Human Devolution
RO08-02

Accountability

The United States Today

Ninevah

Sodom and Gomorrah

So, there is great hope in any nation that has gone as far down the line of self-destruction as our nation has, if there is a body of believers which can be raised up, and oriented to the Word of God to act as the preserving quality of that nation. Who knows how long God permit us to go on, and how many opportunities there are for the outreach of the Word of God from the one nation on the face of the earth that is most capable of doing that? But the problem comes back to: who's going to raise up that kind of salt? Who's going to make Christians that salty? Only the pastor-teachers who understand how this looks, and therefore, are teaching people the Word of God.

Vietnam

Do you have any idea of what's going to happen to people who were strong resisters of communism – to these who voted with their feet by hitting the road and running as fast as they could to South Vietnam? And now we have our Ramsey Clark, and our Jane Fonda, and our Tom Hayden, and all the rest of the weirdo, disoriented characters that are using the freedoms of this country brought about because a nation that once operated in respect to the divine institutions, and to the divine laws for civil governments, have made that freedom possible, and they used it to abuse this nation with the hopes of bringing us under the same tyranny that over a billion people (a third of the world's population) now suffers under.

Well, God always gives a chance to escape. Let's hope that there may be enough preachers with enough brains and enough orientation, and enough people who won't be slapping those preachers down, but will start listening and start supporting them, that we may be able to create enough preserving salt in order to grant us some days of grace that we certainly don't deserve.

Romans 1:21 says, "Because when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful." We're going to look here at the negative volition of the person who has come to the awareness that God exists. Here is the heathens who has come to God consciousness through what he views in nature (in creation). Verse 20 has told us that they are without excuse once they have this information. Verse 21 begins with the word "Because." It's the Greek word "dioti." The word "dioti" ("because") introduces the reason that the end of verse 20 said that they are without excuse. And here's the reason:

Because they Knew

This is in the aorist tense, which means the point in time, in the past, when they came to the awareness of God. It is active voice, which indicates that these people possessed this knowledge themselves, so they can do something with it. It is a participle, which is simply indicating that a principle is being stated. However, it is what grammatically we call a concessive participle. And "concessive" means "in spite of something." So, we translate it: "Although they knew:" "Because, although they knew God" is the way to translate it. The heathen, in spite of the fact that they knew God, and they had received this information, were negative toward Him.

Human Devolution

So, this is very important to notice that God the Holy Spirit is putting this in such grammatical form as to make it clear to us that nobody was expecting the heathen to have a response that they had no ground to make. They did have the ground for being positive toward looking for a relationship with God, because they had been given the information concerning God. But although they had that information, they did not glorify Him as God. First, they knew God through creation and revelation, then they were negative toward God by rejecting the knowledge that they had, and thus rejecting God's authority over them.

Please remember that the human race began with a full knowledge about God. Adam was not ignorant of Bible doctrine. He was well-trained in Bible doctrine, and this information was retained by him after the fall. We don't know how long a period of time he and Eve went along in innocence. But all during that time that they were without sin, God was teaching them divine viewpoint principles. He was teaching them, in effect, what we call Bible doctrine. After the fall, God continued, no doubt, to teach them in one way or another. And Adam passed on this information to his family.

So, mankind begins at a very high point of information and spiritual enlightenment apart from the testimony of creation. But human viewpoint believes that man has evolved upward, and that man, in his knowledge of God, has gone up from a primitive (a polytheistic worship of many gods) to gradually where he became more refined in his religion, and actually came to the worship of one God. The idea is the evolution of religion – from a devil-like God to a beneficent God who is father of all.

However, this is not the view we have in Scripture at all. We have in Scripture the view that man began with the knowledge of God. That's one of the things that's involved here in Romans 1:21 – that man had a knowledge of God. We go all the way back to Adam, and he had a very splendid knowledge of God. Yet when human viewpoint mentality looks upon the scene today, and they see a refinement of the worship of God, they say, "Well, that's because it evolved upward." No, the Bible says that man devolved. He went downward.

