So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. Genesis 1:27

The Bible gives the obvious answer to the question of where life started. It unmistakeably tells us that God created it all and sustains it all. God gives to every creature the strength, health, intelligence, and will to survive, even down to giving them each breath they take. When He decided that that creature's life is over, He withdraws the gift of life and it returns to the dust from which it was created.

When the Lord created all the animals, he made them with physical gifts and instincts to care for themselves and reproduce their kind appropriate to each type of animal. They are truly wondrous to behold and study. He made each with a certain beauty and uniqueness, each with secrets to fascinate us and teach us about God and ourselves as well as about the animals themselves. However, He did not make them with spirits such as He and we have.

The animals were given to us as part of our stewardship of the Earth. Some are useful for food, others for work or companionship. Still others are beautiful for beauty's sake, or serve valuable functions within the ecosystems in which they live. They are a living testimony to the greatness and wisdom of God in creating such biological systems of such a complexity that mankind still has not been able to duplicate even the simplest ones. However, they are not on a level with us nor were ever intended to be.

There is no indication that animals have any concept of themselves or their future outside of their immediate awareness of their surroundings and some memory of past events in their lives. Animals simply react instinctively according to the basic "programmed behavior" that the Lord has given them to keep them alive or according to the training they have received. For example, squirrels hide nuts for the winter, but no squirrel (or any living creature other than man) has ever developed an economic system to own the trees that make the nuts and lumber, cultivate the woods to develop them for the maximum production of useful materials, and to market them worldwide to other creatures who don't live where they have local access to woodland products.

That is why only mankind was given stewardship of the planet and charged with its development. We alone are fearfully and wonderfully made in God's image. The living creatures of the planet are part of the ecosystem for mankind's use. They simply do what they have been programmed or taught to do. In turn, man is to take care of them and treat them humanely in whatever use he makes of them. Man did not evolve from the apes, nor are the apes evolving into a new kind of man.

Such beliefs come from the theory of evolution, where we are supposed to be an unusually advanced ape. If that is so, where are the apes between us and chimps in intelligence? Why do only clearly human beings develop civilizations? The great apes like chimps and gorillas band together in social groups, but they don't ever display any intelligent behavior beyond rude communication and tool making. An intelligent animal is still just that, an animal and not a human. We are the only living beings that display the unique aspirations of the human spirit to transcend our immediate environments and needs with the development of the arts, sciences and technologies that go far beyond what even the most advanced of the great apes and marine species like dolphins do in the wild.

One of the lies of evolution is that man has life in himself. It first proposes that somehow the spark of life originated in organic matter, even though one of the earliest theories of biology was that life does not come from non-living material. No one has ever observed any form of non-living material ever come to life.

Then the theory proposes that this new life became more complexly organized into ever more complicated organisms. Considering how life struggles just to survive in this world, and that thousands of species lose that struggle and become extinct, the evidence indicates that we are losing genetic diversity, not developing more.

Evolutionary theory places man at the top of a chain of steadily more complexly developed creatures. It makes us the undisputed gods of this world, the rulers by blind chance and luck for our species having accumulated the most advantageous mutations to elevate our kind to the most talented animals on the planet.

We're very fond of this idea. It plays to our pride that we're number one atop the food chain pyramid. It appeals to our sense of freedom that there is no One above us Who might intervene to check our wishes because He has the power to do so if our attitudes and actions displease Him. After all, nobody can tell number one not to do something and enforce it.

But are we really on the top rung in the ordering of intelligent beings? Are we really all alone in the peculiar intelligence that allows us to create civilizations, sciences, arts, languages, technologies, and other marks of the human being that the animals can only crudely approximate at best?

Many people scoff at the idea that there is a spiritual aspect to this world that we can't directly see with our normal senses. They cling to the evolutionary theory that paints an unambiguous picture linking the creatures we can see into a giant tree of life forms from the simplest to the most complex. It's provable science, they insist, and we won't listen to anything else.

Well, then, what is being detected when scientists studying the paranormal use the best scientific instruments they have and do discover something real connected to paranormal events? What is communicating with you when you play with your ouija boards and other divination tools? Who are these mysterious space brothers, ascended masters, and spirit guides that are communicating with so many people these days with messages of wisdom and information about us and our world?

There's an unsettling element of danger in living in a world where more powerful beings than you can intelligently manipulate people and events to their designs. We have enough trouble coping when people who gather enough political and military power start changing our lives through exerting that power over current events. There's never a guarantee that the powerful will act in our best interests, and the frequent wars that sweep our planet are constant proof of that. We would rather just deal with that, thank you, and dismiss the reports of powerful beings at war over our world as ancient superstitions.

However, ignoring the possibility that we are part of a web of intelligent beings vying for power and the rule of this world is closing our eyes to a very real part of our history, our present, and our future. There have been too many reports from too many people over the centuries of recorded history to dismiss all of them as unenlightened religious bigotry created by primitive peoples trying to explain their world before the rise of modern science.

The Bible's answer is that there is one Supreme Being who created everything, including an order of powerful, highly intelligent creatures that rebelled against Him and started a war on a higher spiritual/physical level than we humans can directly perceive. We were created with an intelligence above that of the animals that also live on this planet, meant to be an intelligent race in the kingdom that this Supreme Being is creating to be His companions in a loving relationship. We aren't number one in this kingdom, but we're close to the top and were meant to be rulers to help care for the lesser creatures of the kingdom.

