Transcript
The following transcript was automatically generated and may contain errors in spelling and/or grammar. It is provided for assistance in note-taking and review.
– Well, welcome to our first full lesson. In this very first lecture, we will cover what is called the principles, something I talked about in the orientation lecture, and we’ll go ahead and begin the story. It’ll probably be the pattern that we follow for all of these different lessons that we do each week. But this very first historical lesson is on something that we have a witness from, from the book of Genesis, as we are looking at the creation.
Specifically, we are titling this lesson, Imago Dei, which means, “In the Image of Goddess Latin.” That, of course, refers specifically to the special creation of man, and how man is a different creature from any other creature. As Chesterton liked to discuss in his book, “The Everlasting Man,” If man is an animal and that’s all he is, he’s a very strange animal. But as we begin to unpack our principle here, we’ll go ahead and start with that most famous verse from Genesis 1-1. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now, this verse is something that you have known for years, I’m assuming. This is a verse that just seems kind of commonplace to us, but it’s a rather astonishing verse. Because in this short little passage, we have the creation of all space, of all time, of all history, of all matter, of all energy, of absolutely everything, other than God himself, who of course is not created.
In other words, this is a verse that reveals to us that God is the author of everything. And using etymology, the study of words, hopefully we can begin to see that the word “author” relates to the word “authority.” So because he’s the author of everything, because he creates everything, by definition he is also able to be, or able to have authority over absolutely everything.
So that verse right there tells us who he is, tells us what he has made, and therefore tells us why we actually worship him and what our entire purpose is in terms of glorifying him and enjoy him forever because he made all things.
And of course we have another helpful verse as we just begin things here in terms of the creation and that’s from Romans chapter 1. It’s there in verses 18 through 20 that Paul tells us that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men.
In other words, God’s wrath is revealed. who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. So there’s something about us that we like to suppress the truth. We don’t like to admit what the reality actually is. And he goes on to explain what that reality is. Specifically, he says, “For what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power, his divine nature, they’ve been clearly perceived.” His power, his divine nature, they’ve been clearly seen ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made so that they are without excuse. In other words, there’s something special about the creation because it is the creation of everything. It reveals to us that there must be a God. There must be a beginning to it because all things that are created by definition have a beginning. The great theologian Hermann Bavink, and we’ll actually use this quote as our principle for this week. A great little writing about this. He said, “The doctrine of creation, “affirming the distinction between the Creator “and His creatures is the starting point of true religion.” In other words, what we are looking at is not just the foundation of everything. We’re looking at the beginning of history itself. And our entire faith, as I’ve already talked to you about in the orientation lecture, is primarily a faith based upon historical events. It’s not a faith that is based upon certain things that we must do, or a certain world, a certain system of thinking about things a certain way.
It’s based upon events that actually happened at certain points in time, and in certain places, or in this case, the creation of all time in all places.
Anyway, he says it’s a starting point of true religion. It’s a starting point of everything we believe. It’s a starting point of everything we actually worship, and that is God, showing that he’s worthy of worship because he made us, because he made all things. The great theologian and Christian writer, Augustine, one of the church fathers, and his book on his own life, it’s an autobiography, actually, the world’s first autobiography called Confessions. He talks about his search for trying to find something worthy of worship. He talks about how thinking like an ancient man, because we’ll notice this as we take a look at ancient man, that ancient man was often making idols. In fact, this is the habit of mankind, period, to try to find something in this world that we can worship, something in this world that we can say this is the source of my happiness or this is the source of my confidence or this grants me peace.
So he talks about his search for something grand. And he talks about how he looked for it in the creation. Let me read this to you. I’ll try to adapt some of the language to make it a little easier to understand. But he said as he went looking for things and he personifies things like the earth, he says, quote, “I asked the earth, I asked the earth, “What are you? Are you God?” And the earth, he says, answered me, “I am not he.” And whatsoever are in the earth confess the same. So I asked the sea and the deeps and the living, creeping things, and they all answered, “We are not your God. Seek above us.” So he’s asking created things, “Are you God? Are you the greatest power?” And they are saying to him, this is all, of course, metaphorically, or personifying, he’s personifying them, he’s realizing they are not God. So he says, “I asked the moving air, “and the whole air, with its inhabitants, “answered the Anaximenes, the Greek philosopher. “He was deceived, he was wrong. “I am not God. “So I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars. “Nor said they, ‘Are we the God whom you seek?’ “So I replied, ‘Unto all the things “‘which encompass the door of my flesh, “‘all the things that surround me, all the things of creation. I said, “You have told me of my God, “that you are not him, so tell me something of him.” And they all cried out with a loud voice, “He made us.” In other words, this is the incredible nature of the creation, it reveals that it has been made. It reveals an actual design. It’s one of the remarkable things when you find, say the curve that’s created by the Fibonacci sequence that’s found in the golden rectangle, that you find that curve in plant life, you find it in sea life, you even find it in galaxies, revealing something almost like a conspiracy in the things that have been made.
