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Chapter 3

EVOLUTION OF CULTURE

The task is… not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what

nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.

—Erwin Schrodinger

I have been studying society my whole life and have noticed that people are like a flock of birds that can change direction in flight all at once in a perfectly orchestrated fashion by some hidden signaling system they have developed. As a child my neighborhood revolved around a humble little community where all the neighbors knew each other on a first-name basis, but fifty years of misdirected cultural evolution has turned my charming neighborhood into the hood. How did people change so much in one generation? Culture is the soul of society. It has a mind of its own to believe what it wants, yet the mind of culture is not subject to any one person, because it doesn’t belong to anyone, but to the group, which has the power to shape peoples’ behavior, making them act as one person. Culture creates itself on a subliminal level, thinking and acting collectively with no one seemingly at the wheel. Culture is so close to the human experience that we would not be human without it. This strange inherent phenomenon of group behavior, sown into the human gene pool has proven itself central to humanity, always evolving and having free reign to express itself in each successive generation, but how do we control the ebb and flow of change when there doesn’t appear to be anyone at the wheel? When society loses control of what they are becoming and elects fate as their leader of cultural change, the least common denominator always takes control and misdirects people into shallow waters, invariably running them aground on the shoals of selfish hedonism.

Chapter one, Inventors of Culture, concluded that man is destined to destroy himself through his technological advancements, which made life more feasible, causing populations to soar, and making civilization a requirement. Chapter two The Apostasy ended on the note that, despite this technological age, the world is more lost than ever, because the church has lost its own way. This chapter will suggest a mechanism that powers human evolution, equating civilization with domestication, suggesting that technology has made us soft, which has inadvertently compromised the human gene pool, making it easier to lead the world to its logical conclusion. This chapter will attempt to identify the cultural communication device that drives human evolution by examining how worldviews seep into our minds, are converted to biochemical molecules that are genetically transferred to our offspring and reemerge in our children as predispositions for certain behaviors, perpetuating the cycle of cultural evolution.

It is obvious that culture influences society, but it is more meaningful to think in terms of how culture influences the individual. Accordingly, my definition of “Culture” is: The collective influence of individuals on society. By this definition we see that culture manages the mindset of society, though it does not control the individual, since it represents the group as a whole.

Back in the 1950s a man named Alan Turing, an embryologist, designed a computer program that could play checkers. He calculated that there were 1040 possible moves, so he realized he needed to write a program that could select game winning moves among the vast number of possibilities, but teaching a computer to play checkers is tricky business. He tried a variety of approaches, and settled on a strategy that after tinkering with it a few years eventually beat some of the best checker players of all time. He came to the conclusion that he needed to design a program that could write itself, supplying it with the game’s objective and a set of rules to follow and then integrated a number of feedback loops into it, so the program could evaluate its own progress and learn from its mistakes. The more the program played, the more it tweaked its strategy and improved its game. In his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea Daniel Dennett used this story as an analogy that non-living mater discovered life on its own and then taught itself how to survive and flourish (Dennett, pp. 208-212). In stark contrast to Dennett’s idea, the checkers program needed a god to create it (Alan Turing) and then to make it understand that it was playing a game of checkers in the first place, but Dennett didn’t use Mr. Turing in his analogy, because Dennett is an atheist. The checkers program especially needed Mr. Turing to give it the rules of composing a strategy, so it could establish its own algorithm from millions of possible tactics. When you include Mr. Turing’s input, the story works very well as an analogy for creation, but without Mr. Turing the story doesn’t make any sense. However, one thing does make sense about Dennett’s analogy, God designed life in very much the way that Mr. Turing designed his checkers program: He designed it to take care of itself.

