Room number two of our discussion of the work of God in creation on page 82 is the theological significance of the doctrine of creation. I have to admit my outline here is a little scattered, now I'll tell you where I notice that today I always know there's something wrong with it, but it finally hit me today what exactly is wrong with it so I'll let you know when it starts to go right. The fundamental point of departure for the doctrine of creation is that all reality finds its source, its origin in the creative activity of the sovereign God. This affirmation occurs frequently throughout scripture. Genesis 1 of course opens with the words in the beginning, God created. And the last book of scripture confesses God is both the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. I see not only Revelation 21 verse 6 but Isaiah 44 verse 6 as well. The only answer to the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, the only answer to his question of why there is something rather than nothing is that God has wielded it to be so. So God is the origin of all reality. Now here's where the outline goes awry. That was point A, points B, C, how many other points are there? D, E, is there E? F2? Okay, points B through F are implications of A. So in a sense A should have been Romans 2. You all follow me here in terms of the outline? Outlining is not my strong suit. We're just lucky that I'm getting the alphabet right that it's A, B, C. It could have been A, G, B, Z, Q, R, S, T. Okay. So B here, our first implication of God as the origin of all reality is that one God is the sovereign Lord. One God is the sovereign Lord. And what we need to see here is the biblical polemic, remember the word polemic means an argument against the biblical polemic against polytheism. They want to take you through a little bit of that. God has no rivals. The entire universe owes its origin to him alone. The assertion of the Old Testament that there is one God is often coupled with the affirmation of God as the creator of all things. Ezra's appeal for God's aid and deliverance from slavery is typical here. And this is Ezra chapter 9 verse 6. He said, you are Yahweh, you are the Lord, you alone, you have made the heaven, the heaven of heavens, and all their hosts, the earth, and all that is on it, the seas, and all that is in them. You preserve all of them and the host of heaven worship you. Very common scripture to see God's oneness brought together with creation. Clearly, if one God has created the whole universe, what does that mean? All other supposed deities aren't deities at all. They are mere pretenders to the throne of heaven, to appreciate the full significance of the Genesis' creation. We should note that it includes a polemic, an argument against, all rival creation accounts. All rival accounts, and their Genesis 1 is not the only creation story in the ancient Near East. But only Genesis 1 proclaims that the world is the product of one God. All rival accounts, all other accounts presuppose a polytheistic worldview. Only the Hebrew religion is based upon a radical monotheism. Let me say something just very quickly about that monotheism before we talk about the polytheistic worldview. Hibriac monotheism, the fact that there is one God, is not merely the confession of Yahweh, nor is it merely the confession that Yahweh is one and that there is one God whose name is Yahweh. It is also the confession that there are no other gods. Hibriac monotheism is the intentional and the conscious exclusion of the rights of any other deity. What is the first commandment? You shall have no other gods. God's sovereignty over creation. God's single sovereignty denies polytheism. Well, what is this polytheism? What aspect of this polytheism is that the various gods are seen as holding a merely local sovereignty? John Stott writes this in the biblical account and you have his quotation there. It was established from the outset that the God who later chose to reveal himself to Israel was not the God of Israel alone. Israel must not regard Yahweh as the mobile bites regarded Chemaash or Mascot. For he was no petty godling or tribal deity whose domain and interests were limited to the tribe and its territory but the God of creation, the Lord of all the earth. So contrary to the ancient Near Eastern tradition where you have a God of the sky or a God of the land or a God of the Canaanites and a God of the Assyrians, we have a God in Genesis 1 who says, I created everything. I am sovereign Lord of all. Be here and I'm already started to introduce that. I said, God's the sky in the earth. In the polytheistic world the gods were not separate from creation. They were not separate from the world. We might even say that these gods were in fact nothing more than aspects of the world, the sky, the sun, the moon. In scripture however, the living God of creation is constantly constantly constantly constantly constantly living God of creation is until I've been invocation for four days. I can't get my lips back moving. The living God of creation is constantly contrasted with other deities. Other religions of the area saw the gods as part of creation and they were akin to natural phenomena. The Mesopotamian gods, I can say Mesopotamian but I can't say contrast. The Mesopotamian gods were identified with celestial bodies, the sun and the moon. Sometimes they were identified with the behaviors of birds and sometimes with the waters under the earth. Yet the Genesis story declares that the heavenly bodies and the waters and the fall of the air and everything else is created by God and therefore those things are in no sense divine. Other religions might worship those things but the biblical religion knows only one God and it can serve no other. See in our discussion here. God is utterly different from what he creates where we've told this tale before but we're going to return to it here because it fits us appropriately here. Our second implication of the fact that God is the origin of all reality is that he's different from it. When God created the universe he didn't transfer something of his own being into his works. The universe is not an extension of God's own nature. If it were, then creation itself would be worthy of worship. Does that make sense? If the material universe that we live in is an extension of God's own nature, his own being, his own essence, call it what you will, then the universe itself is divine and the universe itself is an object of worship. Scripture tells us to think of