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Mark of Cain




The Mark of Cain



by Philip D. Ropp




September, 2002

   
    One of the great casualties inflicted upon modern man by the widespread acceptance of the scientific view of history has been the relegation of the Bible to the intellectual scrap heap of myth and legend.

    There was a time, and not that long ago, when all of western civilization understood the world historically and socially within the context of a Biblically based reality. The story of how this came about is familiar enough.  The Romans, in an act equivalent to throwing water on a cultural gasoline fire, dispersed the Jews to the far reaches of the known pagan world.  Driven by intense persecutions and the missionary zeal of the early Church, the Christians soon followed, and the historical stage that our time plays itself out upon was thusly set.

    As the Church grew to spiritual and intellectual prominence, the Judeao Christian worldview, with its linear historical progression from created beginning to climactic ending, superseded the endless cycles of time that characterized the pagan cultures that preceded it.  When, in the 4th century, the Church became the dominant religious and social  institution within the Empire of Rome, it represented such a vast and revolutionary change in man's self perception that this time would become the historical line of demarcation separating the ancient and modern worlds.

    By the dawn of the so called "Age of Reason" in the 18th century, the Biblical worldview held sway from the western borders of Asia to the Americas, and was poised for rapid expansion into the remaining world.  Beginning at this time, and continuing over the next 300 years, it became accepted that Christian history, tradition and faith should be subjected to the endless indignities of scientific and philosophical inquiry.  A continuous parade of Rationalists, Deists, Theosophists, Freemasons, Darwinists, Marxists, modernists, atheists and apostates of all stripe have taken this opportunity to call every aspect of the Christian faith into question, and the result is the current public and venemous denial of nearly all that Christian society has traditionally held to be sacred and true.

    During our generation, the world has come to understand itself as a global, secular entity.  Christianity has been stripped of its traditional role in government and society, to the point where even the mention of God raises shrill protests, as the deeply offended rent their garments and beat their breasts in protest.  We dare not speak the name of Jesus Christ in public, in court, in school, or within the halls of state, and the world celebrates hedonism and sin as it did in the days of Noah.

    When viewed in this light, it is clear the spirit of antichrist rules the academic, social, religious and governmental institutions of the earth.  Headlines bear witness to an insidious evil that infiltrates and seeks to pervert the very soul of the ancient and Holy Church of Christ.  Plague and pestilence, once conquered, now join other weapons of death and misery and despair, and the nations of the earth sue falsely for peace as they prepare themselves for warfare.  As the great and ancient war of heaven prepares to spill its wrath upon the earth, we are told by our leaders to go about our business as usual. And so we do, but not without a gnawing and growing apprehension of the future.  Things have gone terribly wrong, terrible judgements loom, and the tension has become palpable. Yet we are told that the future is bright and our possibilities limitless should we but give our hearts to science rather than to Jesus.  Surely it is not the spirit of God that has driven the world to this, the brink of Armageddon.

    The experts, so ordained and sanctioned by the authority of their standing within the academic community, would have you believe that never has there been such a time as ours. Indeed, in their view man has attained his current status as master of the earth through a long, steady march from accidentally animated protein in the primordial ooze, through the animal kingdom, to the portals of space and time and all that the mind can conceive.  It is the dawning of a new "Age of Man."  And all we must do to share in this utopian future is deny Jesus Christ as a well meaning charlatan; an ancient superstition that has out stayed his welcome in a world where technology and arrogance has elevated man to sit upon the empty throne of God.

    And so on earth we find a scenario that is, within the Biblical context, so familiar as to be frightening.  The nations gather from the four corners of the world for unprecedented carnage, and man, joining forces with his chosen master, Satan, seeks to make war upon God.  The spirit of antichrist, in order to secure the utopian "New Age" of secularism as the ruling religion of the world, pits Christianity and Judaism against Islam in a global conflict designed to cleanse the planet of the knowledge of God once and for all.

    In a world in which the scientist has replaced the priest and pastor as the respected keeper of the truth, it should not surprise us that violent and wicked behavior run rampant. In a world in which many, if not most, churchmen have rejected the Bible for the secular view of history, it should not surprise us that apostacy grips the throat of organized Christianity.  And in a world in which there is but one government that holds to the Bible as its official doctrine, and that is the Vatican, it should not surprise us that the earth is plunging headlong towards Revelation 20, verses 7 and 8.  And it should not surprise us that the governments that rule over us should be, or, at least, act as if they are oblivious to the true nature of the historical process that unfolds before us.  What is surprising is the ease with which believing Christians will deny the historical validity of their faith even as its most profound prophecies are fulfilled before their very eyes.

    During the 20th century, the popular conception of the Bible underwent a drastic change.  Scholars of great reknown within the fields of theology, philosophy, history, archaeology and other numerous disciplines found a wide audience and great profit in sensational books aimed at "liberating" western man from the social and intellectual shackles of traditional Christianity.  "God is Dead!" screamed the headlines in the1960's, and by the end of the decade the youth of America, and the west in general, had embraced rebellion (as well as public intoxication and fornication) as a way of life. It is a trend that has continued unabated into our day, a time in which rebellion against the ways of God is counted as right and for the public good.

