Kirk. So we're moving on to session four now, where we begin to talk about what it means to be made in the image of God. There's obviously something unique about this. There's nothing else in creation that's described in this particular way. And scripture doesn't always give us a clear picture of what that means. But I'll pick up on something that Kirk just prayed for, and that is the idea that as Christians in our sanctification, what we have lost in the fall, we are regaining. in our sanctification, that we are being remade into the image of Christ. And who then is that perfect image? And that is Jesus Himself. And it says that we know, well, we do not yet know what we will be when we see Him. We will be like Him. So there's that idea that whatever is captured in the essence of what it means to be fully human that we see in Christ is what our sanctification is about. But first, how did we get to the situation we're in now? I'm going to start again. I referred earlier to a TV show called CSI that I used to watch some years ago, Crime Scene Investigation. And the original version of that, for its theme song, used a popular song called Who Are You? And that's the question that we're trying to ask at this point. When Kirk says, why am I here? What's happening to me? Why is this happening to me? It's really part of the question of who are you and understanding who you are. What does the world have to say about that? Well, the world says you're nothing. But the Bible has a different, a much different view of that. And so this question of who we are, not just a question of what my name is or where I live or where I went to school and those kinds of identifying things, but what we are as man. That's what we're interested in knowing a little better. Now in one of the books that I've read by Schaefer, he talks about his experience at Labrie in Switzerland. And what must be a very frustrating thing for anybody in ministry, someone comes to you in a state of despair. They have been listening to everything that the world has to say about them, basically being evolved germs, grown-up germs emerging from the slime, that their lives really don't have any meaning, that whatever pain they may be feeling or whatever thing they may be suffering is meaningless, it has no purpose. And in what must have been a kind of a brilliant pastoral moment, Schaefer could look at the one who's despairing of what the world has to offer to the answer to the question, who are you? And say, I know who you are. I know who you are. Because he knows who that person is made in the image of God. Maybe that's something that Kirk can use in some of his patient counseling. So that's the question that we come to. Who are we? And what does this mean specifically for us to be made in the image of God? I want to borrow once more from what the Westminster Divines set down for us in the Westminster Confession, and this time in chapter 4, paragraph 2. And there we read, after God had made all other creatures, He created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, after His own image. And there is an important beginning for us to understand what it means to be made in His image. Reasonable and immortal souls, endued with knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness, after His own image. having the law of God written in their hearts and power to fulfill it, and yet under the possibility of transgressing, being left to the liberty of their own will, which was subject unto change. Beside this law written in their hearts, they received a command not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which while they kept, they were happy and happy in their communion with God and had dominion over the creatures. So as we start to look at this, we have to keep in mind that when we come to the next session and talk about the Fall and the effect of the Fall, it might be tempting to think that the Fall erased the image of God in man. But it must not have done that. There is still a remnant of that image left. We have an important clue to that found in Genesis 9 after the flood when God gives the command to Noah that whosoever sheds the blood of man, his blood will be shed. And the reason appended to that is that man is made in the image of God. So that image is still there. It's certainly damaged. It's not what it was originally. And it's not yet what it will be, but that essential aspect of that image of God is still there. Now, Kirk works in a field that in many ways is very secular, very scientific, very analytical. And we could ask, what does science have to say about what it means to be human? And it generally comes down to this, that you're just the sum of your parts. Your atoms, your molecules, your systems, everything working together, what we might call a fortuitous arrangement, of course, all as a product of evolution taking place very slowly over millions and millions of years. Of course, anyone who's studied the anatomy of the body, or even the anatomy of the cell, is completely stunned by the complexity and the order that's found there. It's not possible that it could have happened by chance. And yet, that's the dominant view. Without God, what are we? We're a collection of molecules. Now, interestingly, the medical profession is designed to help do things like alleviate suffering and to cure disease, to repair the body when it's broken, and to help it to heal. But more and more, what do we see? Kirk referred to euthanasia. And there's an oxymoron, if there ever was one, because euthanasia means good death. Euthanasia, as we use the term, is murder. Taking the life of someone, even near death. And that's forbidden. There's no biblical justification for that at all. But that drives us to ask the question, again, as Kirk raised the question, why am I suffering? If it's wrong to end suffering by taking the life of someone, even near the end of their life, then there must be a reason for suffering. But in the secular world, we can't make sense out of those kinds of things. The secular world will look at suffering and say, oh, suffering is bad, period, we have to stop it. If we can alleviate it with medication, we'll do that. But if necessary, we'll stop the suffering by ending a life. And that's wrong. So in the world of science, you're just the sum of your parts. Schaefer has an interesting way of putting this worldview. He calls it the material energy chance view of