Summer Session (2) Sunday School June 11

All right, well, we're going to go ahead and get started this morning. Welcome back. I know that we have several here, it'll be your first week, so we will do a little bit of review and try to catch you guys up.

But let's begin with a word of prayer. Father, we thank you for the day, and we thank you for the opportunity to study your word, listen carefully to the things that you have to tell us.

I pray that you would help us to get a clearer view of your son, Jesus Christ, that we would rejoice in his truth.

We pray these things in his name, amen. We are studying family.

We are engaging in a biblical theology of the family, trying to derive our definitions, understand the design of the family from the point of view of the

Bible. What does the Bible say in harmony, in unity about what is the family?

What is the design of the family, the purpose of the family, and so on? And the title of the study is

Creation Family Greater Than Chaos Family. Chaos family is very much that which has been normalized and is continually trying to be normalized in our culture today, and we need to go back to the definitions.

And the idea is very much what Jesus did when he was confronted with the hot topic of his day, which was, of course, divorce.

And he was asked about siding with side A or side

B. Can a man divorce his wife for any reason or a really good reason? And he said, no.

He didn't take side A. He didn't take side B. He said, have you not read that he who made them in the beginning made them male and female, and for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

What God has joined together, let no man separate, period. What did Jesus do there? There was this controversy in the culture, side

A, side B, and Jesus said the whole thing, no. Here's what God did in the very beginning.

We take our cues from Christ. We follow him. So when we're faced with any kind of controversy about the family today, what is marriage, so on and so forth, then we say, well, what does

God say? We go back to Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 and are informed by the wealth there, the riches there, the glories there, and that's what we're trying to do.

And so what we find is that when Jesus was answering the question about marriage, which of course is the central relationship of any family, he started with how

God made us. Isn't that interesting? How did God make us? He made us male and female, and that's the beginning of how

Jesus answers about the family. He didn't start in Genesis 2 where God made

Eve and brought her to the man. He starts in Genesis 1 about how we were made in the image of God, and so that's why we start there, and we get our trajectory from there.

We get our definitions from there. So we've been talking about the image of God. I mean, how are we going to define what a family is if we don't know what marriage is, if we don't know what a man and woman is, if we don't know what mankind is, what a human being is?

So we've got to go back and get our definitions from God. And so we talked about the image of God, and we looked in Genesis 1 .27

and the surrounding context exactly where Jesus went with the issue, and we were studying the image of God.

So in Genesis 1 .27, it says that God made us in his image according to his likeness, and in verses 26 through 28, everything we need to know about what that means is right there in the context.

We don't have to go someplace else to try to figure out the mystery. It's all right there, and we were made in the image of God.

First of all, it means we were made relational. Secondly, mediating. Third, a servant.

What does it mean to be made in the image of God? We are a relational, mediating servant. Relational in that we were made unlike the animals and the angels, we were made in a unique three -way intersection of relationships.

God blesses us. He gives us the instructions. He tells us who we are.

He tells us how we're going to live, and he blesses us, and we get our life from him, our instructions from him.

Everything's about him, right? So we are to love God supremely, love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, because he is our maker.

He is our creator. He's the one who gave us life. Praise be to him. And then, notice, he made them male and female.

So not just a man on his own or a woman on her own, but he immediately makes us in relationship to one another, and that first relationship is marriage.

And we're going to think about how important that is later on when we think about human society. But from the very beginning, when

God made us in his image, he made us in relationship with one another. And the primary human relationship is marriage.

And so the man is made in his image, the woman is made in God's image, and they are brought together to love one another rightly.

If you mistreat the image of God, are you loving God supremely? Nope. And so you are to love one another rightly.

And there are some things to be done. God says to Adam and Eve, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it.

Have dominion over all these creatures. And the whole idea is that we would fill the earth with the image of God, to fill the earth with the glory of God, bringing glory to God in all that we do.

Whatever we do, do all to the glory of God. And that means that male and female, man and wife, together, are going to labor in being fruitful, multiplying, and filling the earth, and having dominion over all of creation.

Which means we're in relationship as well with the created order. So we're in relationship with God, love God supremely, relationship with one another, love each other rightly, and then in relationship to the created order, to exercise dominion over creation.

