Imago Dei (part 2) - [Genesis 1:26-27]

Bethlehem Bible Church

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What do you think about our world today? Is it confused? I'd say so.

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Let me ask you this. How many of you have been watching the Olympics? I see, yeah, four hands.

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I mean, if I were to have an invitation right now, I'd get more than that. Come on. I haven't been watching either, but I did see a couple of clips of things, and I noticed that in the opening ceremonies, they were singing an anthem.

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How many of you are familiar with the anthem they sang? Not the Olympic song, which I don't even know the words for, but I could do the hymn or the tune, but I won't, for your sakes.

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But they sang an anthem. National anthem? No. Here's how the anthem goes.

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It was written in 1971. Many of you probably know it. Don't start singing. Imagine there are no countries.

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It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too. Imagine all the people living life in peace.

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And you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one.

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Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can, say these rich people. No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man.

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Imagine all the people sharing all the world. And they keep repeating this one line, and the world will live as one.

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No God, no religion, just everyone living in peace.

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What do you call that? What's that? I call it delusional.

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Right? And it reminds me, I'm not going to go to the book of Judges, we're going to be back in Genesis chapter 1 this morning, but it reminds me of the book of Judges.

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Why? Because if there's no God, no religion, then everyone is free to do what is ever right in their eyes.

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No right, no wrong. They say no heaven, no hell, but ultimately what do they mean? No God, nothing to worry about.

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In fact, all that matters are these few years. So make the best of it while you can.

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I'm going to tell you something. They're talking about everybody living in peace and harmony and love, and I'm going to tell you the truth.

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What they're really saying is, ignore what you see. Ignore the realities of the world.

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Listen to what we're trying to sell you. Because we live in a time of great conflict.

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We're in a world war. It's not World War I or II where there are tanks and guns and machine guns and trenches and all that.

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We're in a war of ideas. We are in a war of the truth versus error.

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Satan versus God. We know that God wins, no matter what that anthem may say, but this is an era of lies versus the truth.

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I'm going to read again Genesis 1, 26 -28. You say,

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Pastor, didn't you preach this last week? And I said, well, I got through like five words last week, so come on.

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Somebody said, you know, I like what you said last week. And I go, good, because you're going to get more of it today.

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And I told him, I said, it's kind of like what

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Pastor Mike calls gullet preaching. Gullet is the area of your throat where things tend to get stuck, and I have something in my craw, which is to say the state of the world as it is, and this insidious philosophy of humanity, of this philosophy of men that says we don't need

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God, ultimately. Genesis 1, verses 26 -28.

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Then God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

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So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him.

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Male and female, he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

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Last week, I gave you the first three C's of this message, and in it, I said, basically,

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I want to sort of underscore for you some basics of having a

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Christian worldview, right? The world says this. Here's what the Bible says. Here are the implications, specifically, of being created in the image of God.

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And each and every one of you here is made in the image of God.

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I just wanted to take quick inventory. Yes, absolutely. Made in the image of God.

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And just to review, the first C last week was the creation of the universe. And Genesis 1 tells us how there was nothing.

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I mean, the Hebrew says, wohoo and bohoo. You know, the earth was formless and void. Then God created.

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And I said, Genesis is not compatible with evolution, no matter what anybody says. And it really kind of boggles our minds.

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We've been talking about it in seminary, that God creates. In fact, it was said that God creates out of himself.

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Well, it's true, but God's immaterial, right? John 4, 24. God is spirit. Those who will worship him will worship him in spirit and truth.

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He's spirit. He creates out of himself. Well, that's essentially saying he creates material out of the immaterial.

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He creates out of nothing, ex nihilo. God is also atemporal, meaning he exists outside of time.

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When we think of God, how do we think about him? We think about him like he's, typically, we think about him like he's a better form of us.

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You know, true confession time, I listen to some K -Love music. And a lot of the songs,

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I'm just like, I have to go listen to something more holy, like country and western or something, because I'd rather hear a song about drinking than about a

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God who is just like me. I don't need a God who's like me. A God who's like me is absolutely useless and not found in this book.

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But the Bible never attempts to justify the existence of God. You know, there are all these rationales, and it's fine, right?

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I don't mind engaging in a little bit of philosophical debate. But the

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Bible doesn't. The Bible just says, in the beginning, God, he was just there, he did it, he created.

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And it never says, well, let me tell you about, you know, how God always existed. That's just his nature.

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How do you explain that? How does the finite explain himself fully, or how does the infinite explain himself fully to the finite, right?

