Pt. 8 LBCF Chapter 4 Of Creation

Is chapter four of the Confession. And I just want to remind you that of the logical order that the Confession is in, not necessarily chronological, but a logical order. And remember, we've looked at the scriptures, we've looked at the, of the Holy Trinity, all right?

And then we've looked at God's decree. And the next logical chapter is of creation. And the reason it's the next logical step is that creation is the beginning of the working out of the decree of God in time and history.

Okay, does that make sense? In other words, God has decreed from all eternity all things which will come to pass. That's what we looked at last week. But now what we're looking at, all right, but now how is he going to work out those things that he has decreed?

And it begins with creation, all right? So there are three paragraphs in this chapter, and it's, so it's one of the shorter chapters. And it was interesting, I was telling some of the guys that I might do two chapters tonight because this one is so short, it's only three, and it's kind of, you know, quick doctrine to go through.

Well, forget that. The more I dug into it, the more I realized just how important this doctrine really is. Paragraph one gives an overview of creation. Paragraph two, the apex of creation. Paragraph three, the fulcrum of creation.

And we're going to go through each of these individually. Okay? So first, in the overview of creation, the very first phrase is the time, in the beginning. And that might sound very simplistic, but it's important that we understand that God created time, and he created, so therefore he starts his works of creation in time.

Okay? Because remember, God is outside of time, all right? He's eternal and he's infinite. So time begins when God starts his creative work.

All right?

The Triune God as Creator

Then it goes, next is the author of creation, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Understand this, creation is a work of the triune God. It's a work of the Trinity. So it's not specific to each person, but you'll see as you go through all of scripture that the entire Trinity is involved, each of the persons is involved in the act of creation.

Okay? We see it in the beginning, God is what it says. And then of course, we know that the spirit of God was moving over the waters, all right? And then what does it say in the beginning of the Gospel of John?

You should all know that, in the beginning was the word. And it goes on to tell us that everything that came into being was made through him.

All right?

The Purpose and Extent of Creation

So the act of creation is an act of the triune God. The purpose of creation, for the manifestation of the glory of his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness. Don't ever forget that, all right? There is just so much false teaching, or yeah, it's false teaching, but even just erroneous teaching as to why God created.

God created, God was not compelled to create anything. And we said this in the past about his decrees. Remember, God did not create man because he had some special need that only man could fill. That's blasphemous, all right?

God needed nothing, and he created all things for the manifestation of his glory, from his eternal power, wisdom, and goodness. And if you ever want to do a nice study on the purpose of creation, go to Romans chapter nine.

Romans chapter nine, in fact, J. Adams wrote a fantastic book, small book, it's not that large, it's called The Grand Demonstration, and it's an exposition on Romans chapter nine. So that would be a good study.

The extent of creation, to create or make the world, and all things are in whether visible or invisible. If it's here, if it has been made, if it exists, it's because it's from the divine act of God. All things come through him, he created all things, and all things are made by him, through him, and for him.

Okay, so we see the purpose of creation, the extent of creation, all right? That means there is nothing outside of the creative power of God. Making sense? The duration of creation, in the space of six days.

Now we're going to stop at this one just for a little bit. This is so important, all right? Because in our doctrine of creation, the confession takes a specific stand of a literal interpretation of Genesis one and two, all right?

This doctrine is coming under attack more and more in our postmodern society, all right? Now the confession regards the account of creation to be written in the historical narrative form. We know that the Bible is written in several different forms.

You have historical narrative, you have poetry, you have prophecy, and you have didactic literature or teaching, all right? So there is several different ways that the Bible relates to us and gives us information.

If you do a study of it, the Bible, the first few chapters of Genesis are all written in historical narrative. They may have some poetic aspects to them, but so does most of the rest of the Bible. We've seen the chiastic system of how a lot of passages are broken down.

The Bible is a magnificent piece of literature, but it's very clear when you take it in its entirety that the first 11 chapters are the chapters that come under dispute, and some people call them poetry or figurative language, but it is clear that they are written in historical narrative.

Now what's the importance of that? Importance of that is that when it talks about six days, it's talking about six days as you and I count days, all right? In other words, it takes Genesis 1 and 2 to be literal six days.

That's how God created. In fact, sometimes when I've been in discussions with people, especially those who don't hold to this view, they say, they say, you mean you believe that God created all of this in six short days?

And I said, my answer usually is, yeah, I don't know what took him so long. God could have spoken all things into existence in a nanosecond, and it all could have been there. Why did he take six days?

Because the six days teach us something, and that's why it's important that we understand, number one, it's literal, it's a literal six days, and the various days of creation teach us something. The wording of the confession denies the other two alternate interpretations.

