Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / May 7, 2017 | Christianity 101: "Back To Basics" - Who Is Man?

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May 7, 2017 | Christianity 101: "Back To Basics" - Who Is Man? · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Hey everybody, how are you doing?
0:03
SPEAKER_00: Good to see you on this beautiful sunny day.
0:08
SPEAKER_00: We are in a series called Christianity 101.
0:11
SPEAKER_00: We are in the second week of that series, the first week, two weeks ago.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: Tim Collins did a great job, introduced us to God, covered God thoroughly in 35 minutes.
0:24
SPEAKER_00: Actually, I noticed he took 41, so that's why he was able to get through it all.
0:28
SPEAKER_00: So who is God?
0:30
SPEAKER_00: This morning, two weeks later, last week, if you didn't get to see, if you weren't here from my brother Rob, uh one of my heroes, you ought to go back and look that up.
0:37
SPEAKER_00: He did a fantastic job.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: This morning, what yeah.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: I'll take, I'll take all the deflected praise.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: Uh man, this morning, we're on man.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: So if you have a Bible and you want to mark a couple verses, our text comes from Genesis 1, Genesis 2.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: We're going to talk about man today.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: Genesis 1, 26, 27, 31, 2, 7.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: God said, This is the sixth day, the last day of creation.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: God has created inanimate things, He's created animals, He's created everything else.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: And now He says, Let us make man in our image.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: Betzelum, according to our likeness.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: Notice the first purpose that God gives man, what he associates him with.
1:33
SPEAKER_00: He is his vice regent, his representative on earth with authority.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: Chapter 2, 7.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: Then the Lord God formed man out of the dust from the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: This is the mechanics of creation.
1:51
SPEAKER_00: The difference between this and creating, let's say, the animals is that God got personally involved.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: Stage one, he formed him out of the dust of the ground.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: That's why we have a physical body.
2:02
SPEAKER_00: Two, he breathed the ruach, the spirit of life, into his nostrils.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: That's why we breathe.
2:11
SPEAKER_00: That's what animates us.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: In fact, in the last chapter of Ecclesiastes, death is explained this way.
2:19
SPEAKER_00: When man dies, his body goes back to the ground from which it came, and his spirit goes to God who gave it.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: You and I are, not going to be my topic this morning, basically dichotomous, two-part creatures, a material side and an immaterial side.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: And so the, but the result of that is that man became a living being or a living soul.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: By the way, animals in the Old Testament are also called living souls.
2:49
SPEAKER_00: So what distinguishes us from animals?
2:52
SPEAKER_00: 127.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: So God created man in his own image.
3:01
SPEAKER_00: Say a Latin phrase this morning: Imago Dei.
3:05
SPEAKER_00: Imagodei.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: That famous phrase means image of God.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: He created the male and female.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: And God saw all that he had made, last verse chapter one, and it was very good.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: Up till now, he's concluded each day by saying things were good.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: He looks at man, he says, it's very good.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: Evening came and then morning the sixth day.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: Let's ask God for help.
3:27
SPEAKER_00: Father, huge topic, really important topic today.
3:31
SPEAKER_00: So we're asking your help that I might be clear, people might think clearly, that we might meet together on the pages of your word and truth.
3:40
SPEAKER_00: In Jesus' name.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
3:42
SPEAKER_00: Now, as you'll see in the front of the bulletin, and as Tim explained to you two weeks ago, the purpose of this series is not just to give you five issues in basic Christianity, but to deal with you about one of the most important, overarching topics we could talk with you about, and that is the topic of your worldview.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: Your worldview.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: Dictionary definition of worldview is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: Just makes you want to shout amen, doesn't it?
4:18
SPEAKER_00: Or you could say it's the mental lens through which we view the world and our place in the world, our perspective on reality.
4:27
SPEAKER_00: A young couple moved into a new neighborhood.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: The next morning, the uh the young wife was drinking coffee with her husband.
4:38
SPEAKER_00: She looked out the window, she saw a neighbor hanging the wash outside.
4:43
SPEAKER_00: She said, whoa, look at that.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: The laundry really is not very clean.
4:49
SPEAKER_00: She either doesn't know how to wash correctly, maybe she needs a different laundry soap.
4:55
SPEAKER_00: This went on once a week when it was hanging out of the laundry day, and she'd always make similar comments.