the universe this way is to fall into idolatry. Paul makes that point in Romans 125 when he speaks about people who worship the creature rather than the creator. There is an absolute distinction between God the creator and that which he has created. The necessary inference of this is that everything that is not God is not God. I.e. creation is not divine. We can always distinguish between God and his works. As we've said before the biblical worldview the biblical metaphysic is made up of two realities, the creator and the creation. A worldview which reduces to a single reality. A single pole, a single principle is called monism and whether it's materialism or spiritualism. This is always considered false within a biblical view of reality. A monistic view of things is a non-biblical view. A major impulse of Christian theological reflection from the earliest times has been to resist the temptation to fall into monism. There's always been this temptation. When you think of the gods as being the sun, the moon and the stars you're thinking of the divine as being the material creation. So you've automatically fallen into a monism. This theme is clearly stated in Paul's letter to the Romans in which he openly criticized the tendency to reduce God to the level of the world or to elevate the world to the level of God. Either way you've fallen into this idolatry of monism. According to Paul there's a natural human tendency as a result of sin to serve created things rather than the creator. Thus a central task of the Christian religion is to distinguish between God and the creation, to establish the distinction between the creator and the creation. While at the same time affirming the creation as just that, God's creation. We'll see more about that as we proceed here. Another implication of God as the source, the absolute source of all things, is that God's creative act is unique. God's creative act is unique. It is unlike human creative acts. Human creativity is bounded by a subject to the creation given around us. My son's an artist and sometimes he talks about his creations but his creations are bounded by the chalk and the paint and the wood or whatever materials that he uses. God's creativity however is bounded only by his creative purpose and it is itself the ground for both human life and human creativity. Now there's an important there's a certain importance here for our doctrine of God but what is called theology proper. What this means for our understanding of God is that God's purposes are never frustrated, can never be frustrated by any inherent qualities within the created order. You see when my son's working in chalk he can only do what chalk does. You know he can't use chalk to make a three-dimensional statue. Chalk won't do that. He is limited by the medium. God's purposes however are can never be frustrated by the medium in which he works. The creation is bound to him for he is the author. We know at this point we spoke of Criatio Xnihello. Unlike the potter who needs the clay God does not require any pre-existing raw material out of which he's able to create. Rather he creates the clay itself as well as shaping and molding the clay into the shape he wants. Now that's important for us to note especially under the fact that many particularly modern scholars have argued that the out of nothing which God has said to have created is itself a something. I don't know if you've aware of this but ever since certainly since existentialism nothing has become something. The chaos or the out of nothing is thought of having some positive or substantial reality. It's often said that God had to rest order out of an original chaotic principle but when we look at Genesis we don't find anything like that. We don't find that God must wrestle with something. We don't find that he must rest order from chaos and thus the view of chaos to cosmos compromises God's sovereignty and compromises his absolute right over creation. But I said there's an import here. I said there's an import here for our doctrine of God. There's also an import here for our understanding of ourselves, our doctrine of man, our anthropology. The uniqueness of God's creative act means that we humans remain creatures who are subject to the creative order. We are not creators. We don't create anything. We are fashers. We take the material givens of God's creation and we make those things in the new things. We're invited to do that. He says do it. You know be fruitful and multiply and had dominion. In a sense he's saying God have a good time. Just love one another and serve me and protect my universe. But we do not create. We fashion. Interesting when that's homophobber. So exactly what that means. Man, the maker. E-R, E-R, E-R, E-R, I was going to say E, our fourth implication. The doctrine of creation also means that nothing created is or can be intrinsically evil. I'm going to go back and do some kind of classical theology at this point. The fact that God is the creator, the fact that God made us, that God made his world means that nothing in his world is or can become intrinsically evil. Everything has come from God and the creation story of Genesis insists that everything was good. Even very good. The biblical confession rejects any notion of what we would call dualism. The idea that there is a principle in the universe, an eternal principle in the universe that is diametrically opposed to God's will. Even though the creation is not divine, scripture insists that it's good. You see in any type of dualism there tends to be a moral distinction between the higher and lower principles or elements. Since the higher is more divine and the lower is not the former, the higher is thought of as being more real than the others. And eventually there's difference. This metaphysical difference is also regarded as a moral difference. Thus it's very common for us to speak of the higher as good and the lower is evil. If that didn't make any sense, hang on a second. I'll see if I can help. Such an distinction came to be thought of in the later history of platonic philosophy. Plato had taught that the universe is made up of material substances and mental substances. These mental substances, what he called ideas or forms are the, well, it's the really real world. That's where ultimate reality is. It is in the intelligible reality or world of ideas. The world of perceptible or empirical objects, on the other hand, this world here. This world is simply the world of shadows, the world of the perceptive.
