Biblical Storyline

This evening we want to take up the issue of the Biblical storyline and you now have that outline in front of you. And I get started here with a rather simple question, what's it all about? What is Christianity all about? Now that's a simple question, unfortunately the answer is not so simple. At least if one were to listen to the long pauses that precede the answers and the often painfully partial, confused and contradictory nature of the answers that people give. Almost half a century ago now, CS Lewis made the point or put forth the proposition that most Christians just don't seem to get it. We're confused about the nature of our faith. We can't give a credible answer to the question, what is Christianity all about? But why? Why do believers in the main fail to understand the nature and goal of the Christian faith? Well I think at least part of the answer is that we fail to understand the Bible. Most of us, most Christians can't make heads or tails of Scripture. That's the reason I want to talk about this tonight. Even after I had been in Bible college for some three years and now had a certificate on the wall that said that I had some kind of expertise, I have to admit I could not make heads or tails of what the Bible is all about. You see judging from the nature, let me rephrase that, judging from the way we Christians actually use the Bible. We might conclude that the Bible is a rather loose collection of stuff, historical stories, doctrinal codes, legal codes, apocalyptic tales, morality plays, those sorts of things. And what holds it all together, we're not quite sure. However, if we confess that the Bible is the Word of God, I think we ought to expect it to comprise a coherent message and we ought to understand it as addressing us as a coherent whole, a unified proclamation. I say that because if not, if the Bible is not a coherent whole, then we really shouldn't call it the Word of God. We might better call it the Word of God, the God anthology, or maybe the best of Yahweh. By and large, we've been taught that the Bible is really a kind of theological textbook, a collection of doctrinal statements. We've maybe a few other things thrown in there, willy-nilly, and if we're asked what holds it all together, we might reply that it's a system of doctrine that holds it all together. And by that we usually mean whatever system of doctrine we ourselves hold. When the examin' scripture, however, we find the great majority of its contents aren't doctrinal but narrative and character. The Bible is, as a whole, best understood as a narrative, a story, or drama. Now, John Frame is certainly correct, however, when he cautions us that the Bible is more than a narrative. The Bible includes more than a story. It does have a collection of wisdom sayings and Psalms, moral instruction, and doctrinal reflection. But what holds it all together is the drama of redemption. And the non-nerative pieces of the story make sense only in their appropriate contact in the grand narrative. The Dutch, theologian, Hermann Bobbink said it this way, the essence of the Christian religion consists in this, that the creation of the Father devastated by sin is restored in the death of the Son of God, and re-created by the Holy Spirit into the kingdom of God. Did I use that quotation once before? Great quotation to get double duty on. If I use it a third time, yeah. Now notice what Kuiper, excuse me, Kuiper Bobbink has called the essence of the Christian religion here. It's a trinitarian story. Some 340 years before Bobbink, Calvin spoke of the Bible as the story of God's works in our world, on our behalf. Now I'm not an English teacher. I was not an English major in college. So my approach at this point is rather common-sensical, rather than technical. But it seems to me that even at the surface level or a minimalistic approach or level, there are at least four crucial elements in any story. Any good story has, first of all, an introduction. And in that introduction, you're going to be introduced to the primary characters. You're going to have some kind of context being sets. You're going to get some idea of the end of the environment in which the story will transpire and make sense. A second crucial element in any story is a conflict that forms the dramatic problem of the story. A story that doesn't move beyond its introductory materials or characters is not very interesting. At the first page says John loves Mary. Second page says John loves Mary. Third page says John loves Mary. How many more pages are going to do this before you just give up and move on to something else? So any good story has a conflict, a dramatic problem. Third, a good story has a resolution of that conflict and fourth and finally there's a conclusion. Something that ties up the loose ends. It tells us how the original relationships have been modified by the conflict and the resolution and perhaps there's a telling of the moral. Well, doesn't the Bible demonstrate that it too has these four elements, these four structural elements? It has an introduction, a problem that arises, a resolution to the problem, and finally a summing up, a consummation. And we refer to these four elements within the biblical