What Kind of Being Is Man - Part 2 — Paris Reidhead

Is that the P .A. system or the cooling? I asked for that. Thank you. You know, it's amazing. People ask you to cross the country years ago especially and you're in for a Saturday night youth rally and they take you all the way from New York to California and you'd sit there through two hours of service and then when you'd get up to speak, the speaker would say, now the important thing is when you finish, you've got eight minutes.

And you spent three days there, one day coming, one day going, one day there and eight minutes. Well, I'm glad this is not like that. Psalm 8. I'm going to read it again. We're talking about man. What is man?

Humanity in the Light of Psalm 8

What kind of a being is he? O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth, who has set thy glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

When I consider thy heavens the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained, what is man that thou art mindful of him and the Son of Man that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels and hast crowned him with glory and honor.

Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

O Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth. Now I shall not take time to review in any detail that which we discussed last Lord's Day, though I know many of you were not here. I will remind those of you who were and share with those of you who were not that our concern in these two studies and perhaps others in the months to come, whether here or elsewhere, will have to do with answering this question, what kind of a being is man?

The Doctrine of Man and God's Purpose in Creation

I pointed out in an introduction last week that most of the divisions in Christendom, most of the sects that have grown up have not grown up on the matter of the doctrine of God, theology, but the doctrine of man, anthropology.

What kind of a being is man? What is he capable of doing or incapable of doing? And so we started by asking the basic question, why did God make man in the first place? And the answer was that he made man to meet or serve as the object of his love, one with whom he as the God who is love could share all that he is, all that he has, and all that he is doing.

And he is as father having man as his children, as bridegroom man serves as his bride. Both of these are love relationships and the basic, basic idea that I wanted you to grasp then was that God made man to be the object of his love.

And he made him in his image and likeness because we can only love that which is like us. The only being God has made that he said he loved was man. We do not know wherein angels differ from God as to his image and likeness.

But they're not said to be made in his image and likeness, nor is it said that God loves angels. Man is said to be made in his image and likeness and it is declared that God loves man. Now we also saw that there was a conflict, that when God wanted to have man made, he came right into the very area where for all that we can discern from the Scriptures, he had made the prison of Lucifer, the son of the morning, this angel that revolted against God.

Satan's Rebellion and the Fall of Man

And Christ said he saw Satan, Lucifer, cast out of heaven and apparently to earth. And with him were all the angels that revolted under his leadership. And in a sense I saw personally that that's what you have between Genesis 1, 1 and Genesis 1, 2.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth and then at some time a cataclysm and the earth became. It didn't say it was created. The earth became without form and void. It's my feeling that that is when the God of this world was cast out.

We saw that he had taken four weapons, that these weapons that Satan used were actually the very antithesis to the character of God. God is love, God is light, God is life, and God is truth. And Satan took as the very opposite, as his character and thus as his weapons.

He is the God of this world, his hatred and darkness and death and the lie. And thus it was that these two, as it were, were in combat. God could not say, I hate this rebel and used hate to destroy him.

For had he so done he would have destroyed himself, his own character. So he had to be totally consistent with himself. And love had to overcome hate, at least in a preliminary way to the point where it was consistent and right for God to cast Satan out of heaven.

In all that had become his character. And so it was that darkness covered the face of the deep. Then when God made man he came right to this penal colony, if you please, remade it and placed this one for whom he had from eternity past yearned, this being called man.

And he permitted this enemy, this arch enemy, this declared foe, to come and to approach Eve with all of his subtlety, with all of his fallacy. Yea, yea, hath God said. You think God loves you. God doesn't love you.

He's trying to cheat you and keep from you that which is going to make you happy. He knows that if you do what I'm suggesting you'll be like him. Of course, she was like him. In every sense she could be.

And so the argument was in itself fallacious. And that was that she sinned and then Adam deliberately sinned that he might choose to be with her rather than with God. And they came under the control of the God of this world.

Sin as the Will's Rebellion Against God

Now we begin today at that point. What happened to man when he sinned? First just a word about the nature of sin. What is it? We hear much about sin. And generally when we have put together the suggestions that have been made in an attempt to define sin, it sounds as though that sin is essentially doing something.