In neoplatonism there came to be a moral distinction that was applied to this basically metaphysical idea where Plato had said that the realm of ideas is the ultimately real. Neoplatonism would say it's also the ultimately good. And where Platonism had said the realm of the material, of the phenomenal is a realm of shadow. Neoplatonism would say that this material realm, this physical universe is less good, even evil. Now that dualism, that the spiritual is real and good, y'all seem now where we're headed with that. And that the material is evil. That dualism deeply influenced the history of the church and still does, but is problematic from a biblical perspective. While the Bible takes in very seriously, there's never the slightest hint that evil is the product of God's creativity and God made the material universe. There's never the slightest hint that creation is inherently sinful or evil.
This is the case, and I'm arguing in Veston's case here, this is the case because God didn't just create the world, and he didn't create it as a moral thing, as a morally neutral thing. God created the world good. I know we have problems with that because we see things that are not good, but we need to take the confession of Genesis 1 seriously. How many times have you said there? Seven times, right? By the time you get to verse 31, God looks at the entirety of what he's made and he calls it very good. It's almost as if he looks at what he's made and goes, he goes, man, I do good work. God's world is good. It's neither evil nor neutral. As the product of God's will, as the product of God's love, the creation shares his moral character. Now the goodness of creation comes with its own package of implications. First of all, the goodness of creation thrusts moral responsibility upon us. What I mean here is this, moral or ethical norms come from or are part of the creational order established by God. When God says what he's made is good, it means that goodness his moral will can be found within the creational order. Because this order is not neutral, because it takes on, he is very character. There is a moral norm right within the order of things.
In this, they were now to sub point one under little A. This means that these moral norms are for the sake of man as creature, not even before man is sinner and man is saved creature, but man is originally created creature. And these moral norms don't run contrary to creation, but secondly here a second sub point is that God's moral norms are binding upon man even as fallen man because they're built right into the nature of things because they're built right into things for the sake of those things. God's moral norms come upon us and hold us whether we're saved, we're fallen. And finally here we're B, I guess, under one. All of this suggests that we can never justify our sinful behavior by blaming an evil or corrupting world. We can never escape our moral accountability. We made that point earlier in the semester when we talked about creation, fall, redemption, consummation, recall, we made the point that creation is not the problem. We are the problem. But major point two under F, and this is where I wanted to head here is this, creation is to be part of not eclipsed by Christian piety. Our spirituality, biblically understood, is to include God's world, not deny God's world. The doctrine of creation was of considerable importance for people like Hooleric's Wingly and John Calvin, the two founders of the Reform tradition. Both of them wanted to forge a world firming, did I say firming, a world of firming, that's the word I want, spirituality. And they wanted to do that in somewhat intentional response to the general tenor of the day, in the literature of the day, regarding spirituality, things like Thomas of campuses, imitation of Christ, kind of stand out here. One of the fundamental themes in a campus's doctrine of spirituality was a certain contempt for the world, what was called a contemptial moon day. For a campus in order to lay hold of God, in order to say yes to God, in order to be in communion with God, one had to say no to everything else, one had to say no to creation. So the affirmation of God was the negation of creation. Now, Calvin can and did also speak about a contemptial moon day, a contempt for the world in book four of the institutes, books three and four actually. But that contempt for Calvin was always contextualized by an important distinction. You see, Calvin could distinguish between the world as created by God and the world as corrupted by sin. He knew there was a difference. In that this world is God's creation. It's to be honored, respected, affirmed, and loved. By the way, we shouldn't have to teach ourselves that. You know, when you first see your infant son or daughter, you don't go, gee, what a miserable sinner walk away. Anyone here to that? We rejoice in the gifts of God.
Well, my next sentence was going to be in that creationist fallen. Yeah, it's great to have kids. You always have easy applications for original sin, don't you? In that the world is fallen, it's to be criticized and to a degree fled but always with a view toward redeeming it. Thus, Calvin was able to hold together two equally fundamental biblical insights. Man is fallen, he's sinner. Yet man is the creation of God. Man's sin does damage to the world, corrupts the world, but the world is God's creation and thus it remains the possession even the kingdom of God. So in Calvin, the doctrine of creation leads to a critical world affirming spirituality. Don't just go around saying yes to everything you see, but you say yes to God's creation.