This would be comparable, as someone has said, to a savage in some jungle, walking along, and suddenly coming upon the wreckage of a huge commercial airliner. And he looks at all these pieces and parts lying around here: the wings; the engine; the wheels; and, so on, as he's looking at these parts and wondering about this, another airliner comes overhead – one that is exactly like the one that has crashed on the ground. The primitive man looks up, and he says, "Oh, the airliner flying up there came from this down here." And he has made the same conclusion that the evolutionist has made – that the beautiful airliner flying up there came from the wreckage here on the ground. And if you could put the wreckage together, however it came together, you'd have another beautiful commercial airplane flying through the air.

So, they say man that came from wreckage, and he has become something beautiful. But the truth of the matter is that what we have today is the wreckage of the beautiful high flier that Adam was. Everything we produce today is the rubbish and the leftovers of the splendid things that man once was and that man once produced. The flying plane does not evolve from the wreckage. It is the wreckage that came from the airplane that once flew. Today, humanity is in a state of wreckage because it has devolved from the high point at which it started at the hands of God's creation, and of the information it had. Mankind has experienced spiritual devolution, not evolution. Mankind has gone from the knowledge of one true God to a delusion about many false gods.

The did not Honor God

What they did not do was honor God as God; that is, as the Supreme Being. It was bad enough that they did not honor God. But it said, "Neither were they thankful. The word "neither" is this little Greek word "e," and actually it just means "nor." It just adds to the failure to honor God. Not only did they not honor God, but they did something else: "Nor were they thankful." "Thankful" is "eucharisteo" in the Greek, from which we get our word "Eucharist," one of the terms applied to the Lord's Supper, the communion service of thanksgiving. This expresses their lack of gratitude to God for the revelation of Himself, and the care which He had provided them with. This again is in the aorist tense. At the point that they came to know God, they were not grateful for that information. It is in active voice, which again adds to their condemnation, because it says that they deliberately chose not to appreciate the information – the awareness of the existence of God. It is indicative – a statement of fact about the heathen.

The Supreme Being

Ingratitude

So, having divine viewpoint truth about God is not the sole issue. These people had it. It's also what you do with the divine truth information that you have. Now, that's true of you and me. It's not just that you attend church, and someone teaches you God's thinking, and explains it to you on an authoritative basis such that you see where these things come from, and why we can tell you that certain things are right; certain things are wrong; that God thinks in this direction; and, God is opposed to this direction, because we draw it out of the original languages of the Scripture. It's not enough that you know that. It's what you do with that. There are many Christians today who do the same thing that the heathen do. God gives them information and revelation, and they're so hellbent and determined that they're going to be negative and resist God, that nothing can convince them. Even when the answers are irrefutable from the Word of God, they simply reflect the extreme expression of negative volition, which is: "He who is convinced against his will, remains unconvinced still." That is a deliberate rejection of what God is trying to tell us. And we will not escape the condemnation and the wrath of God.

So, Satan induces us to negative volition toward divine truth for many reasons. He makes us very opinionated for various vested interests that we have. Just listen to this debate which is going on between the tongues crowd and Dr. Criswell at First Baptist Church in Dallas. If you had listened to the radio program that he was on, you would have been readily aware of the fact that the tongues crowd (the charismatics) did themselves a great disservice by even asking questions. The minute they opened their mouths, you knew how disoriented they were to the Word of God. One man called Dr. Criswell, and said, "Dr. Criswell, first of all, you have said now that you don't believe in the Holy Ghost." Right away, the moderator interrupted and said, "Oh, I don't think he said that." And Dr. Criswell said, "Now, why would you say that? I've just written the book on the Holy Spirit in the church today (or something like that). Of course, I believe in the Holy Spirit." And this charismatic said, "Oh, I didn't say the Holy Spirit. I'm talking about the Holy Ghost." And Dr. Criswell said, "What's the matter with you, man?"