We have seen animals obeying their instincts from childhood, such as when fall comes and geese fly south for the winter. These animals are obeying certain genetic switches that are linked to seasonal changes in sunlight and temperature. In what manner did God give instincts to all the living creatures? If He did it on the day of creation, then why do their instincts change with the changing environment and appear to be tailor made for their specific needs? God certainly created the heavens and the earth, man and all the animals, but ever since the day of creation, the earth and its inhabitants have never ceased to change. Adaptation then as we observe it in nature should be viewed as developing shapes and sizes, behaviors and instincts that are flexible enough to accommodate a rapidly changing environment. The result is that it makes animals very flexible (plastic) in their ability to adapt, because they can draw from changes in their surroundings, or they can draw from their own genetic past, or they can press forward in completely novel directions.

There is compelling evidence that instincts and idiosyncratic behavior develop through a mechanism that universally exists in the genetic fabric of all living things, including man, with the purpose of acclimating to their environment. This inborn mechanism that has several names but none that is unanimously accepted by the scientific consensus belongs to a fast growing field called Epigenetics. It best explains the marvelously flexible system of checks and balances we observe in all living things, picking its target of selection based on what the animal most often uses for survival; for us it is our brains.

Before the industrial revolution, the father passed down his trade to his sons. Shoeman, Smith, Wheeler and Taylor are still common names that described what people did for a living. Back then the son inherited the name along with the trade, and after so many generations he also inherited an aptitude and predisposition to carry on the family business. Teasing out the differences between nature and nurture is not easy, but there are examples in nature that totally eliminate the nurture side of this equation. For example, how do salmon instinctively swim upstream in a specific creek to lay their eggs in the same general location where they were hatched without any instruction from their parents? A map of their destination must have been hardwired into their little fish brains while they were still in the egg. Does this happen only to salmon? How do some migratory birds instinctively know which direction to fly and how do they know when they have arrived at their destination, and how do they even know they are migratory birds if they have never received instruction from their parents? Again, perhaps everything they need to know is formed in them while they were still in the egg? Do only certain animals have these gifts, or are they the animals that make it crystal clear that these things are happening in us all?

“…Genes are followers, not leaders, in evolution” is a quote by Mary Jane West-Eberhard in her book Developmental Plasticity and Evolution (p. 20), which is the theme of her work in genetics. The fact that genes do not lead but follow suggests a very flexible genome and requires very far-reaching and revolutionary changes in our thinking about genetics that has been teaching us for the last century and a half that we are the product of our genes. With a brain as big and powerful as our own it would seem impossible that we could use it to point ourselves in the wrong direction, but if all humanity throughout the ages could make one set of footprints, you could look back and see the progress of a man who appears to be totally lost. Society is disintegrating before our very eyes and no one knows why or how to stop it.

Following are three factors in order of influence that cycle through the generations, making us who and what we are:

1) Genetic traits we receive at birth

2) Behaviors that form during our critical period from environmental influences, between the ages of 0-5

3) Influences of society (culture)

Understanding how novel traits emerge in plants and animals would wrap up nicely if there were any evidence to support the idea that our experiences directly edit the DNA molecule, but they don’t. According to the central dogma of genetics called Weismann’s Barrier, genetic information passes in only one direction: from DNA → to RNA → to Protein. In other words protein molecules cannot “upload” their information to DNA from which they originated. However, it is hardly necessary for information to pass directly to the next generation by editing germ cells, since there are other ways for this to happen without risking the integrity of genetic material.

Geneticists have calculated that about 98 percent of our genes do not code for proteins, making them available for other kinds of work, such as cell maintenance, much of which is epigenetic. Epigenetics – the prefix: “Epi-” means that something is occurring at, near or against the gene (American Heritage Dictionary) to the somatic cells of our bodies. We have two kinds of cells: gamete (sex) cells, which we use to reproduce that cannot be edited, and somatic (bone and tissue) cells that are the composition of our bodies that are epigenetically modified throughout our lives. In other words according to this definition, something is occurring near, at or against the genes of somatic cells to influence the way they express themselves. That is, DNA may code for physical and behavioral traits, but Epigenetic molecules appended to the DNA has the final say about what those physical and behavioral traits will be! For example, when our brains develop during our critical period between the ages of 0-5, it forms around environmental conditions of the outside world. These environmental changes to our DNA are expressed by epigenetic influences. The key question is: do we inherit these epigenetic effects? If we do, then we can inherit environmental influences on the gene. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb say we do.

