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The UK Bible Students Website Christian Biblical Studies |
ROCK OF THE PLAIN
Part 1:
Preamble
By C.C.
Scripture citations are to the King James
(Authorised) Version.
Behold, I am against thee, O inhabitant of the valley, and rock of the plain, saith the Lord; which say, Who shall come down against us? or who shall enter into our habitations? But I will punish you according to the fruit of your doings, saith the Lord: and I will kindle a fire in the forest thereof, and it shall devour all things round about it.
— Jer. 21: 13, 14—
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THERE IS AN inevitability to human history, as though it had a date with destiny. Not that randomness, chance and good fortune do not play a large part in the unfolding of human affairs. But the genius of the God of history lies in His permitting complexity, confusion and accident to conspire towards a predictable, guaranteed outcome. As in chess, where each move decides the subsequent one, either limiting one's choices or opening up an unexpected advantage, world events throw up circumstances and persons which decide the fate of empires. As the initial move in a chess match might dictate the outcome long before it is evident, the final result of human history is even now a foregone conclusion.
Most kingdoms, regimes and notable figures of
history, to the present day, have never really understood the principle
proclaimed in Daniel 4: 32, that ʻthe Most High ruleth in the kingdom of men,
and giveth it to whomsoever he willʼ. The expression, ʻMost Highʼ, used a lot in Daniel, is
literally, the ʻsupreme supremeʼ, over which there can be no higher authority. For God is above all and sees all
and perceives trends and consequences which the groundling man cannot.
And He may choose to intervene. The Most High, who always was and is and
always will be, governs as Master and Commander of the past, the present, and
the future.
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The party's over, it's time to call it a day.
– Comden and Green (1956) –
Where is everyone? It seems spurious to say it, but without people in it the planet can have no history. After all, every good party needs intelligent and witty guests. But cosmology and evolutionary science regard human existence as only one stage along a broad spectrum of accidental life, modern humanity having ʻcome alongʼ after most of the foundational elements essential to existence had been laid down. Unlike the conditions on other planets of the solar system and beyond, Earth's environment has been host to plant and animal life for countless millennia a lucky accident from the perspective of modern science. Goldilocks never had it so good.
Had varied life-forms failed to gratuitously develop looking at it from the evolutionary point of view into homo sapiens sapiens, there would of course be nothing to write about, there being no writer, nor any creature interested in nor capable of reviewing how it or its companions got from Point A to Point B and what their next destination might be. Earth might have remained a planet pregnant with potential, a story bursting to be told but with no one to tell it. A place with lots of fauna, but no fun.
It is instructive to consider that from the standpoint of evolution, the emergence of human life was inevitable. As a process which need not have started, once it began evolution couldn't stop. Arising from inanimate matter, the evolutionary process launched itself into the life-generating business and over billions of years generated one life-form after another, often in parallel, building from the less complex to the more complex. It was opportunistic and self-sustaining, supplying its own source material for its continuance, taking advantage of every nook and cranny of the natural environment to work its magic. In this it was excuse the expression single-minded. Its branching off from the ape-like form into varieties of homo sapiens suggests a degree of dissatisfaction with the status quo it had reached at that stage and an awareness that it might improve on the situation by producing us, homo sapiens sapiens.
The present lull in dramatic displays of human macro-evolution is apparently misleading. Anthropology, evolutionary psychology, and the various sub-disciplines within the broad framework of evolutionary science assert that the process continues in more subtle ways, now having less to do with anatomy and biology and more to do with the reconfiguration of the brain-mind-body combination through the use of disruptive, computerised, touch-screen technology and synthetic ʻadd-onsʼ to the human being. Man has become his own designer.
As an omniscient theory, evolution has no
equal, claiming to explain all things pertaining to the past, present and
future. As an article of
faith it holds its own against established religion, anticipating every question
and objection raised against it, deriding its critics. For many it has replaced religious faith and,
regrettably, a biblical interpretation of history.
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Oh, chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken, lay a little egg for me.
Chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken, I want one for me tea.
I haven't had an egg since breakfast, and now it's half-past three,
So, chick, chick, chick, chick, chicken, lay a little egg for me.
– Holt-McGhee-King (British popular song, 1920s) –
One can make scrambled eggs from whole eggs, but not the reverse. The simple observation expresses the idea that Nature moves ineluctably onward, like an arrow of time. The assumption seems to underpin the theory of the Big Bang inflationary model. Triggered by a ‘quantum fluctuation’ about fourteen-thousand-million years ago, the Big Bang was an ʻexplosionʼ emanating from a dense, compressed ʻdotʼ of matter, spreading outwards relative to its hypothetical location in an instantaneous instant, leading to the formation of the universe and everything in it.
