Biblical Framework
Charles Clough
Lesson 6
Tonight we’re going to follow pretty much the
handout almost verbatim, page 18-22, you should have received pages 22-25, How
God can and cannot be known, there’s no exercise with that but there’ll be one
next time. If you want to read
something that goes with the one that was handed out tonight for next week, my
recommendation would be Isaiah 40; Isaiah 40 and Gen. 1 because those are the
passages which basically are at stake.
I also would like to suggest something else, just a little practical
thing about studying the Bible that I’ve found useful just recently, maybe some
of you found out earlier, because I have so many times during the day when I
just have a break you can really redeem the time by taking advantage of it, and
then when you do you can’t find a Bible, your notes are somewhere else.
I found a simple trick is if I’m studying
Gen. 1 is to go to a copy machine and just copy Gen. 1 on the copy machine and
carry around the copy. I’ve been stuck
in traffic jams and I must have been able to read Gen. 1 at least 40
times. So you can get time at odd
moments to go through this by just simply using a Xerox machine. Another advantage of doing that is because
when you’re studying the Scripture, when you study the text, a good habit to
get into, Bible Study Fellowship teaches this, Kay Arthur and Precepts teaches
this, don’t be afraid to use pencils and underline, highlighters, etc., and
you’ll be less fearful to do that if you’re using a Xerox copy of the
text. You might not want to mark your
regular Bible up like that. I hope you are reading Gen. 1 again and again
because I presume that you are; my comments during the lectures presupposes
that you are.
Here are some tips, just observation
tips. When you’re reading the
Scriptures and you’re reading a defined unit, you want to first define what the
unit of Scripture is and it’s not always a chapter. In our case we’re reading actually from Gen. 1:1 to Gen.
2:4. That’s the block of text. In the original language there are actually
markers there that mark that section off, where the rabbis over the centuries
did that. So Gen. 1:1 to Gen. 2:4 and
when you approach a unit of Scripture like that, a habit to get into is look
for partitions in that segment, in other words, can you see a structure that’s
repeated. It’s obvious and very easy
from Gen. 1:1 to Gen. 2:4, it’s the seven days, so you’ve got seven segments in
that text to look at. Then when you get
your segments outlined, and the easy way to do that is take the Xerox and just
rule through those segments, just cut them, with just a mark. And then look to
see what the structure of the segments are, and see if there’s an inherent
structure to those. In other words, is
there a way that you go from day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, etc., is it the same
sequence followed or do you notice things different.
The Holy Spirit is an artist and when He
writes He doesn’t just mechanically write.
One of the things that I noticed years ago when I did that, I blocked it
out by segments, and that’s when I made the discovery that if you look at the
verb “God said,” you start out on day 1, day 2, it says “God said” let’s do
this, then God did, and there’s that formula, God said, then He did, God said,
then He did, and the first couple of days God said, God did, God named. Then the second day God said, God did, God
named. Then you get down to day 4 or 5
and there’s no more naming. That’s kind
of interesting. Why didn’t God name the
rest of it? If you look at verbs and
nouns, you see the next time “name” is used is over in Gen. 2 when He says man,
you name the rest, go ahead, name, when the animals start. There are those little observations.
So segmenting the text, looking at the
structure, and another trick to help observing the text is to look for the main
verbs. I don’t know whether they teach
this, they’re so busy trying to be sure that we all know how to put condoms on
in the public school that they don’t get into things like grammar. One of the things they used to teach is just
diagramming the sentence, go back to the subject and the verb and start picking
out clauses. I’ll tell you where you’re
going to get lost if you don’t do this, where this becomes absolutely critical,
is in Paul’s writings. If you want to
diagram a sentence, it’s one of the longest sentences in the Bible, and it’s a
challenge, try Eph. 1:3 and find out where that sentence ends. If you think that Paul’s a simple guy, by
the time you get through this I guarantee it’s going to take two pieces of
paper because you’ve got all these clauses that modify the previous clause that
modifies the previous clause. And when
you get done with that one sentence you think how could you follow Paul, he was
very intricate in his structure.
Yet, when you come to John, try to diagram
what John was writing. It’s a
completely different structure. This
teaches you how the Holy Spirit uses different people in different ways. God respects our individuality, He never
makes the church and Christians a bunch of clones and we all have to follow
each other, and we’re all carbon copies of everybody else. John and Paul were distinct personalities
with distinct vocabularies that led distinctly different lives, and they
expressed God’s Word differently. Those
are the little nuances that make the Bible real for you.
