile. As was his brother, Hades.

What’s important is the overthrow of the heavens by the Titans, led by Kronos (symbolized by a serpent), resulted in the production of perversions of creation on earth, monstrous deformities among whom were giants (gigantes).

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Cosmic Conflict in Canaan

The story of the Titans comes from even more ancient roots.

It stems from the Phoenician/Canaanite stories of El (the creator god) and Baal (storm god; lord of all). All the major figures from Greek mythology find matches in the more ancient context:

Kronos/El

Zeus/Baal

Poseidon/Yamm

Hades/Maat

In Phoenician mythology, a great war ensues when Baal fights Yamm and then seeks to strip the throne of the gods from El. Maat (death) beats Baal for a time until he’s revived by his sister and overthrows Maat. Throughout the saga, El grants Baal a luxurious palace and essentially hands him the keys to Earth, instead of fighting for rule.

The Egyptians saw Kronos as their own god Geb (earth) who was the father of serpents, separated from his sister Nut (sky) by their father Shu (air).

Geb was the father of Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys. They too, after a great war, fought each other and got into wars of their own, just like the Greek and Canaanite gods. Wars that extended from the heavens to the earth so there was only wickedness and violence everywhere (Genesis 6:5).

The above mythologies are important because there are thousands of flood stories from the most ancient societies across the globe, and many of them include great wars between the gods and depictions of giant abominations. Even some in Egypt, Canaan, and Greece.

Atlantis, for instance, is judged with a great flood after attempting to overthrow the whole Mediterranean to create an empire for Poseidon, according to Plato.

The Israelites understood the stories in the Ancient Near East as representations of a collective memory of actual past events repainted with differing cultural flares. And determined that the closest explanation for the Nephilim and the flood had its home in Mesopotamia, particularly Babylon, where post-flood humans converged at Babel...

A Mess in Mesopotamia

The two stories which captured their attention most were the Akkadian myths of the Apkallu (sages), the Enuma Elish creation myth, and the epic of Gilgamesh, which all have more ancient roots in 3rd century B.C. Sumer.

The ancient Sumerians understood the universe as born through battles with the dragons of chaos, living within the eternal primordial waters. (Apophis, the night serpent, in Egyptian mythology echoes those wars.)

Akkadian cosmology confiscated the dragon myths and told of two waters, Apsu (fresh) and Tiamat (salt), personified as serpent monsters. Yonge gods emerged from their essence and made lots of noise. Infuriated Apsu, who tried to kill them but was slain by Ea.

A massive conflict ensued when Tiamat was enraged, and another Baal figure, Marduk, defeated her. He then built the heavens and earth from her body and made humanity as slaves for the gods from the body of her servant Kingu.

The Apkallu are sage-gods fish-like bodies, sent from the most ancient gods to teach humans

• temple-founding

• city-building

• mathematics

• necromancy

• agriculture

• divination

• exorcism

• writing

• crafts

• law

And the order of the cosmos.

They mate with humans and have children of their own among them. Who become heroes in the eyes of the ancients.

But humans then make lots of noise and annoy the gods, so Enka sends a great flood to wipe them out. But Enlil spares one man with an ark.

The children of that man repopulate the earth, the Apkallu sages reteach humanity the secret knowledge, and then they leave, only their offspring remaining to preserve the wisdom from the heavens.

Gilgamesh in the Epic of Gilgamesh is one of these giant wise men who becomes another mighty hero. But he longs for immortality, so he seeks out the man of the ark, who is said to possess the secret.

The man from the ark points him to a plant/tree of life. Gilgamesh finds it, but while he sleeps, a serpent steals the tree of life away in the dark of night so no man can taste the immortality of the gods.

There are nuances to the story, as with all stories, modern or ancient. But the same themes appear:

• There are eternal waters, no eternal god or gods

• The most ancient gods and their children are power-hungry control freaks in endless battle

• Humans if not accidents are made as slaves to the gods

• The Apkallu (ancient sons of the gods) teach them the mysteries of the cosmos, the arts, and the sciences

• The creator god, if there even is one, is like the other gods or a weak pushover (El)

• Only chaos, no real order, and chaos is represented repeatedly by serpents

• Humans eventually annoy the gods so they become a nuisance and are destroyed by flood

• The great heroes are the giant offspring of the Apkallu (sons of the gods) who maintain the sacred wisdom

• A serpent steals the tree of life

Within all these stories, the Israelites saw everyone had it backwards, traced the collective memory, and articulated an alternative history that is unique in the whole of human history...