The world is to be affirmed, even rejoiced in, but it's never to be absolutized or confessed. Third subpoint here under implications is that asceticism. Did I have that word on there? I better define asceticism. asceticism is a view of spirituality which denies or seeks to deny the hold of the body or the world. Does that make sense? ascetic practices would be things like a monk not speaking, depriving himself of food, sleeping on a hard bed, deny yourself the comforts of the flesh, taking a vow of celibacy, those kinds of things. So point three, asceticism does not appear to be a biblically legitimate avenue towards spirituality. The Bible does not teach asceticism. In other words, salvation and spirituality are not found by fleeing God's creation.
I know this is kind of contrary to what a lot of us have been taught. Salvation and spirituality are found by seeking the redemption of the world, the redemption of the different aspects of human existence within God's creation. We might define a world of herming spirituality as living obediently in this world through grace. Douglas John Hall in a book called Imaging God said it very clearly, at least for me years ago, on the sense that I've used it as a textbook in different courses. He put it this way, he said, when you love someone, you learn to love the things that they love. And loving God means nothing less than loving his creation because he never gives up. He never walks away. And because of that very principle, Hall spends an entire book kind of beating up on or trying to correct immediately the long-standing problem in Christian piety of our view of saying yes to Jesus means saying no to everything else. Saying yes to Jesus does mean relativizing everything else. Absolutely. It means saying only he is Lord, but saying yes to Jesus means also loving the things that he loves. Fourth here of our implications, all of creation is creation and therefore good. All of creation is good. God has created a rich diversity within his creatures. And creatures of God are they all. Jesus indicated that God loves and cares for all of his creatures. See Matthew 6, 20, 6 through 30 and Matthew 10, 29. See God doesn't love just some of his creatures and not others. He doesn't love just parts of his creation and not others. He loves it all. This means that we should be very careful in creating hierarchies of importance between different kinds of creatures. And by creatures here, I don't just mean human beings versus animals or green people versus plaid people. What I mean here is everything in reality because all things are creatures and one way or another. We should be very careful with distinctions of value between heaven and earth, body and soul. Some of these distinctions are valid, at least they're a tunis, but tunis is not bad. Tunis is not an automatic hierarchy. You know, some things come into and that's good. God made him that way. That's because God loves diversity, like you know, boys and girls, heckles and jackals or whatever. But we should also be careful that we don't create faults, twos, sacred and secular, spiritual material. Paul kind of explodes that one by the way in Romans 12, 1 and 2. Present your bodies onto your bodies onto God, which is your spiritual service. Right there, Paul says bodies, material is spiritual. That whole material spiritual distinction that our culture works with actually breeds more from Greek philosophy than it does from scripture. What does the word spiritual mean? In the Bible, it means that which conforms to the rule of the spirit of God, it is simply the agitival form of spirit. From a distance, I'd hope.
Question is how do we look at bacteria, vipers, bacteria, diseases, democrats, what was the rest of it? Yeah. Girls, I don't like spiders and snakes. How about if we looked at them this way? Where we're presently at in the creation fall redemption story that is in fall and redemption is that we don't know, we don't know quite how to get along with all of God's creatures. We've all heard it said that mosquitoes are flies. What's the one that doesn't have any purpose in creation? Or dragonflies, they're the one. Maybe because we don't know enough about creation. Would we all agree that God made vipers? If God makes stuff and stuff is good, then vipers are good. No, it doesn't mean stick your hand in their mouth.
But it does mean within the rectitude of creation, both where we started and where we're going to end up, God's going to place for vipers. I'm not going to assume that it's not with my four-year-old. And the same would hold for mosquitoes. I'm not going to go too far off on this tangent. Well, one last point here. That would be e. And these e five. Five means the same as e. It's just five. There's no such thing as autonomous nature. No such thing as an autonomous creation, but that automatically brings us to the issue of providence. So we will turn the page and get to get to providence. Because I have turned the page, let me then invite any lasting questions or outstanding questions regarding creation before we start picking up the issue of providence. Jerry, first. Say again? Yes. Would fasting be a kind of asceticism? Yes, and it was meant as such, fasting in some ways, like unto the Sabbath principle, is meant to draw us away from the natural order of things, work a day world, work a day schedules, for the purpose of drawing our attention to worship and to God. It seems to me that there is a, this is part of what I might call the retreat, activism principle in scripture. The reformed tradition has always held to a kind of activist piety of a piety that's busy in the world building the kingdom of God. But not in the Sabbath day. On that day, I'm called to be engaged in worship and thinking about God. So I think it's more in that reality of retreats for the sake of worship and regenerating our batteries for work in the world. Sunday is the first day of the week that comes before our work week, and it helps draw our attention to God. Providence. God is not only the sovereign creator, but he's also the sovereign Lord over his creation. Remember we've talked about this a lot of times, it's worth coming back to just about every day. Whoops, got my glasses stuck in my microphone. But God's authority over his works. God's sovereignty over his creation doesn't cease once he calls the universe into being. Traditionally the doctrine of creation refers to God's originating work with respect to the universe and the doctrine of providence refers to God's continuing action in the world. Through his continuing action God preserves or maintains his creation and he guides his creation toward his intended purpose. So right here we have some distinctions and some questions to be asked.