Tonight I want to concentrate as we go
through the description that we have before us, we start in chapter 2 and in
this chapter we deal with the creation event itself. Up to this point we tried to introduce things, and the reason we
spent so long trying to introduce things is to convince you that by the time we
get to this point of looking at the text and looking at a key event that you be
aware, everyone comes to the Bible with presuppositions, and we want to be sure
what those presup-positions are. We
want to understand that we have to correct for them, or at least be aware that
they’re there. All we’re going to do
for evening after evening is look at Gen. 1:1 to Gen. 2:4, and by the time we
get through 3 or 4 more weeks of this, going through this creation event, you
will see how crucial this chapter is for the doctrines of God, man and
nature. Foundational doctrines! It’s all set up here, and that’s another
rule of studying the Bible.
One of the neat things about the Scripture, a
little side note here, is if you notice where and how something is first
introduced in Scripture, that’s the most occurrence of a word, like if you have
a concordance and you look up a word and you see it occurs here, here, here and
here, and you have a whole stream of references, a key is always watch where
the word first occurred. Look at the
context where it first occurred. And that will give you a big clue about how
that word is being used in the Bible; there’s a whole context of meanings
associated with it.
We want to look at creation with a
distinctive characteristics of that event, and where that event leads us. In other words, starting with the Biblical
creation we are led to think certain ways about God. This is without getting into all the details, just the creation
in general. We’ve already said that we
have made the general observation about Genesis, that we can observe this
difference. This is not something we’re
suggesting, this is not an opinion, this comes out of observations, and that’s
why I gave you Enuma Elish, which
is a typical pagan creation text so you can see for yourself that in that text
there is no ex nihilo, i.e. gods
are creating matter out of their anatomy, that’s what’s happening.
In the exercise that you had to do for
tonight, the last question was if you look at the processes God uses in Genesis
to create, what do you observe, vs. the processes that the gods use in pagan
literature. What is the
difference? What do you notice about
the way God creates vs. the way the gods were creating in the pagan text? When God creates He speaks, it’s always a
spoken sovereign omnipotent word, God speaks and it was so. In the pagan text, what you often have them
doing is procreating, or killing the bodies of the gods and making parts of the
universe out of the bodies of the gods.
In other words, the anatomy of the gods becomes the universe. That’s a picture you want to see, it’s
always true. That means it’s not ex
nihilo. Ex nihilo means from
nothing, the God of the Bible creates out of nothing, besides His own Word,
whereas the gods of paganism, what they have to do is they create the world out
of themselves, they are somehow part of the universe. That’s a very sharp distinction and its one that we come back to
again and again.
On page 18 in the notes we said that
creation, the creation event is the defining event for knowing who and what God
is. Many of you have been in liturgical
churches and you know the creeds that you recite, and all the creeds basically
begin somewhat like the apostle’s creed, “I believe in God the Father,
Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”
You notice the creeds never begin with I believe in Jesus. Ever ask yourself why that is? Obviously they do believe in Jesus, but why
don’t they start the creed that way? The reason they don’t start the creed that
way is because the Holy Spirit didn’t start the book of revelation that way. This book doesn’t begin with Jesus, this book
begins with creation, and hence the creeds, the historic creeds of the church
always begin with “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, maker of heaven and
earth,” because that defines God.
So creation is a defining event of who God
is. The cross and the resurrection, are
they important? Absolutely, but the
cross and the resurrection tell you what this guy is doing. But God Himself is defined by the event of
creation. This is why it’s such a
critical event. It sets the universe
apart from God and God apart from the universe, and defines who our God
is. As I said on page 18, the
importance and why the creation, as it were in this point, eclipse the cross,
and that’s the underlying sentence there, “redemption would be unimportant if
the God who redeemed were not the Creator.”
If God is not the Creator, then everything else is sort of quasi
relevant.
Now we come down to the distinctives, and I
mentioned in the diagram on page 19 which is another diagram that I want you to
think about a lot. On page 19 I tried
to in a diagrammatic way depict the difference between what the Bible teaches
vs. what paganism teaches. In the Biblical
creation you have God eternally existing, there never was a time when God did
not exist. So God is eternal, God is
infinite, and God is personal. And then
the creation event marks the start of creation. Now here is why that diagram is so important. I want you to look at where the “X” is,
where the “X” marks the creation event, and I want you to do a little thought
experiment, a little imagination, and it will challenge the very structure of
your imagination t do this. But think
back to that creation event, you have read Gen. 1:1 a number of times, “In the
beginning God created the heavens and the earth. [2] And the earth was without
form and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep,” etc. Imagine being present at verse 2, imagine
seeing all the mass of the universe in this watery mode, and you are somehow
present, and it’s just been called into existence and you’ve just been called
into existence. Look at this chart at
the “X” marks the spot for the creation event.
