Systematic Theology (Part 7)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Originally, this week, what I wanted to talk about was creation and Imago Dei.

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Creation, we know, Imago Dei, made in the image of God. And as I put my notes together,

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I realized that I'm going to have to break this up into two weeks, which is fine, whatever.

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But I've been traveling this past week. I spent the last week in a tree house in Indianapolis, you can ask me about that later.

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It made studying weird. So this morning, I went through everything to make sure it all made sense again.

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So if something doesn't make sense, just ask me, please. All right, but a couple of weeks ago,

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Dave Smith taught, and he talked about man in his original state, man in his original state. We spent a lot of time talking about the constitutional nature of man.

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And we kind of had a crafted discussion about two different descriptions of the constitutional nature of man.

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Does anybody remember what those are? Yes, dichotomous and trichotomous.

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If there are two or three parts to man. See, repetition, repetition, repetition helps us remember.

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We landed after much discussion on the dichotomous view, and then we talked about the origin of man's souls, ending in the creationism view, which says, essentially, that God creates our souls at conception.

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And then we talked a little bit about how that impacts our lives. But when Dave started, he mentioned a couple of things that he wouldn't have time to talk about.

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And I, of course, wrote those down, because that seemed like an easy way to pick a next topic, right?

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And that was my goal for today. And the one that I wrote down was, what are the ramifications of man being made in the image of God?

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I thought that was a really important thing. It's a really good thing for us to talk about, because I think there's a lot of things that kind of leak out of our doctrine of Imago Dei that,

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I think, inform decisions that we make that don't necessarily feel like theological decisions.

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But it's really important for us to have a right view of theology and a right view of how scripture describes man being made in the image of God.

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So that's what I wanted to talk about. But the problem is, before even getting to that, I felt like we didn't have a good kind of foundation about creation in general, from which to have some of this discussion.

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So I figured I would start with that, and then get into Imago Dei. And then I realized that, well, if I start with creation, I'm not gonna get to Imago Dei.

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So we're gonna do that next week, I'm sorry, but here we go. So, before even getting to Burkhoff, we're gonna start with Dr.

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Sproul. Dr. Sproul does a really good job of having these kind of polemic debates in his own writing, where we can sort of look at both sides of a particular issue.

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If you don't have a handout, there are handouts at the back two doors. Please grab one, or if somebody can facilitate that process,

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I appreciate that very much. So Dr. Sproul, I held up his book a couple of weeks ago, well, one of his bazillion books, called

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Everyone's a Theologian. It's a really great read, I recommend it. He starts, when talking about creation, he kind of talks about the three possibilities that scientists have theorized over the years, about how we are who we are.

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Now, these are not theological concepts, these are scientific theories. And here we go, this is,

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I think, number one, yeah, number one in your notes. There is not a mistake in your quiz.

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He says, number one, theory number one, the universe is self -existent and eternal. Number two, the material world is self -existent and eternal.

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And we'll break apart those two different things. You'll see that kind of come together as we go through this over the course of this morning.

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And number three, the universe was self -created. So the universe is self -existent and eternal.

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The material world is self -existent and eternal. And the third one, the universe was self -created.

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So, if we start with the first two, because they're very similar, what's problematic about this idea that the universe or the material world is self -existent and eternal?

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Any thoughts? Barry? If it stretches back into eternity, how do we ever get to the present?

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Okay? Anyone else? Janet? Self -existence always means that there is no first cause.

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You can't have a prime mover. It's something to begin this whole process.

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Anything else? You wanna add anything else? Sure, I mean, that's what a lot of the scientific pursuit is all about, right?

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There's no need for God if it just kind of self -exists. I wrote down a couple things. I wrote down number one, everything in the material universe points back to some point of origin.

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Everything does. When we talk about how we measure the movement of elements in the cosmos, there's this idea that a bajillion years ago, everything must have been at some point because we can track the motion of all of the objects in space.