Now, that kind of concludes our principle section for this very first lecture. So let’s go ahead and take a look at the story. And before we actually begin the story of creation, We’re going to take a look at what is unique about who God actually is. In fact, we’re going to be starting with theology proper. That is, the actual study of who God is. And by the way, we’re just going to scratch the surface. This, like, so many things we’re covering this year, these are enormous topics, topics that I hope you spend a lifetime unpacking, a lifetime exploring, because there is so much here and there are so many wonderful things written about these topics that you can read that will go into greater depth than what I can give you at this point.
But to start out with theology, who God actually is, as a starting point we’ll take a look at John chapter 4 where Jesus and a Samaritan woman have a discussion about worship of all things and that whole story is fascinating itself as he’s talking to someone who assumes he would want to have nothing to do with her. I think I’m talking about worship and it’s at that point that Jesus tells her that God is spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth. In other words, God does not have a physical body like men. God is not a physical thing. He is not matter itself. And this is a huge distinction. We’ll talk about it throughout this lecture, but the ancients assumed that matter was eternal, it had always been. Modern science essentially assumes the same thing, and that matter will always exist until all of its energy runs out, and then the universe will just be this cold wasteland of matter that no longer moves.
But as Christians, we take a look at this differently, and we say, no, God is separate from his entire creation. In fact, this is getting into specific traits of his that we’re going to define, as theologians have defined them for a long time, as “incommunicable.” That’s a word that means these are traits we can’t share. These are traits that we cannot easily communicate, so to speak, because we cannot fully understand them because they are beyond us. Sometimes these traits are also called God’s transcendent traits because they show how how he is entirely other than us, how he is entirely above us, how he is entirely set apart from us.
That’s why the angels in Revelation 15 will say to God, “For you alone are holy.” Now the first of these traits we’ll write down, it’s the word aseity. It’s another Latin term here. It really means from himself. What this means is that God is entirely independent of his creation. His existence is simply from himself. It hints at the fact that he’s always been. In fact, Francis Schaeffer said that God has an always-was-ness, which is a rather intriguing way to describe this. “Was-ness” is not typically a word you can get away with using, say, in a paper for your English teacher. But, all the same, he’s right. The aseity shows that he has always been. There’s never a beginning to him, which gets into his other attributes as well. But we can see this, for example, in Exodus 3, when God appears to Moses at the burning bush, and Moses wants to know his name, and God replies with his name, which we often simply call Yahweh, but it means “I am who I am.” In other words, “I’ve always been.” In other words, I’m from myself. I have no other source of power than myself. It also shows us what we often call the creator/creation distinction, the fact that you have a creator who is an entirely different, well, I can’t even say field. I mean, he’s an entirely different being than we are because he has no beginning and he has no limitations. It’s also worth noting at this point, as we’re talking about the creation, that God actually creates because he wants to. He didn’t create because he had to. He did not create because he was lonely. He already had perfect fellowship in the Trinity. He creates simply because he wants to create. One of the things I love about the medieval theologian Richard of Saint Victor was he had this concept that God so loved his son that he made a bride worthy of him in the creation.
This, of course, is an idea. It’s based upon biblical ideas and kind of echoes John 3, 16, for God so loved the world that he sent his only son to save us.
But the point of Richard of St. Victor is to say that this creation had to be special. This creation had to be out of nothing, a term we’ll talk about in the next lecture, actually. But of course, it had to be out of nothing because the creation, by definition, is something that’s made, is something that’s entirely different than God. Because before their creation, there was only God. In fact, it’s one of the ideas we need to get in our minds is you can’t even say there was a nothingness, there was only God. There wasn’t even a nothingness that God was somehow suspended in, because that would imply the nothingness was infinite within. Another attribute of God that we can look at at this point, and one of his incommunicable attributes, is the fact that he does not change.
He’s always been the same. In other words, you can use to describe this as he is immutable. This means he does not change. In fact, James chapter one, verse 17, says, “Every good gift, every perfect gift is from above, “coming down from the Father of lights, “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.” This is enormous because if we’re to trust who he actually is, if we’re to believe that he can actually do what he says he’s going to do, then we have to trust that he doesn’t actually change. Because if he could change, that would mean he would be subject to the forces of the universe. That would mean perhaps that he could age. That would mean perhaps that he could grow weak. That would mean perhaps that he could turn evil. These are things curiously you see with all of the pagan gods and goddesses, especially the god Ra, for example, when we talk about, we’ll talk about him with Egyptian history, essentially that Ra grew too old to rule over the world anymore. but we take a different stand based upon the scriptures that God does not change, he’s always the same. Another one of his incommunicable attributes, you’re gonna notice he’s all kind of rolled together, is the fact that he is infinite. It’s based partly upon Job chapter 11 verses seven through nine, where one of Job’s friends who proves to be a poor comforter, if you know anything about the story of Job, he does say some brilliant words. He says, “Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It’s higher than heaven. What can you do? It’s deeper than Shale. What can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth and broader than the sea.” Now, this term infinite is important. It’s the opposite of finite. We are finite, which means we have limitations. Specifically, it means we have a beginning. When we say that God is infinite, we mean He has no limitations. We also mean He has no beginning. He has no beginning, He has no end. He is, as Psalm 90 tells us, from everlasting to everlasting. The idea of Him having no end is a little bit easier for us to grasp because our own souls have no end. That’s something we can actually relate to. But the idea of Him having no beginning, of going forever, back in time, and even before time, forever, to everlasting, that is something that should cause you to pause and stand in awe and to recognize that we do indeed have an amazing God.