The first distinction we need to make and you're going to see that in the outline is the distinction between preservation or what is sometimes called guidance on the one hand and governments on the other. And we're going to follow that outline here, but even before we do I'm going to tip you off here with some of the text we're going to talk about because scripture does not make this distinction in any way. It will tend to confuse, not confused in the sense that it will see as the same, but one verse we'll talk about God's preserving the natural order, the next verse we'll talk about God's government in the history of Israel, the next verse we'll talk about God creating in the first place so that all these things get kind of bound together as a single reality for the purpose of praising God. So as we go through this we need to realize that while these distinctions are somewhat artificial they do have some validity in the way that we at least the way we've come to think of things classically. Romans number one preservation. The term providence comes from the Latin word provideo and it means to see beforehand to make provision for as the term implies providence then refers to a kind of past arrangement. You see I can provide for a cross country trip without taking the trip. I can make provision for the journey by taking the car into the garage and making sure that all of its systems work by getting the necessary maps and laying out the route by making sure there's gas in the tank and air in the tires and then I can sit back and watch football all weekend while my wife drives to California. Planning is not doing and the word provideo means to make provision for either a form tradition however. God's providential act or action is a matter of his presence concern, not merely his past concern. Providence is a present activity of God. Now to be sure God's preservation or it's sometimes called sustenance even. God's preservation is concerned with the the maintenance of God's original creation but it is a present active sustenance maintenance preservation. Some reformed theologians people like Herman Bobbink have even spoken of preservation as being creatiocontinua and you don't need to read Latin to figure out what that means. The force of such terminology is to make this point. God does not walk away from his creation once it's made. God cannot walk away from his creation once it's made. He must continue to actively continually uphold things. Thus from the beginning the reform commitment is that a kind of deistic watchmaker ideology is impossible. We're going to talk about deism here so might as well very quickly describe the deistic idea. The deistic idea is yes God created things but once creation was made God set all the principles and powers that were needed for the continuing of creation into it in such a way that he can now retreat that we don't need the presence of God to explain things. We only needed the origination of God to explain things. The reformed commitment however is that God's work doesn't end with creation because the universe is never self-sufficient. There is if I can put it this way there's no cruise control setting in creation. There's no autonomous innate principle by which the universe works. Now by saying that I don't mean I'm not alleging that anything is I'm not saying that there's anything lacking in the world. I'm not suggesting for a second that there's something bad about creation. All I'm doing is recognizing that creation is a vassal. It is ever subject to its king. It is ever dependent upon God's love and power. Sometimes put this way and by different reformed theologians the continuation of the universe.
The presence of the universe right now is just as much a product of the divine will as the original creative act was. Let's look at a few of the biblical texts that might get us here. So be here some of the biblical foundation for divine preservation. You might want to turn your open up your Bible and turn to these texts. We're not going to have time to read them together. I wish we did. I'm not looking at our time here this evening. I'm going to mention each one and mention a few things that are in each of these texts with you. First of all Nehemiah chapter 9 verses 6 through 7. As the text opens verses 5 through 7 because verses 5 and 6 make the point that God is to be praised because he's the creator and also in verse 6 he's made everything and he gives life to everything. This one God did it all and God's work of creating the world and preserving it is foundational for his government, for his governing of things. It's foundational for his deliverance of Israel. That's verse 7 and following. Actually this text is a good example of that mixing up of things so that you have the deliverance of Israel, creation, God, super intending the seasons, all of these kinds of things tend to get not confused. I think what happens is they get ganged up in Scripture. They get ganged up for a purpose and you see it here in the Nehemiah text and you see a lot of these texts we're going to talk about here real quick and that is they get ganged up for the purpose of calling our praise to God. God is to be praised, not because he's the creator but he's also the sustainer and he's the one who governs in our lives and he's the one who and he's the one who and he's the one who. Second text Isaiah chapter 40 verses 22 through 31 are actually the smaller text but written down 12 through 31 because 12 through 31 gives you the broader context here. This was a text that I have to admit was very important for my own conversion of hearing about a God who measures out the heavens in the span of his hand and holds galaxies on his fingertips. But in this text we find out especially in the first couple of verses there, 12 and following that human beings are puny compared to God. He has to be praised for his greatness, for his majesty. He's the transcendent one, verse 22. He rules the earth, verses 