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And if we backtrack that projection, it comes back to one point. So that must be the origin of the universe, right?

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This is a scientific study. This is not something that we do or whatever. This is the scientific idea.

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Also, it turns out, nearly everybody in the scientific community says that there was a beginning.

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Whether we agree with what that beginning was or not, clearly we do not. But everybody seems to indicate this.

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And so even within these theories potentially existing, there's already kind of a problem with it, right?

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It doesn't really make sense for the universe of the material world to be self -existent and eternal.

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And we'll come back to that in a little bit. Because the third one, as Sproul puts it, is the most absurd.

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I like the words that Sproul uses. This idea that the universe is self -created.

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The universe is self -created, that it decided to exist one day.

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And at this point, scientists have kind of started to redefine this as something called chance creation, which is the idea that given enough time, the universe would figure it out and create.

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And really talking about this idea and why this idea makes absolutely zero sense, we need to talk about a couple of Latin phrases.

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One of them you know and one of them you might know. The first one is ex nihilo.

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What does ex nihilo mean? Out of nothing, okay? And we know this term, and there's reasons why.

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And we're gonna return to the term ex nihilo a little bit later. But what about ex nihilo nihil fit?

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Anybody heard this before? This is kind of a logical phrase. Out of nothing, nothing comes.

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Very good. All right. What's that? So I also listen to Dr. Sproul. Thank, well, there you go.

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Well, ex nihilo nihil fit is also in Burkhoff's writing. So it's not a Sproulism, although I would excuse you if you thought that might be the case, cuz he does that kind of stuff.

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But it's kind of this classic position in philosophy and in reason.

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Here's what Sproul says. He says, if all we have is nothing, remember, out of nothing, nothing comes.

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If all we have is nothing, that is all we will ever have, because nothing cannot produce something.

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If there ever was a time when there was absolutely nothing, then we could be absolutely certain that today, at this very moment, there would still be absolutely nothing.

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Something has to be self -existent. Something must have the power of being within it for anything to exist at all.

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Out of nothing, nothing comes. That's why self -creation doesn't make sense.

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It's not possible. If you ever, even for a microsecond, have absolutely nothing, you can't then suddenly or otherwise have something.

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Just doesn't work. So, self -creation, out the window, automatic, we're done.

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That brings us back to the first two points, because we've already established something must exist, right?

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We can't ever have this moment where there's absolutely nothing. By the way, there are handouts at the back. If we ran out on one side, there's probably still some on the other side.

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Please make sure you get one. All right. So, if the universe is self -existent and eternal, or the material world is self -existent and eternal, scientists have posited that the only way this could possibly happen is if somewhere inside the universe, there was some kind of power supply or core that is self -existent or eternal.

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Of course, that then brings us back to the same sets of questions. Right? What's the prime mover?

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What caused this self -existent or eternal thing to decide to create something if it can't possibly be a higher being?

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How does that work? It doesn't work. It doesn't make sense. Because the point of this characterization, like Kirstie said, is to imply that there is no transcendent power.

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So, those are the three possibilities that Sproul talks about. But, in the words of the great theologian

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Obi -Wan Kenobi, there is another. Your quiz does not list three possibilities, but four possibilities.

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And what is the fourth possibility here? In the beginning,

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God created. Or my favorite two -word phrase in all of the Bible, but God. Right?

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The fourth possibility is that the universe and the material world were created by a self -existent, external, and eternal higher power,

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God. So, when we talk about the attributes of God, a lot of the time we kind of talk about these things, and we almost talk about them in kind of an abstract way.

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We're like, okay, this is how we understand the simplicity of God, this is how we understand the omnipotence of God, and this and that, and the other thing.

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This is the working out of the aseity of God, right here. When we think about God being self -existent, right?

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God, there's no creation of God. God just simply exists, right?

