Biblical Framework
Charles Clough
Lesson 3
I
want to take you to the last paragraph
of page 4 on the notes because, while this may seem abstract now, much of what
this introductory chapter is doing is setting something up so when we finally
get into the text of Genesis 1 you’ll begin to see how this comes
together. My desire in this class is to
show the coherence of Scripture, that God speaks coherently in the Scripture. He speaks comprehensively; He speaks to
every area of life. We don’t mean to, but as Christians we often relegate the
Scriptures to sort of a religious compartment of our lives and we fail to see
that Scripture has implications in every area.
Because we do that it perpetuates what I call religious “ghetto-ism”
where we Christians are characterized as people off in the corner someplace,
and we don’t have any forthright challenge to the non-Christian. Can you imagine in Paul’s day, being around
the Apostle Paul? It must have been
quite an experience. I couldn’t imagine
people feeling that he was just sort of a religious person off in the right
somewhere; they would have to recognize that his very presence was challenging
to them, that if Paul, this strange man running around the Mediterranean was
really right, then we’re seriously wrong.
It’d be that kind of tension.
This
is why these first few pages may seem a little abstract, but I’m trying to show
you something that we’ll illustrate again and again. I’ll read through that paragraph word by word because I want you
to see what we’re saying. “I conclude
the matter by enlarging the previous statement. You can’t say anything about
anything without saying (by implication) something about everything.” By this I
mean that if you listen to, say a non-Christian in your family, just as a
simple exercise, try this: don’t get impatient about confronting them with the
gospel or sharing the gospel with them, just back off, relax, and draw them
out. If they say something say, why do
you believe it that way, tell me about it.
First, you’re showing respect for them and how they think but more
importantly, you’re learning something.
And what you want to do is listen for things.
What
you want to listen for are statements that imply universal pronouncements. For example, “well, I think this ought to
happen.” Now we’ve got an ethical
judgment that implies an ethical standard.
Listen for their “oughts,” that’s one of the key words in good
conversational listening. Every time
somebody uses “ought” or “should” they are referencing some standard. What we need to do before we put our feet in
our mouth is just listen for a few minutes and find out where people are. This is one way of doing it, finding out
where their “oughts” and “shoulds” come from; where their standards of right
and wrong are coming from. What are
these standards? It tells you a lot
about how they think. Listen for the
word “all” in a statement, “all people know that,” or, “all the time.” Listen
for adverbs, “all the time something is true…” Listen for “all” words, or “whole” as in “the whole world
believes that,” or words that denote time, “it always happens all the
time.” When we get mad at somebody,
kind of in a humorous way we’ll say “you always do that;” we don’t mean they
“always” do it but we’re so mad that we pronounce a universal judgment on
them. That’s the way we’re built, and
those universal judgments slip out.
That’s
what I mean on page 4 that inevitably conversation will be rooted on a world
view that’s lurking beneath the surface and we have to find out what that world
view is. You don’t have to have every
piece of it in place but for effective communication you should understand what
that world view is, because if you don’t, you haven’t lined up the gun on the
target. If you go to shoot you’re just
shooting fruit off the top of the tree, you’re not at the root it. That’s why often our conversations get so
slippery and greasy and we feel like after we spend 15-20 minutes thinking this
thing through and sharing it we haven’t got anywhere.
Another
thing to remember about what we’re saying, we can’t get proud about this
because when we talk paganism, and we’ll see what paganism is all about just
looking at the text, but when we use the word paganism what we’re really
talking about is the carnal mind, the mind of the flesh. Apart from the regenerating work of the Holy
Spirit, apart from the Lord Jesus Christ’s absolute righteousness and the Holy
Spirit working on that basis, we are pagans, so it’s not like we’re sitting
here self-righteously throwing rocks at people. All we’re trying to do is identify where the problem is. We’re not blaming someone because they have
cancer, but we want to find out where the cancer is -- that’s the issue
here. So when I talk about paganism
versus the Scripture don’t think of this as a rock throwing contest. That’s not what it’s all about. It’s simply to identify problems and find
out where the Scripture collides with this.
Summarizing
the issue on page 4, what we’re saying is that any statement, any thought,
always comes out in language, and that language that it comes out in always
shows at least two things. It shows a
belief in absolute structures and categories; every time somebody uses a noun
they are believing, they are building on the idea that there are
classifications out there that we can talk about, we can talk about light and
darkness, red and green, we can talk objects, boys, girls, we can talk about
these things that are stable. In order
to use language, language is always referred in context to something; you learn
something in context with something else.