storyline as creation, fall, redemption, and consummation. You might want to memorize those for some event coming up in the future. What we find in Scripture is that it's first of all the story of God creating a wonderful universe. Secondly, it's the story of our fall into sin. Third, it's the story of God's provision in Jesus Christ to address that sin. And finally, it's the story of God bringing his creation to his promised consummation. This creation, fall, redemption, consummation storyline is the central, all-encompassing theme of the Bible. And it forms its fundamental or overarching structure at both literary and mathematics level. Now, Calvin recognized this fact when he spoke of the two orders, the order of creation and the order of sin and salvation. So, matter of fact, Calvin structured his classic works, classic works, the institutes of the Christian religion around this storyline. Book one of the institutes deals with God the Father and the work of creation. Book two deals with God the Son and the fall and redemptive events. Book three and four deals with God the Spirit and the works of the Spirit. In effect, the Christian life, the people of God and the Eskitan or the last things. Calvin explicitly took this trinitarian and historical sequence from the Apostles Creed, which faithfully follows the storyline. If you recall, Bobbing's description of the essence of the biblical story, note that he too followed that trinitarian historical structure. Now, this biblical storyline of creation, fall, redemption, consummation, I'll repeat that enough times this evening that you won't have to work on memorizing it. That storyline in its given sequence is foundation or fundamental to the drama the Bible relates. Creation, after all, is the some thing which the fall and redemptive events modify. We fell, fell from what? We fell from God's creation. Therefore, the fall story presupposes the creation story, does that make sense? And creation and fall together form the presupposition for the redemption story, redeemed from what? And redeemed by what standard? So each success of the event in the story assumes the entire proceeding sequence. But this brings us to Romanemoral II in your outline. And before we progress much further, it seems to me we need to enter and explain some theological and philosophical language, the language of structure and direction. And I somewhat apologize for this language. I think it's clumsy language, but it has proven helpful in the history of the tradition. First of all, structure. By structure, I mean nothing more than this. What God has made and God's intention for his creation. The word creation can refer both to the act of creating and the product of that act. It's the latter, the noun, the product which is usually the denotation of the word in our discussion here. Creation is what God made. It's Calvin's order of creation. Philosophically, we might speak of creation as constitution, the thing in itself, essence, substance, nature, or my own personal favorite philosophical term, stuff. Following Augustine, the classical Christian tradition has said this, whatever is is good. And why? Because God is the creator of all that exists. The world in its nature as creation is good. Thus we speak of the structure of creation. Direction, that's Calvin's order of sin and redemption, is on the one hand the distortion and perversion of creation. And on the other hand, it is the restoration of creation. When we speak about direction, we're speaking of the response character of creation. Where creation is a thing, a product of the divine act of creating, sin and redemption are events within. Creation, they take place within creation. Structure speaks of the thing itself, direction speaks of the use or misuse of the thing. Now, if you recall our discussions on Calvin, he would say that anything in creation can be either directed toward God in obedience or misdirected or directed away from God in disobedience. Let me give you an example here. We affirm our sexuality because God has made us as sexual creatures as sexual beings, yet we oppose perversions of our sexuality, whether that be pornography, homosexual activity, adultery, or whatever. Those are misuses. They're misdirections of a given creation structure. Again, of God's intention for creation. So creation and structures are inherently good. They can't be bad because God calls them into existence, but things can be abused. The structures of creation can be misused philosophically. One would say that sin is accidental in the sense that it doesn't belong to the structure of things. Sin is not a substance. It's a quality. It's not essence. What a thing is, but rather a catch is itself. Let me give you one example. I hope we'll elucidate this point. Who makes trees? No one knows. Who makes trees? God makes trees. We all agree. God makes trees. God makes trees. Tree good. You all repeat that? Obviously not. God makes trees. They're there for good. But we can use God's trees or tree for sinful purposes. If I take that tree, cut it down. Nothing wrong in that. We need houses and all the rest. I turn that tree into paper pulp. Nothing wrong there. But then using that paper, using that pulp, I print racist hate