Looking at the condition of humanity today the question comes to mind, why haven’t we been able to control our self-destructive ways and live together in peace? With the great advances in science and technology, the need to live together in peace has become more critical than it has ever been. Technology has greatly improved the quality of life on the one hand and brought us closer to total annihilation on the other.
Modern warfare between nations must cease or like an autoimmune disease attacking the body’s vital organs, killing the very thing it’s supposed to protect, our race may well destroy itself. We don’t lack the intelligence to understand the problem, but we do lack the ability to control it.
It’s not the human enemy across the border, the other guy with nuclear missiles, but the struggle with good and evil within the heart that threatens man’s existence. Whatever civilization we look back to we can see the struggle to create peace and harmony and the failure that ends in conflict.
Philosophers and religious leaders from present and past civilizations have recognized and commented on the moral dilemma we deal with. Socrates describes it in Plato’s Republic as the ‘evil of the soul.’
Considering the presence of good and evil in nature and comparing evil to the corruption of the material like rust corrodes iron, Socrates relates the same process within the heart of man.
Well, I said, is there no evil that corrupts the soul?
Yes, he said, there are all the evils which we were just now passing in review: unrighteousness, intemperance, cowardice, ignorance.
But does any of these dissolve or destroy her?–and here do not let us fall into the error of supposing that the unjust and foolish man, when he is detected, perishes through his own injustice, which is an evil of the soul. Take the analogy of the body: The evil of the body is a disease which wastes and reduces and annihilates the body; and all the things of which we were just now speaking come to annihilation through their own corruption attaching to them and inhering in them and so destroying them. Is not this true? [1]
As Socrates raised the issue of an inherent pattern toward self-destruction in his day, we continue to wrestle with the evil of the soul today. Righteousness remains at the top of the list. We are still failing to make morally right and justifiable decisions to keep us from self-destruction.
A Plan for World Transformation
It was from the recognition of that threat and the response to control it that the United Nations was founded after the Second World War. 51 nations came together and “committed to maintaining international peace and security, developing friendly relations among nations and promoting social progress, better living standards and human rights.”[2]
The second United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, said in a speech in May 1954:
“The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”
With that understanding as the motivation the international community drafted a universal plan to respond to conflict to achieve the desire for a more unified and safer world.
The UN has defined 4 main purposes it serves to guide us to universal wellbeing.
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- To keep peace throughout the world;
- To develop friendly relations among nations;
- To help nations work together to improve the lives of poor people, to conquer hunger, disease and illiteracy, and to encourage respect for each other’s rights and freedoms;
- To be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations to achieve these common ends.
To Be as One
So, 193 member nations have come together today to work in unity to avoid the massive devastation that modern warfare brought to the world in the 1940s. To stop the reproductive cycle of war and destruction and evil bent that rages within man’s heart, nations are working together to seek the goodwill and prosperity of humanity.
To attain that goal requires that all agree on and follow a common rule of law. To maintain the ‘harmonizing’ needed to achieve their goals, all members must be held accountable to the just requirements of the law, the most important of which is that all walk together in a common understanding and concern to keep the peace, as stated in point number one.
The International Court of Justice was founded in 1945 by the United Nations Charter to settle disputes between countries based on voluntary participation.[3] The judges are elected from the member states and chosen for their reputation for high moral character.
What the UN seeks to accomplish is a fundamental change in the character of man that selfless desire for the good of all will control and replace the self-centered and exploitive ‘evil of the soul.’ The common need for justice depends on an agreed upon code of behavior and compliance by all, that could best be defined as righteous character. The survival of the global community depends on the departure the path of self-destruction to a more disciplined path of self-control.
The Biblical Plan; Transformation of the Seed
The Bible has a plan for universal transformation of our inner struggle. To understand the biblical plan to control the evil nature within, we need to understand seed as it’s used in the biblical context.
Now may He who supplies seed to the sower, and bread for food, supply and multiply the seed you have sown and increase the fruits of your righteousness, while you are enriched in everything for all liberality, which causes thanksgiving through us to God. 2 Corinthians 9:10-11
The seed is given to man by the creator, the work to bring it to fruition and reproduce more comes from us. Whether it’s for wheat to make bread for food or perceptions and thoughts in our minds to create benevolent and loving families and societies.
