Richard Hollerman

Today I was reading about the past, especially the distant past. Besides much false teaching and evil in the readings, I found much besides all of this. It was very interesting as well as dismaying. I realize that the title above, “In the beginning,” does sound like Genesis 1:1 but we mean that we must go back beyond Christ Jesus to the “beginning” of this era.

We are referring to thousands of years ago. If the flood of Noah  occurred in about 2,400 BC or 4,500 years ago, and creation happened about 6,000 years ago, we know that this was a long, long time. Of course, it was not at all as long as the billions of years that evolutionists wrongly attribute to this period, but it is admittedly a long time ago!

I have been reading many books and the recent one, the one I am about finishing, says that this occurred before 6,000 years ago. They says that this would be more like one million years ago, on up to maybe 40,000 or 60,000 years ago. We know that these latter statistics are wrong and impossible but we use this for comparisons.

This book refers to the incidents that happened about the time of the New World, about 4,000 years ago, with the Mayan, then Aztec and also the Peruvian period. The book refers to the period of 5,000 years before Christ, and the 8,000 years before the present era. It goes back to the beginnings of culture in China, in India, in Japan, and also the period in Africa, in Europe, and the Near East, but this is before our time. In North America, we learn of the Hopewell tribes even though this would be far later than the former above.

Actually, we know that the period before Abraham (in about 2100 to 2000 years before Christ) is somewhat fuzzy. Even before the Great Flood about 2450 BC find that the time line is somewhat uncertain, and hard to be reconciled with realistically. Today, it is about six thousand years after creation. This is  a long, long time. Much has happened during this period. What has God done during these thousands of years? There were aso tens of thousands of people living during this era of human existence. Civilizations surely would have come and gone. Wars would have been fought. (From my reading, I learn that there may have been eight or ten millions of people at the time of the Flood.)

The so-called “ice age” has also been found in South America, Central America, and North America. There have been hundreds of Indian tribes that made their marks on civilization. Most are now gone and only  a few remain. In the Eastern Hemisphere (Europe, Africa, the Far East, the Middle East, the Pacific region, Asia, and elsewhere,) many cultures thrived, grew, and had their Day. Many or most of these were idolaters. They believed in and followed a multiplicity of false “gods” and had numerous idols.

Of course, they violated the God of their creation. They turned from the creative work of the Lord. These people are mostly now gone. They followed their own path. They worshipped and served false gods and walked in their own ways. Let us not be like them. Let us worship and serve the living God, regardless of what they believed and did (Matthew 5:11).