literature that kills the soul. I have misused. I have abused God's creation good order. We could pile up illustrations here. Even though sin has entered God's world by means of the fall, the world as the stuff of creation remains good. The tree, even though it's misused, even though it's abused, even though it's used against God's divine intention, still remains good, even though it's used for evil purposes. In this point is made by scripture itself, Psalm 24, verse 1. The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof. That's an explicit declaration of the goodness of creation even after the fall. Similarly, first Timothy chapter 4, verses 4 and 5, say this, for everything God created is good. And nothing is to be rejected if it's received by the word of God and prayer. We can't say this strongly enough. Creation was not built with an inbuilt flaw, nor was it created morally neutral. All the works of God, partake of His holy character. Why? Because they've been created to praise Him, to suggest that something is neutral is to suggest or as to hold that whatever that is can get along perfectly well without God's hand, without His abiding, upholding presence. All the works of God, partake of His character. And they never lose that character. Sin is moral. It's disobedient response. It does not deprive creation of its status as the good creation of God. This suggests to us that all systems of thought which identify sin with structure, with substance, whether that substance be creation itself, time, the human body, they all collapse, creation into the fall, and thus denied God's good creation. Now we already said that sin is not essence, the thing itself, but it attaches to essence. This means that sin is an alien intruder. It doesn't belong. It's a parasite that feeds off the good creation of God. The fall story presupposes creation. If there were no creation, there could be no sin. Sin is the privation of the good. But sin is often spoken of or also spoken of in Scripture as missing the mark. Sin attaches to the good creation of God and makes it miss what it's aimed at. Think of a lead weight you might put on an arrow and you aim at the target, but that lead weight will make the arrow spin in such a way that there's no way in the world it's going to hit the bullseye. It will probably miss the target completely. Changing the image, sin is like a cancer. Cancer does not change structure. What it does, it feeds off it. If you go to the hospital to visit a friend who has cancer, that person you visit, that person you see, that person you hug is not a cancer. It's your friend or your loved one. The cancer makes his or her body act disobediently against himself or herself. In other words, no matter how deeply sin and evil corrupt or misdirect aspects of God's creation. Even to the point of turning them away from God and his intended function in place, the distinction between God's creation and our sinful appropriation of his creation holds. One way of saying this and applying it anthropologically to the doctrine of man is that even though man is a sinner and a sinner at his root, he remains man. He remains the image bearer of God. This brings us to Romero 3, the fallspread. At this point you want to take out your Bibles and turn to Genesis 3. I'll give you a moment to do that. The narrative of Genesis 3 speaks of a historical disruption that takes place in the garden, that takes place between God and man. Right in the very first verse, the serpent smuggles in the idea that God is somehow subject to God. Somehow subject to the judgment of the creature and thus elevating the creature to divine status. Did God really say the serpent magnifies the strictness of the divine command not to eat of a particular tree into an all-embrasive, unyielding restrictive prohibition. Most important here is we need to notice who is it who sins in Genesis 3. It's not a non-human creation. It is the man and the woman, Adam and Eve. Yet both of them immediately seek to escape their responsibility. Both of them seek to escape their culpability. The man blames the woman and then turns on the one who made the woman. God in order to place the ultimate blame on God Himself. Let me see that in verses 8-12. For her part, the woman also seeks to escape God. She blames the serpent. In their guilt and shame, both of them seek to misdirect responsibility. You create the context, God. Therefore, it must be your fault. The serpent occasioned the temptation. Therefore, it's his fault. But Adam and Eve have missed the point. They've missed the point that as God's representatives within the earthly creation, they and they alone are responsible for their actions. They made the mistake. They made the choice of listening to a mere creature. A creature that's so low that it slithers on its belly and has absolutely no perspective whatsoever. They fail to listen to their creator. They follow their impressions instead of their instructions. The Word of God. Now we've gotten a bit more sophisticated since the Garden. Have we? No. People who are shaking their heads know you're right. We haven't. We think we have. We blame temporality. We blame our bodies. We blame our culture. We blame our creation. We blame every