To correct the self-destructive pattern within and establish universal change God chose Abraham to be a progenitor for mankind through his seed. He transplanted Abraham from Ur of the Chaldeans, modern day southern Iraq, to Canaan, modern day Israel, with a long-term plan to affect the whole of mankind through his seed.
Abraham was lead from his ancestral homeland to specifically effect a change to all of mankind.
I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” Genesis 12:2-3
Then in chapter 13 it’s explained how that blessing will be accomplished on universal scale.
And I will make your seed as the dust of the earth; so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall your seed also be numbered. Genesis 13:16
This is a statement of intent to effect a change from curse to blessing, evil to in man through the seed Abraham. In the previous post Seed to the Sower, we saw that the engineering of seed today through genotyping we can create new genetic combinations that can be chosen for greater, healthier yield. Farmers work with a nucleus seed that has all the characteristics that the breeder has modified into it for greater genetic purity.
In Genesis 18 God speaks to Abraham of his specific purpose in being chosen and set apart to engineer that change into the moral character of his seed, his offspring.
“For I have known him, to the end that he may command his children and his household after him, that they may keep the way of the LORD, to do righteousness and justice; to the end that the LORD may bring upon Abraham that which He hath spoken of him.” Genesis 18:19
As the United Nations seeks a world where evil motivation is controlled by obedience to just laws for the common good, so does this requirement come to Abraham’s offspring. They must behave righteously and justly for the transformation to blessing to happen. The reproductive process must originate within the family first for it to reproduce though all the families of the earth.
Supernatural Intelligence
This process was chosen to begin with Abraham to counter an earlier corruption to the seed of mankind that happened with Adam. At the beginning of creation, it was one man’s choice to disobey one apparently simple command that began the process of corruption.
And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Genesis 2:16-17
The biblical narrative gives place to a nonhuman presence that poses a subtle challenge to the rule of law that was the first stage of the process of corruption.
1 Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?”
4 Then the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3
Coercion isn’t used to control Adam’s choice but through reason he was convinced to believe that disobedience to command was righteous behavior and would produce fruit, and the prescribed just consequence wouldn’t be enforced. It was through this communication with an opposing authority that unrighteous thought entered the mind of Adam as iniquity and became sin through his actions.
In that Adam was the progenitor of mankind, the effect of his disobedience to the rule of law corrupted the programming of the nuclear seed. Adam had chosen to disobey, thereby establishing, and following a new pattern of programing and cycle of evil within that he hadn’t previously known.
Restoring Communication
To reverse the damage there’s a plan for a future change. A chosen seed of man will overcome the evil nature the serpent planted in the heart and mind.
“And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” Genesis 3:15
Until that time the seed Adam and Eve produced would continue to reproduce the rebellious nature of the seed of the serpent without remedy.
So, the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? And why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it.” Genesis 4:6-7
It was Cain’s choice not to heed the advice from God and work and wait for His own prosperity, but to kill his brother and take what he wanted then. He reproduced the same pattern as his father, choosing to ignore set boundaries and take what wasn’t his to take. Coercion from the supernatural realm is again not used to force his decision.
That pattern continued to control the programming, overriding mankind’s good intentions. In Genesis 6:1-6 the pattern is related to many generations after creation. It again refers here to an alien intelligence as a prime influence of evil as they “took wives for themselves” from the daughters of men.
The New Testament letter of Jude refers to these angels, “who did not keep their proper domain, but left their own abode, He has reserved in everlasting chains under darkness for the judgment of the great day.” They will receive their just punishment for choosing to ignore set boundaries and take what wasn’t theirs to take.
The reproduction of the seed was always the concern the creator. He gives it for man to reproduce but as a loving father he will always intervene to restore it from destruction.
Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. Genesis 6:5-6
The Righteous Seed
Noah’s flood follows the narrative in Genesis 7-9 to cover the earth, primarily to destroy the seed save for Noah and his immediate family. Noah had proven to be a righteous man and, ‘found grace in the eyes of the LORD. 6:8’ Because he was faithful and did, ‘according to all that God commanded him.’ 6:22 Noah was the one chosen by the creator to be the nucleus seed for the next generation of mankind preceding the call of Abraham.
The Biblical Plan for Transformation will continue with an entry on ‘Through the Seed of Messiah’.
[1] The Republic: The Complete and Unabridged Jowett Translation, Page 308
[2] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/chapter-1
[3] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/statute-of-the-international-court-of-justice