    While history may be denied it cannot be avoided, and herein lies the great dilemma that confronts the nations of the earth.  The scientific study of history teaches that man is not controlled by past events unless he so chooses to be controlled.  Mostly it is a disjointed affair that concerns itself with the cataloging of names and dates and events.  Interpretation takes the form of endless scholarly bickering over details and the formulation of novel theories aimed at selling books in great numbers to a multitude hungering for justification of their unbelief. In this way, the author may rise to intellectual prominence and acquire prestige and wealth in the process.  While decrying the anachronisms found in historical texts, the modern historian, none the less, projects his own scientific view of reality into the past and then proudly proclaims that history has been "demythologized," by which he means cleansed of all supernatural elements.  With God thusly removed from history, evolution, both physical and social, becomes the accepted means of understanding the past, and evolution is merely the endless cycles of paganism scientifically repackaged for a more modern audience. And so modern man, like the dog of Proverbs, returns to his own religious vomit, and, should God be alive and well after all, then this is indeed a grave dilemma.

    The Bible teaches that by choosing the sin of rebellion against God at the beginning of the historical epoch, man locked himself into a future of ever escalating violence that would, at the end of the historical epoch, result in the utter destruction of the earth.  Regardless of how history is interpreted, it becomes more certain every day that the present time finds man facing a future of Biblical proportion.  The wages of sin remains death, and so the stakes are very high in this, the end game of the world.  Because the world has denied the validity of the Biblical record is all the more reason for Christians to hold fast to the Bible, not only as a statement of faith, but as the true historical record of ancient earth.

    The Bible is, and always has been, Sacred history; the story of God's interaction with man.  It begins in a wilderness Paradise, with God forbidding sinful man access to the the tree of life, and it ends in the Paradise of God's Great City, with the ban lifted and the trees of life lining the street where the river of life flows for all eternity.  In between lies the history of man, from his original corruption and submission to the spirit of evil to his ultimate triumph and reconciliation with the divine. This reconciliation, promised from the beginning, takes the form of God Himself taking on human flesh and walking out upon the stage of history to the insolent boos and jeers of his greatest creation.  When he is put to death by jealous men for teaching peace, love and salvation, the history of the Old Testament comes to a close.  Man has failed utterly to keep God's law and judgment is at hand. At the resurrection, when our human sensibilities tell us that the long prophesied Day of the Lord and the final destruction of the world should be forthcoming, we find instead God's unfathomable mercy and grace.  The New Testament period begins, the Church Age, which only now is drawing to its final and dramatic conclusion.

    The Bible comes from the region of the world that we call the "Middle" or "Near" East, the westernmost part of the Orient.  It is, therefore, eastern in its mysticism and western in its effort to historically report and explain this mysticism. It's methodology and worldview, accepting and interpreting the supernatural at face value and with an unflinching honesty, is, in fact, representative of the blending of the best aspects of ancient oriental and occidental thought.  As such, it is man's highest achievment, reaching beyond the temporal to reveal the true God and His self appointed role in human affairs.

    If it were possible to remove the water masses from the face of the earth and push the land masses together, one would find that this region sits squarely in the geographic center of the planet.  It is, quite literally, the "crossroads of the world."  Civilization was in full flower here 6,000 years ago, complete with impressive architecture, engineering, medicine, astronomy, religious systems, literature, the arts, legal and governmental systems, and, of course, well organized militaries.

    Once we are able to overcome the barriers of time, language and culture, we find a world that is recognizable and sophisticated, peopled with inhabitants that possess the full range of human attributes that we enjoy.  Conversely, we also find a world that is possessed of all of the human failings that bring pain and misery and death.  It is to this dichotomy of man, his ability to love and hate with equal intesity, that the Bible is addressed.  At its heart, this is the essence of the eternal struggle between good and evil, God and the devil, and it is this strange propensity of man to serve both that draws him squarely into the middle of an eternal conflict that he can neither understand nor control, and which, in the end, will overwhelm him.

    While the ancient world is by all measures a fascinating place, it is the Bible's ability to speak to the future -- our present and beyond -- that is of the greatest interest and importance.  In the Biblical account, history is a series of prophecies and fullfillments.  Prophecy anticipates history, history fullfills prophecy, and so, step by step, each provides the proof for the other.  There is no other body of literature that is self validating in this way, and since it is beyond the ability of human reason to manage events in this fashion, it is logical that we accept the Bible's explanation of itself:  It is the Word of God. As such, it does not lend itself to "unbiased scientific inquiry" because unbiased scientific inquiry demands neutral ground to work from and there is no neutral ground between the forces of good and evil. To question the former invariably results in the defacto accpetance of the latter. God demands not only faith but also fidelility if the Bible is to do the work He intends, which is to teach us to overcome the history of the world and thereby attain the larger place in the universe that He has prepared for us.

     One does not see the truth in the Bible until one finds it within himself, and one does not find it within himself until God chooses to reveal it. This is when the search for God begins, and within the Bible lies the promise that he that seeks shall also find. And so the Bible provides a highly personal spiritual experience that resturctures and reorients the individual consciousness to God's view of reality rather than man's, and thereby opens man's soul to God's saving graces. This salvation is an historical process that takes place here, in the time and space of earth, and it is the duty of those saved out of each generation to perserve the tradition of this salvation history and pass it down to the next with all of the dignity, respect and reverence that is owed to Scripture and, in turn, to God Himself. In the end it is futile to deny Eden's history, for its fulfillment goes on all around us; unabated and unstoppable:  It is the denial of this process and this destiny that brands us with the Mark of Cain.
 

Revelation 20:7-8   And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together for battle: the number of whom is as the sand of the sea.