5:02
SPEAKER_00: A couple months later, the woman looked out the windows there drinking coffee, and she's surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line.
5:10
SPEAKER_00: She said to her husband, look, she has learned how to wash correctly.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: I wonder if she changed her laundry detergent or if someone just showed her how to do it better.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: And her husband said, Well, actually, I got up early this morning and I cleaned our windows.
5:31
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the problem is not out there, the problem is in here.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: Norm Geisler, a fellow Don and I know well, and a great teacher, put it this way.
5:43
SPEAKER_00: I'm paraphrasing him.
5:45
SPEAKER_00: It's not a quote at all, but this is what he used to say.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: Worldview is like colored eyeglasses.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: If you look at something through green-colored glasses, you'll see it as green.
5:56
SPEAKER_00: Someone else looks at the same object through orange glasses, sees it as orange.
6:01
SPEAKER_00: People with different worldviews will see the same facts in a very different way.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: And that's true, isn't it?
6:07
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you talk to people and you come away saying they their glass is half full, right?
6:17
SPEAKER_00: Or their glass is half empty.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: Or if you're George Carlin, you say, I see a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: So one one, you know, we look at things differently.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: Someone said, no, but no two people ever read the same book because we read or we watch a movie with different perspectives.
6:39
SPEAKER_00: One view sees that roses have thorns and complains, another one comes along and sees that that thornbush has roses and rejoices.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: So um, so we're talking about how you look at the world and how two people can differ, as I put on the front of your bulletin today, so radically about this last week would be the uh suggested new healthcare program, or you know, all kinds of things.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: And then we come to the word of God and we find the Lord saying this my thoughts are nothing like your thoughts, says Yahweh.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: As the heavens are higher than the earth, so my thoughts are higher than your thoughts.
7:24
SPEAKER_00: And you say, Oh, there's a worldview I want.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: I would like to think God's thoughts after him.
7:30
SPEAKER_00: And God's in his grace revealed his thoughts to us in what we call the Word of God.
7:38
SPEAKER_00: He gave us the law, he gave us the writings, he gave us wisdom, he gave us the prophets, he gave us the gospels, he gave us the epistles so that we could read and we could learn accurate thoughts and we could think better about things.
7:54
SPEAKER_00: Now, the critical thing is how should we think about man?
7:59
SPEAKER_00: There's no more important question, not even the question of God two weeks ago, no question more important or personal to you than man.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: Last week, when my brother Rob was in town, Melody was in Colorado, so Nancy, Rob's wife, and I and Rob decided to grab a movie.
8:18
SPEAKER_00: And we watched Les Miz.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: It was about five years old.
8:22
SPEAKER_00: It was a version with a lot of singing.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: It was a musical, it was terrific.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: And the the song that you're left with at the end is that wonderful song where Jean Valjean sings, Who am I?
8:36
SPEAKER_00: Who am I, Jean Valjean?
8:38
SPEAKER_00: And then he tears open his shirt and he looks down at the tattooed prison number that he wears on his chest, and he sings again, Who am I?
8:48
SPEAKER_00: 24601.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: And he's asking this, Victor Hugo 150 years ago in this great classic novel, ask, have this hero asking this question Who am I?
9:00
SPEAKER_00: Do I have value?
9:01
SPEAKER_00: Am I simply a nameless criminal?
9:03
SPEAKER_00: Am I simply a number?
9:04
SPEAKER_00: Or am I a person with real worth?
9:06
SPEAKER_00: Am I a person who is worth saving, worth forgiving?
9:13
SPEAKER_00: And that's that's just one of the questions that today, the next 20 minutes, should answer.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: Because this question of who am I has so many implications.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: I mean, let's just ask it in a modern way.
9:28
SPEAKER_00: Do I have any intrinsic worth?
9:30
SPEAKER_00: Or am I just an accident, a bit of nothing on a minor planet 92 million miles away from a minor star, one of 200 billion stars, on an unimportant edge of a spiral galaxy, which in itself is only an average galaxy in the midst of a vast universe of 100 billion galaxies?
9:53
SPEAKER_00: Or am I simply, let's say, the product of natural selection plus random mutation?
10:00
SPEAKER_00: Am I a primate mammal with a few million years head start on the ape that I see at the zoo and I have a lot larger brain?
10:09
SPEAKER_00: Is that it?
