Emmanuel Moses Lijadu’s Ifá (1897) was the first treatise published on the famous Ifá deity of West Africa. Lijadu was a second-generation Anglican evangelist from Abẹokuta, the first Yorùbá polity whose rulers invited Christian missionaries (1842). The Church Missionary Society hailed Abẹokuta as the “Sunrise within the Tropics,” the seat from which West Africa was to be Christianized. In 1854, the new Christian élite transformed this warrior chieftaincy into a monarchy, in order make Abẹokuta a “City of God,” an Anglican theocracy with a state church. The discursive negotiation of divination became a fundamental dimension of this Christianization process. Ifá divination was the cosmology of the Yorùbá clans; its intricate mythology of ancestor deities propagated an ideal of divine kingship. This paper provides an overview of Book 1 of Ifá which, in twenty-six dialogical verses, covers Lijadu’s exegesis on the Yorùbá account of the Creation. It is based on an original translation of the manuscript and archival research in Nigeria. As a critique of government by divination, Lijadu utilizes the doctrine of divine truth to argue that divination’s three epistemic problems posed a hindrance to chiefly government: a contradictory divine economy in the Yorùbá theogony, a problem in the relationship of body and soul, and the divine prerogative charter of the Yorùbá dynasty. Lijadu utilizes Christian apologetic rhetoric, drawn from the Ante-Nicene Church Fathers like Eusebius & Justin the Martyr, in the construction of his arguments against divination. Lijadu ridicules the amorality of the state deities (oriṣa), argues for an anthropocentric conception of the state deities, and frames divination’s Creation account as an impediment to divine sovereignty. He adopts the Genesis Creation narrative, in order to reify the concept of human dominion as central to the stabilization of legitimate social order. Lijadu’s difficult treatise, published ahead of his 1899 proclamation of the Evangelists’ Mission Band, posited the theoretical framework for the suppression of divination, and the establishment of the Anglican Church as the Yorùbá state religion.