We have a horizontal relationship, we have a vertical relationship, we have a horizontal relationship, and we have an expansive relationship.

So that is the nuts and bolts beginning off what is the main image of God. Angels are not made that way.

Animals aren't made that way. Only Adam and Eve. Only the descendants of Adam and Eve. Only Adam and Eve are held to those particular standards.

Okay. Mediating. Now, because we're in relationship, and because we are dependent upon God, we're not self -existent.

We don't exist on our own. I didn't make me. I don't get to identify myself however

I want to. I don't get to say whatever I want to. It's not about my truth, or what

I think is right and wrong. It's not about what kind of authority I can assert.

We are made in God's image. And we can't love

God supremely, or love each other rightly, or steward the creation responsibly, unless we are utterly, thoroughly dependent upon God.

It's not about my truth, it's God's truth that I'm to mediate to others. If I'm going to tell you the truth, it's going to be

God's truth, not my own. If I've been put into a position of authority of whatever kind, it's not that I bear my own authority to that situation.

Right? But that I bring God's authority into that situation. I'm submitted to him as much as the people who are under my authority are submitted to him.

Right? And it's God's holiness. I don't get to say what is sacred and profane, what is sacred and common.

I have to say what God says about that. So it's a mediating relationship, and now we've come up to the matter of us being servants.

And now a servant doesn't get to say who he is or what he does. Right? If you're somebody's servant, if you're somebody's slave, to use the biblical term, the master says, you're going to live in this corner of the stables, a little room for you there, and every morning you're going to go out and you're going to pitch the manure out.

You don't get to say, well, I identify as a cook, and I'm going to live in the house. You're not the master, you're the servant.

So you get all the definitions from the master. Who I am, how things are going to go, what is the standard operating procedure.

And this way, God gets to define us. God gets to define us.

And how does he define us? Well, we see in Genesis 1 and 2 that he defines those made in his image as male and female.

And we're going to get to more of that in this section. Talk about the man and the woman.

We're going to get to that. But he gets to define us as male and female, and we're defined as having both a body and a soul.

In that, God crafts the body out of the dust of the ground, but then he also breathes the breath of life into Adam so that he becomes a living being.

So we're not just body, not just material. We're not just ethereal and spirit, but we're body and soul.

Now, we get all of this from Genesis 1 and 2. There's been a lot of marriage books that have been written.

A lot of marriage books that have been written. You can go buy them on Amazon and so on. But I guarantee you, all of them together in aggregate have not exhausted the wisdom of Genesis 1 and 2.

It is inexhaustibly rich. Now, we're going to think about, what does it mean that God makes us his servants?

We are God's servants in ways that are not true of the other creatures. Now, God is the

Lord of hosts. Yahweh Sabaoth. He is the Lord of hosts. So the stars are his.

The locusts are his. He is the Lord of hosts. But we are

God's servants in ways that are not true of other beings like angels or elephants or bees.

And the differences there consist in our being made in the image of God. And Hermann Baving put it this way.

He said, humans, we are the imago dei. That's the Latin, image of God. The rest of the creatures are the vestigia dei, the vestiges of God.

They still speak of God. They still declare the glory of God. But not as fully and in the same way that you and I do.

The heavens proclaim the glory of God. Well, so do the birds. So does the flower in the field.

The sparrow does. And the lily does. But not like we do.

And if God so cares about the sparrows and the lily of the field, how much more does he care about you?

Was Jesus' teaching. Isn't that correct? So, we are made male and female and we are made body and soul.

Angels are not male and female. Animals are. But they are not called to exercise dominion over the earth.

That there is a lion and a lioness does not mean that there is lion marriage.

Right? Or that the reproductive processes of the pride on the savannah are an affront to God.

Right? It's not an affront to God. Mankind was made male and female and immediately

Adam and Eve were given to one another in marriage as a family. Immediately. That's what we read in Genesis 2, 21 through 25.

So, for those who are made in the image of God, to be named male and female is something far more special than what

Adam observed in the animal kingdom when it was paraded before him. We are not to think of maleness and femaleness in merely genetic terms, reproductive terms, or physical terms.