Then of course, off of this, we get the three omnis. These are all related to his infinite trait. The first is his omnipotence, the fact that he has all power, the fact that he can do anything he wants to do. It’s really important, though, to make some qualifications here and to note that even though he can do anything he wants to do, it has to fit within his character.
So he’s not going to commit evil. Or some people like to point out, well, can God make a rock too big for himself to carry? There might be different versions of that, but that’s kind of the main question, is kind of thought, ah, I got you there. But it misses the point, because once you actually create something, that thing has a beginning, and because it’s created, it has a definition of where it can fit in terms of time. It can’t be truly infinite, and so therefore it cannot be the same as God. So the answer to the question is no, but the question kind of misses the point of what His omnipotence is. His omnipotence means that He can do anything that He wants to within His creation, keeping in mind He doesn’t change. Secondly, he’s also omnipresent, which means that he is present everywhere. I love the way that Cornelius Van Til talked about this, that his center is everywhere and he cannot be circumscribed. So the fullness of God is everywhere you actually go, even in hell. Hell is not the absence of God, it’s just the experience of his judgment and his wrath only. Third, we have his omniscience. Now, this is a word that, of course, means that he knows all things, and it also hints at the fact that he wills all things.
It’s not just that he knows what’s going to happen, it’s the fact that he has ordained everything that is actually going to happen. He has ordered it, he has planned it, he has commanded it. Anyway, we’ll go ahead and move on from these incommunicable attributes, and we’ll talk at least somewhat briefly about his communicable attributes. These are attributes that are sometimes described showing the fact that He is imminent. That even though He’s transcendent, He’s beyond us. He’s also present in His creation, and He’s present in a way that we can understand. These would be attributes, for example, such as His justice, such as His goodness, such as His wisdom, such as His love, such as His wrath or His anger even.
These are all attributes that we can take part in, that we can share, that we all experience because we’re made in His image. I mean, the fact that we create things is because He is a creator. The difference, of course, is that in these attributes, He’s infinite, whereas we are not. So those two things, His incommunicable and communicable attributes, they come together in who He is. It’s something that we cannot actually share in. But at the same time, what’s incredible about Him is that he appears in his creation. We’re gonna see that this was a chief occupation of pagan mankind, or of the culture we’re gonna look at, is they had this desire to know God and sought it in whatever way they could. My favorite stories from Greek mythology is the tale of Simile, one of the many, many women by whom Zeus had a child. The child that she had by Zeus was named Dionysus, whose name literally means the twice born. He’s a curious character. He’s often seen as the god of parties, of reverie, of wine, which he is, but he’s also very curiously the god of resurrection. And what’s interesting is that when she was still pregnant with him, she was tricked by Zeus’s jealous wife, Hera, into, well, I’m sorry, she wasn’t tricked, Zeus was tricked into promising on the river Styx, which was like this promise she made that could not be reversed, that he would grant Simele anything she wished.
And so then Simele asked Zeus, she said, “I want to see you in your glory. “I want to actually know you for who you actually are.” That’s why I mention this story, because that shows us right there the desire to actually know God, desire to actually see him, desire to actually witness him.
Of course, Zeus, knowing that if he reveals himself to her, she’ll die, tries to talk her out of it, but she’s insistent, so he does it, keeping his promise that he had made by the trickery of Hera, reveals himself and suddenly dies before him.
It’s curious because we see something almost similar to this when Moses asked God to show him part of his glory on Mount Sinai, And we’re told kind of this curious language that God reveals a part of his glory, kind of his backside, so to speak, to Moses who sees it through the cleft of a rock.
And then of course, when Moses comes down from the mountain, that glory shines so much on his face that Moses has to wear a veil.
In other words, these appearances of God, they show up in the Old Testament because this is how God actually interacts with us, because this is what we actually want.
It’s even what he wants, because he made us because he desires us. and he made us to desire him. That’s why we’re going to see these ideas throughout ancient stories. We’re also gonna see these ideas throughout the Old Testament, whether God appears in the form of a burning bush, in the form of a pillar of cloud, or a pillar of fire, or in the form of his greatest theophany, which is when he actually came in the form of a man.
The God who had created those vast and distant galaxies actually humbled himself and took on the body of man.