Now, he's so old, and he's been in one church so long, and he's got such a big church, that he doesn't have to worry about offerings, or people in the pews, or anything. So, he can say, "What's the matter with you, man?" He could have said several other things too that he might have liked to have said. But went on to explain about the Greek word "pneuma," and that we don't translated it the old English word "ghost," but that is the Holy Spirit.

That man who was asking the question was very opinionated. He had vested interests. He was not going to be dissuaded from the fact that his gibberish is the gift of tongues. And no matter what was said to him, he was going to hang on to his gibberish. Well, Dr. Criswell has the worm on the hook, and it's squirming. They wanted to challenge him to a debate, and I'm glad to hear that he has said that he's not going to debate them. Just let the worm keep on squirming on the hook, because the Word of God has made its point and made its mark. If people want to be opinionated, and they want to be negative to God's divine viewpoint, then they can't be helped.

What I'm trying to do is to alert you to the fact, though you're not sitting out in the jungle, trying to relate pieces of a broken airplane on the ground with one that you see flying in the air, that you are still in the same position of going negative to the Word of God, and cutting yourself off from the blessing of God as that heathen is. It'll cost him his eternal life. It'll cost him hell. It'll cost you a vast amount of reward at the Judgment Seat of Christ. Just be careful, when you're ready to be opinionated concerning the Word of God, that you're you know what you're talking about, and that your opinion is well-taken? As a matter of fact, most discussions on the Bible between people are an exchange of unbelievable ignorance and smug opinions concerning what the Bible says, that it doesn't say at all.

Well, Paul is going to describe for us a society which, on a whole, has this negative attitude toward the information about God, and the information that the revelation of the Word of God makes. He's going to describe a society which dismisses such knowledge; such a God; and, his thinking. They possess something of infinite value, but their negative volition minds are so blind, yet they don't sense the value of what they have. They fail to grasp the necessity for divine viewpoint; for their personal happiness; and, as a matter of fact, for the survival of their nation.

This results from this oriented thinking, which produces a variety of the human perversions and the derangements that we're going to look at. When you reject God's viewpoint, you invite into your life a pathological condition. When you reject divine viewpoint, you invite a mental derangement. You invite various kinds of pathological conditions into which you may fall. If you are an unbeliever, particularly so. Out of primary attitude of the vast segment of American society and of governmental leaders is a lack of appreciation for the knowledge about God, and His Word, and the thing that God gives us for our guidance.

That's why this nation is in trouble, because its people could look at a Barry Goldwater, and listen to him speak, and not realize that there is our salvation nationally. There is the man who will do the thing that needs to be done. And they looked at Lyndon Johnson and said, "There's the man that we need in order to make life better for us." Well, everybody looks back and realizes what a big mistake that was. But the point is that they're going to make the same mistake until their mentalities get straightened out. And our hopes for that are very small indeed. It's not just the people – it's the leaders. It's producing a chain of deterioration of moral character of the will to resist evil and of suicidal decisions. That's what we are plagued with – leaders who are making suicidal decisions. The United States has maximum opportunity to know God and to find happiness. And yet, we are in confusion; we are in fear; we have lost our confidence; and, we are on a course of total destruction.

Here's how it works. Let's try to illustrate the case of the heathen when he goes negative to the Word of God. He receives a testimony of creation. We can think of his mind as being divided into two parts, because the mind has two functions. It has a perceptive function, or a perceptive mind, whereby we learn things. It has a directive mind, which directs lives, or through which we make decisions.

Going Negative

Going Positive

Here again, he listens to the gospel explained to him by some believer, or through reading something, or through on the air (perhaps on radio). He hears the gospel, and God the Holy Spirit enables him to understand it. Now he has "gnosis." At this point, he goes positive toward that information. And this is then transferred over to his directive mind as gospel "epignosis" – full knowledge of the gospel ready to be used.