Unfortunately, our ancestors Adam and Eve decided that they wanted to be gods equal to the God that created them, and joined the rebellion against Him. It was started by an angel we now call Satan, who decided that he was too great to serve God and tried unsuccessfully to overthrow Him. He is still waging war against God and against us in his obsessive drive for power.

God is presenting His case for His innocence of any offense that would justify this turning away from Him to seek to overthrow Him. He is the source of life and love, not a cruel oppressor who should be dethroned so that these rebellious beings can rule in freedom in a kingdom of their own. God has every right to live in peace in His own home of His own making, and every right to banish ungrateful creatures who create chaos and misery by their unrepented sinful behavior.

Satan and his followers are not little men in red suits with tails and pitchforks. They were created with intelligence and emotions just as we were, but on a different level of existence that is as real as ours is. They have their own goals and plans to bring them about, and carry out those schemes to the best of their abilities. They are the some of the mysterious spirit beings contacting the human race, and they are not doing it for our benefit.

The other spirit beings contacting us are God and the loyal beings who still follow him. God did not abandon us when our ancestors rebelled against Him. He continues to speak to us to call us back to Him and warn us of the truth of this war raging around us. He created us to be the rulers of this world, not Satan and his followers, and we will one day be restored to that position on a peaceful world with a responsible, faithful king, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Bible clearly states that mankind, both male and female, were specially created in the image of God. The image of God refers to the three part being of God. Man is created with a body, a soul (or mind), and an eternal spirit.

Mankind has a special connection to God that the other living creations don't have. We were meant to be spiritually connected to Him, just as Jesus told us that He was connected to the Father. We are to be connected to Jesus, as branches are connected to a vine, to draw our sustenance from Him and produce fruit in our lives thereby.

A man who isn't connected to God will ultimately wither and die. That is what happened to Adam and Eve after they ate the Forbidden Fruit. By that act of rebellion, they were cut off from God and spiritually died that day. The physical death that their bodies suffered came later. We all experience that withering of our physical life as we age. God is not obliged to sustain us eternally if we choose to live our lives as His enemy.

This life He offers is more than the physical life that people hazily understand from their experience of it. It is a life on a higher level beyond death, a life where no time exists so there is no end to it. It is a life which can be one of love, joy, and peace. Or, sadly, it is a life of hate, sorrow, and warfare. The choice a person makes during this physical life determines which of the two ways of life he will live in this eternal state.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, rose from the dead partly to prove that there was indeed life beyond the end of physical existence. This is a question that mankind has debated for thousands of years, but few witnesses ever returned from that final crossing from physical life to eternal life to testify to the continuation of conscious, active life after the physical body died.

There was a foretaste of the possibility when Jesus raised the dead in His earthly ministry, as did some of the earlier prophets who acted in the Name and power of God. However, no one ever raised the dead without the clear intervention of God, and even the most powerful prophets never raised themselves from the dead until Jesus came out of His borrowed tomb to proclaim His victory over death, Hell, and the grave for anyone who would believe on Him as the Son of God.

Skeptics still mock and deny the miracle of the Resurrection of Jesus today as they did back then. Mankind has a sinful urge to be independent of God, even to the point of suicidally choosing to turn their backs on a genuine, free offer of an eternal life of endless love, joy, and peace with Him. We'll figure out how to live forever ourselves, we declare, and our scientists scurry to their labs to do just that.

Centuries of experiments later, we've got a better understanding of the chemical processes that keep our bodies working, but we don't understand why they break down and stop, much less how to get them to work again in a person dead for days. Even Jesus's enemies testified that he could raise people who had begun to decay after several days in their tomb. We've learned how to resuscitate people dead for a few brief minutes, but we still can't go beyond that natural barrier.

We'll figure it out, we reply through stubbornly gritted teeth. We'll become like gods ourselves. Our technology will save us in the end. In the meantime, millions still die and enter that mystery beyond the grave that all must face. God sent His Son to explain the reality of that mystery and the reasons for it and testified to His identity as the Son of God through unmistakable miracles, yet many of us still don't want to believe what He keeps saying to us.

We'd rather do it our way, so we devise theories about how we evolved from apes and the apes evolved from other animals right down the animal kingdom to the very simplest creatures. Yet we can't even make a copy of these simple life forms, much less one of ourselves. We'll try cloning to make copies of ourselves, then, even though that is mechanically transferring a set of genes from a body cell to an egg cell without understanding enough about it to create all the working parts from the basic elements in it, that is, from the dust of the ground as God did.

We haven't even mastered the production of physical life and figured out why something we call the soul has to be in the body for it to continue to live, and yet many refuse to listen to the God who clearly demonstrated that He knows enough about our human bodies to raise them from the dead when they are well past the point of human intervention. He has much, much more to say about the life of the human soul and spirit beyond their residence in the physical body.

The only way to have eternal life is to reestablish that vital connection to the Father through the Son. Jesus has opened the way back to God, but you have to ask for that pardon and the gift of eternal life by adoption back into God's family. You can't gain eternal life by your own means. Jesus has provided the only method by which you can be regrafted into the spiritual family. If you want to rejoin God's family, sincerely pray this prayer and you will be saved:

Dear God, I'm sorry for my sins. I want to join your Heavenly family and I submit to King Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I renounce anything to do with Satan, his kingdom, and his ways. Please save me and adopt me as one of Your children. In Jesus' Name, Amen