one but ourselves. And we still blame God. And sometimes men still blame women. During the second and third centuries, a quasi-Christian cult called Nosticism taught that males are actually spiritual creatures. And females are material creatures. They're put here for the express purpose of bringing us guys down. If we were left to our own devices, we males, we'd be walking around with our heads up in the clouds thinking deep spiritual thoughts. And the very reason we have ties is that so women can pull them down like this and say, hey, look at this. Well, from that day to this, we still blame our sexuality. And from that day to this, we still have a hard time dealing with our sexuality. And we found it an easy target, an easy target for blame for our ills. Believers still, we often speak that if we can just get enough distance between us and the world, you know, that's the issue in monasticism. And going to the monastery and going to the mountain top, right? If I can just get enough space between me and the world, I'll be okay. Why? Because I'm the victim. It's the world. It's my sexuality. It's temporality. It's culture. It's this. It's that is the other. But don't miss the point of Genesis 3. The physical world is not our problem. History is not our problem. In fact, we're the problem. We're the world's problem. The problem of sin is not that the world God created is an unfit habitation for me. The problem of sin is that I'm an unfit citizen for God's creation of kingdom. If the birds and the rocks could speak, they think you're out of here. You human beings are driving the property values down. You're stinking up the joint. We can't put the onus for sin on creation. Neither can we put the onus for sin upon God. The world's not to blame and God's not to blame. Because the story of the fall comes after the story of God creating man in original righteousness, the Bible persists in doing sin as an intruder. Sin and its consequences do not belong to the natural or essential or created order of things. We're left with a very strong impression in this story, in the fall story, that the disruption that comes is non-original. In it always nothing to the divine creativity. The blame for sin falls squarely upon Adam and Eve, the man and the woman. Not God. Sin cannot be understood or analyzed in terms of the creative act. Looking at Genesis 1 through 3, GC Bear Power made the point years ago that the biblical a priori, that means a primary assumption or first principle, is that God is not the source, the cause or the author of man sin. The writer of Ecclesiastes said it this way, this only have I found. God made man kind upright but man have gone in search of many schemes. That's 729. And similarly, Calvin commented, it is not from creation but from corruption of nature that man is bound to sin. It is man who is the guilty one, the sinner, the rebel. The fall story of Genesis 3 is not one of sin invading as if it had its own autonomous independent existence. It is rather one of a rebellion against God, his law and his good creation. But right here in this discussion I sometimes see a hand shoot up. I'm looking for the hand, well I guess it's not here this evening, oh there it is, thank you. And with that hand, oftentimes comes this response, but didn't God foreknow that they would sin. Now if you're thinking that, don't feel too guilty, well do feel guilty, but don't feel too guilty because it's a fairly common response. None of us want to fast up. None of us want to take responsibility. And let me respond to the objection that God foreknow they would sin in a number of ways and these ways I have enumerated for you on your outline and the five of them together should be seen as a cumulative. First of all, the objection God foreknow that they would sin is if you think about it little more than a thinly veiled reproduction of Adam's response in the garden. Adam said, the woman tempted me and God made her. Therefore I'm innocent. God did it. We say God forenew that they would sin. Therefore Adam and Eve were predetermined to sin. They didn't do it. God did it. God didn't buy Adam's plea. There's good reason that we should not expect God to buy it from us either. Second, the objection is isogetic. That's reading in. We'll talk more about this later when we look at hermeneutics next week. It reads a foreign element into the narrative. Nothing in the genesis story says that God ordained the fall yet we rush in and we want to give Moses a theology lesson. Moses, here's what you should have said. You should have said that God predetermined the events. And when we do that, we end up changing the meaning of the entire text. The text clearly means to declare human culpability for the fall. But the objection by its nature seeks to exonerate man by placing the fault for sin at God's doorstep. Third, the objection misapplies God's omniscience and for ordination. Now a person who wants to make the objection right here, or could right here, cite what is called the analogy of scripture. That's comparing scripture with scripture. Again, we'll talk about this next week. They could say this. Okay, even though the text does not explicitly say that God for new the event, Isaiah 46 does tell us God