Well, imagine if you will, you're in your workplace or you're talking to an unbelieving neighbor or maybe family member. Imagine you pose this question to them. What does it mean to be a human being? What does it actually mean? To be a human being. Safe to say that that that whatever the answer may be, it's generally taken for granted, right? But it really is a profound question. What does it mean to be human? In fact, that question, what does it mean to be human, is a worldview question. By worldview, I mean those those handful of basic presuppositions about life and reality that make up the the overall perspective on how we view ourselves and God and reality in life. What does it mean to be human is huge. And in fact. How would you answer it? What does it mean to be human? I would suggest to you that how you answer that question is probably the second most important thing about you. You, of course, remember what the first most important thing about you is, right? It's how you answer the question, what is God? How you answer the question, what is God, is the first and most important thing about you. But how you answer the question, what is it to be human or more particularly, what am I, is the second most important thing about us. If you take your Bibles and turn to Psalm 8. Psalm 8 gives us a good start. Psalm 8. This is one of the Psalms of David. And we read these familiar words, Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth who have displayed your splendor above the heavens from the mouth of infants and nursing babes, you've established strength because of your adversaries to make the enemy and vengeful cease. When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, The moon and the stars, which you have ordained, what is man that you take thought of him and the son of man that you care for him? Yet you have made him a little lower than God and you crown him with glory and majesty. You make him to rule over the works of your hands and you put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heaven, fish of the sea, whatever passes through the paths of the sea. Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth? As you look at Psalm 8, there's something about Psalm 8 that resonates with all of us. There is this profound sense of smallness. David the shepherd, and who knows how many nights he spent out watching the sheep under the starry sky, just looking up and, you know, no what people call now light pollution. No light pollution to wash out the sky, but just star after star after star after star. And some big and some little, and maybe he saw, we were able to see the other night with the moon looking like a cup with Venus right next to it. Right? Then he looked at that and when he looked at that, you know what he thought? I am so little. I'm so small. I look out at all of this and it's God who's big. And it's me who's incredibly small. It's like John Piper said one time, nobody goes to the Grand Canyon for an experience of self-esteem. You stand there, you look at the immensity of it and you think, I'm so small. That's actually a good feeling of being small. Because until you start to feel small, You never start to ask the right questions about God. And so here's David, and he says, what is man that you would even be mindful of us or the son of man, you take notice of us? And it's the question that is that emerges from our profound sense of smallness in God's universe. But then David turns around and says something in the psalm that's absolutely amazing. He says, and yet you've made us a little lower than yourself. Psalm 8, in a real sense, sets before us the agenda for studying man. Now, in the notes, I have why study biblical anthropology. Some people would want to know why they'd have to take anthropology at all. You ever take anthropology in college? Yeah, it's a yawner. OK, then you've got to put up with all the little silly charts of us going through all of our evolutionary stages and and all of that. And so, you know, why waste time studying man when we could study something much greater? There are a number of reasons why we should study biblical anthropology. And Psalm 8 actually gives us one of the best reasons to study man. And that is that man is God's crowning achievement in creation. Now, understand, obviously, that God is far more immense than we could ever imagine. In fact, if you really want to get a sense of how incredibly vast God is and how infinitesimally small we are, watch the DVD by Lou Giglio called How Great Is Our God and it will blow you away. You can get it at Amazon or Manger. You watch it and you realize that this planet that we live on is is smaller than a speck on a speck. And this universe, this galaxy that we're in, is absolutely enormous. And so when you think of everything that God has made, I mean, God obviously is very creative, very powerful. He demonstrates his wisdom in all of the things that he makes. And yet, as David contemplates this in Psalm 8, he comes to a conclusion that is obviously a thoroughly biblical conclusion. And that is in all that God has made. It's human beings that are the crown of his creation. It's not the sun, it's not Betelgeuse, it's not Canis Majora, it's man that is the crowning achievement of his creation. I don't like watching the news, it makes me depressed or mad. But I watch it anyway, and every once in a while you'll see, oh, we got pictures back from from Hubble and and it looks like there may be a slimy pond on some planet somewhere that could possibly in 30 billion years support life. They get all excited. Like, wow, see, we're not alone. Whatever they discover is actually ends up being just so incredibly insignificant compared to what's on this planet. And it is incredibly insignificant compared to human beings. I mean, we are absolutely phenomenal creatures. I mean, what God has made