That it's an action. But I think a more careful study may suggest to us that sin in its essence is not so much doing something as purposing to do something. The essence of sin, therefore, I would say is the committal of the will to the principle and the purpose of pleasing oneself outside of the will of God.

Now that suggests something else, the definition of temptation. What is temptation? Many people become confused at this point and they feel that temptation is synonymous with sin. And they thus bring themselves into enormous bondage because finding that they're tempted, they would then feel that because they are tempted, they have sinned.

Well, let's distinguish in definition. Temptation is the proposition presented to the mind to satisfy a good appetite in a bad way. That brings us back again to something we saw last Sunday. What about man with the appetites that he had?

We saw that when God had made man, he said it is good. But that man that he made had an appetite for food because God had determined that he should live by repeated daily intake of nourishment. He had an appetite for knowledge.

Whereas God knows everything in the now at once, man learns in sequence. And so God gave to man an appetite for food so that he would be stirred to take the necessary nourishment. And then he gave to him an appetite for knowledge so he'd be stirred to learn because he learns in sequence.

Then God gave to man an appetite for pleasure because he had made so many marvelous things as the expression of his love. And he gave to man that appetite or urge or drive to enjoy. And then God gave to him an appetite for authority because it was God's intention that he should rule over his creation.

And so he put into us this drive or urge to rule and to change and to control. He gave to us an appetite for security, a drive or urge for security because he as a thoughtful father had provided for us.

And therefore that we might understand and enjoy and appreciate what he provided, he gave to us the urge or the hunger or the capacity for it. He gave to man the appetite for sex because he made the first pair but his method of completing this beloved was by means of procreation.

And so there was a drive and an urge. And he looked at this person that had an appetite for food and for knowledge and for pleasure and security and for sex and he said, it is good. And then God made every appropriate and proper way and relationship for satisfying each of these urges.

But Lucifer, Satan, came to her and suggested to her mind that she satisfy these urges in a manner that God had forbidden. Now this was temptation. But when within her she determined to do it, then the temptation had changed from something which was an intellectual activity to something which had moral involvement.

She now made the decision to do it. And when she decided, when she made the decision to eat, she had sinned, borne out by the fact that the Lord Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, He that looketh to lust has committed adultery.

He that has hate or has purpose to injure has committed murder. The criminal aspect is in the decision to do it, not finally in the action to do it. One may have decided and have to wait for an opportunity.

They are criminal from the moment the decision was made. From the moment the temptation passed from an intellectual function to a moral purpose, that is the time when it becomes sin. And so sin we define, therefore, in relation to the individual in terms of his life, the criminal aspects of it.

At the age of accountability, when you committed your will to the policy or the supreme choice of your life became that of pleasing yourself without regard for the will of God or the rights of others, then it would be that you would sin and come short of the glory of God.

That became the ruling purpose. Now I speak not in detail of other aspects with which you are familiar about the inherited aspects or the congenital aspects of the crime of sin. I'm talking about moral responsibility.

I'm talking about that time when we reached the age of accountability and we said like Mother Eve and Father Adam, this is how I am going to live. Now we may not have hit your hand. You may not have gritted your teeth.

You may not have done anything of that sort. You just did it. And the scripture says that this is the case because all have sinned. Not just the act that they unconsciously committed because of an opportunity or a suggestion or an inherited propensity, but rather because it became a policy of life to which we all these things contributed, but it acquired its moral essence as a crime when you said this is how I'm going to govern my life.

The Fourfold Death Introduced by Sin

Now what happened when man sinned? What were the effects? God said the day thou eatest thou shalt surely die. Thou shalt surely die. Now this is an enormously important point and one that I think we should take quite seriously and perhaps quite closely and carefully.

Now does death mean annihilation? Let me illustrate it. You come into your television set and you want to watch something on it and you turn it on and it's just nothing goes. A little white dot doesn't show.

No sound comes. What do you say about it? Well, I'm sorry. I can't get it. The set is dead. Now what does that mean? That all of the insides have sort of rusted down and inside this machine is just a pile of rust?

