I must congratulate you on your grasp of arithmetic and on your perception when you worked out that when I was here thirty-four years ago I was in my early or late teenage years and I hope you will sustain that impression!

Overview of our studies

It is an honour, ladies and gentlemen, to be asked to address you on these occasions this week. Let me say at once what it is that we shall attempt to do. We shall be studying together what the Bible has to say about creation—the world in which we live and the great universe around us. We shall be thinking, of course, not only of creation but also of its great creator and how the doctrine of creation has implications for us right up to this present time.

What does the Bible say about creation?

Our main thrust will be to consider what the Bible has to say about creation. It says a tremendous amount, which we may sum up this evening with four verses from holy Scripture.

The universe had a beginning—Genesis 1:1

The first of these verses comes in the very first words of the Bible, the majestic opening statement of holy Scripture: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. That verse tells us, among other things, that this universe in which we live had a beginning, which is exceedingly significant and the Bible has been saying it for many a long century.

When I was little more than a teenager, and before I came to Ireland, there was a growing consensus among scientists of a particular kind that the universe never did have a beginning. It was in what they called ‘a steady-state’, and somehow from somewhere there was manufactured a supply of atoms and basic energy that kept the universe going and would keep it going forever. These scientists promised that they would soon provide us with evidence for the steady-state, but the evidence was never forthcoming.

Nowadays, as you’ll know, the present theory that gains maximum, but not complete, consent is that our universe did have a beginning in the so-called Big Bang. I’m not urging you to trust the Bible because science says so; I’m asking you to observe how the Bible’s statement has stood the test of time, and even among atheist scientists it is still the majority view that the universe had a beginning. We shall see in the course of these studies why that is important.

Behind the universe is the Word—John 1:1

The second verse in Scripture that helps us to sum up our topic is found in the Gospel of John: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. This is one of the most remarkable statements on the subject in the whole of Scripture. It goes on to say, ‘All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made’ (v. 3). This tells us that the basic thing in the whole universe is the Word, which here is a description of the second person of the holy Trinity, our blessed Lord Jesus. It tells us that eventually in the course of history, ‘the Word became flesh and dwelt among us’ (v. 14).

This is particularly interesting in the light of modern science, because in the last number of years one of the progressive sciences has come to show us how information theory is basic to the universe. You needn’t worry much about that for tonight; we shall come across it again tomorrow night, God willing. But even the scientists now tell us that behind the matter of the universe there is to be perceived the information carried by science. So much so that in one of his recent books a leading scientist has made the suggestion that the basic stuff in the universe is not matter, as people used to think, but is much more probably information. Again, the Bible has been saying for centuries that the basic thing—I ought to rephrase it—the basic person behind the universe is the Word: that second person of the Trinity who is the expression of the Godhead. It is through his word that the universe has come to be, and it carries the information that leads to the effecting of his original design.

There is another important thing in these verses. Not only did this universe have a beginning, but when it began the Word already was. You will notice that the Bible does not say, ‘In the beginning, the Word became this or that’. Nor does it say, ‘In the beginning, the Word was made, or came to be’. It says that in the beginning the Word already was: ‘All things were made through him’ (v. 3). Whereas they became—there was a time when they didn’t exist and then they came to be; as distinct from the universe that came to be, the Word himself was eternal and independent of the universe. In other words, it is important for us to grasp that God is not part of the stuff of the universe; yet many religions in this world have not grasped it. God is independent, he is the author of it: ‘In him was life, and the life was the light of men’ (v. 4). To use the Biblical term, ‘God is holy’ (see Ps 99).

The universe was created out of nothing—Hebrews 11:3

A third verse from Scripture that will sum up the territory we shall be following in these talks is to be found in the Epistle to the Hebrews: By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.

That is true, of course—I nearly said, ‘as every schoolboy now knows’. This desk at which I stand is composed of largely empty space between atoms. Normally we cannot see atoms, though modern devices have brought about the wonder that we can at least begin to see photographs of them. But beyond that, if you say, ‘where did God get the stuff from to make a universe?’, he didn’t get it from anywhere. He created it; he made a universe out of nothing.

The universe gives evidence of design—Romans 1:20

Finally for the moment: For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. It is the claim of Scripture that, by just being there and working the way it was designed to work, the universe conveys evidence that there is a God.

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made . . . (Rom 1:18–20)

It is the Bible’s claim that the universe around us supplies us with evidence that there is a God, particularly our world and mankind in it: ‘By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God’ (Heb 11:3). Faith is not a leap in the dark—deciding to believe something without any evidence at all on which to rest our faith. Faith is our response to evidence which is supplied by God himself, and that evidence leads us to put our faith in him. Scripture is telling us plainly that the universe around us supplies us with evidence that there is a God.

Three complementary accounts of creation

Let that suffice for the moment for the kind of territory that we shall be exploring this week. What I propose to do in particular is to take the three accounts of creation that are given to us in the book of Genesis. It may sound strange to some of you who are experts in the Bible when I talk about the three accounts in Genesis. That’s not a slip of the tongue. As I understand it, there are three accounts of creation in the book of Genesis, just like in the New Testament there are four accounts of the life of our Lord Jesus: one by Matthew, one by Mark, one by Luke, and one by John. The four Gospels do not contradict one another; they give us a view of Christ from four different aspects and we get a ‘three-dimensional’ or a ‘full-blown’ image of Christ. So in the Old Testament: in the first book of the Bible we get three accounts of creation, looking at it from different points of view. And then, drawing out the principles behind it, how they were meant to affect our lives as God’s creatures on this planet, and what happened when men and women chose not to retain the knowledge of God the creator in their minds.

Has science made it impossible to believe in a creator?

These are the topics in store for us this week. But tonight there’s a prior question in many a mind, is there not? It is quite a widely held belief by an ever increasing number of people that belief in a creator is unscientific, at least I find that it is. ‘Science,’ they say, ‘has buried God, and it’s no longer possible to believe that there is a creator.’ Many people think that it is even more difficult now to believe the account of creation in the book of Genesis and elsewhere. Many schoolchildren have been taught that science has proved there is no room for God in the workings of this planet and the universe. Everything can be explained without God. ‘We have looked down our test tubes, done our sums and can give a coherent and logical account of how it works. We’ve come to understand the universe, so there is no need to suppose there is a God behind it. We can understand how it works without dragging in the idea of God. Science therefore has shown us that there is no God’, so they say.

So let’s deal with that question tonight and see what answer we have about what science really does say. As for the notion that science has proved there is no God, it is laughable of course, because science by definition could never prove any such thing. To prove there is no God you would first have to know everything in this vast universe, and everything outside of it as well. It would be foolish therefore to think that you could prove there is no God.

Based on what we know about the universe, is belief in God unnecessary?

We know that there are numbers of things in our daily experience that science cannot begin to show us. For instance, scientists could put a machine on your head and it would have a lovely time measuring all the tremendous things that are going on inside your brain. Science can tell you what particular part of your brain is working at this moment, but it could never tell you what you were thinking about. Science has very limited abilities. It could measure all the electrical currents in your brain, the firing of the neurons and the synapses and all the rest of it, but it couldn’t possibly tell you what you were actually thinking unless you told the scientist.

John Polkinghorne is a believer in God and in Christ. As a Fellow of the Royal Society and a nuclear mathematician, he has pointed out in his many writings how limited science is in its ability to explain things. For example, it cannot explain the significance of music to us—why we love it or what we see in it, let alone a host of other things.

So I say to myself, ‘How has this notion come about, that people have the idea that somehow science has made belief in God unnecessary, if not impossible?’ I think it is because of the tremendous increase in the number of things that science has been able to explain. For instance, if you go back in history, you will find that when people heard the roar of the thunder they thought it must be God speaking some words they didn’t understand. Then the scientists got to work, and they were able to explain accurately what thunder actually is, the wind velocities, atmospheric pressures, electrical currents and so forth, and they were able not only to explain it but to reproduce it.

I’m a professor in the Faculty of Arts. At one stage in my career I walked across from my department of classical Greek to the electrical engineering department. The engineers in that department were very bright people. They conducted me around their laboratories, and then took me down into the subterranean parts and caves of their department, stood me in a room where there were two great cylinders with big bulbs (which were not lights) at the top, and told me to look at them. So here I was, an innocent classicist, looking at the cylinders, when all of a sudden there came such a flash of lightning from pole to pole and an enormous roar. They had reproduced the effect of lightning and thunder and I was suitably frightened, much to their great pleasure.

Many people think that because we can explain how some things in the universe happen we don’t need God, but that is a curious and fallacious deduction. Let me give you a little parable—I made it up myself, so you can trust it! I want you to think about some pygmies in the heart of a rainforest, and one day they come across a motorcar. I can’t tell you how it got there; you must just believe me that it did! They’ve never seen a thing like this before in all their lives, so they fall to examining this strange contraption. Eventually one of them boldly opens the door, turns the ignition key, and to his shock and surprise the engine starts. Well, they are tremendously afraid and decide that someone must be in there making that noise, a god or something. They listen to it for a while, and find that as it hums along no harm comes to them, so they get used to it. It’s going on nicely and they bring some fruit and vegetables as a sacrifice. But then all of a sudden the engine backfires. They get a tremendous shock and think it must be that the god or person inside is displeased with them. Of course, after a while the shock wears off, and they take up engineering. They dismantle the motorcar and take the engine to bits. Little by little, they discover how the thing works, with its pistons, cylinders, internal combustion, sparks, plugs and all that kind of thing. They rejoice in their knowledge and how they can now explain everything about it. And what is more, they realize that there is no man or god inside it, so they do a dance to celebrate this discovery. The name on the front of the motorcar is Ford, which they had originally thought was the name of the god or man inside. Because they can understand how the thing works, and having discovered that there is no Mr Ford inside it, now they come to the conclusion that there never was a Mr Ford.

How then did this thing come to be? They say, ‘Well, we don’t exactly know. If we go on with our scientific investigation, we shall eventually find out. But we do know that there is no Mr Ford.’ It would be false to conclude that just because they now understand how the Ford engine works and there is no Mr Ford inside, there never was a Mr Ford who designed it.

Thank God for the scientists who have shown us so much of how the universe works. They say that when they look through their microscopes, they don’t see any God. Well, why do they expect to find him? Just because they understand how certain things in the universe work, to conclude that there is no Creator God who made it in the first place is like deciding that because you know how the Ford motorcar works, there never was a Mr Ford.

Do a priori prejudices influence our beliefs?

There are some people who prefer not to believe in God. Of course, we all have our prejudices, don’t we? As you have gathered, I speak as a Christian and I have my prejudices—a whole host of them. Christian prejudices, if I might so describe them. There are other people who have other prejudices—some are scientists, like Stephen Hawking. He says, ‘Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning’. Why not? ‘Well,’ he says, ‘probably because it smacks of divine intervention.’¹ And some scientists, as well as other people, don’t like the idea of a creator who started the whole show going and could intervene any time he chooses. Sir Arthur Eddington, now long deceased, said in his time, ‘Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of nature is repugnant . . . I should like to find a genuine loophole.’²

Yes, I have my prejudices; I freely admit that. But you should be aware that many scientists who proclaim to the world that there is no God are also working from their prejudices. We’ve just heard the once eminent Sir Arthur Eddington daring to confess that to him the whole idea of time having a beginning is repugnant.

More recently, Sir John Maddox, former editor of Nature (perhaps the leading scientific journal in the British Isles) pronounced the idea of a beginning as ‘thoroughly unacceptable’. Why? Because it implied ‘an ultimate origin for our world’ and gave creationists (people who believe in creation) ‘ample justification’ for their beliefs.³ So, yes, there is a good deal of prejudice about. We need to observe our prejudices and constantly review them in the light of the evidence, as best we can.

Do our beliefs influence our view of human significance?

But now one other thing before we get down to some of the evidence. Let’s look at some of the practical implications of what we are now talking about. The scientist Douglas Futuyma, in his book Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution, is forthright in his remarks:

Anyone who believes in Genesis as a literal description of history must hold a world view that is entirely incompatible with the idea of evolution, not to speak of science itself . . . Where science insists on material, mechanistic causes that can be understood by physics and chemistry, the literal believer in Genesis invokes unknowable supernatural forces.⁴

In other words, he is saying that the literal believer in Genesis believes in God, and he contrasts that with a belief in evolution and science. There are, then, two views of history.

What’s the practical point of this? How does it affect you and me, whether we believe there is a God or not? What difference does it make? Of course, one of these days it will make an eternal difference, but it has implications even now in the present.

Futuyma continues:

Perhaps more importantly, if the world and its creatures developed purely by material, physical forces, it could not have been designed and has no purpose or goal.⁵

Futuyma is recommending to you that you believe there is no God, and that the universe around you, and you yourself, are the result of merely mechanical forces. And because that is so, according to him, you weren’t designed; you are the result of blind, mindless bits and pieces of stuff put together without any plan or purpose. Ultimately, there is no purpose at all for your existence; you are ultimately meaningless.

Now, there are many people who don’t see that logical implication. They think life would be happier, filled with much more pleasure and meaning, if only they could get rid of God. But really the opposite is true. Look what he goes on to say:

The fundamentalist, in contrast, believes that everything in the world, every species and every characteristic of every species, was designed by an intelligent, purposeful artificer, and that it was made for a purpose.⁶

That is what believers in God believe, of course. They believe that you, madam, and you, sir, were made by an intelligent creator for an eternal purpose. And whether life has treated you roughly or smoothly, there is meaning in your existence; you are not the prisoner of mindless forces.

Futuyma then comes to his great conclusion:

Nowhere does this contrast apply with more force than to the human species. Some shrink from the conclusion that the human species was not designed, has no purpose, and is the product of mere mechanical mechanisms—but this seems to be the message of evolution.⁷

These are stark choices, ladies and gentlemen. Is it not worth having a look again at the evidence before you decide that you are absolutely meaningless—that your existence was never designed, that you are an amalgam of mindless bits and pieces of stuff put together without purpose, and those blind forces that made you will one day destroy you, and that’s all life is?

Evidence of God from science

So, let’s turn now to the evidence. As the Bible itself says in the passage we read in Romans 1, the invisible things of God, since the creation of the world are made visible—we can perceive them (see vv. 19–20). Notice that Paul uses a very interesting word, perceive.

To give an illustration, suppose you took me out into your garden this spring and you have a bed of tulips. You say to me, ‘Gooding, look at those tulips. What do you think of them? Aren’t they beautiful?’ Suppose I say, ‘Prove to me they are beautiful’, what would you do? I think you might ring for a psychiatrist. Prove that tulips are beautiful! Don’t be so absurd, you can see they’re beautiful; it’s what we call intuition.

Paul says that as we look at the great creation around us, we can perceive the evidence from it that there is a supreme power, and that power is not human but divine. We’re going to think a lot about that evidence in the course of these evening studies, if you consent to come and listen.

I want now to point to three avenues that modern science goes down, which seem to me to point very strongly in the direction that creation has been designed by an intelligent source—by God, in fact. I will not be quoting the Bible but rather from modern science.

The intelligibility of the universe

First of all, we’ll consider what we would call the intelligibility of the universe. Let me explain what that means. It means that we can understand how the universe works. The other week, there was a full eclipse of the moon. I didn’t see it, but many people in Austria, where I was at the time, saw this marvellous sight. I suspect everyone here tonight could tell how an eclipse of the moon is brought about: that at a certain time, as the earth goes around the sun and the moon goes around the earth, the earth gets between the sun and the moon and blocks out the light of the sun on the moon, and you have an eclipse of the moon. We can understand it, but don’t dismiss that too quickly and say it is some innocent little thing. It isn’t. Your dog doesn’t understand it, does it? The fact that human beings can understand it is a phenomenon full of the deepest significance.

