The Ultimate Destiny of Humanity

Before the Beginning

Before everything existed, there was God. The Bible tells us that God is an eternal being, so by that logic, God is uncreated. We know from Scripture that God exists as One but in three essences, which we have historically seen as persons, and either term will work for our purpose.

Examining the topic of history that occurred before any was recorded must rely on bits and pieces of information gathered from sources who were present at the time of those events, and that information can necessarily only come from Scripture. That is the God-given record that He Himself has communicated to us inside what we will term historical time. I know it sounds redundant, and it is, but we need to give this category of information a name, and that is the one I choose. It is to be distinguished from and juxtaposed to “outside historical time,” which will include some pre-history that has bearing on our topic of discussion.

To establish what happened, I will begin in a text from Ezekiel 28:12-19.

“Son of man, take up a lamentation over the king of Tyre and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord God, “You had the seal of perfection, Full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. “You were in Eden, the garden of God; Every precious stone was your covering: The ruby, the topaz and the diamond; The beryl, the onyx and the jasper; The lapis lazuli, the turquoise and the emerald; And the gold, the workmanship of your settings and sockets, Was in you. On the day that you were created They were prepared. “You were the anointed cherub who covers, And I placed you there. You were on the holy mountain of God; You walked in the midst of the stones of fire. “You were blameless in your ways From the day you were created Until unrighteousness was found in you. “By the abundance of your trade You were internally filled with violence, And you sinned; Therefore I have cast you as profane From the mountain of God. And I have destroyed you, O covering cherub, From the midst of the stones of fire. “Your heart was lifted up because of your beauty; You corrupted your wisdom by reason of your splendor. I cast you to the ground; I put you before kings, That they may see you. “By the multitude of your iniquities, In the unrighteousness of your trade You profaned your sanctuaries. Therefore I have brought fire from the midst of you; It has consumed you, And I have turned you to ashes on the earth In the eyes of all who see you. “All who know you among the peoples Are appalled at you; You have become terrified And you will cease to be forever.” ’ ”

The first thing we should notice is that the king of Tyre is not the one being addressed here. The Prince of Tyre was historically being addressed by the prophet Ezekiel for claiming to be a god, but from what Ezekiel says, I doubt the intended audience was the king of Tyre because there is no way he would have been present in Eden, the Garden of God (13a). The literary device employed here is that of symbolic analogy and uses the King of Tyre to speak to a created being, an angel named Lucifer.

Imagine, if you will, a hypothetical conversation by two individuals, standing side by side together, looking out as Master and servant, over the entire cosmos, the realm of the Master, Almighty God Himself. The other being is his guarding cherub, His first in the created order, perhaps the first created being, Lucifer. They are having a conversation as they look out on the multitude of wonders in an expanding universe. “Have you seen my latest idea?  I'll call them mankind,” said YHWH.  “Yes, they are something to behold. They look a little like You.  Will they be mine to guide and control?” asked the angel who was first in creation and rank before all other angels.  YHWH kept a neutral expression as he looked over His creation.  “No, Lucifer, my son.  They will replace you.”

We do not know if that was the very moment Lucifer’s rebellion began, but it cannot be imagined it was long after that Lucifer chose to stand against God for all of angelkind, and take the throne of Heaven for himself. God saw it in His heart immediately, and we know of it because Isaiah told of it in Isaiah 14:4-15.

“…that you will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon, and say, “How the oppressor has ceased, And how fury has ceased! “The Lord has broken the staff of the wicked, The scepter of rulers Which used to strike the peoples in fury with unceasing strokes, Which subdued the nations in anger with unrestrained persecution. “The whole earth is at rest and is quiet; They break forth into shouts of joy. “Even the cypress trees rejoice over you, and the cedars of Lebanon, saying, ‘Since you were laid low, no tree cutter comes up against us.’ “Sheol from beneath is excited over you to meet you when you come; It arouses for you the spirits of the dead, all the leaders of the earth; It raises all the kings of the nations from their thrones. “They will all respond and say to you, ‘Even you have been made weak as we, You have become like us. ‘Your pomp and the music of your harps Have been brought down to Sheol; Maggots are spread out as your bed beneath you And worms are your covering.’ “How you have fallen from heaven, O star of the morning, son of the dawn! You have been cut down to the earth, You who have weakened the nations! “But you said in your heart, ‘I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, And I will sit on the mount of assembly In the recesses of the north. ‘I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.’ “Nevertheless you will be thrust down to Sheol, To the recesses of the pit.”