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How can the incomprehensible explain himself to the comprehensible? Well, he does, he condescends here, but we can't fully comprehend him.

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The Bible simply declares God, tells us who he is. And on days one to four,

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God created and established the framework of life. On day five, he created the life in the sea and the air, and we just read in 28 how he said, have dominion over everything, over every little thing, over the air, over the sea, over everything on the earth.

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On day six, God introduced life on the dry ground.

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And then, I want to say after lunch, but it's really not accurate. He created man.

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He looked at it and he said, everything is good, meaning ultimately it's perfect, just the way things should be.

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And then the second C, the counsel of the triune God in verse 26, the second part of it,

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God said, let us. So we discussed a little bit this concept of who is us.

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Some say it's a plural of majesty. Ultimately, what I came down on, there are six explanations. I didn't go through all of them, but ultimately

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I came down to this. I think it is the counsel of the trinity, like I said there, the counsel of the triune

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God, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit all being present at creation, and then determining that they were going to make man in their own image.

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So then we talked about the third C, the creative pinnacle. Creative pinnacle, and I spent a lot of time on this, and I'm going to recap this in a little bit of length and include even a little bit of new material, bonus material, for those who were here last week and not this week.

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They're missing out, so blessed are you among men. Verse 26 again,

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God said, let us make man in our own image, after our own likeness. As I said, man is

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God's last creation, unique among all he created. He says of no other creature that it's created in our likeness or in the image of God, and I want to just read,

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I'm going to turn for a moment to Genesis 2. I was just reading this this morning, and I thought, this is so good, because, you know,

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Genesis 2 kind of works through creation from a different angle, where, you know, if you're not careful, and I'm not going to go through all this, but if you're not careful, you might think, well, wait a minute, this is out of order.

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It's not out of order, it's just a different emphasis, but let me just read Genesis chapter 2, and I want to read verse 7, and a little bit more than that, but starting at verse 7, then the

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Lord God, listen, formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.

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And then he goes on to say, and the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put man whom he had formed, just talking about the meticulous nature that God created man with.

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And even in verse 15, then the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it, and the

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Lord God commanded the man, saying, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shall not eat, for the day you eat of it, you shall surely die.

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Listen, he took such great care with Adam. We don't see that with any of the other creatures.

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We don't see it described in such detail. Well, why not? Because there's something spectacular, special.

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As I said, the pinnacle of creation. We talked last week about, does God look like us?

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And the answer is no. When we see the anthropomorphic language, the hand of God, the arm of God, these kind of things, measures the heavens by the span of his hand, this is just to help us understand the nature of God, nothing else.

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As I even quoted John 4 .24, we mentioned that earlier, God is spirit.

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He does not look like us. Jesus took on the likeness of a man, in other words, became a man, took on a second nature, then

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God looked like us, but he walked among us, right? The father never took on a body, the spirit never took on a body, only the son did that.

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We talked about there being communicable and incommunicable attributes. What does that mean? It simply means that there are aspects, there are attributes of God that we reflect back in him.

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What we can't do is, we can't be all -powerful, we can't do those kind of things, but we can be loving, we can be kind, we can, there are a number of things that we can, we can be wrathful, usually sinfully, but, so there are the communicable and incommunicable attributes.

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But we also talked about how sin, Adam's sin specifically, Adam and Eve's sin, plunged the whole human race into sin, as we'd learn from Romans chapter 5, and because of that, the image of God in us is marred, meaning we don't glorify

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God as we ought to. Even when we're obedient, we don't fully glorify him as we ought to.

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So, those are the first three C's, and then I talked about implications, some of the implications of being image -bearers, and I said that each and every human being is immortal because we have souls.

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Dogs, cats, elephants, all these other beings, creations, do not have souls, and they are not, they will not live forever in that sense, spiritually.

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We talked about how that impacts the death of human beings, right?

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If somebody is wrongfully killed, if they're murdered, God says that there's a specific prohibition against that, there's a specific punishment, it's called murder.

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Innocent human life is called murder, you shall not murder, Exodus 20 .13. We talked about how, you know, animal cruelty is horrible.

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There's a viral video even today about some dog being abandoned in Texas, that's terrible.

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But I was thinking about it this week, and I thought, you know what, if I could save one million dogs, a billion dogs,

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I love dogs, or one human being, I would take a human being anytime. Why?

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Image -bearer. Infinite value on that soul. We talked about abortion.

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It is murder. People say, yeah, but it's legal. Okay. It's wrongful.

