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All right, well, after five weeks
looking at chapter three of the Westminster Confession of Faith,
we're now going to look at chapter four, which is entitled Of Creation. So just a very quick review before
we dive right in. Chapter one was of the Holy Scripture. Chapter two was of God and the
Holy Trinity. And then chapter three was of
God's eternal decree. So these first three chapters
of the confession really lay out the basis for who God is,
how we know about him, how he's revealed himself, and then what
his general will for the world is. That's kind of the first
three chapters. And then in the remaining chapters, a couple
dozen chapters, we get much more into the nuts and bolts of how
his decretive will or his decrees, what he's decreed to come to
pass, are executed. How it happens in time. And then how his prescriptive
will, his commands, what he said, I command that you do this, this
is my will for your life, how that is to be obeyed. So the
rest of the chapters, for the most part, are how his decrees
pan out in time and how we are to obey him as he reveals himself
in the Holy Scripture. So the logical place to begin
speaking about how God's eternal decrees are worked out in time
is by speaking about the creation of the heavens and the earth.
So that's what we're on now, chapter four of creation. I'm gonna read paragraph one
for us today. It's just a two paragraph chapter,
so it's a little shorter, and we're just gonna go through the
first half of it tonight. Chapter four, paragraph one.
It pleased God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost for the manifestation
of the glory of His eternal power, wisdom, and goodness in the beginning
to create or make out of nothing the world and all things therein,
whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days and
all very good. We'll go through that a couple
more times as we're going through, but I'll read it again one more
time for you right now, just so you have it in your head.
I know their sentences are very long and they're very full. So
sometimes we can get lost in the middle of it. So I'm gonna
read it one more time. It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost for the manifestation of the glory of His eternal power,
wisdom, and goodness in the beginning to create or make of nothing
the world and all things therein, whether visible or invisible,
in the space of six days and all very good. I've said this before, but it
bears repeating. When we're reading the Bible
or sometimes theology books, it's often very easy for us to
rush past important details. But when God inspired the scriptures,
he did not waste a single word. There's no unnecessary fluff
added, no elegance that lacks content. So every word of the
Bible comes directly from the mouth of God and every word matters. And I just want us to remember
that, especially as we approach this doctrine of creation, because
the Westminster divines, we might think, wow, they're really making
these long sentences, but every single clause has a purpose.
Sometimes they'll even have in one sentence, multiple footnotes
throughout the sentence, just to show you where they're establishing
each phrase from scripture. And so I don't want us to rush
past these first few words in this paragraph. We're going to
dive right in. Paragraph one opens by declaring the truth
that it pleased God to create the world. It pleased God to
make the heavens and the earth. He didn't make the heavens and
the earth because he was lonely, but it did please him. Think
about the first chapter of Genesis describes God reflecting on the
work of his creation. What phrase do we see over and
over again in Genesis 1, where God reflects on his creation
after he made it? If you know it, you can say it
out loud. That's right. And it was good. And God saw
it and it was good. God saw what he had made and
behold, it was good. We see that over and over again.
God makes something. Well, first he decrees it of
God's eternal decree. He has a plan in his mind. Everything
God does is according to his eternal counsel of his perfect
will. Then he does that plan and then
he reflects on what he did. And as he's reflecting on creation,
he says, this is good. I see what I've made and behold,
it is good. And then at the end, it is very
good. God was taking pleasure. in his
creation. It was, of course, an objective
goodness. He's looking at it objectively and saying, this
is good, but he was also taking delight and pleasure in what
he made, just not a cold calculating checkbox of good creation. And
even though his entire creation shortly would be subjected to
a curse because of our sinfulness in Adam, God continues even to
this day to take pleasure in what he has made. He delights
in the work of his hands. There are things about this world. I don't know if you've thought
about this before. It's something I think about
frequently. There are things about this world that only God
knows about. No matter how long the heavens
and the earth persist before Christ returns to judge the living
and the dead, whether that's a hundred more years or 10,000
more years or even longer, there will almost certainly, I think,
be things about God's creation that are known only to God. And in our self-centered humanistic
minds, we are sometimes tempted to think, well, what purpose
could something created that's never discovered by man serve?
