From Cain to Rome: The Line of Rebellion Against God

In turning now to Theophilus of Antioch, we encounter a figure who embodies the steadfast spirit of the Ante-Nicene fathers: a pastor vigilant against error, a convert devoted wholly to Christ, and an apologist who sought to commend the faith to a skeptical world. Though little is known of his life beyond his conversion, episcopate, and writings to Autolycus, Theophilus offers us a valuable glimpse into the intellectual and pastoral strength of the Church in Antioch. His work continues the legacy of those before him, while also marking new ground as one of the earliest Christian historians and interpreters of Scripture.

Theophilus wastes no time with empty ornament. He reminds his reader that smooth words may dazzle the ear, but truth demands substance, not style. And the truth is this: the so-called “gods” of the pagans are nothing more than the lifeless products of human craft; wood cut and shaped, stone chiseled, or metal hammered and poured into form. They neither see nor hear, for they are mute images, carried about by the very men who first fashioned them. To bow before such things, or to parade them in solemn procession, is not only vain but utterly illogical. For if these figures are not worshipped, why adorn them, honor them, or surround them with reverence as though they possessed life? And if they are worshipped, how can what is visibly made by human hands represent the invisible God who made all things?

Theophilus turns the insult of being called a Christian into a badge of glory: Yes, I am a Christian. Unlike idols; mute, powerless, dead; the Christian serves the living God, unseen yet all-seeing, who alone is worthy of adoration. To claim to worship Him “in spirit and in truth” while clinging to material images is self-deception, for the eyes become enslaved to what they behold, mistaking form for essence, matter for spirit. Theophilus’s argument runs deep: what is fashioned cannot be divine, for divinity by its very nature is unmade, eternal, and beyond the grasp of human artistry.

Here is the force of his logic: the invisible God is reduced to stone and wood, stripped of His transcendence and made a prisoner of man’s imagination; For the living God has not been silent. Through His holy prophets He spoke again and again: “You shall not make for yourself an image… You shall not bow down to them nor serve them.” What, then, is idolatry but open rebellion against His voice? To craft an image and claim it represents Him is not humility but arrogance; a human presumption to define and depict the very One who cannot be seen. Pride dares to set aside His commandment in order to exalt man’s authority.

2 Kings 18:4 – “He removed the high places, and broke the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan.”

Theophilus presses his opponent to open not the eyes of the body, but the eyes of the soul. For just as physical eyes can distinguish between light and darkness, or ears between sweet and harsh sounds, so the soul, when cleansed, is able to perceive God. The tragedy, he insists, is not that God cannot be seen, but that man’s spiritual vision is obscured by sin. Just as rust on a mirror prevents a true reflection, so lust, pride, arrogance, and idolatry cloud the soul until it can no longer behold the living God.

This is the heart of the issue: when men bow before images, burning incense and offering reverence to what their hands have made, they reveal not devotion but blindness. Their eyes are deceived by matter; their hearts are captive to pride. For God Himself has declared that He is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth (John 4:24). To turn instead to wood, stone, dolls of marble or even painted and gilded likenesses is to spiritually blind, blindness, because they cannot see the absurdity of mistaking the shadow for the substance; arrogance, because they dare to represent in matter the One who forbade the making of any likeness of Himself, or of anything in heaven above, on the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth

Theophilus calls such men to self-examination: Show me yourself. Are you pure, holy, undefiled? Or do your deeds betray pride, lust, covetousness, and corruption? For as long as the soul remains stained with sin, God cannot be seen. Incense, vestments, processions; these are but pageantry if the heart remains rusted through. The soul must be burnished, cleansed of sin, before it can truly reflect the glory of God. Anything less is nothing but darkness parading as light.