The Hebrew Worldview

Genesis takes a different path. It starts with the serpent stealing eternal life through trickery.

There IS an eternal God who makes humanity in his own image, endowing them with divine purpose, to multiply over the earth and rule with him. And get their knowledge from him as his children.

But the serpent (likely a spirit being himself, a seraphim) convinces them to choose quick knowledge over life with God. Unleashing sin and death into the world through disobedience.

Rebellion sparked ongoing conflict between the heavens and the earth, between man and man, between man and creation, and between man and God.

Even so, God extends mercy, spares humanity from instant death, and allows his Spirit to remain with men (with the exception of Cain who murders his brother). They are at first only cut off from accessing the way to everlasting life.

But then, the sons of God see the daughters of men and take some as wives, merging the bloodline of heaven with the bloodline of earth.

Genesis doesn’t tell us the sons are the Apkallu, but 1 Enoch, written during the Second Temple period, aligns with the Akkadian story almost word for word and calls the Apkallu the Watchers.

They descended upon Mount Hermon, north of Israel, mated with human women and taught humankind the depths of secret knowledge, carrying on the work of the serpent. Their offspring became giant abominations, the Nephilim, who were vicious cannibals, slaughtering and feasting upon humans and creation.

Humans who bowed to them and envisioned them as mighty demigod heroes were spared and became their slaves. Soon, humankind took on the nature of their masters, and paired with the intelligence of the gods, began killing their own kind until there was no end to the creative violence.

Pre-flood humans were knowledgeable but had no wisdom because they didn’t follow God, and it ended in annihilation. As Wisdom says in Proverbs 8:35-36: “For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from the Lord; but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.”

Such was the condition of the pre-flood world.

The Global Flood wasn’t sent because humanity annoyed the gods with noise. God sent it to purge the corrupt bloodline of the Nephilim (the first and most grotesque sexual perversion in history) and end humanity, since their thoughts were evil all the time and there was only violence everywhere. And he imprisoned the original rebellious sons of God (Apkallu) beneath the Euphrates River.

God spared Noah and his family because they were uncorrupted by the Nephilim bloodline and remained loyal to God. Never bowed to the Nephilim rulers…

As Above, So Below

Nephilim appear again after the Flood, and the Bible doesn’t say why. But the story of the Apkallu gives a clue:

Other sages (sons of God) returned to re-educate humanity in the lost knowledge. Followed the sins of their brothers. Which means they likely mated with human women again, created more “men of renown,” “heroes of old,” Nephilim.

Noah, knowing the old ways, should have put an end to it, to keep the cycle from repeating. But according to Genesis, he became drunk on much wine and fell into the same sins as Adam. Failed to lead his family to God.

Instead, he gorged himself on the land, forgot about Almighty God, was dishonored by one of his sons, and watched the world deteriorate in chaos again.

The only difference this time was God promised never to flood the earth again (Genesis 9:8-17). So, cataclysmic judgment, un-creating the creation, was out of the question.

But there would be a long history of God battling with the forces of darkness, the fallen sons of God, and destroying the descendants of the Nephilim from earth.

While most of humanity converged at Babel in Mesopotamia, ruled by some Nephilim, many Nephilim returned to Canaan, the land where the first sons of God descended upon Mount Hermon. It would become the headquarters of spiritual and physical war for ages to come.

When the Israelites arrive at Canaan in Numbers 13, the spies who survey Canaan are horrified because they encountered the descendants of the Nephilim. The enormous Rephaim, Anakim, Emim, and Zamzummim. And the land is consumed with bloodshed and cannibalism. A microcosm of the pre-flood world.

God commands them to wipe out the monsters to put an end to the Nephilim bloodline and its terror.

But that’s not the only puzzle pieced together by the Nephilim…

God’s Rescue Mission

As Christians, we’re in the middle of God’s ancient war. On the victorious side of it, since all roads lead to Christ.