This is a vast universe. Let’s have a look at one star cluster. Recent photography has revealed millions upon millions of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud—two lots of stars, one behind the other. So this universe is vast. The interesting thing is that, as human beings take their telescopes and all their things for analysis, and peer out at these galaxies, they can understand how they work. How is that?

Here is what the very learned scientist, Paul Davies, says. As far as I know, he is not a believer in God and certainly isn’t a Christian. In his earlier days he was actively atheistic. In more recent times, compelled, it would seem, by his science, he has modified his views very, very markedly. In his book, The Mind of God, he says:

. . . through science, we human beings are able to grasp at least some of nature’s secrets. We have cracked part of the cosmic code. Why this should be, just why Homo sapiens should carry the spark of rationality that provides the key to the universe, is a deep enigma.⁸

Well, so it is if you’re an atheist. Just imagine what atheists have to believe. We all started off as a bit of mindless, brainless stuff, and by a series of chance permutations we actually grew. This mindless stuff, without any purpose, without any teaching, suddenly developed into your brain, and, lo and behold, it could understand the way the universe works. You should have a greater estimate of your brain than that, shouldn’t you? And, says Paul Davies, it is a deep enigma. To somebody who doesn’t believe in God and believes in evolution—that mindless processes brought us to be—how can this be? What does it mean? What is man that we might be party to such privilege?

I cannot believe that our existence in this universe is a mere quirk of fate, an accident of history, an incidental blip in the great cosmic drama; our involvement is too intimate. The physical species homo, man, may count for nothing; but the existence of mind in some organism on some planet in the universe is surely a fact of fundamental significance. You’ve got a brain, madam. You’ve got a brain, sir. You can understand how the universe works—if not the outer one, because you haven’t studied it yet, then the one in your next-door neighbour’s garden, and the planets, the sun, eclipses and things like that. That’s a phenomenon. You are a phenomenon in this universe. It is a phenomenon that atheism can’t explain.

The Bible’s answer to it is that man was made in the image of God; made so that we could begin to understand our creator’s thoughts. As one of the great scientists, Johannes Kepler, said when he made his discoveries, ‘We are thinking God’s thoughts after him’. Listen to what Davies concludes: ‘Through conscious beings the universe has generated self-awareness’. Being an atheist, he believes that somehow the universe has generated this self-awareness. ‘This can be no trivial detail, no minor by-product of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here.’⁹

There speaks an atheist, who is a scientist of world renown, not a Christian. His science is pushing him to the belief that we are not the by-product of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here.

That raises a big question, doesn’t it? Who meant us to be here? To say that science has made belief in God impossible or unscientific is to live somewhat in the past. Modern science is pointing, more than it has done for centuries, to the fact that there is an intelligent power behind this universe, a mind that meant us to be here.

The fine-tuning of the universe

And then we come to another matter in the universe, and that is what is called fine tuning. We look at the universe and the more we discover about it and the way it works, the more it becomes apparent that our universe, and then our planet in the planetary system, has been deliberately designed to make human life possible. We are indeed meant to be here, and the universe has been prepared to make it possible for us to be here.

I will take some details from the book by the Christian astrophysicist, Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos,¹⁰ in which he points out some of the arrangements or parameters in our near vicinity in the universe that make life on this planet possible—our sun, the planets and our earth.

The sun’s characteristics

Our first necessity for life on earth, perhaps, is that we have a source of light and a source of heat. Without those, life would be impossible. So how do we get this source of light and this source of heat?

‘Well,’ you say, ‘the sun up in the sky is our source for both light and heat.’

Of course, it is. Then, what a marvel the sun up in the sky is. It is one colossal atomic furnace—a vast affair. If we look at a picture of the sun, flares are coming out of it for thousands upon thousands of miles, erupting from the sun under powers working within it, and so forth. It’s a vast atomic furnace. We’ve all become aware that if you expose yourself to the sun too much in the summer, you are in danger of getting skin cancer. What does that show us? Well, it shows us that our earth is at the precise distance from the sun to make human life possible. If we were too near the sun we would fry like sausages in a frying pan—we wouldn’t last long. And if we were too far from the sun we would freeze to death—life would be impossible. We have to be at the critical point of distance and nearness to the sun to make life possible. How do we come to be precisely at that distance?

Then you say, ‘There’s nothing unusual about the sun’.

But wait a minute! There are billions upon billions of suns in the universe. Every star is a sun; and, to put it the other way round, our sun is a star. Not just any old star would do for our planet, either. To be suitable for us, it had to be what is called a middle-aged bachelor star. Perhaps you’ve never thought about middle-aged bachelor stars? Well, some stars explode when they get a bit older. We have photographs of them exploding, as well as photographs that show what happened to them afterwards. It wouldn’t do if our sun were a star that could explode. Neither would it do for it to be what is called a binary star. If you look out into the sky with a telescope, you will see that a lot of stars come in pairs—they are rotating one around the other. They are called binaries. Well, it’s a good thing that our sun isn’t a binary, because if the other star were going around it we should be knocked off course. Our sun has to be a very special kind of star in order to be the source of our light and the source of our heat.

Earth’s rotation speed

Then there’s the matter of the daily rotation speed of the earth. When we look at the planets that go round our sun, they all go at different speeds. They also all twizzle round, but not all at the same speed. As our earth rotates round the sun, we have nights and days; but what is exceedingly important is the speed at which it turns around. Why is that? Because if it went more slowly, the earth on the daytime side would get so baking hot that it would make life impossible; while on the nighttime side people would freeze to death. The great planet, Jupiter, goes round at a colossal rate. The result is that it develops such huge storms on its surface that life for us on earth would be absolutely impossible.

Precision in creation

So the more it is studied there is mounting evidence that, even within our relatively little sun and its planetary system, the whole thing has been engineered to make human life possible. Let me give you a quote on this same topic from Sir Roger Penrose, a mathematician of Oxford, who did a lot of work on the black hole theory with Stephen Hawking. I don’t know what his religious beliefs are, if any. In philosophy he is a Platonist, but as a mathematician he explains that in order to have a universe compatible with the second law of thermodynamics and with what we now observe, the creator’s aim must have been accurate to one part in 10 to the power of 10¹²³. That is ‘1’ followed by 10¹²³ successive zeros. In the words of Penrose:

This is an extraordinary figure. One could not possibly even write the number down in full, in the ordinary, denary notation [that is, decimal notation] . . . Even if we were to write a ‘0’ on each separate proton and on each separate neutron in the entire universe—and we could throw in all the other particles as well for good measure—we should fall far short of writing down the figure needed. The precision needed to set the universe on its course . . .¹¹

In the light of that, the notion that the universe has come about by sheer accident of mindless forces looks nonsensical, doesn’t it? This is not some man expressing his Christian view. This is a world-famous mathematician who understands the laws of how the universe moves, ticks and works better than most of us do, and he is saying, ‘Yes, this universe has been fine-tuned in its making to its remotest bound, to make human life possible on this planet’. That’s a marvellous thing, isn’t it?

What we are looking at tonight is what science is saying—not all scientists, of course. My young friends, if you find your teachers at school telling you that science makes belief in a creator impossible, then I think you would have to conclude that they are way behind the times in their actual science. The Bible is true after all: the invisible things of God are clearly seen by looking at the universe around us. So clearly seen, says the Bible, that God will hold men and women responsible. They could have seen the evidence for his existence, deity and almighty power, and if they shut their eyes to it he will hold them responsible (see Rom 1).

Irreducible Complexity

We’ll consider one other kind of evidence tonight, and that is what is called irreducible complexity—a large phrase, but it means something very simple. It has been popularized by Michael Behe.¹² The illustration I shall use is from him. He is a biochemist and an expert in studying the cell in the human body and how it works. He points out that in our human bodies there are exceedingly complicated systems that could not possibly have evolved one at a time by chance over millions of years. The systems are necessary for life and every bit had to be there right from the start, or else it wouldn’t work.

THE MOUSETRAP ILLUSTRATION

The illustration he uses for simple folks like me is the now famous illustration of a mousetrap. Mousetraps are not exactly as complicated as galaxies or the human cell, but he uses it as an illustration.

He would say that this mousetrap I have here is irreducibly complex. So, if somebody asks you what you mean by irreducible complexity, say, ‘Mousetraps!’ That is an example of it, anyway. The mousetrap is made up of a bit of wood at the bottom, and there is this hammer thing that comes down and smites the unwary mouse. It has to have a spring that makes the hammer come down, and a thing to hold the spring up until the precise moment the mouse stands on the trap, when it releases the spring. And then there is a place to put the cheese—delightful gourmet stuff for the mouse.

How do you think the mousetrap came together? Would you agree that once upon a time, billions of years ago, there was a plain bit of wood and a few mice got caught on it—on just the wood, nothing else? And then, some millions of years later, a bit of iron from nowhere in particular, but without a spring, happened to fall on the wood, and a few more mice got caught? And then, millions of years later, by an accidental thing in the genes or something, the spring out of your grandfather’s clock fell on the wood and the iron, and they worked together and made the hammer on the spring, which caught a lot more mice? And then, because it was good at catching mice, eventually this other thing was put here?

‘Don’t go on,’ you say, ‘that’s absolutely absurd. Of course it didn’t come to be that way!’

For a mousetrap to work, every part of it—the length of the bit of wood, the size of the hammer so it should come down and smite the mouse in the appropriate part, the bait and everything else—had to be there right from the very start. It is irreducibly complex. Says Behe, ‘If that is true of mousetraps, how much more so of the systems we find in the human body?’

THE BLOOD CLOTTING ILLUSTRATION

He uses one of those systems to illustrate the point. If you cut your finger and feel the pain, you draw your hand away, don’t you? If the wound is deep, the blood starts to come, which is very good because it helps to wash away germs. But it wouldn’t do for the blood to keep on coming and never stop coming, because you’d soon be dead. So the blood has got to come, and then it has to plug the gap to stop any more blood from coming. It has got to coagulate, in other words. When it has done that, the body produces other kinds of things to destroy any germs that remain. When all the germs have been gobbled up, the body supplies the tissue to remake the flesh and plugs the hole with flesh. And when that’s done, the scab falls off and the blood goes back where it was before.

These processes occur when you cut your finger. But they tell me that the blood that is going through your veins is not meant to clot, and if it arbitrarily clotted every now and again, you would be dead. I mean, it can’t keep clotting. So normally, the blood has got to be there, but not in a form where it clots. When you cut your finger, though, then you do want some blood that clots, so how do you get the blood from being blood that doesn’t clot to being blood that does clot? To do that, all sorts of things must happen in the body to adapt various chemicals, and do this, that, and the other. There are, I think, about twenty or twenty-five different processes that have to go on, all of them coordinated and in their proper order, if your life is to be saved when you have a serious cut on your finger. Eventually, when the blood has clotted, it has got to go back to its normal form, hasn’t it? Says Behe, it’s like the mousetrap, only more complicated. If any of those processes weren’t there, not only would the system not work, but you would be very ill, if not dead. You couldn’t start with five of them for a few million years, and then add a few more; they all had to be there at one and the same time. And they were, of course, because they were designed by God.

As I said, ladies and gentleman, this is not just me expressing my Christian opinion; this is what science is showing. The more we study the human cell, or any cell for that matter, the more it is discovered that the thing is a veritable world of engineering, divisions and subdivisions of labour and remarkable systems, and it is impossible to think that they have evolved accidentally without any design.

Conclusion

I have given you only a few examples of what modern science is beginning to point to. My purpose this evening is to give you an illustration of what Romans 1 means, when it says that the invisible things of him—the things we can’t see about God—become visible, as we look at the creation around us.

Perhaps tonight you will have a very big question. I have a friend, a mathematical physicist, now retired from Queen’s University as I am, and he and I used to talk from time to time. He would say, ‘All right, David, I admit there must be an intelligence behind the universe, but not a personal intelligence’.

And I would say, ‘Why not a personal intelligence?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘look at all the natural disasters around the world. I’m not talking about cruelty between fellow humans; that’s our own fault. But what about the earthquakes, the floods, the landslides, the volcanoes and the hurricanes? How can I think that these things are arranged or designed by a personal God? Isn’t your God supposed to be all-powerful, so that he can do what he likes? Isn’t he supposed to be all-loving? If he’s all-loving and all-powerful, then why has he allowed our world to be like it is, with volcanoes and earthquakes and things?’

In the last two or three weeks, we’ve had examples of what my friend was talking about. Look at the earthquakes in India, in El Salvador and other places. Sometimes it is not a desire to be atheistic that makes people question whether there is a God or not; it is the sufferings and disasters in life. How can you still go on believing that there is a loving God in heaven when these disasters happen? I want to face that question in the coming evenings, so I will leave it hanging in the air for now, but there is an answer.

As we close our study, in reply to that question let me just say what I said to a professor of psychiatry in Moscow a year or two ago when we had dinner together. He was in charge of the enormous psychiatric hospital in Moscow, a man therefore who had seen much human suffering. I tried to talk to him about the evidence for design as distinct from evolution. He smiled graciously—he was a scientist, and I was not. He told me that they perfectly understood how biology works without God. He said, ‘How can you still believe in a God of love, who designed our world and designed mankind, when there is so much pain and suffering?’

We had a long conversation, but I began it this way: ‘I’ll admit to you that I have a problem. I don’t have a one hundred per cent answer to it either. Could we get rid of the problem if we decided to believe there is no God, against all the evidence that creation puts before us that there is a God who designed us? Now we don’t have a problem, do we? Get rid of the idea of God, and you won’t have any problem accounting for pain, because, in that case, evolution would be true. And since it all happens by undesigned errors, mistakes and so on, what else would you expect but a universe full of pain? So, get rid of God and you don’t have the problem. But you still have the pain—you don’t get rid of the pain by getting rid of God.’

I said, ‘I want to suggest to you, sir, that by getting rid of God in your mind, not only have you still got pain, but you’ve made the pain ten thousand times worse, because if there is no God there is no hope. Whereas, since there is a God, however desperate our pain is, there is hope that the God who made us will be loyal to his creatures. As the Bible says, he is so loyal to his creatures that to redeem us from our sin, guilt and wandering, God himself sent his Son to suffer in our place. So there is hope.’

I’ve already kept you too long. I should apologize for keeping you over the time, but I’ve have been given permission to do it! Thank you very much.

Questions

I have had three questions put to me:

The Word in creation

Please expand on the thought in John 1, regarding the concept of the Word creating.

I mentioned the following verses, as you may remember:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:1–3)

So, I’m asked to expand on the idea of the Word creating.

First of all, it refers to the second person of the gracious tri-unity, who became flesh. We know him as Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God. He is called the Word of God because he is the expression of God—of the mind, heart and character of God. So the universe created by him is an expression of God. He who made it is called the Word because, in his creatorial activities, he spells out the mind, heart and character of God.

Secondly, the Bible says of Jesus Christ our Lord, ‘For in him all things were created . . . all things have been created through him and for him’ (Col 1:16 NIV).

The first of those—‘in him all things were created’—is exceedingly significant. If, for instance, you looked at some great building going up on the skyline and you asked, ‘Where did it have its beginning?’, it wouldn’t be exact to say it had its beginning when the builders arrived, pegged out the ground and dug the foundation. That would be the beginning of the actual process of construction. But the building itself began in the mind of somebody who decided that there should be a hospital built in the area. So, having decided that, they asked some architect to design the thing. It first of all took shape in his mind and then he committed his design to paper, and so on. Long before the builders got anywhere near it to start building, it began in the mind of its author and designer.