Theophilus continues to “describe God” by insisting that God’s essence is ineffable and beyond human comprehension. He cannot be seen with fleshly eyes, for His glory, greatness, power, wisdom, and goodness are immeasurable. Human words only grasp aspects of His works: to call Him Light, Word, Spirit, Wisdom, or Power is to name what He does, not to define what He is. God is Father as the source of all things, Judge as just and righteous, and Fire in His wrath against wickedness. Yet He is also kind, merciful, and good toward those who love Him. Thus, He is both chastener of the godly and punisher of the impious, revealing Himself through His actions without ever being reducible to human categories.

Theophilus diagnoses the root problem as the blindness of the soul and the hardness of the heart. Yet he offers hope: healing is possible if one entrusts himself to the true Physician—God; who gives life through His Word and wisdom. By that same Word the heavens and earth were created, and by His wisdom and knowledge all things hold together. To perceive God, a man must live chastely, righteously, and in the fear of God, with faith ruling in his heart. But how is it righteous to ignore His command, alter it, and then stand before a congregation burning incense to a doll as though it were God? Obedience is the first proof of righteousness; righteousness severed from obedience is theater. God has spoken plainly: “You shall not make for yourself an image… you shall not bow down to them” (Exod. 20:4–5). By Theophilus’s standard, raising incense before a marble/carved statuette; such as in the image I shared of the “infallible” pope censing a baby doll; exposes a contradiction: whether labeled “veneration” or “worship,” the act still directs reverence toward what human hands have made, training the eyes to trust what is seen rather than to worship God “in spirit and truth” (John 4:24). Changing, trimming, or conveniently omitting the command does not sanctify the practice; it only magnifies human pride; presuming to represent the Invisible and to improve upon His Word. Full vision of God awaits the resurrection, when the mortal puts on immortality and both soul and body are raised incorruptible. Then the faithful shall see the Immortal as He truly is, and the unbelieving will know they spoke unjustly. Until then, the path to sight is not through images and incense, but through repentance, obedience, and a heart cleansed to mirror the living God.

Theophilus’s Logic Applied: Why a Pagan Phallus Cannot Be “Christianized”

Theophilus strips paganism to the studs: the “gods” are dead men and demons, their stories a tangle of lust, violence, and shame; their images are wood, stone, and metal—the works of men’s hands.

For signs carry stubborn meanings. Their weight is not erased by a new label, nor sanctified by decoration. An obelisk, a phallic monument to Osiris and a fixture of solar cults, cannot shed its origin. Place a cross on top, carve an inscription, station eagles and lions around it; its core identity remains.

And the claim of “Christian victory” does not justify the act. If keeping pagan monuments were proof of triumph, then Gideon would have crowned Baal’s altar with Yahweh’s nameplate, and Hezekiah would have placed a golden plaque beside Nehushtan. But victory in Scripture is always proven by destruction. Gideon tore Baal down; Hezekiah smashed the serpent into pieces. God never asked His people to contextualize idols, but to remove them. Triumph is measured by obedience.

Place a pagan obelisk in the center of Christian worship, and the eyes grow accustomed to revering it. Place a monstrance engraved with the faces of the dead (as shown above) into the "infallible" pope's hands, and people learn to bow before it.

Theophilus is clear: idols enslave the senses and blind the soul.

Paul writes that what pagans sacrifice they sacrifice to demons, and he warns: “I do not want you to be participants with demons” (1 Cor. 10:20–21). A phallus once raised to Osiris does not become holy because a cross crowns it; a golden monstrance stamped with the faces of men does not become clean because it is lifted in liturgy. The weak stumble, learning that God’s prohibitions can be sidestepped if you cloak the idol in enough Christian symbols.

No decree, no authority, no claim of “apostolic tradition” can annul God’s word. To change His command, to erase the prohibition against images, and then to bow before stone, brass, or plastic, is the height of arrogance. The prophets thundered against this conceit (Isa. 42:8; Jer. 7). Authority without obedience is nothing but man’s mouthpiece, raised up against God.

