Escaping the Cataclysm

by Keith Robinson

  Finally, Adam took a step back and dropped his arms to his sides. “Why have you come?”

  “It’s a very long story,” Mack said with a grin. “We came seeking help. And when we saw you standing over the river, we wanted to stop you from killing yourself.”

  “‘Killing myself’?” he repeated in shock. “Why would I do that?”

  Mack frowned. “When we saw you on the edge by the river, we thought…we thought you were going to jump in.”

  Adam’s expression took on a hint of fear. “I could not do that. I have thought much more about death recently. But I could never leave Eve alone.” Disturbed by the very idea of taking his own life, Adam changed the subject. “You said ‘we’ a moment ago. Why?”

  “I’ve come with friends,” Mack answered. “They are still in the pyramid.”

  “I would like to meet them, but I must first find my wife,” Adam said.

  “Where is she?” Mack asked, suddenly worried. It didn’t dawn on him until now that she was missing.

  “If you are truly my descendent, then you must know my terrible shame,” he said, his head dropping low and his voice reflecting his deep regret and sorrow.

  Mack nodded solemnly. “Yes. How long ago were you ejected from the Garden?”

  Without looking up, Adam answered. “Today. Not long ago. When we were cast out, Eve and I were so filled with our own shame and regret that we could not bear to be near one another. She went off by herself to the other side of the river.”

  Raising his head, he stared at his visitor with such intensity in his eyes that Mack took an involuntary step backward. “Can you truly fathom the depth of our shame? We disobeyed our very Creator: the one who gave us life, and who created all things! We deserve death. And death will come soon.

  “If you truly are my descendent, then you have probably never seen the inside of the Garden, have you?” When Mack shook his head, Adam continued. “Do you believe that this world is beautiful?”

  “Yes! Compared to the time during which I live, this world is spectacular,” Mack answered.

  Adam’s depression only deepened. “You only say that because you never saw what the world was like before. When I look around, I see that even now, things have begun to change. I even saw a pair of animals fighting one another. Can you understand? My sin has affected everything! Everywhere I look, I am constantly reminded of my failing.”

  Mack walked up to Adam and put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “But there is hope! God has not abandoned you or Eve. You do not know this, but in the future, one of your descendents will give birth to the Savior, who will rescue the world from sin. He will open the door to eternal life.”

  “The Promise…” Adam muttered.

  “What?” Mack said, confused.

  “Just before the Creator banished us from the Garden, He made a promise that there would be enmity between the offspring of the serpent and Eve’s offspring,” Adam said. “He said to the serpent that ‘he will crush your head and you will strike his heel.’1 Could this be of what you speak?”

  “It could be,” Mack answered honestly. “I’m not the expert on those things, but it sounds about right. I think Rebecca might have said something about that.”

  “Rebecca?” Adam asked. “Is that your wife?”

  Mack blushed. “No. She’s just a good friend. Let’s go find Eve, and then I’ll introduce you to the rest of my friends.”

  “I must go to her alone,” Adam said. “She and I must talk first. Then, I will bring her back here to meet you and your companions.”

  Mack agreed, and to his great surprise, Adam stepped forward and embraced him. “Thank you, my son, for reminding me of the Creator’s Promise.”

  Not knowing what else to do, Mack simply smiled dumbly. “You’re welcome.”

  With a renewed sense of purpose, Adam went off in search of his wife, leaving Mack alone on the hillside. For several moments, he just stood in silence, reviewing the conversation with Adam in his mind. Finally, he turned and made his way slowly back to the pyramid. Shaking his head in wonder, he smiled broadly, his spirit soaring.

  1. Genesis 3:15

  31

  Answers

  Not more than an hour after Mack had returned to the pyramid to tell the others what had happened, Adam and his wife arrived at the entrance to the strange structure. Having watched them approach through the exterior cameras, Mack met them at the main door and escorted them inside.

  He was immediately stunned by Eve’s beauty. Her brownish-red hair flowed luxuriously over her shoulders and seemed to glisten, even in the interior lights of the pyramid. Her skin was tan and flawless. Still, despite her outward, perfect beauty, it was her eyes that captured Mack, for their dark brown depths contained both intelligence and sorrow. One look at her caused him to momentarily forget his surroundings and his companions.

  Once Mack had recovered from the intoxicating effect of Eve’s beauty, he introduced Adam and Eve to the rest of his companions—including Goliath, who used his armor to once more disguise himself as a normal, albeit tall, human. Mack then took Adam and Eve on a tour of the pyramid. Under other circumstances, he could tell that Adam would have found the entire structure fascinating. However, still weighed down by their overwhelming grief and guilt at being cast from Eden, both he and Eve found it difficult to stay focused on the intricacies of the structure. Sensing their uneasiness and apprehension about the strange machine and its occupants, Mack decided to cut the tour short.

  Intercepting Mack and his guests as they finished viewing the inside of the structure, Rebecca invited the man and his wife to eat with her and her companions while they waited for the pyramid’s core to recharge. They accepted, but due to their feelings of discomfort at being indoors, Rebecca and the others took the food outside, where the group sat on the plush grass. Using the gravity control devices, Jerome and Goliath brought Jeffrey out so that he could join the group.