in a human being is profound. It's amazing. And that's what David turns around and says. He says, on the one hand, I feel this incredible sense of smallness as I look out at the sky and consider your heavens. But then I turn around and I consider the fact that you've made us just a little lower than you. And so on the one hand, there's this incredible sense of of transcendence, this huge gap between God and us. But then on the other hand, there's something that David recognizes that makes us closer to God than anything else that he's made. And that is that we're made in the image and likeness of God. And there is. Nothing. In God's created order, it is quite like man. Even angels who are smarter and stronger and so forth, they're not redeemed. God didn't send a Savior for angels. Human beings are the crowning achievement of all that God has made. And in fact, the Bible exhorts us over and over again, does it not, that we are to study the works of God's hands? Doesn't the Bible tell us repeatedly throughout the Psalms that we're to examine his ways? And so if we would spend our time studying his works in creation, then we should spend time looking and seeing who and what we are. And so the first very good reason why we should study anthropology is because man is God's crowning achievement in creation. But the second reason is because it addresses the worldview question of being. That is what we are. Studying man gives us the answer of what am I? Who am I? You ever remember growing up, maybe even struggle with these kinds of questions to this day, I remember distinctly being nine years old and wondering, what am I? And what's going to happen to me when I die? Even from our earliest days, we have this basic, fundamental worldview question, what am I? And studying the doctrine of man helps us to answer that most basic question of being, but thirdly, it also addresses the other worldview question of purpose. Not only do you have to ask, what am I? Then you have to ask the next question, which is, why am I here? You have to wrestle with these questions. These are the questions that end up making up the big picture of what life is all about. And there are people that they don't want to ask these kinds of questions. What am I? What is my purpose? Why am I here? They don't want to ask those kinds of questions because they're afraid of what the answers are going to look like. And so instead, what they do is they embrace just a life of pleasure, of hedonism, of pursuing their own lusts and desires. And their lusts and desires end up being nothing more than an anesthetic to the basic question of what am I and why am I here? Once you start to ask, what am I and why am I here? All of a sudden, getting drunk on the weekends seems pretty stupid. Fourth reason. It addresses multiple worldview questions on ethics. Why study man? Why try to understand what we are and why we're here? It has huge ethical implications. Do you think people would kill their babies through abortion if they understood what we are and why we're here? Do you think that people would want to live and die for a militant homosexual agenda if they understood what God actually has made us to be? All of the ethical issues that percolate in our culture, all of the ethical issues that are right on the front burner for us as a society, people want to argue for their own positions, they want to be able to set forth their own views, and yet not get back and answer the most fundamental view of what am I? It's like having a spelling contest, but nobody take time to learn the alphabet. It's like wanting to get into a math quiz and yet not learning your multiplication tables. The most basic fundamental question, who am I and why am I here, has radical implications for all of the ethical questions that our culture wrestles with. We should also want to study. man, because it demonstrates the interrelationship between knowing God and knowing ourselves. Anybody in honor of Calvin's 500th birthday start reading the Institutes this year? Good, Gene, and I know Frank has, too. Where does Calvin start in the Institutes? He doesn't start with predestination or election or baptizing babies. Where does he start? He starts with this interesting reciprocal relationship between what it means to know God and to know ourselves. And to know God is to know ourselves. And in a lesser way, to know ourselves is to begin to understand God. You need to read the opening chapters of book one in the Institutes, because it is It is very, very stirring when you stop and consider what he's saying. There is an inner relationship. So we don't learn about God by learning about ourselves, but learning about ourselves does drive us to learn about God. And then learning about God teaches us all about ourselves. And then finally, why study biblical anthropology, because what it means to be human affects our understanding of the incarnation and salvation. I've taught this this section of systematic theology a number of times in the past, and it never dawned on me until today. But one of the reasons why we should study anthropology, biblical anthropology. Is because the way we understand humanity ends up affecting The way we understand the incarnation and the way we understand the incarnation affects the way that we understand humanity. If you believe that God became man, don't you think you ought to know what man is? If God sent his son to save mankind, don't you think we ought to know what it means to be human? And so there are a lot of good reasons why we should study biblical anthropology. But I want to give you some more, and these will be more negative. And it's because secular culture has corrupted anthropology. Secular culture has corrupted what it means, or at least our understanding of what it means to be a human being. There are two competing worldviews out there. In