We
want to conclude that early section by distinguishing between two words,
neutrality and tolerance. Tolerance is
Scriptural. Because this is a day of
the age of grace we are tolerant, God is tolerant. Hasn’t God withheld judgment in order that men may come to
repentance in Jesus Christ? Does that
mean God condones sin? No! Does it mean He’s tolerant for now? Yes,
tolerance is an axiom of grace.
Tolerance is grace in action. So
we can be tolerant. But where it gets
slippery is when the idea of tolerance is subtly converted in our minds to
neutrality. We’re saying here that if you believe what we’ve said so far, all
language is non-neutral, it wells up into a world view. All language is rooted in basic beliefs, and
those basic beliefs cannot be neutral in the light of Scripture, because the
carnal mind is enmity with God, is not subject to God, and won’t be. So what we’re
saying is there is no neutrality in the area of language. Does that mean we have to look down our
nose? No, all it’s saying is that we
live in an environment that while we tolerate it, it doesn’t mean we back off,
get passive and somehow accept religion A and religion B.
We
lead everyone to believe that we Christians are setting aside our beliefs in
order to be objective. I don’t set
aside my beliefs in order to be objective, because if I set aside my beliefs I
couldn’t be objective. Apart from the Christian faith there is no such thing as
objectivity. In fact there’s no such
thing as knowledge or truth in the true sense of the word. One time I was selected for jury and this
lawyer asked, could you set aside your religious convictions for blah blah blah
blah, and the judge stopped him and said you have no right to ask any person in
this courtroom to set aside their religious beliefs. He chopped that lawyer off real fast. We will tolerate, but we are not neutral. Beware of that, it’s a little game of words.
Tonight
we want to spend our time on the notes. In the middle of page 6 I quote Dr.
Alexander Heidel, who for many years taught at the University of Chicago, his
first statement is: Enuma Elish,”
that’s the pagan text we’re going to compare with Gen. 1, “Enuma Elish is the principle source of our knowledge of
Mesopotamian cosmology.” Cosmology is
the belief system, the world view of the ancients, or the world view today of
what the universe is all about. “Enuma Elish is the principle source of
our knowledge of Mesopotamian,” i.e. the people that lived back in Bible times
that occupied the Mesopotamian valley.
Notice what he said, “Yet Enuma
Elish is not primarily a creation story at all.” Some of you get into this in high school, at least in college,
you’ll be assigned to read sections of The
Epic of Gilgamesh and you’ll learn about some other parts of Mesopotamian
cosmology. But the interesting thing
is, neither Enuma Elish nor The Epic of Gilgamesh is fundamentally
creation stories. That’s an interesting
observation. Why don’t we read a creation story? The answer is because the ancient man, like the modern man,
whenever he deals with a profound topic, in Enuma
Elish you see the topic is a justification for the domination of the city
of Babylon in history, or The Epic of
Gilgamesh is an adventure story. Whenever men deal with epical topics and
themes they always bring up origins because they unconsciously are admitting
that it’s the origins that give the framework for the epic.
One
of the greatest epic movies in the past decade, it had several sequels, was a
tremendous money maker, people loved it, was Star Wars. Star Wars and all the things that went
into that were basically what we would classify as epic, epic in the sense that
it was cosmic, it describes civilization by using the tool of science fiction;
writers can get outside civilization and look at it, etc. In the movie Star Wars, what was the God substitute? “The force,” that came up
in that film again and again and again.
Isn’t that interesting, not the person, but “the force.” What Spielberg did was what every pagan
writer or author does, i.e. he converted the personal sovereign God into an
impersonal force. Paganism always does
that. When they spoke of the force,
what did they talk about as far as light and darkness? They said the [not sure of word, sounds like
onk] side of the force, the dark side of the force. There was a good side to the force and a dark side to the
force. In other words, the force is not
only impersonal but it’s also good and evil.
And that’s what paganism always does to the gods and goddesses, ALWAYS does, every century, every continent, every race and every people,
always show that same structure. It’s
universal.
I
want to point out a second thing before we get into the comparisons. The bottom
of page 6, the paragraph that begins “Before hastily reading this text,” watch
that carefully because I want you to develop a habit as a Christian of using
the Scripture in every subject you study.