I put alternate, I wrestled with using that word I kept going and typing heresy, but I decided on being more kind, more gentle, and trying to mellow out it with my older age. But there are two alternative interpretations that are put forth by evangelical Christians.

And first one is the day-age theory. The day-age theory basically says that, and there was light, okay. The day-age theory teaches that the six days of creation are not six literal days, but they represent ages, could be as much as 1 ,000 years.

And in fact, some actually say they could represent millions of years. In fact, the Schofield Reference Bible of 1909, that was the original Schofield Reference Bible, has had margin notes, and is basically endorsing this period of time in that there was a long period of time between Genesis 1 .1 and Genesis 1 .2, and the whole purpose for that type of thinking is to accommodate what's called the geological column.

All right, everybody familiar what the geological column is? They go down and they date the various layers of Earth by how many years that it would take to lay down this many layers. And the problem with that is that when Mount St. Helens erupted, it laid down so many layers that if you took a geologist there and pointed it to him, he would have said it would have taken about 6 ,000 years to form that, and we know it was formed in a matter of months.

So there's the fallacy of trying to adapt the Bible to what, quote, science teaches. Science changes, all right? We know science changes, right? Look at how many scientific discoveries have overlapped and superseded previous ones, things that we thought, all right?

For example, even the fact that the universe, the world, the sun is the center of our solar system. Well, for years, science told us that it wasn't, and it wasn't until Copernicus, and then later, Galileo, all right?

But if they'd read the Bible, they would have found out, you know? Talks about the circle, anyway, you get the idea. I'm not gonna go into that. All right, so that's the day-age theory, that it's long periods of time.

Or the other one is the symbolic or figurative theory, and that is that it's more like poetry to explain how things came, but we can't really go by that, all right? The wording of our confession blows those away.

You can't say you hold to the 1689 and hold to one of those theories, because the 1689 refutes those right out of hand, okay? The result of creation, all was very good. That's that whole first paragraph of the confession.

It was all very good. Now, I wanna just go through a couple of things about the importance of creation week. One of the things that you will notice, all right, as you go through the scriptures is there are certain things that are referred back to creation, all right?

For example, the order of creation impacts the marriage relationship. Why do we teach in this church and in most evangelical churches that in a marriage that the man is the head of the home? Is it because all men are so much smarter than all women?

Hardly.

I wouldn't even wanna go there, all right? And if I did, I wouldn't go home. No, but that's not it. It's because in the creation week, we have God creating Adam first, then creating Eve, Adam naming Eve, and if you go through the whole thing, everything in that week shows that God intended it that man and woman should be co-equal but in status before him, but as far as the family is concerned, the man is the head of the home.

It's a question of role. It's not a question of intelligence, a question of ability or anything else. That's the important, when God sets a standard in creation, that standard is binding for everyone, not just for believers, all right?

The order of creation impacts the Sabbath command. When the Sabbath command is defended, all right, throughout, well, right even in the 10 commandments, what is the reason given? Because God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh.

That sets up the standard for the Sabbath command. So if you're ever going to defend our doctrine of the Sabbath, you have to go back to creation. Now, don't lose sight of this either. As we look at that, what does that mean?

Who is the Sabbath command binding on? The Christian church?

Everyone.

It's before the fall, so which means it's binding upon the entire world. It's not part of the covenant of grace. Well, I mean, it is, but it precedes the covenant of grace. It is binding upon all of humanity, okay?

And that's why even in the 10 commandments, it says remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy, all right? And you will see so many other portions of scripture where certain things are referred back to the created order, all right?

So that's why it's very, very important. Paragraph two, Waldron calls it the apex of creation, and which, what is the apex of creation? It is the creation of man, okay? And again, this is an extremely, extremely important paragraph of the confession.

After God had made all other creatures, he created man, male and female, with reasonable and immortal souls, rendering them fit unto that life to God for which they were created. So much contained in that.

Notice, why were we created? We were created for God, for his purposes. And this is, you ever wonder why so many people, you know what the suicide rate is in our country? It's astronomical, all right?

Do you know who the people are who commit more suicides than any, well, you know, somebody once asked me, what's the suicide rate? It's one per person, by the way, just in case you're wondering. But anyway, do you know who, what class of people commit suicide more than any others?

Well, yeah, that's actually true, but I'm looking for a little bit broader class. The wealthy. Somebody said, the wealthy. The wealthy, the famous, and the powerful commit more suicides. The lower the class economically, the less the suicide rate.

Interesting, all right? Now, years ago, when I was working in homicide, we would average, because we investigated suicides as well, we averaged anywhere from 70 to 100 suicides a year just in Little Suffolk County out here.