Biblical Creation:
INFINITE-PERSONAL
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . CREATOR. . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
X.
. . . . . . . . .finite man, nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . .
Creation event
Paganism:
INFINITE-IMPERSONAL
COSMOS
“Mystery”. . . . . . . . . . . transformation of gods, man, nature . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Seconds before God called the universe into
existence, if we can conceive of time, it wasn’t there, only God was there, and
this is the discipline spiritually that you want to go through when you think
about creation, is that God preceded everything. It is not God and the universe that always existed, it is not God
and the laws of physics that always existed, it is not God and the particles,
the subatomic particles that always existed.
It is not even God and a universe of another order that always
existed. It is only that God and God
alone always existed. This produces a
number of exciting things, which we’ll get to as we work through this. On the pagan side of the house eventually
what paganism has to do is to say that all we can say is there was mystery in
eternity past, that’s all we can say, just mystery in eternity past. We know not from whence we come, and we know
not to where we go. That is the
ultimate confession of paganism. And
everything in between the left and the right on that blind of paganism was
mystery on the left, you could say mystery on the right also, in between those
parts of the line all you ever will get is some form of transformation. You
never get creation, and that’s where we want to distinguish this.
There are two words here; you might circle
them in that diagram: Creation and Transformation. It’s something for you as a mental tool to
think with. When people come to you for
example and they talk about the big bang, which is the prevalent physics model
of the origin of the universe, when you think about that and you ask deeper
questions and you say what was the universe like in the first three seconds and
they’ll give you this story, the best that physicists can do to reconstruct
this big bang. The problem is that even
there matter, energy, and some form of physical laws exist. So that really is not creation. That is transformation of the universe in
one primeval state into another state which we recognize today; it is a
transformation, it is not a creation.
So be careful of the vocabulary word
“creation.” People tend to use that in
a sloppy fashion, and we want to be clear as Christians about what God’s Word
says and what it doesn’t say. When God says in Gen. 1:1, I create… turn to Gen.
1:1, let’s look at that text, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth.” The heavens and the earth are a
word pair that mean the whole universe.
There’s no other word pair available in the Hebrew language for
universe; heavens and earth, those two terms coupled together equal what we
today would call universe. That’s just
the Hebrew way of saying universe. So
it is an all encompassing point in verse 1, there’s nothing outside of the
heavens and nothing outside of the earth.
If I say God created the heavens and the earth I mean God has created
all that there is, outside of Himself that is.
Turn to Exodus 20:11, the chapter where God
reveals the Ten Commandments. I take
you here, like I took you last week to all those New Testament verses, because
I want you to get in the habit—when you read the Old Testament learn to read it
in the same way that the people who wrote the New Testament read it; or the
people that wrote later portions of the Old Testament, how they interpreted the
earlier portions of the Old Testament.
That’s how you learn to interpret Scripture. It’s not what some person says in the 20th century
that Scripture means, it’s the rules of interpretation that were already
established by the very people who wrote it.
Here is Moses, who was the compiler of Genesis and he says in Exodus
20:1, “Then God spoke all these words.” Look who’s doing the speaking, the
subject of the verb in verse 1 is not Moses.
The subject of the verb is God.
And so what we are left with is that from verse 2 on these are the words
that God spoke.
It’s not Moses making them up, it’s what if
you were a tape recorder and you taped it, you could have taped this in
Hebrew. And God Himself says in verse
9-10, notice the context, verse 8, “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.”
That’s the context. But look how He
gives you reasons why the sabbath day is important. Verse 9, “Six days you shall labor and do all your work. [10] But
the seventh day is a sabbath of the LORD your God; in
it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male
servant or your female servant or your cattle” that’s an interesting point,
when we look at the Mosaic Law code you’ll see that the first laws of being
humane to animals are given by Moses, very interesting. The other law codes in the ancient world did
not have provisions to protect animals, they had some but usually it was for
economic reasons. Here you have a very
clear mandate that the animals are to be cared for and to be protected.