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It's intentional. And it's the taking of human life. If every human being has equal value, then abortion is murder.

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I said, and I didn't, nobody made me a bumper sticker or anything, I wanted, you know, every soul is a

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Lamborghini, I wanted that. I don't. And because of the value, the equal value of being image -bearers,

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I said that ethnic prejudice has no place. I looked it up this week.

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Did you know? There are 167 nations in this world.

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Not that exist, because there are about 200 or so. But about 80 % of the world has some form of slavery or another.

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It's pretty shocking. Today, I'm talking about. And here's another amazing statistic.

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More than half of the countries in this world have no punishment for slavery. What does that say about the value they put on human beings?

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Let's all hold hands and sing Imagine. There are even,

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I mean, shocking. I looked at a list specifically of 15 nations where slavery is prevalent.

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Three of them are in Africa. Shocking. But if we view others rightly, if we see them as image -bearers, we cannot do, we cannot

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A, participate in that, obviously, but we ought to hate it. It's wrong.

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It's sinful. In fact, let me just turn to 1 Timothy 1.

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We're talking about the law. But it has a direct implication for slavery.

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Listen. 1 Timothy 1, verses 8 through 11. Now, we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully.

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Understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just, but for the lawless and disobedient. Listen to how the lawless and disobedient are described.

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For the ungodly and sinners. For the unholy and profane. For those who strike their fathers and mothers.

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For murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, and listen, enslavers, and liars, perjurers, whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed

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God with which I have been entrusted. That word, enslavers, man -stealers, kidnappers.

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We have an epidemic around this world of sex trafficking. Women and children being bartered like commodities.

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What does the Bible have to do with the world today? Everything. There is sin and sickness in this world, and the idea that we're going to get over it without God, without his law, without Christ, is a lie from the pit.

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I talked last week about how we should speak to one another in light of being image bearers, right?

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James even says, you know, you bless God and you curse your fellow man. How do you do that? How do you do that?

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The answer is we shouldn't, but we do. Now, I didn't talk about this last week either.

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What about the death penalty? People say, well, you know, in light of us being image bearers, how can you support the death penalty?

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Because the Bible does. In Romans 13,

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Paul says this. And it's not just Paul's opinion, by the way. I have to say this just for those who may not understand this.

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This is Paul writing under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. This is God speaking.

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He says, but if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain.

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And he's talking about government, rulers. Does not bear the sword in vain. It's not a sword, you know, that he just flashes around like some kind of movie hero.

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This is talking about the sword of judgment, the sword of punishment, the death penalty.

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You do things that merit death, you should be put to death. In fact, Genesis 9, 6, this is the law of God that reflects who he is.

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In other words, this is an intrinsic command. This is forever. Whoever sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed.

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For God made man in his own image. Murder demands that punishment.

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You say, well, could you actually support that? And I'm like, I have seen plenty of crimes. I've read about plenty of crimes where I say, you know what?

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Yes, I could do that. I'd like to go in there and preach the gospel to that person.

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But then if they're put to death, I'm okay with it. Not that I rejoice over it, which is my next point. Should we ever celebrate the death of any human being?

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I see people cheering because this person died or that person died. How ungodly.

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If the person is saved and they lived a good long life and it's their time to go, well, we rejoice in their home going, right?

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But to celebrate the death of an unbeliever, knowing that that person is going to hell, you know what that tells me?

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It tells me, again, we're like forgetting for a moment or two in our glee, the grace of God.

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Because but for the grace of God, we would be no better than them. And when we think about hell and the wrath of God and eternity facing that, we ought not to wish it on anyone.

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Judas Iscariot, who was complicit in the plot to murder Jesus. What did

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Jesus say? You know, when he when Judas is about to betray him, did he say, well, you know, it's good.

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Let him go about this quickly and I'll just rejoice in his demise. No, he said,

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Matthew 26. Woe to that man by whom the son of man is betrayed. It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.

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Why? Because he knew where he was going. Every image bearer has equal value.

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And because of that, it's why we indiscriminately, in other words, without prejudice, without qualm, without fear, we preach the gospel to every single person.

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We want everyone to receive Christ. I don't want anybody here, anybody watching, anybody that I meet, anybody that I see to go to hell, anybody even that I don't like.

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Because it's not liking them or disliking them. That is the issue. The issue is, is that person an image bearer?

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Do they have equal value to me? How should I view them in light of that? So now that we've had our review, our last three

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C's. First, seeding dominion.