What purpose could that serve? I get asked questions like these
sometimes when I'm doing outreach about, you know, what if this
crime happens and no one ever sees it? Will there ever be justice
done? Or what if there's just all types of absurd questions,
but God sees everything and God delights in the goodness of his
creation. The answer is what purpose can
these things that we don't know serve is that even the secret
things about the heavens and the earth exist for God's pleasure
and for the display of his glory. One of the Psalms we sing here
at church puts this doctrine on display very clearly. Psalm
104, God makes the grass grow. It's a favorite of our kids because
it talks about sea monsters. In verse six, we sing this, forever
Jehovah, your glory is lasting. Rejoice in your works and look
down on the earth. That's a fairly literal translation.
Rejoice in your works and look down on the earth. And this is
not just, the psalmist is not just giving a vague hope. I really hope God rejoices in
what he's made. No, this is a prayer of praise,
thanking God that you, in fact, Lord, you do rejoice in the work
of your hands. And that's something that we
should praise you all the more for. You continue to rejoice
in this world you made. God tells us about this in great
detail in the whirlwind speeches in Job. Job about 38 through
41, we read some of the most wonderful descriptions of God's
power and his works in the world. We learn about heavenly storehouses
full of snow, treasuries of hail stockpiled for the day of battle. We hear about God's ability to
string together constellations, to tame the most powerful animals
on earth. Many of the things God describes
here, no one has ever even seen. God says this, who has divided
a channel for the overflowing water or a path for the thunderbolt
to cause it to rain on a land where there is no one, a wilderness
in which there is no man. No one's even in some of these
places on the earth and God says, I'm still sending rain. I'm still
sending rain. I'm still growing plants. There
might not even be animals here. Why am I doing this? It's for
my glory and for my pleasure. God has created things that we
don't know about and that no one will ever see just to delight
himself in them and to declare his glory to himself. He can
declare his glory just to himself. Sometimes we think, well, God's
declaring his glory for us to see. Well, he does, but he also
declares his glory for himself and for his angels. His angels
are concerned about his glory and about proper worship of God
and to the animals. Think about that. God declares
his glory to animals. We're not his only creatures.
We're the only ones made with rational souls and made in the
image of God, but we're not the only ones he has made. All of
God's creation is first and foremost for the pleasure and glory of
God himself. And so I don't think the confession
accidentally put in there that the first words, it was for God's
pleasure, according to his pleasure. Another detail we might be tempted
to rush past here in chapter four, paragraph one, is who the
divine say accomplished this great work of creation. They
do not merely assert that God is the creator, but that God,
the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or Holy Ghost, as they say, took
pleasure in the creation of the world. The creation of the heavens
and the earth, like all of the works of God, was a Trinitarian
work. It was not only God the Father
who created the world. And then we have thousands of
years until Jesus shows up. Sometimes we can kind of slip
into that thinking, but the Trinity, God is a Trinity, and God as
the Trinity was involved in the work of creation. The confession
cites a number of proof texts here to establish this point.
I want us to look at just a few of them together. First, we have
Hebrews 1, 2. God hath in these last days spoken
unto us by his Son, whom he hath appointed heir of all things,
by whom also he made the worlds. How was it that God made the
worlds? It was by His Son. And then looking
back into the Old Testament, with the understanding that we
now have, since God sent His Son and gave us the revelation
of Jesus Christ and gave us the New Testament, we can see even
more how Christ was pointed to, even in the words of the Old
Testament. Psalm 33 verse six tells us this,
by the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the
host of them by the breath of His mouth. That sounds to me
like it's pointing exactly to Jesus Christ. By the word of
the Lord, the heavens were made. Jesus is the one who's gone forth.
He's the one who's been sent by God to effect his creative
power. The apostle John tells us essentially
this exact same thing in the opening of his gospel that we've
been going through on Sunday mornings. John 1. In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made
by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.