Now if you didn’t read verse 11, you stopped
at verse 10, just look at verse 9-10 for a minute, at the end of verse 10, if
you had heard there… picture yourself, you’re standing there before Mt. Sinai
and God blasts forth with these words in the Hebrew language and they
reverberate down through that canyon, I showed a picture at Mt. Horeb and how
you can stand at the face of that mountain, you take your camera and look back
out and there’s this tremendous valley and it’s very easy to conceive of a
million people in this valley with this sound of God reverberating down the
valley. Remember what the people said
after they heard this? They said hey, Moses, you take care of this, this is a
little high voltage for us. So
obviously they were hearing words. If
you just stopped with a period at the end of verse 10, how would you interpret
days? What is the context? Verses 8, 9, and 10 are talking about
what? What we call the week. Hasn’t it ever struck you as a little odd
that all over the world, on every continent, and every culture, the week is
always seven? How is that?
Ever hear of a week of 10 days? At times there have been attempts to do
this. One of the silly things that
communism did in the 30’s in Russia when they were trying to increase
productivity, I’ve read although I can’t document it completely, is they
experimented where they tried to keep the factories funning for 8 or 9 days,
then have one day break, because they thought greater productivity. What they found out was they weren’t getting
greater productivity, people were getting tired and making more mistakes. And they found out there was an optimum here
of six to one, and that when you violate the optimum human efficiency goes
down. Gee, I wonder why. Because we’re created that way, here’s the
God that made us, and He’s telling us, I built you a certain way, and I
structured the universe a certain way, so follow the directions.
In verse 8-9 it’s days, nobody has a problem
with that. It’s very clear in verse 10
it’s a day. The only time people have a
problem is when they get to verse 11, “For in six days the LORD made the
heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the
seventh day.” Now if you were there, sitting at the base of Mt. Sinai, you
would have to structure that if God is saying what He’s saying in verse 11,
then Genesis must be meant to be interpreted in a straightforward normal
way. How else would you interpret
it? Today the problem is we’re under
pressure. Obviously the last 200 years
the church has been under tremendous intellectual pressure about this problem
of the age of the universe, etc. That’s
why in the previous chapter I went into the accommodation strategies, etc. There’s a lot of pressure, we all know this.
Any educated person knows a lot of pressure, but I can’t bend my interpretation
because of the pressure. I have to
trust the Lord that somehow this will work out, but I can’t be dishonest to the
text. I suggested to the person that
runs Christian book store, someday I’d like a Christian manufacturing company
to take a little piece of rubber, like an inner tube, and just make up a little
Bible, with rubber pages, a rubber cover, a rubber binding, we’d call it the first
liberal edition of the Bible, you could stretch it any way you want. But you can’t rip through the text of
Scripture. If you’re going to play
grease with the text in Gen., if we have problems interpreting the first two
chapters of the Bible, and you think that’s a problem, what are you going to do
with Ezekiel and Revelation?
Let’s look at the results of looking at
Biblical creation and paganism. I’ve organized on page 19-20, under 3 key
questions that men have asked, and those of you who have read a little bit know
very well what I’m doing, I’m just going through the areas where philosophy has
divided itself into metaphysics, epistemology and ethics. And it’s a tripartite structure known to
every student that has a philosophy course.
But let’s look at these questions.
Look at the question, Who am I?
A basic identity question. Today
we hear all things about having a problem with self-identity, we can’t figure
out who we really are, and that’s not silly, there’s a real problem here, who
are we? What is the universe all
about? Now look at it from two points
of view. Go back to the diagram on page
19 and think. If the Bible is true, and
if we have God as the Creator, and He has a character and a being of His own,
and then we have the creation down here, let’s draw the creation as a separate
thing, on this diagram I’m going to leave God as an open box, it’s just my way
of saying He’s infinite so all we see is part of Him, we never can glimpse all
of Him, and God speaks the word, so therefore God through the word creates the
universe. We are part of that universe. If God had not created the universe, so
we blank out the universe and our own existence, what would there have been,
even today? God. Would there be protons and electrons? No.
Would there be laws of physics?
No. But there would be God.
Out of this comes an enormously powerful
truth that is deeply moving. What I’m
getting at in this “Who am I” question is that the basic environment of all is
a person, an infinite personal God, not an impersonal force, not an “it,” not
protons and electrons, not DNA, not laws of physics. All those weren’t there at one time, only God was there. So behind what we see in the universe stands
a person. Go out to the farthest galaxy and God is there. The universe, as big as the Hubble telescope
is making it appear to us in the pictures that we’re getting back, as big as
the universe appears, it’s enormous, God preexists it all. So the challenge in our time is to take the
new data that we see and wrap it up in a Biblical package. Remember the first class and I drew the
picture of that slimy amoeba, and I said you feed out the gospel in a little
piece and the unbeliever will take it and it’s almost like an amoeba just slurps
it up. It’s because they take our truth
and absorb it within their frame of reference.