23 and 24. He created the heavens and he keeps them going by his power. There's the crucial statement in verse 26. Something that comes up in many of these texts is that God is eternal verse 28 and God is the creator and sustainer who encourages and strengthens his people verses 28 through 31. A lot of these texts deal with God's eternality, the fact that he's eternal. Why is that important? Well, if God upholds the universe and must uphold the universe and he's not eternal, what happens? If he's not going to be here tomorrow, we're not going to be here tomorrow. If we're going to talk about God upholding things, it's crucially important that God's eternal. Psalm 148 and just make one comment about the entire Psalm. This Psalm calls upon everything, not just man, but everything in heaven and earth to praise God because of his works of creation and for providing for his creation. Hebrews chapter 1, verse 3, speaks of the sun as upholding the universe by his word or power. Colossians chapter 1, verses 15 through 17. Interestingly here, in verse 16, the sun, Christ, is the agent of the Father in creation. In verse 17, Jesus does the work of providence, and also in verse 17, Jesus is eternal. As creator and sustainer, he's preeminent over all things, it's back in verse 15. As the heir of all things, all things exist for his purposes, exist for his glory, verse 16. There are many, many other texts, and we're going to actually speak about some more of them, but I just wanted you to see that they're certainly sufficient biblical foundation for the idea of preservation that we can speak of it this way. And again, I do this in the context of a kind of deism of a kind of spoken about, but also a kind of naturalism, which is not all that different from deism, where the deists would say God created things and went on vacation. Therefore, we don't need God to explain processes that are going on. The naturalists would agree with the latter, we would simply say, well, we don't need God to explain their origin either. So, if we see that scripture affirms that the very presence of creation right now depends upon God, then we are ready to come to point C in the outline, and that is from a biblical perspective, we can then respond to the notion of an autonomous physical universe. And this is worth doing, we're spending a little bit of time on this evening, because any of us who went to public school were taught an autonomous physical universe. There are self-sustaining principles within biological systems, within astrological systems, within geophysical systems, that leave any systems out, I don't know. So, all of which render the hypothesis of God irrelevant. We can explain natural phenomena simply by using the laws of natural causation. Well, from a biblical perspective, how are we to respond to the notion of an autonomous physical universe? First of all, here, so one undersea is this, neither God nor the physical universe can be abstracted from the other. The world is never a self-sufficient or self-existing magnitude. Creation cannot be absolutized as a autonomous or sovereign quantity. A truly biblical perspective insists that any notion of an independent creation is really a kind of idolatry. So, from a biblical perspective, I summarize it this way, from a biblical perspective, the hypothesis of an autonomous nature is idolatry. Reason to say that is this, that which is independent is essentially free from God's sovereignty, free from his power, free from his moral order, free from his goal. Does that make sense, guys? Second, how do I put it here? Neither God nor his creation can be abstracted from another. Did I say that the world? Like I did, I'm confused, it must be the time of day. Neither God nor his creation can be abstracted from another. Simply mean this. God does not will to be God without the world. We talked with this before, when we talked about the fact that we don't get to God except from how he manifests himself within the world. He does not will. Remember, that's his determination. He does not will to be God, apart from the world. But the opposite is the case. It's the converse, but it's the case too, it's this. God does not will the creation to be the creation without him. And here you have the quotation from Langley and Gilkey. I'm not going to read that to you, read that at your own leisure. But God never wills the creation to exist without him. Article 13 of the Belgium Confession, 1561, that's the year, 1561. Article 13 of that confession says this. After he created all things, he did not abandon them. Interestingly, that the Belgium Confession stayed it that way because people were already in the 16th century arguing for an autonomous creation. John Calvin said it this way, he said that if we limit God's activity to the primal act of creation, we necessarily cut ourselves off from God's fatherly concern. That makes sense, why? Because we weren't there. We're here. If God only worked there and not here, we don't know his fatherly love, a love to which I continue here with Calvin, a love to which the Bible saw abundantly witnesses. For it's in the present, not just in the past, in the Harry quotes, Acts 17, 28, that we have our being and move and live in God. Point number three, here about an autonomous physical universe. It's only because we are confident in God's sustaining love, in His faithfulness that we can have faith about the regularities of creation. Think about this for a second. The sun will come up tomorrow, not because of an innate law, but because of God's promise. What is natural law anyway? I know we've all been taught in science classes that there are these innate, independent, impersonal abstract laws. What is a law? A law is nothing more than our observing that something happens with regularity. Is there a text somewhere that says this is the law? Well, yeah, it's called the Bible, but other than that, no. What we call natural law is nothing more than statistical