himself tells us there that he ordained the end from the beginning. Therefore, all things transpire as a matter of God's predetermination. But applying that to the fall story is a misappropriation of the doctrine of omniscience and for ordination. Interestingly, the context and scripture where God's for ordination comes up, where God's omniscience comes up, are almost always the context of assurance and the context of comfort. In Isaiah 46, for instance, and invading armies at the door of Israel, and the question is, Yahweh, what's going on? We thought you were the king, we thought you were God. And here now your chosen people are about to be defeated and taken off into exile. Isaiah's purpose, I should say God's purpose, there is prophet Isaiah, is to comfort people in the midst of that impending calamity. I am still in charge. I know the end from the beginning. I determine the end from the beginning. I have all things under my sovereign control. Nothing can toward my purpose. Divine omniscience can never be appealed to as a universal answer key for historical causation. In other words, God's omniscience is not a carte blanche, get out of guilt-free card. I completely affirm divine omniscience and even divine for ordination of historical events. We'll talk about this later in the course. Yet it's also true that we cannot theologize from them. You see we can confess God's sovereignty over history is true, but we can never use it as an escape hatch, through which we can run away from our responsibility for our actions. In fact, scripture is unrelenting in holding, firstly, that God is sovereign over all things, but second, we are responsible for our actions. Firstly, God does ordain all things from the beginning, but second, He never tempts man to sin. Now there's a mystery there. We often call this the mystery of divine sovereignty and human responsibility, and we cannot resolve that mystery by absolutizing one pole and rendering the other moot. Fifth, the objection implies that we are to find the headwaters of sin and the guilt entailed in it. In some realm, beyond Adam and Eve's response to God. You see when we read the fall story, we may be tempted to ask whether there's not some more original cause behind the rebellion of the garden. We want to explain it in some way. When we read the story, something seems missing to us. Yet in its own unique way, the Bible issues a much needed and stern reminder of the limits that the creator has placed. It has placed upon human rationality. However frustrating it is to our speculative inclination, the text speaks only of the beginning of sin, not its metaphysical origins, and it doesn't seem to care. Just as the text safeguards the mysteries that lie behind the beginnings of creation, so it safeguards whatever mysteries lie behind the beginnings of sin, we must start where scripture starts. And at starting point is the disobedience of our first parents. I have no way to answer the question, what was God doing before creation? And we have no way to answer the question, what is the ultimate or metaphysical cause for sin? With that sober account, we must make our peace. Every pursuit, every attempt to find a more original or ultimate explanation for sin is bound to come up empty. And that's why Calvin here advocated that on this issue, we accept a spirit of humble and pious ignorance. Seeking to speculate beyond the bounds of scripture is what Calvin called a kind of madness. You just can't go there. Accordingly, he said this, quote, we should contemplate the evident cause of condemnation in the corrupt nature of humanity, which is closer to us, rather than seek a hidden and utterly incomprehensible cause in God's predestination. The ultimate origin of sin then forever remains an enigma, a puzzle, a riddle, folly, an absurdity. And I press this here because to explain something is to make a place for it. It's to make a place for it at the table to explain something is to think of it as a rational reality, but sin does not belong and it is decidedly irrational in character. Sin is not something we explain or rationalize or fit into the world. Sin is something we confess. Well, let me pause there for questions. I agree with everything you've just said. However, many of us have because of that omniscience, because God is not a, he is not bound by the temporal order, he stands outside of that order and therefore sees all of it. But we have often moved to the point that God predetermines the fall and therefore is culpable for the fall. Now it is true and I will argue later that God in his omniscience and in his sovereignty is sovereign over all events, yet there are important biblical limits, at least from from our side, the creation side that we need to keep in mind. One, God, this God tempts no man to sin and two, you and I are responsible for our actions. And interesting, Scripture does not see that as attention, does not see that as a problem. It will simply assert both and affirm both unrelenting way and will not allow us to vote in favor of one and carve the other off. And that has been a problem in the reform tradition. We have often had a high view of God's sovereignty and a low view of human responsibility. I don't think Scripture