Now what we have to do is to do the same thing. [blank spot]
What does that make me? What that makes me is what does Genesis says
I am in Gen. 1:26. What does God say we
are in Gen. 1:26, “Then God said, Let us make man in our image, according to
our likeness.” What it says we are is
that inside the creation there’s one and only one creature called man, and of
all the things that God made, if you carefully observe the text, there’s one
and only one part of the universe that’s said to be made in His image. One and only one part of the universe that’s
said to be made in God’s image!
Man. And that means whoever is a
human being, whatever the race, whatever the culture, wherever they are,
whatever point in history, whatever language they speak, they are made in God’s
image. This is powerful and we’ll see just how powerful it is in the handout
that you have for next time. But I’m
just pointing out here an answer to the question, “Who am I?” I get a very distinct answer if I begin with
Biblical creation. If Biblical creation
is valid, if it is a true event that happened, that makes me a creature,
bounded in time and space, whose existence is dependent upon a God who is
always there, and I wasn’t always there.
The DNA that makes me up was passed down to me by Adam.
I told one of my sons that’s working in Johns
Hopkins laboratory when you look at the DNA, and he’s working with little
chunks and pieces, trying to trace how inherited defects move from the father
and mother to their children, and when you look at these little chunks, just
think about it, do you realize that the chunks that you’re observing in the DNA
are the lineal descendants of the act of verse 26. In verse 26, when God said “Let us make man in our image,” and
verse 27, “And God created man in His own image,” that was when the first DNA
was structured for man, and every piece of DNA that we all share has chemically
derived itself in its lineage from that DNA of verse 27. That’s where it started. We carry Adam and Eve with us, whoever we
are, wherever we are, we are carrying around the direct genetic descent, the
baggage from Adam and Eve. And there
are implications in Rom. 5 about that.
This is an observation that will come back when we get into salvation,
redemption, etc. But the idea there is
that we get a distinct answer.
Let’s go back to the question again, “Who am
I?” If I work with the presupposition
of the Scriptural viewpoint, the answer is this. If I deny this Biblical answer, if I say that the universe is the
impersonal, the bottom line on page 19, now what does that make me? Let’s draw a picture. What that makes me is that God, if He exists,
we’ll put god(s), men, animals, rocks, we have this scale of being, and who knows
what’s out here beyond this, fate, chance, whatever. And this is why on page 20, the first full paragraph, I have this
sentence: “And what does the pagan world view tell you that you are? It tells you that reality at bottom is
one.” What do I mean “reality at bottom
is one?” What I mean by that is you can’t split between God and the
creation. That split between creation
and God is available only to the Bible believing Christian. We are the only ones who can make the
split. Everyone else holds to this
idea, that all reality encompasses everything, one level of existence. Then I say, “there is only one level of
being. It matters not whether is
reality is pictured as a vast machine,” as many people did in the 19th
century, “or as some sort of cosmic organism,” which is ancient and also now
coming into modern vogue. “The
universe” and this is the sentence I want you to look at, “beneath you, above
you, in front of you, and behind you is an infinite impersonal ‘it.’ You and
your ‘personal’ nature differ only in degree from its electrons and
protons. In the Chain of Being your
thinking, talking, emotions, loving, and artistic expressions are merely
surface appearances on a reality that is basically impersonal.” You should be depressed, you should really
be profoundly depressed by that sentence.
This is where the grass isn’t greener on the other side of the
fence. Pity the poor non-Christian, he
doesn’t realize it but this is where he is.
I’ll read that again. “In the Chain of Being, your thinking,
talking, emotions, loving and artistic expressions are merely surface
appearances on a reality that is basically impersonal. You and other human beings are really only
person-like bubbles, floating for the moment on an impersonal ocean of
chance. Ultimately you and other human
beings are alone,” tragically and cosmically alone. Frances Schaefer often speaks of a funny remark Charlie Chaplain
made when the probe that went to Mars, Voyager II, and they had all the TV
cameras and the little foot came out and the probe and everyone was sitting
there wondering are we going to get some organic molecules on this probe to
find out if there’s life there, and there wasn’t. Somebody asked Charlie Chaplain what’s your response to that, and
he said I feel lonely. It wasn’t a funny remark; it’s exactly what this
is. People don’t see the consequences
of things. You, as Christians in whom
the Spirit of God dwells, should be the people who interpret to our fellow
beings the loneliness and the darkness of the world.