our society, two competing worldviews, and one is a man-centered worldview that basically says that man is the measure of all things. Man is the beginning of all things. Man is the source of all knowledge. That is a man-centered worldview. And then there's a God-centered worldview that says all true knowledge has to begin with God. And where do you think secular society starts? Secular society conscientiously neglects God and pushes God out of the way so that God is a non-factor in the way that we think about everything else. And so it actually ends up being fairly ironic that those who argue so vehemently against the existence of God Only do so within the closed man centered perspective that says from the outset, there can't be a God. By the way, if you assume the conclusion before you begin, there's not going to be much thinking that goes on. Right. And so secular thinking, secular worldview begins with man. and says, how do we know what we know? Because we learn it. We're the source of it. We're the measure of it. But there's another perspective that says, no, we know what we know because God's revealed it, and we start with God. Now, a man-centered worldview or an anthropocentric worldview has created a whole host of problems for us. And one is the perspective of biology and naturalism. Stop and think about the way that biology presents man. Man is simply a highly developed animal. Right? I mean, if you take sophomore high school biology, What is your conclusion about the nature of man? What must man be? Man is actually nothing more than a highly developed animal on the ever-ascending process that we call evolution. And so biology says that man is simply the product of evolutionary process, which is, by the way, just governed by chance. Which ends up being ridiculous in and of itself because chance is a no thing. Chance never did anything. And yet this whole incredible process that they see is governed only by randomness and chance. Naturalism, then, is the accompanying philosophy or worldview that basically says this. Nature's ultimate reality. Ultimate reality is nothing more than what you can see and touch. If you can look at it under a microscope or see it through a telescope, that's reality. But if you can't see it, if you can't analyze it, if you can't touch it, it's not real. So here you've got this biological perspective on man, highly developed animal, and what is his source? How did he get here? It's just naturalism. That leads to a psychologized view of man and a philosophy called materialism. I would probably... say that the vast majority of people, whether they actually understand it or not. Let me say this. Everybody has a worldview. Everybody, whether they know it or not. It's just like a dog. Might have fleas. If it does, may know it, may not, but it has fleas. Everybody has a worldview, just as sure as dogs have fleas. Some people scratch. When they scratch, that's when they're asking the important questions, but they don't really have an idea. I'm infested with fleas. So here's man, everybody's got a worldview, but they may not know that they have a worldview. But everybody has those basic assumptions about what life is about and who they are and all of that. And so I would suggest that the vast majority of people, whether they understand it or not, have a very, very psychologized view of what human beings are. You know how we can tell that? Just listen to the way people talk. A psychologized worldview permeates the way that we talk. Right? And so we use all kinds of phrases, and I'm not saying there's no validity to some of these phrases, but we use phrases that all simply indicate that man is nothing more than matter in motion. That's materialism, by the way. Materialism isn't, in this sense, a lust for material goods or greed for things. Materialism is the idea that man is matter and nothing more. In fact, materialism is the philosophy that basically says, you know what you are? You are matter in motion, and that is about the extent of it. Now, When you think of man in a psychologized framework and see naturalism, nature is ultimate reality, and materialism, all you are is matter in motion, when those are the undergirding planks of the way that you view people, creates some incredible problems. Let me just give you a really quick rundown of what a psychologized view of human beings looks like. We'll just begin first with Freud, of course, the father of modern psychology and psychotherapy. Human beings are simply those who are controlled by their unconscious minds. Freud was a materialist. All you are is what's inside your skin, and if you can't look at it under a microscope, then it isn't real. Behavior is a result of primal urges combined with experiences, and our fundamental problem is environment, traumas, parents, religion. Those are the real culprits to man's misbehaviors, right? Carl Jung, major influence, took issue with some of Freud's theories. He believed that there was a collective unconsciousness, which makes us what we are. But all psychotherapy, that is, by the way, everybody should be in it, should lead you to this realization of personhood and wholeness. He believed, of course, in all kinds of stuff like the occult astrology, telekinesis, clairvoyance, ESP and so forth. B.F. Skinner, behaviorist, wrote a bombshell of a book in the 1960s, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Man's a bag of molecules and chemicals and circuits. That's all you are. As a result, if you are displaying unpleasant behavior, what needs to take place is behavior modification. By learning how to reroute through a positive stimuli, positive reinforcement. And so. Pavlov's dog. You want to train your kids, it's pretty easy. Carl Rogers ends up being extremely important today. By the way, Rogers was also deeply involved in the occult, the goal. The goal of