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And you're like, seeding, that's S -E -E. No, it's not. It's C -E -D -I -N -G. Seeding or giving.

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But see, giving doesn't have a C in it. Seeding dominion.

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Again, verse 26. And let them have dominion, control, over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

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I had to include 28 because somebody's going to say, well, what about the birds and what about the fish? They're all in there.

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The whole deal. From the Arctic Circle to the Antarctic, from the North Pole to the South Pole, from east to west, the whole shoot and match, it all is under the dominion of man.

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Now, let's start with the obvious. God created everything.

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God sustains everything. In fact, what does Psalm 24, the psalmist says in Psalm 24, the earth is the Lord's and all it contains.

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And he says to man, here, it's yours. Have it home by 10.

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It really is like he's keeping the pink slip though, right? Dominion means it's a stewardship.

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He's coming back for it, folks. But I've got the pink slip, you can have the keys.

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Take it out, right? What's the message there? Man is greater, more important than creation.

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I'm not against saving the planet. I'm against this kind of Malthusian idea.

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If you don't know who Malthus is, look him up. He said the problem with the earth, basically, I'll give you a shorthand. The problem with the earth is people.

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Get rid of the people, it would be a great place. What happens if you get rid of the people? Chaos. How do

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I know that? Because God gave dominion to men. This is our planet to control, to sustain, to care for.

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Matthew said this, he said, mankind is appointed as God's royal representatives to rule the earth in his place.

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That's right. And allowing for Adam's sin, man is still in charge.

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I'm going to read 2 Peter 3. I know Pastor Mike just preached this, but I'm not saying he got it wrong.

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No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm just saying that there's an emphasis here that I want to make.

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2 Peter 3. I mean, it's interesting. We had the experience a few weeks ago where,

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I don't know, a few months ago, Sammy Williams was here and preached Romans 1, and then a couple weeks later, Pastor Mike preached

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Romans 1, same passage. And I thought, you know what's interesting is you can hear two godly men preach the same passage and just not think, oh,

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I've already heard this, but just go, the depth and the riches of the word of God, right?

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I mean, it's just a multifaceted jewel, and you can just hear it and hear it and hear it and hear it. 2

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Peter 3. Listen, talking about our stewardship. But the day of the

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Lord, in other words, judgment day, will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed.

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Since all these things are to be dissolved, what sort of people ought you to be in lives of holiness and godliness? And I'm sure we stressed ethical eschatology when we went through this, but waiting for and hastening the coming day of God, because of which the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved, and the heavenly bodies will melt as they burn.

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So make sure that you turn your thermostats down and... Listen, God is going to bring a reset, a great reset, if I may say, to this planet.

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Everything physical is going to be destroyed. But listen, verse 13, but according to his promise, we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells.

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That's not the world we live in. That's the world that we're looking forward to. Okay, so...

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Our fifth C, that was seeding dominion. We're in charge of this earth. We have a stewardship over this earth.

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Fifth C, creating gender. By that, I mean God created gender.

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Look at verse 27. Simple. So simple a four -year -old can understand it.

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So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them.

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God created man, then he created man and woman. Right? He created the couple.

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Now, there's a sign that we see frequently all around the place. I mean, I posted one, you know, about...

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Moms are in charge, but there's another one. You know, it's the one with the rainbow in the back, and it's posted around in some people's yards and in front of some churches.

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And I found this one outside of a church, and it starts with this. Love is love.

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Have you seen those? Now, do you know the word tautology?

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We were talking about it last night at dinner, because who doesn't start a dinner conversation with that? And you're like, what's a tautology?

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Okay, so that is either a needless repetition, like love is love, or a logical combination of sentences that is always true.

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In other words, it is a duh moment, right? And they give the example here, and this is probably dictionary .com

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or something, so don't think I'm plagiarizing. A beginner, a beginner who has just started, right?

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If you read that in a paper, you know, a beginner who has just started, you go, dude, rewrite that, that's terrible, right?

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But love is love at face value, that appears to be a tautology. But what are they really saying?

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What they're really saying is, ignore sexual misbehavior.

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Ignore sexual sin. Because it doesn't really matter. You must approve of homosexual marriage.

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After all, love is love. And you can't control who you love, that's the message. Love is love, so just live and let love.

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And because of the vacuous nature, in other words, the empty -headed nature of love is love, the statement, you must also accept plural marriage.

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We're going to go to St. George here in a few weeks, Lord willing, in St. George, Utah, where they actually do practice still plural marriage.

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You must accept pedophilia. You must accept every manner of unbiblical, sinful abomination that they want to call marriage.