You cannot use divine viewpoint information from your perceptive mind. You can only learn it there. It is only from the directive (action) side of your mind that you can make decisions, and that you can do something with the information that you have received. So, now he has the information of the gospel. He inhales, in other words, the gospel message, and then he exhales it in the form of faith (or Jesus Christ), and the result is that he explodes into eternal life. Salvation becomes his lot. A living human spirit leaps into life within his being, and he becomes a fully constituted human being with spirit, soul, and body.

It is in this form of going from receiving creation testimony to the desire to know God, where God then brings the gospel information, and the positive response to that by faith in Christ, brings that heathen man or that heathen woman to eternal life. It is not enough to be aware that God is out there. That will not bring him to eternal life. It is the positive response to the gospel. It is faith in Christ that makes the difference. Salvation is hearing the gospel and then believing it: "Believe (or trust) in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." That's why you cannot be saved by inviting Christ into your heart. When the Bible gives the image of inviting Christ into your heart in Revelation 3, that is for a believer who is out of temporal fellowship, who has confessed his sins; and, by confessing his sin, is inviting Christ to come back into fellowship with him into his life. You cannot be saved by inviting Christ into your heart, because that, as it connotes your life, is a very dirty place, and He wouldn't enter it. Salvation is believing the gospel by exercising trusting faith in Christ as Savior.

Human viewpoint thinks that we can improve on the biblical specification, and I don't think we can. I think that the biblical specification for salvation, which is constantly believe; believe; believe, but in a proper object, the Lord Jesus Christ, as Savior – that is the way the Bible presents it, because that is the way that it actually takes place. It's an act of trust in Christ on the basis of gospel information that brings a person to salvation. So, don't go around telling people that they can be saved by inviting Jesus Christ into their heart, because they probably will not be by doing it that way. They probably will not be by your telling them that if they try to act upon that. There's a great difference between inviting Christ into your life, or into your heart, and trusting Him as personal Savior.

So, the solution for human evil of all kinds is regeneration that begins with God-consciousness, and it concludes with positive belief in the gospel message.

So, the first part of Romans 1:21 says, "Because (although) when they (the heathen) knew God, through the testimony of creation (and whatever direct revelation was left from the time of Adam), they glorified (they honored) God not (absolutely not) as God (as the Supreme Being), nor were they grateful for the awareness of Him and the information concerning Him. They were ingrates to the core.

Vain in their Imaginations

Specifically, it says, "They became empty in their imaginations." The word "in" plus the locative case gives us location. It's the Greek word "en." And the word "imaginations" is the "dialogismos." This comes from two words: from "logismos," which means reasoning or thoughts; and, the preposition "dia," which means "through." So, the idea is "the reasoning through." Something in man is able to reason through, or to come to an understanding, is the thing that goes empty. The very thing that a person needs to be able to think his way through to proper decisions is the thing that breaks down in him completely.

So, what the Word of God tells us is that the heathen who goes negative finds that his thinking through (his reasoning capacity) loses its reality. He becomes a pathological person so that his thinking is deranged. He becomes a sick person in his thinking. This refers to the perceptive side of the mind – the place where he processes the information he receives. The thinking of the negative heathen becomes futile, because it's void of reality. He is incapable of solving problems, and incapable of making life decisions. He has nothing in his mind to go on.

Their Senseless Heart

Without Understanding

A Darkened Mind

Here, in the perceptive mind, is a spiritual vacuum. The person has gone negative to Bible doctrine, so Bible doctrine information (the knowledge of God) is canceled out. So, what happens? Well, holes open up, so to speak, in the perceptive mind. There is a vacuum condition here. There's a high pressure area out there created by Satan. And in through the openings there is sucked into the perceptive mind, human viewpoint; doctrines of demons; religion; and, everything imaginable that is false from the realm of Satan. All of that is sucked into the perceptive mind. This then is transferred over to the director side of the mind. So, human viewpoint comes in to develop the frame of reference. Human viewpoint determines what values the person has, and what standards he lives by. The doctrine of demons determines this. Religion determines this. And when a person has this condition, where false information has been sucked into the perceptive mind, and transferred over to the directing side, it expresses itself in a variety of ways.