That it's disintegrated? That somehow its substance has changed? That there's been some great change in its physical characteristics? That it has been annihilated, so to speak? What does it mean? Well, all it may mean is that one little wire came loose and it separated.

The wires are all there. The tubes are all there. Everything is there. But because that one little wire has separated, then there is no communication with all of this electronic impulse and power that surrounds the set.

So in a sense, I think that gives us the basis of looking at the word death. What does it mean? Well, it means separation. It means that the filaments come loose, if you please. Separation. The day thou eatest, thou shall die.

What did that mean? That somehow you're going to become a subhuman, a new species? That the purpose of God and the investment of God in you is going to have all been withdrawn and you now become some other kind of a species?

Is that what it talks about? Well, I don't think so. I don't think that's what it talks about at all. It talks about the very thing that death is everywhere in the scripture, namely separation. Well, let's look at some aspects of it.

The first way in which man died as a result of sin, the first thing that was introduced because of this, or the first aspect of this penalty, and I'll see at least four with you in the next few moments, was physical death.

It's amazing to learn that the body is so made, so say those who know something about it, and I make no claim for being a scientist. I get all of my science out of the Reader's Digest. And that, of course, makes me a happier authority than the ones who know something about it, because they know so much about it, they can't be sure of anything.

But when you've read the Reader's Digest, like I have, you can be sure, because you don't know enough not to be. But I recall reading some time ago, either there or in one other of my equally scientific treatises, that every cell in the human body is replaced periodically.

And I heard that it was every seven years, and that had to do with the enamel on the teeth and other hard structures. But someone else comes along and says 90 of the human body is replaced every seven days.

Well, be that as it may, the process is going on because I know this morning I rubbed some callus off my hands. And I just know that some place is being replaced, because I've been doing that for half a century, and my hands are still there, they aren't worn out yet.

And so somebody is taking place, it's coming and going all at the same time, you know. And therefore, when God made us, apparently he built into us a principle that makes old age and death kind of an insult to the creator.

He put into us a principle by which there should be and can be and must be a reproduction of cells, a replacement of the equipment that we came, we brought with us when we came. An enlargement of it, growth of it, and then afterwards replacement.

So, if that's the case, then there is this matter of why do we get old? We are told about some who live 900 years. Then God saw that they could do an awful lot of mischief in 900 years. So after the flood, he said, hey, let's cut that down a little, huh?

How about 120? That gives them time enough to really make a mess of things. And then after that, it still was that that was too much. So finally he got around to Moses and he said, look, 70 or 80 is about all I can stand, any of you fellows.

You can learn enough mischief in that time to keep a flock of angels busy. And so I'm just not going to let you live too much longer than that. But that was an arbitrary decision, like he said to the sea, thus far and no farther.

He said to man, thus far and no longer. Thus long and no longer. Yeah, that's right. And some that have reached that point are just about agree with Jacob. But I would have you see that the death, physical death, is one of the first consequences of sin.

Death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned and all die. That's the first thing. God introduced into the human race this principle of death. Now the second thing. Man not only began to die physically, so that from the first heartbeat, the pulse is saying near death, near death, near death, near death.

That's just one less pulse beat that we'll have as a certain number. Each one that goes is gone. But there's another aspect in which we died, and that's legally. Legal separation. Physical death is a separation from the spirit from the body.

We see that. We know that. I've gone in at the request of family and been there when that last gasp and sigh and have to go around the bed at the hospital and take the arm of the wife or husband and say, well, she's gone.

She's gone to be with him. But look, everything is there. Body's still warm. Eyes still open. Few moments ago, few minutes ago, conscious perhaps or aware, and now gone. What's gone? That person, the part that thinks and feels and wills.

That part that's made in the image and likeness of God. That which remains is the tenement we've occupied, the suit we've worn, the physical suit we've used. But the person is separated from the body.

And that separation we call death. Now, the other aspect of death, I said, is a legal separation. Man, God had made man and God had assumed responsibility for man. But when man sinned, he abrogated the covenant, if you please, and therefore he was on his own.