10:10
SPEAKER_00: Or am I worth more than that animal or any animal or an insect or a tree or a clot of dirt?
10:17
SPEAKER_00: And then there's the question of free will, question of value, but the question of free will, do I really have ability to determine my future, or am I determined by my environment and by by my DNA and by that computer of a brain that I have?
10:36
SPEAKER_00: Do I really have independent decision-making capabilities?
10:42
SPEAKER_00: Am I more than a machine?
10:44
SPEAKER_00: I mean, since my computer now can beat me in chess, and since the computer in my car corrects me when I'm going the wrong way, and then that sweet but nauseating voice tells me to take the nearest U-turn, and then when I get home, because a computer fixes my food, and when my computer breaks down, I then dialogue with another computer about what's wrong with my computer.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: Is my brain anything more than just a slow computer?
11:12
SPEAKER_00: And then that from the question of free will, we move to the question of morality.
11:16
SPEAKER_00: Really, is there any such thing as a standard and objective, independent standard of right and wrong?
11:22
SPEAKER_00: And if so, am I basically good or am I basically kind of disgusting?
11:30
SPEAKER_00: And from the question of morality, we move to the question of, shall we say, eternity or longevity?
11:36
SPEAKER_00: Am I destined to live as the prevailing view holds today in the West?
11:42
SPEAKER_00: Am I destined to merely live for a brief blip of time and then crumble into dust and become extinct forever, like the rest of mankind will be one of these days?
11:54
SPEAKER_00: Or is there something of me that will last beyond death into eternity?
12:00
SPEAKER_00: And then move from the question of longevity to the question of purpose.
12:03
SPEAKER_00: Do I have any reason for living or any purpose?
12:06
SPEAKER_00: So you can see how important this question of who am I is.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: So let me give you a quick overview of the three main worldviews, the three great worldviews that answer this question in very different ways.
12:19
SPEAKER_00: The first is naturalism, the second, pantheism, the third, Christianity.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: Naturalism sometimes is called secular humanism.
12:28
SPEAKER_00: It's illustrated in communism and agnosticism and atheism, and it has some slightly different variations, but I stuck God up here because we learned two weeks ago, this will be like review, that some people believe there's no personal God.
12:44
SPEAKER_00: Those are naturalists.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: Now, pantheism is very different.
12:47
SPEAKER_00: If secular humanism or naturalism says that everything is matter and there is no spirit, no real spirituality, there's no supernaturalism, pantheism's the opposite.
13:00
SPEAKER_00: It says there is no matter, and everything is spiritual, that God is all and all of us are God, and again, this godness is an impersonal thing.
13:11
SPEAKER_00: And then we move to the Christian worldview, and Tim showed us two weeks ago that God exists and that he is both something very high and something very low, that he is holy.
13:23
SPEAKER_00: The theologians used to call it holy other.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: He is alien, he is so high.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: At the same time, he's he's our father.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: He's something, the best translation I think of Abba Father in the New Testament is he's Papa.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: He's that is, you know, he's so close to us.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: He's infinite and yet personal.
13:42
SPEAKER_00: By the way, so let me get you to do something here because I want to manipulate you, okay?
13:48
SPEAKER_00: Take one hand and drop it down without moving, or just drop it as low as you can, below the edge of the seat if you can, just as low as you can get without bending over and hurting your back.
13:57
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
13:58
SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the hard part.
13:59
SPEAKER_00: Take your other hand and move it up as high as you can.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: Point up to the seat.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: Come on, reach up as high as you can.
14:03
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so this is God.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: Keep it this way.
14:06
SPEAKER_00: God is both super high, holy at the same time, he's down here with us.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: Drop it if you want.
14:11
SPEAKER_00: But I could make you keep them your hands just like, yeah, go right ahead, Zach.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: I could make you keep it just like this for the next 15, 20 minutes, because I want to share with you this week, and by the way, next week when we get to Jesus, that a way to hold on to man, understand man and understand Jesus, just like the way we understand God.
14:32
SPEAKER_00: Something very high, something very low.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: Okay, are you with me?
14:36
SPEAKER_00: So as we move to man, as we move to man, naturalism, secular humanism would say, you are nothing more than a complex, congratulations, you're complex, but you're just a biological machine and a cosmos that is a machine.