So, all things were created in Christ—they began in his mind. And as I look at you, I’m tempted to say that you are his idea. Sometimes we come across something funny in life, and we say, ‘Whose idea was that?’ Sometimes people look at me and say, ‘Whose idea was he?’ And I return the question to you, ‘Whose idea were you?’ The answer to that question, of course, is that you were Christ’s idea. He thought you up as an expression of God’s will and purpose.

God willing, tomorrow I shall comment on the other two things. The Bible says that he created all things by his word: ‘He commanded, and it stood firm’ (Ps 33:9). Being God, he spoke by his creative power and it was done. But more than that, as I shall suggest tomorrow, when we examine nature, particularly in biology, we find that the cell and the DNA¹³ within the cell is carrying information. That might be a difficult topic to go to bed on, but I shall try and explain it tomorrow. The marvellous double helix of the DNA within the cell carries information through its chemicals. The chemicals are not themselves the information; they carry the information that helps to design the human body, control the materials and the timing of the development of the foetus in the womb, the time of birth, and the development of the new born infant right through adulthood to the end of its days.

The remarkable thing is that the information is then carried on by the next generation. Although the original chemicals that carried the information from the parents are long gone, the information carries on. And therefore, in the opinion of many scientists, the DNA is a code, like a language, carrying information. And that is a very interesting thing, because it’s not just matter in the universe, but matter that is carrying information; or, if you will, the purpose and mind of God and his design implanted on nature, so that, just as letters on a page carry the information of the author who was sending the message to somebody, in biology matter is carrying information necessary for the development of the particular life, and necessary as the expression of God’s intention. But more of that tomorrow, when we’re all a little bit more awake than I am now, perhaps.

Failing to see the evidence

Why do men and women fail to see the evidence of a creator?

Well, that’s a big question, isn’t it? There are all sorts of reasons. One is because they have been taught the opposite by teachers whom they regard as authoritative. And therefore, children in school, who are told by the chemistry or physics teacher or someone else that science proves there’s no God, don’t even start looking for the evidence. So, in those cases, it’s the fault of other folks.

But the Bible says:

For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. (Rom 1:18)

There is, alas, deliberate action on the part of some people who do not wish to see the evidence of deity in the universe around us. I have here, and I can show it to anybody who wishes to see it, a quotation from Richard Lewontin, a Harvard biologist. He is a Jew, a Marxist and an atheist. In a review of the book written by his friend Carl Sagan, now deceased, he wrote to explain why, as a scientist, he organizes his experiments in certain ways and what his basic belief is. His starting point, he explains, is materialism—not consumerism, but materialism in the philosophical sense that there is nothing but matter in the universe. In other words, there is no God, no spirit and no soul; there’s nothing but matter, and human beings are nothing but matter. He explains how he devises his experiments and finds that sometimes they come up with very funny results. He says they do it that way because ‘we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door’.¹⁴ In other words, he’s telling the public straight that he is not prepared to envisage the possibility that there should be a God.

And of course, there is another reason why some people don’t like to face the fact that there is a God, and that is because it raises the possibility of a final judgment. I’m not saying this is true of everybody, of course. The early Greeks invented the atomic theory in 300 or 400 BC and this theory was embraced in the first century by a Roman poet named Lucretius, who wrote six books of poetry on the subject.¹⁵ People read his poetry; I had to read it as a student and later lecture on it from time to time. They were different men than we are nowadays, of course. Lucretius was delighted by this atomic theory, as he explained in the preface to his work, because it shows that when we die the atoms of our body and soul come adrift, and there’s nothing left of us. That shows that there is no God out there waiting to punish us, and we can be delivered from all fear because nothing happens after death. There is no God, there is no final judgment, and we are therefore delivered from fear of the wrath of the gods.

Sometimes, in people’s hearts, there is that sneaking feeling, isn’t there? If there is a God, then conscience tells us that he is concerned with the way we behave and one day we shall have to meet him to give account of what we have done. Upon that and our attitude to him and to the Saviour will depend our eternal destiny, so it’s understandable that some people prefer to think that there is no God.

Then there are others whom I mentioned at the end of the lecture. Life has hurt them, and they say, ‘Look at that mosquito—beautifully engineered with the drilling equipment to pierce my skin and infect me with malaria and maybe kill me. Was it designed by your God, to do that?’ Faced with life’s pains and sorrows, they find it difficult to believe that there’s a God in heaven who loves them.

I thank God that I was brought up as a Christian and came to know the good Shepherd of the sheep before I faced many of life’s sufferings. Knowing the shepherd makes it easier for a sheep to trust him when things get difficult. My heart goes out to those who come across suffering in life and don’t yet know the Shepherd. In the end, suffering for them is therefore destructive and absolutely meaningless. They too will have their reasons for feeling that there is no God. So, we will try to deal with that question more fully on another occasion.

Matter and Design

Does ‘the Word created’ involve merely matter or design?

It involves both things: he created the stuff, and then he created the design. It’s a thing to be remembered that, when God made man, he made him of pre-existent material, didn’t he?

Man was formed of the dust of the ground, and then God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Gen 2:7). But that dust of the ground evidently existed before Adam existed, so where did the dust come from? From the scientific point of view, that is a very interesting question. Where did all the heavy elements necessary for human life, that are not normally producible on this planet, come from? Anyway, my short answer tonight to this question is that God created both: he made the matter, and then he designed it. Both things are true.

Thank you for those interesting questions.

Sermon 1 Footnotes

¹ A Brief History of Time, London: Bantam Press, 1988, p. 46.

² ‘The End of the World: From the Standpoint of Mathematical Physics’, Nature, 127 (1931), p. 450.

³ Nature, 340 (1989) p. 425.

⁴ Science on Trial: The Case for Evolution, New York, Pantheon Books, 1983, pp. 12–13.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ Ibid.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ The Mind of God: Science and the Search for Ultimate Meaning, London: Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 231–2.

⁹ The Mind of God, p. 232.

¹⁰ The Creator and the Cosmos: How the Greatest Scientific Discoveries of this Century Reveal God, Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1993.

¹¹ The Emperor’s New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford Landmark Science), OUP Oxford, 1990, pp. 444–6.

¹² Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, Free Press, 1996.

¹³ Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid.

¹⁴ From Lewontin’s review of Carl Sagan’s last book, Billions and Billions of Demons: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium, Random House 1997.

¹⁵ De Rerum Natura (‘On the Nature of Things’ or ‘On the Nature of the Universe’ as it is often translated.)

2. Man: The Creator's Viceroy

I would like to begin tonight, my friends, by reading you a delightful poem that celebrates God; and at the same time it celebrates the high dignity of man and woman as God’s viceroys in his creation:

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. Out of the mouth of babies and infants, you have established strength because of your foes, to still the enemy and the avenger. When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him? (Ps 8:1–4)

At this point in the poem, having considered the glory and majesty of the creator and then casting his eye upon man, you might have thought that the poet would go on to say what a tiny little thing man is—what an insignificant, infinitesimal worm he is compared with God. But if you listen, you will notice that the poem goes in altogether the opposite direction. It has celebrated the unmatchable glory of the creator, then it asks, ‘what is man?’ Well, here comes the poet’s answer:

Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour. You have given him dominion over the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas. O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! (vv. 5–9)

It is a sheer joy and tonic to one’s heart to be allowed to read such a beautiful, magnificent description of man and woman as God’s viceroys in creation. Sometimes I am asked why I believe the Bible is the word of God. You will see my prejudice easily, won’t you, when I confess that one of the reasons I believe the Bible to be the word of God is the glorious dignity it confers on us human beings. It is the feeling of many who are known to me that the only way for humans to assert their freedom is to get rid of every notion of God and thus assert man’s independence and complete freedom, as though belief in God automatically rendered human beings as slaves or prisoners. But the very opposite is true. Scripture says, and this poem celebrates it, that, under the creator, belief in God confers on humankind this pinnacle of glory to be God’s viceroys in his creation here on Earth. Whereas, of course, the atheistic view that banishes God the creator from this universe and seems to give man freedom, eventually does the very opposite. For, as we saw last night, if there is no God we human beings are simply the product of mindless forces and mindless matter. They have made us, and one of these days these same mindless forces and purposeless bits of matter will destroy us. And when they begin to do it, we shall have enough intelligence in our heads to see what they are going to do, but in the end all our science will fail us. These mindless forces will destroy us—our bodies, our minds, our sense of beauty, our purposes, and everything else that is human—and the irony is that they won’t even know they’ve done it.

I do confess that it puzzles me how men and women can think it is the height of intelligence and rationality to get rid of God and end up, as they must tell you, being destroyed by mindless forces that will destroy our intelligence. And, as I said, they won’t even know what they’ve done. How preferable, in my humble opinion, is the wonderful revelation of God the creator through his word in the Bible. When he created man and woman, he created them to be the viceroys in his name within creation.

The three accounts of creation in Genesis

We come this evening to study the first account of creation, as we find it in the book of Genesis. As I said in lecture one, in the book of Genesis there are three accounts of creation. If that sounds strange to you, you may care to turn to the text and let me point them out.

Genesis 1:1–2:3

The first one begins in chapter 1 verse 1, with the words: ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’. It proceeds throughout that chapter, detailing the creation by God as it was done in six stages, coming finally in chapter 2 verse 3 to its completion and the seventh day of God’s rest.

Genesis 2:4–4:26

Then we notice that in chapter 2 verse 4, the writer starts his second account of creation with the words: ‘These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens’. Having announced that, he then pursues his account of creation. And not only of creation in the physical sense; he points us to some of the basic principles of God’s creation of human life, and describes for us what human life means and where it all went wrong. He comes to the end of this account in the final verses of chapter 4.

Genesis 5:1–9:28

But then the writer takes us backwards once more to the beginning of things. And he says in chapter 5 verses 1 and 2:

This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man [Adam] when they were created.

Having come back to the beginning of things in history, he proceeds with his third account of creation and what followed from it. He tells us about the fortunes of mankind, and what happened to them. The story of their corruption, God’s judgment upon them in the form of the flood, the great salvation that God provided for them, and the new beginnings in the person of Noah. That occupies the following chapters until the end of chapter 9.

These three accounts of creation do not contradict each other, of course. In their way, they resemble the four Gospels. In the New Testament, we have four separate accounts of the life, ministry, death and resurrection of our blessed Lord Jesus, so that he is portrayed from four different points of view—from four different angles, so to speak—and thus we have a four-dimensional picture of our Lord. So here in Genesis we have three accounts of creation that look at it from different points of view and draw out its implications, its meaning and its lessons for us who live in this distant day.

Creation in stages

So this evening we are to study the first account of creation, occupying Genesis 1:1 to 2:3. We shall not be able to consider the whole of the story; I aim only to bring out some of its major points.

This first account of creation in Genesis is the one that tells us that when God created the heavens and the earth, he did not create everything at once; he created things in stages. Perhaps we are so used to the story that this is no surprise to us. But if you had not heard it before, and were contemplating how God created the universe, you may well have said to yourself, ‘God is almighty and, being all powerful, he can do what he likes. If he had so chosen, he could have created the whole universe in a single instant of time.’ If you held that view, you should be extraordinarily surprised to find that, almighty though God was and is, he did not create the universe in one split second, but in stages.

Creation by the word of God

I have listed the days of creation for you here.


Gen 1:1–2	In the beginning
Gen 1:3–5	AND GOD SAID	The first day	Day 1
Gen 1:6–8	AND GOD SAID	The second day	Day 2
Gen 1:9–10	AND GOD SAID–inanimate		Day 3
Gen 1:11–13	AND GOD SAID–inanimate	The third day
Gen 1:14–19	AND GOD SAID	The fourth day	Day 4
Gen 1:20–23	AND GOD SAID	The fifth day	Day 5
Gen 1:24–25	AND GOD SAID–animals		Day 6
Gen 1:26–31	AND GOD SAID–man	The sixth day
Gen 2:1–3	God rested	The seventh day	Day 7

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished . . . And on the seventh day God finished his work . . . and he rested . . . from all his work that he had done. (2:1–2)

You will notice that the first day begins in 1:3 with the phrase, ‘And God said’. And every day from one to six is introduced by that majestic, simple statement, ‘And God said’. I want to stay with this observation for a moment because it is exceedingly significant. This is emphasizing the fact that the universe and our world within it were created by the word of God. It is a theme to which Scripture continually refers. The psalmist says, ‘For he spoke, and it came to be; he commanded, and it stood firm’ (Ps 33:9). The Gospel of John repeats it:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. (John 1:1–3)

This is telling us that creation was by the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, one of whose titles is the Word of God. And the Epistle to the Hebrews repeats the theme: ‘By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God’ (11:3).

As I said, first of all we understand this in the sense of his command. He commanded and the worlds were made; he commanded and the light shone out of the darkness, and so forth. But as we look at these accounts in the light of what we now know about our world through science, it is evident that, in addition to being a command of God as he made the universe and matter within it, in creating it he implanted certain information, and I want now to spend a few moments talking about this.

Information and the created world

What the scientists nowadays call information theory is a comparatively modern idea going back but a few decades, and as far as I understand it, it originated with engineers. Let’s use a simple example of what they mean when they talk about information. Here is an engineer, a locksmith. He has designed a lock, and now he’s going to design the key to undo the lock or lock it up. So he designs a bit of metal in this shape, and then he puts perhaps two or three prongs coming out at the bottom. What are they for? Well, he knows what’s got to happen inside the lock; he can envisage that, as he’s the one who created the lock. So now he gets this idea of a key that could unlock it and implants that idea on this bit of metal. In engineering terms, you call that information. He is building certain bits of information onto the key, so that when somebody picks up the key and inserts it into the lock and then turns it, those bits and pieces on the key will do the job that the designer intended they should do. Of course, it’s not information in the way the ‘man on the street’ thinks of it; the key doesn’t impart any information to the lock.

You can get a more sophisticated idea of this with a computer. The computer programmer, having designed electrical circuits and chips and so on, sits down and devises a programme. He wants the machine to do this, this and this, and ten thousand other things—and mighty complicated it is! But if the computer is going to do it, it’s got to be told what to do and when to do it. So the directions—the information, so to speak—are put onto the chips by the programmer, and the computer is told via the electrical current what to do, all the way through the ten thousand and one instructions that have been built into the thing. Through these chips and electrical circuits and various other things, the ideas of the designer go into the machinery to make the computer do what the designer wants it to do.

That’s fairly simple, isn’t it? The designer puts information onto the chips and into the machine to get the computer to perform.

Let’s take another example. I don’t see anyone here old enough to know about what I shall describe. Washing machines were first invented when I was a boy. They had tubs made of plastic or tin, or whatever it was, with open tops in which you put the clothes. Inside was a whirligig thing that made the clothes go around and cleaned them. In their way they were sophisticated devices. At the top, generally on the right-hand side, there was a slit. Then there was a piece of plastic, a few inches square. Along its four sides were notches in various proportions and rows, which controlled the many processes the machine could perform. If you wanted to wash the clothes, you got the bit of plastic and turned it around until the right series of notches fitted, and the machine started washing the clothes. If you wanted woollens or coloured items to be washed, you took the plastic out, turned it around to get another set of notches, put it back in the slit and the machine ran the appropriate process for those items. The notches controlled the machine and told it which programme to run.

