1667. IV. In Denying Spirit or Angel, the Sadducees Deny the Creative Work of God
IV. In Denying Spirit or Angel, the Sadducees Deny the Creative Work of God
In the denial now before us, we will observe how Sadduceeism was the forerunner of evolution.
Instead of the evolutionist discovering his pedigree in a monkey, he will find that he is, in reality, an intellectual descendant of the men who said: "There is neither spirit nor angel."
According to the Sadducee position on evolution, three things must be said.
1. Man came in like a beast. He could not have been created, according to Sadduceeism, because, as there was neither spirit nor angel, there was no God to create him.
Far back in the unknown past (mark the words "unknown past"), the amoeba generated itself.
Through indeterminable periods, the amoeba grew and grew and grew, passing from one form to another, from one species to another until everything that we see about us which has life, evolved.
Somewhere between the amoeba and man was the monkey.
2. Man, therefore, is a beast. This may not seem poetic, but it is plainly the conclusion of evolution. If man, in the distant ages was a beast, then man in the present age is a beast.
According to evolution, there is no place for God to give man anything. What man has, different from the beast of the forest, he has by reason of his evolving.
If man evolved from a monkey, then man is an evolved monkey, and a monkey is a man in the course of evolving.
The only distinction between man and monkey is that the monkey, who has become man, was more apt as a pupil than his fellow monkeys, he was more swift in his racial development than the man who is still monkey.
The monkey is the man in embryo; the man is the monkey "evoluted."
Evolution, if it is true to its own line of scientific deductions, must grant that man is a beast, even though he is a highly developed and high class beast.
3. Man dies like a beast. If man came in like a beast, and is now a "glorified beast," man must die like a beast.
He cannot die differently than other beasts simply because he is a "highly developed beast;" for all beasts have but one breath.
From the viewpoint of evolution, man may possess a higher quality of "breath," and a higher "organism" of body, but, nevertheless, man and beast are the same in principle.
If the Eternal God did not create man in His own image, according to the statement of Genesis; why should the Eternal God receive man unto Himself, and dwell with him in the New Jerusalem, according to the statement of Revelation?
Some one will remark, "But evolutionists particularly theistic evolutionists, believe in Heaven." This may be true, but they have no right to believe in Heaven. They are altogether too "intellectual" to admit such base Biblical "assumptions."
If man is no more than a cultivated beast, how can he enter into Heaven and dwell forever with God and the created sons of God?
The best that the evolutionist can do is to chime in with "man under the sun," in Ecclesiastes, and accept his philosophical conclusions: "That they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea; they have all one breath; so that a man has no pre-eminence above a beast: for all is vanity" (Ecc_3:18-19).
God must have put this verse in the Bible to aid evolutionists with their foolish, God-denying philosophy, to reach their only sane conclusion–the only destiny, which their philosophy can, in reason, offer them.
Evolutionists acknowledge that they share a beast's origin, then why should they object to sharing a beast's destiny?
If an evolutionist does not like the conclusions to which his own philosophy leads him, perhaps he can place question marks around his destiny, as he verily must around his origin, and say with the "man under the sun:" "Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the spirit of the beast that goeth downward to the earth?" (Ecc_3:21).
Autor: R.E. NEIGHBOUR