So the second aspect of death is legal separation from responsibility. You've seen the ads in the paper. So and so having left my bed and board, I do hereby declare that I'm no longer responsible for any debts incurred by and the name.

What a tragedy it is when that happens. And it's happening every day. And thus we're seeing legal separation of those that have had a legal commitment to each other and a legal responsibility for each other.

And one of the aspects of sin was legal separation, wherein God, who had made man, said, since man has committed himself to the God of this world, let him look to that one for his sustenance. I no longer have legal obligation.

Now the only thing that a sinner can legally expect of God is justice and judgment. If he asks for any more, he's asking beyond all right. But there's no great consolation in that, is there? That God will be just when he judges.

And that, of course, he will by reference to his character and not to the sinner's petition. But that's the only thing a sinner can ask of God. Yet you recall, those of you who, like myself, were fairly adult during the Second World War, as their plane was shot down over the South Pacific or the guidance system shot out and they were miles from their carrier and it was dark and they couldn't find their way and they cried, O God of my mother, lead me back to my ship.

And some, they'd see a plane out there and follow the plane until they could see the ship and come in. And God answered prayer. But they didn't have any claim upon him. They had no basis of expecting it.

God answers many prayers of sinners that he might show himself merciful. There's no relationship upon which that prayer is based. Maybe on the basis of a faithful mother or someone else, but the sinner has no claim on God.

He has by his revolt, by committing himself to pleasing himself at the end of his being, he's relinquished all right to expect care, sustenance, protection or any other kind of help from God. That's legal separation.

And then there is a third kind of death and that is spiritual separation, a spiritual death. Now what are we talking about? Let's go back to our analogy of the television set. All around is the electronic impulse and here's the set that was made to receive it, but because of some break inside, there is no longer the function of the set in relation to the environment.

Now the Bible tells us that in God we live and move and have our being. That God is just as close to us, close to you as the sound of my voice. He's just as near as the light upon your face. He's just as close as the gentle breeze that may cool your brow.

God is here. In him we live and move and have our being. We live actually in three environments. The first of them is the one to which I've referred just now. That is the environment of atmosphere or air.

We understand it goes some, how far, 17 miles above us. That it exerts a pressure of 15 pounds per square inch upon our bodies. It's a pressure that is such that if you exhaust the air from, say, a can, just an ordinary can, you take the air out by a vacuum pump and the can will collapse from the pressure of the air.

The reason we don't collapse is because it's equalized within, without. But when you go up in an elevator and your ears feel, or in an airplane your ears feel, what is it? The pressure is not equalized in.

You begin to feel the weight of that down upon the eardrum. So we blow our nose or we swallow or something else trying to equalize the pressure. We're living at the bottom of a sea of air. We're walking on the bottom of that sea.

Now, the only part of you that gets good out of it or the essential good out of it, the life sustenance out of it, is your lungs. That simple little action for five minutes or more and you'd be a statistic.

And yet you'd have air all around you. But it wasn't getting where it had to go in order to sustain your life. You were separated from it. All right? That's the first atmosphere. Now, the second atmosphere is electronic impulse.

If we wanted to prove that to the degree to which it's true, and you know it's true, it wasn't so when I was in Africa years ago as a missionary in the Sudan. I had gone out in 1945 and had one of these army surplus type radios that connected to a battery or more.

I never did figure out what all the dials and gadgets were, but I had it working a couple of times. And one night I was out at the Gaboose River Bridge in the Sudan, right on the Sudan-Ethiopian border.

And I had visitors come. Salil was my informant, and he came that evening with his wife and sister-in-law, and they wanted to see this fellow that he was coming to work with each day, making them do the planting and so on.

And they were sitting there. I had a little grass-thatched rest house, government rest house, that I was occupying, and it was sand floor. When I arrived, my boy went in and very carefully said, Wait at the car a minute.

And I wondered what he was doing, and he was brushing the lion tracks out. He thought that might disturb me too. And he was right. Yeah. After he told me, it disturbed me too. I never got over being disturbed by that.

But we were sitting on that sand floor, not knowing what was outside. I had a pressure ladder there. Salil was there, and I reached over behind me and put the switch on. The car was pulled up next and had the cables out to the battery, and I did want to hear the news from Cairo, BBC out of Cairo.