Jesus was involved in every aspect of creation. All things were
made by Him, and just in case you're confused, there was nothing
that was made that wasn't made by Him. All by the Word of the
Lord. And then of course we have Genesis
chapter one again. In the beginning, God made the heaven and the earth
and the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon
the face of the deep and the spirit of God moved upon the
face of the waters. So each person of the Trinity
was clearly involved in the work of creation. Now, before we move
on, I wanna just read our paragraph we're working through one more
time here to keep us calibrated. It pleased God the Father, Son,
and Holy Ghost for the manifestation of the glory of His eternal power,
wisdom, and goodness in the beginning to create or make of nothing
the world and all things therein, whether visible or invisible,
in the space of six days and all very good. So God has created
the world for the manifestation of His glory, of the glory of
His eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, specifically, the divines
point out here. And we've already touched on
a good bit of that. I think that's all shown in the whirlwind speeches
and elsewhere, but I wanna reflect specifically on how we can see
these three attributes that the confession cites for us, three
attributes of God on display in His creation. And I'd love
if anyone has examples, some participation here. Can someone
give us an example of how we can see, today, we can see God's
power, wisdom, or goodness on display in his creation? Those
three aspects are highlighted. Absolutely. That's right. That's right. And used to, even
in the news and papers and things, we would call them acts of God.
Because it was so evident that only God could do something like
that. That that's something a human couldn't do. Well, it could be. Yeah. Maybe
if you have something in mind. Sorry. Yeah. Power, wisdom, goodness,
anything that you see in creation. Just as deep as you want to go
in the intricacies of a flower or a leaf or... Absolutely. Absolutely. So we can see, you
know, God's, both his power and ability to create that, but also
wisdom and the intricacy and the intentionality that went
there, the knowledge that he must have to create something
like that. I mean, he has all possible knowledge that could
ever be, and that's how he creates these things. The counsel of
his will is perfect. And so I think intricate care is an important
one. Any other examples anyone wants to highlight? I think we see his wisdom in the
marriage relationship. Yes. How it's designed and how
it works. We see his wisdom in a lot of
design, I guess. Yeah, I think design is really
key for wisdom. Marriage is a good one. It teaches
us about who God is and how he relates to us. And then just
how he made us to go together, how he made us to just to fit
together so perfectly in a marriage relationship. Another one that
I thought of that... I just put down here in some
notes is how God has made food just all over the place. I mean,
he's made food to pop up out of the ground. He's made it to
fall from trees. He's made food that runs around, you know, until
we catch it. He's made food that swims in
the water. He's made food that makes other food for us, like
chickens giving us eggs or cows giving us milk. All the intricate
wisdom and goodness and power that goes into things like that
is amazing. Think of the wisdom that it takes
to make an eye. or to make a bumblebee fly. You know, I've heard, I
don't know how true this is, but I've heard like scientists
and physicists and engineers say bumblebees shouldn't be able
to fly according to what we understand about mechanics. Like it just,
they don't know how this giant round thing can fly so well,
but they do, they fly. God is wise. He's wiser than
all the wisdom of the world. And His goodness, I think, relates
to all that. He's been very good. Relating to food, I was just
reflecting this afternoon thinking, yes, God was wise and powerful
to make all these ways of getting food, but he was good too. He
gave us a desire and he gave us the answer to that desire.
He's not going to leave us hungry. And he made the food taste good.
God didn't have to invent taste. He could have made everything
bland or he could have made things taste bad, but he made food taste
so good. There are some foods that just
taste so good. You want to keep eating them and eating them and
eating them. And then he made other things. I thought about
goodness. He made things in the world, think of this, God created
the world good. He did not create the world with
any sin. And yet he still planned and designed that certain things
in this world would heal us when we get sick or injured. Like
he put into certain plants, medicinal qualities, antibiotic qualities,
pain relieving power within certain things because he knew we were
going to sin and therefore we were gonna incur the curse, which
results in sickness and death. And he said, I'm gonna just,
preload into all of these wonderful things that I made healing qualities.