can be pushed in that direction, but it really has, is a high view of covenantal relationship which wants to see both that God is sovereign and that we are responsible. The question is how do we how do we distinguish between sin and our ourselves as we have been intended by God? Is that close? But should not be confused. This might help. One of the realities of our lives existentially and historically is that we really cannot imagine ourselves radically sense of sin. Right? Sin is so endemic to us, so much a part of us that could we imagine our own lives? Wake up tomorrow morning and there's no sin there. It's awfully hard, isn't it? Yet God is able to do that and He calls for us to seek that kind of discernment as well. And we need to be able to do that to see the good, to see what He intends to see His structure. And we have enough of the biblical materials in terms of God's ordinances, in terms of God's stated intention for creation. Apart from the fall, before the fall that we can piously speculate what would have happened if the fall had not taken place. Now you have to be careful with those are called contrary to fact conditionals. What would have happened if and a lot of contrary to fact conditionals are unlegitimate? What I hear sometimes from students is what would have happened if Eve had bitten the apple and Adam hadn't? That's that one you can't do anything with. One, there's no way to get an answer and two, there's nothing to do with the answer once you get it. However, on the question, what would have happened, what would the world be like if the fall hadn't happened? We can because we have a creation pattern already before the fall and the answer will help us understand something of God's normativity. Quite simply, or in simplest terms, if we could do that, we would say that human character would be one which sought to serve God in all things. Be a blessing to our fellow human beings in all things and would till in keep God's creational garden. Because those three at least, minimally, are clearly there within the biblical materials even before the fall. I think that's just the start of an answer to your question. Yes, the question is if God created praise and are good, is man also good? Yes, in his structure. Yes, man remains image bearer. Now, we actualize that calling to image God, poorly, disobediently, we're broken mirrors, but God God does. And he calls us to make a distinction between what? The center and the sin. That's what we're talking about. The very blasphemy of sin is that the good works of God are used against God. Are used against God's order. And that includes us. Absolutely. One more question for we turn to the Camille. You're a wait, you're an Illinois, this evening. Certainly sin has an accumulative effect. And I want to say that sin is primarily moral and character, ethical and character rather than structural. I'm going to stop short of thorns and fistles. I'm not a believer in weed theology. I suspect that those critters were there in the original creation, but in our fallenists we do not know how to steward them. But even having said that, there are physical effects of the fall. There is an accumulative effect from our sin. And while we're with some of those, we taught each other to smoke behind the barn and 40 years later we get cancer. Now some of those connections are harder to get a hold of. What is the connection between the fall and birth effects? I see Biblical that somehow is a connection. I turn to Romans chapter 8. That because of our sin creation itself has been brought to futility and it groans and cries and says how long, how long. But I don't know the mechanisms for that or the physics for that. I can see the moral physics for it. And we'll talk a bit more about that tonight. Does that at least get started there, Camille? I'm saying there are part of the result of the fall. There are part of the result of the fall. That the fall does have physical substantial consequences. But God can and does distinguish between those defects and whatever other physical problems come from the fall and God's good intention. And he's original intention for the fall. I have a good friend who was born with a deformed hand. My prayer for her is that God will heal that hand. And I know that in the eschaton he will. That hand will be whole. Let's look at D here in our outline here to remind us where we're at. The ground is cursed because of what Adam has done. Now one way of understanding that curse is exactly with a whole thing of weeds that Camille mentioned. That weeds sprout up. That's possible. We have to do some speculation about physics and all of that. I think it's also possible that all God is saying it here is this. See Adam? See Eve? This is the word you're going to have to deal with now. From this point forward, Adam will experience the world as an inhospitable place that will resist his gardening. But the real point here is that Adam's disobedience is not an isolated event. An issue that's relevant only to him and God. And that's true of all sin. That's true of all moral behavior. Think about that. The political context. Adam's sin was a catastrophic event for the entire creation. The entire world is caught up and affected by