reality. The material energy chance view of reality. Everything is the way it is purely by chance. The idea of materialism is that we're just stuff. Whatever we are, we're just composed of stuff. The world is composed of stuff and we are just the sum of our stuff, whatever it happens to be. And trying to assign some value to it, trying to assign some meaning to it, is a fruitless effort because everything is just stuff at the end of the day. Now the Enlightenment brought us this idea and it turned out to be a futile one so the Enlightenment didn't go very far philosophically. It attempted to understand truth using reason without a knowledge of God. Remember what we were saying at the beginning that even Adam and Eve in their state of perfection needed God's word. to know what was right and wrong and to be able to discern. Rationalism says, we're just going to use our minds. We're rational beings. We're going to think it through and we're going to figure it out on the basis of where our thoughts take us. So the rationalist looks around at the universe and says, well, this seems to be a very ordered place. Everything works in a very orderly kind of way and there seem to be these natural laws that govern how everything works. And so we see in cause and effect, if one thing happens, then the effect is something else on the basis of whatever the natural law is that governs that. And on the basis of that, if we keep going with our rationalism, we end up saying that the universe is a machine and man is just part of the machinery. And it's a pretty pessimistic view because it basically means that whatever we may think we have in the way of free will or the ability to think for ourselves is just an illusion. Because everything can be predicted if we know the antecedent events. Everything follows a very mechanistic view. And so that means that man is really nothing but a cog in the machinery. He may think he has free will, he may think he thinks for himself, but he really doesn't. And that brought us to a point of despair. That's as far as enlightenment rationalism could get us. And if man is just a machine, then man isn't much. We have to draw the inevitable conclusion that we're just a product of the forces of the universe. So that led us to existentialism or what Schaeffer calls the upper story leap into mysticism. Logic took us down the road of despair. If we wanted to get back some idea of meaning, then we were going to have to give up reason in order to get to it. That wasn't much of an improvement. Now the dominant philosophy of our time is called humanism. And we could say there are many shades of it. But it's the same kind of idea, starting with man and trying to reason from what we have, without assuming the existence of God so that there's really no inherent purpose in our lives, and by the same degree, there is no inherent value to our lives. And as philosophy goes, that should scare you a little bit. because that ends up leading us into a collectivist kind of view. And what I mean by that, one of the buzzwords that you'll hear that is kind of the dog whistle is when you start hearing people talking about, well, this is for the common good. Well, what does that mean? That means somebody is not going to turn out well. For one person to do well, somebody else is going to lose. And in a humanistic worldview, there is no argument against that. This is the kind of view that would say, well, our hospitals are full of old patients who are dying. They're probably terminally ill. Let's just go ahead and put them down like an old mutt so that we can clear out the resources and allow younger people to have access to the resources. It takes a very utilitarian view of human life. There's something else in Schaeffer that is a very sticky idea, though. He talks about the manishness of man in his usual odd kind of way of speaking. And it's that idea that man knows that there's something that's different about man. There is something, as it were, written in the heart that tells him he is different, that his life is not meaningless, his life is not an accident, that there is something unique about it and something valuable about it. Humanism, however, has a worldview, and this is interesting if you read the Humanist Manifestos, that it says that science has disproved the idea of a separable soul. Somehow or another, and I was napping at the time, science managed to prove something that's metaphysical. The idea that man does not have a soul. And of course, we know from the biblical account that man does have a soul, and that's part of what makes him unique. He is both body and soul, body and spirit. But humanism tries to deny the existence of the soul. And part of the consequence of that, if there is no soul, then when your life is over, it's over. There's nothing that continues beyond the grave. There's nothing beyond the grave for you to find. And certainly no one beyond the grave to hold you accountable. Another consequence of this kind of humanistic view is that we start engaging in an economic calculus. We say, what is the value of a human life? And I guarantee you, I don't know if Kirk has started to run into this or not, but I guarantee you this is coming. Oh, you're 80 years old. Well, we're not going to pay for you to have a knee replacement. Because why? Well, you're already at the end of your life. There's no reason in spending money on someone who's already near the end of their life. But if you're in too much pain, we'll give you some morphine. And you can take as much of that as you want to. So there's inevitably, when we go down this kind of road, a utilitarian way of thinking, we're going to be changing what it means to be human by the way that we try to place a value on human life. Biblically, how do we do that? What is the value of a human life from the standpoint of Scripture? Well, here's one of those places where we run into a temporal limitation. And what I mean by that is how do you measure the value of a soul with something that's temporal or temporary, like money? Is your soul worth a million dollars or two million? What is the price of a soul? And we'll look at a verse in a moment that attempts to answer that question. So we end up, if we go down that pathway, in what's called a quality of life ethic. And it sounds maybe reasonable on the surface, but it ought to scare you. Because it basically says when you get to a certain age or you