So just so many wonderful things that God made that testified
to his power, wisdom, and goodness that anyone can see. You don't
have to have a Bible. You don't have to have a relationship
with the Lord. You can just see and realize who could make a
mountain. Clearly only God could do something
like that. So he's just wonderful and powerful. Sadly, I think today, perhaps
this aspect of seeing God in creation is a little bit harder
for us than it was for our fathers. We live more disconnected from
the land and from animals than our ancestors did. They knew
about the power of the ox because the ox is the one that plowed
their fields. They didn't have tractors. They didn't go to the
grocery store to get their meat. They knew about this more than
I think maybe we do today. I'm confident they had a more
real knowledge of God's power in creation than we do. today
yes yeah for like 80 years without stopping a single time that's
right yeah That's right. You put a slightly
wrong weighted oil into your car engine and it doesn't work.
You put anything into us and we just keep going for years
and years and years. It's amazing. God just made a system that works
so perfectly together, even with the curse of sin. We still, I
mean, it still just works really, really well. And that is something
that we could just praise God about. Praise God. God created a good world, a good
world that declares his goodness, his wisdom, and his power. And
then this first paragraph closes by emphasizing that, in the beginning,
God created or made of nothing the world and all things therein,
whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days and
all very good. A lot of the things we just talked
about when we were talking about how we can see God's wonderful power,
goodness, and wisdom in creation, we think automatically of the
physical and the visible things that God has created. But he
also made a whole spiritual world as well. God made these glorious
creatures called angels. And they are among us. They're
attending the public worship of God. They guard over us. They
are ministering spirits. They are messengers from the
Lord. We don't even see them. We don't even see these angels
around us and they are around us. And just think of how wonderful
that is. And whenever people do get glimpses of angels, it
is overwhelming. People think they're going to
die when they see an angel. Obviously, fear is a huge component,
but I think it's just the awesomeness of this wonderful thing that
God has made that He is, for the most part, hidden from our
eyes. He made heavenly realities that
we have not found out about, and we won't find out about until
eternity. There could be just tons of things
about the heavenly spiritual world that we don't know anything
about. We get these glimpses though, like the celestial city.
What does it mean to have streets of gold or shining clothes or
gates made of pearl? I mean, it's just amazing. We
can't hardly understand what that would be like. Think of
the descriptions that we have of God's heavenly throne room
or his throne, that he has a rainbow of emerald around him. And his
throne is on a floor of like these wonderful jewels that we
don't even know how to put into words because they shine and
sparkle and show so many colors. are not just what we would think
of as heavenly things, but think of other unseen things like radio
waves. I mean, what? I don't even know
what a radio wave is, if I'm being honest. No human being
even knew radio waves existed for almost 6,000 years. But God
created this electromagnetic field so that thousands of years
after his work of creation was complete, people would be able
to talk to their loved ones from opposite ends of the earth. I
mean, that's amazing. He made these radio waves so
that in the 21st century, the gospel could be preached here
in North Carolina and then listened to in Australia or Oman or Madagascar
or South Korea or Sweden. Those were all places that people
have listened to our messages. I looked that up because I was thinking,
how far has this gone? It's amazing that God has done
this. I mean, the electromagnetic field was not an accidental aspect
of creation. God designed that intentionally.
We probably haven't even discovered all the ways we can harness that
power. I'm sure we haven't, in fact. All according to God's
wonderful plan, though. Further, the confession reminds
us of the very plain biblical truth that God created the world
out of nothing. This is one of the greatest miracles
that could ever be. God himself has existed from
eternity past. We know that, but nothing else
has. There's been nothing else that has existed from eternity
past. God did not have any raw materials
with which to create the cosmos. When we create things, we might
use that word create, but when we create things, we have to
do it out of materials that already exist. If we wanna make a house,
we have to get the wood and we have to get the cement and get
the nails and get all these supplies. We can't just speak a house into
existence. But God created the heavens and the earth out of
nothing. And this is something that no
one else can do. This is the great problem that
atheism and naturalism cannot answer. They cannot, atheists
cannot even come close to anything that even looks like an answer
for where the universe came from. Something that I've talked to
people about a bunch and I'll run into an app when we're doing
evangelism. It's, you know, we'll talk about, well, you don't believe
in God, tell me why. Well, I believe in evolution,
you know, something like that. Or I believe in the big bang.
So I say, okay, well, where did our universe come from? Please
enlighten me. Tell me where it came from. Because
everything that begins to exist has to have a cause. And the
universe, nearly every atheistic, naturalistic scientist or anyone
will now admit it had a beginning. Almost every single person agrees
the universe had a beginning. This is bad news for atheism.