14:54
SPEAKER_00: You are the chance product of evolution.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: You will eventually go extinct, which leads to the following truth and morals that the only truth that we can really derive is truth from science.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: Remember, our Easter Day speaker grew up in Southern California, agnostic atheist home.
15:15
SPEAKER_00: The only things allowed in my home, he said, even when I was five, six years old, were verifiable proofs from science.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: Morals are relative to culture and situation, they are man-made, they're subject to change and evolution.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: Now, pantheism, of course, in some ways is very different.
15:35
SPEAKER_00: Because man is not a machine.
15:37
SPEAKER_00: No, he's part of the cosmic spirit, and he's destined to be one with the impersonal cosmic spirit one day.
15:44
SPEAKER_00: Now, individuality is an illusion, as is personality and matter.
15:49
SPEAKER_00: And so truth is limited to just the unity of the perfect cosmos.
15:55
SPEAKER_00: Morals, wow, well, evil's an illusion.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: There's really no distinction between good and evil.
16:01
SPEAKER_00: You've seen the yin-yang sign, because the force has both a good side and a bad side of the force, so you can't really say one is any better than the other.
16:11
SPEAKER_00: Both sides fulfill truth and morals and Godhood.
16:16
SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm not going to get to the Christian, I'll explain the Christian worldview later, but you can see where we need to go with this.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: We need to find out what it is that Christianity believes because it's so different than everything else we hear today.
16:33
SPEAKER_00: And the high, the reach up, really high side of you, of man, who am I, is where the Bible starts.
16:40
SPEAKER_00: Genesis 1 and 2.
16:41
SPEAKER_00: With the divinity and dignity of man, God said, Let's make humankind, the key verse, in our image according to our likeness, the combination of those words we now know used in the ancient Near East, only of kings and those other nations.
16:59
SPEAKER_00: A king was in the image and likeness of the God of Syria or the God of what we call today Iran or Iraq.
17:08
SPEAKER_00: But then we have the democracy.
17:10
SPEAKER_00: God comes along today and he says, every single person in the world is royalty.
17:17
SPEAKER_00: Every single person in the world has majesty, is made in my image and in my likeness.
17:24
SPEAKER_00: This is what gives us the dignity and worth that we have.
17:29
SPEAKER_00: We are image-bearers of God.
17:33
SPEAKER_00: Speaker who's been here before, Ronald Allen, wrote a book that reflected this majesty or royalty that Genesis 1 hints at.
17:44
SPEAKER_00: The majesty of man, the dignity of being human.
17:49
SPEAKER_00: If man is not a divinity, G.K.
17:52
SPEAKER_00: Chesterton said years ago, then man is a disease.
17:56
SPEAKER_00: Either he is the image of God or else he's the one animal which has gone mad.
18:02
SPEAKER_00: Dear friends, you need to understand something that is not the prevailing view in the West, and that is that you and I are divinity and have essential dignity.
18:14
SPEAKER_00: Just in the last generation, a generation ago, this used to be common knowledge, so that a play by Thornton Wilder could have his character say in our town, I don't care what they say.
18:26
SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows that something is eternal.
18:29
SPEAKER_00: And it ain't houses and it ain't earth and it ain't even stars.
18:33
SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings.
18:41
SPEAKER_00: Now listen, you need to understand this has implications that go directly against a move in modern society away from the dignity and value of man.
18:53
SPEAKER_00: New Yorker magazine calls Professor Peter Singer, ethics prof at Princeton, the planet's most influential living philosopher.
19:02
SPEAKER_00: And he is the one who's written books on animal ethics, people ethics, and he's unique because he doesn't just blur the lines between you and your dog Fido, he completely erases them.
19:17
SPEAKER_00: So that when he comes to animals, he says some animals are persons and should be treated as persons, but then when he comes to humans, he says euthanasia and infanticide are in some cases morally obligatory.
19:32
SPEAKER_00: And he explains that just as you would shoot a horse that broke its leg, so when a child is under the age of two, if they have severe handicaps, they should be euthanized.
19:44
SPEAKER_00: And if an older person is just drooling, then you need to euthanize them.
19:49
SPEAKER_00: They say, that's shocking.
19:51
SPEAKER_00: Well, he's the number one ethics professor at Princeton University.
19:55
SPEAKER_00: And I find a voice crying out in the streets of London from 130 years ago, the voice of Elephant Man.
20:03
SPEAKER_00: Don't know if you saw that movie.