From rebellious humanity, God selected a nation for himself through whom he would work to bring about victory over the seed of the serpent, destroy the power of the gods of the world (the fallen sons of God), and eliminate the bonds of sin and death for good.

From the heart of post-flood humanity’s central hub (Babylon), he brought Abraham into the land of the Nephilim (Canaan), gave him a stake in the land, and promised him his ancestors would purge Canaan of the evil of the Amorites (general descriptor for the inhabitants of Canaan). And Abraham’s seed (a Messianic promise) would bless all nations.

Egypt was a refresher of the war. God went down to face the gods of Egypt, the fallen sons of God who controlled that corner of the world, and began the battle anew. They thought the war was over, but God said, “Not today.”

He rescued Israel from their grip, made Israel a nation for himself, showed them a sacrificial system to deal with sin and death, and brought them back to the promised land of Canaan to become a nation of priests to humanity (Exodus 19).

God wanted them to be his holy vessel. But when they failed to eliminate the Nephilim descendants entirely and worshipped the gods of Canaan, even bringing those gods into his holy Temple, God brought judgment upon them.

Yet, through a holy remnant, the line of King David (who routed the final Nephilim, Goliath and his family of giants), he worked to bring about the arrival of his own Son, Jesus, as the final sacrifice of atonement and conqueror of sin and death. In the Nephilim backyard!

Since Israel forgot God, like Noah, and worshipped other gods, evil festered in Israel. Hermon became a stronghold for the fallen sons of God, ruled by none other than Satan. The Second Temple Jews, by the time the Romans took over, considered the land of Bashan (Galilee), where Mount Hermon towered over the North and Jesus spent most of his ministry, the “gates of hell.”

When Jesus faced temptation in the wilderness, Bashan is where the Spirit led him.

When Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James, and John, Bashan is where they went.

When Jesus performed exorcisms, most were done in Bashan.

Jesus, God-made-flesh, went to war with the headquarters of the fallen sons of God, and made sure they knew the time of their end was at hand. The world was about to be stripped from their grip forever. For the kingdom of God had arrived.

Where We Are Now

Because of Christ’s war, final sacrifice, and resurrection, we now live in the era of the kingdom of God. While the principalities of darkness, as Paul calls the sons of God in Ephesians 6, still fight for the souls of humanity (ours is becoming another world that hates wisdom and loves death), they are powerless against Almighty God because the victory has been sealed.

They’re permitted their raging folly for a time, storing up wrath for themselves in the Day of the Lord. In the final moments leading up to that day, John tells us in Revelation that even the sons of God imprisoned below the Euphrates will be released to wreak havoc, killing a third of mankind.

But nothing will compare to the wrath and justice of Christ to come. God will make all things right and new. Destroy sin, death, and their arbiters with such permanence, only eternal glory, beauty, and goodness will remain for his children.

Christ comes on his white stallion, his own mouth like a sword. No enemy against the eternal Creator shall prosper.

• Order is to be restored.

• The chaos serpents slain.

• The gods defeated.

And the kingdom of God shall reign forevermore.

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If you’re like me, you’ve read the story of Cain and Abel a thousand times. If not, what follows will be new to you.

As shocking as this may seem, Cain’s wife IS NOT the most important facet of the story.

Atheists bring her up as if she’s some slam dunk in their waste bin of anti-God arguments, while completely ignoring the background and larger points of the story.

For instance, Adam and Eve, driven from the Garden of Eden, remained close to God and within proximity of the Garden.

Genesis 4:16 suggests they knew exactly where Eden was and even shared the location with their own children, likely because they longed for the life contained within its boundaries, defended by the fiery cherubim.

And God remained accessible to them.

These are important elements of the story of Cain and Abel overlooked because our infatuation today is with the alleged mystery of Cain’s wife.

The feud between the brothers is the first recorded dissolution of relational bonds that ends in the physical destruction of material life. Influenced by jealous rage.

And that has IMMENSE bearing on the story of not only the Bible, but the Gospel.

Below, we’ll briefly address Cain’s wife and why she’s not really a mystery, and then explore the theological and historical heart of the passage to the story of God and mankind.

Pop! There’s a Woman

Since our world is so warped by evolutionary theory as the only “acceptable” history of the natural world, including humanity, stories like Cain and Abel in the Bible are often reimagined as myths recounting the history of groups of people through singular figures.