If the obelisk, or the monstrance, or the doll were truly “Christianized,” they would not be needed at all. If their only meaning were Christ’s triumph, then the clearer and purer witness would be to remove them entirely and raise up what is wholly Christian in their place. The fact that they are kept proves the opposite; their old power is still desired.

Theophilus is eager to demonstrate; not with polished rhetoric, but with plain truth; the emptiness of pagan worship and the vanity of its labor. He is willing to expose falsehood not only by reason and Scripture, but even from Autolycus’s own histories, which he reads but does not rightly understand.

He doesn’t argue from a position of borrowed authority or ecclesiastical decree; he appeals to what is right before Autolycus’s own eyes. The futility of idolatry, the corruption of the so-called gods, the contradictions of pagan stories; all of these things are written in the very sources his opponent reveres.

Autolycus calls the Christian faith folly, but in reality, it is paganism that is irrational. To labor over lifeless images, to parade them through the streets, to burn incense before them, to place hope in the memory of dead men; this is the true foolishness.

Theophilus presses further. Paganism exposes itself as folly, not only because its idols are lifeless and its "gods" corrupt, because its own poets and philosophers reveal its folly in their contradictions and absurd tales. Their myths may be clothed in eloquence, but eloquence is only honey covering poison. Even when they stumble onto a fragment of truth, it is corrupted by error, like wine mixed with deadly drug.

In contrast, the prophets spoke by the Spirit of God. They were not present at creation, but the divine Wisdom, the eternal Word, was with God from the beginning, and through them He made known His works. As Solomon records: “When He prepared the heavens, I was there… then I was by Him as one brought up with Him” (Prov. 8:27, 30). And Moses, long before Solomon, wrote not out of speculation but as an instrument of the Word: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). He does not introduce God lightly, but first speaks of “beginning” and “creation,” so that no one may trifle with the idea of many gods. The living God is known by His works, and by His Word He brought forth heaven and earth.

Against this revelation, the philosophers prattle. Hesiod speaks of “chaos,” “earth,” and “love” ruling gods and men alike, but Theophilus rightly calls this “idle and frigid,” foreign to truth. Shall God, eternal and pure, be ruled by pleasure, when even men of temperance refuse to be enslaved by lust? The contrast is sharp: their myths enslave reason, but the Word of God liberates.

Even their acknowledgment of the “seventh” day (Saturday) betrays their ignorance. Every nation knows the word “week,” every tongue names the “seventh,” yet most are blind to the truth it declares. For the seventh day is the Sabbath; the day hallowed by the Creator, the memorial of His work, the sign of His covenant. That this word lingers across the languages of men is itself a testimony that the commandment was once universal. Yet in arrogance, men have erased it, set it aside, and exalted the first day in its place; Sunday, the day of the sun; thus bowing once more to creation rather than to the Creator. What is this but presumption against the Lawgiver? God rested on the seventh day, blessed it, and sanctified it (Gen. 2:2–3).

Idolatry is not only bowing to wood and stone, it is abandoning the Word of God for the inventions of men. Heresies, Theophilus says, are like pirates, steering men’s ships onto rocks where they are shattered and plundered. Doctrines of error may look promising, but they destroy all who board them. So too, those who abandon God’s commandments wander from truth, changing their position as ships adrift, no longer anchored in the Word.

But man was created for more. “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). These words, Theophilus insists, were not spoken to angels or lesser powers, but to the divine Logos, and the eternal Divine Wisdom of God. It is through the Logos, and Divine wisdom, that creation was framed and humanity was formed. And it is only when man returns to this Word, and walks once more in obedience, that he is restored to his true condition, no longer bent by sin, but reflecting again the image and likeness of his Maker.