They say you want to be free in your
thoughts. If you want to be free, just
understand this is where you wind up; you have to wind up this way. You can dress it up with drugs and I frankly
think a lot of the drugs and all the other stuff, some of the smartest people
in society take drugs, don’t think only stupid people, or poor people take
drugs, smart people take drugs. Do you
know why they do that? For the same
reason they drink; for the same reason they do anything else. If you profoundly grasp what we have just
said here that is the result of the non-Christian view of life, life is tragic,
it is painful, it pains you to live an existence like this; therefore why
not. You see it’s not the question,
just say no to drugs; you’ve got to have a reason for saying no. If I’m in pain I want morphine or something
because I want to stop the pain, and if it’s a pain in the soul, it’s a pain
that involves the way I think about myself, my life, everything, if I really
grasp this, and some of the most smart people do grasp this, and it’s precisely
because they do see this that they take drugs.
And you can’t stop them from taking drugs until this is clear. Brilliant people take drugs. Huxley was no stupid person, he was the
pioneer in America in the 60’s for advocating drugs, he taught at Harvard. Why
did he advocate taking drugs? Read him,
you’ll see why, because he saw this, he saw that ultimately when you lay aside
all the hoopla and get right down to the basics there is no reason for
life. It’s just a big cosmic
machine. Isn’t that true with you start
with a pagan set of values, if you start with a pagan perspective?
Go to the first part of page 20, this sounds
a little funny and I’m not sure I want to leave it in this form in the
sentence, but here’s what I’m trying to say.
This is on the Biblical basis now, if there is an event called Biblical
creation. Your ultimate environment as
a person who thinks, who talk, who experiences… imagine this, in Star Wars they
talk about the great force, you have Darth Vader, etc., and his manifestation
of the force. But think of what you
really have in the universe as we know it.
We have a God who speaks, and that God who speaks has a sense of art, He
appreciates music, do you know how I know that? Because when the universe was created a choir was singing, you
read about that in the book of Job, it says when God laid the foundations of
the earth, the morning stars rejoiced, and it’s the word for singing. The first song ever sung by humans is Adam
to Eve, we know that because it’s in Hebrew, it’s in poetic structure, it was a
love song. The first music ever uttered
by a human being was a love song. Now
where does this come from? Because we
are made in God’s image, He sings, He loves music, He has emotions. That which we see in ourselves that we
identify as we’re people, that’s part of Him, that’s patterned after Him. That’s the magnitude, its mind blowing to
think about this. You can spend years
thinking about this, and the implications of just starting from Biblical
creation, or starting from a pagan idea that there is nothing there except the
impersonal machine cranking out molecules, that’s all.
Now we come to the second and third
question. Again these are critical
questions that we’ll come up with from time to time, I’m not intending to turn
this class into theory, it’s just that I want you to see this because it comes
up in literature, I think it comes up in personal life, I think it comes up in
sociology, I think it comes up all across the board of life. I think we’re always involved in this, it’s
just that we don’t see it to much.
The next question is, “What is truth?” Another live question is “How can I
know?” That’s a question that’s
tortured people, actually tortured people, how can I really be sure of
truth. And we have to approach this
question, like I’ve been trying to model for you, every great question has to
be approached from a viewpoint, you can’t approach these questions naked, you
come to the question with a bunch of stuff, and you approach it out of that
viewpoint. You approach it from a
Biblical viewpoint or you approach it from a non Biblical viewpoint, but
approach it from a viewpoint you will.
Now if you approach the question of truth from the Biblical point of
view, let’s go back to the diagram. If
this is God, and we have God through His Word creating the universe, think back
for a minute on the chart on page 19, just prior to God creating the heavens
and the earth, when He and He alone existed, did He have a plan in His head for
what He was going to do, or did He just say, gee, I feel lonely today. Did God have an eternal plan? Do you know a verse that shows where God had
from all eternity a plan? There are many passages.
Turn to Eph. 1 to get used to the fact that
God had a plan. This is usually used
when we get into things like predestination, etc. all I want to do is look at
verse 4-5, “Just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that
we should be holy and blameless before Him.”
When did we get chosen? “Before
the foundation of the world.” That
means before Gen. 1:1; that God had a plan in mind for eternity. It means that He had it all in mind. There are two people that never learn
anything, a moron and God, a moron because he can’t learn, and God because He
can’t learn because He knows everything.
So there are two people that never learn, God and morons.
The idea is that God has a plan that includes
everything. So what does that have to
do with the question we’re asking, what is truth? Anybody see where it leads?