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This is it. This is why it's so important. So, if we now turn to a universe where God exists and has created the universe, one would think, okay, finally, we got past this big debate.

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Now we're good to go, we can kind of get into some deeper theology. Nope, there's still arguments. So now we're going to talk about some of those arguments as we kind of narrow this thing down a little bit.

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So your first question just done, your second question, define ex nihilo nihilo fit, out of nothing, nothing comes.

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I'll talk about the dualistic theory. Has anybody heard of the dualistic theory before? This is interesting.

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Dualistic theory. Dualism, or the dualistic theory, is the view that God and material,

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God, material, are both eternal, and God reshapes the eternal matter to his pleasure.

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Birkhoff, dualism is not always presented in the same form, but in its most usual form posits two self -existent principles,

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God and matter, which are distinct from and co -eternal with each other. Okay, fine, fine, fine, fine.

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You need a God to do some stuff, but God is spirit, right? The material world, it also just kind of existed, but it didn't have agency, it couldn't do anything, but God has agency, and so God's gonna take this other stuff that existed eternally, and he's gonna kind of silly putty

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Plato it into stuff, right? That's this idea. There's a lot of problems with this view.

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Who can think of some potential problems with this kind of a perspective? This dualism perspective,

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Barry. Sure, in Christian theology,

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God is the only eternal being, and now he's sharing space with some eternal matter.

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Birkhoff writes, if matter is eternal, it must be infinite, for it cannot be infinite in one way, duration, and finite in other respects.

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Look at that, Barry, I had a quote to support what you said. I didn't even call him yesterday or anything.

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I was driving too much. Anything else? Any other thoughts about dualism, why dualism is a problem?

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I didn't write their names down. I can get those for you if you'd like, I will. A redeemed evolution.

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So it's kind of more deism, which we'll talk about a little bit later. This kind of, well, I don't want to define deism because it's on your sheet, so we should probably define it when we get to it, right?

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Well, I'll leave my issue with that later. Great, I love it when you have issues, Christine. Okay, kind of the idea that there is no divine plan.

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That just like when your kids sit down in front of a lump of three different colors of Play -Doh, you always end up with gross brown

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Play -Doh at the end, right? In one color. Sure.

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Yeah, spirit good, material bad. And truthfully, Burkoff does talk about that idea in this chapter.

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I didn't really want to kind of get into a lot of that stuff. But how about this? How about the idea that it implies that God doesn't really have the power of creation, right?

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He's not creating things, he's just kind of reshaping things. It's not the same -

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Playing with Legos is a great example, right? No Kregel. Janet, did you have something?

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No. Well, it's okay. We don't agree with dualism, so it's okay if it's got a hole poked in it.

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That's fine. How about this one? It implies that God doesn't have control over the existence of matter, right?

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Matter would have to pre -exist in order for him to do something with it. And therefore, God would not be absolutely sovereign.

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Because I am a fair arbiter of science fiction, this implies that God is like a replicator in Star Trek, where the replicator just takes molecules, rearranges them, puts them together into something else, and gives it to you.

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Your homework is to find out where those molecules come from. I'm not going to say it. Any other thoughts about dualism, problems with this idea?

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Sure. Yeah, it's this idea of remaking

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God in man's image, right? Where we don't really create anything.

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We just take things and change them and put them together. We destroy things, I guess.

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We cut wood up, make sawdust, and you can never have the hole again, right? But we don't create things out of nothing.

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So it's really bringing God down to our level, in a way.

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Anything else? It's self -existent and eternal.

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And that's, by the way, that's the difference between the universe is self -existent and eternal, and the material world is self -existent and eternal.

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Those two definitions that I talked about in question one, that's part of that.

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Yes, it does. It brings God down to imply that God and matter are on the same level, right?

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Maybe God's got a little bit of a step up, because he's got some agency. He's not just this formless, shapeless mass of goo or something, right?