Now, if you had just handed me that bit of plastic with the notches on the side, and said to me, ‘what do you suppose this is?’, I would have said, ‘plastic’. But half a minute! Is that all it is—just plastic? In one sense, it would be true. But in another sense, I would have missed the whole point, because it wasn’t just plastic. It was plastic designed by an engineer to convey the necessary instructions to the machine, so that the machine would run its varied programmes according to the will of the person doing the laundry. It was plastic carrying information.

Over the last forty years or so, modern science has taught us that there is a marvellous device in our bodies to carry information. Genesis 1 and other Scriptures tell us that God made the first man (Adam) out of the dust of the ground. He was a direct creation of God. He had no father or mother; he was made by the direct act of a creator. Eve was also a direct creation of God. A rib was taken from Adam, and she was made. She had no mother or father either. However, it’s been different with every generation since, has it not? In that sense, we are not direct creations, as we do have fathers and mothers. How does that come about? As the Apostle Paul was talking to the Athenians, he said that God had made all the nations that dwell upon the face of the earth from one man, that is, from Adam (see Acts 17:26).

How did God manage to do it? As we now know, when God made man, he put into man what we nowadays call genes. When the zygote (part from the wife and part from the husband) is formed, the machinery inside the cell contains all the information necessary for that cell to develop into other cells; for those cells to develop into an embryo; and the embryo into a foetus. Isn’t it a magnificent thing? If you didn’t believe in God, you would think it was magic or something. It will control this information through what is called the DNA, controlling the development of the foetus until birth and ordering when parts of the body should grow until the time of birth. It’s no good having eyes, for example, if you haven’t got a skull to put them into. Then the growth of the infant to adulthood and beyond. When the bits and pieces of the old genes are worn out, it will bring the body to its end.

But then there is another marvellous thing. If the grown adult has children, the information will pass on to them. So, while the original chemicals that carried the information have perished long ago, the information has passed on to the succeeding generations. God forbid that we should ever get used to the idea. It is a magnificent and startlingly wonderful thing.

Here is a model of the DNA double helix. If it looks complicated to you, it’s meant to, because the DNA is complicated. It is showing the double helix, these two strands like two spiral ladders, which carry the chemicals that are necessary for life to become possible, the amino acids, and so forth and so on.

Let’s look at the next picture. Within a cell one strand, that is called the DNA, uncoils itself, and what was together all wrapped around each other is now uncoiled. The various bits and pieces, the amino acids, break away. And this one separates and collects to itself all kinds of chemicals within the cell, and makes another double helix. What is happening is that the information is being transferred from one lot to the other, and from that lot to the next lot; but of course it is an exceedingly complicated invention on God’s part, because the acids that are put there are in different colours, and must always be in the correct order to achieve what they have to achieve in the building up of the foetus and the human body, and the control of its life.¹⁶

I want to point out one of the implications of this discovery, which was made by Francis Crick and James Watson in the 1960s. Could that mechanism have come about by accident? The theory of evolution says that by tiny little, very often mistaken, errors in the gene, it gradually built up a more sophisticated store of information. Could it really have happened by accident?

Listen to the scientists, Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe. As far as I am aware neither of them is a believer in God—certainly not in the Jewish or Christian sense. Sir Fred Hoyle was an eminent astronomer and mathematician, and Chandra Wickramasinghe is likewise an eminent mathematician. They have shown that the chance of obtaining the enzymes necessary for life by randomly assembling amino acid chains—the chance of doing it without design, in other words—is exceedingly minute:

A simple calculation then shows that the chance of obtaining the necessary total of 2000 enzymes by randomly assembling amino acid chains is exceedingly minute. The random chance is not a million to one against, or a billion to one or even a trillion to one against, but p to 1 against, with p minimally an enormous super-astronomical number equal to 10^40,000 (1 followed by 40,000 zeros). The odds we have thus computed are only for the enzymes and of course correct arrangements within many other important macromolecules of life, besides enzymes, must also be considered.¹⁷

The conclusions we have reached in our book are derived from known experimentally and observationally tested properties of the Universe, including not least among them the property that living cells can replicate. The rival theory of the ‘chemical evolution’ of primitive life, and of the evolution of life to progressively higher levels entirely through random processes, is an uneasy combination of dogma and wishful thinking.¹⁸

I repeat, as far as I know neither of these scientists is a believer in God. This is not to insult them, of course. They are giving their testimony simply as scientists, working out mathematically the odds that the origin of life happened by chance. Is it at all conceivable that the DNA chain, which holds the key for life and its development, could have come together by random chance? They say it is certainly impossible. Thus, we return to the words of Scripture: ‘In the beginning was the Word . . . All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made’ (John 1:1–3).

Information is non-material

There is another implication in these apparently simple words, ‘And God said’—creation by the Word. In the estimation of many scientists, the DNA is a code, a form of language that conveys information.

I suspect most of us, when we’re not thinking too hard, imagine that information is quite an easy concept. Actually, information is a startlingly interesting thing. It is not material.

You say, ‘What do you mean, it’s not material?’

Well, it isn’t so much stuff. You see, here’s a good lady who’s been to Belfast, and she’s looked in one of the fashion shops. She comes home, and now she’s going to give some information to her daughter. ‘I was in Belfast today and I saw in such and such a shop such a beautiful dress; it would suit you down to the ground. I went in and asked the people to reserve it for you.’ So, the mother has got this information to pass on to her daughter.

You say, ‘Where is the information? What does it look like?’

Well, it’s in her head.

‘Oh,’ you say, ‘what’s it made of?’

Well, the scientist would answer you by saying, ‘Let’s put this machine to the mother’s head. Yes, there’s a buzzing in that part of the brain; the electro-chemicals are at work. Marvellous!’

‘And what are the electro-chemicals saying?’, you ask.

The scientist hasn’t got a clue. The only one who can tell you what the mother is thinking is the mother herself. Science can’t tell you.

The information is not made of chemicals or electricity; it’s what we call ‘non-material’. But she’s got to communicate it; so how will she do it? She has various choices. She could get a piece of paper and write on it with ink; but the ink isn’t the information, nor is the paper. When her daughter gets it, neither the paper nor the ink will go into her head; the paper will remain there, as will the ink on the page. The ink, paper and words are carrying the information. She needn’t have used ink and paper; she could have spoken to her daughter on the telephone. The air and the currents through the wires would carry the information, but neither the telephone nor the wires is the information.

Well, that’s very simple! This DNA sketch that we looked at, which carries the information for human life, bears every indication of being a code carrying information. That raises a big question, doesn’t it? Where did the information come from?

In the whole of our human experience, we know of no other source of information than an intelligent person. But let me not be the one to say it; let me remind you of the big programme that still runs in America.¹⁹ They spend millions of dollars on it every year. Its chief proponent was a scientist by the name of Carl Sagan, now deceased. They have set up radio telescopes facing space in the hope that one day they will pick up signals that come from distant parts of the universe. They argue that if life evolved here on earth, it may also have evolved around other suns in the vast universe. If life has evolved elsewhere, there may be beings there too; and if they’re intelligent, they probably would like to get in contact with us. (To my mind, that proposition is a bit doubtful. If they were intelligent, they might not want to get in contact with us. But that is beside the point!) So, they point their radio telescope dishes to the sky and try to pick up signals. They get a lot of random noise from all the things that are going on in outer space, but they know at once that it’s just noise and not language. They’re hoping to get a succession of sounds from their radio telescopes that, when they analyse them in their computers, will show every characteristic feature of language—an ordered sequence of sounds rather than just random noise. Even if they don’t know at first what the language is saying, they’ll know it’s a language, because you can detect a language by the fact that there is a certain sophisticated order to the sounds.

So far they haven’t got this desired result, but on what grounds would they decide that it came from some intelligent being in outer space? The answer is, language or information. Our only experience is that language comes from an intelligent personality, which was the view held by Carl Sagan, who was an atheist, and others.

Why then don’t these scientists apply their logic? If the DNA within our cells, in all its marvellous design, cannot be by chance; if it is a code, a language carrying information that controls conception, the growth of a foetus in the womb, the birth and life of a human being; and if that information is passed on to succeeding generations—does it not by analogy force one to the conclusion that it must have come from an intelligent being? Why don’t the atheists acknowledge the force of their own argument? Ah, but the only intelligent being that you could possibly ascribe it to would be an almighty creator.

My fellow Christians, we needn’t be ashamed of the first chapter of Genesis as an account of creation. Far from being some antiquated myth, it lifts up its face to the most modern scientific findings and proclaims that the evidence of the DNA structure in our cells and its function come from an intelligent source, a creator. That has implications for every one of us, of course, which I take to be obvious.

When God said it

What else shall we learn from this account in Genesis? Notice this small detail. Whereas each of the six days in chapter 1 is introduced by the phrase, ‘And God said’, on two days the phrase is repeated. On day three it occurs twice; first in verses 9 to 10 and then in verses 11 to 13. On day six it again occurs twice; first in verses 24 to 25 and then in verses 26 to 31.

That is very significant. We see that on day three, the first part of the day is still dealing with the creation of inanimate, lifeless things, as was the case in days one and two. But then, halfway through day three, it turns from the creation of inanimate things to the creation of animate, vegetable life. Notice at that point, there is another ‘And God said’. You do not just evolve from the inanimate to the animate by permutation of the genes; it requires another divine input of information.

Similarly on the sixth day, and even more to the point, the first ‘And God said’ brings forth the terrestrial animals. They’re living things (animate), of course. But on this day God also created man and woman. You’ll notice here that there is not just one ‘And God said’ but two. Human beings did not just evolve out of animals by some chance permutation of the genes; it required another divine input of information. DNA being so sophisticated as it is, the idea that mere chance or accident could add this information, as evolutionary theory contends, is nonsensical. If you wrote a letter to your daughter, and the postman left it sitting out in the rain, and the rain spoiled the writing, would that accident increase the information you wanted to send to her? That would be nonsense, wouldn’t it? If there is a bridge at all between animals and human beings, it is with regard to their bodies—stomachs and other organs and the like. But a human being is a separate creature, the creation of which required a separate input of divine creative information.

The pinnacle of creation

I pointed out already that God didn’t create the universe all at once; he created it in stages. And when we read about what was done on each of the successive days, we notice that things are obviously getting more and more complicated as the days go by. It’s not just repetition, therefore; it’s an ascending scale of complexity. When you come to day six, you come to the pinnacle of that ascending scale. And the pinnacle, by God’s grace, is the creation of man and woman. I’ll allow you to puff your chest out a little bit, if you want to!

Man and woman made in the image of God

How did the idea get into people’s heads that God is against humankind? They say, ‘If you listen to him, he will make your life a misery, stifle your intellect and cheat you of the pleasures that otherwise you could have had’. It was he who made our very bodies that experience the pleasures. According to Scripture, he made man (the human being, male and female) not as a slave. Rather, God said, ‘Let us make man [male and female] in our image, after our likeness’ (Gen 1:26).

What does it mean, that man and woman were made in God’s image? In the context, the first thing we are told is that God gave man and woman dominion over creation: over its vegetation, animal life, bird life and fish life. They were made as God’s viceroys, God’s representatives to the animal world. That’s a tremendous thing, isn’t it? God doesn’t come down and tie your infant’s shoelaces, does he? He’s given to parents the awesome responsibility of representing God to their children.

Of course, the New Testament will indicate that, being made in the image of God, human beings are not just biological machines. They are to resemble God in his moral character and spiritual being. We have to remember that with our two eyes we have never seen a perfect human being, because early on, between creation and the present, there came the fall. But it still remains true that human beings are made in the image of God. That’s why Scripture says you must not kill; you must not murder a human being. Why not? If your television doesn’t work and you are exasperated to the last degree, go ahead and kick it, if you must; smash its glass and be done with it. Nobody will take you to court, because it’s only a machine. But suppose your next-door neighbour irritates you to the last degree, why shouldn’t you kick him in the midriff and have done with him as well? The reason is that human beings are made in the image of God, and to attack the viceroy of the sovereign is to attack the sovereign. In our visits to Russia we gently tried to remind the Marxist Russians, if Stalin had believed that men and women were made in the image of God perhaps he wouldn’t have killed millions of them just to suit his political theories, which in the end have proved to be foolish in the extreme. This is important, isn’t it? This is not just a legend.

The organization of creation

As we come to the end of this particular study, there is one more feature in this first creation story that I wish to draw attention to. This first account of creation has to do not merely with creation, strictly so called, but with organization.


1	Gen 1:5	Evening and morning = one day	day = 24 hours
		He called the light Day	day = 12 hours of daylight
		He called the darkness Night	night = 12 hours of darkness
2	Gen 1:8	He called the firmament Heaven
3	Gen 1:10	He called the dry land Earth
		(yet in v. 1 earth = the whole planet)
		He called the gathering of the waters Seas

You’ll notice a repeated feature of this first account, namely, God calling things by various names. On day one, God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. . . . God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night (vv. 3–5). In verse 8, he made the firmament, the atmosphere (space, in all probability); and he called the firmament Heaven. And then in verse 10, he called the dry land Earth, and he called the gathering of the waters Seas.

I want to pose a question: why did he give them these extra names? Why didn’t he just leave them as they were? For instance, he called the light Day. Why not just leave it as ‘light’? And he called the darkness Night: why did he do that? Why call the firmament Heaven? Wasn’t ‘firmament’ a jolly good name to start with? And why call the dry land Earth? Why not leave it as ‘dry land’? Why call the gathering of the waters Seas? Why not just leave it as the ‘gathering of the waters’? The point is, of course, that this is part of God’s organization. Not merely his creating; but his organizing of our planet within the universe, and therefore, our life on our planet.

He called the light Day

Let me call attention now to the fact that when he called the light Day in verse 5, it means that in this verse, day is being used in two different senses. There was evening and there was morning one day. Day here means twenty-four hours. ‘He called the light Day’, meaning when we have daylight, which is roughly twelve hours, and certainly in the Middle East it would be around that. So, ‘day’ can mean twenty-four hours, or it can mean just the twelve hours or so when there is daylight. He called the twelve hours of darkness Night, so roughly twelve hours of Night and twelve hours of Day make up one day.

You say, ‘That’s a little bit confusing. We didn’t come here to be confused like that.’

But we use the same idiom, don’t we? I say to you, ‘I believe your Aunt Jemima is coming to visit you next week.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘What day is she coming?’

‘On Thursday.’

‘I see. Is she coming by day or by night?’

‘She’s flying in at night.’

So she’s coming on Thursday but flying at night. Thursday is twenty-four hours long. We call it Thursday and know it’s divided into two parts—the daylight and the darkness. And we call the daylight day and the darkness night.

This is the lighting system of our world. Don’t say it’s unimportant. The basic necessity for human life and existence is comprised of two things, light and heat, and without these life would be impossible. To repeat: the absolute number one necessity for human life on our planet is to have a source of heat and a source of light. How has God organized it? He’s organized it such that every day of our existence, in the sense of every day for twenty-four hours, we are given light for roughly twelve hours, but not for the whole twenty-four. Then we’re given darkness. We know how it is, because our light source is the sun up in the sky, and our little planet Earth is constantly rotating around it. So, for roughly twelve hours in the day, the planet twizzles us around into the light of the sun, and then, whether we’re ready for it or not, we are twizzled out of it and put in the dark. The light doesn’t cease to exist when we’re in the dark. It’s still there, but God has organized it so that we are rationed for light.

You say, ‘Whatever has God done that for?’

Well, that’s a very good question to ask—what is the purpose of the organization?