If you’re looking at something down here in the creation, some feature,
let’s make it personal, make it an event in your life, go back to a tent in the
Middle East occupied by one Abraham and Sarah. They’re having a little marital dispute over children. Abraham says, all right, have it your way
lady, and he shacks up with a maid. An
event. What’s the meaning of that
event? In their lifetime did Sarah and
Abraham fully perceive what would come forth out of Ishmael? Did they have a clue? They had some of a clue, yes, they knew some
of the truth. Today in the Middle East do we know more of the truth, of Isaac
and Ishmael? 1948 Isaac and Ishmael,
1967 Isaac and Ishmael, Begin is assassinated and we worry about who’s going to
take over in the Palestinian, the PLO, Isaac and Ishmael. The meaning of what happened centuries and
centuries ago in that tent in the Middle East, how can one person perceive the
true meaning. We never do.
Sarah and Abraham could know some of the
truth, bracketed by their time and their experience, but they themselves didn’t
know the full meaning of their own life.
Maybe they do now because they can see history unrolled. And we will one
day see the meaning of things that we thought so insignificant in our lifetime,
events that frustrated us, events that came into our life that we considered
them to be interruptions and disturbances, or unfortunate things that
happened. But just as Sarah and Abraham
can now look backward in history and say oh, that was what God was doing with
that incident, gee, I didn’t realize a marital dispute would wreck the world
for twenty centuries. The meaning of an
act in a point in time!
Let’s enlarge this. If I start with the creation, if I have God who created, from all
eternity He had a plan in His mind, that means God has a plan expressed by His
Word, and truth inside the creation is that which corresponds to His plan. And
I know something truly as much as I know its place in His plan. I cannot say that I really know truth until
I locate what I’m talking about in the context of His eternal plan. That’s why we say we only know bits and
pieces of truth. There’s a song we sing,
“I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded, that He is able,” it’s a quotation
from Romans, that is a very theologically correct hymn, because the hymn
writer, because he is being faithful to the text of Scripture, notice what he’s
not saying, he’s not saying that I know everything there is to know, he is not
saying I even thoroughly understand God, He is not even saying at least this I
know, what he is saying I know Him, I know enough of God’s character to be able
to trust Him for all the unknowns, because as a human being I am filled, I am
faced daily with unknowns, I have no control, and so my salvation,
epistemologically and how I know is because I know Him and I trust His
character on the basis of His revelation, and therefore I say “I know whom I
have believed, and I am persuaded that He is able.” Why? Because He is there and I know my God well enough to know
that He is a God who plans.
He is a God that has rationality, and as
chaotic as life is, I know enough about God to know that His reason prevails;
somehow His reason prevails. Do you
know what that produces? Stability in
your life. In this generation, with the
chaos we see going on, it’s the key to sanity.
I do not know how a thinking non-Christian is not going insane in this
decade; with the changes that are happening, and the rate of history changing
like we see it now, how anybody can keep their mind from fragmenting I don’t
know. It’s not a wonder to me that
people are flipping out, because the stress is so high about this thing. And the little fundies are here, well show
me someone else who has an answer to this.
We ought to be proud in a proper sense as Christians.
We have something the world has nothing of,
knows nothing of, and can’t even grasp.
It’s the concept of truth. They’re the ones that are saying “what is
truth?” Just like Pilate used to say in
the trial of Jesus, what is truth?
You’d better figure out what truth is, because it’s what keeps you
going. If you really believe that you
can’t know something truly, what does that produce? I’ll tell you, you hear it
said again and again, kids don’t want to learn anything; we can’t get anybody
to read any more, we can’t get anybody to think any more, why should they, if
there’s not truth to find out why go to all the pain of learning to read. Why did people in our society learn to read
in the first place? Because they had a
Bible. The first reading programs were
not just to read the almanac, the reading programs were so that a person could
come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ on their own by reading Scripture. That’s the source of literacy. Mark my words, you take away this powerful
concept of truth and literacy will go away; as night follows day, there’s no
reason for me, if I’m a kid to go learn something that’s going to change
tomorrow. It’s to hard to learn today
if what I learn today is going to be obsolete tomorrow.
All these powerful things come out of this
creation event. Do you see why we’re saying Gen. 1 is very important? Look what comes out of this. If I am a pagan what comes out of it is that
I have total flux, go back to the diagram about God, man and the universe, here
we are surrounded by fate, chance, God knows what, subject to a universe that
transforms itself from one moment to the next, everything in flux, why should I
bother to learn. It strikes at the very
heart and the very motivation to learn anything.
