Interlocked Series – Lesson #01, Part 3
The Creator God: Divine Institutions
July 4, 2023
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Father, we are so thankful, so grateful for Your grace to us, Your goodness to us, and for the provision of such a great salvation. It is a salvation that goes far beyond simply providing eternal life, that is, freeing us from the penalty of sin, but also providing us with a rich spiritual life, an abundant life, that we can have as long as we follow Your Word and internalize Your Word and live according to Your Word.
“It is Your Word that has the power to transform us and it is Your Word that has the power to transform nations, to transform people. But Father, we see also that evil has a horrible and destructive effect, and we see that as it is permeating our culture. The results of 150 to 175 years of increasing rejection of the truth of Your Word.
“Father, we pray that this might be reversed, but we know that is so rare in history. We do pray for Your grace that this would reverse. But Father, if not, we pray that You would strengthen us, that we may be able to face and endure whatever may come, and that we may continue to stand fast as believers no matter what the cost, even if it means imprisonment or martyrdom.
“We pray that we might come to understand that we must stand as lights in the midst of this wicked and perverse generation. Father, we’re so thankful for the heritage that we have on this birthday of the United States. We’re thankful for all of the benefits and blessings that have come our way because of the liberty that was understood in a biblical way by the founding fathers in their documents, in the Declaration, in the Constitution, and in the Bill of Rights,
“We understand that all that we are, all that we have comes from You. Our freedom, our liberty, our rights, our privileges all derive from You, not from government. And Father, we see the horrible encroachments of government in our lives every day as they restrain righteousness and promote unrighteousness.
“Father, we do pray for a reversal. We pray for men and women who are brought up in godly families to have the courage to be involved and to go forth proclaiming the truth of Your Word, living out the truth of Your Word, and standing firm in the gap.
“Father, we just ask that as we study Your Word today that we may come to understand the foundation principles that must be present if there is to be liberty. We pray this in Christ’s name, Amen.”
Slides 1 and 2
As you know, today is the 247th birthday of the United States. The Declaration of Independence had been already written, but we celebrate it on July 4th. Its wording was approved on July 4, 1776, which is why we celebrate this on July 4th. Actually, it was on the 2nd of July that Congress voted to declare independence from Great Britain.
It was on the 4th of July that the wording was finally approved by Congress, and probably the only one who signed it was the Secretary of the Continental Congress. We’re not sure if John Hancock, who was the President of the Second Continental Congress, signed the document that day. He probably did not sign it until the typeset version was printed a few days later.
It was on July 9th that the document that we are familiar with, the engrossed version of the script form, was signed by some of the others, but most of them did not sign it until August 2nd. And that is the version that is on display at the National Archives in Washington.
In that document, the signers were willing to sacrifice their prosperity for freedom for their posterity. They were willing to sacrifice all that they had in order to secure liberty for their countrymen and for their descendants.
Of the signers, 11 of them had their homes destroyed in the War for Independence. Five of them were hunted down and captured by the British. 17 of them served in the military and nine of them died during the war.
Twenty-seven-year-old George Walton signed and at the Battle of Savannah he was wounded and captured. Another signer, Edward Rutledge, also 27, and Thomas Hayward Jr., age 30, along with Arthur Middleton, were made prisoners at the siege of Charleston. Thirty-eight-year-old signer Thomas Nelson, for whom the Christian publisher Thomas Nelson Publishers is named, had his home used as a British headquarters during the siege of Yorktown. And he reportedly offered a reward to the first man to hit his house, to destroy it with the British inside.
John Adams wrote a letter to his wife, in which he said, “You will think me transported with enthusiasm, but I am not.” They use the word enthusiasm like we would use emotionalism. “I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure that it will cost us to maintain this declaration and support and defend these states. And it will, let me add, take toil and blood and treasure to restore this nation if that is God’s will.”
He went on to say, “Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is more than worth all of the means, and that posterity will triumph in the day’s transaction, even if we should rue it, which I trust in God we shall not.”
When his cousin, 54-year-old Samuel Adams, signed the Declaration, he said, “We have this day restored the sovereign to whom all men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven, and from the rising to the setting of the sun let His kingdom come.”
The men who signed the Declaration, and later those who signed the Constitution, understood life from the perspective of the Bible. They may not have all been regenerate, they may not have all correctly understood the gospel, but they all thought within the framework of a Judeo-Christian worldview, a biblical worldview, and thus they understood what absolutes were, and they had the correct standards for their absolutes as coming from the Bible.
They all grew up in a culture whose roots ran deeply into the Scriptures, and it can be seen and clearly understood by their thinking that every individual human being was endowed by God, His Creator, with certain rights, certain freedoms, and certain privileges. In their discussions of those responsibilities, they demonstrated, they understood what we’re going to be talking about in tonight’s lesson as we go into our third lesson in the Interlocked series, which focuses on three Divine Institutions.
Slide 3
As we begin this, here is our chart of the timeline of the biblical events from Creation to final judgment. And timelines are so important. I remember hearing people talk about bad history teachers who were just worried about dates. Dates are critical. Dates are the skeleton on which everything hangs. And unfortunately, people make that sound boring. I remember my mother talking that way. God ties His doctrines to geographical locations and to chronological dates. Only in the Bible can we go to specific dates and say, this is when God did this.