It's a lot, okay? Why do people commit suicide?

No hope.

Why don't they have hope? Because they don't understand what their purpose is. When you have a purpose, okay, when you have a purpose, you have hope, and you have a reason to live, and you're willing to press on.

During the Great Depression, okay, yeah, I think it was the end of the Great Depression, but anyway, it was the WPA. So maybe somebody was here older than I am. Oh, there is nobody here older than I am.

Remembers, anybody remember what the WPA was? It was a work program sponsored by FDR, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. What they would do is the government came up with jobs and put people to work, and they were being paid by the government to do these jobs.

A lot of the jobs that they were put on were made-up jobs. There was a group of men who were commissioned to build a road, and these guys were ecstatic that they were able to come back to work, and they were working, and the roadwork was going beautifully.

I mean, it was done right. It was done timely. Guys were willing to work overtime, and a lot of hard work went into it. All of a sudden, one of the guys found out that it was a road to nowhere, that it was just made-up.

There was no purpose for the road other than to give them work, and all the work fell apart. Shoddy workmanship. Fights started to break out because there was no purpose into it. If you don't understand that you were created for a purpose, and that purpose was for God, you're never gonna have a happy life, all right?

So that's why it's important that we understand. Now, we're looking at the constitution of man. Something else that you see in here, it's kind of implied here, and it will be expanded upon more in the rest of the confession, is that man was created body and soul, all right?

Now, again, it's not stated explicitly here, but he created man, male and female. There's the body, of course, with reasonable and immortal souls, okay? Now, that's important for a couple of reasons. The confession asserts the dual constitution of man, body and soul, and why is that important?

Well, the dual constitution is presumed throughout the confession. I'm gonna fast forward to chapter 31. Who can tell me what's the chapter 31 of the confession? All right, here's a quick exam. What's chapter 31 of the London Baptist Confession of Faith?

No peeking. I'm heartbroken, all right? It's on the intermediate state of man. What happens to man after he dies? Chapter 31, paragraph one. The bodies of men after death return to dust and seek corruption, but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them.

Okay? Now, notice, something that's laid the groundwork in chapter four is picked up again in chapter 31. God made man body and soul, okay? At death, all right, what happens? The body goes to dust, but the soul goes back to God, and of course, we know that there's two different ends for man, whether he's redeemed or whether he's not, all right?

But this happens to all men until Christ returns, all right? Now, why is this important? Several conclusions to be drawn from this duality. Sometimes it's called a dichotomy, all right? But it's very, very important, and I'm gonna show you a couple of reasons why.

Firstly, it's a radical difference from the Greek view of man. The Greek view of man was the soul, or the spirit, is inherently good, flesh is evil. This is where Gnosticism comes from. Remember, the early Gnostics were more influenced from Greek thought, pagan Greek thought, than they were from Christianity, all right?

And this is one of the major differences, which is why the Gnostics, they'd say, oh no, God could not have come in the flesh because the flesh is evil, and flesh and spirit can't be meshed together in any way, all right?

So this is a radical difference. Now, of course, this is what the Bible teaches, but our confession makes it very clear. It rejects the modern view of a trichotomy of man. Now, here's what we mean by trichotomy.

The general teaching of the Evangelical Church today, and I'm talking about the wide-based Evangelical Church throughout all of America and the rest of the world, teaches that man is not two parts, but three, okay?

They teach that he's body, soul, and spirit. They teach that there's two immaterial parts of man, okay? Now, there's a problem with that. First, what's the first biggest problem with it?

Yeah, it's not in the Bible.

The Bible teaches all along that God created man and he became a living soul, all right? Second, look at the chapter on chapter 31. When the body dies, it goes back to dust, okay? The soul goes to be in the presence of God.

What do you do with the other part, soul and spirit? Where's the third part go? There's no mention in Scripture that there's a third place or a third part to man. It's body, soul. The soul and the spirit are used interchangeably.

Usually, the soul is considered, when you talk about the mind, the will, and the emotions, and the spirit, the soul of man, that is regenerated, et cetera, okay? So, now, here's one of the problems with this trichotomy view.

Let me show you how, when you have a false view, and how it can be exacerbated going down the road, right? Here's what, you've heard me, well, how many people were here when I went through the biblical counseling?

It was just prior to our study in the confession, and I went through the biblical basis for counseling from the Scriptures alone. All right, here's what happens to counseling if you hold to a trichotomy view of man.

If you're sick, okay, physically sick, go see a doctor, he's the expert, okay? If you have a problem, a spiritual problem, go see the pastor, he's the expert of the spirit. But if you have emotional problems, or a problem in the soul, well, neither of those guys are qualified.