it. In Romans 8 text I just alluded to verse 20 particularly. It makes it clear that the effects of evil created upon the created order. Visited upon the created order come about through no fault of creation here. But it's important to ask why. Why is creation? To use Paul's language subjected to futility. I think the answer is this. In the covenant of creation, man has been appointed God's representative. He's been appointed the earthly head of the creation. This means that man's moral response is to God. Either an obedience or disobedience will redound to the rest of creation. When Adam acts obediently, when man acts obediently, blessing will come to all. When he acts disobediently, faithlessly, misery and covenant curse will come to all. In verses 14 through 19 of Genesis 3 we read that man is cursed. Sin will bring sorrow on all creation. And sin will touch every aspect, every part of man. It will touch everything he does. And how can it not? Man's rebellion in the garden represents his rejection of his appointed position in God's creation. He is saying no thanks to God's call that he be God's representative. Scripture speaks of sin as an apostasy, a falling away from our appointed place, a lawlessness, a desertion, a disobedience, a revolt, a usurping God's authority and sovereignty, a defection from fellowship. What we see is that from front to back Scripture speaks of sin in relational terms. It's a severance of relationship. We sometimes speak of sin and rightly so as a failure to keep the law. But the law itself serves relationship. The law itself is not an abstract reality. The laws serve moral relationships. Before the fall God walked with Adam in the cool of the garden and he spoke to him there. But that relationship was severed by Adam's arrogance and by his pride. And as the rest of Genesis 3 makes plain, Adam's fundamental relationships to God to himself, to others and to the creation world around him is now corrupted and jeopardized. He has been alienated from all. This means he'll no longer understand his place in the world correctly. He has again used some of Calvin's language that went off from Merua. He has grown blind. His senses have become dulled. The creation which was designed to be a theater in which man would be schooled in the things of God still transmits but he's not there to listen anymore. It springs us to death, the antithesis. Man is cursed. The ground is cursed. But the serpent is also cursed. God curses the serpent for his corrupting and divisive activity in the garden and he immediately adds this verse 15. I will put enmity between you and the woman between your offspring and hers. This word enmity means opposition or even hostility. Right here in Genesis 3-15 we have God's formal declaration of war against sin. From this day forward there are going to be two opposing forces that work in the world. The kingdom of God and the kingdom of Satan. The kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness. Abraham Kuiper spoke of this enmity as the antithesis because two kingdoms stand in utter opposition. The word antithesis is related to a particle in Galatians 5-17. For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the spirit? What is antithetical to the spirit? Because of the fall in the garden there is now a contention and enmity, a strife and antithesis within the world. But we should note where this antithesis is and where it is not. It is not an antithesis, it's not a contention between heaven and earth. It's not a contention between the visible and the invisible. It's not a contention between the so-called spiritual and the so-called material. It's not a contention between body and soul. It is an antithesis between God and Satan, between obedience and disobedience, between faith and faithlessness. The biblical story gets repeated witness to this tension, to this antithesis. In Deuteronomy 30 Moses declares I hold up before you this day blessing and cursing the way of death and the way of life. Therefore, choose life. Likewise, Joshua cried, choose you this day whom you will serve. The gods of your forefathers or Yahweh, that's Joshua 24 verses 14 and 15. Elijah challenged Israel, saying, how long will you go halting? Some translations say limping between two positions. If God be gods, serve him, if bail, then serve him. Let's verse 18 and 18 and 20. The psalmist gave voice to the antithesis in his distinction right there in Psalm 1, between the broadway and the narrowway between the wicked and the righteous. The New Testament witnesses to it in its distinction between God and Maman, the old man and the new, the spirits of God and the flesh and the parables of Jesus. We read of the same antithesis, the same warfare when Jesus speaks of the wheat, the tears and the sheep and the goats. Gordon Spikeman said this point. This is not a dualism, he's talking about the antithesis. For the antithesis represents a spiritual warfare between good and evil, which knows no territorial boundaries. In other words, there's not an area of life over here we can call sacred and an area of life over here we can call secular. It's not geographically locally or spatially definable. The enmity between two hostile forces does not coincide with