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Yeah, absolutely. So the person who defined this theory, are they proposing to be a

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Christian, or are they trying to disprove Christianity based on these theories? So dualism as a theory has a lot of forms to it.

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What we're talking about is the most classic form of dualism. And so it was argued in the

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Christian church, just trying to make sense of all of this stuff, yes. Then, a lot of these arguments did take place.

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But if you're talking to a Christian, you could just go back to Genesis 1, where it talks about there was no form, so we can't -

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But then it says the spirit of God hovered over the waters, and so what does that mean? Was the water there? Did the spirit put the water there first before it hovered over the waters?

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That's where you get into this weird stuff, right? Yeah. All right, so dualism has problems.

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The next one is called the emanation theory. Now, as someone who really likes kind of crunching logical stuff together,

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I found this one super fascinating. It's super interesting, especially because I know where we're going in this lesson. So has anybody ever heard of the emanation theory?

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Okay, I'm gonna use important words that we need to remember. The emanation theory is the idea that the creation of the world -

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We're gonna bring back some arguments we just heard against dualism, by the way. The creation of the world is a necessary act of God.

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A necessary act of God. So again, we're gonna talk about free acts of God and necessary acts of God later.

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But this idea essentially teaches that God is bound to, or is required to, or is ontologically, like, just does, does this thing, which is creating the world as part of his existence.

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The world emanates from him, like light emanates from the sun. The sun doesn't just exist and be like, oh, I'm gonna shed some light, right?

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It just does. Okay, that's emanation. Ramifications of this idea.

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Problems with emanation theory. It seems like God needs us.

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I think it seems like, what you said before, we're kind of equal again, right?

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Like creation is now becoming equal to God, in a sense, right? If creation is a thing that God necessarily must create, he's bound by his essence to do it, right?

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And so that thing, all of a sudden, in terms of net value to the universe, goes up.

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Sure, absolutely, 100%. Limits God by making creation a necessary part of his being.

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A necessary act. Janet? Yes? It's a constitutional part of his nature in this position.

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Every single thing that happens would be emanating from him, which removes human responsibility altogether, right?

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By the way, it implies the world is eternal. If God is eternal, and the world necessarily emanates from him, then the world must be eternal, which we've already kind of talked about problems with that.

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This is also pantheism, essentially, right? God is in everything.

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Everything is in God. There's all this kind of like weird intertwining kind of deal going on. There's a lot of problems with emanation theory, but I really think it's interesting.

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Just a really neat idea. And the last one that Burkoff talks about before we actually move into the doctrine of creation in the context of church history and develop it with actual correct theology.

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Yes, pantheism, pantheism, yep, is evolution.

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Bev. I don't want to spend a lot of time talking about evolution except to say, if God exists in a world where evolution exists as a creative power, then we are essentially reduced to being deists.

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What is deism? I think we know what deism is.

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Yep, yep, wound up the clock, right? The great clockmaker.

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Deist believes that God exists and created the world, but does not interfere with his creation. Your time to shine.

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Like the sun. What's the problem with creationism?

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What? I don't. For me, when I was first saved, both being raised in more of like a liberal mindset.

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Who needs democracy? Liberal, okay. You try to blend them together. Like, I can be a creationism and, or not creationism.

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I can be a evolutionist and a Christian, but then the idea that we, like death wouldn't have been able to dislodge me from what

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I was going to say before. You can blame pregnancy break, that's all good. You've got that excuse built in for a couple more months, yeah.

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Well, if you think of it, raise your hand and I'll try my best to call on you. Okay, anything else before we move on?

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Absolutely, yes, 100 % correct. Yeah, it limits God by making creation a necessary part of his being, not a free act.

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Right, he doesn't have the agency to say, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this. He doesn't act within accordance of his decree.

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In fact, there really is no decree of God anymore, if creation is a necessary act of God, right?

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Because there is no plan that he is decreeing we'll go forth. It just kind of happens, because that's emanation, that's how it works.

