What is the most important subject you could hear study if you were just beginning a relationship with God? It is the subject of the great beginning of God and His creation.

In 1926, a century ago, Herbert W. Armstrong encountered what he called “dual challenges” that would fundamentally change the course of his life.

One day, his wife, Loma, visited a neighbor lady who handed her a Bible and had her read scriptures about God’s Sabbath commands. Mrs. Armstrong realized those scriptures meant that the seventh-day Sabbath is still binding on God’s people today. She went to her husband and told him what she had learned.

“I was aghast!” Mr. Armstrong wrote in Mystery of the Ages. “I was angry. To me that was religious fanaticism! What would business contacts think? But she claimed to have found this teaching in the Bible.”

Mrs. Armstrong challenged her husband, “If you can show me where the Bible commands Sunday observance, I’ll go back to it.”

Soon afterward came the second challenge. In a conversation with his sister-in-law, Hertha Dillon, Mr. Armstrong mentioned he was not convinced that evolution was true.

“Herbert Armstrong,” she accused, “you are simply ignorant! One is uneducated, and ignorant, unless he believes in evolution. All educated people now believe it” (Autobiography of Herbert W. Armstrong).

These two challenges were the genesis of Mr. Armstrong’s calling into God’s truth and His work. There is an important reason why God challenged him on the Sabbath first of all! And there is also an important reason why the challenge on evolution came right after that.

A Memorial of Creation

Why did God challenge Mr. Armstrong to prove the Sabbath day first? Because if you don’t understand the Sabbath, you cannot understand God’s purpose for mankind! (To prove whether the seventh-day Sabbath is still binding for New Testament Christians, request a free copy of Mr. Armstrong’s booklet Which Day Is the Christian Sabbath?)

In Genesis 1, God reveals how He renewed the Earth for man. On the first day, He separated light from darkness. On the second day, He divided the bodies of water from Earth’s atmosphere. On the third day, He raised dry land up from below the water and planted vegetation on it. On the fourth day, the sun, moon and stars became visible from Earth. On the fifth day, God created aquatic animals and birds. On the sixth day, God created land animals and man.

Then, on the seventh day, by resting from His labor of the previous six days, God instituted the Sabbath day (Genesis 2:1-3).

The Sabbath day is a memorial of God’s creation!

Everything began with God creating all these things, culminating in man and in the Sabbath, the seventh day of this inaugural week of this new world. Genesis makes it clear that this was a literal week, not a metaphor for some lengthy or undefined span of time.

Exodus 31 records a special covenant God made with His people regarding the seventh-day Sabbath. Verse 14 reads: “Ye shall keep the sabbath therefore; for it is holy unto you: every one that defileth it shall surely be put to death: for whosoever doeth any work therein, that soul shall be cut off from among his people.”

God takes the Sabbath day very seriously. People lose their physical and spiritual lives when they know God’s Sabbath command yet refuse to keep it! The ancient nation of Israel was enslaved numerous times for breaking it!

The Sabbath memorializes the very beginning of mankind! It is the foundation of God’s way of life! If we reject the Sabbath, everything else in our lives will go off track.

The Sabbath points to the renewing of the face of the Earth in preparation for the creation of man’s body and mind on the sixth day and spiritual creation on the seventh day. It points to the awesome master plan of God!

Satan hates this and has substituted a counterfeit explanation for man’s origin. This counterfeit is evolution. It is, in fact, Satan’s deadliest weapon.

This is why God challenged Mr. Armstrong at the start of his conversion with both subjects, the Sabbath and evolution, at once.

Believing in Evolution and God

The people who created the theory of evolution were atheists and agnostics. Evolutionists claim that you are ignorant if you have faith in God and don’t believe in their theory. But now, even people who are religious say they believe in evolution and God. Many people who supposedly believe the Bible accept notions of creation being the product of evolutionary forces rather than the work of the Creator.

People have come to believe ideas like “theistic evolution” or “evolutionary creationism.” They say God used evolution to create man, that God created the universe and life through natural processes, including evolution.

Some say the Genesis creation account is metaphorical. They say that “day” doesn’t mean “day,” but rather “epoch”—an indefinite period, or a literary device—meaning they could have added up to billions of years. But that doesn’t agree with the Bible, which says God divided the light from the darkness and called the light “day” and the darkness “night,” and said “the evening and the morning were the first day” and the same for all seven days.

Pope Benedict xvi said there were “many scientific proofs in favor of evolution” and that “the term evolution is appropriate” to describe God’s creation. The United Methodist Church states, “We find that science’s descriptions of cosmological, geological and biological evolution are not in conflict with theology.” Prominent 19th-century Jewish theologian Samson Raphael Hirsch wrote that Judaism “can accommodate even this ‘theory of the origin of species.’”

That is false! A true Christian lives “by every word of God” (Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:4), and Genesis 1 explicitly says God made every kind of animal to “reproduce after its own kind” before He made man after the God kind.

“Theistic evolution” is an attack on this biblical truth. It twists Scripture to make it sound like God used the evolutionary process as a tool to slowly transform amoebas into His own image and likeness over billions of years. Christians who believe this are usually too weak in faith to believe what the Bible says. So instead of choosing between the Bible and Darwin like Mr. Armstrong did, they try to marry biblical creationism with evolutionary agnosticism. The result destroys their understanding of God’s ultimate purpose, which is to reproduce Himself in mankind.

God did not make monkeys to slowly evolve into humans over millions of years. Mankind is not of the monkey kind—he is of the God kind!

“Theistic evolution” is a satanic attempt to convince people that they are nothing more than animals!

When the premise is wrong, all that follows is wrong.

If you don’t believe the seven-day re-creation week of Genesis 1, then you do not believe the Bible: You do not believe you were created by God!