Go see a psychiatrist, or a psychologist. It fosters this whole view that there are certain problems that are neither of the body or of the spirit. That totally mitigates against what the Scripture teaches.

We need to understand, and in fact, I don't know if I have a slide up here for it, so I'll just talk now, and if I do, I'll gloss over it later. One of the things that people don't understand, and we've been talking about this, this has really come to light with this pandemic.

As elders, we've had to make some very, very difficult decisions. And our decisions are that, what makes it hard is, we have to minister to the whole man. We're not just called to be, quote, spiritual advisors.

We are shepherds of the whole man. That means body and soul. Because you can have sins of the flesh, and where do those sins come from? They come from the spirit. You cannot separate the body and the soul and administer or counsel somebody accurately.

There are times, I've had, I had a good friend of mine, I won't say his name, some of you may know who it is, who was terribly obese, four or 500 pounds. And he was having all kinds, he'd come for me for counseling, and I, this was a good friend, dear, dear brother.

And when I counseled him about his spiritual issues, I would also have to counsel him about losing weight. Because the two were definitely related. The reason that he was obese were the same reason that he was anxious.

And if he didn't deal with the one, he's not gonna deal with the other. And sometimes starting to deal with the physical problem, and that, you know, following that will make it easier to deal with the spiritual problem.

But ultimately, all of those issues come back to spiritual issues. So the elders are called to minister to the whole person. When we decided to cancel our service last week, it wasn't that we were afraid of government confrontation, because we're obviously, we're opening this coming week.

There were issues that were brought to us, a possibility of infection, plus some of the ramping up of the orders, and we had to sit down and discuss it. And what we were weighing was, yes, we want our people here to worship, but are we putting them at risk physically?

Now, you can disagree with our decision, but that's what we had to wrestle with. I mean, the last thing we wanna do is say, oh no, everybody come on in here, and then have half the congregation come down with the COVID virus.

That would be foolish on our part. So that's why we're taking the steps that we are. We're taking every steps we can to keep these doors open and still have people come in and worship, but still try to keep people safe.

That's why there's gonna be some guidelines coming out even for Sunday as to how we're going to open. All right, does that make sense? Again, because we have to deal with the whole person, not just with, and you didn't think, see that?

We're only in chapter four of the confession. Look at this. This is a marvelous document, isn't it? Okay, it rejects the modern view of the trichotomy of man, body, soul, and spirit. That's not what we find in the scriptures.

It rejects the holistic view of man. That's the opposite, that body and soul are one, and they can't be distinguished between. I'm not even gonna get into that. That's just foolishness. This is almost more of a pagan view, that when you die, your eyes never open again.

It vindicates the goodness of bodily functions. Do you realize there are people who believe that certain things you do in the body are inherently evil because the body's evil? All right, and it'll even take, like David saying that he was conceived in sin, meaning that that particular act of intimacy was sinful.

No, no, the Bible has, that's completely foreign to the Bible. Bible says that God made man male and female, and what they do as a husband and wife is good. In fact, if you notice, a little innuendo here.

Throughout their creation week, God said at the end of every day, and it was good. Then he makes man, and what does he say? It's not good. Then he makes woman. He says, no, it's very good. As a man, I can appreciate that.

You know?

Okay, it presents the proper relationship of the body and soul. All right, we just talked about that. This is important. It shows the necessity of ministry to both body and soul, and that's something that we should be as elders at Hope.

This is very consistent reform doctrine that we have to minister to the whole body, not just your spiritual aspect, but the whole person, your emotional status, and your physical concerns. You can see that this is true, because what did the church do in the early days right after Pentecost?

They were sharing everything with each other, making sure that all the needs were met, physical, spiritual, financial. Everything was being taken care of. That's because we understand the interrelationship of body and soul.

Shows that both physical and spiritual events affect a person. I mentioned this when we went through the counseling. If somebody comes to me for counseling, especially if they're coming for depression, one of the first things I always ask them, when was the last time you had a medical exam?

Because sometimes there can be real physical things that are wrong with somebody, and cause them to be depressed. When my wife had our second child, she went into what is now called postpartum depression.

Of course, in dark ages, when we had our first child, nobody knew what postpartum depression was. We couldn't understand what was going wrong. But now we understand that it's a physical thing, it's a hormonal thing, and there's a way to treat that.

It's not that she was in sin. It shows the unnatural character of death. You realize that, that death is unnatural. And I hope you realize, what's the overriding characteristic, what does death mean in scripture?

Separation. Yes. Death in scripture is not annihilation. It's not ceasing to exist. It's separation. Those who are gonna suffer eternal damnation, or the second death, are not going to cease to exist.