The Scripture says that a condition of darkness develops on this side of the mentality. Now the person is out there groping. He's trying to make decisions, and everything about it is in the dark. He doesn't know at all what to do. What's the result? The result is liberalism and collectivism. It is collectivism in the form of socialism, communism, and anarchy. That's why we have so much demand for anarchy in the nation today – slavery of one kind and another: to drugs; to sex; and, to booze. It is enslavement because the directive minds is in the dark, and it thinks that these things are desirable and useful.

We have world government concepts – the idea that this would be a better world if there was one chief ruler. When the directive side of the minds of humanity sink into this kind of darkness everywhere because there's a spiritual emptiness over here on the other side, this body of humanity (which will then be on earth) will readily receive the antichrist. And they'll welcome him. Their minds (in the dark) will think that he's a wonderful solution.

We have a morality because people are in the dark. We had relativism to determine what is right and wrong. We have do-goodism because the minds of people are in the dark. We have great welfare programs. We have a weakness militarily in the United States government because we have leaders who say, "If we are weak, other people will not feel threatened. The Chinese will not feel threatened. The Russians will not feel threatened. And then they'll behave themselves, and they won't go storming across borders and taking other people's countries away from them.

You have to be a black, darkened, ignorant fool. And I use the word advisedly, because the next verse is going to tell you that's exactly what they have become: fools, because of the blackness and darkness on the directive side of their mind. There's nothing else that they could be. Along with that, their minds are not only disoriented, but so are their emotions. The emotions move over and start dominating the soul like a woman dominating her husband. So, they become blind to reality in their feelings. Their feelings are sick – pathological. The things they desire are sickly things. They're devoted to false subjects. Instead of being true to the people they should be true to, they're false to them. Instead of being loyal to the government they should be true to, they're loyal to false governments.

If you understand this psychological setup that the Bible reveals to us, you'll see why people do the things they do. You'll see why the radicals in our country are doing the things they do. And you see why we have government leaders who are scared rabbits, because they themselves have darkened minds. They don't have the courage to stand up against darkened minds. They themselves would have to be men of enlightenment in their directive minds, so that they knew what was taking place; they understood what was happening; and, therefore, they had the courage to stand up against people who are promoting the kinds of things in this country that are destroying this nation.

This explains why some of you wonder about our people in Congress. They know that if they spend more money than we raise in taxes, that it will make the prices of everything go up. You may say, "That's madness. Every time they do that, it tightens the noose around the economic life of this country." That's right. But do you think that they're going to stop? No. Why? Because their minds are darkened. Can you see what kind of leaders you'd have to have to stand up and say, "Just a minute. We're going to stop this. We're going to cut out welfare programs. We're going to whatever we have to do to stop this kind of madness, and we're going to put the American dollar back to a relationship with gold, and we're going to come within our budget, and we are going to become economically strong again.

"Wait a minute. If you come storming across the country of an ally that we have promised to support, and we're going to go north, and we're going to use our bombs if we have to, to blow you off the face of the earth. Now, if you want to go storming in other people's country, just be prepared for that."

The Panama Canal

You may say, "These people are out of their minds." That's right. They may not exactly be out of their minds, but they're groping around in a dark room. They are in darkness such as when you put your hand in front of your face, you can't see it. And these people are making decisions on that basis that are affecting your lives. The actions are senseless; they are stupid; and, they are self-destructive.

You may read for yourself Ephesians 4:17-19, which describe the same breakdown for you as a Christian. God help you if you come to the point where the directive side of your mind is covered with the darkness that you allow to descend upon it because of your negative attitude toward the intake of the Word of God, and toward the Word of God that you have learned. The same thing will happen to you in your happiness, and in your personal self-destruction.

Dr. John E. Danish, 1975

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