Only by going to biblical places can we go, and we can say this is where the Holy of Holies of the Tabernacle was located and God’s presence was here on the earth for over 300 years right where I’m looking. No other religion does that. Only Christianity can point to the objective revelation of God.
What we’ll hear on Thursday night is about the discovery of the altar that Joshua built described in Joshua 8 when the tribes of Israel gathered six tribes on Mount Gerizim and six tribes on Mount Ebal. Some of you here have been with me when we were with Joel Kramer on Mount Gerizim several years ago.
Mount Gerizim was called the Mount of Blessings and they read from Leviticus the blessings, and then the curses were read from Mount Ebal. And this has been discounted and rejected by most modern academicians. They claim that these kinds of things never happened, that Joshua never existed, that Moses never existed, that Abraham never existed, that there was never an altar built by Joshua.
They say that there was no exodus and that the Israelites were never slaves in Egypt. The discovery of Joshua’s altar has turned their whole theory upside down. It is important to understand the reality of these things.
(The hand motions can be seen on the video.)
Now let’s stand up as we go through our motions, our hand signals on the timeline chart. Remember, I’m just going to review it for everybody. We talk about Creation. This is God creating the world. And then there’s the Fall. And then the waters come and fill the earth at the Flood. And then there’s the Tower of Babel. Tower of Babel is when God decides not to work through all mankind anymore. He’s going to work through Abraham. Then you have the call of Abraham.
450 years later, his descendants are slaves in Egypt. and you have their exodus. God delivers them or redeems them from slavery in Egypt. That deliverance is called the Exodus. Then they go into the conquest of the Promised Land. And we march for conquest. Sometime after the period of the judges, they have the kingdom.
The kingdom, of course, will split into two. And then finally, God will take them all out of the land. We use two hands because God only calls part of them back. You have a partial return.
Once again let’s run through it. It’s Creation, Fall, Flood, Tower of Babel, call of Abraham. Then you have the Exodus. I left out the law. Very good. The Ten Commandments of the Mosaic Law. And then the conquest. And then the kingdom. And then the exile. And then the return.
Next in the New Testament you have the coming of the Messiah. You have the birth of Jesus. And then the crucifixion on the Cross, and then He is buried for three days, then He rises from the dead, 40 days later He ascends to Heaven.
The Church is established on the day of Pentecost, and then Jesus will return at the end of the Church Age in the air to take us to be with Him in the air to Heaven. Next you have the seven years of tribulation. Then Jesus Christ returns to the earth and establishes the Millennial Kingdom.
At the end of the Millennial Kingdom you have the Great White Throne Judgment. And all those who appear there are unbelievers and they are all sent to the Lake of Fire. Very good. Y’all did a good job. Next week we may have one of the kids run us through that and see if any adults can keep up with them.
Slides 4 and 5
Tonight, what we’re going to do is continue a little bit of review. We have these events. There are 11 events in the Old Testament, and then there are 8 events in the New Testament, which gives us 19 events. And it’s called Interlocked because all of the events of Scripture, the key events, are interconnected. If you take out one and say, well, that really didn’t happen, then the rest of it falls like a house of cards.
When it comes to understanding the historical significance of all of these events, especially the ones from Genesis 1 through Genesis 11, everything else in the Bible stands on those events. You have many, many situations now where people grow up, they go to church, they’re taught a lot of stuff in Sunday school, but usually there’s great skepticism about the actual historicity and factuality of the events in Genesis 1 through 11.
All these events, the Creation, Fall, Flood, and the Tower of Babel are all within the first 11 chapters. There’s a concentration here at the beginning in what’s in Genesis. All of that covers a huge amount of time, but it’s foundational to everything else.
Later we’ll see where Jesus affirms the historicity and factuality of all of these events. He believed them to be true. In about 99% of churches in this country the people are taught that they’re not historically true. They’re not accurate.
If someone goes to a university, they will be told that these events did not happen. They say they’re not true. There’s no evidence of those things and the earth is billions of years old, they insist.
Yesterday, I happened to run across a YouTube video where Ken Ham was critiquing various so-called evangelical leaders. N.T. Wright is one of them, a very well-known bishop, Anglican bishop, I think former Anglican bishop now in England. He’s been very influential in revising the way a lot of people look at the New Testament in a very sad way. He holds to Replacement Theology, Covenant Theology. He doesn’t believe in any kind of future millennium. He’s an amillennialist. I know of at least one doctrinal pastor who is completely deceived by N.T. Wright.
Ken Ham talks about an American guy, a theologian who sings a song about how we believe the Bible, we believe in Genesis, we believe God created billions of years ago. What’s wrong with that? They’ve reinterpreted Genesis. This is so critical.
Slide 6
We’re still in lesson one of the Interlocked series. We broke it into actually three lessons because of the long review last time. It focuses on God’s creation, especially it focuses on His relationship to the human race and the development of the social structures which God created which we refer to as the Divine Institutions.