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You have to. Why? Because love is love and people can't control who they love. And in that statement, love is love, there are three attacks.

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And I'm going to enumerate those three attacks. First, the attack on gender.

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By saying it does not matter who you love, ultimately they're saying that gender is irrelevant. With great respect and deference,

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God disagrees. Male and female, He created them.

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Now, this is a website, I looked it up, and if you want to get it, you can for me.

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How about this quote? At its core, talking about gender fluidity, this idea that gender is a social construct and you're free, it's a slider.

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You can just slide it however you like. At its core, gender fluidity is, listen, breaking down, it's the breaking down of archaic societal norms that rigidly define gender and place unrealistic expectations on people who live their life in a way that they may not feel true to who they are.

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Archaic societal norms. Archaic. It's so interesting when

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God is described as archaic. He who has no time is outside of time.

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Created time. His standard is archaic. Sure. You know, there's even a word for men and women who take on traditional roles and they're in traditional relationships.

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If you're a man and you know that you're a man, or you're a woman and you know that you're a woman, you are what?

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Cisgendered. I hate all this language. Why? Why? Because what they're really trying to get us to do is swallow this anti -God philosophy.

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Male and female created he them. Again, commentator Matthews says,

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Then the sign in front of the church goes on to say,

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All genders are whole. W -H -O -L -E. Holy and good.

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And I would say, you know what? All genders are. Holy, whole, and good.

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Because there are two. Male and female. Right? But these invented ones are wicked and evil and the products of depraved minds.

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I'm not going to go through all of Romans 1. I could. But just listen to Romans 1 .22. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.

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And you know it's foolish because gender is not complex. Gender is not complicated.

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As I said before, a four -year -old can tell you the difference between boys and girls. It takes years of advanced studies and many degrees to figure out that there are no differences.

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I mean, even this week they're talking about drafting women into the military, making women register for the draft.

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God created male and female. Another commentator, Kidner, says this.

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He says, Moses has not considered gender to be an important feature to stress in his...

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did consider gender to be an important feature to stress in this account. Unbelievers don't like what

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God has said. They don't like what he did.

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And there's a word for that, right? They're like, well, you know, what if somebody doesn't feel comfortable? Okay.

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That person is in sin. Reality isn't based on how we feel.

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Reality is based on what God has said. So that's the first attack. The second one, attack on marriage.

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Love is love, is really, as I said before, a life from the pit of hell. It is a construct, a philosophy, contrary to the word of God.

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And it's simple. God created male and female, and in the next chapter he tells us what that means,

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Genesis 2 .24. Therefore, a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

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That's God's design. Not a multiplicity of people in a marriage, not two men in a marriage, not two women, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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One man, one woman for life. Jesus was also playing on this.

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They said, well, that's old, you know, who cares what Genesis says? In other words, who cares what

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God says? Jesus was playing too. Matthew 6, 19, 1 to 6.

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Now when Jesus had finished these sayings, he went away from Galilee and entered the new region of, or the region of Judea beyond the

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Jordan. Large crowds followed him and he healed them there. And Pharisees came up to him and tested him by asking, is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?

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He answered, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

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So there are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.

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He's quoting what? Genesis. And marriage we know specifically is a picture of Christ in the church.

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Paul tells us that in Ephesians 5. Wives submit to your own husbands as to the

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Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, his body and his is himself its savior.

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Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her.

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This is talking about Jesus having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word so that he,

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Jesus, might present the church to himself, talking about future, in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing that she might be holy and without blemish.

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When we allow for other than what God has designed, we're eradicating this picture of Christ in the church.

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Thirdly, it's also an attack on the nature of God. The Bible says that humans are made in the image of God, that we are not animals, that we have the capacity for morality.

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What does man say? No, we're animals. We have to give in to our urges.

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We're nothing other than smarter dogs. You wouldn't take a dog and accuse a dog of adultery.

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You wouldn't accuse a dog of a lot of things. Why? Because they're not like us. They're not made in the image of God.

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They don't have that sense of right and wrong. They don't have the law of God written in their hearts.

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The goal, the singular goal of all these attacks is to eradicate, as much as is possible, the image of God from mankind.

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They are nothing but spiritual graffiti artists, spiritual arsonists.

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They would do anything. They'd take a blowtorch to the image of God, if they could, to eradicate it from men and women.

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They want us to act like beasts ruled by our emotions and impulses.

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Love has a definition. It's giving. It's not impulse.