Let me tell you a story. In my student days, I was walking down a road in Cambridge with a couple of my friends. One was a very learned mathematician, and the other was a psychologist. And we fell to discussing the difference between the question ‘how’ and the question ‘why’. The psychologist said there was a very important difference between the two, and the mathematician agreed. But the psychologist felt that the mathematician hadn’t really understood the point; so to illustrate it he pointed to the street lighting, which was amber-coloured (the latest thing in those days), and asked the mathematician, ‘Why are those lights amber?’

The mathematician began with words that took a long while to get out of his mouth because they were so complicated. He spoke about the chemicals, the electricity and I don’t know what else. Neither of us understood it. When he had finished, the psychologist said, ‘Yes, that’s interesting, but that’s not why the lights are amber; that’s how they’re amber. The reason why the lights are amber is because the city council decided that amber lighting is the best way to light the road.’

Why has God arranged our lighting system the way he has? Don’t say he couldn’t do it any other way; he could have made us like some of the fish in the deep sea with lights in our foreheads. God has arranged it so that we get this number one necessity that we need—the light and heat from the sun. Its source is roughly ninety million miles outside our world, and every day we are made to feel our dependence on that source outside of our world.

Our Lord Jesus was moved on one occasion to use that physical fact as a parable. He was announcing to his disciples that he was about to journey up to Jerusalem, and the disciples tried to dissuade him, saying, ‘If you go there, the Jews will kill you’ (see John 11:7–8). Prudence would suggest that he should not go. In his answer, our Lord first appealed by way of a parable to the lighting system of our world. He said, ‘Are there not twelve hours in the day? If anyone walks in the day, he does not stumble, because he sees the light [the sun] of this world. But if anyone walks in the night, he stumbles, because’—and to translate our Lord literally—‘the light is not in him’ (John 11:9–10).

It is a very elementary but absolutely basic observation, isn’t it? The light isn’t in us, ladies and gentlemen. The number one necessity for life is not even in our planet. It’s not within our reach nor within our control—it’s outside of us, outside of our planet, roughly ninety million miles away. Why has God arranged it like that? We may be God’s viceroys on this planet, but we had better observe on what terms we hold that position. We may have been given dominion over the planet and, in that sense, wield power in the name of God; yet we are taught every day of the week, if we have the sense to see it, that we’re not independent. We’re not autocrats; the physical light that we need is not in us. It’s outside of us, and we’re helplessly dependent on it.

And this is true not only of the physical light but, at the deeper level, of the moral and spiritual light that we need to find our way through life properly. That light, ladies and gentlemen, is also not in us. ‘It is not in man who walks,’ says Scripture, ‘to direct his steps’ (Jer 10:23). That is the number one basic lesson that each of us must learn: we’re dependent on God our creator—helplessly dependent on him from the very first physical conditions for our life to the necessary guidance and wisdom that we might live life aright.

He called the land Earth and the waters Seas

We see also that God called the land Earth and the waters Seas. The situation at that time was that the earth was completely enveloped by water. Then God spoke and he gathered the waters together into one place, and he let the dry land appear (Gen 1:9). He called the dry land Earth. That’s interesting, because Earth is the name also given to the whole of the planet. ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth’ (1:1). So Earth is used to describe both the planet itself and the bit of it that we can walk on—the dry land. The other bit of the planet is the Seas. Therefore, we’re not altogether free to walk just wherever we like on Earth.

You say, ‘Yes, but we’ve invented ships.’

And aeroplanes, for that matter! But you can’t walk very far on water, can you? And I’ll tell you something else about these Seas: ultimately they’re not in our control either. Many of the ancients had a great fear of the sea as they saw the raging tempest come rolling to the shore. They wondered if one day the sea would come rushing in over the land. In those primitive days they didn’t quite understand what kept the sea within its bounds, that it didn’t come and overflow them. The psalmist expressed gratitude to God, who has given the sea its decree that it should not exceed its bounds (see Ps 104:6–9).

But, ladies and gentlemen, mere common sense and observation will tell us that we didn’t build this earth, and our very existence depends on those seas being properly controlled. We’re now beginning to think about the warming of the atmosphere—global warming. If the earth tilted just a little bit on its axis and the ice caps melted, we couldn’t stop the seas from rushing in. Many of the leading capital cities would be submerged and life could be wiped out, if the tilt of the earth was altered significantly. It isn’t we who control this. Oh, how loudly does the organization of our planet tell us that we need water: the major part of the planet is water. We need it for human survival, but we can’t control it. Only the Creator’s control keeps it in its place.

He called the firmament Heaven

And then we see that God called the firmament Heaven. That was a funny name, if the Lord won’t mind my saying it in my ignorance. Why did he call the firmament—the atmosphere and then space beyond it—Heaven? Didn’t he know that Heaven would become the word we use to describe God’s dwelling place, where God is? Why did he call our atmosphere Heaven? Why didn’t he just leave its name as ‘firmament’? It has a curious result. I don’t know if you’ve ever been able to fly outside in space somewhere and have a look back to see what we must all look like to somebody miles out in space with a big enough telescope to see us. They’d see this round ball, Earth, and all around its surface are these human beings with their heads sticking out into space. It would look like an apple or an orange with cloves put in all the way around. It would be funny-looking, wouldn’t it? When you stand up, do you know that only the soles of your feet are on Earth? Where is the rest of you in this terminology? We are so made that gravity keeps us on this planet; but when we stand up, only the soles of our feet are on Earth and the rest of us is poking out into what is here called Heaven.

You say, ‘That’s merely a play on words, isn’t it?’

No. Where did early mankind begin to gain awareness that, while we were made to live on Earth, we were also made for another world? In order to live on Earth properly and survive, we must have contact not only with the Heaven around us in the sense of the atmosphere that we breathe, but we need to have a relationship with that other heaven and the God of heaven.

He made the sun, moon and stars

And finally, we see that on day four of creation God made the sun, moon and stars. He made them ‘for signs and for seasons, and for days and years’ (see vv. 14–16). Once more, it is not merely their creation; it is more to the point to observe the function that the sun and moon and stars were meant to hold for us. Doubtless, in the universe itself, they have other functions, but they are there for our guidance. Because the astronomers have plotted all the information and we can have it in our diaries, we often forget the need to keep looking to the heavens. But in the ancient world a farmer would constantly have to watch the sky. How would he keep track of time? How would he know when one year ended and another had begun? How would he know that a mild November wasn’t April, when he should be starting sowing the April barley or something? If you read the ancient books on farming, the directions are: ‘When you see such and such a constellation rising with the sun, or just before the sun, that is the time to start sowing your seed’. The early mariners, who went in their boats from the east to the new world in the west performing amazing feats of navigation in their day, were also guided by the constellations. It was absolutely vital.

What is the organization of creation telling us? For the guidance we need to go about our daily lives, to find our way and to organize our activities, we have to look outside our world for the signs that God has given us. He gave them to us also for days and for years—the days pass and the years come around. We now know about the circling of the earth around the sun, which gives us the variety of constellations at any one time in the night sky. The very revolution of our planet and the signs in the sky tell us that we’re moving on, and the years go by. Sir and Madam, you and I have seen a lot of circlings of the moon, many a circling of the years, and they’re going fast. Where are they leading us? This is a temporary world. Thank God for him who, being God our creator, visited our planet and said as he walked among us, ‘I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life’ (John 8:12).

May God give us good understanding of his word.

Questions

We have two very interesting, very thoughtful and, in their way, profound questions. The first of them reads like this:

Proof of a creator

#If we had access to all the information within the cosmos, would this prove that there is a creator?*

Now that’s a very interesting and profound question, because, in the first place, at the heart of it is this word ‘prove’, which carries different meanings in different situations. For instance, you can prove a mathematical theorem: one and one make two. You can prove it by mathematical logic. Given your presuppositions and your numeral system, then one and one make two, and five times five make twenty-five. So you can prove things by mathematical logic. Philosophical things have to be proved by logic as far as we can; but then, in all logical systems you have to have your axioms. You have to start believing something before you can prove anything. Let me demonstrate to you what that means.

Suppose I say to you, ‘A is true’ (whatever A is.)

You say, ‘Prove it.’

So I quote B to prove A.

Then you say, ‘Prove B’.

So, I say, ‘C—C proves B and B proves A’.

But you say, ‘I don’t believe C either’.

If you had to prove everything, you would never prove anything; it would be an infinite regress, as they call it, and you would never stop anywhere. Any sensible system of philosophy will tell you that you’ll have to start with axioms that you can’t prove, but you assume them to be true because they seem reasonable. You cannot prove everything in the universe by sheer logic, but once you have the axioms you can begin to prove your premise. So it is with God himself.

Moreover, the mathematician Kurt Gödel developed a theorem in 1930 that startled the mathematicians and philosophers of his day. Gödel proved mathematically that in any closed system (i.e. where you can’t bring information in from the outside) you will never be able to prove everything within that system by the laws within the system.²⁰ That shocked the scientific world at the time. Because, if our universe is a closed system and you can’t bring anything in from the outside, you will never finally prove everything within the universe. So this matter of proof is a very profound thing.

Forgive me for appearing to make it a little difficult, but we shall have to face this if we want to be rigorous in our thinking. That’s why Christians say that if you want to explain this universe, ultimately you won’t explain it unless you’re prepared to go outside of it and bring in the evidence of a creator.

But now let’s think of another level. If I said to a married man, ‘Prove that your wife loves you’, what kind of proof would he offer? I don’t suppose he’d offer me a sum in arithmetic, or tell me, ‘She allows me to keep £5 pocket money a week’, or something. How would you prove that your wife loves you?

‘Oh,’ you say, ‘she darns my socks and she feeds me well.’

So I say, ‘She’s only doing it in the hope that one of these days you’ll die and she’ll inherit your fortune and marry somebody else’.

How would you prove that I’m not correct? What kind of proof would suffice? In that circumstance, I suggest to you that you can’t prove somebody loves you by mathematical formula, Q.E.D. What you’d have to do is to survey the evidence and then take what people call a leap of faith. Faith in the Bible is a response to evidence. So, you’ve known your good wife for years, you know the way she behaves and you think you know her character, her lovingkindness and all the rest of it. You cannot prove it one hundred per cent, but on the basis of the evidence you take the leap of faith and trust your dear wife.

When it comes to proving that God exists, it’s not a question of a mathematical formula or of an equation in chemistry, for God is a person. ‘There is evidence’, says the Bible. There is evidence in the cosmos around us—we’ve been discussing some of it last night and tonight. Suppose we had all the information in the cosmos: that would be a colossal amount of evidence that would point to a creator. What little we understand of the universe points to a creator, a designer. But when the Bible says that the invisible things from the creation of the world are seen, namely his divinity and almighty power (see Rom 1:20), it doesn’t say that creation shows us the love of God. Creation also shows us earthquakes and volcanoes, and I take evidence for a designer to be overwhelming. But knowing God is not merely accepting the result of some logical proof. God is a person, and if you and I are ever going to know God, God will have to let himself be known by us. In prayer, our Lord Jesus said:

I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children. (Matt 11:25)

Why is that? Well, God is a person, as I’m a person and you are too. If you wanted to know me, you could put me through a machine that would analyse my blood and bones, or use encephalography to examine my brain, or dissolve me into atoms and all this kind of thing. You could know a colossal amount about me, but you’ll never know me unless I am prepared to let you know me.

You see, if it’s a question of getting to know an atom, that’s simple if you’ve got a moderately high IQ. Put the atom in a cyclotron, speed things up to nearly the speed of light, bash the charged particles into the atom, and the poor old atom has to give up its secrets. It’s only a thing. You don’t get to know a person that way, and God is the supreme person. If we’re ever to know him, it won’t be simply as the proof of a logical equation. There is evidence that he exists, that he is the designer; but he has made himself known to us through his word, spoken and written (we call it the Bible), and supremely through his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. If we humble ourselves and come to God through Christ, God will let himself be known by us.

Now, finally, the question says, ‘If we had access to all the information within the cosmos . . .’. When our Lord was here on earth, according to the Gospel of John he did some spectacular signs. For instance, on one occasion he miraculously multiplied five loaves and two small fish and fed a multitude, giving them a sign that he was God become man, the Creator (see John 6). The Bible tells us of an interesting thing that happened. The next day, the crowd came seeking him. What for? Well, because they had a free meal yesterday and they wanted another one today. They had seen the physical miracle. And our Lord said to them, ‘Sorry, no more bread today. You seek me, not because you saw signs, but simply because your stomachs got filled’ (see v. 26). What they should have done was to take the evidence of this miracle right in front of them, that their stomachs were full of the bread and fish, and ask themselves, ‘But who did it? Whose hands broke that bread? Who is this?’ The bread and fish ought to have led them to ask about him and whether they could get to know him.

If you had all the information in the cosmos, it would point overwhelmingly at the evidence for the existence of God. But that wouldn’t be enough, would it? You would need to come to God, hear him, and get to know him by responding to his voice and word. I’m no authority on the topic, but that’s how I believe men eventually decide to marry their wives. They weigh them up, as their wives also weigh them up. Each person watches the other’s ways: their behaviour, their disposition and their character. They listen to what people say about them, and consider all the other evidence about them. Then, of course, there has to be that personal relationship, the posing of the question from both sides, and the acceptance of the person. It seems to me, that’s how it is with God.

Sorry for that long sermon. I promise not to be so long on the next question, but I wanted to try and be fair to the question because this matter of proof is something that often gets in the way of our coming in simple faith to God through Christ.

Scientific beliefs and Scripture

Should Scripture be used to establish our scientific beliefs, or should our scientific beliefs influence our interpretation of Scripture?

Well, I think it’s not an either/or, but both.

Should Scripture be used to establish our scientific beliefs? Well, as far as I know you can’t use Scripture to decide what’s inside an atom or what isn’t. You can’t use Scripture to decide how the heart works in the body; you have to find that out by doing experiments. So, when it comes to the conquest of nature, God has left us to develop nature. The people who discovered electricity didn’t discover it because they happened to read about it in the Bible, did they? Of course not. Nor did the people who discovered the principles of the internal combustion engine. God leaves us to find out how the universe works, and to administer it for him.

But there are certain things in Scripture that should be the basis of our scientific endeavours, and that is true on both sides of the fence. People who talk much in support of evolution very often don’t accept that there is a God. They say that they believe in evolution because it is science. Very often they are mistaking science for something much more important. They think that science is simply science, which deals with the facts. In other words, you don’t first have to believe anything when you come to science; you just do science, and science delivers the facts. ‘Whereas, the Bible,’ they say, ‘is all about faith. You have first of all to believe.’ And many scientists overlook the fact that science is built on faith. Even the science of the most hard-headed atheistic evolutionist is based on faith or philosophy. They start from what philosophically is termed materialism, and their presupposition is that there is no God; but that too is a faith.

You’ve asked me about proving that there is a God. Well, let me tell you, you can’t prove that there isn’t one. Any scientist worth his salt will tell you that you can’t prove there’s no God. The atheistic scientist starts with the assumption that there is no God. Einstein himself said, ‘Of course, science is built on faith’. Science is built on faith because, if you’re going to do science, first of all you’ve got to start with the belief that the universe runs according to law. There would be no science if the sun did different things every day of the week, every week of the year, and what you observed today was not something acting in accordance with law but rather some random act. You have to suppose that the universe is governed by law before science is even worth starting.

Science is built on faith, and that should be heralded abroad, particularly to our younger folks. The Bible will insist that the true way to do science is, first of all, to believe that God exists—that is the basis. But to repeat what I’ve said, even atheists, when they come to do science, base their science on their philosophical presuppositions. In other words, philosophy is more important than science, even at the level of academic discipline. Atheists have their own philosophy and base their science on their philosophy, which is materialism.