The first part, which actually we covered in the last two lessons, focused on the Creation and the Creator, that God created out of nothing. He created by his Word out of nothing. It was a six-day pattern, so it shows that God is orderly, His work is structured, and He is not a God of chaos.
We saw the important doctrine of the distinction of the Creator-creature. The Creator has privileges and does things, and He designs how reality is. And the creature does not. We live in a world today where the creature has rejected the Creator, and the creatures are trying to redefine reality.
That’s at the core of this whole transgender thing, that you can change your gender. That’s saying we’re going to be the creator. We’re not just creatures. We can create our own reality. That is out-and-out rebellion against God. What we see in the Scripture and what we studied was the unique design of mankind that we are all created in the image and likeness of God.
Slide 7
This third lesson focuses on the social structures that God created. We’re still on that first topic, talking about Creation.
Slides 8 and 9
One of the review questions last week was, God created everything out of what? Nothing. Very good. God created everything out of nothing. He created simply by what? Speaking. By His Word. It was by His Word He created everything.
The fact that God created is important and how God created is important.
Slides 10 and 11
What was it that He used to create everything? His Word. By His Word He created everything.
Slide 12
We saw that God is a God of order and purpose.
First, He created the environments in days 1, 2, and 3, and then He created that which fit into the environments in days 3, 4, and 5.
Slide 13
Then we talked about the Creator-creature distinction. This is so important.
At the first level there’s God who’s an infinite personal God. At the second level there’s man. We are limited. We are finite. We are not infinite.
Slides 14, 15, and 16
We had this chart that at the first level there’s the infinite personal Creator-God. And at the second level, that is totally different from the first level, you have the beginning of time God creates nature and man. The first level we have God who is the infinite personal Creator-God.
Each one of those is a very important term to understand. In the creation event, He creates the natural creation and the human race, mankind.
Slide 17
What we’ve learned so far is that God is the Creator of everything. There’s not one thing that was made apart from God creating it.
One of our Sunday school teachers made the point that God created everything out of nothing. A little six-year-old boy said, “That’s not true. He created man out of the dust of the ground.” Sharp kid. What’s important is who created the dust.
That always reminds me of an old joke about the scientist who decided that because he could create life in the laboratory, that he could challenge God to a contest to show him that he could create life. God said, “You challenged Me, so you start first.” And the guy reached down to get some dirt, and God said, “No, no, no, you have to create your own dirt.”
The second thing we learned is that God is different from His creation. He did not make it out of His own body or out of something else. If you study the origin stories of pagan myths, the creation always comes out of something that’s already there. There’s no explanation of how anything got there. One of the existentialist philosophers back in the 1950s said the big question is, why is there anything? Why does anything exist at all?
Third, we learned that God must be all powerful. To do all what He does, God must be all powerful. We learned about the unique design of mankind.
Slide 18
In Genesis 1:26, God said, “Let us make human beings in our image to be like us.”
Somebody asked me a really good question last time. We normally define man in terms of mentality, in terms of emotion, in terms of will, in terms of conscience. If that is the totality of the imageness of God, then what distinguishes man from the angels?
I don’t know. That’s a very good question, because we usually teach that the image is the reflection of God, but it’s got to be more than that. There’s something more, and I’m not sure what that is, because the angels have all of that as well, and they had volitional responsibility as well at one point. The imageness of man is something more than simply what we see in terms of those elements.
God created us in His image to be like Him so that humans could rule as an underlord. They would reign over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky, over all of the cattle of the fields and the wild animals on the earth.
Slide 19
What we’ll look at more tonight in Genesis 1:27 is that God created the male and female. Both male and female are in the image of God. That is so crucial to understand that.
Slide 20
This teaches us some things about the image of God. He’s sovereign and we have limited sovereignty. God is also righteous. He’s perfect in every way. We can only have a measure of righteousness, if we conform now to His standard. God is perfectly righteous and for all eternity He is love.
God is all-loving. We can only love in a finite way. He has eternal life. There never was a time when He didn’t exist, never will be a time when He doesn’t exist, but we have limited existence.
He is just, but it is in a universal way. He’s the absolute standard and we are just a finite representation of that.
God knows everything. We know some things. God is present everywhere. We are limited to just where we are in space and time.
And then God is all-powerful. We have some power, but nothing like God’s.
Slide 21
What this chart explains is showing how the creature is vastly inferior to the Creator.
The creature cannot understand the Creator. We can understand some things that are true about the Creator, but we cannot understand Him fully because He is far beyond us.
Slide 22
We have learned that God as the Creator owns everything because He made everything. If you’re teaching this to little kids, you have to help them understand some concepts. He is the ultimate boss. He’s the ultimate authority. He’s the one who is in control of everything.
We’re made like God, but a smaller and more limited reflection of God. We have limited authority and our authority and our power is to be subservient or to be under the control of God’s power. We’ve seen that God’s attributes are powerful. He’s present everywhere and they are without boundaries. He’s infinite in every way and that there is nothing like God.