20:05
SPEAKER_00: A severely deformed and handicapped man who's taken around like sort of an animal, who's displayed in a circus.
20:13
SPEAKER_00: And as he would walk, if he walked in the evening with that sheet over his head to hide his face, the boys of London used to treat him like a stray dog, throwing sticks and stones at him.
20:25
SPEAKER_00: And at one point he stopped and cried out those famous words, but I am a man.
20:32
SPEAKER_00: And listen, the Christian worldview is that no matter how, shall we say, deformed or slow thinking you are, or you know, going downhill, not just in your golf game, but in every other way, your bodies, you know, you still have a spark of divinity, of divinity in you and dignity because you were made in the image of God.
20:58
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a subject that Dennis Prager, my favorite Jew, uh Jewish uh philosopher, has covered a couple of times on his show.
21:06
SPEAKER_00: And when he was on CNN once in depth, or see, um I forget, I forget what the channel is, but um, he was discussing the question would you first save the dog you love or a stranger if both were drowning?
21:22
SPEAKER_00: And the answer depends on your worldview, on your value system.
21:26
SPEAKER_00: And he said this the secular denial that human beings are created in God's image has led to humans increasingly being equated with animals, which is why, over the course of 30 years of asking high school seniors if they'd first try to save their dog or a stranger, two thirds have voted against the person.
21:46
SPEAKER_00: They either don't know what they would do or they would actually vote for their dog.
21:52
SPEAKER_00: Many adults now vote similarly.
21:54
SPEAKER_00: If you don't mind, a couple years later on his show, he talked about PETA.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: He said the best known.
22:00
SPEAKER_00: Animal Rights Organization, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, PETA, funded by the best educated in our society, launched an international campaign titled, quote, Holocaust on your plate, unquote.
22:16
SPEAKER_00: I saw the uh billboards for that several years back, which equates the barbecuing of millions of chickens with the cremating of millions of Jews in the Holocaust.
22:27
SPEAKER_00: To PETA and its supporters, there's no difference between chicken life and human life.
22:33
SPEAKER_00: Only a very morally confused age could produce so many people who do not recognize the immeasurable distance between human and animal worth.
22:41
SPEAKER_00: We live in that age.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: We do in large measure because values based on God and the Bible have been replaced by secular, naturalistic values.
22:50
SPEAKER_00: G.K.
22:51
SPEAKER_00: Chesterton said, when people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing.
22:56
SPEAKER_00: They believe in anything.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: And there's other, you could quote a lot of silly, you know, silly things that are done, like when Peter's president wrote a personal letter, Yasser Arafat, they'd instead of using a suicide bomber, they'd strap the bombs to a donkey, and then the cell phone detonated the donkey and the bomb when a bus with Israeli school children was passing by.
23:18
SPEAKER_00: And the letter said, please, please don't use animals when you're doing this.
23:24
SPEAKER_00: I mean, really, sometimes it gets silly.
23:27
SPEAKER_00: Now, Christian philosophers sometimes point out the great chain of worth: God, angels, man, animals, plants, minerals.
23:35
SPEAKER_00: But the three I've been mentioning this morning, God, man, and animals, if you'll just think with me for just a second about the implications of holding this Christian worldview.
23:46
SPEAKER_00: Because God is so far above man, man should never take the place of God.
23:53
SPEAKER_00: Man should never do what, let's say, the North Korean dictator has done.
23:58
SPEAKER_00: Declare himself God.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: Order the people to worship him.
24:03
SPEAKER_00: Feel free to be a tyrant because he is the God of their country.
24:06
SPEAKER_00: No, government has to be limited by the fact that no matter what man this is and how skilled he is, he is not God, therefore should not rule as God.
24:17
SPEAKER_00: Because man is all in the same category.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: The Declaration of Independence got it right when it said all men are created equal, and by men it meant both men and women, men of all races, of all of both genders, and so forth.
24:32
SPEAKER_00: Therefore, we can never treat another gender or another race as though it was in a lower category like an animal.
24:40
SPEAKER_00: They cannot be owned, they cannot be mistreated.
24:42
SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
24:44
SPEAKER_00: You see the implications of holding this Christian worldview.
24:48
SPEAKER_00: So here we have man, woman, Adam, Eve, divinity and with dignity, and you go, Well, what happened?
24:59
SPEAKER_00: And the answer is, of course, the fall of man and the low side of man.