And so all of a sudden, voices came. Oh, you could have brushed their eyes off with a stick, you know what I mean? And I said, Oh, it's just the radio. And he turned and said, It's just the radio. And he didn't know what radio meant, you know.

I saw his sister-in-law get up out of the corner of my eye. She went out. And then I wondered where she went, and then I saw just a flick of reflection on black skin outside. And she came and she got down behind that and she looked up into the inside of that radio.

And she came and sat down and she said something to her sister and then she said something to her husband. And I said, What'd she say? Oh, yeah, no, no, nothing. I said, Yeah, yeah, something. What was it?

She said, She knows who's doing the talking in there. I said, Who's doing the talking? She said, There's little houses in there and she could see little people. And those were the people that were doing the talking inside those houses.

Well, it was an old tube set, you know, the day long before the day of the transistor. And she had seen the filaments in there and so those were the people inside the lighted huts. And she could see them through the little holes in the back.

And I said, No, no, those aren't little people inside there doing the talking. She said, They are, I saw them. I said, I'm sorry, they're not. They're not little people. I said, It's coming from the air.

And he said, See, it's coming from the air. And then she got excited. She said, Listen. And he got it back to me and said, I've got the best news in our village. I can hear a line when nobody else can.

I can hear a gazelle when nobody else can hear it. And you're trying to tell me that there are sounds in the air I can't hear? I don't know what this man is, what he thinks he's going to say, but he can't tell me that.

I looked inside. He's got little houses there. He's got little people. And I'm going home because I don't want to be put in a house like that. I don't know how he does it. And he says, I think I better go home too.

So they all left him very shortly. Utterly unconvinced that around them was a world of sound that they couldn't hear. You know it. I know it. If we wanted to take all the sound that you're not listening to and bring it in at, say, 100 decibels, we'd have to get shells put in here with radios, long-distance radios, television sets, and probably the whole room would be filled next Sunday.

Each one of the 100 decibels, this whole wing of the church would just shatter down to dust. Couldn't take it. All the electronic sound that you've taken for granted, that's just as close as the air you breathe, that it's interlaced with the air, it's not the air, it's distinct from the air, it moves not through the air but through the spaces between the air.

Now I've exhausted all that I know about radio. In fact, I've gone too far, I can see that. And some of you said, boy, that guy don't know enough. I hope he's more better on his theology than he is on electronics.

But I blame it on the readers' digest. And that's, now we're in, there could be little people inside that one. But we have a receiving set. We have to have a receiving set together, don't we? Now when God made you, he built into you a receiving set to know God.

That's the point I'm making. The receiving set for your air are your lungs. The receiving set for the electronic sound is the radio receiver, or the television receiver. And the receiving set for this third environment is the human spirit.

In him we live, and we move, and we have our being. And God is as near as the air we've been talking about, as near as the electronic sound we've been talking about, but he's not in the air or the air, and he's not the, he's not the electronic sound.

God is God. Now how can you be in three atmospheres at once? I don't know. How can you be in two atmospheres at once? I don't know. But this is what the Bible tells us. And you have a receiving set to know God.

And that receiving set is the human spirit. God is spirit, and you are spirit, living in a body. And God has given to the human spirit the ability to feel him, to hear him, to taste him, to see him, to know him, to commune with him.

But when man sinned, that set went bad, out of commission. He died, spiritually. Now he didn't shatter or disintegrate or turn to rust any more than your television set that doesn't operate has done that.

It's just not working. And when man sinned, God just sort of, just sort of let the set go out of, just out of kilter. He fixed it in such a way when man has committed his will to please himself, his set doesn't receive God.

So what do we find in India? The people that know there's a God, that are aware of his presence and must know him. And so they say, if I can just abnegate the flesh and punish the body. And so we'll see someone lying down and taking his fingers and scratching a mark and getting up and putting his toes where the finger's mark was, laying down, the whole subcontinent of India.

We'll see them laying their babies for the crocodiles to eat along the Ganges. We see them sitting between fires until the skin and flesh turns to parchment and leather, yearning after God. But that's not how you find God.