Rogerian psychology is to get to a place where you dismiss guilt and shame over wrong behavior. Man, in essence, is good, which, by the way, in a materialistic, naturalistic worldview, it ends up being a contradiction, right? How in the world? Well, we won't go there. Man, in essence, is good, has unlimited potential. And so how do you help people get over, dismiss guilt and shame over wrong behavior? Well, you have the therapy of talk, rephrasing everything in nonjudgmental and accepting manner. That ends up being the way that you deal with people. So does it matter how you view what people are? Absolutely. I mean, you can see the implications. Abraham Maslow, colleague of Rogers, incredible influence today. Maslow basically says man really is nothing but a needy animal. And what he needs, he's got this hierarchy of needs, of course, and his most basic needs is food, clothing, shelter, all that stuff. But any animal needs that. I mean, except the clothing part, of course. But, you know, the fact is, is that he has a hierarchy of needs, and the more each level of need that's met, then he begins to realize what it is to be a person. Which, of course, is ironic, because at the end of the day, you're still just a glorified animal. The reason men do bad things isn't because they're bad. It's because they didn't have their desires or needs met at certain levels. So if you don't have the most fundamental desires met, you're going to go steal. For Maslow, man's greatest problem is unmet needs that come from his environment. Man's answer to his own problems is always found inside of himself. And because he has unlimited potential, he actually can finally reach that place of self-actualization. And this is where he actually finds his highest need met, which ends up being self-esteem and self-love. I find it interesting that the highest need of a human animal would be self-esteem, but. So what are you? Are you a bag of molecules and chemicals and circuits? Are you just a glorified animal? Do you watch the National Geographic Channel and see the shows on the primates and say, how about that? We're cousins. Are you basically just matter in motion, basically good, natural tendency to do right? The only reason you do wrong, of course, is because your mom didn't breastfeed you long enough. Man's problems come from unmet needs, from your own environment. Is that really what our problem is? Where do you find the solution to these problems? Do you find it within? All of this has to do with what you think you are. Do you really have unlimited potential? When we say it's vitally important in our day to understand who we are and why we're here, you have to understand that the conclusions that we're going to come to. Are going to take us directly. In opposition to the current. of our culture. What we're going to find out about who we are and why we're here and what we're all about will fly right in the face of what everybody else around us thinks. Now, here's the irony. Here's the dilemma. Here's the dilemma of secular thinking about humanity. There's an inherent conflict. Slime versus self-esteem. How can a rational, logical person say, in the educational process, what we need to make sure we do is we need to teach the students But what happened was, there was this pond of slime. And through being hit with electricity, then one cell became two, and two cells became four, and four became eight, and so on and so forth. And through this incredibly long, complicated process that all begins with single-cell protozoa, or something, All governed by chance. And nothing else. We're going to tell them that that's where they came from, that's how they got here, that's what they are. And then, by the way, you need to make sure that they feel good about themselves. And you need to make sure that they have lots of self-esteem and you need to make sure they have a positive self-image. And you need to make sure that they're at that place of healthy self-love. That is the most self-contradictory, self-defeating agenda that you could ever imagine. We want you to feel good about yourself. We want you to have a sense of dignity. By the way, you came from slime. I would suggest to you that what we see in our own culture in terms of a culture of death. A culture where eight year old kids take guns to school and kill other eight year old kids. And where 15 year old girls think nothing of going down to a Planned Parenthood and getting an abortion. And where baby boomers think absolutely nothing of letting the doctor give a little extra medication to get mom and dad well on their way to the world to come. And the incredible, overwhelming degeneration of sense of morals and values, that all of that is nothing less than reaping the whirlwind of 140 years of naturalism and evolution. We somehow try to get morally outraged at the Holocaust, but if you grant the presuppositions of secularism, you don't have a leg to stand on. If you grant that all we are is just coming from the same pool of slime. And at the end of the day, what really matters is the survival of the fittest. And it's the best animal who wins at the end of the day. Then why not try to figure out how to create a race of super humans? We are in culturally a mess. We don't know how to extricate ourselves from it because we begin with the fundamental assumptions that we're just bags of molecules and chemicals and circuits. And why we do bad things is either because the circuits misfire. Are you a little bit alarmed? In our legal system of how many times now we hear of defenses. Mom kills her baby, postpartum depression. You can go. Medical models for why people do the things that they do. He has the adultery gene. He's got the homosexual gene. We also need to be grounded in what the Bible teaches about what we are because of feminist and homosexual agendas which seek to