There are differences on all those three levels, but there's even more differences. To be made in the image of God is to be made either male or female.

And we see that in Genesis 1 and 2 that the central organizing relationship of all human society is marriage.

Marriage is the foundation, the heartbeat, for those of you taking Latin, the sine qua non of family and thus of society.

That which you cannot do without marriage. Now, we're going to come back to that when we study that.

But also, we're made body and soul. We're also made body and soul. And that is the natural condition.

That is the original design of what God intends. When God made us male and female, he also made us body and soul.

He formed Adam out of the dust of the ground and then breathed into Adam the breath of life and Adam became a living being.

And after he did that and also made Eve also a living being and brought her to the man, then

God says, very good. Very good. He says very good about man living as body and soul.

As a whole. He says very good about that. We have a temptation to sometimes think that the spirit and soul is wonderful and good, but the body is just terrible.

Oh, it's terrible. Can't wait till I can escape. C .S.

Lewis once said, you do not possess a soul. You are a soul. You possess a body.

And that's helpful, but it's not quite right. Because you are a body as well.

Your soul is organized for a body. It is absolutely unnatural. It is not good.

It is not good. It is on the level of consequences for sin.

Not good for the soul to be divorced from the body. Death. It is not good for the soul to be separated from the body.

That's called death. That is not according to the original design and standard.

Heaven is not the end goal. You get to heaven, you're not done. You've not crossed the finish line.

Sorry. There's something even better. A lot of you are like, oh man, really?

I can see the finish line. Heaven is not the end goal.

The resurrection into the glorious state wherein your glorified spirit is united with a glorified resurrected body, that is the glorified state.

The end goal. That your inner man is designed for your outer man and vice versa is a very important part of what it means to be made in the image of God.

In other words, you're not female in a male body.

You're not male in a female body or anything else on the dialectic, anything else on the spectrum.

God made you, all of you. Animals do not possess souls in the way that humans do.

They can exhibit various emotional states and they can exhibit loyalty and so on, but not the same way as those made in God's image.

Angels do not possess bodies, though they appear in that form from time to time and scare people to death in the

Bible. The Bible teaches us that the inner man is responsible for and blessed by the outer man.

There is a connection. We're not trapped and attempting to escape, which is a

Greek philosophical thought. The inner man in the Bible is described as the heart, the will, the mind, the soul, the spirit.

It's a very robust kind of description. Now, the reason why we're taking the time with this is because in the engagement of the body and the soul, in the engagement of the outer man with the inner man, we express our creatureliness as those made in God's image.

When we express our rationality, artistry, emotion, and passion, we are exhibiting a capacity far beyond all other creatures.

God designed us as his relational mediating servants with the capacity for displaying his glory, for manifesting his glory.

God made us so that we could receive his word, amen his word, study his word, discuss his word, treasure his word, apply his word, and thus glorify him in the world.

God made Adam and Eve in his own image, that he gave him his word. This is who I am. This is who you are.

This is the way the world works. Go forth. And to the degree that Adam and Eve received his word and amened it and rejoiced in it and followed through in it, that was all to the glory of God.

So, his breath in us, his word in us, his life in us. He made us his servants. So, that was a very quick rundown of the image of God.

We could have taken the whole summer session to just study that. But we have to move quickly through our definitions because we're trying to understand family, thus we must begin with marriage.

That's where God begins. God begins with marriage, so we begin with marriage. Family begins and ends with marriage.

When Jesus was answering that controversial hot topic, he wanted to know, have you not read

Genesis 127? He wanted to know, have you not read Genesis 224? The purposeful, systemic obfuscation of marriage and family in our culture is not native to our culture.

It's happened throughout time through the deceptions of Satan. It's not just a question of, did

God really say? Certainly, it is that. But also, who cares if he did? Nonetheless, Christ is king of kings and he is the

Lord of lords and he gives us God's definitions for marriage and family from God's good design.

God fashioned the woman from the man and for the man, gave her to the man and we have marriage. The spirit of Christ in Moses concludes in Genesis 224.

Here is the conclusion. Therefore, based on what happened in the creation on the sixth day, therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh.

So, we hear that, right? So, family begins with marriage. The man leaves his father and mother and he's joined to his wife.