…For many years it was taken for granted that all memories of the “epigenetic past” had to be completely erased before cells became germ [reproductive] cells. This assumption ruled out any possibility that induced epigenetic variations could be inherited. The discovery in the 1980s that the epigenetic slate is not wiped clean—that some epigenetic information does pass from one generation to the next—was therefore totally unexpected (Jablonka, Page 139).

Epigenetic functions do such things as assign flags to certain genes. These flags (also termed switches) consist of small molecules that surround the gene, creating a microenvironment around them, appending additional instructions to their protein synthesis or else turning them on or off. For example, kidney cells are kidney cells because epigenetic effects on the cell turn on the sections of the chromosome that code for kidney cell production (Jablonka, page 113). When that cell divides, the resulting child cell is another kidney cell, which means epigenetic effects are inherited from cell to cell, and as previously stated, there is compelling evidence that they are inherited from parent to offspring:

In genetic inheritance, traits are passed from one generation to the next via DNA sequences in genes. Differences in a DNA sequence specify differences in a trait. Epigenetic inheritance involves passing a trait from one generation to the next without a difference in DNA sequence. Known mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance include changes in molecular structures around the DNA so that while the gene is the same, the gene behaves differently. For example, genes switch on and off in response to hormonal signals. [i]

There is only a 1.1% difference in our DNA from chimpanzees, suggesting that the major difference between them and us is epigenetic (West-Eberhard, p 335)! The way our genes function and express themselves are performed under a giant web of epigenetic influences which do far more than anyone expected in order to create the expressions of life and variation that we observe in nature and in ourselves. One proof of this is the Human Genome Project itself. Scientists were disappointed about half way through the mission when they began to realize that what they were learning was never going to span the immeasurable variation of nature’s intricate complexity. The great hope of the Human Genome Project was to plot one gene to one trait, and with that they could heal any disease, modify our food production and genetically perfect humanity, but there wasn’t a one-to-one correlation between genes and proteins, and scientists quickly realized that DNA doesn’t fit into the nice formula that they expected. There are only about ten thousand genes in the human genome. That may sound like a lot, until you begin adding up all the different tissues and organs throughout the body, along with our physiological systems and anatomic structures, etc.

When you consider that only about 2-3 percent of our genes are coding for proteins, it reduces the number of active protein coding genes to about 300. The only possible explanation for the complexity of life under such a small number of genes is that they are working in concert with each other in a near infinite array of combinations. When you consider that the possible combinations for 300 genes is about 3 X 10 384 (the number 3 with 384 zeros behind it), our observations of the rich variation of life are restored. This means we must revise our earlier notions of one gene coding for one protein. Genes mostly work in groups, are assigned to groups at birth, and are reassigned and rearranged throughout life, based on epigenetic information that attempts to fulfill the survival needs of the organism, based on a built-in highly flexible genome that God designed to respond directly to the environment. To the degree that our genes are hardly different from that of a chimp is the degree to which something vastly unintuitive is transpiring within our cells.

For example, genetic information that no longer serves a purpose, usually from a change in the environment, can be put aside as modules, and then later un-shelved and reused at a later time (called reversion). These modules are bundles of genes that combine forces capable of engineering very specific physical and behavioral characteristics. Based on these insights, biological processes interpret the way we live as adapting to the environment, and then begin to modify the environment of our DNA to accommodate highly tuned instincts to help us deal with a changing world. We humans use the word culture in place of instincts.

In development, genes and environment have complementary quantitative effects on switches, such that an increase in the influence of one implies a commensurate decrease in the influence of the other. There is a sliding continuum in their proportional influences on switch determination, such that environmental and genetic factors in a sense compete with each other for control of regulation (West-Eberhard, p. 100).

In other words, as we mature throughout childhood there is one of two developmental pathways we will follow, depending on the similarities or differences of the environment from that of our parents and their ancestors. If the offspring is born and raised in an environment that is similar to the parent’s experiences, they will develop closely forming to the information contained in their DNA that they were given at birth, but if the environment differs significantly, their DNA will search for new developmental pathways that will attempt to acclimate to their unique circumstances.