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So it's got problems. Alright, church history.

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From the beginning, the Christian church has attested, by and large, writ large, to creation as a free act of God ex nihilo.

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I keep my promises, I told you we'd come back to this. What is a free act of God? He does what he wants, right?

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He desires to do something and then does it, right? As opposed to a necessary act, which we already talked about, is something that he is bound to do by his essence.

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So a free act versus a necessary act. This is important because it really gets back to that emanation thing.

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That's the difference between a free act and a necessary act. A free act is an act where one makes their own decision to perform an action.

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A necessary act, an act where one is bound by existence to perform something.

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By the way, can anybody give me an example of a necessary act of God? Are there things by which

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God is bound and he must do? Are there things that happen?

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Attributes of God, because he is internally consistent, sure. Sure, sure.

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Anything else? Getting back to Steve's lessons, how about the generation of the

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Son? We talked a lot about this idea, well, okay, if the Son emanates from the

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Father, there's that word again, right? Then how is it that the Son has a deity if he has to emanate from the

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Father? Well, how does that make sense? That doesn't really make sense in our brains, except in this case where the

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Father, as a necessary act, as part of his essence, generates the Son. And the

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Father and the Son, as parts of their essence, as a necessary act, spirate the

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Spirit. Okay, so I know, I know. But when we think about necessary acts, there are necessary acts of God.

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And they're tied to his essence in this way. And when we think about generation, we think about spiration, those are necessary acts of God.

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And I think that talking about free and necessary kind of helps us get an idea of what this generation is and why this generation doesn't violate a deity.

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But that also means that if we can figure out in our brains, in our limited human brains, that the generation of the

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Son, the eminence of the Son from the Father is a necessary act of God, then the emanation theory would imply that creation is on par with Jesus.

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Make sense? You follow that? If the emanation theory, which says that the world exists as a necessary act of God, and Trinitarian theology says that God the

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Son exists as a necessary act of God the Father in emanation, then we're essentially putting creation on par with Jesus Christ.

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That make sense? And that's why there's a problem with this. O'Donnell, in writing about the writings of St.

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Thomas Aquinas, said, in creating things outside of himself, without any other thing to determine him,

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God freely wills the existence of things, but necessarily they stand in relation back toward him as their supreme good.

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Although God is free in his act of creation by the fact that infinite goodness is outside of limited beings, the nature of all movements and existences must necessarily have the glory of God as their purpose and end.

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What does that mean? God creates as a free act.

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The things that he creates, because he is infinitely good, ontologically, necessarily have the glory of God as their purpose.

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How do we say this more succinctly? Westminster answer?

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To glorify God and enjoy him forever. That is our chief end.

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We've heard this before. Man, we are created as worshipers. We are. Whether it's perverted by sin and we worship money or sex or experiences or self or whatever those things are, we are created as worshipers.

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It is necessary for us to worship something. It is part of who we are.

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Any questions? We got really heady really fast, so I just want to make sure if anybody has any questions about the questions or otherwise we talk about those.

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Our actions are bound by our will. I've got to get through my lesson.

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We have free actions that function in accordance with our will and our nature, which is a sin nature until we are regenerated by God.

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How's that? Good enough? All right, thanks. It's like the test, the refiner's fire of Mark Krantz.

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In regard to the context of free and necessary acts, this is what Berkhoff says. He says, During the Trinitarian controversy, some of them emphasized the fact that, in distinction from the generation of the

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Son, which was a necessary act of the Father, the creation of the world was a free act of the triune

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God. That's free act versus necessary act.

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And God created freely the world ex nihilo, which means what again?

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Out of nothing. Why is this important? Because we're not dualists.

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Repetition is the key to understanding and remembrance. Right. Number seven, we are not dualists. It's kind of an easy way to answer that one,

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I guess. I think the biggest reason why this is so important to me is because it's a really good reminder that the existence of everything is entirely dependent on God.