projections based upon observation. That's a pretty good scientific description of law. But our comfort, our hope that tomorrow will come, that the sun will come up tomorrow, wise not with probabilistic constructs, but with the personal promise of a sovereign Lord. A good example of this, I'm going to take some questions, I see some hands up. A good example of this promise and comfort that comes to us from it is Psalm 104. You might want to turn there, Psalm 104. Notice how active God is in His creation here. Again, I'm not going to read the text, I'm going to cite some things and you can thumb along. God sets the earth on its foundations so that it will never be shaken in verse 5. But notice what God's the active one here. God set the earth. Verse 10, He sends the streams into the valley. Verse 5 was in the past tense, creation. Verse 10 is in the present tense. Verse 13, He waters the mountains. Verse 20 and 21, He makes the darkness so that the beasts of the, that the beasts of prey can seek their own sustenance. Verse 24 through 30, all creatures receive their food from Him. He sends, He makes, He waters, all creatures receive. That's the, that's our comfort. I saw a couple hands here, there's one. Did you have your hand up? Oh, you're just waiting at me? Oh, okay. Anyone else? Go ahead once, go in twice. Okay, Romans 2. I only ask once. Romans 2, government. You'll see I'm looking at the calendar at this point in the semester, I'm going to use every, every minute we have. The preservation of the creation, the fact that God must uphold the world in His hand right now, or it would fall apart, is not all there is to providence. Creation is not static after all. The creation didn't just begin somewhere, it's also going somewhere. Where should it be someplace? See, right at the very beginning, God introduced a principle of dynamism in the creation. A principle of novelty. A principle of contingency. You want to know what that is? Look at the mirror. There it is. God created one of His creatures as a free respondent to His love and His law. When God introduced man into the creation order, he guaranteed that things would change. He guaranteed that they wouldn't stay static. In the same way that God gave all of His creatures a role to play with in creation, so he gave man a role. But with an important difference, he invites this creature to reflect his own imaginative character. As God delegated his own rulership to man and made man his vice-regent, the human is not only responsible to preserve and protect creation, but also to seek new things within it, to make new things, to shape it into new things. I guess I'm going to put it this way. In a very real sense, God's intent was that He would rule His creation through the human, but through the abuse of His responsible freedom, the human introduced dangerous and counterproductive elements into creation as well. We introduced sin. See, as sinners, we're poor vice-regents. As sinners, we tend to get it wrong. As sinners, we can't see things as they really are. We have a tendency to see good as evil and evil as good. As sinners, we don't see things as God intended, either their realities or their futures to be. And that means we need help, lots of help, help to see directions to act, we need remediation, we need fixing. As a broken vessel, we break things which must be fixed. And thus, we force God to sustain His creation in spite of us. So part of God's sustaining ministry, His sustaining act, is to, if I can say it this way, I guess, to uphold creation in spite of this covenant vessel. There's a certain irony there, I hope you see that, but He intends to govern through us, but it doesn't work because of our forms. Well, when we speak here, we're moving to see, when we speak of providence as governments, as God's rule over creation and history, we're obviously here talking about the Kingdom of God, but there's a certain irony to the Kingdom of God in scripture. We can speak of the Kingdom as a structural reality, God's right to rule over all things, but in terms of the biblical story, the vast majority of the Kingdom, or I could say the scripture's greatest concern in talking about the Kingdom, is its remedial trajectory, its redemptive intention. So in some ways, God's sustaining His governments is remedial in action. As government, God's providence means that He directs all things to their appointed ends. I should also note here that reform theology has also spoken of sustenance here as well, and again, this is an example of how things can be confused, or ganged up. For God must sustain and protect the redemptive strategies, agencies, and entities that He calls into existence. So again, our sin tremendously complicates the realities of things, even the realities of how God must govern and protect His creation. So in some ways, when it looks like we'll get to tonight, next week, we are going to deal with the issue of God's sovereignty and free will a bit more. And again, our sin, our fall, tremendously complicates this issue. Obviously, I think we'd all agree that it's much more complicated because we're sinners than it would be if we had not been sinners. De, as I've already indicated, many texts combine or fail to make any distinction between God's leading His people, His sustaining activity, His creating, and here I'll give you as an example, Psalm 33. In verses one through three of Psalm 33, God has to be praised for His work in verses six through nine. God created by His word in verses eight and nine. All should fear Him because He's the creator, verses ten and eleven. God fulfills His plans and He frustrates the plans of the nations and continues to do so. See there an example of how our sin complicates the issue of God's government. And verses twelve through twenty-two, God is the creator and sustainer who loves Israel. Well, eat here. Let's clean this up a bit. Scripture speaks of God's government as extending to all things. Not just