Homology (Same-ology) is the study of biological similarities within all living matter. For example, fish eyes work similar to bird eyes that work similar to human eyes. Since there are so many similarities between biological systems, it should not surprise anyone to know that there are functional similarities between our DNA and the neurons of our brain. Brain cells wire to other brain cells that fire in concert with the same outside stimuli, referred to Hebbian Plasticity that holds to the truism: ‘Cells that fire together wire together.’ Just as the brain is incredibly flexible (especially in children) and continually rewires itself throughout life to accommodate our mental and physiological needs, so our genes are flexible in very similar ways. Our genes often need to trade positions along the DNA strand, controlled by epigenetic functions that reassign genes to work with other genes, causing them to produce completely different expressions to accommodate our needs based on our changing environment. In genetics jargon this process of gene sequencing is called Exon Shuffling.

An Exon as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as: “A nucleotide sequence in DNA that carries the code for the final messenger RNA molecule and thus defines the amino acid sequence during protein synthesis.” According to this definition, exons constitute the end product of gene expression, so that when these units trade places the body can make any protein it needs, with the goal of establishing highly specific behavioral modules for the purpose of accommodation. Barlow (1977) wrote: “A cornerstone of ethological theory is the belief that behavior comes in discrete packets…” (referring to modularity p. 98), and as West-Eberhard also wrote, “Traits can be lost and regained as units” (p. 234). So then, we think and behave in a manner similar to our biology, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. The process of exon shuffling is partly summarized by West-Eberhard, p.317:

Since biochemistry and molecular biology focus on the fundamentally modular structure and behavior of biological molecules, it is perhaps not surprising that they arrived early at a combinatorial view of evolution, and that it was a molecular biologist (Jacob, 1977) who described evolution as “tinkering” with preexisting pieces. The lowest level of combinatorial evolution is based on the “changeability” of the genetic code—its ability to undergo rearrangement without loss of functionality (Maeshiro and Kimura, 1998).

Combinatorial adaptation refers to groups of genes that form modules to produce new protein molecules that alter physical and behavioral traits, effectively fine-tuning the organism. Phenotypic plasticity is a popular scientific term that refers to the flexibility of gene expression. In other words,

Genes can produce alternate effects by differences in transcription from different promoters. Another way is by differences in how the transcripts are joined together, or spliced. RNA splicing cuts and then joins together (splices) sections of transcribed pre-RNA into the mRNA that will form the functional gene product. Alternative splicing produces alternative molecular phenotypes, and as might be predicted, it is involved in the origins of molecular novelties (West-Eberhard, pp. 318-323).

Now that we understand that epigenetic functions are commonplace and important, let’s take a closer look at what is happening around the DNA molecule to make it respond so concisely to environmental conditions when these switches are applied. Switches refer to, “Some element of a phenotype [that] changes from a default state, action, or pathway to an alternative one” (West-Eberhard, Page 67), referred to as an Alternative Phenotype (or alternative gene expression). The greatest strength of epigenetic switches is their ability to determine which genes work in concert with other genes. Genes are assigned partners at birth, but throughout our lives they trade partners with other genes in an attempt to accommodate environmental demands, as mentioned earlier, similar to dendrite reconfiguration within the brain as we mentally adapt to our environment. Since there are so many similarities between functional processes of DNA and mental processes within the brain, perhaps they are indeed interconnected. Just as the eye is the window to the soul, so maybe the brain is the window to our DNA. Perhaps our DNA has the ability to observe the changes that take place within the brain and use that information as a blueprint of its own genetic rearrangement. Perhaps the regulating forces of epigenetic change are looking to the brain as a model to tweak the somatic DNA molecule before it reproduces itself in the next cell generation to reflect the changes in the way we live. These alternative expressions are best seen as genetic modules that are pre-built and self-contained components designed for easy assembly and flexible use that can be invoked by a single switch. “A switch implies some change in state, for example, between on and off, under certain conditions… so a condition sensitivity is an implicit quality of all switches. They mark developmental decision points that depend on conditions. Conditions in this case may refer to the internal environment, the social environment, or the external environment” (West-Eberhard, p. 68).