Don’t ever leave the Bible on a shelf, divorced from whatever subject
you study. I am reading a paper right
now in theoretical mathematics about set theory, and the Christian PhD who was
writing that paper on set theory is a very godly man, he is concerned about the
system of logic being used in set theory, as a Christian, and he wants to
distinguish what he calls the Aristotelian logical system that’s being used in
set theory from a Biblical system of logic.
You can’t get much more abstruse than that. But you know what? The guy’s
a godly man; he shows that he believes in the Lordship of Jesus Christ
seriously enough to follow it in his professional area of study.
Now
the paragraph on page 6: “Before hastily reading the text, however, you should
start with a Biblical framework, as we learned in Part I. What do you know already about such a text
from the Biblical perspective?” Follow
what I am doing, watch my method. I am
going to read a pagan text; I’ve got this new piece of material, I am a Christian, so before I even come to
the pagan literature I’m going to prepare myself as a Christian. I am going to ask myself, what help can I
get from God’s Word, ahead of even dealing with the details. Does the Word of God set up the problem for
me so I can save some time and not get sidetracked? You should remember that the inhabitants of Babylon had to have
come from Noah’s sons. From this fact
you can expect that Enuma Elish
writers may have had access to the creation traditions directly from Noah. They didn’t have to get it handed down from
Moses. If the Babylonians are
post-flood people, and all the people on this side of the flood came from one
family on the boat, then doesn’t it follow that in every tribe, in every culture
on the face of the planet that we could have surviving memories of what Noah
and his sons taught their sons? We’re
not saying this in every case, but theoretically we have the option if we
believe in Scripture. Hold the place in
the notes in page 6 and turn over to the bottom of page 8, watch the
opposite. This is the slick trick that
we get sucked into in classrooms and I want to help you to prevent yourself
from getting this slippery slope problem.
It says “Similarities Between” etc.; it begins “When modern scholars
first began to analyze ancient pagan texts, like Enuma Elish, many of them” watch this sentence, “interpreted them
from an evolutionary perspective.”
Are
they being neutral? Where’s the
neutrality? They’re not being neutral;
they’re bringing gobs of baggage from the world view of evolution into the
discussion of this piece of religious literature. Nobody is being neutral, there’s no objectivity of analysis here;
they are approaching the text with the idea that it’s bracketed by the history
they see in evolution. “Because of the
similarities they saw they thought they could see a gradual evolution from
these earlier, more speculative, polytheistic stories to the later, loftier,
monotheistic Genesis.” In other words,
they made Genesis later, they put these stories earlier, and the stories from
that seem polytheistic and Genesis was clean and monotheistic, so they said,
aha, aha, see, there’s evolution at work again, out from chaos we get a higher
and higher level of religion. And for a
hundred years this has been taught in universities, on every continent, that
pagan literature gradually evolved into the Bible. And then I point out the reasons why we no longer believe that.
Now
go to the pagan literature. You should
have done the exercise for tonight, just to get some ideas and
observations. What we want to do is to
train ourselves to observe the text of Scripture. We want to ask two questions. The first question is what do you
observe as you read through this text and compare it side by side with the
Bible? You’ve got Genesis 1 in one
hand, the pagan text in the other hand.
Just watch because you hear this flippant remark, the Bible is full of
paganism. When we get through this
exercise you’ll be prepared next time your neighbor tells you that one. What do you notice about the similarities
between Genesis 1 and this Enuma Elish
text? I haven’t given you the whole
text, the whole text goes on for pages and pages, and everywhere you see the
dash I cut a section out, lots of things out, and instead of going through
400-500 lines of material, I pulled out the special lines. Enuma
Elish is what the language sounds like, “when above.” Ancient documents were named for the first
two or three words, they didn’t have titles.
Genesis in Hebrew isn’t called Genesis; it’s called “Bereshith,” because
Berith is the first word, “In the beginning.”
That’s the way all the Bible was originally labeled on the basis of the
first word or so of the text. So this
was common. Enuma Elish just means “when above” the heaven is not the name,
etc. Look at those 8 or 9 lines; are there any resemblances to what you’re
reading in Gen. 1? Notice the words in
the first two clauses, “heaven” and “earth.”