Because of that, when mention of Cain’s wife pops up in Genesis 4:17, skeptics immediately jump to the argument that there were more humans who existed separate from Adam and Eve and their sons. Humans of different bloodlines who evolved from separate ape clans encountered by Adam and Eve after they left the Garden.

All of that is pure speculation, of course. But they love it. And insist it’s the only explanation for Cain’s wife.

They’re wrong.

The real and only answer for the identity of Cain’s wife permitted by the Bible is she was his sister.

That makes us recoil because these days, incestuous relationships result in horrible genetic and psychological abnormalities, disabilities, and diseases which ruin humanity.

But what most don’t consider is if humanity actually came from two first ancestors, like Adam and Eve, there would have been much less genetic diversity...the actual cause of destructive genetic mutations. Making it possible and even necessary for incestuous relationships to exist for a time so humanity could populate the earth, adapt, and diversify into what we see today.

By the time of the Law of Moses, humanity had diversified so much and spread across the globe that incest was destructive and therefore banned by God amongst the Israelites as an abomination. Because of the fact that it destroys the image of God.

The Bible makes clear that Eve was “the mother of all living.” That’s the very reason for her name, given to her by the first man, Adam, her husband. So, we are left with no other adequate explanation than to infer all humanity came from her and her children.

Even though the text hones in on Cain and Abel, two sons of Adam and Eve, it does not eliminate the possibility of other children being born to the first couple. After all, time jumps from when Eve gives birth and thanks the Lord for them in 4:1-2 to their giving of their sacrifices to God as grown men in 4:3-5. Their entire childhood is omitted.

Logically, in the story, they would’ve had other brothers and sisters already by the time they were grown. And Cain selected a wife from among his sisters.

Nevertheless, the whole fiasco with Cain’s wife distracts from the more important matters in the narrative...

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From Disobedience to Violent Murder

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But the Bible is also weird, strange, confusing, and challenging. What are we to do with the passages that utterly baffle us?

Pay close attention.

As the late Hebrew scholar Dr. Michael Heiser said, “If it’s weird, it’s important.”

Over the next several months, we’re going to travel through the weirdest parts of Scripture to explore what they mean and why they matter, so you can gain a better understanding of God’s Word and how it applies to your own life.

Beginning with Genesis 3:9 and the question of God’s knowledge:

“[T]he Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’”

So many commentators, Jewish and Christian, have dealt with the question of God’s omniscience in Genesis 3:9 through the ages…it’s almost annoying we are still puzzling over it.

Yet, the verse is popping up again. Particularly in the withering weeds of modern atheism.

Just yesterday I saw an atheist on X argue the verse was a sign God is not all-knowing.

But is it REALLY?

I want to take you through a deep dive of the verse, its surrounding context, and language to show you it has never and will never show God as an ignorant fool.

What’s the Context?

Anytime we’re dealing with a verse or passage in Scripture, we must first consider context.

For Genesis 3:9, context is particularly important. I wrote in depth about the full context of Genesis 1-3 in a recent article:

For our sake now, below is a brief summary.

Genesis establishes God as the eternal, transcendent Creator. In the beginning, there was God, and there was nothing else until God spoke everything else into being.

By that definition, it’s impossible for him not to know everything since he transcends everything, including knowledge. He’s the Source.

Humanity was made in his image in this world and given three commands:

1. Be fruitful and multiply

2. Rule over the earth and subdue it

3. Don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

The last command came with the consequence that they would surely die if they ate of the tree.

The serpent, who came to be known as Satan in Second Temple Jewish tradition, tricked Eve into eating the fruit by promising she and Adam would not die but would become as gods.

When Adam and Eve both ate, a slow death ensued:

• Erosion of human-divine and human-human relations

• Erosion of human-creation relations

• Erosion of divine-creation relations

The curses from God reflect a collapse of creation and the original commands. I called them inversions in the previous article, but they are really perversions.

1. The serpent’s curse is a perversion of proper design

2. Adam’s is a perversion of the command to tend to and rule over creation

3. Eve’s is a perversion of the command to be fruitful and multiply

Adam and Eve gaining knowledge isn’t the problem. The way they went about it is because they disobeyed the eternal Creator, their Father, and violated established boundaries put in place for their own safety and the safety of creation.