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Entirely dependent on God. Hebrews 1 .3.

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Remember, Hebrews is all about what? Anybody remember? It's the theme of Hebrews. We only sat under teaching of Hebrews for five years.

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Jesus is the best. Yes. It's a great Sunday school answer. What did you learn about today?

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Jesus is the best. Yes. All right. Hebrews 1 .3, talking about the second person in the Trinity, says, he is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.

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And he, listen, upholds the universe by the word of his power. This is very different from deism.

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Right. Which is go very different from deism.

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It also helps us remember that if God created all things out of nothing, then all of those things are distinct from God.

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They are a different thing. Right. If God created the world from a part of himself, then we've got some problems.

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If he created the world in the same way, he took a part of himself like he took the rib from Adam and made

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Eve. Right. There would be a likeness of the essence of the world to God.

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That kind of sounds like the emanation theory, doesn't it? It would also imply, because remember, if the only thing that self -existent is

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God, and he didn't create the world out of nothing, then he had to have created the world out of some part of himself, because that's all there was.

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Right. So it would imply that God could change, because he would take some part of himself. Well, that doesn't make sense.

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And it would imply that God was not simple. What does

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God being simple mean? He's not composed of parts.

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Well, if God is not composed of parts, how could he take a part of himself and use that to make the world? It doesn't make sense.

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He couldn't do that. We remember

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God pre -existed all things. Birkhoff says, there was no time before creation since the world was brought into being with time rather than in time.

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Let's say that again. There was no time before creation since the world was brought into being with time rather than in time.

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God was not sitting on his throne. It's 937.

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I'm going to make the world at 940. That didn't happen. So it's important for us to understand creation ex nihilo, because there was no pre -existent material to create the world with.

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World created in time. Therefore, anything that existed before the world was, I'm sorry, world was created with time.

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Therefore, anything that pre -existed that would have by definition been an eternal thing, because it was outside of time.

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So there was nothing to make the world with, because there was no eternal material.

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So ex nihilo helps us understand why dualism doesn't make sense. There can't be this kind of co -eternal material stuff that God is reshaping into the creation that we understand and that we know.

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He asks a question with a smile on his face. I'm already worried. I haven't even heard the question yet. Yeah, so it's a great question.

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I don't think that really anybody has a good answer for it. If the world was created with time, and we understand the angelic wars, and Lucifer falling, and the creation of hell, and all this stuff, how does that fit in?

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There is no chronological explanation of all of those things. I don't know.

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I have this kind of concept in my head, and it's probably informed by watching bad TV or something, or eating too much

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Taco Bell before dinner, to use a pastoral application from BBC, that those things happened in eternity past.

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I don't know. I don't have a good answer. I don't think anybody has a good answer, because we have this conceit that, okay, so if there was

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Adam and Eve, okay, Cain and Abel, Cain sinned, wait, wait, hold on. So Satan was in the garden with Adam, which means that if Satan is

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Lucifer, then that had to happen before Adam and Eve. So how does that all work?

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I don't know. I don't have a good answer for you. If you want to email me at tmssteve at bbcchurch .org,

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give it a shot. He's not even here for me to, I don't know,

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I'm sure he's doing something very important. But anyway, I don't have a good answer for you, and I don't know if anybody does.

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All right, so we're going to pivot. It's kind of a hard pivot, so I want to make sure, if anybody's got any questions, that we address those questions.

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So the question is, why is the argument that God is self -existent better than the argument that the universe is self -existent?

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And my answer to that, essentially, would be because Scripture tells us that God is self -existent.

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I mean, that's kind of where I would start with that. The universe being a self -existent thing, it doesn't have agency.

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There's no catalyst in a self -existent universe to do anything. It just is there.

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So you have to have something. And that gets back to the whole, like, there's a core in the universe that exists, that's eternal, and stuff happens, and that's where you get into chance creation, where, you know, if enough things get messed up enough times, eventually something will go right, and it will start to grow.