25:05
SPEAKER_00: The high is the dignity and divinity, the low is the depravity and the dust of man.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: And you know the story, Genesis 3, Genesis 4, where man listens to the serpent, disobeys God, is ejected from the garden.
25:21
SPEAKER_00: And very quickly, the theological sort of commentary on how that spread through the earth is found in the last 15 chapters of Romans chapter 1.
25:30
SPEAKER_00: I'll read them quickly.
25:31
SPEAKER_00: But this is the other side of man.
25:34
SPEAKER_00: And it says the wrath of God's being revealed right now from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: Did you catch that?
25:44
SPEAKER_00: God gets angry at sin.
25:47
SPEAKER_00: He's not a tame lion.
25:50
SPEAKER_00: And then Paul continues, for what can be known about God is plain to them because God has shown it to them.
25:56
SPEAKER_00: For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived.
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SPEAKER_00: Where?
26:03
SPEAKER_00: Grand Canyon, Milky Way, stars, ever since the creation of the world and the things made, so they're without excuse.
26:12
SPEAKER_00: And then he says, for although they knew God, they didn't honor him as God or give thanks to him, but became futile in their thinking, their foolish hearts were darkened.
26:21
SPEAKER_00: No, it's it's not an evolution.
26:23
SPEAKER_00: Man didn't crawl out of a terribly dark swamp like a lizard and become more and more noble down through the years.
26:29
SPEAKER_00: It's just the opposite.
26:31
SPEAKER_00: Man started in paradise and has been devolving.
26:34
SPEAKER_00: Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, became idolaters and so forth.
26:44
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is a totally different way to look at man than sometimes we hear, isn't it?
26:50
SPEAKER_00: What we hear came from Rousseau in the 18th century, who believed that man was born good.
26:56
SPEAKER_00: And he wrote that it was society that corrupted man, it was religion and government.
27:02
SPEAKER_00: The noble savage or man in nature was perfect if you just leave him alone and keep society and religion away from him.
27:12
SPEAKER_00: I don't usually get my theology from movie producers, especially not the producer of A Clockwork Orange, 2001, a Space Odyssey and the Shining, but Stanley Kubrick laughed at that.
27:24
SPEAKER_00: He said, man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage.
27:28
SPEAKER_00: He's irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved.
27:35
SPEAKER_00: That about sums it up.
27:36
SPEAKER_00: I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him.
27:41
SPEAKER_00: And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.
27:49
SPEAKER_00: So the next time you hear someone talk about man as a noble savage, you need to think this to yourself.
27:54
SPEAKER_00: The idea of noble savage is somehow that man is an animal, sort of a savage, but inside, we're such good creatures, we're noble.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: But it's just the opposite instead.
28:05
SPEAKER_00: We're fallen princes.
28:07
SPEAKER_00: Our essence is that God created us as princes with royalty, with divinity and dignity.
28:12
SPEAKER_00: But what happened is that we fell, we turned against him, we've become dark in our hearts.
28:19
SPEAKER_00: And so the bottom line is that we're all in the same boat.
28:23
SPEAKER_00: We're all sinners, we're all condemned.
28:25
SPEAKER_00: In the view of Christianity, there is no one righteous, not even one.
28:31
SPEAKER_00: Romans 3.10.
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SPEAKER_00: That all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
28:38
SPEAKER_00: That our heart, whoever you are on earth, the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick, so much so that we can't even fathom it.
28:48
SPEAKER_00: And that's the bad news.
28:50
SPEAKER_00: We're all in the same boat.
28:52
SPEAKER_00: We're all sinners, we're all condemned.
28:55
SPEAKER_00: And that leads Paul to say, and this is not the purpose of our sermon this morning, that there is good news that we are saved from God's anger and given eternal life when we put our faith in the Savior.
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SPEAKER_00: Can you say amen?
29:09
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and then pretend you didn't hear that, because that's not part of what is man, that's salvation, and that'll be later, as is this verse, for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God's eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
29:23
SPEAKER_00: So to summarize, we have man up high, dignity, divinity, but down low, he's as disgusting as you can imagine.
29:31
SPEAKER_00: There's a depravity and a darkness there, and we're just simply made out of dust.
29:36
SPEAKER_00: Or to summarize the three great worldviews.
29:42
SPEAKER_00: Whereas in naturalism, man is a machine who will eventually go extinct.