Safety against the nothingness. To keep it from encroaching on and consuming God’s very-good creation.

That brings us to Genesis 3:9...

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A Walk Through the Garden

Immediately after eating the fruit, Adam and Eve make a foolish attempt to hide from the presence of God.

The verses directly preceding verse 9 illustrate their foolishness in a comical way.

They hear God walking through the Garden and realize their nakedness (a symbol of their exposure, which was previously good but now bad because of their sin), they attempt to create a design but it comes out faulty (their makeshift clothes from fig leaves), and, here’s the key, they try to hide from the presence of the eternal God.

If God wasn’t around and didn’t know what was going on, that last reaction is odd. Adam and Eve had all the knowledge in the world at their fingertips and could’ve tried to outwit God.

That they hid implies they were overwhelmed by the knowledge received, knew any attempt to outwit God was futile, or still had an attachment and hunger for the perfection and safety of the Garden.

I’m guessing it was a combo of all three, but Genesis doesn’t tell us.

Anyway, God comes walking through the Garden. In human form. Meaning he made himself accessible to his creation.

Also implied by context is that God was enjoying the fruits of his labor, per the seventh day in Genesis chapter 1.

Up to this point, Adam and Eve were without the immediate presence of God. God gave them leeway to enjoy the Garden and enact their designated duties to tend and rule over the creation. And to enjoy each other.

That God picks the exact moment after they sinned to show up means he already knew what happened. The text doesn’t leave another option. Any others must be speculated.

God deliberately seeks Adam and Eve out because he knows what they did, and intends to confront them, as any good Father would do for his children.

So, when he says, “Where are you?” it’s being used as a rhetorical device. Like if my son did something bad, I knew it, and found him hiding behind the couch to escape the consequences. I might say, “Where are you?” to give him a chance to respond and come clean, even though I know full well he’s guilty.

The context of Genesis 3:9 doesn’t bear this interpretation out alone. Analysis of the Hebrew language supports it too...

Ayekah: An Emotionally-Packed Pun

The Hebrew word used most commonly for general locational inquiries is the neutral eiphoh. But that’s not the word God uses in Genesis 3:9.

Instead, he uses ayekah, derived from the adverb aye. And it shares consonants with the exclamatory word eichah (”How!”) used mainly in lamentations over sorrows. Aye itself also carries a nuance of anguished expectation or lament.

Put together, God’s question is more precisely rendered, “Where have you gone when I expected you here?” or “Why have you hid from me?”

Bearing the emotional punch of mourning.

And if God had no clue what had taken place and where Adam and Eve had actually gone, there would be no need for mourning until the disobedience was discovered.

So, God is far from ignorant in Genesis 3:9. He knows what Adam and Eve did and seeks them out in good faith, while devastated by their choice to defy him and follow the creation instead of their Creator, their heavenly Father.

The above revelation also explains the subsequent questions in verse 11: “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”

The conversation isn’t one to determine unknowns; it’s one to give Adam a chance to make his case. To take accountability for his own actions, which he fails miserably. Blaming his wife instead, who then blames the serpent.

So, God doesn’t heap curses upon them and the serpent haphazardly. With a heavy heart, he distributes the curses because the consequences were promised, and God will not violate his own Word. And he hates every second of the trial.

But as the loving Father he is, he also slips into the curses a promise that he will keep fighting for them. The promise there will be enmity between the serpent and the seed of the woman, and though he bruise man’s heel, man will crush the serpent’s head and emerge victorious.

That promise is considered the first Messianic promise, alluding to the coming Christ Jesus, who would restore the relational bonds perverted by the fall in the Garden.

In other words, the cross and resurrection reversed and overcame the consequences of sin and death.

The necessity of the cross is further signified by God pushing death off onto two animals instead of letting it overtake Adam and Eve. In an act of mercy, he slaughters a lesser creation to preserve his own imagers and then clothes them in the skins of the slain.

Blood was shed to cover the shame of sin. A prelude to the sacrifices in the Law of Moses, which would be fully satisfied in the final sacrifice of atonement through the body and blood of Jesus upon the cross.