“When
above [Enuma Elish] the heaven had
not (yet) been named,
(And)
below the earth had not (yet) been called by a name,
(When)
Apsu primeval, their begetter,
Mummu,
(and) Tiamat, she who gave birth to them all,
(Still)
mingled their waters together,
And
no pasture land had been formed (and) not (even) a reed marsh was to be seen;
When
none of the (other) gods had been brought into being,
(When)
they had not (yet) been called by (their) name(s) and their destinies had not
yet been fixed,
(At
that time) were the gods created within them. . . .
--------------------
They
lived many days, adding years (to days). . . .
-------------------
The
divine brothers gathered together.
They
disturbed Tiamat and assaulted(?) their keeper,
Yea,
they disturbed the inner parts of Tiamat,
Moving
(and) running about in the divine abode(?). . . .
--------------------
[Marduk]
took from [Kingu] the tablet of destinies, which was not his rightful
possession. .
--------------------
After
he had vanquished (and) subdued his enemies. . . .
--------------------
Strengthened
his hold upon the captive gods;
And
then he returned to Tiamat, whom he had subdued.
The
lord trod upon the hinder part of Tiamat,
And
with his unsparing club he split her skull.
He
cut the arteries of her blood,
And
caused the north wind to carry (it) to out-of-the-way places.
--------------------
[Marduk]
split [Tiamat] open like a muscle into two (parts);
Half
of her he set in place and formed the sky (therewith) as a roof.
He
fixed the crossbar (and) posted guards,
He
commanded them not to let her waters escape.
--------------------
And
a great structure, its counterpart, he established, (namely) Esharra [earth], .
. .
--------------------
He
created stations for the great gods;
The
stars their likeness(es), the signs of the zodiac, he set up.
He
determined the year, defined the divisions. . . .
--------------------
Punishment
they inflicted upon [Kingu] by cutting (the arteries of) his blood.
With
his blood they created mankind;
[Ea]
imposed the services of the gods (upon them) and set the gods free.[i]
What
do you notice in the first clause of Genesis?
“Heavens and the earth.” So
you’ve got the same theme, the same content.
Notice the condition, about the 5th line down, “still mingled
their waters together,” and what do you read in Gen. 1:2? Waters, water, a chaos of water. Now drop all the way down to “Strengthen his hold upon the captive gods;
And then he returned to Tiamat,” etc.
“He cut the arteries of her blood, And caused the north wind to carry (it) to
out-of-the-way places.” “[Marduk] split
[Tiamut] open like a muscle into two (parts); Half of her he set in place and
formed the sky, (therewith) as a roof.
He fixed the crossbar (and) posted guards.” “And a great structure, its
counterpart, he established, (namely Esharra [earth]…”
Do
you notice something about the sequence of actions here? Are they the same as Gen. 1? The heavens and the earth are a watery mass;
in the Genesis text the heavens and the earth have a watery mass. The sky is formed, and the sky is formed in
the Bible. And then you have the
earth. Continuing with Enuma Elish, the stars are set up,
notice the stars are not set up either at the beginning, the stars are set up
half way through the narrative, that’s exactly like the Bible. And they “determined the year, defined the
divisions” of the year; look at the 4th day of Gen. 1 and what are
the stars’ function? The stars set the
days apart and make a calendar. What’s
the last act in Enuma Elish? To make man. What’s the last act in Genesis 1? To make man.
If
it’s true that these guys in the ancient world just made this up, isn’t it
striking that we have different civilizations remembering the same order of
events? I wonder why that happens. That’s why I say when you come to literature
like this as a Christian, don’t just walk into it cold, say wait a minute, what
does the Word of God say about this subject material. Get your mind clicking, subordinate, and humble before the Lord
before you start your intellectual exercises. Spiritual preparation before
intellectual thought.
We
want to emphasize the differences. Look
at this text carefully. You have three
gods, Apsu, Mummu and Tiamat. Based on
this author’s words, how would you sketch the appearance of these gods? They are “morphosing.” Notice they “(Still) mingle their waters
together” Notice the pronoun, “their waters.”
Notice also these gods and goddesses are material, there’s not any
distinguishing between god and matter, or god and anything else, they’re water
deities. They’re gods of chaos, but
they have a material nature. We see
more evidence of that later on. Notice,
“they disturbed the inner parts of Tiamut,” in other words after the gods were
created they were running around, the divine brothers gathered together,” They
disturbed Tiamut and assaulted their keeper, Yea, they disturbed the inner
parts of Tiamut, Moving and running about in the divine abode?” There’s a question mark there because it’s
hard to translate some of these words, nobody left a dictionary so scholars
have to kind of guess at what some of these words mean. When you read that, what does it tell you
about how they were conceiving to get Tiamut, as some sort of a volume and
inside this space or inside this volume these other gods were running around
inside her, so she must be space, she must have volume; she’s not only a water
deity but she appears to have volume in which the other gods are running around
making a big noise.