  As they ate, the conversation was initially dominated by Mack answering any questions that Adam had. The travelers found that nearly everything that they took for granted was new and fascinating to the man and woman. Despite the seriousness of the day’s events, Adam was thankful for the distraction, while Eve seemed to withdraw into herself as she leaned against him, half-listening. As Mack described various concepts and ideas, Adam became increasingly intrigued, especially when Mack talked about different languages and cultures, as well as the differences in skin color and body shape that was exhibited by the travelers.

  As the meal was drawing to an end, Rebecca and Dr. Eisenberg began to ask questions of their guests while Akwen, Lisa, Jerome, Jeffrey, and Goliath merely listened in interest.

  “I never imagined that Adam would be so hot!” Lisa whispered to Jerome who sat next to her in the grass.

  Jerome threw her a wry look. “No kidding! I can’t take my eyes off of Eve either! She is drop-dead gorgeous! I suppose I never really gave it any thought. After all, I never believed that they were real people to begin with. But I guess that if you accept that they were real, which I can’t deny now, then it would make sense that they’d be beautiful. I mean, God made them perfect, and since traits for beauty are inherited, they must already have all of that information in their genetic material. I imagine it’d be several generations at least before ugliness starts to even creep into the population.”

  “But I don’t get something,” Lisa asked, “if Adam and Eve are the only two people alive, then who do their kids marry?”

  Jerome snickered. “I’ve always wondered that myself. That was one of the questions that made me wonder about the accuracy of the Bible. How do you think Doc would answer that one?”

  “There’s one way to find out,” Lisa replied.

  While Mack continued to converse with Adam and Eve in their language, Jerome reiterated Lisa’s question to Doc. “The Bible talks about Adam’s son Cain going off and marrying his wife. But where did he find her? Are there other people around?”

&n
bsp; Dr. Eisenberg smiled. “That is a common question that people have asked over the years. First of all, the Bible doesn’t say that Cain ‘went off and married his wife.’ It says that he left, then his wife conceived.”

  “What’s the difference?” Jerome asked.

  “The difference is that his wife left with him,” the doctor clarified. “Cain didn’t meet her after he left his family.1 Also, when you study the Torah, it says that Adam called his wife Eve because she ‘would become the mother of all living.’2 It says that our first parents also had other sons and daughters.”

  “Aw man, you’re not suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, are you?” Mack asked, disgust written all over his face.

  The doctor nodded. “I am. Cain must have married his sister, or possibly his niece.”

  Seeing Mack’s reaction, Adam asked him what was being discussed. While Mack tried to come up with some way to explain their conversation, Lisa responded to Dr. Eisenberg’s statement.

  “But how can that be?” she asked. “If he married his sister, then wouldn’t their children have been born with birth defects?”

  “No, they wouldn’t,” the doctor replied. “What causes birth defects?”

  Lisa thought for a moment before responding. “Mutations in the genes of the parents, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right. The closer a man and woman are in relation, the more similar their genes are,” Dr. Eisenberg explained. “So, in our time, if a brother and sister marry, their children are likely to have some deformity because they will inherit the same mistakes from both mother and father. However, if a man marries a woman who is not closely related, they will have different mistakes in their genes. Since the child will receive one set of genes from each parent, and since good genes tend to override or mask bad genes, serious deformities are avoided.”

  “Exactly,” Jerome replied. “Which means that if Cain married his sister, then they would have all kinds of deformities.”

  The professor raised a finger to halt Jerome’s assumption. “Not exactly. You are making a critical error in logic. You are doing what too many scientists do when considering questions from the past. You are assuming that everything that we see in our time applies to this time.”

  “But why shouldn’t we?” Jerome replied. “Science is science. The laws of genetics don’t change.”

  “I’m not saying that the laws of genetics must change. What I am saying is that we have to take what we see in our times and extrapolate backward in time using logic,” he clarified. “Think about this for a moment: Is the genetic load of mutations in the human race as a whole increasing or decreasing with each generation?” he asked.

  “Increasing,” Jerome answered. “Every generation has more mutations in their genes than the previous one.”

  “Precisely,” Dr. Eisenberg said. “Which means, if you go back in time, the genetic load would be less and less until you reach a time when there were no genetic mistakes,” he paused, glancing at Adam and Eve. “It’s kind of like making a copy of a copy of a copy. The further you get away from the source, the more fuzzy the image.”

  Rebecca sat up straighter in sudden understanding. “So, Adam’s descendents could have children without deformities because their genetic information was pure.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you that, but doesn’t the Bible forbid marrying your close relative?” Jerome asked. “How could it do so and yet imply that it was okay for Adam’s family? Is it sinful or not?”

  “Again, you must understand the timing and reason that God gave the laws,” the doctor explained. “First, the law against marrying your sister and other relatives was given by Moses, which was well over two thousand years after creation. With our modern understanding of genetics, we can now understand why God gave that law at that particular time. He knew that the genetic load was at a point where it would start to cause their children to have deformities. This is a perfect example of how, when the Israelites followed God’s laws, even if they didn’t understand them, they were healthier than those nations around them.”