29:48
SPEAKER_00: Matter is everything.
29:49
SPEAKER_00: Or in pantheism, spirit is everything, and man will be swallowed up by a cosmic spirit.
30:03
SPEAKER_00: And a fallen prince of dust and depravity, which leads to different kinds of truth and morals, that truth is objective in Christianity, revealed by God who is truth, and morals are objective, declared by God who hates evil.
30:22
SPEAKER_00: So here's the takeaway I want to leave with you.
30:26
SPEAKER_00: If you buy into any worldview of man, any view of man other than the Christian one, can I just say boring, banal, black and white, you're gonna disappear, you're unimportant, you're a speck, you know, unimportant speck on a distant planet, you have no real soul, no real worth.
30:50
SPEAKER_00: I mean, how do you really want to think that way about yourself?
30:55
SPEAKER_00: But the Christian worldview is a worldview that's just amazed at who you are.
31:02
SPEAKER_00: Augustine said it back in 400 AD, men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, the long courses of the rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motions of the stars, and they get this.
31:17
SPEAKER_00: They pass by themselves without wondering, without being amazed at their dignity and divinity, and yet tragically, horrifyingly, their dust and depravity.
31:34
SPEAKER_00: So let me give you an illustration of this so that you'll remember this takeaway.
31:38
SPEAKER_00: It was years ago, and Melody and I decided that we wanted to give our children a family night.
31:43
SPEAKER_00: We announced a family night.
31:44
SPEAKER_00: We didn't have any money to do anything, but we announced that we were gonna have a family night.
31:48
SPEAKER_00: They're so excited.
31:49
SPEAKER_00: Thursday night was gonna be family night.
31:51
SPEAKER_00: We told them, Melody told them, I, because I don't lie, she told them we're gonna take them to a hotel.
31:56
SPEAKER_00: So we just decided we were gonna play with their minds a little bit and they try to tweak their worldview.
32:03
SPEAKER_00: Their worldview was as they were screaming with excitement, home, boring, hotel, exciting, and fun.
32:10
SPEAKER_00: Okay so what happened is that on the day, on Thursday, on the day of our family night, you know, they came home and it was time, and I told them to we told them to pack an overnight bag.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: So they go to their rooms and I help them.
32:24
SPEAKER_00: We pack little clothes for overnight.
32:26
SPEAKER_00: Uh, their ages, by the way, are six, five, and three at the time.
32:29
SPEAKER_00: Six, five, and three.
32:30
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
32:31
SPEAKER_00: So you can take advantage of children when they're that age.
32:34
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, at six, five, and three.
32:36
SPEAKER_00: So they're packing their overnight bag, and I say, come on, let's go, let's put them out in the car, and we go out there and we do, we throw them into the back of the station wagon.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: They get in the car, start driving down backwards down the driveway.
32:45
SPEAKER_00: They start screaming, Daddy, daddy, daddy, wait, mommy's not here.
32:49
SPEAKER_00: I said, Well, little white lie, but you know, I say, she's gonna join us at the hotel.
32:57
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and the real purpose is because she had to transform our house into a hotel.
33:03
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, I drive down the driveway, and you know, so I drive around Topeka.
33:07
SPEAKER_00: They're 6'5 and 3, they have no idea what's going on.
33:10
SPEAKER_00: I'm going backroads, I'm going freeways, and so forth for a half an hour, 30 minutes, 40 minutes.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: We're driving around to give her time.
33:18
SPEAKER_00: And and finally, as I, you know, I it's you know, we agreed on this time.
33:22
SPEAKER_00: So I'm driving back to the house to get about half a mile away.
33:25
SPEAKER_00: I say, hey kids, heads in your lap, close your eyes.
33:28
SPEAKER_00: It's exciting.
33:29
SPEAKER_00: I want this to be a surprise.
33:31
SPEAKER_00: Hide your eyes.
33:32
SPEAKER_00: Anyone peeking?
33:33
SPEAKER_00: No, Daddy, no is peak.
33:35
SPEAKER_00: So so then I turn into Crest Drive and I come up and I drive in the driveway, and I stop and I say, Okay, you can open your eyes.
33:42
SPEAKER_00: We're here at the hotel.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: Heads come up.
33:46
SPEAKER_00: Silence.
33:48
SPEAKER_00: Now they're going, uh uh, they start peppering me with questions.