undermine biblical gender and role distinctions. Don't know if you know it or not. We're pretty isolated. We're pretty insulated. We don't usually pay attention to what happens in California. At least, most of us don't. Look at what's taught. Look at how early it starts. Look at what is done with gender roles. Look at what's done with gender distinctions. Look at what is done in terms of promoting homosexuality. There is a massive agenda that's taking place, and really it's nothing more than trying to undermine the most basic realities of what it means to be male and female. Which is part of what it is to be human. God made man, Adam, as male and female. And so we have all kinds of crazy, crazy ideas, but yet they're not crazy to the people that think we all came from a bucket of slime. Unisex, androgyny, homosexuality, bisexuality, all of this is being crammed down our throats all the time. Have you noticed you can't even watch a movie anymore without seeing a homosexual somewhere? And he's usually nicer than the Christian guy. Usually smarter than the Christian guy. It's all over the place. What is it? It's a fundamental attack on who and what we are. You have to understand that. It's not just a bunch of people that want to promote a certain lifestyle. It is a fundamental attack of what God has made. It is ultimately a war, not against humanity, but against God. If we don't understand these basic worldview questions, then you know what we do? We set our kids up to go to Babylon U. and get it crammed down their throat from every direction. And then they end up saying, well, I suppose it is true. And so is it important to study man? The answer is absolutely. We have to know what we are. And why we're here. Now, how do we do that? How should we study man? Soft sciences or divine revelation? Now, notice I didn't say soft sciences and divine revelation. By soft science, you know what I mean? It's not not geology. Geology is considered a hard science. Why? It's not because of the hard heads that are involved in geology, right? Although that may be a plausible explanation as to why it's hard science, but why do we call it hard science? You're looking at empirical data. You're actually examining empirical data. Why do we call soft science soft science? Yeah, it's basically theory that you extrapolate your methods from a certain theory that really may or may not be true. The theory isn't based on what you're looking at under a microscope, or what you can see in an MRI, or what you can hit with a hammer. It's based on fundamental assumptions. So, soft science would be sociology. In many ways, anthropology is a soft science. Psychology is the softest of the sciences. Because psychology ends up coming from fundamental presuppositions about what man is and what man's problem is. Those are basic worldview assumptions. And when you build an entire science based on assumptions about the way things are, about reality, that ends up being a soft science, not a hard science. Now, presuppositions are absolutely critical. That should be totally clear to us right now, that the answer to what am I and why am I here end up being incredibly important. And soft sciences may or may not want to try to answer that. But at the most basic level, they have to start somewhere. And so secular presuppositions are, by the way, diametrically opposed to divine revelation. You can't and what I'm saying is this, you can't be a Freudian Christian. You can't be a Rogerian Christian. You can't be a Jungian Christian. Why? Because the starting points for those two worldviews are so radically different that they are completely, thoroughly incompatible. Incompatible. There is an antithesis. between the starting points of secularism and the starting points of divine revelation. And so biblical revelation is the only authoritative and reliable method of knowing what we are. Now, let me say a word about common grace and empirical observations. There may be times when secular research contributes data by empirical observation that can be helpful to us. I don't doubt that at all. In October of 07, I'm laying there for two weeks with this excruciating back pain and these spasms and they put me in this MRI machine and they took 3D pictures and they could tell it was wrong and then they went in and cut and took care of it. common grace. That's a perspective on humanity. It's a perspective on my physical being. I wasn't going to find out that I had an imploded disc from the Bible. Right. Wasn't like God was waiting for me somehow to get to Psalm 38 and then I'd figured it out. I needed common grace and empirical observation. There are times, what I'm saying is there are times where there are scientific understandings about us that are empirical, that are hard, that do help us in some ways. But what you need to understand is that there is an antithesis between what we're saying are the soft sciences and biblical revelation. Remember years ago, There was a man who was he was ordained to something or other up at the lake. I liked him a lot. He's a great guy used to help us with our worship when we first started the church. And he wanted to he had a counseling practice up at the lake and he wanted to open a Christian counseling practice down in the valley and he wanted to use our church offices to to to have this practice. And so He wanted to talk to me and see if I was willing. And so I said, I've just a few questions for you. And this probably won't take long. One, do you plan on charging people? He said, of course. So, OK, well, I got a problem with that. So we talked about that for a while. Then I said, what is your method for helping people? And what he said was, I'm an eclectic integrationist. Whoa, that sounds so good, it's just got to be really smart, right? No, because all eclectic means is a little bit from this and a little bit