There's the beginning of a family. But there's also an end to the connection of the other family.

He left his father and mother. There's a distinction between one family and the next. Now, a family reunion, there's a whole lot of families that are still family.

It's not an all or nothing thing, but there is a distinct difference. The distinction between one family and another marriage.

Now, I want you to hear this. The distinction between one family and another family is marriage. Not consent, not legal paper, not how you file for your taxes, but the distinction between one family and another family is marriage.

Now, a son is still a son, though he has taken a wife. But he has indeed left his father and his mother to become his own head of household.

There are secondary and tertiary family relationships, which in aggregate come together as the lattice of a nation upon which the vine of culture grows.

Families connected by family, by family, by family. This is the lattice of a nation upon which the vine of culture grows.

However, this is still dependent on there being a distinctly defined institution called a family, which begins and ends with marriage.

Now, one of the reasons why there's such confusion in our day about what a nation is, is because there's confusion about what makes a marriage, or even if we need it or not.

The question about whether or not we even needed a marriage precedes whether or not we even need a nation.

The whole thing breaks down. If the building material of a human society is wood, hay, and stubble, the construction site is going to look like a disaster.

Now, without announcing it, we have already boarded a particular train, and we are already heading in a particular direction.

What we know before we begin. What we know before we begin constitutes our presuppositions, what we think before we begin to think.

The questions we've answered before we start asking questions. We have already settled down on our train of thought.

We've had our ticket punched. At this point, passengers on other trains are heading in other directions, and it's very difficult to talk with them.

It's very difficult to have conversations with people who are on the pride parade train.

Very difficult to have any kind of conversation whatsoever, isn't it? But if we had taken the time to speak with them back at the train station, before we boarded, before we left, then we would have an opportunity to have a conversation.

We have similar vocabulary, but we have different dictionaries, and we don't get to explore that unless we begin at an adequate starting point.

Otherwise, it's just yelling at each other as the trains pass. It's important to know that because as we begin to investigate the recipe for marriage, we're going to have to deal with topics like male and female.

Pronouns will be used. All dictionary definitions involve some kind of positive and negative element, even if the negative is simply implicit and hidden.

By stating what something is, by definition, it is not something else.

All right, so in terms of what we know, we have a few options, different philosophical options.

There are some that say basically any kind of definition in the dictionary, whatever dictionary you're going to use, is simply deception.

All equally wrong, all equally a lie. This is the conclusion of Michel Foucault. Any kind of language construction is simply a power play.

We're just trying to exercise power over one another. So etymology, history, science, doesn't matter what it is, people are just telling their narratives and telling their stories to try to oppress you.

Never mind that he was telling a story trying to oppress you. So the idea that everything is a deception, whether you're

Nietzsche or whether you're Buddha, always ends up in the void and disaster.

Not a lot of people embrace the deception angle. The ancient

Greeks and others see everything in dualism.

So the one would say marriage is a deception, male and female is a deception, society is a deception, it's not even worth thinking about.

Dualism, dualism would say, well, spirit and matter are in opposition.

The fact that you are a body and soul is a travesty, it's a problem, and you want to escape the physical and get to the spiritual.

Good and evil are equal and opposite. The powers of good are in constant conflict with the powers of evil, and there's this big tug of war going on.

Dualism, male and female are severed by their differences in value, constitution, and purpose.

Dualistic opposites, male and female. Obviously, this breaks down as well.

The enlightenment answer to dualism is the dialectic.

Now, let me show you something. Remember side

A and side B, whatever the controversial subject is, the dialectic moves like this.

And to quote Hegel, who talked about the dialectic, he said, the truth is not in the thesis or in the antithesis, but truth emerges through the synthesis of the two.

Okay, truth is somewhere in the middle. Maybe you've heard that. So, this is not what

Jesus does when he's confronted with side A and side B. He says, no, what did God say?

But the dialectic says, well, this truth is somewhere in the middle, and then this becomes

A, and there's another B, and the whole thing keeps going.

All right, that's the dialectic. Now, that is the prevailing cultural ethos of our day. That's how everything's operating in our world today.

