DID PRIMITIVE MAN AND MODERN MAN WORSHIP THE SAME GOD?
Is there any credibility to the premises that primitive man and modern man worshipped the same God? Most people probably do not think so, but let’s look at it with a different perspective.
When Unangan hunters, later to be called Aleuts, some ten to fifteen thousand years ago crossed the Bering Sea land bridge into what we know as Alaska today, they had to struggle daily to survive and how they did this tells us much about their belief system. They arrived in this new land with a well developed religious belief and their success was more than just the ability to conquer fire and make tools. At sometime in the far distant past they became aware of something greater than themselves and felt a need to connect with this budding enlightenment.
It was this gigantic leap in intellect that laid the foundation for man’s capacity to adapt to a harsh and unforgiving world. Man needed a way to predict the future and not just live for the moment and their belief in a Spirit or God provided them a stable view of life in an unstable world. Their religion provided a place to go to seek help in deciding when to plant or hunt and gave new meaning to birth and death. There was another world out there beyond their existence on earth and they wanted to be a part of it. An explanation of just whom or what God represented to them was certainly vague and beyond their intellect to conceptualize. But they knew they were not alone in their world.
However, modern man today is no different in that his explanation of God is just as vague. Man today also needs to know that there is meaning to life during and after death. But who are these two people, separated by countless thousands of years, worshipping? Both their individual views on an afterlife satisfied their pursuit for immortality. Is the God of primitive man any different than the God of modern man? Who’s to say with impunity that God was not there for early man as well? Another way of saying it is why would God only avail himself for modern man but no one else? Man today may very well cast aside beliefs of long ago as irrelevant with no correlation to the God we worship today. But is there a cut off period when only people who existed after a certain date are deemed worthy of God’s grace? Early man may not have been able to write and record their thoughts, but they did think and what they left behind in their artifacts indicates that they thought a lot about their belief about another life after their existence on earth.
God remains an enigma to all people because it is beyond man’s ability to comprehend the nature of God and what He really is. We believe that God controls our lives but that’s as far as any man can take the statement without faith. God is life’s greatest mystery and it was just as mysterious to ancient man.
It is conjectured here that primitive man worshipped the same God that we do today. God’s presence is available to all men whether at the beginning of time or now and an omnipotent God would be accessible for all people. Every man has the same claim to a life after death no matter when he lived on this earth. God is God whether now, in the future, or in the far distant past. God does not avail himself only to certain people, ignore other people, or change faces to satisfy any particular group. He is what He is and that means He is there for all people whenever and wherever.
