The Good Lord intended humanity—men in particular—to function as discoverers. His initial mandate for His people was to go into Creation and take dominion, and despite the rampant mis-imaging in our heads of the Edenic story, man was always intended to be sent into a wilderness, a wild land, to tame it and explore it and settle it. It simply wasn't a fallen land yet; it was a land that would yield to him. The world itself was not a paradise. Only the garden was, which, while we're at it, wasn't Eden. The Garden was planted in Eden.
"And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden" (Genesis 1:8a, emphasis added, KJV)
Human failed the tutorial level. Yay humanity. But the intention was that they leave the paradise, the naval of the world and the proto-tabernacle, the place where God and His creation communed personally, the Garden, and discover all that the Lord has created for the purpose of holding dominion over it, as its head, under the greater headship of God Himself.
"And God blessed [the man and the woman], and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." (Genesis 1:28 KJV)
This position of Adam's headship would, for all intents and purposes, would be surrendered to the devil, and bring all creation under the reign of death, until reclaimed by the Second Adam, but for now, we see his mandate to explore, to discover, to multiply with Eve, in part through his mandate to name things. We can spend more exploratory time on this later, but in ancient circles like those of the Biblical writers, to name a thing is to have authority over it, hence God naming Adam, and Adam being told to name the animals. But naming is also a form of classifying, categorizing, essentially the foundation of observation and study, of science.
Point is: men were always intended to discover.
We were designed from the bones outward, to go into the unknown, face challenges, grow, overcome, tame, reproduce, and pass on what we know. This is most obviously seen in historical exploration of new lands, new heights, but also in new fields, sciences, industries, and challenges.
One of the most fascinating fields to study is the open market of early 20th century free-market medicine, from electro-therapies (no, not electro-shock) to radio frequency effects to polymorphic bacteria or herbal formulae, before regulation crushed practitioners. These were new fields, and ones that allowed brilliant minds to innovate and discover and invent, as have such minds in any burgeoning fields before regulation admini-strangled them into non-existence. Without the spirit of discovery we would have no Wright Brothers inventing airplanes, no Teslas inventing radio (sorry Marconi, he got to it first), no Royal Raymand Rife and the Universal Microscope, or many other things.
So what in blazes does any of this have to do with Biblical prophecy?
A sharp corner was turned in American Christian thought in 1970, with the publication of Hal Lindsay's Late Great Planet Earth. With it came the wider public explosion of already spreading Dispensational theology and illogical text analysis, but to a particularly destructive end. It was the "church culture" of Late Great Planet Earth that began to express, by the 1990s, a particular kind of corrosive paranoia.
Every burgeoning field of any kind, from microchip computing to international treaties (good or bad) to artificial intelligence were all uniformly and universally credited with unwavering certainty with contribution to the unquestioned "prophesied" downfall of the Church. From 1970 onward, any and all new fields were certain to bring about doom. Period. You'll see. Dust off your hands. That's all she wrote. Also, locusts are Apache helicopters. Don't question prophecy "experts."
The result of all this contortion of Scriptural imagery was and is the simultaneous condemnation of any burgeoning technological field by way of its expected exclusively secular output, and the unwillingness to permit our Christian sons to explore and discover the vistas of said field. With no Christians labouring within it, we then fold our arms, smugly nod, and claim "we told you so" when we witness only a secular output of the field that we didn't allow Christians into ourselves ... somewhat ignoring the fact that it didn't lead to the end of the world like the said it would, because of course the Bible never said it would.
But we'd rather not mention that. We'd also rather not mention the Old Testament ruling that any "prophet" who predicted something wrong was to be put to death as a false prophet. I mention it as a reminder for how many Christians continue to purchase books from "prophecy experts" who are proven wrong again and again and again and again and again.
Why would we think that a theology that stops our very nature from functioning how God designed it to work would ever glorify Him? Why would we think that somehow that nature and design would just ... stop being the intent once the New Testament was reached? Why would we be surprised when we see something new that is only ever misused, when we discourage Christian men of good character from entering the field? We do so continually on the basis of bad theology, but that is a larger topic for another day; this is simply a moment of reflection on how obviously unbiblical and unhealthy is has to be when he violate the very design He built into us, fooling ourselves into believing that His most fundamental intentions for His creation have changed, rather than be redeemed.
Christ is on the Throne. He reigns, reclaiming His Kingdom, little by little, and when He is finished, He will hand it to His Father. Our fundamental nature hasn't changed, but is redeemed if we are in Him. Take every hill for Christ the Lord. Fear nothing but the Lord. He goes before you as your banner.
"Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death." (I Corinthians 15:24-26, KJV)
Hallelujah. Now go discover something.
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