Because then the question is, well, how did it begin? Well,
they'll say the Big Bang. The Big Bang caused it. All the
matter of the whole universe was compressed into one single
point and then exploded into the universe we know of today,
more or less, after some cooling and some other things happened.
Say, okay, well, you've told me how the universe expanded,
how everything got spread out, but you've said absolutely nothing
about how it came to be. How did all this matter come
into existence to be compressed into that one little point? I
don't know. Okay, well, how did it explode
though? Apart from some outside force
acting on it, how would this little singularity explode? because
I don't understand how that could happen. And if there was an outside
force, then that means there was something outside of all
matter. Sounds like something like a
God, right? I don't know. I don't know what
they might say. And why is it that only universes explode into
apparent existence? Sure would be great if money
exploded into apparent existence, or why don't people explode into
apparent existence, or microwaves, or iPhones? Why is it only entire
universes? I don't know. Atheism is utterly
unable to explain any of this. And this is one of the most basic
articles of our faith. It's the thing that they can't
figure out and they can't understand. And it's the absolute base level
of Christianity that every toddler knows God created the world.
It's how the Bible opens, Genesis 1. It's how the Apostles' Creed
begins. I believe in God, the Father
Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. Basic, basic. Hebrews 11.3 is perhaps even
more clear on this doctrine. Here we're taught that through
faith, we understand that the worlds were framed by the word
of God so that the things which are seen were not made of things
which do appear. The things which are seen were
not made of things which do appear. And then finally, the divines
tell us that God did this wonderful work of creation in the space
of six days. There's no reason whatsoever
for us to doubt that God created the heavens and the earth in
six literal consecutive 24 hour days. There've been many theories
which have been advanced over the years, over the millennia
even, but especially over the past century and a half or so
to explain, well, maybe this could have been, the universe
could have been much older or God could have created things
over a longer period of time. But all of these theories fall
flat. Some people have said, well, the creation account in
Genesis and in other places of the Bible, it's poetic. So it
shouldn't be understood literally. And sure, there are poetic elements
to how many parts of the Bible are written. But just because
the first several chapters of Genesis do have some poetic elements
as to how they were written, doesn't mean they're not true
and historical. This is just very plain, clear
communication. Genesis 1 is not one of the dark
and hard passages of the Bible to interpret. There was evening
and there was morning, one day. That's how you could read the
Hebrew, literally. There's evening, there's morning,
one day. And then interestingly, after
that one day, then we have a numbering, which shows a consecutive. Then
there's evening and morning, the second day. Evening and morning
the third day. So the first one's a measurement.
Evening and morning one day, not first day. Then evening and
morning a second day, evening and morning a third day, and
so on in sequence. It's very clear, these are just
regular days. And if there was any doubt from reading Genesis
1, look at what God says when he gives the law to his people
on Mount Sinai. The fourth commandment reads
like this. He says, remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor and
do all thy work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord
thy God. In it thou shalt not do any work,
Thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant,
nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates. For,
we could say, because in six days the Lord made heaven and
earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested the seventh
day. Wherefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed
it. So what's one of the reasons that God gives the people for
their observing of a weekly Sabbath? Because that's precisely what
God did. He worked for six days and rested on the seventh. He's,
I mean, clearly God in the 10 commandments is talking about
a literal week here. That's absolutely what he's talking about. He worked
six days and rested on the seventh. And since the heavens and the
earth were created in six literal 24 hour days, we can also conclude
that the earth is relatively young. Archbishop James Usher
calculated that the creation occurred in 4004 BC. He did an enormous amount of
work just before the Westminster Confession was written in the
17th century to come up with that date. He combed through
all the genealogies, however old everyone was, all the events
that we knew had certain dates before Christ. And he came up
with the year 4004 BC. Now I haven't done, 1% of the legwork that Usher did.
But I don't know if we can be that certain about the year.
And he was certain. I don't know that we can be that certain.