They're going to be separated from the mercy, the love of God, and only gonna be experiencing his wrath. So they're separated from the goodness of God. That's the concept in scripture of death. Death is separation, not annihilationism.

Okay, then we come to the identity of man. Being made after the image of God in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness. This is very important, and it can get very technical, so I'm gonna try not to do that too much.

What does it mean that man is the image of God?

Somewhat.

Yeah, the idea of reflecting. I'm gonna give you a quotation from Sam Waldron. This comes right from his modern exposition of the 1689. Sam's a dear brother. He's the president of Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary, pastor of a Reformed Baptist church in Kentucky.

This is what he says. How is man related to the image of God? We are not to think of the image of God as an appendage to, or attribute of man. We should not even speak of man as possessing the image of God, for the image of God is not something man possesses.

It is something that man is. Man is the image of God. He says it very well. All right, so what does that mean? What makes man the image of God? Everything that makes him man, with the exception of sin, of course, because man has his identity, the image of God.

That's why man was created separate from all the rest of the animals, and why Eve was taken from the side of Adam to show this unique relationship. All right, that's why I say this Creation Week is extremely important, because it's the foundation for so many other doctrines of Scripture.

All that enables man to represent God on Earth is related to the image of God. That includes dominion, intelligence, morality, visibility, et cetera. Okay, dominion, right? That was part of the original mandate that God, right after he created Adam and Eve, God says, you're to exercise dominion, all right, to represent intelligence.

He created them with minds to think, and he gave them, they were to make choices. Morality, there they made a bad choice, all right? Visibility, they were God's visible representatives.

On Earth.

People could, the rest of the creation could identify with God through Adam and Eve. What about fallen man, all right? Fallen man presents a distorted image of God. It's an important thing. When man fell, he did not lose the fallen man.

He did not lose the fact that he was the image of God, because that's who he is. What he does then is he presents a distorted image of God. All right, do you follow that? So every man represents God. It's just a question of what image it is.

The image needs to be renewed through redemption. And since man is the image of God, his sin misrepresents God. Now, this is important. I wanna show you how these doctrines, and why doctrine is so important, all right?

Why is there eternal judgment? Why are people punished for their sin? Sin misrepresents who God is. Man's representation of God is never neutral. You're either representing God accurately or presenting a distorted image.

Therefore, God can never be indifferent to sin. When man sins, it is an offense to the image of God. And God is not indifferent towards his image being shattered or distorted. The integrity of man, having the law of God written in their hearts and power to fulfill it, yet under a possibility of transgressing, being left to their liberty of their own will, which was subject to change.

Now, again, this section here, this is a description of man before the fall. And notice that it's actually starting to prepare the way for chapter six of the fall of man of sin and of judgment. Okay? So you notice that, because notice this just leaves it, it leaves you kind of almost hanging there, that this is how he was created, yet it was possible for him to transgress.

It doesn't get into the transgression yet. That's coming in chapter six of the fall of man. Now we come to paragraph three, which Waldron calls the fulcrum of creation. Besides the law written in their hearts, they received a command not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which while they kept, they were happy in their communion with God and had dominion over the creatures.

Why is this paragraph called the fulcrum? Take a look at it and see if you can answer that question. Why is this called the fulcrum? What's a fulcrum? Fulcrum is a pivot point, remember, like a see-saw.

The middle of the see-saw sits on a fulcrum. Yeah, it's laying out the two, obviously the two, obviously, conclusions. They were happy with communion with God as long as they obeyed the commands. If they disobeyed, well, it doesn't tell you what's gonna happen yet.

That's chapter six, all right? But notice how, so that's why it's the fulcrum. The rest of the history of man hinged on this. They were created, right, perfect, commanded not to eat of the tree of knowledge, and as long as they kept it, they had their communion with God and had the dominion over the rest of the world.

But as we know, they did not. So all of history from that point on is looking back on that, but looking forward to Christ.

Okay?

It is the point in which the state of man pivots. Questions. Now, again, there's so much more in this chapter and even at that, I took much longer than I would have anticipated. Foolish me, I thought I could do two tonight.

Yes, Ted? Put them in my house for one day, they'd die anyway. Go ahead, Dave. Yes? Yeah.

And he told us how to exercise.

Yes, he did. Yeah, and that's why it's so important and why so much of the criticism leveled against it. Against those of us who believe in the sovereignty of God, it's just wrong. Because we are the ones who truly believe in free will, you know?

That man exercises that will that God gave him. Just that since the fall of Adam, our will is in bondage, you know? But no, Adam was created with that free will.