There is a well-known story about a Russian man named Dmitri Belyaev, who bred silver foxes for tameness in Novosibirsk. Prior to his breeding efforts, these foxes were afraid of people and would snarl at anyone who came too close, or would hurt themselves trying to get away. Some would overheat or suffocate from fear. Although they had been raising these foxes for eighty years, they still had not become tame. People who have attempted to raise wolves encountered exactly the same problems. Belyaev reported that 40 percent of them were aggressively fearful, 30 percent were extremely aggressive, 20 percent were fearful and 10 percent “displayed a quiet, exploratory reaction without either fear or aggression.” Belyaev separated the ten percent based on their flight distance, which was measured by two attributes: 1) how close he could get to the foxes before they ran away, and 2) how far away they would run. It only took eighteen generations to tame these foxes, after which they would look for their keepers and jump on their laps to get petted; they would let people rub their bellies, let them give them their shots and answered to their names. In short, they began to look and behave like dogs. At the beginning of Mr. Belyaev’s selective breeding experiment there was not a single fox that came close to being as tame as the foxes that resulted from his efforts. As these foxes became tamer other totally unexpected physical attributes began to emerge outside of Mr. Belyaev’s selective control. In other words they were byproducts of selection.

Their tails turned up at the end, like a dog’s. Their coats were often piebald [black and white spotted or patched], their ears drooped [floppy], and the females came into heat twice a year instead of once. Belyaev noted, “They even sound like dogs.” (Coppinger, P. 64)  

… but for the most part, while the dog is in its first few weeks of life, and growing its brain, it is making the cell connections and rearranging them in a specific way, according to the signals that are coming from outside. This development predetermines its adult behavior. In other words, imprinting changes the dog forever. (Coppinger, P. 105)

Understanding brain growth should dispel the nature/nurture controversy once and for all. It is never, ever either nature or nurture, but always both at the same time. But liver cells make more liver cells because that is the environment they respond to. Behavior is always epigenetic—above the genes—an interaction between the genes and the developmental environment.  (Coppinger, P. 113)

It is determined there is a definite look and behavior of tameness in the canine family, so is there a definite look and behavior of tameness in humans— Tameness being tantamount to Civilization? The short answer is yes. What are the byproducts of domestication for us? Dogs go into heat twice a year instead of once and have smaller skulls than wolves, suggesting that being more sexually active and the loss of intelligence are natural byproducts of tameness, because any creature that is tamed no longer relies on its wits to survive, and if food is abundant, proliferating will naturally increase. There are probably many other negative byproducts of domestication, but the loss of intelligence I should think would trump them all.

Remember that Mendelian genetics cannot account for novel traits, including tameness in these foxes. Pure Mendelian genetics modifies traits that already exist and you simply get more of the same, but Epigenetics is the road that leads to increased predispositions and novel traits. This is why Mr. Belyaev not only selected for tameness in the foxes (Mendelian Genetics), but also worked with them from pups during their critical period to instill the characteristic tameness in them (Epigenetics), just like you would create a guard dog or a bird dog from a pup. In the process of raising these foxes from pups Mr. Belyaev encouraged the epigenetic connections in their brains to form around the characteristic tameness, and then selected the tamest foxes from the litter for mating. In this way he combined genetics with epigenetics to increase the measure of tameness in the foxes from one generation to the next. This well documented account makes it crystal clear that some of the epigenetic information that the foxes acquired during their critical period was passed to the next generation and accumulated in the foxes’ gene pool through the course of selection. We humans also have a critical period, between the ages of 0-5, and we also have a selection regiment called culture. This critical period is when we develop epigenetic connections within the brain that starts the process of passing adaptive information to our DNA as the first step in transcribing those traits to our offspring. Following is a summary of the epigenetic process of inheritance:

Epigenetic Inheritance Cycle

1. Parents epigenetically transcribe information from their own critical period to the DNA of their children during conception, establishing predispositions for behavior

2. Cognitive development occurs within children between the ages of 0-5 (critical period) based on family environment, supplementing or else overriding the parents’ congenital input

3. Social pressures from culture (gene pool) influence behavior throughout adulthood, influencing how parents raise their children

4. Cultural instincts form between the generations, entrenching consistent traits into the DNA

*                   *                   *                   *                   *                 *

Now that we have established that there is a genetic mechanism encoding predispositions into our DNA, we will now turn our attention back to the subject we left behind at the end of chapter two, The Apostasy, and apply what we learned from this chapter to the problems we see in the church and in society as a whole. Going back to the old covenant Levitical priesthood that consisted of the tribe of Levy, these priests were selected by Israel based on their genealogy (only the tribe of Levy could act as priests). This became a breeding ground for the epigenetic inheritance cycle proposed above. However, the Catholic priesthood was not handed down from father to son like the Levitical Priesthood, but anybody could be a Catholic priest. In other words the present day Catholic priesthood does not represent a single tribe, but a cross-section of our contemporary society. It represents a cross-section of the degenerating human gene pool, which is controlled by this epigenetic inheritance cycle, that is, by culture. The nation of Israel became so evil that Jesus had to come down as their messiah to fix their problems and they crucified Him for it. In the last days the religions of the world will become so atrocious that He will return again to fix the problems, and they will attempt to kill Him again, only this time God will judge the world for rejecting His offer of eternal life. Now, listen to what Jesus said about the religious monsters of His day, and compare His words to the monsters of our own time and to society as a whole.

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. And you say, `If we had lived in the days of our forefathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.' So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. Fill up, then, the measure of the sin of your forefathers! "You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? Therefore I am sending you prophets and wise men and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom You murdered between the temple and the altar. I tell you the truth, all this will come upon this generation.  Mat 23,29-36 NIV

We know according to Rom 5:12-21 that every person has genetically inherited Adam’s sin. Therefore, it is no stretch to believe that after reading the above verses we can inherit the sins of our forefathers. Jesus accused the Pharisees of being sons of those who murdered the prophets, but the ancient prophets were ancient even to the Pharisees. Israel hadn’t seen a prophet in four hundred years (there was a long prophetic silence before Christ), so there was no way the Pharisees learned by example the murderous behavior of their fathers, suggesting that the Pharisees’ great, great grandfathers who murdered the prophets had an indirect influence on them. How can people act like their ancestors whom they have never met?

Rejecting the truth and killing Christ came naturally to the Pharisees through genetically instilled predispositions, similar to instincts, according to 2 Peter 2:12, “But these, like unreasoning animals, born as creatures of instinct to be captured and killed, reviling where they have no knowledge, will in the destruction of those creatures also be destroyed,” NASB. When Jesus posed the rhetorical question to the Pharisees, “How will you escape the sentence of hell?” He was basing their judgment on their own sin, not on the sins of their forefathers. Jesus was painting the picture of the Pharisees’ ancestors pushing down their sins to their offspring, while the Pharisees were simultaneously tugging their hatred of Jesus from their own chromosomes!

Jesus spoke as though they were inherently guilty of being sons of their fathers, as though being born into their respective families made them guilty of murdering the Son of God, saying, “Fill up, then, the measure of the sin of your forefathers!” There must be some truth to this, otherwise Jesus would not have said it. He was referring in part to ancestral sin. It doesn’t predestine anyone to act a certain way, but it does predispose them to certain behaviors. Born and raised to mirror their genetic code instinctively without thinking by reflex as though trusting a voice that reverberates through their flesh as the antithesis of the Holy Spirit. They feel they have a destiny to explore their corrupt desires, born as reprobates and raised to fulfill their predisposed demise with a propensity to follow the currents of their fleshly desires, they move impetuously on command, having learned obedience to carnal impulses from childhood.