from that. And integrationist just means I'm going to try to figure out how the Bible and a little bit of this and a little bit of that all fit together. Right. And so I said, well, what what exactly do you pick up from? And he mentioned Gestalt and and some Rogerian practices, and he thought hypnosis was OK. And he had a number of different things. And I'm sitting there, I'm feeling this tightening in my chest, thinking I might want to have the waitress call 911 or something. And he said, you know, there were some aspects of Freud that were good and I'm just dying on the inside. And I said, well, don't you believe in the sufficiency of scripture? And he said, of course I do. I said, no, you don't. And he says, well, I mean, not not if what you mean is the Bible alone. So that's exactly what I mean, the Bible alone, and he said, If you break your arm. You go to a medical doctor. Not your pastor. I said, you're absolutely right. And when I go to that medical doctor, guess what he's going to be able to do, he's going to be able to X-ray my arm and deal with hard data that he can see. What hard data do you have for Gestalt? And so is it important that we understand the method and the answers? Absolutely. God's word is always the final authority. When it comes to answering questions about who I am, God's word is the ultimate authority. When it comes to questions about why am I here, where am I going to learn that? I'm going to learn from God's word, God's word, the final authority when it comes to gender roles and what it means to be male and female and what women should do and what men should do. Where am I going to learn that, Dr. Phil? I'm going to learn it from the Bible. So the Bible is the final, ultimate authority. And so I would say that we need to be, in dealing with this, how should we study man? We need to be very, very cautious of what is called integrationism. I went to a school, I did my undergrad at At Biola and at Biola University, they had Rosemead School of Psychology, which going all the way back to the 60s, had a motto, integrating faith and learning. And really, that sounds pretty good, right? I mean, that sounds good, integrating faith and learning. But what happens in the so-called integration process is not that the Bible ends up being the plumb line standard for looking at the soft sciences. What happens is, is the Bible is turned into a wax nose to fit whatever perspective you want to lay hold of, so it's not a matter of integrationism at all. It's a matter of inundation, taking your own categories from the particular perspective you like, and then trying to figure out how you can rework or rename some of those categories with biblical names. That is exactly what they mean by integration, and if you don't believe me, listen sometime to the Minereth and Meyer Clinic on the radio. All psychologized categories with just biblical names put to them. So the individuation, Rogerian individuation or Maslowian self-realization is just put in terms of sanctification. So his method for learning who we are, why we're here, what we're all about, important. Absolutely. We need to keep in mind there's a fundamental antithesis between the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of God's word. Now, here's the importance of studying Christian or biblical anthropology. We need to understand what we are. We need to understand what we were made for. We need to understand who We were made for. We need to be able to understand our true dignity. As image bearers, we also need to be able to understand our true depravity. By the way, it is only from a Christian worldview and a biblical perspective that you can answer both the dignity and depravity dilemma of human beings. Secularism can never explain to you why an Adolf Hitler and Mother Teresa can arrive from the same gene pool. Understanding biblical anthropology helps us understand our real problem. And that's the only solution, which is in Jesus Christ, our Lord. And here's the message when you study the doctrine of man biblically. You come away with this multi-dimensional perspective, who we are, why we're here, all those things. You should also come away with, it is an awesome thing to be a human being. It really is. Yeah, we all have to live with our own crud. We all have to live with our own remaining corruption and we all have to battle indwelling sin and all of that. But I will tell you. It is an awesome thing. To be human. It is an awesome thing to be made in the image and likeness of God. You talk about giving purpose to your life, understanding that. will make you want to give up wasting your life and will make you want to use it for the glory of God when you've discovered the purpose for which you're here. And so the doctrine of man is incredibly important. It's important for all of us. And in fact, you may not think very much about who you are and why you're here. And if you don't, I would urge you to go home and think about it with an open Bible. You come back and listen. You may be living in existence that is reflective, not of your true dignity as a human being. You may just simply be living out an existence that is reflective of your own lusts and desires. God has something much, much better for you than that. He really does. Let's pray. Father, we pray that as we start on this study and look at what it means for us to be created, what it means for us to be made in Your image and likeness, what it means for us to be created as male and female. Father, we pray that You would realign our thinking and our feeling that we might truly strive to be what You've called us to be. And Father, we pray tonight that You would very simply overwhelm us with what it means to be a living soul. What will a man give in exchange for His soul. Father, we pray that we would be astounded at simply being human. In Jesus' name, Amen.