Slide 23
Now we get into our topic which is the Divine Institutions. We have to understand that it is God who created them. It is God who made these institutions. That’s why they’re called Divine Institutions. These are not ideas that man came up with. Man didn’t come up with the idea that, oh, wouldn’t marriage be a good idea? Let’s have this thing called marriage because it would help the family. It wasn’t something like that.
God made the human race, designed the human race, so that the human race would only be able to function successfully under the control and under the guidelines that God has set forth in His design of marriage. If man violates God’s standards for marriage, then they have a negative impact on his own soul as well as on his relationships and on his culture or nation.
Also, God designed the family and how it must operate. What God says about the family must be followed because if that breaks down then the core of what is necessary for a nation or culture to survive and prosper is going to be destroyed. This is recognized empirically by numerous historians who recognize that when the family collapses, the culture is destroyed. That is where we are as a nation sadly.
Slide 24
When we look at the Divine Institutions, we recognize that this is set up by God. and that every human being is purposefully made by God. We are designed in a way so that these institutions must be followed in order for us to function successfully as an individual and as a people. It’s a really important thought, that when God creates marriage, He designed man so that man would function best in a marriage environment. That’s why He says it’s not good for man to be alone.
The Word He uses for man there isn’t the Word for mankind, it’s the Word for male. Because God created a difference between male and female, so that men, despite their independence, their desire for leadership, their desire to take initiative, all of those things which would lead them to a hyper individualism, can’t really function well unless they’re in the framework of a marriage. God designed us to work a certain way and that is what is related in the Divine Institutions.
Slide 25
God has created both physical and social absolutes for mankind. These social absolutes are just as significant as the law of gravity which God designed. If you violate the Divine Institution of marriage, it will destroy a culture.
If you reject the whole concept of personal individual responsibility by putting all the responsibility on government, then you’re going to destroy the people. They are not made for that. This was clearly understood by our Founding Fathers. These Divine Institutions are these social absolutes that are built into the nature of all human beings related to normal patterns of behavior.
What we have in Genesis 1 and 2, where there’s no sin, is what normal is. I say that every time I do a marriage, that we live in an abnormal world, and we have abnormal relationships. We are all victims of Adam’s original sin. If everybody’s victims of the same thing, then let’s quit talking about our victimization.
Christ has died on the Cross and He’s provided us the solution to the problem and that needs to be the focus. God created both.
Slide 26
God created the Divine Institutions, not mankind.
When you have a Supreme Court that comes along and recognizes the validity of a non-Christian form of marriage or let’s say, non-biblical, because it doesn’t have anything to do with being a Christian or not, they are for everybody.
One of the questions that young seminary students would throw around to each other is, “okay, you’re pastor of a church and you have a couple of unbelievers come to ask you if you would do their wedding, would you do it?” And the answer is yes, because the Divine Institution is for believers and unbelievers. But your responsibility is also to lead them to the Lord, so if you lead one to the Lord and not the other one, now you have a problem.
Slide 27
The fourth point is that violating God’s Divine Institutions will bring social chaos and destroy a nation. It eats it away from the inside. It’s not something that happens overnight. It takes time, but it destroys order. It destroys that which gives a nation the ability to prosper, where you can provide for the future by teaching the next generation within the framework of a family.
Slide 28
Here we have the first three Divine Institutions. I call the first Divine Institution individual responsibility. In the Interlocked curriculum, they call it responsible dominion. I understand why it’s that way. That was a term Charlie Clough used and it relates to the dominion mandate of Genesis 1:26–28.
I think it’s more than that. There’s an individual responsibility to God. Each of these has an authority. The authority and individual responsibility is God’s authority over each individual. The authority in marriage is the husband, the authority in the family are the parents. And it’s within the framework of those authorities that a teaching of authority is necessary to be passed on to the next generation.
A generation that does not pass on the importance of obedience to authority, and that doesn’t mean slavery, which is the devil’s twist, but orientation to authority is necessary for there to be order and to achieve objectives.
Slide 29
Here’s a question for you. What is man doing when he tries to modify or ignore these Divine Institutions? What is he violating? When man wants to change these Divine Institutions, what’s he doing?
Slide 30
He’s trying to be the Creator. He’s violating the Creator-creature distinction.
I’m trying to show you this is how you think critically about these things, that when you hear people say, “well, I think my son is really a girl,” then they’re trying to recreate reality. They’re functioning like the Creator, and they’re denying reality. And in many other ways, we live in a world divorced from reality. They’re all trying to be their own Creator.
And that’s exactly what happens in Judges when everyone’s doing what’s right in their own eyes. They’ve made themselves into the Creator, the determiner of ultimate truth and ultimate reality. It’s a violation of the Creator-creature distinction.
Slide 31
God is the Creator, and as the Creator, He has the right and the authority to tell us how He made us and how we can function best because of how He made us.
We haven’t gotten to the Fall yet, but we have to start with what God’s intent was and how God designed us, because sin doesn’t destroy the image of God. It may corrupt it, it may deface it, but it doesn’t destroy it. These are all still true. And remember, these are established before there’s ever any sin.
They are not designed to limit sin or restrict sin or protect from sin. They are designed positively to promote the prosperity and the success of the human race in perfection. They’re still true today.