I tend to think he was right, but here's the thing. It doesn't
matter for our faith at all. It's no consequence to us or
to the truth of God's word if it was 4,004 or 5,000. I mean,
it's not a big deal. The key is the earth is thousands
of years old, not tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, not
more than that. The people which posit an old
earth, which I encountered a lot in seminary, you know, we forget
the institutions always run more liberal. Almost all the institutions
that are teaching pastors are going to teach tend toward a
more old earth approach. The people which posit an old
earth tend to allow the so-called scientific discoveries to influence
their reading of scripture in ways which are just clearly foreign
to the text and largely foreign to church history. Plus, along
with an old earth, you have very troubling elements that pop up.
Macro evolution, that one type of being could become over a
a long period of time, another type of being in its descendants.
Death before sin, that's the absolute biggest problem of theistic
evolution. Because Romans 5 is absolutely
clear that death came into the world through sin. But if we
evolve from another species that God created millennia before
us, or millions of years before us, well, why are they all not
still there when Adam's there? They kept dying, of course. Well,
how do you have death before sin? That's a big, big problem.
A denial of the special creation of Adam and Eve. We just run
into so many problems once you leave a young earth understanding
of the creation, of the age of the universe. The problems are
legion. So we just want to affirm what
the Bible says, what the majority of the church history has said,
and what our confession says here. God made the world in six
days and all very good. There would be no death in a
very good creation like that. So we'll end it right there for
now. But what questions do you have? Or comments? I enjoy that. part of the chapter, is because
it's very attainable to understand. Right. I mean, I think so, but
apparently there are a bunch of people that don't grasp that.
Christians, apparently, that you said, like in the universities,
aren't grasping it. I mean, it is very clear in the
Bible, I think. There are some things that are
hard for us to understand, but this one, it's, I think it's
very clear. it seems very straightforward
if we just take the Word of God as it is written you can say
that's what he's saying six days mm-hmm that's the real simple
version of it but I think some of the academia put too much Stock and that will
scientists say and they forget there those scientists are not
coming from a presupposition of the beginning of knowledge
is fear of the Lord. Absolutely. And they say, well,
we have to comply with that, otherwise we... Even these Christians
feel like they have to comply with what these scientists are
saying. That's probably what's drawing them away as opposed
to saying, no, they have this wrong starting point and I don't.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, absolutely. And I mean,
the church tradition is not... unanimous in thinking it's six
24-hour days, but it's a majority position. There were some people,
Augustine for instance, thought that maybe the days represented
figurative periods of time, like ages. And I think Origen had
some weird views on creation. I think he might have even believed
it was like an eternal generation of some sort. Don't quote me
on that, but I know he had some strange, that you wouldn't get
it from the Bible, influenced from philosophy or something
like that. But yeah, and I'm not a scientist. I don't pretend to be, but I
mean, we know that there is no contradiction between God's book
of scripture and God's book of creation. So it's clearly just
an interpretive problem that the scientists are having. And
we know there are scientists who are Christians who believe
in the traditional literal six 24 hour day account of creation. Probably the most well-known
in the 20th century was I think his name was Henry Morris. He
was the director of engineering at Virginia Tech. He was a flood,
he was a hydrologist and he specialized in how water worked and moved
and affected things. And so he did a lot of research
and he said, you know, the reason we have this confusion with the
fossil record and ground layering and stuff is because how catastrophic
the flood was. And then, you know, he would
point to other events like what we see when a volcano erupts,
how it shoots everything in all these different ways that, you
know, make it look like it's millions of years old if we use
these other methods of calculation. But so I think the science will
eventually one day unanimously bear out that the Earth is very
young. Of course, we have Ken Ham. He
does a lot of work in that field and very good stuff. They do a good job of speaking
of the different possibilities of the Christian view, the age
theory, what you mentioned about death before the fall. if that
were true, and just speaking to the different theories people
have, even from a Christian point of view, to get back to six literal
days. Yeah, yeah. And there are, I
mean, there's a lot of thought on it. I don't want to, I'm oversimplifying
it right now. I think there's very good answers
to that. Yes. Mr. Hanger, did you have a thought? I'm intrigued by verse number
seven. It says, Separate the waters
from above and below. It's not going to be filled up. It's a long journey of exploring. Mm-hmm There's a big drop of water in
that sense. It's like it's just a stream
of water. I'm still looking at it, but
the need is immense. We live in a world that defies
the law. I'm not trying to land you. I'm just standing in the middle
of a big problem. Yeah, that's a good thought.