Look
further to see if this bears out. As
you go down through the text, look at this one: “The lord trod upon the hinder
part of Tiamut,” this is Marduk coming along because this text is really to
justify the role of Babylon in history and who was the god of Babylon but
Marduk, so this is the “proof” of why Babylon was superior at that point in
history. Marduk comes along and he
beats up on her. “With his unsparing
club he split her skull, He cut the arteries of her blood,” which shows how the
Ninevites killed people in those days, “and caused the north wind to carry (it)
to out-of-the-way places. Marduk split
Tiamut like a muscle into two (parts); half of her he set in place and formed
the sky (therewith) as a roof. He fixed
a crossbar (and) posted guards, He commanded them not to let her waters
escape.” Look at the Genesis text; do
you notice any parallel in verse 9. What is God doing there? “Let the waters below the heavens be
gathered together, and let the dry land appear,” and we have amplifications of
that passage of how God put boundaries on it.
Then the earth is established, so on and so forth.
One
of the key differences that we want to understand is this: in all of paganism,
not just this text, ALL of paganism, from Enuma
Elish to Star Wars, it’s the same
idea. Gods are part and parcel of the
cosmos; the cosmos itself is divine.
There is no clear-cut distinction in paganism between God and what He
creates. In the Bible how many Gods are
there in Gen. 1? One God, there’s a
plurality of sorts because He spoke in plural, but the point is, there is One
God and He is distinct from all else.
Re-read Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth.” Do you read any analogous
statement in any of the first four or five verses of Enuma Elish that corresponds to Gen. 1:1? There’s a vast difference between those two texts. The difference is this, and get this idea
because we’ll come back to it again and again.
The thing that makes the Bible anti-pagan is the Creator/creature
distinction. That is the most
fundamental thing that we can learn from the entire Bible. God is not ever to be identified with water,
trees, sky, and stars. God makes those, but those are not God; to fail to make
that distinction is to become at heart an idolater. That is idolatry, and it’s rebellion spiritually.
So
at the beginning we see a clear cut distinction. Is the Bible an ancient book?
Yes. Is Enuma Elish an ancient text?
Of course. Does the Bible have paganism in it? No, the Bible is anti-pagan.
This literature is both ancient and pagan; the Bible is ancient and
anti-pagan. Don’t confuse ancient with
paganism, slurp it together and come out with the idea that the Bible has
mythology and paganism in it. No! You just saw a very clear distinction about
the way the gods are treated here and the way the God of Scripture appears in
the Bible. Did you notice anything else
different as you observe these texts and work through the exercises? [can’t
hear what’s said] The question is, you
notice the gods get chaotic and the struggles among them, and quite obviously
this is a faint memory and a screwed up version of the rebellion of Satan
against God. But what is different is
that in this case the rebels win; the young god Marduk rises up and crushes
Tiamat, the creator, he rises up in his pride and his power, and he becomes as
god, and he triumphs over all.
So
you have an opposite theme going on in pagan literature, which leads to the
second profound difference between pagan literature and the Bible.
Not
only is the Creator/creature distinction missing, but we also have the problem of
personal sovereignty vs. chance, page 11 in the notes. The second great
difference is who is ultimately in charge in Genesis 1, who has unchallenged
control over everything? God speaks
and it is done. What is going on in the
pagan literature? You have a knock down
drag out to find out who’s going to win.
So ultimately here’s the question that paganism can never answer, it’s a
very strong question, and if you understand this question, mentioned on page
11, the paragraph that begins “Observe carefully what is going on here. If
today Marduk beats up all the other gods, what about tomorrow? Will another god, younger and stronger than
Marduk, rise up and triumph over him?
On the polytheistic basis of Enuma
Elish, what assurance would a Babylonian have about the future? Who is in charge in the final
analysis?” If you lived in Babylon and
your welfare politically and economically depended literally upon a god like
Marduk, could Marduk predict what’s going to happen 2,000 years ahead if Marduk
is insecure? The problem in polytheism
is that there’s no god who is ever secure.