Slide 32
For the children we can teach that the Creator God is the big boss. The human race, mankind, are under lords. They’re the small boss. They work for God. God does not work for us.
How many times do you hear people raising questions about, why does God let this happen? Why did God let that happen? Why does God let all these wars and everything? Well, the core of that question is you’re trying to be the Creator, and you’re trying to tell God what to do.
You have to go back to the attributes of God, that God is omniscient. Do you know everything there is to know about everything? Well, how can you question God? Where did that occur in the Bible? Hmm? Job. That’s right. That is what Job is all about.
By the time you get to Job 38, God is asking Job where he was when God created everything, when He did certain things. He told him he wasn’t around and witnessed what God was doing. You weren’t around. No human being witnessed what I was doing.
How can you, who know just about a grain of salt’s worth of all human knowledge and the entire universe question Me?
That’s not analogous to God’s infinite knowledge. Man’s knowledge is finite. We can’t even come close to understanding God. His knowledge is infinite.
So, what happens in the first Divine Institution is the establishment of individual responsibility to God. Every one of us is responsible to God for the decisions we make in life and for the actions that we take in life.
Slide 33
Genesis 1:28, God blessed them after creating the man and the woman. He blessed them and said five commands. Be fruitful. Multiply. Be fruitful—that means having a lot of babies. Multiply. Generation upon generation. Fill the earth. Govern it.
Ruling it is a good term, but governing is better. Govern the earth. Ruling adds an autocratic element to it, whereas governing is not so autocratic. Reign over. That means man is placed over the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.
Can you name an organization that rejects that and puts themselves in charge? PETA. Very good. That’s right. We have to understand that God has created the lower forms of life, and we are not animals. I remember being taught that in elementary school that human beings are animals, because that’s a view that we’re all on the same chain. But we’re not animals.
We are distinct from all other created life, because we are what? What makes us different? We’re in the image and likeness of God, exactly.
Slide 34
God’s the big boss, man’s the lower-level boss, and this establishes the principle of authority and responsibility in perfect environment.
We live in a world where people think that authority is evil. But even within the Godhead there is authority. God the Father is the ultimate authority within the Godhead. Authority is necessary for a chain of command, for division of labor, and for orderly production, for reaching the end goal.
The idea that one person is an authority and the other person is to submit to them does not mean that the person who is submitting is less equal than the one to whom he submits. And that is the lie undergirding all feminism. Because feminism says to say that a wife needs to submit to her husband is wrong, because women in many cases are superior.
It has nothing to do with talent. It has everything to do with how God designed males and females to work. And you have that same order in the Godhead. The Father is an authority over the Son. That does not mean that the Son is less equal, less powerful, less knowledgeable, less anything than God the Father. They are absolutely equal in everything. Authority is always going to be present. Authority was present in the perfect environment of Eden. Authority will be present for all eternity.
Authority was the issue that led to the very first sin. Satan wanted to be an authority. I think that’s why Scripture emphasizes submission and authority in all the various areas so much because that goes back to that initial sin. Man is responsible to God to obey God. He is to rule over the creation and over the animals.
Slide 35
In Genesis 2:8, God plants a garden on the sixth day. It says it was planted eastward in Eden, which brings out a thought which I had not run across before and I think there’s some merit to it. When it says God planted a garden, it distinguishes what’s in the garden from the rest of the planet.
God plants this garden eastward in Eden and there He put the man whom He had formed. He named the man Adam. The woman has not yet been created. Then we’re going to have two more commands show up in Genesis 2:15. The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend and to keep it. He’s given responsibilities related to work.
The man wasn’t just to sit around eating all that he could eat and just lollygagging around and doing nothing. He had responsibilities. The responsibilities were not laborious. Labor and weariness come as a result of sin. Before that there was work, and when we’re in Heaven, we’re going to have lots of responsibilities, lots of things to do, but it’s not going to be difficult. It becomes difficult because of sin.
Man is given the responsibility in this garden. And what is he doing? This is really interesting to think this through. God has created the garden. And He puts them there, and He’s basically saying to Adam, look at what I’ve created, look at what I’ve done. You are to imitate Me.
I’m giving you this area, and I have shown you what I can do here. Now you need to go and do likewise to the rest of the planet, because you are to rule over it. And Adam’s probably thinking this is a pretty big place so he starts to think that he needs help.
Slide 36
In the first Divine Institution of individual responsibility to God we’re responsible for all the choices we make and we’re not to try to act like we can remake the rules or recreate reality but that is exactly what we find going on in in our world. And that’s been going on ever since Eve decided she could remake reality and that fruit on the tree that was prohibited is going to be good to eat. She was rewriting the rules. She’s acting like the Creator. She’s remaking the absolutes.
Slide 37
One aspect of God’s right as the Creator was to name things. We see Him beginning to name things at the beginning. And He did it with spoken Words. The reason for that, I believe, is that it initializes—He’s formatting the brain of His creatures. Because by speaking, it stimulates the auditory nerves. And studies seem to indicate that if there’s not an external source for language, we will not learn language.
