Pete Garcia
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The Bible then walks through the rest of the creation process rather briefly according to Genesis 1-2. The pinnacle of God’s work was man, for he was created in His image. We are not told how long Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden before their fall, but let us assume for the sake of argument that is a brief period. I understand “brief” can be a rather relative or subjective term, so let’s just say that it is more than a day and less than 100 years.
When God made Adam on the sixth day, He encoded into him all the genetic information the human race would ever need. Every race, every variation of mankind comes from the genetic combination that came from both Adam and Eve. But after their creation and before their fall, God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and take dominion over the earth (vs. 1:27-28). This would enable all that genetic material to be dispersed amongst their descendants who would then move out beyond the garden to the rest of the planet. If this sounds ridiculous, let us first consider just how much information the average human body can hold.
From both Sciencemag.organd http://science.sciencemag.org/content/355/6328/950 shows that:
Your DNA and your brain are the two primary storage entities in your body. Each has its own storage capacity, but combined they can do wonders! A single gram of DNA can store around 215 petabytes of data (215 million gigabytes). To put it in simple terms, DNA could store all of the world’s data in one room! If we extracted the entire DNA from your cells, we would end up with a mass of 250 grams. This means, your whole DNA can store around 53,750,000,000 Gigabytes of data.
On the other hand, your brain can store approximately one petabyte of data (1,000,000 gigabytes). Unlike DNA, the brain’s capacity to store information is more limited, that’s because old data must be erased to make space for new one. As for DNA, it can keep on expanding and replicating to store more and more information.
Combining the storage capacity of both your DNA and your brain, the total would be 53,751,000,000 Gigabytes. The most powerful supercomputer right now is the Chinese Sunway TaihuLight, which can store up to 20 petabytes of data (20,000,000 gigabytes). That’s only 0.04% of your body’s storage capacity! This means your body has a storage capacity that is equivalent to 2500 Sunway TaihuLight supercomputers.
Before Adam and Eve fell, they had full access to the spiritual realm. Adam interacted personally and physically with God in the Garden (Gen. 3:8). But when they sinned and lost their status as both innocent and immortal, their fall would have both spiritual and physical ramifications for all succeeding generations. Although the sin would become a spiritual pandemic, the infection is more than just spiritual, the repercussions always manifest themselves into the physical, emotional, and intellectual realms. Not only this, but now sin and death was introduced into the whole world. Unfortunately, all the genetic data Adam carried would now be passed down to subsequent generations corrupted.
Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned—Romans 5:12
Assessment
Man was created (or hardwired) to worship because we were designed to be spiritual beings. We were built with eternity in our hearts (Eccl. 3:11). God also created man to be fruitful and multiply and to have dominion over the earth. But if corrupted man is not worshipping who he was designed to worship (God), then how does man satiate that innermost desire to connect with his Creator? Historically speaking, we can absolutely know man is hardwired to worship as we can simply look back through history and see that every civilization has come and gone has worshipped something or someone. Just as our God of the Bible is a Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), so too is man created as a triune being since we are created in God’s image. According to the Bible (1 Thess. 5:23, Hebrews 4:12), man’s nature is divided into three parts: Body, soul, and spirit. Clarence Larkin has a great diagram of this that essentially breaks down what makes up every person.
Body (Soma): Nose, ears, eyes, touch, and taste all feed our senses that lead to the soul
Soul (Psyche): Imagination, conscious, memory, reason, and affections
Spirit (Pneuma): Faith, hope, reverence, prayer, and worship
Two of the three aspects of man’s being has been corrupted. The spirit, has to be regenerated in order for man to be reconciled to His Creator. While Scripture tells us that while the spirit can be redeemed, it also tells us that we will continue to live in these fallen bodies until the day of our redemption (Phil. 3:21-22). All men except one have the same genetic makeup of our forefathers going back thousands of generations. As time passed, mans inherited errors in the genetic makeup began to become compounded, manifesting themselves in the form of increased genetic flaws which would require man to discover a cure.
Conclusion
And as it was in the days of Noah, so it will be also in the days of the Son of Man: They ate, they drank, they married wives, they were given in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all….Even so will it be in the day when the Son of Man is revealed. Luke 17:26-30
While we don’t know specifically when the Lord will return, we know without a doubt that we are living in the days of Noah and Lot. As the time draws near to our Lord’s return, mankind has once again returned to many of those same problems which caused God to destroy the earth the first time with water. Not only did man forget God and commit great violence, but there was an explosion of forbidden knowledge pertaining to the human body. We know fallen angels co-mingled with human women, and out of these unions, brought forth human/angel hybrids called the Nephilim.
The angelic host were eyewitnesses to creation (Job 38:6-7) and they knew how our genetics could be manipulated. Satan, the serpent, had been told by God that someone from the race of man (Gen. 3:15) would ultimately destroy him, so he sought to further corrupt mankind beyond just being sinners (who could be redeemed). We know according to Scripture that at some point before the Flood, fallen angels began to mingle with human women. In Noah’s day, this resulted in producing beings that were neither fully human nor fully angelic. They were the Nephilim, and although they physically perished in the Flood, their unredeemed spirits would haunt the earth until the end.
In Noah’s day, the world demonstrated four key indicators that it was ripe for judgment:
Great violence
Man’s thoughts were only evil continually
The earth was corrupt
Genetic tampering through sexual corruption
In the 20th century, the world saw two of the greatest Wars (WWI and WWII) ever conducted by man. Also in the 20th, the world would also experience the greatest corruption of truth (theory of evolution, global warming, spiritualism, sexual freedom, etc.), knowledge (big bang theory, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, etc.), freedom (socialism, communism, Islamic theocracies, etc.) and every other facet facing mankind’s existence.
What had been missing was man’s ability to play God by altering his own genetic makeup. Man’s quest for godhood had laid dormant for some 4,500 years until the 1950’s when scientists discovered DNA. Since then, it has been an all-out race by all nations to master gene editing, altering inception, interspecies hybridization, etc. So it shouldn’t be a stretch to see today match quite easily with Noah’s, further validating why man’s history of dominion on this earth is about to come to an abrupt end.
But just as the giants reappeared after the time of the flood (Canaan, Goliath, et. al.), so too would the spirits of the Nephilim. These would appear henceforth as “demons” or “evil spirits,” who are always seeking another body to inhabit or possess. While it is not necessary to know the origin of demons, it is interesting that they know what is coming and what their fate is (Luke 8:30-32) and when (Matt: 8:28-30). They do not want to go where their fallen angelic fathers are (the abyss in chains) awaiting judgment (2 Peter 2:4; Jude 1:6). Not all demons are the disembodied spirit of the Nephilim, as there are also varying ranks of falling angels according to the Apostle Paul (Eph. 6:12). Given that, mankind’s recent access to forbidden knowledge is not accidental, as we know that the ‘god of this age’ and his demonic hosts can provide this access when allowed. They don’t care about us finding cures for cancer or birth defects. All they care about, is getting mankind to the stage where he can create the technology that lays the foundation for the “mark.”
Given man’s natural disposition to worship, he (Satan) will combine that technological breakthrough to buy and sell with man’s rebellious nature and provide a man for the world to worship. He (the Antichrist) will force those who remain behind after the Rapture to either be killed or submit and become unredeemable.
“If anyone worships the beast and his image, and receives his mark on his forehead or on his hand, he himself shall also drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out full strength into the cup of His indignation. He shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever; and they have no rest day or night, who worship the beast and his image, and whoever receives the mark of his name.” Revelation 14:9-11