Another symbolic analogy, this time using the king of Babylon to address Lucifer, rang out in Heaven, the pronouncement of Almighty God against the unrepentant Lucifer for choosing to rebel and lead others in rebellion against the Ancient of Days who created everything. This would have to have been a war beyond our comprehension, and a full third of the angels followed Lucifer into rebellion.

There is no way to tell how long of a period of time there may have been until the very beginning of what we call time, that is God creating the Heavens and the Earth in Genesis 1:1. Perhaps it was immediately, perhaps it was a length of eons. What we do know is that the next event on our timeline is the creation of earth.

Creation

After the Spirit of God hovered over the waters for this unknown period of time, God the Son, who spoke everything into existence (John 1:3), started His work (Gen. 1:1) that lasted six days. To create order from the chaos that heavenly conflagration had to have been an incoprehensible task for us. The Scripture tells us He took six days, and spanned from the grand bodies of the universe (heavens) down to the finest of details (earth). The word used for day is יוֹם (yôm), and from the context of the verse, one can conclude a regular 24-hour day. There was an evening, and a morning, one day.

This becomes important when difficult and proud scholars want to redefine the word to mean an unspecified length of period. I will freely tell you I am not a Hebrew Scholar, but I have tools to study the grammar and usage of all the words in the biblical text. The lemma (the definitional form of the word in the original language) is what I just supplied, and the form of the word indicates the unit of time from one sunset to the following sunset. I use Logos bible software for my detailed study, and a detailed word study of yôm says that the word itself is part of a subset of the word that is used in exactly this fashion, as are 1721 out or 2281 uses of the word in the Hebrew Scriptures.

I was once an unwilling participant on a live broadcast where an individual who wanted to be the most intelligent person in the conversation insisted that it did not mean that until the fourth day when God created the sun, moon, and stars, because there could in fact be no time until there were means to measure it. Although I can see the reasoning, I must conclude that God is the thing that measured the time before then, so the definition still holds. God is not dependent on external factors to measure things like time, which is irrelevant to Him. The definition of “day” in this usage remains intact for that reason. This means that the earth in this “creation” was created in six literal days.

This presents a problem for modern man since about 1859, which is when the original publication of the work of Charles Darwin’s work, The Origin of Species sold out on the first day it was available to the public. One of the third-year required courses I took for my Biology degree was called “The History of Biology.” We learned that Darwin voyaged to the Galapagos Islands in the 1830s and developed this theory based, among other observations, the size of the beak of a yellow finch, a bird that lives on the Galapagos. He posited that a theory called natural selection changed the beak of the finch over time as an adaptation to their island habitat. After a gentleman by the name of Alfred Russel Wallace proposed a similar mechanism in 1858, Darwin published his work and observations. Others took Darwin’s work and ran with it, particularly Thomas Henry Huxley (known as Darwin’s Bulldog) and Ernst Haekel, who were extremely agressive in the promotion of this as science, and had success into shifting this from the outside edges of science to its mainstream over the next couple of decades.

I mention “the theory of evolution here, because it has become today the dominant worldview of the scientific world. Because I have no hope of ever having a career in science, I will say definitively that there is no actual proof of the theory, but there is a great deal of “evidence” that can be pointed to on the topic. The problem is that this evidence has always been viewed through the same lens and has never been critiqued by those with scientific and systematic minds. If I were to say “evolution is untrue” to a room full of biologists, or any other scientists at all, it would be like the screeching of the ringwraiths in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and they would rain verbal attacks on me until I would have to be escorted from the room for safety. What I will say is that there are other ways of viewing the evidence; if you see a house, you know it had a builder. If you see a painting, you know it had a painter. If you see a creature, you know it had a Creator. For those that think that’s an oversimplification, I ask this question: How else and you explain it?

When you view the preponderance of evidence about what is called “Natural History,” from the hisorical narrative that is “taught” and insitutions of “higher learning,” none of them can explain it at all, but they will say, almost by default without ANY promptine, “Well, it’s not because of a Creator!” Why not? Because they do not want to be accountable to Him, especially not for their own sins, which by my own experience are many, and I know because I was at one point a joyful participant. Then I was confronted with the Truth, and the absolute Truth as it is in Jesus. Yes, there are absolutes, including that one. We will discuss a couple more.