Noam Chomsky, who teaches at MIT thought this was the problem for evolution. Who initializes the first human to be able to speak? If a human being cannot learn language without hearing it, from whom will the first human hear language? That’s a problem and he understood that.
God delegated or handed over authority for that responsibility to Adam. God said, I’ve started naming all of the animals. Isn’t it fun? What kind of things can you do? Now, Adam, you try it. What do you call that thing with the long nose and the little short tail? Where are you going to go from there, and start naming all of the different animals?
God had a purpose for all of that. And the purpose is that as God brings all of the animals to Adam, there’s a male and a female. There weren’t 50 different genders of giraffes. There weren’t 30 different genders of cattle. They’re all male and female, except there was an exception. And the exception was Adam, because there was just one human being. That was what God wanted him to understand, that there was something that was missing.
Slide 38
God had initialized by calling the light day, the darkness night, evening and morning were the first day. Then in Genesis 1:10, God called the dry land earth and gathered together the waters. He called them seas.
Slide 39
He forms all of the animals and then He brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And the man chose a name for each one. I believe that if you and I have IQs between, I’ll be generous, let’s say 100 and 170, I think Adam’s IQ was north of 500 somewhere, and that there’s just been a dilution of human IQ through DNA degeneration over the last 5,000 to 6,000 years.
Slide 40
One thing I want to point out, when God in Genesis 1:31 looked over all that He made and saw that it was very good, the Word there in Hebrew is the word tov. Tov has a number of meanings, and in some passages, Tov can be a synonym for that which is righteous and moral. But in many passages, it does not have that connotation. It has the idea that something is according to plan. Something is okay.
It is not necessarily implied, and you will find that almost every theologian that wants to argue for a young-earth-creation position, which I argue for, but they sideline this. Because they look here it’s very good, therefore there’s no sin yet. Satan hasn’t fallen yet. We’ll talk about the fall of Satan in the next couple of lessons.
The problem with this is that when you get into the next chapter, into chapter 2, you have the use of the word tov again and there what’s going to happen is God says it’s not good tov, same word, for man to be alone.
Now you’re going to have a real problem if you’re going to make that moral because that means it’s immoral or sinful or unrighteous for man to be single. But if you have the sense that I would put into Genesis 1, that it means according to my plan, then that makes much more sense.
Each day God is very orderly. He’s got a blueprint. He’s broken it down. These are the objectives on day 1. These are the objectives on day 2. These are the objectives on day 3, 4, 5, and 6. And at the end of the day, He looks at His to-do list and He says everything’s accomplished, everything’s what I intended it to be, it’s good.
When He gets to the end of the project, He says it’s very good. It’s all completed, it’s all finished, it’s all according to plan. In the next chapter we have the same word used, related to Adam. I think that has to be dealt with, and I have raised that question to innumerable people.
Steve Austin and I had great debates over this, but he can’t answer it, and he admits he can’t answer it. So that’s important because it goes back to when did Satan fall? Because almost all those people try to put Satan’s fall sometime after day six and before the events of Genesis 2:3. Exegetically, we can’t figure that out but we’ll get to that later.
Slides 41 and 42
That’s what we see in terms of the creation of man. There’s a couple of other passages in Scripture that are important, for example, in Psalm 8. Psalm 8:1–9 reads, “O Yahweh, our Lord, your majestic name fills the earth! Your glory is higher than the heavens. You have taught children and infants to tell of your strength, silencing your enemies and all who oppose you. When I look at the night sky and see the work of your fingers—the moon and the stars you set in place—what are mere mortals that you should think about them, human beings that you should care for them? Yet you made them only a little lower than angels, and crowned them with glory and honor. You gave them charge of everything you made, putting all things under their authority.”
That’s Divine Institution number one. He put all things under the authority of man. The flocks and the herds, all the wild animals, the birds in the sky, the fish in the sea, everything that swims in the ocean current.
Slides 43
First what we’ve seen is that God looked over it all, took pleasure in it, and now He expected Adam to exercise that same creativity, and to take pleasure in ruling God’s creation. Second, as an image-bearer, mankind was to imitate what God the Creator had done. Third, man in the perfect, unflawed image of God was sinless, but that was only at the beginning.
Slide 44
Now, point four, God, as part of responsible choice, gave man volition. Otherwise, man would have been a robot, and there would have been no test. There would have been no validity to it. Man had the ability to make choices. God did not want man to be a robot or simply a programmed being to do what God said.
Fifth, each person is accountable to God for his choices. Responsible choice means that there are both positive and negative consequences for what choices we make. Sixth, our lives are the result of the choices that we make, good or bad.
Slide 45
There’s a couple of breakout box areas in the curriculum. The first one is on the top of page 10 in the notes, and it asks if we can understand the world just by looking at Creation? We can understand it in a limited way.
Slide 46
If we go back to Genesis 1, God showed him the garden and God began to teach Adam about what He had made. He told him certain things. And there’s one thing He told him that Adam could never have figured out by observation. And that was that if he ate from the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would immediately die. God told him how to live well. Don’t eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Slide 47
Now there is communication from God’s Creation. Psalm 19:1–4 says the heavens declare the glory of God. Declare is a communication word. “And the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, night unto night reveals knowledge.” You can learn things by looking around and observing. There is knowledge through empiricism.