This is the presuppositional worldview in operation in all of our institutions of learning, all of them, not just the higher ones, but all of them.

What's going on in the politics, and so on. Now, you'll notice that the dialectic does not achieve escape velocity from dualism.

It still stays in orbit, not like a satellite, but like a parasite, because you still have

A, B, A, B. You still have the dual going on, but they're trying to say, well, the answer to all the dualistic problems is that there needs to be a synthesis.

So, the dialectic, of course, there's Hegel. He believed that the world could be saved through ideas.

All right, here is this idea. Another idea that counters it will rise up against it, and in the conflict between the two, you have to have conflict between these ideas, a new idea will emerge, and then once again, that will become the thesis, and another one will rise up against it, and then you have conflict again until it's solved.

Eventually, you purify yourself, and you come to perfection, utopia, and so on. Marx thought that was an idiotic idea.

It's not ideas. It's material. So, he had material, the dialectic materialism, and so he said, here's the people with not a lot of material.

Here's the people with all the material, and you have to have conflict between the two, so it all evens out, and the big conflict was called the revolution.

So, Marx thought Hegel didn't go far enough. Okay, and so all of a sudden, you have Hegel, the dialectic idealism, the dialectical idealism, and then you have

Marx, the dialectical materialism, and then what was the synthesis between the two? Welcome to today.

Welcome to today. Let me give you an example. What are the arguments against having a pride parade in downtown

Dallas? What are the arguments against it that are being put forth by anybody who has a loud megaphone?

Not like what's the proper and right argument, but I'm saying what are the common objections to it that are gaining some kind of traction?

Fun, good life. Sounds like they're saying it's going to be a good experience for them, but what is the argument against it?

And worse, a bad experience, isn't it? A scarring experience.

A soul -destroying experience. The whole argument against grooming is what?

Chaining together several experiences which scar and ruin a child, right?

Well, this is true, isn't it? Yes, indeed. The argument for the pride parade in Dallas is what?

This is a good experience. Everybody on the alphabet soup has been living in bad experiences because they're oppressed and everybody hates them, and they're having terrible experiences, and so what we need to do is to have a parade, and we need to normalize the experiences of alphabet soup so that they will no longer be targeted and hated and hurt, and this will be a positive experience called love.

So the arguments for and against the pride parade in Dallas, as far as what everybody's saying on both sides, side

A and side B, is what? It's a negative experience, side A says. Side B says no, it's a positive experience.

This is dialectical experientialism. It's not totally ideals, ideas.

It's not totally material and matter. It's the synthesis of the two, and everybody's arguing from their personal experiences.

You know, you don't, you know, you're killing us, you know, we're dying out here.

Like, no, you're not. I can, you know, your pulse is going and you're breathing. You haven't experienced what

I've experienced, right? So it's all experience -based, and so what the arguments are right now from the conservative and from the liberal side are all about, it's a bad experience, no, it's a good experience, no, it's a bad experience, no, it's a good experience.

Everybody's on the same train. Just in different cars of the train. Side B is up near the engine, way farther down the track than side

A. They're in the caboose, and they're all yelling at each other, but they're on the same train, all right?

We don't want to get on the train. That's a bad train. So our conversations have to start at the train station where we part ways.

Yes? Hmm? Van Teel. Yes, correct.

Yes, yes. So here's the thing. We don't need to run away, you're correct.

They may not have a good understanding, pretty obvious. So what kind of conversation are we going to have?

Are we going to have a conversation in which we are swept along by dialectical experientialism and start talking about experiences?

Here's my experience. Here's the bad experience of all of these kids and all of these young adults who now wish they could detransition, but they can't, and it's a disaster.

Look at all these negative experiences. Are we going to talk about that? We should talk about that. We should have compassion. We should pray for these people.

But is that where we start talking? And the answer is no, because we're already on the train. What we want to do is talk to these people who are on the train and say, let's back up to the train station, please.

I would like to invite you to back up the train a little bit, and let's think about where it all began. Because I am concerned for you that you're on the wrong train.

And the reason I'm talking to you is that I love you. You see, so that's what we're talking about.