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And that's pretty much the prevailing theory around the Big Bang right now, is that, well, stuff happened, and then stuff didn't happen, kind of eternal, whatever, and then eventually there was a

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Big Bang that had the right concoction of chemicals in it that life began over time.

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That's pretty much, from my understanding, the best they've got. And the argument essentially just infinitely continues into, well, with enough time, well, with enough time, well, enough time, something will happen.

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You know what I mean? Okay. You can't prove a negative.

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There's really no answer to that, Janet. But one thing I'll say about Bible -believing

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Christians is that we are at least willing to acknowledge that circular logic exists. No honest theologian is going to say, oh no, no, we just, there's no circular.

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We believe in God and what God has done because God says that God has done these things.

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That is absolutely circular logic, and so is science. Science is the same way.

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I think, to answer your question, I do think that there is a sense of trying to understand the universe.

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It's a very human thing. Okay, so if we take this defined fact and we say, okay, fine, this is here.

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Let me look at the entire corpus of creation, try to rationalize all of these things, and see how it fits with this one thing.

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Instead of just saying, okay, I'm going to believe what God says because I'm just going to believe what God says. Let me see, how does

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God fit in the universe? I think that's kind of where a lot of this stuff comes from.

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It's like, okay, well, let me, and they don't say it like this, let me, in my finite understanding, try to figure out how it is that God could possibly coexist with all of this other stuff.

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What is the practical outworking of God is creating things by the word of his power? How does that actually look?

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How does that manifest in the world? That's where you get these weird explanations because they're just trying to figure it out.

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We don't have a good way of understanding in scientific terms the way that God created the world.

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It is ultimately unexplainable, but a lot of this is an attempt to figure it out.

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I don't necessarily think it's malicious. I just think it's misguided. Anything else?

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Was that helpful? I don't know. Okay, so, boy, howdy, am

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I glad I didn't even pretend to get into Imago Dei because I'm not even done with this stuff and we are almost at time.

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All right, so here's my hard pivot. We like to debate this stuff. We just kind of had a conversation about it.

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When we consider creation, we spend a lot of our time talking about, is it literal six -day creation?

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Does evolution actually exist? Or how about, is creation truly a free act or is it a necessary act of God?

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These kinds of things. They're sort of interesting conversations, right? Our brains that like to compute logical things, some people more than others, like to have these sort of arguments and discussions and just trying to figure things out, and it feels really good to put things in their place, right?

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That's why we go to Ikea and why we buy Lego stuff, because there's a picture, it tells us how to put the picture together, and then we have a cool thing, and we're like, hey, it looks like the picture.

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I must be good at this, right? We put stuff together, we figure it out, we solve the puzzle, and that's why we have a lot of these conversations.

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I mentioned the Westminster Catechism before. It is a handy and helpful tool for us. Here's how the Westminster Catechism defines creation.

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Question, what is the work of creation? Listen, all these words are important.

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The work of creation is God's making all things out of nothing by the word of his power in the space of six days and all very good.

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There's a lot of theology packed into one sentence. The work of creation is God's making all things out of nothing by the word of his power in the space of six days and all very good.

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Handles God as creator, handles ex nihilo, handles old earth creation, and a couple other things in there.

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Burkhoff does something really interesting. I really, really like this, because I think that it's something that me, in my very scientific dig, dig, dig, dig, dig, dig personality, really need, and it's very helpful.

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Instead of these kinds of conversations about creation and these logical things, Burkhoff breaks out how scripture stresses

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God's attributes and his work through creation. Points us to scripture.

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Oh, my notes are wrong. It says we see these in five ways. There's six here, and I think there's more.

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These are just the ones that Burkhoff pulls out. This is question eight on your quiz. The omnipotence of God in the work of creation.