“There is no speech nor language where their voice is not heard. Their voice declares the glory of God.” What happens? Psalm 19:4 says, “Their line has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world. In them He has set a tabernacle for the sun.” The creation loudly speaks of God’s glory. That’s what the Bible says.
Slide 48
Every molecule, every cell structure, every leaf, every rodent, every creature declares the glory of God because of how it is made. Romans 1:18–21 answers the question I asked. “God shows His anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who suppress the truth by their wickedness.”
I don’t like the translation there of wickedness, because the word is unrighteousness and unrighteousness is different from wickedness. Wickedness is something we think of as like the wicked witch of the west or we think of this as the wicked witch in Hansel and Gretel or Snow White.
Wickedness is not the same as unrighteousness. Unrighteousness can masquerade as something quite nice and wonderful. He shows His wrath from Heaven because they know the truth about God, because He’s made it obvious to them. How did He make it obvious to them? Through His creation.
Every single human being has God’s existence made obvious to them. “For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature. They have no excuse for not knowing God. Yes, they knew God, but they wouldn’t worship him as God.”
It’s volition. They refuse to worship Him as God. They chose to not worship Him as God, and they chose to be ungrateful. And they began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like, and as a result, their minds became dark and confused.
Slide 49
Next, we need to ask if work is evil. No, God had work for Adam at the beginning. People have all kinds of ideas about work, but in a perfect world, man had responsibilities. He had to take care of the Garden, but it wasn’t toilsome. It wasn’t laborious.
Slide 50
Proverbs 18:9 says, “A lazy person is as bad as someone who destroys things.” Think about somebody who’s lazy. Think about somebody who doesn’t clean up their house, somebody who doesn’t take care of their financial bills. What happens? They destroy their lives. They destroy the place they live physically by not taking care of it. They destroy their credit rating and their finances by not paying their bills or being responsible.
Slide 51
Paul says in 2 Thessalonians 2:5–7, “Yet we hear that some of you are living idle lives, refusing to work and meddling in other people’s business. We command such people and urge them in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ to settle down and work to earn their own living.” The New Testament says if they don’t work, they don’t eat. That’s a more direct translation.
Slide 52
That’s the first Divine Institution, individual responsibility to God. And that is necessary for the second Divine Institution to function well. And that is marriage. God designed marriage for the benefit of the human race.
Slide 53
In Genesis 2:20, God brings all the animals before Adam. Adam names them, and he doesn’t find a helper. What is a helper? We live in a culture that has defined a helper as someone who is less significant than the one who is being helped. But that is blasphemy.
Slide 54
Why did God need a helper? Is a helper a less important or less significant role? Those are the two questions we should ask.
Slide 55
In Genesis 1:27 God made both man and woman, male and female, in His image and likeness. They’re equally in the image of God.
Slide 56
In Genesis 2:18, He says, “I will make a helper who is just right for him.” He designed the female to be the complementary counterpart to the male. There’s a clear distinction made both physically and soulishly for male and female. There’s nothing wrong with being a helper.
Slide 57
In fact, the word in Hebrew that is used for helper is the word Ezer. And it’s in the name of Eliezer. Eliezer was the son of Aaron. In Eliezer, the word El is God. The “i” is a first person suffix meaning “my God” or “my helper.” Ezer is the word for help. God is called our helper many times.
Is God less significant than we are? No. A helper is actually more significant than the one who is being helped because the helper is the one who enables the one who’s being helped to accomplish the task.
Slide 58
When we look at God, we see that both what we see as feminine as well as masculine traits are assigned to God. The image of God is found in both, but there are certain traits that are distinctive for females and certain traits distinctive for males.
In Isaiah 66:13, God compares His comfort to the comfort of a mother. And in Isaiah 49:15, He compares His care for Israel to the mother’s care when she’s nursing a child.
Slide 59
In Proverbs 27:23–27, Solomon is talking about the importance of the family working together. And when the family is working together, then God has provided everything for them. He says, Be diligent to work, “Be diligent to know the state of your flocks, and to attend to your herds; For riches are not forever, nor does a crown endure to all generations. When the hay is removed, and the tender grass shows itself, and the herbs of the mountains are gathered in, the lambs will provide your clothing, and the goats the price of the field.”
You have to work it. You have to know your flocks, you have to know your herds. “You shall have enough goat’s milk for your food, for the food of your household, and the nourishment of your maidservants.” But if you’re lazy, you won’t have that.
Slide 60
Then the woman is praised because of her industriousness in Psalm 31:27–29. “She watches over the activities of her household and is never idle. Her sons rise up and call her blessed. Her husband also praises her: ‘Many people are capable, but you surpass them all.’ ”
It’s important to emphasize to kids from the very beginning that God thinks that both the roles of mother and father, the role of wife and husband are significant. You have to start with God’s standards. The problem we have now, we’ll deal with this later, is the problem of sin.
Slide 61
The third Divine Institution is the family. Hillary Clinton wrote a well-known book back in the 1990s called It Takes a Village. That’s not what God says. God says it takes a family. It’s a direct assault on the Divine Institution of the family.