The first of those is time, or more specifically time-space. It is presumed that evolution takes huge lengths of time to take place, as well as the interstellar distances that light must travel to reach us from other stars, planetary systems, and galaxies. This becomes important when carbon dating becomes involved in any part of an equation. Carbon dating (and other methods like Argon dating) all observe a radioactive isotope that has a known rate of decay. We will deal with carbon, because it is what I know the most about. Carbon naturally exists as C12, based on the number of subatomic particles in its nucleus, in this case, six protons and six neutrons. There is a radioactive isotope that has 14 particles, six protons and eight neutrons, and unlike the stable C12, decays by emitting a high-energy electron and an antineutrino into stable Nitrogen-14. (I remember this from grade 11 physics I think, it’s been a long time, but I did confirm this via Perplexity AI.) We know the decay rate (also called half-life) of C14 is approximately 5370 years. This theoretically means that we can measure the time in years of things that had C14 (everything organic) in it from the time it died until time of measurement. The problem enters when you consider that the standard error increases past measurment reliability outside of 50,000 years, but there are other radioactive isotpes that can be used for longer dates. I remember using the equations in first year chemistry to age something in chemistry class. There are problems with element dating, but I am not going to go into it, because it is very hotly debated, and at least as far as I am concerned, not settled in terms of methodology. I am aware that as I write this it is February of 2026, and dating methods date to years before 1950. I guess we add after that.

Another issue that we can run into with the dating of our present Earth is with young-earth theory. I want to first say, in an effort to avoid the screaming ringwraiths, I am not a hostile attacker, I am a brother who loves you, and I am speaking theoretically. How God Himself actually did it is still up for speculation where the Bible doesn’t actually say. When we add up the numbers of all the people in Genesis up to Moses (the very beginning of Exodus), and the rest of the recorded record in Scripture, we get about 5950 years, depending on the calendar and translations used. We may adress this later.

What I think may be evidence that contradicts this is that we see stars that are more than 5950 light-years from earth. If we accept the speed of light as a constant (and there is a gent named Barry Setterfield from Australia that argues it is not), as most do, then with a young earth, we should not see things like the Andromeda Galaxy, which is approximately 2.5 million lightyears from earth. On very clear nights without light pollution, I have even located Andromeda with the naked eye, barely, from Button Bay in New Hampshire (the clearest sky I have ever seen). There are stars that are outside 6000 lightyears we can see, like V762 Cas in Casseopia, which is roughly 16,000 lightyears distant. The young-earthers I speak to about this suggest that God created it all to be visible to display His glory, so the light-path was created to these at the same time. If anyone could, it would be God, so I can see it, but it still remains intellectually unsatisfying. It doesn’t mean it’s not true, but it is outside of what I know about astrophysics, and I had the best mark in the class in the year I took it at university. (To be fair, it may have been the number two mark, I don’t remember, but the other guy was an actual astrophysicist, and I was taking the course as a science elective, being a biologist. We shared the keys to the big telescope on top of the physics building. We saw Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and even Venus during the day.) This does not mean I know everything, but it cast enough doubt for me on the young-earth theology that I cannot hold it and be consistent in my own theology.

Because of my rejection of both the theory of evolution (all of them, I can name five, those being Lamarkianism, Classic Darwinism, Punctuated Equillibruim, Radiating Mutations (a.k.a. “hopeful monsters”, and Neo-Darwinism, the current frontrunner in the media) and my rejection of young-earth theology (sorry guys, I like to be part of the crowd, but I cannot be here), I subscribe to a version of something called the Gap Theory of Genesis 1:1-2.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.

I will agree with my Young Earth Creationist friends in this: Everything God creates is perfect. This goes along with a very widely accepted assumption that if what we see is imperfect, something happened to it from something external to it or God. With that understood, why then does verse 2 read “the earth was formless and void?” The sense of the text comes from the NASB95 marginal rendering: “a waste and emptiness.” The text is clear there is an earth there. We can assume from the first verse that God created it. If God created it, He created it perfectly. We can make this assumption based on the New Creation of the Heavens and the Earth He makes at the END of the bible, in Revelation 21:1–7:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth passed away, and there is no longer any sea. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, made ready as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, “Behold, the tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them, and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.” And He who sits on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” And He said, “Write, for these words are faithful and true.” Then He said to me, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give to the one who thirsts from the spring of the water of life without cost. “He who overcomes will inherit these things, and I will be his God and he will be My son.”

All of what John sees in this recreation is created to be perfect. What John sees is amazing and beyond description, but it created in perfection, and John describes it that way as best he can. I ask again, why then is Genesis 1:2 recording that the Earth itself is specifically “waste and emptiness?” These exact words are rendered “confusion and emptiness” in Isaiah 34:11, which says, “But pelican and hedgehog will possess it, And owl and raven will dwell in it; And He will stretch over it the line of desolation And the plumb line of emptiness.”

What we should call to mind now is our assumption that if something isn’t perfect, then something external to God or the Earth itself rendered it imperfect.