No god can ever be sure that out of this universe there won’t arise a
god that will in turn defeat him. So
the pagan mind, when faced with this dilemma, usually tries to appeal to something
behind the gods, because a person may be a pagan but still they want order in
their life. How do I get order in my
life when this headless horseman that I’ve got is running the universe? The order comes in, in a sneaky way. Note in Enuma
Elish the line that reads: “[Marduk] took from [Kingu] the tablet of
destinies.” Whoever holds the tablet of
destinies seems to be able to reign.
The Greeks and the Romans later took that tablet of destinies idea and
brought up the Latin word that we still use:
Fate. Those of you who read
ancient Greek drama know that there was “the Fate,” “the Fate” seems to
determine. So you have the gods running
around but in the background you have this quiet mysterious Fate.
The
first science fiction film that was done in epic proportion, that became the
grandfather film of Fate and everything else that followed, the theme at the
beginning of this film, “thus spoke Zoroaster,” (or was it Nostradamus?) it was used in commercials, in 2001: A Space
Odyssey. It was very well done. Arthur
C. Clark who wrote the script that was used by Cooper to make that film was
considered the father of science fiction.
Star Wars and other things just grew out of Arthur C. Clark and his
work. In the beginning of the film
there’s this ape, they zero in on it with this great crescendo of music, and
the ape throws a stick up in the air.
What Clark is saying is there’s the evolution of man, it’s beginning
now, the ape just got his brand new tool, and the rest of the story gets into
the fact that the tool becomes a computer; the computer begins to take things
over, etc. To get symmetry at the
beginning and end of the film, he had this spinning tablet, cut out so it
looked like the tablets Moses took down from Mt. Sinai; this tablet just sort of
appears at the beginning of the film and then at the end of the film it shows
up again. What do you suppose that is?
It’s the same pagan theme, Fate.
Somehow the computers, somehow the space station, the ape, the stick are
all controlled by that tablet that just appears and then disappears, appears
and then disappears, appears and then disappears, at critical junctures of
human history the tablet is there. Why does the pagan mind revert to this? Because it’s got to find order
somewhere.
I
want to summarize what this is. I have
an overhead transparency; I want to contrast these ideas. Here’s the difference in a nutshell. On the left side the view is: yes, there is
an ex nihilo Creator. Why do we say ex nihilo? It’s a Latin
phrase used as a technical term to define the Christian faith over against
paganism. Why must we have ex nihilo and not just creator? Ex
nihilo means out from nothing. It
means that God created without help from something else. It wasn’t God and the universe, it is God
and God alone. That’s why salvation…
this is how this reverberates down through history to our own personal
spiritual life, this is not abstract philosophy I’m teaching, this is why the
heart of the spiritual life is to come into fellowship with God and God alone,
not God and something, God and this, God and that, it’s God and God alone. Why?
Because He and He alone is the Creator of the universe. Nothing created can satisfy the human heart,
NOTHING! God and God alone, it falls naturally out of this premise of the ex nihilo Creator.
Notice
down at the bottom I’ve put two hyphenated words, very important terms because
they summarize something about God. God
is infinite person. You can call it
other names. The reason I’m putting
those two adjectives together is because God is infinite, that’s His
Creator/creature distinction, but He’s also a person, He’s not an it, He’s not
a force, He’s not a tablet of destinies, He’s not blind faith. He is a person, and that has tremendous and
powerful repercussions as we only begin to see. As we study the text of Genesis
and really think through what we’re reading, this is a powerful challenge to
everything in the modern world. It is a
cosmic statement, that ultimately in back of everything there is no such thing
as fate; there are the personal decrees of a personal God, that’s back behind
everything. It’s a Person that drives
the universe, not an “it.”
On
the other side we have no ex nihilo
Creator, therefore this other doctrine, opposite to the Creator/creature distinction. There’s no neutrality, a person is going to
believe one or the other, there’s no other option. Continuity of Being means that the universe is basically all one,
matter, immaterial, dogs, cats, trees, rocks, etc. That is the doctrine of the Continuity of Being. It’s sometimes known as the Chain of
Being. Turn to page 10 in the notes,
the paragraph that begins: “Over against the Bible’s Creator/creature
distinction, paganism insists upon the unity of creator(s) and creations. Gods, men, animals and rocks are all part of
the same existence or being. This is
the doctrine of the Chain of Being, a doctrine you will find lurking in all
forms of paganism from ancient times through New Testament times.” By the way, one entire book in the New Testament
is written against this idea—Colossians.