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Number one. We see this in Isaiah 40,

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Amos 4, for behold, he who forms the mountains and creates the wind and declares to man what is his thought, who makes the morning darkness and treads on the heights of the earth, the

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Lord, the God of hosts, is his name. He's all -powerful.

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He can do anything. He does not faint or grow weary,

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Isaiah says. His understanding is unsearchable. His omniscience. Let me go through these a little fast, just for the sake of time.

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So, number one, omnipotence of God in the work of creation.

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The second one, how scripture stresses God's attributes through creation. Exaltation of God above his creation.

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When we talked about these different theories, eminence, and whatever, this is something that clearly they don't address correctly.

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Old Testament, Psalm 90 verse 2, before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting, you are

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God. Throw some New Testament flavor in there. Acts 17, the

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God who made the world and everything in it, being the Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man.

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So, omnipotence of God in the work of creation. Exaltation of God above his creation. Number three, the wisdom of God in creation.

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He's not just all -powerful. He's not just all -knowing, but he is wise. We see this again in Isaiah 40.

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If you want all the verses, by the way, just come see me after. I'm happy to give these to you. Jeremiah 10, 12 through 16, it is he who made the earth by his power, who established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding, stretched out to the heavens.

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When he utters his voice, there is a tumult of waters in the heavens, and he makes the mist rise from the ends of the earth.

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He makes lightning for the rain, and he brings forth the wind from his storehouses. Every man is stupid and without knowledge.

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Every goldsmith is put to shame by his idols, for his images are false, and there is no breath in them.

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They are worthless, a work of delusion. At the time of their punishment, they shall perish.

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Not like these is he who is the portion of Jacob, for he is the one who formed all things, and Israel is the tribe of his inheritance.

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The Lord of hosts is his name. Omnipotence of God, exaltation of God, wisdom of God, and then the sovereignty and purpose of God in creation.

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Number four, the sovereignty and purpose of God in creation. Isaiah 43, everyone who is called by my name, whom

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I created for my glory, whom I formed and made. Romans 1, therefore

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God gave them up in the lust of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the creator who is blessed forever.

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Remember, we are worshippers. We will worship something. Sovereignty and purpose of God in creation.

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Scripture even talks about creation as a fundamental work of God. See this in Nehemiah.

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I love this passage. Somebody want to read, by the way? I've talked a lot. Anybody want to read? Hands up? No hands up?

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Okay, I'll read. Nehemiah 9, 6, you are the Lord, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their hosts, the earth and all that is in it, the seas and all that is in them, and you preserve all of them, and the host of heaven worships you.

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Creation is a fundamental work of God and really just a picture of his transcendence. And as we wrap up,

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I'm not even going to read any of these verses. There's lots of them. But number six, creation is a triune act of God.

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A triune act of God. And we see this again throughout Scripture. John 1, 3, 1

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Corinthians 8, Colossians 1, Genesis 1, 2, Job 26, and more and more.

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Five, creation is a fundamental work of God. I printed myself an answer sheet so I didn't have to scroll.

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All right, so, in talking about creation, especially in light of this, this trinitarian work or triune act of God, Burkhoff wrote that all things are at once out of the

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Father, through the Son, and in the Spirit. It's kind of a quick and easy way that we can think about creation as a triune act of God.

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All things are at once out of the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit.

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Okay, I made it. So, next week we're going to talk about Imago Dei. We're going to talk about man being created in the image of God.

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The good things about that, bad things about that, ramifications of that, maybe some other stuff depending on how study goes.

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We'll see. But that's it for this morning. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we just thank you for this morning. Thank you for an opportunity to look at the world that you have given to us, the universe that you have created for your glory.

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Help us, Father, as worshipers to fix our eyes upon you and your Son. Help us to have a right understanding of who you are, what you've done for us,

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Father. Even the world that you've created, tainted though it is by sin, Lord, I just pray that you would give us eyes to see and ears to hear the truths of your word this morning.