Christians should and do base their science on their belief in God. And because they believe in God, they expect the universe to be ordered and run according to the laws set by the Creator. That doesn’t excuse them from doing science. But their scientific endeavours are encouraged by the fact that they believe in a creator who established the universe and made it to run according to his divinely appointed laws. The universe is worth studying, and the more we study it, the more we shall find that it runs according to law. So, that’s my answer. I hope it makes some sense.

Ladies and gentlemen, once again I’m sorry to have kept you so long, but you ask such interesting and profound questions. I’m a little bit afraid you’re trying to test me, as to whether my basic approach to philosophy and science is sound. I hope it has met with your approval so far.

Sermon 2 Footnotes

¹⁶ Dr Gooding was showing a series of slides. Nowadays there are many websites that give detailed images.

¹⁷ Cosmic Life Force, London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1988, p. 134.

¹⁸ Cosmic Life Force, p. 135.

¹⁹ Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

²⁰ On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems, Monatshefte für Mathematik (1931).

3. Consequences of the Fall

Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, we will study the second section of the book of Genesis, in which we are given the second account of creation. As I have said, the majority view is that there are two accounts of creation in the book of Genesis. For my part I hold that there are three, and they do not contradict each other. Like the four Gospels in the New Testament, which give us a four-fold view of our blessed Lord Jesus—his life, ministry, death and resurrection, so the three accounts of creation in the book of Genesis give us a three-fold view of creation. Each in its own way brings out the implications of the creation for all subsequent generations; and for us too, who live at this remote age in the history of the world.

While most students of Genesis agree therefore, that there is this second account of creation, beginning with chapter 2 verse 4, it is normally held that this account comprises the rest of chapter 2 and the whole of chapter 3. Tonight I want to advance the idea that the second account of creation certainly comprises the rest of chapter 2, from verse 4 onwards, and the whole of chapter 3; but I want to add that it also comprises chapter 4. In a word, the second account deals not only with the creation of man and of woman, but then, considering the terms upon which they were created, it follows their history through the temptation and the fall of mankind and the subsequent history consequent upon that fall, bringing out the sad consequences of what was induced when man and woman disobeyed their Creator.

The theme of the ground in the second creation story

I would like, therefore, to begin by demonstrating how these three chapters in Genesis hang together. Let us notice, in the first place, how the word ground occurs time and time again, and occurs at the crucially most important point in each of the three chapters. I do not know what particular translation of the Bible you may have in your hand, if you have one. You may find, on occasion, that your translation uses some other word instead of ‘ground’, but the verses I shall point you to carry the same Hebrew word and are rightly translated ‘ground’.

Let’s, first of all, consider the origin of man’s body:

Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. (Gen 2:7)

Now let’s put that in its context:

When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground—then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. . . . The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. (Gen 2:5–9, 15)

So, at this crucial point in chapter 2—the creation of man and the purpose for which he was created—the word ground stands central to the message.

Then let’s go on to chapter 3. We come there to the sad story of the fall of man and then to the curse that was pronounced. Let’s read what God said to Adam:

Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it’, cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return. (Gen 3:17–19)

Then the LORD God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live for ever—’ therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. (3:22–23)

So, at this second crucial point in the story—man’s fall—the word ground is once more central to the message that is being conveyed.

But then let us notice how it continues in chapter 4. We have just read of the curse upon the ground because of Adam and his disobedience. Now we read of Cain’s rebellion against God and of the curse that was pronounced upon him in consequence of his rebellion:

‘And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.’ Cain said to the LORD, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.’ Then the LORD said to him, ‘Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’ And the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD . . . (4:11–16)

The verses that stand in chapter 4 at the crisis point of the story—the curse now pronounced upon Cain—have to do likewise with the ground. But now notice the difference between the curse pronounced upon Adam and this curse pronounced upon Cain. With Adam, it was, ‘cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you.’ That is to say, Adam was to be allowed to carry on with the purpose for which he had been created. He had been created to till the ground, and, though now he had disobeyed his Lord and master, he was not turned out of his job, so to speak. He was allowed to continue the purpose for which he had been made and to till the ground; but now what had been delightful work before would be mixed with hard labour and toil. ‘When you till the ground, it shall bring forth thorns and thistles. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken’ (see 3:18–19).

But when Cain defied God and rebelled against him, the curse pronounced upon him, as you perceive now, was much more severe. Now it would be useless for him to try and carry on tilling the ground; the purpose for which man had been made was removed from him. ‘When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength’ (4:12). ‘You might as well get out, Cain’, said God. And Cain saw the point at once. ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden’ (vv. 13–14). Well, he had to see that, by being dismissed thus from the purpose for which God had originally created mankind, life for him was now without purpose. And we read, ‘Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD’ (v. 16).

So much, therefore, for looking at the way these three chapters hang together. Let’s just, for the moment, sum up this second account of creation and the unifying theme between chapters 2, 3, and 4.

We have seen that the unifying theme is the ground: man’s body was made out of the ground (2:5–7; 3:19); man’s function, as originally created, was to till the ground (2:5, 15; 3:23); the curse upon Adam was ‘cursed is the ground because of you’ (3:17–19, 23); and the curse upon Cain was ‘you are cursed from the ground’ (4:11).

We noticed the difference between those two curses. To repeat, with Adam, it is the ground that is cursed: ‘cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall it bring forth for you’. But when Cain is cursed, it is differently worded: ‘you are cursed from the ground’. It is not now that when he works the ground, it will be hard work, and it shall bring forth thorns and thistles; but, ‘it shall no longer yield to you its strength’. So he is told by God, ‘You might as well stop the thing, Cain. You might as well get out.’ And Cain said, ‘you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden’. ‘Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD’.

And the writer of the Epistle of Jude in the New Testament has perceived the point of the story. He says that the heretics, the false teachers in his own day, were following the ‘way of Cain’ (see v. 11), for they, like Cain, had gone away from the presence of the Lord.

Now these are solemn things, and we shall not get around to talking tonight about those two curses.

A description of what life means

Let us, rather, sit back tonight and enjoy ourselves, if that isn’t wickedness. Why not, once in a while, sit back, fold your hands if need be—don’t close your eyes, but fold your hands—and join with me in the celebration of the wonder of human life. What does it mean to be human and what is this many-splendoured, multi-coloured, multi-faceted thing, which is human life? Some of us have been living it for so long that we are no longer surprised by all the wonders that are inherent in our physical life. And then some of us who know the salvation of the Lord are all agog with eternal life, which God has already given us, and the glorious and certain hope that one day we shall have a new body. It will not be like Adam’s body, but like the resurrected and glorified body of our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, we praise God and look forward with a living hope, born of the resurrection of the body of Christ from the dead.

But while all that is so, my brothers and sisters, don’t let us forget what a superbly wonderful thing even our physical life is here and now in this world, and daily praise our Creator for the wonderful way in which he has made us.

What is life? In these three chapters of Genesis we’re going to hear about death; but you will not understand death unless you know what life is. So, let’s start with the early verses, and I will put up a list of things for you to follow as we go along.

What life means

· A material body and a non-material soul

· Function, employment, work

· Aesthetic sense

· Moral sense

· Ability to sin and moral responsibility to God

· Relationship to animals and the faculty of language

· Man-woman relationship and our relationship to the spirit world

· Music, metal-work, lyric

A material body and a non-material soul—Genesis 2:7

First of all, there are the basic component parts of a human person: the material body, and the immaterial part—the soul. We are told that God made the body out of the dust of the ground. That’s very interesting because, if you had only read the first story of creation you might have supposed when God said, ‘Let us make man’, that in a split second a man appeared, fully formed, made out of nothing. It says, ‘Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, . . .”. So, God created man . . . male and female he created them. And God blessed them’ (1:26–28).

But the second story fills in the details that the first story didn’t tell us. That is, God didn’t make the human body out of nothing; he made Adam’s body out of the dust of the ground, out of pre-existing material. Again, that’s very interesting because the biochemists will tell us all sorts of wonderful things about the chemistry of the body. For instance, for a human body to be possible, we must have a plentiful supply of carbon, which is a very heavy element, and other heavy elements. If I’ve understood the chemists aright, those elements can’t be reproduced here on earth—we can’t make them. So God made the elements to start with, and then he made Adam from the dust of the ground. As far as that goes, we’re so much stuff. Excuse me for so describing you, my good friend, but we’re so much stuff, a collection of the dust of the ground—marvellously put together, of course.

But we’re not just so much stuff, are we? For God ‘breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul’ (2:7 kjv). God breathed into his nostrils the animating principle, the life-giving principle, that should take hold of this material body and control it, be its life and use all its faculties and facilities. Man became, therefore, not a living body but a living soul.

God-willing, on another occasion we shall speak in more detail about man’s composition—he is not only flesh but he is also spirit. But tonight, we notice the dual substance: man’s body being made of the dust of the ground, and then the God-inbreathed, life-giving principle that caused man to become a living soul.

The scientists say that they can’t find a soul inside us. Well, of course they can’t; what instrument would you use to have a look at the soul? But I’m going to submit to you that you know you have one. You only have to look inside, and by intuition you are aware of yourself. I dare say that at times you distinguish between yourself and your body.

‘Oh, my body hurts,’ you say.

Who is talking? Is it your body talking? When you say, ‘My body’, who is the ‘my’?

‘Well,’ you say, ‘that’s me.’

Yes, of course it’s you.

You say, ‘I remember when I was four years old.’

You do? And you’re eighty-four now? Marvellous! It’s the same you, isn’t it?

‘Well, yes,’ you say. ‘The whole body has changed, and I have learned a lot and grown through experience, but I am the same person.’

Marvellous, isn’t it?

The scientists tell us that the average age of the cells in our bodies is seven years, so the cells in your body change, but yet you’re the same person. Of course it’s the same you, because you are not just your body; there’s you, yourself—the living soul. The Bible goes on to tell us how the soul can exist apart from the body, and one day it will. And if you are a believer, one day your soul shall be clothed with an altogether superior body. This present body, says the Bible, is a soulish body—the kind of body that Adam had. It is glorious and wonderful, but the body we shall have at the resurrection shall be infinitely more glorious; it will be a spiritual body (see 1 Cor 15:35–57).

You say, ‘What will a spiritual body be like?’

Don’t let the terms confuse us. When the Bible says that in the resurrection, believers will have a spiritual body, it doesn’t mean a body made of spirit.

If I were to ask you, ‘What kind of car have you got—is it diesel or petrol?’, you might say, ‘I have a petrol car’. Does that mean your car is made of petrol? Of course not. But it’s got a petrol engine, so the force that keeps it going is petrol; but the engine isn’t made of petrol. And we shall have a spiritual body. It’s not that the body will be made of spirit, but rather that its life force shall not be soul but spirit.

While these are wonderful things, I mustn’t be tempted to go off into those wonders. We are talking tonight about the human life that we got from God’s creation through Adam and Eve, our forebears. So let’s continue on with that now.

Function, employment, work—Genesis 2:5, 15

Secondly, in the simple words of chapter 2 we notice the function for which man was made. The historians tell us that there were certain plants and things at the beginning that were not yet in the ground. They would require rainfall and eventually someone to tend them. So when the Lord made man out of the dust of the ground the first task he gave Adam was to keep the garden of Eden. That was his work. From time to time you may get burdened down with your daily work and wish it wasn’t so hard, but work was an original part of God’s idea for mankind. Of course, in those days it was a gentleman’s occupation. It didn’t yet entail the drudgery that we have known since the fall, even though some work at least is still interesting, if not exciting. It develops our energy, ingenuity and talent, does it not?

It was a wonderful day when God not only made man, but gave him work to do. We are told that God Almighty planted a garden in Eden, which shows us that the rest of the world wasn’t garden. I’d love to have been there when God planted the garden of Eden. He set it out with trees and plants; the animals came and went, and the rivers glided through it. What a magnificent thing it was! He put Adam there to keep it and guard it. The original commission of mankind, as given in the first creation story, was not merely that they should look after a garden, but that they should be viceroys over the whole planet. ‘Fill the earth and subdue it’, said God (1:28). God graciously gave them a little example of what they could do, and what they could make of Earth. ‘Look at this, Adam,’ says God, ‘isn’t it superb? See what can be made of it, if you put a little care, organization and artistry into it.’ Gardens are still wonderful things, aren’t they? They are not just ordinary, straight nature; they bring order—nature developed, farmed and manicured.

It was a lovely occupation for Adam, preparing mankind for going out into the planet at large to develop it. What a wonderful story man’s development of Earth has been. Living in our great modern age, we look back upon the long story and I hope you’re proud of it. Sometimes we can take a very gloomy view of modern science and technology, but then we look at our wristwatches, which are a fruit of technology, and our cars and radios and all the rest of it. We are delighted when we need to go to hospital and the surgeon knows the latest medical technology and theory, and uses all sorts of things to heal and perpetuate life. God meant us to develop the planet, so we mustn’t talk badly of modern technology and science. It’s part of developing the earth. I am filled with admiration for the scientists and technologists. For example, those who learned to master the sea, harness the wind and eventually discovered electricity. What a marvellous thing it was for mankind to be junior creators in fellowship with their Creator. Not creating things out of nothing, but working with the Creator as God’s viceroys and creatures to develop Earth in the way that he wanted it developed. It’s a magnificent career, isn’t it? Well, I hope you agree with me that it is.

You say, ‘I don’t like work; I’m looking forward to going to heaven. Oh, won’t it be wonderful, “When all my labours and trials are o’er, and I am safe on that beautiful shore”!’²¹

So, with all labour past and work done, you’re going to sit in a heavenly armchair, put your feet up on a heavenly footrest and never do a stroke of work again? If that were true, you might even get bored with heaven. You’ll not only work when you get home to heaven; you’ll work far more and far better than ever you did here. Surely you will.

God loves working. I say it with reverence, God doesn’t have to work to earn his living. Then why does he work? Why are there these billions and billions of galaxies out in space? Why does he do it? The only answer I can think of is that he wanted to do it. He enjoyed doing it, of course: they are expressions of his character.

‘At present, we do not see all things in subjection to [man] . . .’. Even though the fall has intervened God is persisting with his purpose. ‘But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honour because of the suffering of death’ (see Heb 2:8–9). One day everything shall be put under subjection to Christ, and in the great ages to come Christ will be in charge. The likes of you and me, who have been trained here to work according to God’s will, purposes and principles, will be privileged to join with him for all eternity in the administration of the new heavens and earth. That’s what gives meaning to our work here.

Our Lord Jesus said, ‘When you go to work, don’t you be like the Gentiles’.

Why not? What do the Gentiles do when they go to work?

‘They go to work,’ says Christ, ‘simply to seek food and clothes and the money to buy those things with. Don’t make that your first objective when you go to work.’

What am I to make my first objective when I go to work?

‘Seek first,’ says Christ, ‘the kingdom of God and his righteousness. That is, the rule of God in your life’ (see Matt 6:25–33). That’s what work is. God puts us to work so that he might train us to do his will and live according to his purpose. As we shall see, Adam was given conditions regarding how to go about his work, what to do and what not to do. It was of absolutely fundamental importance that he should seek God’s rule first and foremost. And it is still so with us, for it is in our daily work that we find the challenges and the lessons: Shall we be honest? Shall be truthful? Shall we not be lazy? Shall we be patient? If we go to work without these motives, we might still make a pile of money but we shall miss the whole point of work. The first point is to seek the rule of God in every detail of our lives and work, and thus build up a righteousness of character to prepare us for the great day when the Lord comes, when we have our spiritual bodies and join with him to administer the new heavens and the new earth for God.