have a certain kind of illness or disability, that someone else is going to determine for you that the quality of your life is not worth saving, that the quality of your life is not worth living. So there's a profound difference, just as the difference between creation and evolution, between a quality of life ethic that is humanistic, where there's no intrinsic value to human life, and a sanctity of life ethic. What was it that we were fighting for so many years ago when we started Lufkin for Life? We could say, well, we were fighting against Planned Parenthood. That might be true enough. But what we were really doing in the process was articulating a sanctity of life ethic, that all life is precious, especially life in the womb from the moment of conception. It's not something for us to simply decide that if we don't want it or it's inconvenient, that we discard it. Or if we think that it's too expensive, as if we could measure the value of a human life with dollars and cents. So in all of those kinds of things, those humanistic views, we don't have a doctrine of suffering. And in fact, it's one of the common objections to Christianity It goes something like this, if God is good and God is all-powerful, then why does he allow suffering? And the answer is, if God is good and God is all-powerful and he allows suffering, then he must have a good reason for it. And then he must be able to bring some good out of it. And that's what we need to understand. So suffering, even suffering in the Christian view, is not without meaning. It's not without purpose. It doesn't diminish the difficulty of it. The reality of it comes as a result of the fall, which we'll talk about in the next session. But at least in a Christian worldview, we could say it this way, that our suffering is redeemed, that there is a purpose in it. that it is not, as it were, a reason for rejecting Christianity because we assume that if God were good, he would stop it. At this point, it might be helpful to remember that it wasn't God who brought suffering and death into the world. That would be us. That was on us. So we talked a little bit before lunch about how In the narrative of creation, as we read the unfolding narrative of six-day creation, it seems to be a story with a direction. It's going somewhere. And so it culminates then on that last day with the creation of Adam and Eve in the image of God. We could say that God was saving the best for last. And it's unfortunate, and this is part of the fall, that even though we are given incredible dignity as creatures made in the image of God, that we seem to spend a lot of our time denigrating that and trying to tear it down. It's kind of like the idea of taking a beautiful painting and just spraying it with graffiti. We are besmirching what was made beautiful and valuable, infinitely valuable. Now one of the narratives that you hear, especially in regard to climate change, there's this inherent idea that somehow man is bad, and there are those who will even argue that man is literally a plague on the planet, and it might be better if he were mostly wiped out. I guess mostly, not including those who are saying that he should be wiped out. There are always going to be exceptions. But is that the case? What is the purpose of this creation? God made the heavens and the earth, and He made it to be inhabited. He made it as the theater of redemption where this unfolding story of redemption would play out. This world is temporary. Our scientists may say it's been here for four and a half billion years, But based on the scriptural evidence, we wouldn't agree with that, that it's been here a few thousand. And it may be here for a few thousand more, we don't know. But the idea that the Earth is still going to be here in five billion years, that's a guess. And that's not a justification for saying that what we are doing now, which is using the world's resources and destroying the planet, is a problem. If it's the case that the Lord returns tomorrow when we still have plenty of coal and oil and gas, then there was more than enough here for the time that we needed it. And we have to trust that God and His wisdom would provide the resources that we would need, whether in terms of food or energy or those kinds of things. Let's look at Isaiah 45 verses 18 and 19. And here we have another reminder of God as the Creator. For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens, he is God, who formed the earth and made it, he established it, he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited. I am the Lord and there is no other. I did not speak in secret in a land of darkness. I did not say to the offspring of Jacob, seek me in vain. I, the Lord, speak the truth. I declare what is right." So God intends for man to thrive upon the earth. What do we see in the very opening narrative of Genesis in chapter 1? For those who are lying awake at night worrying about population explosion, I've got to press the question, where did you get that idea? Because you didn't get it from scripture. You may have gotten it from Malthus or what's his name? More recently, sure, yeah. there are those who have predicted the end of the universe or the end of the earth because of overpopulation and yet the scripture is very clear from the beginning that God made life to multiply, to reproduce, to fill the earth and that command was given to the whole earth wasn't it? Look at verse 22 in chapter 1 referring to the creatures. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters and the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth. And He later gives the same command to man, and more than once. And in fact, if you remember a little further along in Genesis after the flood, after God said, Now after the flood, I want you to disperse abroad over the whole earth." And man said, nah, here's a good spot, let's stay here. And what resulted from that? God came down and confused the languages and scattered the families abroad so that they could not just stay in one place. We're meant to scatter abroad. I was just noticing, I just happened to notice this on the way from Colorado down here to Texas and across a good portion of Texas, that there's still a lot of open space. I think there's still room for a few more people. And anybody who's flown across the country would probably say the same thing. There are vast expanses. of this country and every country that are yet uninhabited. And yet, why do we fret so much about population control? Man is made in God's image, and God says to him, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and have dominion over it. And yet man says, I think we're wiser than that, and we're not going to do that. Now let's take a look at Genesis 2 as we start to dial in a little more in this idea of the Imago Dei. Take a look at verse 7 in chapter 2. It says, Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature." Now here's something for us to think about for a moment. The first thing that God did was form Adam's body. If we had been there at that moment, we would have seen Adam. He might have looked like he was asleep, but he was still just dust, wasn't he? like clay formed from the ground. And it wasn't until that moment when God breathed into him the breath of life that he became a living being. And what seems to be more unusual about this creation than the other parts of creation that we've seen so far? We notice that it's very personal and that it's God's breath Himself that breathes into the man life. And this breath is referring to the soul, that man has a soul. And that makes him unique in all the creation, because nothing else that God has created so far has a soul. It may be material or flesh, but after it perishes, it's gone. It returns to the ground. that something's unique about man, that even though man's body may return to the ground after death, his soul returns to the Lord. So man has a soul that lives forever. One of my former pastors used to like referring to man as animated dust, trying to think of who that was. But the spirit of man lives on. God has made that spirit to live forever. And one of the reasons why we cannot simply try to value mankind on the basis of what he can do or what he consists of is that the most important thing that he consists of is metaphysical. What is the value of a man's soul? And we can't put a price on it. This man also has particular responsibilities. He's given dominion over all the rest of creation. And he's also bounded by a law, and we see that a little further down in chapter 2. The confession that we read from a little while ago referred to this. Let's see. Trying to find the verse. Oh, here we go. So verse 16. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat of it you shall surely die. So here God places man in the garden. surrounds him with every kind of tree that's good for food, places no limitations at all on what he can eat or how much, when, but then there's this one line in the sand, so to speak. There's this one tree that's off limits. And as we'll see, Part of what's happening here is that while God is establishing Adam to have dominion over this creation, there's a limit to that dominion. He doesn't have dominion over all of it because there's a part of it that God has created that he says, that part's not for you. And that's going to represent the test that we see when we get to the next chapter. Is man going to stay within the bounds of the dominion that God has assigned to him, or is he going to be tempted to leave that proper bound? This limitation has two parts as well. There's a limitation in terms of the authority. In other words, think of it as if you walk outside here, there's a fence around your property. That fence represents the boundary between your property and the next property, and it's not for you to cross that fence into someone else's property. In the same way, God says, I'm putting a fence around this tree, that one's mine, all the rest are yours. Is Adam going to fall into the temptation of crossing that boundary, of taking some property that's not his? And the other thing that that tree represents, as we'll see, is knowledge. So we see that as Adam is created, even in his perfection, he is limited both in terms of authority and in terms of knowledge, and that his temptation is going to be to grasp something that's outside of his authority and to reach for knowledge that God has not intended for him to have. Does God intend for His creatures to have complete knowledge? The answer is, of course, not. We are finite creatures. Even if we wanted to, we couldn't have omniscience. But it is the case that God has revealed to us what He wants us to know and what we need to know, and therein we're supposed to be content. There's a verse that captures that idea. pretty familiar verse in Deuteronomy. The secret things belong to the Lord our God. The revealed things belong to us and to our children forever. And it doesn't stop there. It also goes on to say, so that we may do all that is in this law. So God intends for us to know His law and to live according to His law, to live within the bounds of that law, to live with the knowledge that He has given to us, and not to grasp after those things that He has set off limits to us. So man is reminded, as it were, in the creation, even though he's given dominion, that his dominion necessarily has limits because he as a creature has limits. As we mentioned in the last section, one of the important consequences of the creation account of Adam as the first man and Eve as the first woman is that all people everywhere are descended from them. Many varieties, many colors, many different languages, but all one human race so that The idea that we can arbitrarily divide people into different races, that's problematical from the very beginning. We may have different backgrounds, but we are nevertheless one race. We also talk some about the fact that God makes man male and female. And when we look at the anarchy of our present age and the insanity of it, the idea that if we go back, let's say, 50 years to the 60s, the big deal was sexual anarchy. I don't want to be restrained at all. And then that turned into homosexuality. And now what do we have? we have this movement that says well I'm not male or female I'm whatever I want to be and even if I was made one or the other I can deny that and try to be something else and use every means possible to do that whether chemical or surgical and how much of a repudiation is that of the manner in which God has made us he's made us male and female by His design and for His purpose. And it's as if man is trying to distance himself as much as he can from God as God originally created him. And it's an act of futility. As we start to bring this section to a close, I want to take a look at John 11. We have the story in