33:52
SPEAKER_00: Daddy, but I mean, this isn't a hotel, this is home.
33:55
SPEAKER_00: You know, and so forth.
33:56
SPEAKER_00: I said, not answering any questions, follow me, grab your bag, let's go.
33:59
SPEAKER_00: So grab their bags, we go up on the porch and they're starting to open.
34:03
SPEAKER_00: Whoa, I say, ring the doorbell.
34:06
SPEAKER_00: It's at this point that my the youngest, whose name is Dougie, he's three years old, he is so sad that his daddy is so confused about things.
34:19
SPEAKER_00: And he said, in a line which would be used against him for decades after that, he said, he couldn't pronounce the letter R.
34:26
SPEAKER_00: He goes, but this is our house.
34:28
SPEAKER_00: But this is our house.
34:32
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, ring the doorbell, the door opens, and it's Melody.
34:35
SPEAKER_00: Is that mommy or not?
34:37
SPEAKER_00: She's wearing a wig and she had an outfit on, looked like a dormant.
34:41
SPEAKER_00: She's welcome to the hotel, she said.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: All agog, the children traips in looking at her, and then they look around, and the normal pictures are off the wall, and the living room looks different.
34:52
SPEAKER_00: Something she's moved things around and it just looks different.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: She says, Can I take help you take your bags to the room and start heading toward the bedroom?
34:59
SPEAKER_00: She says, No, no, no, that's not your room.
35:01
SPEAKER_00: And so she takes each of them to their bedroom in the hotel, which is a very different room than the room they normally sleep in.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: Now she says it's time for us to eat at the hotel restaurant.
35:13
SPEAKER_00: They traip to the kitchen.
35:14
SPEAKER_00: The restaurant's not there, so we go to the library, go to the back room, sort of the playroom.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: There's a table all set up with a tablecloth, and there's play settings, and there's a menu on every plate.
35:27
SPEAKER_00: They are so excited, they gotta get on there.
35:29
SPEAKER_00: And in big capital letters, you know, it reads uh hot dog, mac and cheese, you know, and so forth, but they have a menu.
35:37
SPEAKER_00: And now Melie comes in and she's dressed like a waitress.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: You know, she says, May I take your order?
35:43
SPEAKER_00: And she goes to each one of them, so excited as they're looking down those, and they choose what they want for supper.
35:49
SPEAKER_00: And so they are all they start getting into this.
35:52
SPEAKER_00: This is really exciting.
35:53
SPEAKER_00: It's the hotel, and they get to choose their food, and so we have the food, and then afterwards do special games, and then eventually, you know, they go to their rooms.
36:02
SPEAKER_00: And in one night, they had their viewpoint changed about their house.
36:08
SPEAKER_00: I think they'd always sort of thought of their house, you know, this way.
36:12
SPEAKER_00: It's boring, it's banal, it's dark, it's no fun.
36:15
SPEAKER_00: But then they realized, you know what?
36:18
SPEAKER_00: Our house actually could be pretty exciting.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a hotel.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: It's a hotel.
36:29
SPEAKER_00: And listen, this is this is why I tell you the story, because my takeaway is like this is a way that you and I have of going out in the world and hearing what everybody talks to us about and thinking that, you know, you and I really aren't anything very important.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: We're just sort of dingy houses.
36:46
SPEAKER_00: And it really doesn't matter what we do in life because we're unimportant anyway, and we're going to become extinct.
36:53
SPEAKER_00: And then you go to the Bible, you go to the Christian worldview, and suddenly the black and white changes, and there's it's color everywhere, and it's bright, and you find that you are awesome, divinity and dignity.
37:05
SPEAKER_00: At the same time, you are horrifying in your depravity.
37:10
SPEAKER_00: And thus, which is why you and I need a savior.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: Right?
37:14
SPEAKER_00: It's why we need salvation.
37:17
SPEAKER_00: It's why we're about to celebrate the Lord's table right now.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
37:21
SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we're about to look up and remember your son and think this morning that it's it's our fault.
37:30
SPEAKER_00: We're the ones who caused you to need to come down from heaven and hang on that cross for us.
37:37
SPEAKER_00: Give your body, give your blood as we eat the bread and drink the cup.
37:43
SPEAKER_00: Bless us as humbly we thank you for our salvation in Jesus' name.