Colossians was directed against this because the heresy Paul had to deal
with was Gnosticism, and Gnosticism believed that you had God and the nations
from God, man, etc. etc. etc. It was
all a gradation, sort of like a spectrum of light, no separation.
The
next paragraph, watch this one because here’s a sneaky little corollary that’s
the twin brother of the Continuity of Being idea. “Implied by the Continuity of Being idea and overtly present in
some pagan origin-myths, is the concept of spontaneous generation. Since the universe basically is of one kind,
everything within it differs only in degree.
Thus the universe has the power to bring forth life from non-life all by
itself. Man is just part of nature.”
Contrast this situation with the Bible’s teaching about
non-transgressable boundaries between man, each kind of animal, and each kind
of plant.” [blank spot] All this happens in every century, every pagan idea, every
continent, every language and every race, it doesn’t make any difference, we’ll
always follow that agenda, and we’ll give you references, gobs of references,
that I stuck in the notes to substantiate that.
In
the exercise I asked you to look at, 1 Kings 22:19, a passage I happened to
come across when I was doing some Hebrew work and it blew me away; what really
blew me away is when you read what some commentators say about it. Keep in mind Enuma Elish, all the running around that’s going on, fighting among
the gods, look at what happens here, isn’t this odd. Verse 19, “And Micaiah
said, Therefore, hear the word of the LORD. I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and
all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left. [20] And
the LORD said, Who will entice Ahab
to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?”
This is an evil act. “And one said this while another said that.” In
other words, there was a discussion in this counsel. [21] “Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD and said, I will entice
him. [22] And the LORD said to him, How? And he said, I will go out and be a
deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” Notice the ability of that spirit to fracture himself and appear
in many different people at the same time and it’s all the same spirit. “I will go out and be a,” single “deceiving
spirit in the mouth of,” plural, “all his prophets. Then he said, You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do
so.”
What
do you see about the conduct of that meeting that is missing in this mess? God is sovereign. The spirits go where they are told to go by God, and God alone.
Do you see the greatness of God appearing here? Sometimes it takes a step outside of the Scripture to bounce off
and come back into the Scripture to appreciate Scripture. What I’m trying to do tonight is take you
into the theological and spiritual milieu of paganism, so that you will then
come back to the Scripture and say whew, WOW!
The God of Scripture is always in control. We may not like that, we may
argue with that, but you cannot deny that the God of Scripture is always in
control. That’s the fierceness of the
God of the Scripture. This is what is
deeply offensive to the pagan mind.
Isaiah
46:10 is a passage that’s ringing opposite to all of paganism. In Isaiah 40-49 Isaiah was teaching his
generation how to survive. He knew the
nation was going down, he knew that he was called by God to prepare for
judgment. The way people prepared for judgment was to prepare their hearts with
a deeper personal relationship so when that crashing wave of judgment came they
could stand against it. What Isaiah
ministered to in his generation were people that were going around Robin
Hood’s barn, worrying about this, doing this, upset about that, and he said
folks, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, what you have to do is
get straightened out in your theology of who and what God is. The Isaiah 40’s are filled with these
things.
Isaiah
46:10, think about what you read about Marduk, Tiamat, Apsu and Mummu; contrast
those deities with what you see in verse 10.
The God, our God, “Declaring the end from the beginning, and from
ancient times things which have not been done, Saying, My purpose will be
established, And I will accomplish all My good pleasure.” You say how egotistical. Not for God. Egotism for us is bad because we’re creatures, but it’s okay for
God to do because He’s God. When we do
that we’re acting like we’re God; that’s what makes it egotism. We can’t do
that, but God can. Had I given you all
of Enuma Elish you would never find
any of the gods, Tiamat included, able to declare the end from the
beginning. Nor would you ever read any
of them daring to say those last two clauses in verse 10, “My purpose will be
accomplished,” you never read Marduk saying that, you never read Tiamat saying
I will accomplish all my good pleasure, all the way down the corridors of
time. It’s missing, because the pagan
gods aren’t big enough to make those kinds of statements.
I
want to summarize what we’re saying by setting paganism off from Biblical
faith. We’ve talked about paganism,
we’ve said there’s no neutrality, that all men have this need to know. We’ve
said that the heart is not neutral, that words have to be known in context, but
ultimately the bottom line is there are only two contexts. One is the Creator/creature context; the
other is the Continuity of Being context.