Genesis 1 that we just looked at of how God formed Adam out of the dust and breathed into him the breath of life. Again, that's nothing less than a miracle. There is no natural process by which something that's non-living can become living. I'll give you an anecdote that I recently saw that kind of illustrates the point. And that's the idea that when you buy a jug of milk and it says on the milk that it's pasteurized, it's de facto proof that life doesn't come from non-life. The whole point of pasteurizing a jug of milk is that it's not going to grow bacteria because bacteria don't grow unless there's already bacteria there to grow. But if you kill what's living, then nothing else grows because life does not come from non-life. I can illustrate in a little more graphic way what I call the frog in the blender. Go take a frog and put him in a blender, put it on puree for 20 or 30 seconds, turn the blender off, remove the lid, and wait for the frog to come out. And you say, well, the frog's not coming back out. And my response is, why not? All the ingredients for life are in the blender. Everything that's necessary for life is already in the blender. I'm giving you a big head start. But we know that life does not come from non-life, not without the intervention of the Creator. And so we come to John 11. This is the narrative of the raising of Lazarus. Let me start in verse 17 to capture more of the narrative here. Now, when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother. So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house. Martha said to Jesus, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you. Jesus said to her, your brother will rise again. Martha said to him, I know that he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day. Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet he shall live. And everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this? She said to him, Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world. When she had said this, she went and called her sister Mary, saying in private, The teacher is here and is calling for you. And when she heard it, she rose quickly and went to him. Now Jesus had not yet come into the village, but was still in the place where Martha had met him. When the Jews who were with her in the house, consoling her, saw Mary rise quickly and go out, they followed her, supposing that she was going to the tomb to weep there. Now, when Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet saying to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said to him, where have you laid him? They said to him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept. So the Jews said, see how he loved him. But some of them said, could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying? Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, take away the stone. Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead for four days. Jesus said to her, did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God? So they took away the stone and Jesus lifted up his eyes and said, Father, I thank you that you have heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I said this on account of the people standing around that they may believe that you sent me. When he had said these things, he cried out with a loud voice, Lazarus, come out. The man who had died came out, his hands and feet bound with linen strips and his face wrapped with a cloth. Jesus said to them, unbind him and let him go. This is even more remarkable than my disgusting analogy of the frog in the blender because Someone who's been dead for four days is going to have more than an odor. Decomposition by this time has set in considerably. And yet, this one who calls to life the dead is also the one that we read earlier was the one who created in the beginning, created all things, and sustains all things. Science doesn't explain these kinds of things. Science says that that can't happen. That sort of thing doesn't happen. It's kind of interesting that they would deny the resurrection, saying that it couldn't happen, when they're the ones who are telling us that life came out of non-life in the beginning. And it kept evolving and becoming more complex completely on its own without any directed effort. and there's part of the inconsistency of an unbelieving worldview. We can't make sense out of what we're seeing. Now, this is an important story for more than one reason. Obviously, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead is a picture of Jesus raising all the dead on the last day. It's also a picture that connects us back to creation, the one who breathes the breath of life into the dust of Adam. and makes him a living being. And part of what is being expressed here when Jesus says, I am, takes us back. And let's look at Exodus 3. This is where Moses is in the wilderness and sees the burning bush and turns aside to see what this is about. And he begins this conversation with God, where God tells him he's going to be sent to lead the people of Israel out of their captivity in Egypt. And I'll pick up the narrative in verse 13 of chapter 3. Then Moses said to God, if I come to the people of Israel and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me, what is his name, what shall I say to them? God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you. When Jesus starts using these expressions, I am, the resurrection and the life. I am the way and the truth and the life. I am the door to the sheepfold. I am the Good Shepherd and so forth. He's making statements of deity. He is more than just a teacher. He is a Savior and He is the one who has created us and the one who has the power of resurrection, the power of life in Himself. and we would all do well to heed that call that He makes for those to put their trust in Him for salvation because there is salvation in no other. We'll close this session by considering a short quotation from Berkhoff. where he says, The doctrine of the image of God in man is of the greatest importance in theology, for that image is the expression of that which is most distinctive in man and in his relation to God. Man has infinite worth because he is created in God's image. And it is precisely the work that Christ is doing in the renewal of that fallen spirit to bring man back into the image and likeness that God created him with. Amen. Come back here, please, at 245.