Job is feisty in his suffering and poses a question to God, “ [It is said,] `God stores up a man's punishment for his sons.' Let him repay the man himself, so that he will know it! (Job 21:19).” What Job didn’t know was that the Pharisees were by no means innocent. So, it seems that God judges the sons for emulating their fathers. The Pharisees confidently boasted they were better than their forefathers because they understood the prophets to be martyrs for telling the truth, yet in their own hearts they believed that the only good prophet was a dead one. It is one thing for the Pharisees to speak well of the prophets, but quite another to stand in the presence of Jesus Christ, who epitomized the Spirit of the prophets and murder Him for telling them the truth, just like their fathers treated the prophets before them. The ancient prophets were eventually exonerated, but while they were alive, they “were stoned; they were sawed in two; they were put to death by the sword. They went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, persecuted and mistreated- the world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and in mountains and in caves and holes in the ground” (Heb 11:37-38 NIV).

In review, Jesus sentenced the Pharisees to hell based on their genealogy, which at least partially determined their behavior. Over a period of many generations satanic powers work on cultures and subcultures, weakening their will to resist sin, making them more and more evil and slowly editing their hereditary makeup. Their polluted genes are then passed from generation to generation ultimately accumulating in the human gene pool with the goal of preparing humanity to receive their antichrist in the last days. As an example, Jesus accused the Pharisees of murdering Zechariah, who lived hundreds of years before the Pharisees were even born. The Pharisees did not murder Zechariah, but Jesus held them personally responsible for his blood, saying, “So upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar” (Mat 23:35). Jesus was speaking both to the Pharisees and to the spirit of murder within them, whom the Pharisees worshipped and served, who murdered the prophets and all the righteous men from the beginning of time until now.

A more accurate interpretation of this verse might be that He held their generation personally responsible for all the blood spilled on the earth since the beginning of time, saying, “I tell you the truth, all this will come upon this generation” Mat 23:36. When Jesus was speaking to the spirit of murder, He was prophesying about his own crucifixion. God intended to heap upon Him the sin of the whole world committed since the beginning of time, so that He might destroy the power of sin and break the chains of ancestral regression perpetuated by demons for those who would believe in Him through faith and receive eternal life. In other words He offered the world a new beginning, and it worked for a while, but now man has slumped back into a deep spiritual apathy where religion is common as sandstone, but faith is rare as gold.

Sin accumulates in the human gene pool, which is why God had to start over many times throughout history. Had God not intervened during these times, man would have continued in his wickedness until he destroyed himself before the time. Following is a list of historical beginnings:

1. Noah’s ark

2. The tower of Babel

3. Jesus personally interceded for mankind by dying for our sins, giving the world an opportunity to launch themselves into a new, positive direction

4. The end times – it is not really the end of time, but the beginning of a new age

Jesus has already died and paid the price for man’s sin, but man has continued in his legacy of depravity as though God never bestowed His mercy upon us. It says He died once for all (Heb 7:27), so that, “If we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a terrifying expectation of judgment, and the fury of a fire which will consume the adversaries,” Heb 10:26-27 NASB. Let’s go back to Job’s statement (Job 21:19); “God stores away a man’s iniquity for his sons.” The way Jesus spoke about sin from Able to Zechariah, He made it sound like it accumulates, inviting us to ask the question: what if all the sin of man from which he has not repented has been accumulating in the human gene pool since the crucifixion of Christ to the present day? When God judges the sin of the world in the last days, He intends to make mankind pick up the tab, since Jesus picked it up last time. Man has responded to the gospel throughout the centuries by “trampling under foot the Son of God, and have regarded as unclean the blood of the covenant by which [they were] sanctified, and have insulted the Spirit of grace” (Heb 10:29). “For if we go on sinning willfully after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins” (Heb 10:26). What else is God supposed to do for us after we have rejected the offer of His Son? When you think of all the horrors prophesied for the last days, collectively they will amount to the horror that Jesus experienced on the cross. The fact that man has collectively rejected the work of the cross is the very cause of God’s impending judgment that He is about to unleash against the unbelieving world in the last days.

James R. Wuthrich

jimwuthrich@yahoo.com