In Genesis, man was placed in Paradise with access to the tree of life, but commanded not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was not because knowledge itself was evil, but because knowledge seized apart from God is not the same as divine wisdom. Wisdom is through God’s own eternal Word, through whom the world was made, and it is received through obedience and humility, not grasped by presumption. Man was created as a middle nature, capable of either mortality or immortality, and Paradise was given as an intermediate place between earth and heaven. His true work was not endless labor but the keeping of God’s command. Had he obeyed, he would have ripened into perfection and immortality, ascending into fellowship with God through divine Wisdom. Instead, by grasping for knowledge on his own terms, he lost both spiritual life and wisdom.

This is why the sorrow in travail spoken to Eve in Genesis is carried forward to the woman in Revelation. The first woman chose knowledge and inherited pain; the last woman labors in pain but brings forth Divine Wisdom through the Word (Logos), the true tree of life. In Genesis, the woman was told her travail would be multiplied, and in Revelation we see a woman in travail, crying out in anguish to deliver. The dragon waits to devour the child, but the child is caught up to God and to His throne. The vision calls this a “male child,” echoing Psalm 2’s promise of the Son who would rule the nations with a rod of iron. But this is not a biological scene, nor is it about Mary giving birth to flesh. It is a spiritual reality: Divine Wisdom bringing forth Christ.

From the beginning, Wisdom was with God, through whom creation came to be. That Wisdom speaks through the prophets, orders creation, and labors in the faithful. As Paul says, “My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you” (Gal. 4:19). The travail of the woman in Revelation is of that same kind; not physical labor, but spiritual travail until Christ rises in her.

This is why the woman cannot be Mary. Mary gave birth to the physical body of Jesus in time, but the Apocalypse is showing something far greater. Theophilus and the prophets before him all testify that Christ is not seen by fleshly eyes, nor birthed by human will, but by the Spirit of God, Divine Wisdom.

So the woman’s anguish is not about a manger in Bethlehem but about the cosmic reality that Wisdom labors, and in her travail Christ is formed and brought forth in her. The dragon opposes it, always seeking to devour, but what Wisdom births cannot be destroyed; it ascends to God and to His throne.

Knowledge apart from God leads to corruption; Wisdom received from God leads to life and immortality.

Restoration, by definition, must proceed by the same Spirit and Word that first made the world and ordered His people: repentance, obedience, and truth. If the end sought is “the restoration of all things” (Acts 3:21), the means cannot contradict the commands by which God sanctifies His people. A house cannot be rebuilt with the very rot that ruined it.

God’s prohibition is explicit and moral, not ceremonial —“you shall not make for yourself an image… you shall not bow down to them.” The biblical remedy for compromised cult-objects is removal. Worship, Christ says, is “in spirit and truth,” not by trusting the work of our hands. Therefore, any program that retains, parades, censes, or commands reverence toward man-made figures is already at odds with the conditions of restoration.

Likewise, a monstrance engraved with the faces of the dead and lifted before a kneeling crowd trains the eyes to reverence the visible and the man-made. Liturgy is pedagogy: what we enthrone catechizes the soul. When incense is offered to a plastic doll, or when people are taught to bow before images of dead men, the senses are habituated to trust sight over spirit. Theophilus’s charge lands here: idols enslave the senses and darken the soul. Such practices do not restore sight; they institutionalize blindness.

When a church merges the second commandment into the first, erases the “not making” clause in practice, and then splits the tenth commandment to preserve the count, it signals that human decree stands over divine speech. That is not guardianship of the law but presumption against the Lawgiver. “We must obey God rather than men” is not an anti-ecclesial slogan; it is the apostolic rule that preserves the church (the called out assembly). If restoration depends on returning to the Word, a system that edits the Word to preserve its monuments and power cannot be its instrument.

Restoration includes the times and rhythms God blessed. Even the nations confess the “seventh” with their tongues, yet the meaning is erased in practice. To shift what God sanctified to what man prefers while claiming to restore all things is self-contradiction.

Restoration cannot be mediated by an authority that normalizes what God forbids, catechizes by the visible what God says must be spiritual, edits commandments to accommodate monuments, and then presents these contradictions as marks of triumph. The Spirit restores by leading into obedience to the Word, purging idols, and purifying worship. Any "authority" that refuses those terms cannot be the instrument of the restoration it claims to seek.