  “Actually, doesn’t the Bible record that Abraham married his half-sister?” Rebecca asked, joining the conversation.

  “Yes, it does,” Dr. Eisenberg confirmed. “And he was the father of the Jewish nation. So, Jerome, to answer your question, it was not sinful to marry your sister before the Mosaic law, but afterward it became so in order to protect the people from physical deformities.”

  “Uh…can we change the subject?” Mack asked. “Our guests are starting to really wonder about the details of what we’re talking about, and I can’t keep dodging the point forever.”

  As the conversation returned its focus back to Adam and Eve, Rebecca found her gaze turning to Jeffrey, who sat silent and morose several feet away from her. Although she wondered what he thought of meeting and talking to the real Adam and Eve, she knew that now would not be the time to ask. She closed her eyes momentarily and began praying for her husband and friends.

  She knew that Dr. Eisenberg and Mack had come to accept Jesus as their savior, and Doc had told her that Lisa had as well. Yet, despite all they had seen and experienced, Akwen, Jerome, and (to a degree) Jeffrey still seemed too stubborn to accept the truth. However, she could also tell that each of them, including Akwen, had changed. She prayed that God would continue to work on their hearts and minds until they finally accepted His love.

  Opening her eyes, Rebecca continued to pray as she half-heartedly listened to the conversation. Suddenly, a strange prickling sensation traveled down her spine, causing her to look around expectantly. Something, or someone, was coming closer. Although she couldn’t see anything just yet, her spirit knew that a supernatural presence was drawing near.

  “What is it, Rebecca?” Dr. Eisenberg asked in concern as she stood to her feet and began looking around.

  She was about to reply when she saw a figure begin to materialize ten feet in front of her. Just as she felt a twinge of fear begin to flow through her veins, she recognized the being. Relief flooded over her, yet his presence was so powerful that she still found it difficult to stand.

  “Sikaris!” she exclaimed breathlessly as she looked up at him. She noticed that he was no longer wearing the gleaming armor, but instead was dressed in a simple white robe. “I’m so glad to see you again,” she said as she stared into the angel’s violet eyes expectantly.

  “Dear Rebecca, I told you that we would surely meet again,” he said, his voice firm and comforting. “Rise. All of you. Am I God that you would bow before me?”

  As she stood, she turned to look at her friends. Each of them, including Goliath, was lying facedown in the grass. Even Jeffrey had managed to roll himself over despite his paralyzed legs in order to turn away from the angelic being. Although her friends had seen him once before, his power and might had been partially masked by their own fear and the presence of Odin and the other false gods. Now, however, they felt the full weight of his majesty. Next to her friends, Rebecca could see that although Adam and Eve were still seated on the grass, Eve had her face buried in her husband’s chest, while he had his turned away from Sikaris in shame.

  Walking over to Adam and his wife, Sikaris crouched down and spoke to them softly. To her surprise, Rebecca found that she understood him, despite the fact that he was speaking in the Language of Eden. “Fear not. Although you have disobeyed the Lord, and have received your punishment, I have come to tell you that you are not forgotten. You will not commune with the Creator the way you once did, but know that He will always hear you and respond to your needs when you cry out to Him. He will never leave you, nor forsake you, but you will still have to deal with the consequences of the sin that you have brought into the world.”

  Standing, Sikaris spoke louder, addressing all of them. “You have brought encouragement to the firstborn among men. But now it is time for Adam and his wife to leave you. They must begin their new life and you must return to your home.”

  Adam rose to his feet. Cryin
g softly, Eve joined him. Together they bid farewell to Rebecca and the others and thanked them. As they turned to leave, Sikaris stood before the couple and touched each of them on their foreheads. Without looking back, they turned and walked away from the visitors.

  Turning his attention to Rebecca and the others, Sikaris spoke. “I have altered their minds so that they will not remember you. Their memories of this encounter will be nothing more than strange dreams to them. But they will always keep with them the feelings of encouragement that you brought. For you have reminded them of the Promise, which is to be their primary purpose for living.”

  “Is that…is that what happened to everyone we have met on this journey?” Rebecca asked. “Have you altered their memories as well? Will Noah and his family remember us?”

  “Yes and no,” the angel replied as he walked over to where Jeffrey lay on the ground. Lifting him, Sikaris set him back on the cushions that Rebecca and the others had set out for him. His face white as a ghost, Jeffrey watched silently as the angelic being smiled at him, then stood and walked over to stand near Rebecca once more as he continued speaking. “I have not altered the memories of anyone else you have encountered. Do you not remember that when you first met Noah he remarked that you looked familiar? It is because he remembered meeting you before the Flood.”

  “Then why did you change the memories of Adam and Eve?” Rebecca asked.

  “Because they are still too young and innocent to fully comprehend all that you have showed them,” Sikaris replied. “Remember, they are not yet a year old, even though they appear to be much older.”

  Dr. Eisenberg, having finally recovered his voice, spoke tremulously. “Oh servant of the Most High God, forgive my ignorance, but how do you know about our previous meeting with Noah? Were you there with us?”