We're not talking about giving people up. We're talking about where do we start the conversation? Now, the reason why

I'm bringing that up is because when we start working our way through what marriage is, you may find that some of your assumptions and your ideas about marriage, about what is maleness and what is femaleness, is not coming from the scriptures, but is coming from that train, right?

So I'm not saying just we, not just that we back up to make sure that we are compassionate and evangelistic so that we can talk to people about what

God says, but also we may have a need to back up as well. Because, folks, it's just in the water, okay?

It's just in the water. It's Flint, Michigan, okay? Yes, yes.

So statistics and studies, right, are based on what? Experiences, correct?

Observation, observation about what happened, that's the materialistic side of it, and how they feel about it, how they understand themselves, the idealistic part of it.

Merged together, the statistics, these studies, and guess what?

They have as many studies, side A has as many studies as side B does, and they're throwing studies at each other.

Where's the authority? Who gets to say, you know? Okay, now the definitions that we receive from scripture are not framed by a duality or by dialectic, but by distinctions, distinctions.

This is the Christian worldview. Let's start where everything begins.

The world in which we live is one created by, defined by, and ruled over by a triune God, manifest in the incarnation, the incarnation of the second person of the

Godhead. In other words, the Trinity is not a dualism, and the Trinity is not a dialectic.

There are distinctions. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Spirit is God. God is one, not three gods.

The Son is not the Father, nor the Spirit, okay? These are distinctions.

Jesus Christ has two distinct full natures. He is fully God and fully man, and the one nature does not bleed into the other.

Now, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have an interpenetrating yet distinct kind of relationship.

The $10 word for the day is perichoresis, which is the idea, it's not a dialectic in which, you know,

God is really the Spirit, but on a different part of the spectrum. No, that's not true.

And it's not true that God the Father is a different God from God the Spirit. That's not true.

God the Holy Spirit, and God the Son, and God the Father are in perfect relationship, and the relationship blends, but it doesn't mix.

Now, that's a mystery. Don't ask me to explain it as best I can do, okay? But we have lots of scripture in which

Jesus says, the Father and I are one, and he says, I will send forth my Spirit, and he's the

Spirit of Christ, and the Spirit is the Lord. I mean, we could go on and on and on. There are distinctions of the persons in the

Trinity, and yet the relationships are so very close, and yet they are still very distinct.

It's a mystery. But that's the kind of world we live in. The same with Jesus Christ and his two natures.

Now, why is that important to say from the beginning? I'm not trying to confuse you.

I'm trying to explain something. When we say the two shall become one flesh, why do we say that?

Because we live in a perichoretic world. We live in a world in which the triune

God has made everything in a particular way. Does the man stop being who he is, and the woman stop being who she is?

Well, no, but yes, the two become one flesh. How do we understand that?

What God has drawn, let no man separate. And so, we live in this type of world. We don't live in a dualistic world, a deceptive world.

We don't live in a dialectic world. We live in a world full of distinctions, good distinctions, created distinctions.

Distinctions are good. God put them into his creation. The first day was not the second day, but they weren't in opposition to each other.

The same with the sky, the water, the land, the birds, the fish, and the animals.

Light and dark is not a duality, because morning and evening make up one day. Male and female, man and woman, husband and wife, parents and children, these are good distinctions.

Good distinctions, and they make up a family. All right, we're going to start talking about the man.

Oh, man. We're not going to get through that today. But we'll start with that.

Distinctions, biblical distinctions. We begin with the man because God does, right?

If we're going to talk about the family, he begins with marriage, so we begin there. We're going to talk about marriage, we begin with the man because God starts there.

Now, in Genesis chapter 1, verses 26 and 27, we read, then

God said, let us make man, which the Hebrew word is Adam, sounds familiar,

Adam, but it's not in the capital proper name kind of way, it's just Adam.

Let us make man in our image according to our likeness. Let them have dominion, see the plural, them, making mankind.

All of humanity being called Adam, being called man. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

So, God created man, again, Adam, in his own image.

In the image of God, he created them male, Hebrew word is zakar, and female, nekevah, he created them.

So, there's man, mankind, named Adam, and then there's a distinction, there's a distinction, zakar is

Adam, and nekevah is Adam. Male is man, female is man, mankind, humanity, created in the image of God.