Theophilus explains that man was created free, placed between mortality and immortality, and given power over himself. If he inclined toward immortality by keeping God’s command, he would receive it as a gift, even becoming “god” by participation in God’s own life. But if he inclined toward death through disobedience, he would be the cause of his own ruin. Death, then, was not created by God but introduced by man’s own choice. What Adam lost through carelessness, God in His mercy now offers again as a gift through Christ, but only on the condition of obedience. As man brought death upon himself by disobedience, so by obedience to God he may gain everlasting life, the resurrection, and incorruption.

This is why God gave us the law and holy commandments: they are not arbitrary restrictions, but the very path of life. To ignore them, to edit them, or to place man’s decree above them is to choose death once again. Theophilus roots this back to the deception of Eve, who by listening to the serpent became the doorway through which sin entered. And that same adversary; the wicked demon, Satan; still works in men to this day. He is called “dragon” because he first revolted from God, falling from an angel of light into the author of rebellion. The same deceiver who spoke through the serpent in Eden is the same dragon we meet in Revelation, raging against the woman and her spiritual Christ child.

Man’s freedom remains the battleground. Obedience to God restores life and incorruption; disobedience delivers us back to the one who was a liar from the beginning. The question is unchanged from Eden to the Apocalypse: will we incline toward immortality through obedience, or toward death through rebellion?

Theophilus traces the corruption of man back to Cain. When Satan failed to kill Adam and Eve, he turned Cain against his brother, and the first blood was shed upon the earth. Death entered the world not by God’s design but by man’s rebellion. From Cain’s seed came not righteousness but the beginnings of cities, of polygamy, of music distorted, of industry bent to pride, of apotheosis (cheers George Washington et al) until his line faded into oblivion under the mark of fratricide.

In contrast, God raised up Seth in the place of Abel, so that the true line of promise might continue. From Seth came Noah, and after the flood the same cycle repeated: men multiplied, built cities, raised kings, and turned again to rebellion. Nimrod founded Babel and Nineveh, and in Shinar men sought to build a tower that reached the heavens, not to honor God but to make a name for themselves.

Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, and all the nations exalted kings, carved idols, and deified men long dead, parading their images as gods. Even their poets and sages bear witness that their so-called deities were nothing but mortals adorned with myth. Thus the earth filled with cities and empires, but also with false gods, fornication, violence, and deceit; exactly what the prophets warned against.

Rome, inheriting the spirit of Babylon, is only the culmination of this long rebellion. The empire exalted itself above God, claimed divine honors for its rulers, and littered the world with idols, temples, and blood. And that same spirit carries forward into the Roman Catholic Church. For though it names Christ with its lips, it breaks His perpetual covenant in practice: changing the seventh-day Sabbath, the sign of creation and covenant, into the day of the sun; merging and rearranging the commandments to conceal the prohibition against images; parading idols through the streets as though they were holy; burning incense to plastic dolls; lifting monstrances engraved with the faces of the dead; and demanding that believers bow before them. All this it cloaks under the claim of “infallibility”; as though prideful finite men could override the Word of the infinite God.

From Cain’s fratricide and the building of cities in defiance of God, through Babel’s tower, Babylon’s idols, and Rome’s empire of blood, the same serpent has possessed men to exalt themselves above their Maker those men who rewrite God’s command, and enthrones idols in His place. But Theophilus reminds us: it is not the earth, nor God, that is the cause of death; it is man who brings death upon himself by transgression. Restoration cannot come from those who perpetuate the rebellion of Cain, it comes only through returning to the Creator, keeping His commandments, and worshiping Him in spirit and truth. Anything else; whether empire or church; is simply the old serpent’s work dressed in new garments.

Revelation 12:17 –

“And the dragon was enraged with the woman, and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring, who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.”