Let’s go to the third question, one that’s
quite straightforward on page 21, “How should I then live?” And, of course, we’re left with values. Look at the next paragraph, follow as I read
through it. “You just learned that in the pagan worldview you are alone
and autonomous,” and I explained the word autonomous, it means that you
are auto=self, nomos=law, that you are a law for
yourself. If you really believe this
and you are a person, then you have to have the idea that it’s your mind that
reaches out and creates truth. You have
to, you’re not discovering truth that was there prior to you. On a Biblical basis yes, there was a God who
preexisted the universe, who had a plan in His head, and so there’s something
out there worth my brain coming to know, His plan. But if there is no God out there who has a plan for the universe
and it’s just there, then what my thoughts and my mind and everything, it just
becomes another feeling, just another little activity of my brain, that’s
all. That’s being autonomous.
So “you just learned that in the pagan
worldview you are alone and autonomous. That means you have a big problem at this
point. With no One there to whom you
are ultimately responsible,” and notice this sentence, “with no One there to
whom you are ultimately responsible, you are left on your own. You may do what seems right in your own
eyes!” The rub comes when you meet
another autonomous person who is doing what seems right in his eyes. “You could try to attach your loyalty to
“society,” hoping to convince your doubting heart that at least here you have a
standard of right and wrong. Or you
could try ‘mother earth.’”
One parent told me just tonight what happened
in the public school system, they invited an American Indian type, mother earth
thing in, so now we’re talking about the flowers being our brothers and our
sisters. Excuse me, flowers being
brothers and sisters? I don’t think so.
Flowers are not created in God’s image, there’s a slight problem there.
That’s paganism. Do you know what that is? That’s Continuity of Being. A lot of you thought this is all theory.
It’s not theory, we had it right here in the public schools this afternoon,
Continuity of Being. And probably the
whole class just sat there, some of the Christian kids sat there and laughed at
it and knew that somehow this is crazy, but I bet half the administrators in
that school don’t have the foggiest notion what happened in that classroom,
because they can’t think about the differences we’re studying right here. And yet it goes on and on and on and. The tragedy is, as I say in this paragraph
on page 21, every time this happens you are eroding values some more. You are
destroying the moral basis; you are wrecking standards of right and wrong,
because you’re destroying the foundation of them. That’s what’s happening. So I say in those last two sentences,
notice I emphasize in parenthesis society and mother earth, I’m not trying to
be sarcastic, by mother earth I mean nature.
There’s only two other places you can get
ethics from. If you knock out God, where else could you go to get an
ethic? Society. You’ve heard it, the argument of society. Here’s the counter to that. If somebody tells you that ethics come out
of society, ask them what a German evangelical would have done in 1937 when he
would protest against Nazi racism, and they answer—but the majority of people
believe this. Now what happens? If 51% of the people believe it, that’s
society, right? Do you really believe
that morals come out of a 51% vote? If
that’s true, we live dangerously. So
morals can’t come out of a society. Do
any of you remember the great trial after WWII? Where was the trial when they brought the Nazi’s in and judged
them? Nuremberg. What was the Nazi defense, when those great
proud men of the SS corps went into court and their lawyers stood behind
them? I followed my orders, “yes sir,”
society told me to do it. What was the
judgment at Nuremberg? Did the nations
accept that defense? They did not. That’s something to remember when you get
into a conversation and somebody yaks yaks I think society says. Oh really, what do you do with Nuremberg,
the Nazi’s were right. If society
determines right and wrong, the Nazi racists were right, and you can’t answer
them. The only way you can answer them
is to say this society is not the source of ethics, God is and He transcends
society. If you don’t hold to that
position, you have no defense, no defense against this sort of thing. When a
society collectively becomes mad, you can’t stand against it.
Or, what’s happening today, we’re getting
more sophisticated, we think, and we’re going back to nature. The problem here is if you make nature the
source of ethics, what happens in the boundary between man and animal now? It
goes away. So now we see the spectacle
where we’re concerned if a seal hangs himself up on a rock, and we have a million
dollar rescue effort, and meanwhile we can pull a baby halfway down the birth
canal and shove a scissor up its brain and suck its brains out. Isn’t that logical though, if it’s just
nature you can define your ethic any way you please. I talked about a rubber Bible; you’ve got a rubber ethic, stretch
it any way you want. So these are
practical questions that come right out of the Scriptures and right out of
Genesis.
Look at page 21, I hope you look those verses
up listed. Those are key passages in
the Old Testament where God’s distinct nature transcends the creation, the
Creator/creature distinction. And if
you look particularly in the Job reference, Job 38, where God is doing the
speaking, see if you can as you read that read God’s emotions. The emotional level with which God speaks those
words are very strong, and you want to pick that flavor up … [tape ends]