So, the first creature made in God's image was a male creature named

Adam, later on named Adam, but he was also Adam. Now, rather than call all humans

Adamites, which would be kind of weird, God just calls them all

Adam, calls them all man. The word human comes from the

Latin word for man, homo, which also means same. And, the

Greek word that lies behind that, which means same, indicates a pattern.

So, the Latin, the Greek, the Hebrew, are all pointing at something, and of course, this is very triggering to the culturally virtuous.

But, it's interesting in that it reflects Genesis. The man, Adam, is described as both male and female, but the male, zakar, is the

Hebrew word for remembrance, Zachariah, my

Lord, remember, may my Lord remember, Zachariah, that's his name.

But, zakar, how does zakar, the Hebrew word for remembrance, is also the word for male in Genesis 127?

That was a surprise, but why? Because it is indicative of the male being the archetype, the pattern.

Each family we read of in the Bible is known by the man of the household, and his name continues through his sons.

If you notice, this practice has largely been retained to this day by the wives taking their husband's last name.

Why? Because male means zakar, to remember. Now, each of those instances that we can look at in scripture, and even in the reflected biblical culture that has been retained to this day, all of those instances speak to the larger picture.

We are creatures called man. I was teaching a course in philosophy, a very short course in philosophy to a business group about ethics, and there was grave concern about language in our day, about how women were being identified as male.

But there is no understanding of why all humanity is called man or mankind.

Why? Because the male constitutes the remembrance of the race. Now, the founder of a movement becomes the name of the movement, right?

Russellites, Campbellites, Hussites, Lutherans. We get that a lot, don't we? The founder of a movement becomes the name of the movement.

That's a common thing. But when humanity is spoken of as a whole in the scriptures, it is called man.

We sometimes translate it mankind, just to be clear. When humanity falls into sin, who's responsible for it?

Who was it? Adam. Not Eve. Wait, didn't she sin first?

Adam is responsible. Not Eve, right?

And here is the hope for all mankind. Women included. Here's the hope.

Jesus Christ, as the second Adam, is 100 % male.

100 % male. As such, he stands in for the whole, as the archetype, as the pattern, a sufficient savior for men and women, right?

That whole line of thinking is largely out of sight in our day. I was in a conversation just the other day with a friend who was talking about, you know, people are really reaching, how can

Jesus be our savior unless he has experienced everything we have?

Now, there's some passages in Hebrew which assures us that he was fully human, and he stands in for us and for our salvation as a true brother, right?

Because he's fully human, and he did experience humanness on a full level. However, the concern is that unless he experiences all of the different temptations and sins and orientations of humanity today, how can he be a sufficient savior, right?

If Jesus wasn't 100 % in tune with his feminine side, or if he did not have trouble with his sexual identity, or if he didn't have certain homosexual feelings in him, how can he be our savior?

Right? Why are they saying that? Because they're on the dialectic train. Dialectic experientialism.

That's the train they're on, and they didn't even know how they got there, right? But it's not about the dialectic.

It's about the distinction. In the distinction of what humanity is, male is remembrance, and Jesus can truly, as the second

Adam, represent and mediate for women when he was not a woman. Now, this is being wrestled with.

Today, labels of man, mankind, even human, right? Even amen, right?

Oh, what an evil thing to say. You said men. But throughout the old covenant, the males of the covenant were what?

Circumcised. Just the males of the covenant were circumcised. Why not the little girls? Because there was a remembrance of the seed who was to come.

That was the significance of the sign of circumcision. And it was a son who would come and who would stand in as the second

Adam, bruised yet victorious over the serpent. And the question in the scriptures is simply coming down to this.

Will you be remembered in the first Adam? Or will you be remembered in the second

Adam? Only two races of men. In which image of God will you stand?

The ruined or the risen? We'll leave it there. Father, I thank you so much for the time that we've had.

Lord, I pray that you would bless our continuing study of what family means.

That you would help us as we think about what does it mean to be made in your image.

Lord, I pray that you would encourage us and strengthen us. I pray that you would guide us, that you would help us in our compassion and understanding of your word.

To speak clearly and lovingly to those who are around us in this day and age. We pray these things in Jesus' name.