On April 6, four nasa astronauts set a new record and traveled farther from Earth than any human beings in history: They flew 252,756 miles from home, looping around the far side of the moon. United States President Donald Trump radioed the crew and told them, “Humans have never really seen anything quite like what you’re doing. It’s really special.”

He is right. It is special. It is astonishing. Yet it tells us nothing about how to live our lives here on Earth.

That is the great paradox of our age. And if you do not understand it—if you mistake technological wonder for moral progress—you will be deceived by it.

Most of us avoid the most important questions in life because we don’t have the answers. But the late educator Herbert W. Armstrong faced this paradox head on.

“For 6,000 years, mankind has been producing knowledge. … Scientific and technical publications are being ground out by the hundreds of thousands continually. Development of new knowledge skyrockets. All this knowledge—yet virtually no happiness—just accelerating troubles, problems, evils. It’s like being stranded on a raft in mid-ocean. Water everywhere, but not a drop to drink!”

He wrote that in an August 1970 Plain Truth article titled “In a Single Decade Knowledge Has Doubled—So Have Troubles—Why?” What would he say today?

The push-button world has arrived. Libraries of information fit in your pocket. We are circling the moon and eyeing Mars—while arming for wars that could extinguish human life on Earth. We are producing artificial intelligence capable of writing poetry—and precision missiles capable of erasing cities.

The knowledge explosion is real, and so is the explosion of evil.

Social media celebrated the Artemis ii mission with the breathless optimism of a nation that has convinced itself progress is happening. One popular post declared: “The U.S. is in a vibe shift. It’s now the age of heroes and miracles.” People are talking about Americans being able to do the impossible, saying we are entering a golden age.

Notice what posts like that conspicuously omit: the wars, the division, the strife. They do not mention the selfishness, perversions, broken families, fentanyl deaths or mental health crises tearing through an entire generation. They do not mention that the same technology driving the space age is also driving the arms race. Forget the spaceship for a moment. Look at what else we are building with all this knowledge: hypersonic missiles, cluster warheads, artificial intelligence targeting.

We now have the power to end human life on Earth. This is not a golden age. This is the Olivet prophecy.

Are you being deceived by materialistic knowledge?

The Bible explains why this paradox exists. It explains it from the first pages of Genesis. What power human minds have to circle the moon or build skyscrapers or write symphonies. But where did that power come from? The great original Engineer, Builder, Composer and Mind—the Creator God!

Human beings, from the first one to now, have brains and mind power from God, but they lack something.

“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it …” (Genesis 2:16-17).

God was giving them revelation: information, truth, knowledge beyond what they could discern with their human minds and five physical senses.

Notice the very first words the serpent said to Eve, recorded in Genesis 3:1: “Yea, hath God said …?”

Just a question. Just a little doubt. Just a little separation between God’s revelation and their minds. He went on to say, “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”

You might have read this before, but do you realize what this reveals about Adam and Eve and all their human children right up to today?

The serpent was saying, You already have immortal souls. You do not need God’s instruction. Decide for yourselves what is good and what is evil.

Adam and Eve “pioneered in deciding for themselves what is right and what is wrong—what is righteousness and what is sin! And humanity has been doing what seems right in its own eyes ever since” Mr. Armstrong wrote in The Missing Dimension in Sex.

“There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 14:12).

That decision in the garden established the method of human reasoning and human civilization itself: observation, experimentation and acting “as gods, knowing good and evil”—while rejecting belief in and obedience to God’s revealed knowledge.

This is “precisely the ‘scientific’ method used by modern science today!” Mr. Armstrong noted in The Missing Dimension in Sex. And it has produced wonders: This human mind and body God gave us has produced genuinely astonishing wonders! And it has simultaneously produced a civilization that, in Mr. Armstrong’s words, is “full of empty lives, discontent, unhappiness, pain and suffering, crime, immorality, broken homes and family life, corruption, injustice, unfairness, violence, pollution, war and death” (Plain Truth, op cit).

That experiment started with the very first man, the very first marriage, the very first family—which produced a murderer. The experiment has now run for 6,000 years. The results are in: The experiment has failed.

In Hosea 4:1, God prophesied: “[T]here is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land.” And then verse 2 piles on the evidence: “By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood.”

While we circle the moon, here on Earth blood touches blood. The weight of rampant sin is crushing us!

Notice God’s verdict in verse 6: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee ….”

We glorify our knowledge, but God says our lack of knowledge is so drastic that we are destroyed because of it!

“Destroyed” here means cut off. We have cut ourselves off from God. We rejected the tree of life, the symbol of believing and submitting to revelation from God.

God sent Adam and Eve from the garden—from His presence, from revelation, from true education. The nations that descended from them have walked in the same wilderness of self-trust, confusion, sin and misery.

“As they were increased, so they sinned against me …” (verse 7). As we have accumulated more knowledge, so have we sinned more. As the data centers fill up, so do the morgues. As the rockets fly higher, so do the body counts.

God prophesied that in the last days, we would be “[e]ver learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7). Think about that: ever learning. We live in the age of space travel, the Internet, AI, quantum computing—the Information Age. We are ever learning and ever unable to come to the knowledge of the truth. We are building on the wrong foundation. We are building with false education, and we are making things worse.

“[E]vil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived” (verse 13). Deceiving—and being deceived. Evil men are deceived by their own technology. They are telling themselves “the vibe has shifted” into a new golden age—while the missiles multiply and the families shatter and the land mourns!

Mr. Armstrong spent decades identifying what he called the missing dimension in education. He found it by reading the Bible. “[T]he very foundation of education to fit one for happy and successful living is being totally ignored,” he wrote (Plain Truth, October 1975). That foundation is awareness of the purpose of life, knowledge of what man is, recognition of true values as opposed to false ones, and knowledge of the way of life that produces every desired result.

These are the most important aspects of human life, yet most human beings don’t even think much about them—because they don’t know the answers, and that’s quietly, deeply unsettling.

That knowledge is absent from the curriculum of every school, the catalog of every university, the policies of every government. We teach children how to build rockets. We do not teach them why they are alive or how to love their neighbor or what becomes of a civilization that has rejected God.

We eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It looks good, but it causes emptiness and death.

Traditional Christians accept that God exists, but they do not accept that He is our Educator, who teaches us revelation and requires belief and obedience before He gives us further revelation and blessings. He is our Father!

He has even given us a textbook—an instruction manual of His revelation that accompanies His human creation. When we reject the faith and obedience required by that book, the Holy Bible, the result is Hosea 4. The result is 2 Timothy 3. The result is the world we are living in right now.

“O Lord, I know that the way of man is not in himself: it is not in man that walketh to direct his steps” (Jeremiah 10:23). Man does not know how to direct his own steps. That is not a metaphor: It is a diagnosis! The evidence is all around us.

Do not be fooled by the Artemis ii mission. It is a genuine triumph of the mind that God gave humanity. But the mind God gave us was never meant to operate without His revelation as its foundation! Jesus said to judge by the fruits. Despite the hype, you must judge this civilization by its fruits. Look at the wars. Look at the families. Look at the churches. Look at the nations. None of it is coming together. Far from it.

God will have to intervene to save us from ourselves. He said so. That is not pessimism. It is prophecy. And the quicker we come to understand it, the better. There is no hope in the human heart apart from God. There is no golden age on the way—only the Great Tribulation that ends this present evil age, and then the Kingdom of God that follows.

Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness (Matthew 6:33). That is the only education with vision.