Aesthetic sense—Genesis 2:8–9

And then, of course, mankind was given an aesthetic sense.

You say, ‘Where do you get that from?’

Well, look at verse 9:

And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

So, out of the ground the Lord God made trees to grow—every tree that was good to look at, and then good for food. I personally admire God’s preference of order. Which would you have put first: good for food or good to look at?

You say, ‘Be realistic, Mr Lecturer, food is our number one necessity. If you don’t have enough food to keep you alive, you can’t enjoy anything.’

So, you’d put food first? When I’m hungry I do too. But are potatoes the most important things in life? Or flowers? What would you say? Well, I think if a friend of yours was seriously ill in the hospital and you wanted to take him a little something, if you knew that other visitors had already brought five or six pounds of grapes would you take him a bag of potatoes?

‘Well, no,’ you say, ‘that wouldn’t help much.’

For their sheer beauty, maybe you would take him a bunch of flowers. He would just have to lie there and look at them, and perhaps their beauty would help to distract him from his pain. God could have made this place a utility world, just drab and functional. But not God! God loves beauty; he is beautiful. And when our Lord, the Creator incarnate, was here and conversing about other things, he had occasion to point to the flowers and say:

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (Matt 6:28–29)

That’s God’s idea of dress. I’m old and curmudgeonly and rancorous and all that; it’s been a long time since I was young. But I sometimes think that since the 1960s, some young people have delighted in being scruffy instead of dressing beautifully. Don’t take it as too bitter a criticism, put it down to my silver hairs; but as far as I can gather from God and our blessed Lord, God loves people to look beautiful. He would never make you look ugly and bad.

God put trees in the garden that were good to look at. What other use did they have? I don’t know that they had any; their chief thing was that they were good to look at, for God loves beauty. What kind of life would it be if you were born in a dungeon with no light, just four walls, nothing but blackness and no beauty? Would you call that life? No, of course you wouldn’t. Physical life is one thing, but there are many other dimensions to life.

Moral sense—Genesis 2:15–17

And then we notice another thing about mankind. They were given the potential knowledge of moral values. You see, among the trees God made, he made the tree of the knowledge of good and evil:

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’ (Gen 2:16–17)

These are wonderful verses, for they tell us one of the distinctions between human beings and animals. Animals have no potential ability to understand moral principles. You can train your dog to do various things and not to do others. For instance, you can train him not to go next door and steal the weekend joint of beef off the kitchen table, by disciplining him every time he gives the appearance of going anywhere near the neighbour’s house. His behaviour is based on memory. But what happens if you try and explain to your dog why it is morally wrong to steal the next-door neighbour’s meat? ‘It’s morally wrong, Fido!’ I wonder what hope of success you would have by talking to your Fido like that? He has no moral sense, nor does he have the potential to develop it. Human beings were made with that potential, weren’t they? That is the marvellous thing about you: you are a morally responsible being.

At a series of lectures I was giving, I met a Christian psychiatrist who was in charge of a ward in the psychiatric hospital. He was renowned in that part of the world for the success rate he had in treating patients. At the conference with fellow Christians, he told us how important moral responsibility is. He said, ‘In the courts, the judges and so forth often want me to say that the person who has just committed the crime is a bit psychologically disturbed, and therefore not responsible. That can be so in extreme cases, but not all. If a patient has a tantrum in my ward and breaks a window, I make them pay for it as part of their healing.’

We’ve been made with the capacity to shoulder moral responsibility because that’s part of what it is to be human and part of our healing. To say that people are not really morally responsible and they can’t help themselves—it’s all in their genes—is to reduce men and women to mere animals, or even cabbages. Yes, we have sinned, and because moral responsibility is a very big burden to bear we often run away from the guilt of our sin. But God is merciful and has provided the remedy for it. We can be freed from guilt through the sacrifice of Christ; but not to go out then and be morally irresponsible. Rooted in the love of God we grow, and we learn to shoulder moral responsibility through the abiding presence of the Holy Spirit, who teaches us how to live morally and please God.

Ability to sin and moral responsibility to God—Genesis 2:16–17

At the first, when God put man in the garden, there was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and God forbade Adam to take of it.

‘Why so,’ you say, ‘if God wanted him to be morally grown up?’

Well, precisely for that reason. When Adam and Eve were first created, they were as innocent as babies, weren’t they? A little baby hasn’t yet the concept of good and evil. Sometimes a young pre-teenager hasn’t enough concept of evil, so that when she goes outside, you say, ‘Be careful with whom you speak.’ Nowadays, it’s becoming more difficult in some great cities for parents to let their children walk to school. Children are innocent and don’t realize what evil there is around.

How would Adam and Eve ever come to be morally responsible and know what is good and what is evil? Well, as they could bear to learn them, they would get their first lessons and the basic principles from God himself and grow up morally. They would need to depend on God for his guidance, as your children depend on you in the days of their comparative innocence. You tell them what is good and what is evil, and if your children, as young children, were to despise you, your heart would be broken. They could throw off your authority, deciding for themselves what is good and evil, and go off into drugs and who knows what else, for they don’t have the ability to carry the knowledge that such things are evil and stop doing them. They can’t foresee that this unlawful pleasure will, in the end, result in tears and perhaps disease, and so they go their own way. It breaks your heart, doesn’t it, that they have to learn the hard way? God wanted to shelter man in his innocence from this, and so forbade him to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

That shows us another absolutely fundamental thing about human life. To be fully life, it has to be lived in relationship with God, and that relationship is bounded. Relationships that are not bounded are not relationships, are they? That’s why, sir, you have only one wife. At least, I hope you have only one, because if you had the same relationship with any woman you met throughout the world, it wouldn’t be what most people mean by a married relationship. And our relationship with God is bounded by his commands and prohibitions because he is our creator.

To put it crudely, if you get a car from a manufacturer with their instructions in it and you decide to ignore them—you fight them, do the very opposite of what they tell you and put sand in the petrol tank—well, carry on, but you are being exceedingly foolish. And, through his commands and prohibitions, God the creator has the right, the love and the kindness to lay down the boundaries of our relationship with him. In life, then, we are morally responsible and are meant to live in a relationship with God that is bound by his moral standards.

But notice another marvellous thing about God. God said to Adam, ‘You may surely eat of every tree, except this one. Don’t take it, because in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die’ (see 2:16–17). Notice what is implied in that. God forbade him to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but at the same time he gave Adam the power to do so, if that was his choice. God clearly forbade him to eat it, but he not only gave him the physical power to stretch out his hand and take it, but notice that no great flaming sword descended from heaven to cut off his hand. He was given the power to do it; and, what is more, God gave Adam what we call free will to disobey him. To repeat, he had no permission to eat the fruit of the tree, but he had a free choice.

I personally express my admiration for God that he would give me free will. I am not even six feet of clay, yet if I choose to I can go against almighty God. What an awesome, wonderful God he is.

There are some people who say, ‘Did God know that mankind would take that free will and abuse it?’

Yes, of course, he foreknew it.

‘Then why did he give us free will?’ they ask. ‘Wouldn’t this have been a better world if God had not given us free will, and made us so that we couldn’t transgress his command and just worked like clockwork or super-duper computers?’

But then, if God had made us like computers, look what would have been missing from human life. Moral responsibility would go out the window, wouldn’t it? If your computer goes wrong, disobeys your instructions and comes up with false results—such as ‘two and two make six’—and refuses to be corrected, you might smash it; but you wouldn’t summon it to court and find it guilty. You’d say, ‘Poor thing, you can’t blame it’. The computer was never morally responsible, because to be morally responsible you have to have free will. If you don’t have free will and have no choice in the matter, you can’t be blamed for doing wrong, nor credited for doing what is right.

But if we didn’t have free will, there’s something else that would be missing. Love would be impossible, wouldn’t it? Suppose you’re sitting in your lounge, drinking your after-dinner cup of coffee, and in walks your robot. Coming over to you, it puts its computerized arms around your neck and, in its curious voice, says, ‘I love you’. What would you do? You’d kick it in the shins, and say, ‘Don’t be so daft!’ But why would you say that?

‘Well, because it’s nonsense for a machine to say that it loves me. It doesn’t know what love is. It’s only a machine and someone programmed it to come in and say that. It doesn’t have any free choice.’

We love to be loved. I mean love in the deepest sense, not puppet love. But for love to be love in a fully human sense, it has to involve free choice. Oh, the wonder of God! He wants you to love him first, but he’ll not compel you like a machine to make you love him. The very gospel is couched in those terms, ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16). But what about those who won’t believe? God will do his utmost to save them, but in the end he will not remove their free will, not even to get them saved. Why won’t he? Because if you remove a person’s free will you’ve reduced them to something that is subhuman. As you’ll see from this story in Genesis, an integral part of what it means to be human is that God has given us free will.

Are you beginning to see what marvels we humans are? I’m not flattering you. We are made in the image of God, and that is true of you as a creature even before redemption has come. Marvellous!

Relationship to animals and the faculty of language—Genesis 2:19–20

Then God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone’. So he called the animals before Adam, and Adam named them (see 2:18–20). I find that very interesting, for the naming of things is a human characteristic.

At one stage in my career I worked under a professor of Latin, who was a linguist. At the beginning of one of his books he called attention to this passage in Genesis 2, to point out how this story of Adam naming the animals goes right to the heart of what human language is. Some people will try to tell you that human language evolved out of animal cries.

You say, ‘How is that?’

Well, imagine a little piglet that wandered off and came face to face with a lion. When it saw the lion the little piglet went, ‘Ooh’, and when that happened ever so many times all the other pigs knew that ‘Ooh’ meant that a lion was near. It was just a reaction to the sight of a lion. And some people will say that that’s how human language began. But if that’s so, it’s come a long way, for pigs have no word for ‘lion’ that I’ve ever heard.

What is the genius behind naming things? Well, it is a genius of invention to deliberately take an arbitrary sound and use it as a label for something. For instance, when those who speak English see a bit of wood coming out of the ground with branches and leaves on it, they say ‘tree’.

You say, ‘Why do they make that sound?’

Because they’ve chosen to use it as a label for that bit of wood. It is not an automatic reaction to seeing a tree, but a deliberate use of sound as a label for the thing. In other languages, they use a different label. The Romans would say arbor, the Greeks dendron, and the Hebrews ʿēts. It doesn’t matter which sound is used; it was the genius of thinking to use an arbitrary sound to indicate a thing that is the basis of language. God gave that possibility uniquely to human beings.

Modern science acknowledges this. For instance, Professor Noam Chomsky, an atheist and a Marxist, points out that, in his opinion, a language faculty is built into the human psyche that animals don’t have.²²

You say, ‘What does that mean?’

Well, whatever language you learned in childhood, you can only use it if, first of all, you have the logical idea of what that language expresses. It doesn’t matter if it’s Japanese, Celtic, Spanish, English or something else, if you don’t understand the logic, you won’t be able to express it in any language, nor understand it when the language is spoken to you. As distinct from animals, it is a fact that human youngsters, little toddlers, very soon begin to evidence the fact that they have an inbuilt language faculty, and it’s astonishing. Mother can say to five-year-old Johnnie, ‘If you’re good this afternoon, Mummy will buy you an ice cream for tea’. Johnnie understands it—not only that ice creams are not normally served for tea, but the logic of what is being said. It’s astonishing because what Mummy has now uttered is a hypothetical condition: ‘If you are good . . .’. Johnnie might not be good, but if he is good, on the basis of that hypothesis, he will get an ice cream. That’s high-powered logic, and Johnnie, at five years old, can understand it. If you were to say to your dog, ‘Now, Fido, if you are good this afternoon, you will get a bone for your supper’, it doesn’t register. Even if he could speak, the dog doesn’t have the logic to begin to make sense of it. Isn’t it marvellous that God has made us with this language facility?

In the context of Genesis, the story began by telling us that God was going to provide a helper for Adam, and goes on to tell how he made Eve—how charming she was, and how wonderful the institution of marriage is.

But let me keep to this matter of language for a little while. A lion is very limited if he wants to tell a lioness how marvellous she is—a grunt and a tap with his paw. But you should hear a young man telling his bride how wonderful she is—and he means it. What language he uses!

We all know what we mean when we say, ‘It’s only words’—words that are spoken without a deliberate meaning behind them. But never say of this book, the Bible, ‘It’s only words’. What do you mean, ‘only words’? Words are the high point of human communication. God has given to human beings a language facility, able to use words so that we might speak to him, who is ‘the Word’ (John 1:1). Straight from the mind and heart of God, we have these God-breathed words, and the Bible exhorts us that we are to take to ourselves words and come and speak to God. God’s love is not just an emotional thing; it is a matter of the will, of course, and of character. God has chosen to give us a language facility that he might also speak to us in words. And I say, and I believe it with all my heart, that all Scripture is given by inspiration of God (see 2 Tim 3:16). It is said of Mary that she sat at the Lord’s feet and heard his words (see Luke 10:39). Oh, what a marvellous thing it is, and shall be, that when we get home to glory we shall never cease to speak to and about our blessed Lord.

Man-woman relationship and our relationship to the spirit world (Genesis 2:18–25)

The relationship between man and woman as designed by God is what some people say is the pinnacle of human life: (2:18–25). God is not against pleasure, is he? But it is more than pleasure. The relationship, awesome in its wonder, is a beautiful picture of man and woman as co-workers with God in the creation of other human beings. It’s a wonderful relationship. The Bible itself uses it as a prototype of the love of Christ for the church (see Eph 5:32); but how sadly the world has abused it. May God give you married couples the grace to show the loveliness of human marriage, despite all its stresses and strains, as something that the God of all beauty, grace and holiness invented for our enjoyment and pleasure. Just as importantly, may he give you hope as you bring up your children in this very difficult modern age. And, my dear sisters, may he give you grace to train the younger women in what Christian marriage means, as distinct from the false standards that are being taught in many of their schools nowadays.

Human beings are to live their lives in the context of the spirit world. We can pass over this briefly. Perhaps in her innocence, Eve was not aware of what was happening when she was tempted. The New Testament informs us that it was that old serpent, called the devil, and Satan (Rev 12:9), impersonating the snake, who tempted Eve (see 2 Cor 11:3). We are not angels: angels are spirits. We have a spirit, but we also have a body. The animals also have bodies like we do, but the difference between us and them is with respect to the mind. We were made a little lower than the angels (Ps 8:4–5); but we were never meant to descend to being animals. An awareness of the spirit world—of good and bad angels—is part of our growing up in God’s universe.

Music, metal-work, lyric (Genesis 4:21–24)

Tomorrow, by God’s will, we shall consider the fall, the curse upon Adam, Cain’s rebellion and the curse pronounced in his case. And then we shall learn that after Cain went out, his descendants lived and prospered as human beings. Some of them invented metal-work, and one of them was the father of organs and musical instruments.

You say, ‘But they were of Cain’s spirit, so anything they produced must be bad’.

No. Who produced your motor car? Are you sure the person was a Christian? Having been invented, in the Old Testament musical instruments were used for the praise of God. Oh, the wonders of music, and God invented it! If the hymn is true that we constantly sing, then how wonderful it will be at last to hear the choirs of heaven.

With harps and with viols, there stand a great throng

In the presence of Jesus, and sing this new song:

Unto him who hath loved us and washed us from sin,

Unto him be the glory forever, Amen.²³

Those of us who love the Lord Jesus shall one day not only hear it but contribute to it. May God be thanked, who made it so that you can enjoy music and sing it to his eternal glory.