I don't know exactly. I would love to hear more. So
yeah, the question is about the waters above and the waters below
and how perhaps the earth is like a big drop of water because
water is perfectly spherical. Frankly, I don't know exactly
what that means in the text. I've heard some people say that
there's a positing that before the flood, the earth was surrounded
by a circle of water. And then at the flood, when God
opened the casements of heaven or opened the windows of heaven
and poured down the deluge on the earth, that all that water
came and covered the earth. Or it could be the cloud cover.
Or it could be something before God separated everything out
that is no longer presenting in the same way. I don't know.
It's a good one for thought. It's one that we'll find out
the answer one day, if not in this life and in the next. Or
perhaps it's just one of those areas of theology that will get
refined in a thousand years by the church. I don't know. It's
very interesting. Any other thoughts or questions?
I'll just say that it's been surprising to me to see how many
serious Christian people believe in theistic evolution. We were
at an OPC church in Atlanta, and our pastor was John Fesco,
who's now a professor at Westminster. He was a professor at RTS. And
I remember being so surprised that this young, recently graduated
seminary student who is now the pastor of this NPC church, and
one day out of the pulpit, he started talking about creation
and how it came to be through theistic evolution, God guiding
it. And my take, big picture, is
that Culturally, Christians have been absorbing worldly presuppositions,
ideas, beliefs. They really do think, they've
been taught that man is a neutral investigator, that he doesn't
suppress the truth to protect himself from God's law, that
the mind doesn't justify what the heart has chosen. The mind
is neutral and just goes and look at the facts. And so if
that's what you think the scientists are doing, and again, that's
what a lot of Christians are taught, then it kind of hooks
them in to, they can't explain the difference between a six-day
account in the Bible and what these honest scientists are saying,
right? And so then they start, bending,
warping, shaping, working on methods to try to make the Bible
say something different than what it plainly says. And you've
linked it to the fourth commandment. I mean, there's just, I don't
see how you get around that. That's a huge bulwark for that
doctrine. But I do think that people's
belief about whether or not the scientists are neutral has something
to do with it. And then they go back to scripture
and bend the scripture based on that cultural belief. Yeah, that's absolutely correct.
That's absolutely correct. There is a myth of objectivity
and no bias. But yeah, it's definitely not
the case at all. And anyone who spent time in
academia, especially at higher levels, you know, if they're
being honest, they'll tell you that that's completely untrue.
That's just something they sell on the masses, you know, that
the universities are unbiased. And another related aspect, which
is maybe a little more insidious in a sense, is that evangelicals
Since we kind of lost control of the universities and lost
our cultural influence, there's a temptation to do whatever we
think we need to do to get a seat at the table. And that's a big
thing, and you can see it in the seminaries especially. If
you want to publish, you need to make sure you're saying this
and not saying that. if you want to get tenure. I
mean, just wanting a seat at the secular table is a strong
allure for many people. And it is bad, bad, bad. We shouldn't
want a seat at their table. We need our own table. And we
want them to change and come to our table, you know? So that's
a problem too. Do you know what I mean by wanting
a seat at the table? We want to have a voice in their
arena. We want to be considered on their level and in the same
guild as the PhD from Duke. We want the PhD from RTS to be
given the same treatment. We don't want that. We don't
want that, because we are different. And we don't need to be part
of their academic associations. We don't need to be part of their
accrediting bodies. We don't need that, because we don't need
the worldly wisdom. All right.
WCF: Ch. 4 (Pt. 1)
Series Westminster Conf. of Faith
In this lesson, we begin our study of chapter 4 of the Westminster Confession of Faith by working our way through paragraph 1: "It pleased God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, for the manifestation of the glory of His eternal power, wisdom, and goodness, in the beginning, to create, or make of nothing, the world, and all things therein whether visible or invisible, in the space of six days; and all very good."
| Sermon ID | 228251632118182 |
| Duration | 41:47 |
| Date | |
| Category | Midweek Service |
| Language | English |
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