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In the bigger picture, we are given two commands by God, right? Love the

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Lord with all our hearts, soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves. And to approve of or participate in the sinful behavior that God forbids is to say what?

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I hate God, and I hate my neighbor enough to participate in this with him. Sin. Sin.

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Sin. That's all it is. So, the creation of the universe, our first sea, the council of the triune

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God, our second one, third one, the creative pinnacle, fourth one, seeding dominion, fifth one, creating gender, and sixth is

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Christ. Christ. Now, he's not directly in there, but we're going to get there.

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He's not directly in the text. We know that Adam and Eve sinned, and we know that the image of God, the imago dei in each of us, is damaged as a result.

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However, as I said earlier, it's not eradicated. It's not erased. It's not destroyed. We all have consciences.

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We have the law of God written in our hearts. And Jesus, if you want to turn to Hebrews 1 for a moment,

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Jesus came to be the perfect image of God in human form, the perfect image of God in human form.

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Hebrews 1. Long ago, at many times and in many ways,

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God spoke to our fathers by the prophets. But in these last days, he has spoken to us by his son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom he also created the world.

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He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.

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And he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high.

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Verses 1, the beginning of 2, tell us that Jesus is the final revelation of God to us.

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There are no more prophets. There is no more communication. Everything that needs to be said is said in the pages of the

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Bible. Jesus Christ is the final word. That's it. No dreams, no new scripture, no still small voice, unless it's somebody reading the

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Bible to you in a low voice. Notice how also that he's the heir of all things.

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Now, if we just picture, you know, get way back to Genesis 1. God gives,

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God cedes dominion to mankind. What does it say here? That he's the heir, Jesus is the heir of all things,

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H -E -I -R, in case you're wondering. Adam failed to faithfully execute the dominion that he was given, right?

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Jesus, the last Adam, is given ultimate dominion. He will rule and reign forever.

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Now, what does it mean when it says here that he's the exact imprint of God's nature? God himself, this is

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Kistemacher, I believe, God himself stamped upon his son the divine imprint of his being.

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The word translated as exact representation refers to minted coins that bear the image of a sovereign or a president.

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It refers to a precise reproduction of the original. The son then is completely the same in his being as the father.

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What Adam failed to do, what he failed to faithfully portray the image of God, Jesus does perfectly.

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He reflects back the glory of God perfectly to him. Now getting back to that anthem that I started with,

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Imagine. No hell below us, above us only sky.

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Jesus talked about hell a good deal. The world says there is no hell, don't worry about it.

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The world says there is no heaven, don't worry about it. The world says there is no

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God, don't worry about him. The world says, of course, that men can have babies.

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I'm not really sure about the world's opinion. I don't know if you saw that, but Apple came out with a new icon that you can tap on your phone that shows a pregnant man, and I'm like, okay, you people are special.

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The world also says that gender is a social construct, and that one's own understanding is more important than even biology, right?

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Don't believe your body even, believe your feelings. The world says that the only thing that matters is being kind.

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That means affirming people as they what? Destroy themselves. As they virtually jump off the cliff into hell.

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Just affirm them, tell them that they're fine, you know, give them a hug, and send them on their way.

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The world says life is what you make it, and death is just dissolution.

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In other words, you go into nothingness. If the world is out to destroy the image of God in man,

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Jesus Christ came to restore it perfectly. They want to destroy, he restores.

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Jesus said in John 11, 25, I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me though he die, which he physically will, yet shall he live.

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In other words, he will live in my presence. Getting back to our

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Olympics analogy, Adam was given the baton, right? God gives it to him. He drops it, he kicks it.

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He can't pick it up. Jesus picked it up, ran the race flawlessly, and then gave his life so that all who believe in his life, death, and resurrection would spend eternity with him in the new heaven.

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Let's pray. Father in heaven, as we think about the confusion that the world presents,

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Lord, we thank you for the clarity of the word of God. It's not archaic, it's timeless.

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The truths contained within tell us the truth about who we are, about our need, about our true need, which is to believe in the

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Lord Jesus Christ, to trust in his life, his death, his resurrection, and in him, we can put down our heads at night, relax, knowing that his work is sufficient for our sins.

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Lord, teach us, remind us often that what the world says is not for our good, but for our destruction.

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Turn us again to your word, to your truth, and to the very words of our

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Lord Jesus Christ, the words of life. Father, let us not be those who would encourage those in sin to keep going, to affirm them in their lostness.

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Let us be like our Lord, warners, truth tellers, those who stand against the tide when it's not popular, when it costs us.