some things, but all things. A lot of examples here from the Bible. And I'm not going to mention the text I have been written down for you there. God sustains and directs the universe. Okay, he tells the moon, okay, here's your orbit. He tells asteroids, okay, you do this? Comment, you do that. He governs the realm of nature. He governs the realm of angels, including Satan and the fallen angels. He governs nations, human beings, animals, the free actions of people. We'll have fun with that one. The sinful actions of people and Satan. We'll have fun with that. And even accidental occurrences. Which this does lead us to room number three, concurrence. And I think we will have time to do concurrence this evening before we go to four. Now, I'm sure there are many ways that scripture talks about God's Lordship over history. But two of the, and nature. But two of the more common ways that theology and scripture gets at this is by the way, by way of the doctrine of concurrence and miracles. We want to talk about both of those, obviously, not all of it tonight. But first of all, concurrence. The word concurrence only means cooperation. Okay, again, I know we could have just said doctrine of cooperation. But we've got to complicate it and make it something you've got to memorize. So the doctrine of concurrence. Now, while the doctrine, the idea of concurrence, has a real long history in reformed any, well, broader Christian dogmatics. It oftentimes never makes it to the pew. In fact, it doesn't make it to the pew because it doesn't, it does not adequately make it into the pulpit, I guess. Many people, just looking at Calvinus here, for an example, for a moment, have this idea that Calvinus teach that God does everything. Well, we do. But further they'll say that those Calvinus teach that man does nothing. We don't. Those Calvinus teach that human beings are puppets on strings. All history is the result of a divine decree and even a divine execution. And it doesn't need any human input or participation. Well, we don't. Teach such things. There may have been and there may be some people who approached some kind of thing, sometimes called hyper Calvinism, but the majority position in the reformed tradition has never been this view. God does everything. Man does nothing. We just sit there and wait for him to say, okay, you know, right hand smack him on the head. We don't do that. Interestingly, you can find an affirmation and a discussion of concurrence in almost every reform systematic theology. In fact, Bavinc called concurrence the primary manner in which God exercises his providence in the world. Well, what do we mean by buy it here? Just as we start before we get to be, we can say this at least, history is never a merely divine enterprise. History is never a merely human enterprise. Both God and man are real actors within history and already by knowing that concurrence means cooperation and get a hint where we're going, okay. Now a couple of disclaimers here, this is B, what concurrence is not. I don't think that we're going to get anywhere by trying to understand God's agency and history or our agency in history by way of games with causality terms. I think this is actually what happens oftentimes in erstillion causality, where you have final causes and formal causes and efficient causes and secondary causes and tertiary causes and I'm sure I've left out some causes. The action of God in history is not merely another way of talking about our action, but in different language. I think that's what a lot of a lot of that kind of language does. We are simply by changing the language. We pretend we've made a change. Does that make sense, folks? But the fact of the matter is we haven't really made a change at all. We haven't talked about anything different at all. You're talking about formal, efficient, effective and all the rest of that. A second thing concurrence is not is it's not a division of labor in which we point to one kind of event or one event and say, well God did that and we point to another event or kind of event and say, well, man did that. That's a kind of synergism. In the first one when we talked about different kinds of causation here, what we really do is make one of the two redundant. Either man did it or God did it, make up your mind. In the second one, we have a division of labor which says only one did it. I think it's better to think of history as being an inherently covenantal enterprise. It's interesting that both G.C. Barakauer and Lewis Barakoff likened concurrence to marriage. And that might be our best analogy here. God's relationship to our historical action in history is much like the relationship of one spouse to another in a healthy working marital relationship. In other words, history is fully the product of both in cooperation. In terms of the biblical text, we should note that scripture confesses that God is sovereign over all its works. Even to the point that Isaiah can say in chapter 42, actually Yahweh speaking, I determine the ends from the beginning. I think that's verse six. God is sovereign over all its works. But scripture holds just as unrelenting way to the thesis that we human beings are responsible for our behaviors. And both are true all the time at each moment in history. God is sovereign and I'm responsible. As Barakauer noted, you have the quotation here, concurrence excludes neither party. It excludes neither party. He says the scripture nowhere suggests that God's work is limited by human activity. Oh, that God's activity negates human enterprise. He who understands well the biblical teaching of God's government knows that it's no despotism, compulsion or sort of overpowering which renders real, creaturely activity, null or impossible. He knows that it's a divine ruling in and over all creaturely enterprise. Notice here that we're not simply talking everything up to the inscrutable will of God. History and our lives are far too complicated for that.