From time immemorial there has been a strategic war fought between the forces of good and the forces of evil.  It is fought over control of the minds of men and all systems of the earth are affected or involved in this process.  This perpetual battle is known by several titles: some have called it light versus darkness, or good versus evil, or heaven versus hell, or more specifically, Kingdom versus kingdom.

This battle can be traced through the Bible from the very first Book to our present day. Not to recognize the existence of this battle is to miss the true meaning and purpose of history, what I often call the God Factor!

Where do you stand in this battle? What is your concept of history? Do you believe that history is a product of evolutionary processes, and that time, even though it possesses billions of years, is ultimately terminal.  That transition is inadvertently associated with evolutionary change agents, and because they are, they are never predictable!

This view of history says that time has no overriding superintendence – that it is quite arbitrary. As a result, it has no meaning or purpose.  Thus the contents of history, while we can study it and know it, have outcomes that are purposeless and serendipitous. being only the story of man’s naturalistic origins and thus left to him to record and tell! It is fickle, fatalistic and fanciful!  The only thing for certain is change!  Reality is only found in the here and now; assigning to life some importance, but all is expendable for the greater good, and when we die — that’s it, we’re simply dead!

Left to our own ingenuity, we can never perceive the bigger picture. This view of history can never put all the dots together. or make connections of events, personalities. or movements in time.  Believing this view of history to be based in science. we often develop historical myopia, and because truth is constantly changing, we accept the revisions made in history. With no continuity or purpose, we become as dust in a fathomless cosmos. a fatalistic position epitomized by the late evolutionary scientist, Carl Sagan, who often said, “Man is lost in space without meaning or destiny.”

But if there is a God, the God of Scripture, who by definition is the first and the last, the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, then, He is also eternal, sovereign and omnipotent! He is not bound by space and time, nor is He reactive to man. angels or demons. He is always proactive; always in plan A, He has no plan B! He was before time. He created time, and will be here when time is no more.  Therefore, He, and He alone, is the author of history! Thus He knows the end from the beginning because He is omniscient! it is as the Apostle John said of Him, “The Lord God Omnipotent reigns!”

This view of history is directional, guided and purposeful. It is seamless!  In school we study history in sections or periods, which is an accommodation to students and teachers, but real history has no seams or periods, it is continuous, connected, and consecutive. Therefore the rise and fall of Kings, Presidents, Nations and Empires are all in His hand, and history is going somewhere! It is not ambiguous, arbitrary or ambivalent, it is rather ordered, directed and purposeful.

The question has always been, “Does life have meaning?”  lf history is fortuitous, then life is meaningless. but if history is prescribed by an overriding supernatural agency it has definite meaning! But it is not without conflict, and it is this conflict, its source, its nature and its outcomes that comprise the battle for good and evil, a battle that is unavoidable.

Blessings,

G. Thomas Sharp