two parts of reality as though one sector of life were holy and the other unholy or one block of righteous and the other unrighteous. It is a directional antithesis which runs through all the structures of life. Sin is totally pervasive. Grace too lays its claim to all reality. The antithesis may therefore not be dualistically misconstrued as though it drives a wedge between soul and body, faith and reason, theology and philosophy, church and world, with the former viewed as good and the latter as evil. Both God and Satan lay claim to all things. What we experience, what we live under is the reality of two warring sovereignty, two regimes which stand over against one another in their contention for everything. And nothing, no aspect of life is neutral or uncontested. I mentioned Abraham Kuiper earlier. Kuiper put it this way, getting at the same point. All of life is religion. The kingdom of God lays claim to all things. Yes, the kingdom of God is the only thing that's important. But because the kingdom of God is the only thing that's important, everything's important. Because the kingdom that's sovereign and lays claim to all. G, total property. The sin of our first parents brings all of us into this world as sinners. And thus all of us stand under the curse of sin and death. Man is corrupted by sin, but he's also depraved by virtue of his fallen nature. He's tainted by it and so much so that he now sins by nature. Paul's argument in Romans chapter 5 is that Adam's sin has a devastating effect, not just on Adam, but on all of Adam's progeny. All of us are born sinners, all of us incur guilt, and we all stand under the righteous condemnation of God against sin. Our created nature has been deranged. The result being to quote Calvin that we have degenerated from our original condition. This means that sin overturns the whole person head to foot. No part is untouched. Scripture gets at this by saying that man's heart has become corrupt. Now when the Bible uses the word heart, it doesn't mean a localized part of us. It doesn't mean a particular organ. It's speaking of our ethical, God-directed core. It's the whole man, but from the perspective of his God-word relationship and it includes all the issues of life, our actions as well as our intentions. For instance, in Proverbs chapter 4, verse 23, we're told that the heart is the wellspring of life, and of course Jesus said that the issues of life proceed from the heart. But before we get at exactly what the doctrine told the gravity does mean, we should say something about what it does not mean. The fact that we are totally depraved does not mean that God has surrendered or given up his sovereign rights over his creation. Sin cannot abolish the created order. Procreation is continually upheld by God's merciful hand, what is sometimes called his common grace. Total property also does not mean that the unregenerate are as bad as they can be, that unbelievers are the incarnations of evil. Sometimes we Christians talk that way, but it's just plain false. My next door neighbors are not Christians, but they're not cannibals. They're not of their killing each other and all the rest of that. Again, that's part of God's common grace. He upholds his creation. He brings the reality of his creation home to us, even if we are unregenerate. What the doctrine of creation does mean, or excuse me, what the doctrine of total property does mean, is that we are spiritually enabled. In our unregenerate state, man is unable to even see the kingdom of God much less enter it. And here I just want to quote a couple of texts from Scripture to you, which get at this reality of a radically misdirected human heart. Jeremiah 17 verse 9. The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it? Jeremiah 13, 23. Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil. Romans 7, 18. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is in my flesh, for I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot cure it out. Romans 8 verses 7 and 8. The sinful mind is hostile to God. It does not submit to God's law nor can it do so. Those controlled by the sinful nature cannot please God. First Corinthians 2, 14. The man without the Spirit of God does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God. For they are in foolishness to him and he cannot understand them. There are many, many more texts we could cite here. Well, this total spiritual inability is ubiquitously witnessed to in Scripture. And the natural correlates of this inability, the natural correlates of our spiritual inability is our utter dependence upon God. If we are to be saved, that salvation cannot arise from us. It must arise from God. I think Paul captures this perfectly in one sentence. In Romans 5, 8 we read this, God demonstrates his love for us in this. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. That's the point. It's not that unregenerate people can do absolutely no good, but that they can do nothing to commend themselves to God for redemption. We've been so overturned by sin that we can't work our way to God for our salvation. God must move toward us and that's grace. Let's take our break here and when we return, we'll take up our discussion with Romans 4 and grace.