Every man is in one or the other; every man understands the world in
terms of one or the other views. There
may be different names to it. There may
be different ways, you may talk about this in equations and scientific language
but after all is said and done, you still wind up in one of these two camps,
always! These are fundamental
distinctions. We, as Christians, must learn in our day, and this is what makes
it so hard as Oriental religions, particularly, are invading us, the New Age,
what makes it so hard to deal with is making this distinction. All the New Age,
all the Oriental religions believe in the Continuity of Being. I’ve got quotes in the notes, they all
believe in the Continuity of Being, they all believe it’s just a relative
difference between God and man, if there is a God. God is a super man who is more quantatively, He’s stronger than
we are, maybe infinitely stronger than we are, infinitely more wise than we
are, but there are gray areas and shades of difference between Him and us. In the Scripture He is totally other, He is
totally by Himself, He is not in any way dependent upon the creature.
Here’s
the way we summarize the point. How do
we as Christians describe our God? It
doesn’t mean you have to describe it this way to every person; this is for our
own notes, to think through, to meditate on.
We believe in an infinite personal God who is preexisting the universe,
preexisting, self-contained, self-contained because He doesn’t need anything
outside of Himself. There is a phrase
that is used theologically to describe self-contained; it comes out of a Greek
expression, it’s called Aseity. Aseity
means that God is not dependent upon His creation whatsoever. There’s an interesting corollary. One of the problems we’re going to face is
that the Christian church in the United States in the last part of the 20th
century and the first part of the 21st century is a coming new wave,
and the new wave is Islam. Islam is not
like the Oriental religions.
Islam
has a view of God, much like Jehovah’s Witnesses, in that God is a solitary
creator, Allah is a solitary person.
Now think. From everything we
know by analogy with God, what is it about a person that is always
incomplete? What did God say after He
made Adam, after He made everything without sin He made that one statement, He
said it is not good that man be alone, and in that there’s a fundamental
observation about persons. There’s no
such thing, the Bible knows no such thing, as solitary personality, that
personality is a corporate, it is something that demands another person. And this is why the Christian faith insists
on a plurality of persons in God. If
God is not multi-personal, then the problem that comes up, and Islam has never
solved this problem, if you have a solitary being then the solitary being has
to create in order to have another object to talk to, to fellowship with. He doesn’t have fellowship with himself, not
in a corporate, social sense. It is the
Triune God of Christianity where God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy
Spirit commune among themselves.
What
did Jesus say in the priestly prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane say? While He
was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane He let slip a phrase, and that little
phrase allows us to penetrate eternity past; in one little glimpse we can go
all the way back in time before the universe, because Jesus said, “Father,
before the world was made, You loved me, I talked with you, we had Fellowship
together.” What is Jesus talking about
there? He’s talking about the Triune
multiple-person God of the Christian faith; this is not something to be ashamed
of, this is part of a logical structure of our faith. We can stand up and be proud of this. The counterfeits to the Christian faith always get slippery here,
they always try to deny the Trinity and they wind up with a solitary monotheism
and a solitary monotheism has to have a God who creates or he is a lonely
God. Christianity alone has a
self-contained God because He doesn’t need to create to have fellowship. The Trinity was perfectly at home among
themselves. The Father had eternal
fellowship with the Son; we get into this more in the New Testament. But we conclude with that statement because
if you look at the text carefully, Genesis 1, there’s a mysterious phrase there
that has long troubled readers of Genesis, they’ve tried to explain this away
with all kinds of gimmicks, but the text still stands. Gen. 1:26, what is the pronoun? What is the number of the pronoun in verse
26, singular or plural? Plural!
You
can argue about the Trinity not being here explicitly, but do you notice the
plurality. “Let us make man in our
image, according to our likeness…”
Who’s the “our?” It is the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. If
you read the Genesis text carefully for that exercise you saw the Father and
you saw the Spirit mentioned. I wonder
how many saw the second personality mentioned.
The hint there is we’re going to look at the Apostle John’s
interpretation of Genesis, because John 1 is John’s meditation on Genesis
1. If you read John 1, then go back and
read Genesis 1, and ask yourself how would John have interpreted Genesis 1 and
you will discover an amazing thing about Jesus Christ. We won’t tell you tonight.