That doesn’t mean that Earth is only 6,000 years old, however, as some literal Bible interpreters believe.

The events of Genesis 1, beginning in verse 2, are a “re-creation” because the original creation of the Earth and the universe (described in verse 1) had occurred prior (see also Job 38:4-11). This could have taken place millions of years before the events detailed in the rest of the chapter. The rebellion of Lucifer and one third of the angels (Isaiah 14; Ezekiel 28; Revelation 12, etc) wrecked the universe and caused the surface of the Earth to become “without form, and void” (Genesis 1:2). God then embarked on a plan even greater than the angelic plan! (This truth is thoroughly explained in Herbert W. Armstrong’s free book The Incredible Human Potential.)

Many Christians reject evolution and say they have faith that Genesis 1-2 explain the origin of life on Earth. But their faith is weak because they don’t fully believe what God says: They reject the seventh day, the Sabbath, the very memorial of that creation! (Genesis 2:1-3; Exodus 20:8-11). They think it does not matter which day you keep. But as we will see, keeping the Sabbath is crucial to being a true Christian and to understanding the question of origins.

Christ Confirmed Creation

Jesus Christ confirmed that the Old Testament is accurate. He quoted from 24 different books! He confirmed the lives of Zechariah, Daniel, Elijah, David, Moses, Israel, Isaac, Abraham, Abel, Eve, Adam—and the creation.

Christ also kept the Sabbath, the memorial of creation. He believed in the Genesis creation account! In Matthew 19:4-5, He quotes the creation of man (Genesis 1:26-27), when God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness ….” Christ asked the religious people of His day—and our day—”Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female, And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they twain shall be one flesh?”

God created us male and female. We didn’t evolve from an ape or any other animal kind. And there aren’t more than two genders, either! We are made in God’s likeness. We are of the God kind!

God made us male and female, and it is “for this cause” that God instructs a young man and woman to leave their parents, to marry and build their own family. They are to become “one flesh”—physically and spiritually. That is a deep closeness and unity. Matthew 19:5 quotes Genesis 2:24. Christ definitely believed the Genesis account of creation. He certainly should, since the Father created all things through Him! (Ephesians 3:9). How can anyone who claims to be a Christian reject the Genesis account?

If you don’t believe Genesis 1, then you don’t believe any of the Bible.

Most educators and scientists don’t know the origin of marriage because they reject God as the Creator of man as stated in Genesis. That book contains the record of when marriage and family began. Many of these scholars see only “human evolutionary history.” They contemptuously and arrogantly include the word evolutionary. They assume they know more than the great God! They close their mind to God’s truth. They have never known God, and they probably never will until God plunges them into the worst suffering ever. Then, thankfully, most of them will be humble enough to heed God’s Word and repent.

Higher Education?

When Mr. Armstrong started studying into evolution, he thought it seemed plausible. When he got deep into his studies, he discovered that evolution is a farce (sidebar, “Arguing in a Circle”).

“Actually, this is simply the study into the two possibilities of origins,” he wrote in his autobiography. “It threw me directly into an in-depth research of what is perhaps the most basic of all knowledge—the very starting point in the acquisition of knowledge—the search for the correct concept through which to view all facts.”

The concept through which scientists view all facts flatly excludes everything that is non-material. They have no real explanation for consciousness, intuition, creativity or beauty. They can’t explain moral questions or spiritual matters. Scientists confine their research entirely to the physical realm. They reject the slightest possibility of the spiritual, the supernatural, the miraculous.

They deny the “spirit in man” (Job 32:8) that God gave human beings, which gives us mind power that far exceeds anything animals can understand (1 Corinthians 2:11; request a free copy of Mr. Armstrong’s booklet What Science Can’t Discover About the Human Mind). Of course, they also deny the Holy Spirit, the power through which God saves us. And even though evidence of the Master Designer and Creator is all around us—the exquisite universe, our planet and our very lives are His superb handiwork—they deny God altogether!

Such thinking produces profound blindness. People’s faith is completely destroyed by the theory of evolution!

Yet the whole system of higher education promotes that thinking. Professors basically demand that their students accept the theory of evolution without thinking deeply about it at all. Maybe a student enters college believing in God, but after being indoctrinated in secular teaching, he finishes college as agnostic or atheist. The highly educated of this world—nearly all of them agnostics or atheists—ridicule anyone who dares have faith in God!

This is Satan’s way of discrediting the Bible’s account of re-creation week. Students are taught that Earth as it is today came into existence through a process that took millions of years. God says He renewed the face of the Earth in six days!

Blind Faith

Is faith really just an unseemly quality of ignorant people?

Evolution is nothing but a blind faith! Scientists believe the precisely ordered, law-abiding universe came into being because of a spontaneous “big bang” or some other insane idea. They reject the existence of a Creator, even though the scientific law of biogenesis states that life comes only from life. They have never found a “missing link” fossil of a half-man, half-monkey or anything else, yet they wholeheartedly believe in evolution.

King David used a strong word to describe anyone who scoffs at the notion of God. He called that person a fool (Psalm 14:1).

God wants us to understand who He is: our Creator. He created us physically, but He is also creating us spiritually to become members of His Family. That is why God looks like a man (Ezekiel 1:26). We look like God! Animals do not.

God created man! We all have a human spirit that can connect with God’s Holy Spirit. Without that connection, we would have no concept of our future. God cannot convert a dog. Not even the brilliant angels have the opportunity to become God beings like we do! (Hebrews 1:5). Our incredible human potential is to build the very mind and character of God. That’s our purpose for living on Earth, our testing ground.

Satan uses evolution to directly attack this understanding.

A true Christian cannot believe in evolution! The idea that God used evolution as a means to create man is nonsense! He created man in one day. We must believe the inspired words of the Holy Bible.