That's not how you meet him. That's not how he's known. But you see, they know he's there. God didn't allow that knowledge to be destroyed. They know that he is. They know he made the world. They know that he's going to judge them when they die.

God didn't allow that knowledge to go. He just doesn't allow communication with him. Man died. Man died spiritually. It broke the contact. Broke the contact. And then there's a fourth aspect of this death, and that is man came under the sentence of eternal separation from God.

That this crime of turning to our own way, of committing our will to please ourselves, had the effect of bringing us under the sentence of living eternally separated from God, not knowing him. And that sentence has passed upon all.

That death has passed upon all because all have sinned. Physical death, indeed. Legal death, certainly. Spiritual death, obviously. But the sentence of eternal separation. And no time does it mean annihilation or cessation of being or change of form, but rather a distance between, a separation from.

And whatever that place that God has prepared for those who reject and spurn him, that he's prepared for Lucifer and the angels and others who choose to follow and accept and adhere to the character of that prime inhabitant, whatever it is, it's going to include an eternity of separation from God.

That is obvious. So we have then the fact that death has passed upon all. What kind? Physical death and legal death and spiritual death and then eternal separation from him. Now, having seen that, then let's look for just a moment as to what didn't happen when man died.

What Sin Did Not Destroy in Humanity

First, his intelligence was not necessarily impaired. We find, for instance, after the man has been driven from the garden and the sons of Tubal-Cain, for instance, one of the sons of Adam and Eve, went out and invented musical instruments and built cities.

Someone said they were living in the country and Cain killed Abel. That was a rural massacre. And then Tubal-Cain invented cities so they could do it wholesale. And there's a good bit of evidence to support that.

But the fact is that whatever sin did, it did not destroy the mental capacity of man. His mental ability was remained. His ingenuity, his inventiveness, his genius was unimpaired by the coming of sin.

And the powers of his personality and of his capacity to exercise much of that authority that God had given, that was not impaired. So whereas there's a tremendous amount of effect on sin on man, we must not attribute to it what the scripture doesn't and we must not assign to it more than the scripture does.

So I would suggest to you that man's nature and his personality and his personal powers, those powers that he recognizes, were not destroyed or annihilated in any sense by the coming of sin. Now, we find that some things happen.

Man is under the sentence of death. And so there's an interesting thing that's given to us and I'll have you look at it because it helps you to understand the relationship of man to God in this sinful state.

I think perhaps if you turn to the third chapter of Genesis that you can see this rather quickly. And the 14th verse. Now remember, man at this point is under the sentence of death. He is condemned in these aspects that we've said.

And now there's going to have something else come in. And it's important for us to see this. I think verse 14 tells us,. And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle.

And that's the first mention. One of the hermeneutical principles that you get when you study the scripture in a formal way is that the first mention of a word generally gives to you the significance that word is going to have throughout scripture.

And this is the first time the word curse is introduced. Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle and above every beast of the field. Upon thy belly shalt thou go and thus shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.

And I will put enmity between thee and the woman and between thy seed and her seed. It shall bruise thy head, thou shalt bruise his heel. Now unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception.

In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children. And thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee. And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife and hast eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying thou shalt not eat of it, curse it is the ground for thy sake.

In sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life. Thorns also and thistle shall it bring forth to thee. And thou shalt eat the herb of the field and the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return unto the ground.

Now what do we find then in curse? Does this sound like death? Separation? No, what does it say? What do we find? A change coming from the time the condemnation to death is pronounced until it is exercised.

And what's the purpose of the curse? I'm suggesting, and I think I can prove in a few moments, that God cursed the ground and woman in this relationship of the sorrow and pain in childbearing man and his labor in order that he might have a foretaste of the penalty that would induce him to return to God to be forgiven and to be pardoned.

The sentence is death and the curse is the foretaste of the sentence that is to be experienced in the interim between the time the sentence is pronounced and is carried out for the purpose of inducing the one that's under the sentence to realize the enormity of the sentence and thus to get, to return to God in repentance and seek forgiveness and pardon.