Benevolence, not Ignorance

When atheists argue God was ignorant, they must deliberately misinterpret the text of Genesis through surface-level reading.

The language and context make plain that God is no fool reacting to cards as they’re dealt. He owns and knows the table, is surprised by nothing, and works to secure the victory, even in the face of seemingly horrible odds.

God’s invested in us and creation, not just intellectually but emotionally. He loves all he made and hates that divisions were born between us and him, us and creation, and him and creation.

But he’s also a God of his Word. And since we were made with free will to make our own choices and disobeyed despite knowing the consequences, he would’ve been dishonest and dishonorable not to hold us accountable for our crimes.

No amount of kicking and screaming alters the above revelation from Genesis. It only continues the blame game begun by our predecessors and reveals the underlying condition of the perverted human heart.

Our corruption requires a Savior. And Christ bore the penalty we couldn’t bear in order to reverse the curses Adam and Eve so ignorantly unleashed upon us all.

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For much of the 20th century, many Americans not only disagreed with Charles Darwin’s theories. They despised them. Knew his theories presented an invalid history of the natural world.

Hard-fought battles were waged against them, as people recognized the threat to foundational truths about creation and humanity’s place in it.

Resistance remained well into the early 20th century. When atheist materialists and eugenicists in America, such as Margaret Sanger, Leon Whitney, and Madison Grant, vied for Darwin’s theories to eradicate Christian mores, their drivel was rightly disregarded, since it was openly racist and false.

These figures promoted ideas of racial superiority and population control, masking their bigotry and evil intents with the guise of scientific progress and Darwin’s “survival of the fittest.”

However, Americans’ dismissal of their foolishness wouldn’t last. Evolutionary theory was eventually forced upon the public.

Below is an account, from Rene Descartes to modern America, of how deep-rooted anti-Christian agendas propelled this flawed worldview into mainstream culture.

So-Called “Enlightenment”

Universities were created for theological study, and the different subjects like history, philosophy, and science were subsets of that study. Without Christianity, modern education systems never would have been founded.

The roots of higher learning trace back to Christian monasteries and cathedrals in medieval Europe, where monks pursued knowledge to better understand God’s creation.

After the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), the Church was blamed, even though conflicts arose between European nations for various reasons, ranging from religious, territorial, political, and commercial. “Enlightenment” ideals (a prior minority), detached from God in Christ, slowly rose in popularity.

Rene Descartes, often hailed as the father of modern philosophy, was a devout Catholic who sought to defend Christianity through rational inquiry. His famous dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” aimed to establish certainty in knowledge, including the existence of God, within a Christian framework.

However, Descartes’s emphasis on reason and doubt inadvertently paved the way for secular “rationalism,” which later rebelled against religious authority.

His emphasis on radical dualism also separated mind and body, influencing a mechanistic view of the universe which reduced everything to material explanations and sidelined divine intervention. Later popularized by Immanuel Kant as the phenomenal (natural) and noumenal (spiritual). A new Gnostic revolution.

Baruch Spinoza, a Dutch philosopher of Jewish descent, went further than Descartes in challenging organized religion. Excommunicated from his Jewish community, Spinoza’s pantheistic views equated God with nature and denied a personal deity, miracles, and biblical revelation.

In his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, he critiqued the Bible as a human document filled with inconsistencies, advocating for its interpretation through “reason” alone to promote tolerance. Undermining its divine authority.

Spinoza saw Christianity, particularly its dogmatic forms, as superstitious and oppressive, favoring a secular society where religion was privatized and clergy power limited.

These ideas fueled Enlightenment skepticism toward Christianity. And sparked the bloodiest revolution and church persecution in 18th century France…

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The French Connection

Charles Darwin’s theories only made headway in the 1800s due to secular philosophy. Evolutionists exaggerate his views were popular. They were popular mainly in French circles where like-minded “scientists” were rampant after their own secular revolution.

During the French Revolution’s “Reign of Terror” in the 1790s, radicals sought to eradicate Christian influence:

Church lands were seized

Priests mass slaughtered or exiled

A “Cult of Reason” replaced traditional worship.

And from that “anti-religious” socialist climate emerged Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist. He laid the groundwork for evolutionary thought decades before Darwin.

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