Humanity has encountered angels since the beginning of time. Taken from the Greek, angelos, meaning messenger, the Bible records over three hundred angelic references. They are spiritual beings of heavenly residence, employed by God as the ministers of His will.

Originally, the Old Testament, which included the five books of Moses (in Greek, Pentateuch-five scrolls), the Prophets, and Apocrypha, were Divine revelations, both written and oral, given by God through Moses, some of them at Mount Sinai and others at the Tabernacle. All of the teachings were written down by Moses, or his scribe Joshua, and passed down orally in an unbroken chain from generation to generation, until its contents were committed to papyrus around 700BC (Archeological evidence discovered in 2004, suggests before the Babylonian captivity).

Painstaking care was taken in making written copies of the Old Testament, which is reflected in a statement in Psalm 18:30, “The word of the Lord is tried” pointing to the extreme caution taken with every word, letter, and mark of the Holy Texts preserved during the copying process (counting words and letters to insure accuracy).

The Hebrew priests memorized the Torah word for word. When the Old Testament was eventually written, the text appeared as one continuous set of consonants known as the “Word of God” with no breaks or vowels to separate words, and thus could only be read by priests who had memorized every word. To the uneducated, the unbroken document was incomprehensible.

For roughly the last 150 years the Western world, and increasingly the Eastern world, has come under the sway of a set of ideas and principles brought together formally, since 1970 in The Humanist Manifesto, under the rubric—Secular Humanism.

Though presented as something new, Secular Humanism had its precursors in the Skeptics, Cynics and Stoics of ancient Greece and Rome. Essentially what it proposed then and what it proposes now—stripped of its deceptive academic dress is: “What you see, hear, smell, taste and feel is all there is, Buddy. Deal with it.” While there is no formal Secular Humanist Non-Bible written for the unenlightened, if there were, its chapters might be headed:

The universe is an accident.
Matter precedes Mind.
Consciousness is a fortuitous spin-off of Matter.
Human life, indeed, all life, serves no higher purpose.
There is no consciousness higher than our own.
“Progress” ascends in a straight line from primitive hominids to ourselves.
Reliigion is delusion.
“Spiritual” and “sacred” are polite words for superstition.
Only modern science and the scientific method can reveal the objective Truth.
Contemporary man represents the most highly evolved level humanity has ever reached.

(John Anthony West)