God sees the family as the educational institution for raising up the next generation. I don’t know about you, but I remember when I was a little kid how many times my teachers were saying what we had to learn because they were teaching citizenship and everything so that we would develop into good citizens and be able to carry on the history and the ideals of our nation. They failed miserably.
That generation was a generation that rioted about the Vietnam War and demonstrated one of the highest levels of disrespect for authority of any generation. But that was their volition. It wasn’t because it wasn’t taught to them.
Slide 62
Deuteronomy 6:5–9, part of the Mosaic Law says, “This is what is to dominate your thinking. Repeat them to your children.” Parents’ primary job is to teach your children good theology, good doctrine, to have them memorize Scripture, to teach them the gospel from the day they come out of the womb.
You need to be telling your children about the gospel, about how much God loves them, and how God has provided for them, and that He provided Jesus to die for their sins. You’re formatting the vocabulary of their brain with biblical truth.
When they get old enough that they can articulate anything back to you, everything you have said has already been heard and stored in their brains and their memories. When you get around to telling them the gospel, you have laid the foundation for two or three years. That’s what you’re supposed to do.
Parents who say that I’m going to wait till my kids are 18 and let them make up their own mind are miserable failures. You’re to repeat these truths to your children, talk about them all the time. “When you sit in your house, when you walk along the road, when you lie down, when you get up, bind them as a sign on your hand and let them be a symbol on your forehead.”
The Jews have taken that literally and put the law into these phylacteries, these little pouches that they put on their foreheads or their hands. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. In other words, what He is saying is this should govern everything that’s in your house.
Slide 63
Proverbs 19:18 says to discipline your children while there is hope. Otherwise, you will ruin their lives. Proverbs 22:6 says to direct your children into the right path and when they are older, they will not leave it.
You should be teaching this to your children, that this is what your responsibility is, so that they will be able to do their responsibility to God.
Slide 64
There was a negative to this in the law that a lot of people think is so cruel of God, but God is like a surgeon. He knows what happens when malignancy, something malignant socially, develops. And that is if you have a child that is rebellious, that that rebelliousness can penetrate the rest of society and destroy the culture.
We saw examples of that in the Book of Judges. One person making a rebellious decision infects the whole culture and leads to a disaster. And in Deuteronomy 21, it talks about the fact that if someone, notice it says, if a man has a stubborn and rebellious son, doesn’t talk about a daughter, because the son, the males are the leaders.
“If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who does not obey his father or mother and doesn’t listen to them even after they discipline him, his father and mother must take hold of him ...” This is an older adolescent. His father and mother must, they don’t have an option according to the Law, “take hold of him bring him to the elders of his city, to the gate of the hometown. They will say to the elders of his city, ‘this son of ours is stubborn and rebellious; he doesn’t obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all of the men of his city will stone him to death. You must purge the evil from you, and all Israel will hear and be afraid.” That last sentence is what people miss. That’s why it’s there. This is an evil that will destroy the culture if it’s allowed to go on.
Slide 65
In the Interlocked lesson on page 15 there is a question: Is it true that once children become adults and can do whatever they want, do parents no longer have the right to speak into their lives? I think parents always have a responsibility to communicate, but it changes when their children become adults. There are still times when parents need to urge them to exercise some caution. It’s how they do it that is as important as what they do.
Slide 66
We have interesting examples in Scripture. In 1 Kings 1:6 David’s about to die. Solomon has been appointed the heir. But Adonijah wants to take the throne from Solomon eventually. We’re told in 1 Kings 1:6, that King David had never disciplined Adonijah at any time, even by asking, why are you doing that? Adonijah had been born next after Absalom, and he was very handsome. He got spoiled. David never corrected him.
Slide 67
The same thing happened to Eli’s sons. And God says in 1 Samuel 3:13, “I have warned him that judgment is coming upon his family forever, because his sons are blaspheming God and he hasn’t disciplined them.”
Slide 68
It’s important to understand these first three Divine Institutions work together. They are Divine Institutions, but people want to make them man-made institutions. You’ve got to have personal responsibility in the culture to have good marriages in the culture, and you have to have good marriages to have good families.
Once personal responsibility breaks down, and that started happening in Western culture in the late 19th century with the rise of psychotherapy, which blamed everything else in the culture and the parents for whatever problems the next generation had. And this worked its way through the culture to take responsibility away from individuals.
That led to greater and greater problems in marriage and the breakdown of families as well.
Slide 69
When God created the Creation, it was all perfect. “God saw that all that He had made, and it was very good. Evening came and then morning: the sixth day. So the heavens and the earth and everything in them were completed,” and that was normal.
Slide 70
We’re going to see what happens when the Creator-creature distinction is violated. We’ll do that next time.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this opportunity to look at these things, to assimilate them into our thinking. that we may think biblically according to the standards that You created, the way You designed us to be and to function the best and recognize the destructive impact that sin has had on everything around us.
“Father, we pray that we might be able to submit our thinking, our decisions, our opinions to Your Word and be able to think clearly about how to present this to our children and grandchildren and to the kids in our prep school classes. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”