Likewise, human history exemplifies the principle of forward motion. Not that civilisation consistently progresses from a lower to a higher state without ʻdark agesʼ intervening or calamitous setbacks. Rather, there is in the unfolding of events, small and great, an implicit object in view an end point, a collective hopeful vision and rudimentary human longing, enunciated through art, poetry, religion and great oratory, and evinced by such endeavours as the construction of legal and economic systems to secure the present and future weal of Society.
Communities are dynamic; they progress and grow by means of the naturally forward-looking process of sexual reproduction and the phases of the human condition: infancy, childhood, adolescence, maturity. Peoples migrate in response to a raft of pressures, such as overcrowding, dwindling resources, perturbations in climate, dislocations caused by war, disease, famine, and so forth. Mighty empires rise and fall in reaction to internal and external forces. But for all the interruption, the human family continues to expand, overspreading the Earth and surging forward through history in order to reach its destiny one ill-defined by secular philosophy, but one which humanity cannot evade.
Isn't this a rather odd contention? No more odd than the atheistic assertion that humanity arose accidentally and without purpose and keeps on going because it must, captive to inexorable processes of Nature and immutable physical laws. But human history is not merely a catalogue of survival techniques, but rather a concatenation of intangible aspirations and ambitions, and a quest for stability and haven. A search for knowledge, religious and artistic expression, inventiveness, are all marks of human mind and human history, and which on memorable occasions have combined to form useful civilisations, which in their turn have added to the storehouse of human heritage, and upon which our modern world has been built.
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What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of man's ideological evolution and the universalism of Western liberal democracy.
– Francis Fukuyama (1989)
–
There is a natural tension between divine intervention and humanity's free will and depending on one's point of view one can argue that perhaps there is not enough of the former and too much of the latter. But perhaps the argument is outdated anyway, since popular Western thought, directed by materialistic philosophy, has scuttled the notion of free will by insisting that our minds are influenced more by chemistry than volition, effectively nullifying any belief in a higher authority or that we are responsible for the things we do. Such propaganda has contributed to the bursting of the sewers of immoral, self-serving and brutal behaviour which now course through the channels of Western society.
But the news is not all bad. We still live in a state of grey, in which altruism and hedonism operate side by side. Wickedness will never wholly triumph, thanks to God's past and timely interposition in the sending of Christ, and a future strategic lesson in trouble which will yet take humanity to the brink of despair. The Christian faith will never be exterminated, for the godly will continue to declaim against the evils of this world. A faithful witness against the unrighteousness abroad in the land is always in order, and as it was with the prophet Jeremiah, it is a fire that inflames the bones (Jer. 20: 9). Long may it burn!
Revising History
To many contemporary historians human history is comparable to the process of evolution, a melange of good and bad luck, foolish and fortunate decisions, with dollops of cruelty, ambition, stupidity and foresight thrown in hectic, uneven and, in the end, pointless. In short, just what one would expect of a species which is itself the product of a purposeless process. In this light, the human race ought not to be here at all.
But no matter how much this concept argues for
the vanity and meaninglessness of it all, real people do not behave as if
this were true. Most
people believe that the elements of their lives are important their
families, friends, their conscientious efforts to do right, or to help save the
planet for future generations, and so forth. The unthinking, unsympathetic process of evolution which we
are told has shaped us has not passed on a universal instinct of carelessness in
such matters. Most people still cling to the
belief that life has worth. Of all sounds, the
wail of the ambulance siren is one of the most hopeful. For as long as the rest of us think that the
saving of even one life is important, the human condition will continue to
reflect the image and likeness of its Creator.
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The dust of exploded
beliefs may make a fine sunset.
– Geoffrey Madan (1934)
–
Both the universe and subsequent life on earth had purposeful beginnings. History began with the deliberate creation of Man. And like any complete story, human history has a beginning, middle, and end. It has been an epic trek, embarked upon for the most part by wayfarers who don't know where they came from nor where they're going.
The truth behind the genesis and story of the human race is found only in the Scriptures. Secularists have studied and commented on the unfolding of this story to great effect. But they usually miss the real background to the story and their prejudices often get in the way. The past may not always be a good guide to the future, but it is useful to ask whether we can extrapolate present conditions and perhaps catch a glimpse of where the tale is heading. But without an understanding of how God works in history, it's impossible.
In the next instalment we will consider some
of the events which shaped our modern world and simultaneously presaged the
long-term decline of Protestant Christianity in the West. Through the lens of
Scripture we will glimpse the destination in view the real end of history and see how it casts its shadow back upon the Rock of the
Plain.
Continues
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May 2014. The usual and natural author rights are asserted, except that you may reproduce this article in whole or in part without express permission, but please acknowledge its source.