Questions

I have two questions from you this evening:

1. 'The 'day' God made the earth and heavens

You have mentioned a day of twelve hours and a day of twenty-four hours. Can we determine the number of hours ‘in the day’ of Genesis 2:4: ‘These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens’? This relates to what we were talking about yesterday in the context of the first creation story. We noticed the intriguing phenomenon in that story of how God not only made things but called parts of his creation by various names. The first one was that he called the light ‘Day’, and he called the darkness ‘Night’ (1:5). There, the word Day means the roughly twelve hours of daylight, and the word Night is the roughly twelve hours of darkness. So, ‘Day’ is the twelve hours of daylight.

Yet in this same verse, he called the evening and morning one day. Here, the word ‘day’ means twenty-four hours—the whole thing, comprising the hours of daylight and the hours of darkness. That’s nothing extraordinary, for we have the same idiom in English and a lot of other languages. You might say that somebody is due to arrive next Friday.

I could ask, ‘Is he going to arrive by day or by night?’

‘Friday night,’ you say.

So we’re using the word ‘day’ for the day of the week; and then we’re using the word ‘day’ for the daylight hours, and ‘night’ for the hours in darkness. The word ‘day’, therefore, has two meanings. And because of that, the question now is: Can we determine the number of hours in the day of Genesis 2:4, ‘the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens’?

To answer this, we also need to look at the other part of the creation story, which we considered last time. So look again at the opening verses of Genesis 1:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (vv. 1–2)

And God said, ‘Let there be light’, and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. (vv. 3–5)

I’m not quite sure what the question is implying. Perhaps the questioner might be asking whether the first day of creation begins in verse 1 and extends to the end of verse 5, as multitudes of Christians contend. And if the first day starts in Genesis 1:1, can we determine the number of hours in the day of Genesis 2:4, ‘the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens’?

Well, thinking as I do, my answer to that would be No! I can’t say that we could determine how many hours there are in that day because, for my part, I believe that day one starts only at Genesis 1:3. I believe that because, without exception, all the days of creation start with the same formula, ‘And God said’. Verses 1 and 2 do not start with that formula, and therefore it seems to me that it’s quite possible that the activities of the creator described in these opening verses predate day one. And if that is so, I couldn’t begin to know how long it took God to do this first bit, for I don’t think God has told us. However, I don’t think he included it in day one. To repeat, I think that verses 1 and 2 might well describe God’s earlier work in the universe, so to speak; and his operation there before the six days of creation began relative to our planet.

But I freely admit that that is simply a viewpoint. Multitudes of believers, who are more perceptive than I, hold that day one starts at Genesis 1:1 and goes down to verse 5. If that is so, and you ask me, ‘How many hours are there in that day?’, well, many people think that every day of creation is a day of twenty-four hours, and therefore this day of verse 1 to verse 5 would be a day of twenty-four hours. I don’t think that myself; but they may be right. I wouldn’t want to fall out, and certainly not argue, with any dear Christian over the matter. I must confess that it seems unfortunate to me that sometimes Christians, who equally love the Lord, fall out over such things as these and come to regard each other as budding heretics. I am open to being converted, so to speak.

But what I do believe is that it doesn’t take God more than a split second to say anything. ‘Then God said, “Let us make man”’ (1:26), and if you only had that, you would think that God said it, and there and then in that split second a fully grown man appeared. The second account in Genesis 2 fills in the details and shows us that that was not quite so. God first formed man of the dust of the ground, and then he breathed into him the breath of life (see 2:7). Eventually God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him’ (2:18). So along came Eve, created by God out of Adam’s rib (vv. 21–22). God had brought all the animals to Adam, and Adam named them (v. 20). Genesis 2 doesn’t say how long all that took. It is conceivable, perhaps, that he did it all in one day of twenty-four hours, along with the making of the animals as well. But I myself would draw a distinction between the word of God as the ‘creative fiat’—the creative command of God; and then what you might call ‘development’. These are the two processes that God has used in the creation, strictly so called, of our world: the command or fiat, ‘Let it be done’; and then the necessary consequent development.

That’s all I would want to say at the moment.

The tree of life

Did the tree of life have any supernatural qualities?

Among the trees in the garden was the tree of life. When man sinned, having disobeyed God and taken of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, chapter 3 says:

Then the LORD God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live for ever—’ therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. (3:22–23)

So, having sinned, God drove man out of the garden and, no longer having access to the tree of life, he began to deteriorate from that moment onwards. Though he lived for hundreds of years, he eventually died because he had no access to the tree of life. That raises a very interesting question indeed: did this tree of life have some supernatural qualities?

Well, not to quibble about a word, but it came from the hand of God, like all the other trees did. If this tree had supernatural qualities, it’s the same God, and I wouldn’t be quite sure what the word ‘supernatural’ in that context would mean. Starting with the plain text, what I myself take it to be is that the eating of that tree of life was necessary for the maintenance and perpetuation of human life, in such a way that if somebody were prevented from eating of that tree, they would begin to decline physically.

That raises a big doctrinal and theological question. When God made Adam and Eve in the garden, did they possess in themselves inherent physical immortality? In other words, could Adam just carry on and say, ‘I don’t care what God says or does; I have physical immortality and I shall live forever’? The Bible says that only God has immortality (see 1 Tim 6:16). I feel that the text implies that, if Adam was going to live for ever, because he didn’t have inherent immortality in himself it was necessary for him to eat of that tree of life. When he was precluded from it he began to physically decay and go down the path that would lead him back to the dust.

Now, far more learned expositors than I have felt that when God said, ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever’ (see v. 22), God hurried him out of the garden. They say, ‘Do you see that phrase, “He must not be allowed to reach out his hand . . . and eat”—doesn’t that imply that until then Adam had not thought to eat of that tree?’

He had permission to do so, of course, as God had said, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil . . .’ (see 2:16–17). They feel that perhaps Adam hadn’t thought to eat of the tree of life, and so God said, ‘How fortunate—let’s hurry him out of the garden before he gets it into his head to eat of the tree, because if he eats of it he’ll live for ever’.

This implies that taking one bite of the fruit of the tree of life would have meant living forever. I think that’s not quite right. I don’t think it was a question of one bite of the fruit of the tree of life; it was a question of constantly eating it. Constant eating would have maintained Adam, and I think that he had probably eaten of it when he was in the garden. It was when he was shut out from it that he began decline.

One final thing that seems to support me in that view is that the tree of life is used subsequently in the New Testament as a symbol of our Lord. The book of Revelation says, ‘To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God’ (2:7). The word translated ‘paradise’ in this verse is the Greek word, parádeisos, which is how the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew translates the ‘garden of Eden’. It means a pleasure garden. And our Lord says, ‘To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God’. It’s a symbol of himself, of course. He is the tree of life; he is the source of life; in him is life.

If I were to put to you the idea that it’s enough for you to come and eat of Christ once (see John 6), and you don’t have to eat of him ever again, would you agree with me? In other words, having come to Christ and eaten of him once, could you rightly say, ‘Well, thank you, Lord. I now have eternal life, so I don’t need you anymore. I’ll go my own way and we shall probably never meet again because I don’t need you anymore’? You don’t hold that view, do you? I hope you don’t. We do not have life apart from Christ. It isn’t that a believer can lose his eternal life. What I’m saying is that we don’t have our private store of eternal life, ‘[Our] life is hidden with Christ in God’ (Col 3:3). It is because we are united to him, constantly feed on him, draw our life from him and are inseparable from him, that we have spiritual eternal life.

So at the physical level, I think that the tree of life probably consisted of elements that the human body needs to maintain itself in continued life. Without those elements, the genes eventually go wonky and the body starts to decline.

Two very interesting questions, and I’ve given you my honest opinions. I hope you’ll love me still!

Footnotes for Sermon 3

²¹ Chas. H. Gabriel (1856–1932), ‘O That will be Glory’ (1900).

²² Language and Mind, London: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1972.

²³ Arthur T. Pierson (1837-1911), ‘With harps and with viols’.

4. Is there Purpose in Human Existence?

I welcome you to this, our fourth study in the book of Genesis. On the last occasion, we began to study the second account of creation as we find it in the early chapters and I urged the conclusion that the second story of creation comprises the bulk of chapter 2, the whole of chapter 3 and the whole of chapter 4. Let us just look again at the evidence that brought us to that viewpoint. In those three chapters we found a word that appears time and again, and very significantly at the main centre of interest of each chapter.

In chapter 2 we read of man’s body being made out of the ground. We are then told of man’s function—the purpose for which he was originally made. Until this time, there had not been a man to till the ground; so God planted the garden in Eden, and of the dust of the ground he made man and gave him his purpose and function, which was to till the ground. So the term ground comes at this vital part in the opening story of chapter 2.

In chapter 3 we have the story of the temptation and the ensuing curse that was pronounced by God in his discipline upon mankind. So, to Adam he said, ‘Cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it will bring forth for you; and you shall till the ground under these more difficult conditions until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken’ (see 3:17–19). A solemn curse was therefore brought about by Adam’s sin, and we notice that the term ground is at the heart of that curse. Man was made to till the ground. Now that he is disciplined of God as a result of his sin, he is not turned out and forbidden ever more to till the ground, but his function will become so much more difficult.

In chapter 4 we have the story of Cain, who murdered his brother Abel and defied God over the matter. God once more pronounced a curse, but a somewhat different curse upon Cain. It was not now, ‘When you till the ground, it shall bring forth thorns and thistles for you’, but rather, ‘now you are cursed from the ground . . . When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength’ (4:11–12). Cain at once saw the significance of this curse, and replied to God, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden’ (4:13–14).

Therefore, at the central points in these three parts of the grand story we see how this term ground is central. And if we grasp again the initial point made in chapter 2—that man was made out of the ground to till the ground, it will help us to see the significance of what subsequently happens in the next two chapters when we think of man’s fall.

On the last occasion, we asked ‘What is life?’. We celebrated the wonder and beauty of that many-splendoured thing—the life that God has given to his human creatures. We found that life was not merely physical; but along with life comes a whole host of wonderful potentials and capacities, so that it proves to be a very detailed, marvellously complex and glorious thing.

Now, however, we have to consider the very opposite, ‘What is death?’. What does it mean to die? We shall find that, through one man’s disobedience sin entered the world, and death by sin (see Rom 5:12). And death meant that man began to die at every level of life, all the way downwards until he returned to the dust, from which his body was originally taken.

In the first story we’ll look at tonight, we shall discover the story of the fall in chapter 3. When Adam sinned, God imposed disciplines upon him and upon Eve, but he didn’t destroy them. In terms that were fitting for their simple state in those far-off early days, God announced the glorious salvation that he was about to provide as an answer to human sin. But in the final story, the story of Cain in chapter 4, we shall meet a man who, having grossly sinned, not only defied God but rejected the way of forgiveness. With him, the curse wasn’t that the ground would bring forth thorns and thistles, which would make tilling it hard. But rather, God told Cain, ‘When you till the ground now, it won’t yield its strength to you. You are cursed from the ground.’ In other words, ‘Cain, you might as well get out’. Why get out? Because man was made to till the ground—that was his first and prime purpose for existence in those first days. When Adam sinned, he was allowed to continue with his God-given function; but when Cain defied God and refused the forgiveness that God offered him, God turned him out of his job. The man lost the very purpose for which he was created.

As we are told in the story, Cain was not killed; he was allowed to carry on existing. In fact, God put a mark upon him so that anybody finding him should not be disposed to kill him. That simply tells us this: there’s something worse than physical death. That is, to exist while having missed the purpose for which you were created; to spend an eternity existing, but lost. These are the solemn stories that will engage our thoughts this evening.

The fall and its first effects

We come first to chapter 3, to the story of the fall, and enquire first of all how it was that mankind fell, and what temptation was put in their way by the cunning serpent.

Volumes have been written about the identity of the serpent; how it was that a serpent could speak; whether the serpent actually spoke, or whether by his manoeuvres and looks, and so forth, he evoked the innermost thoughts of Eve. We shall not consider all those suggestions tonight. The New Testament has pronounced upon the topic, and as a Christian I accept the interpretation of the New Testament. Said Paul, ‘But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ’ (2 Cor 11:3).

It was Satan himself, using the serpent in some way or other, who was allowed to tempt mankind. Notice that it is true of Satan, as it was true of the physical serpent—God made the serpent that was the vehicle of Eve’s temptation. ‘Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made’ (3:1). And it is good to remember that Satan himself is a creature, when we come to the deeper point that it was Satan who tempted our first parents to sin and still carries on his evil work.

If you ask, ‘Why has God allowed Satan to rebel and to continue rebelling?’, it is not because God is not almighty. When Satan rebelled against God by raising doubts about the character of God in the minds of Adam and Eve, those doubts could not be dispelled simply by an exercise of God’s almighty power. The fact that God is almighty has never been in doubt—not even Satan doubts it. The big question in our universe is not, who has the greatest power; it is a moral question, who has the greatest love for mankind? But you cannot prove love or moral rightness simply by exercising power.

Satan, then, was a creature, and he came to the woman to begin his nefarious temptation. He said to Eve, ‘Did God actually say, “You shall not eat of any tree in the garden”?’ The wily tempter’s device was to deliberately overstate God’s original prohibition.

‘Oh no,’ said Eve, ‘that isn’t what God said. He said that we can eat the fruit of the trees in the garden, but “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die”’ (see 3:2–3).

‘Oh, I thought so,’ said the devil. ‘That’s just like God, actually. He makes a lovely garden, puts you in it with a beautiful tree right under your nose for you to admire, and just as you’re going to eat and enjoy it, he says “No”. That’s God all over. He loves to hold out pleasures in front of you and then say you mustn’t enjoy them. You see, God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like him, knowing good and evil. The fact is that God doesn’t want you to be like him; he wants to keep you down. That’s the kind of tyrant God is: tantalizing you with pleasure and then saying you mustn’t have it. When you try to rise in the world, develop all your potential and gain knowledge of good and evil, then he wants to keep you down. God is afraid that you will become like him, be independent and able to decide for yourself.’

Eve had never heard that before. When she looked at the tree, she saw that it was good for food (it provided physical satisfaction); it was a delight to the eyes (it provided aesthetic satisfaction); and it was desirable to make one wise (it provided intellectual satisfaction). That was how God had made it.

‘Physical, aesthetic and intellectual satisfaction: that is life,’ said Satan. ‘What else do you want? Take it, woman!’

‘But God has said that in the day we eat of it, we shall surely die.’

‘Nobody believes God’s word. You can have life without God. Instead of remaining there as an infant with God telling you what’s right and wrong, you can make up your own mind and go your own way.’

By listening to Satan, Eve was deceived. She took the fruit from the tree and ate it.

This teaches us one of life’s most important lessons. It was repeated by God through Moses to the Israelites in the wilderness, and applied by our blessed Lord as he faced the same tempter in the wilderness. The basic principle of life is this: ‘Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’ (see Deut 8:3; Matt 4:4). God is not making life difficult. He made the lovely things that are good for food, for beauty and for intellect. But in giving them he reminds us that none of these things spells out what true life is—‘man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’.

Suppose that one of these days you get the strange idea into your head that you would like to get to know me and become my friend, so you invite me to your house for dinner. You’ve got everything beautifully laid out and you sit me down at your right hand as your guest of honour. As the meal begins I bury my head in the soup and the hors d’oeuvres, and you try to make conversation. You say, ‘It’s been a very nice day today, hasn’t it?’ I don’t make any reply. ‘That’s a bit odd,’ you think. So you wait until I get to the beefsteak, and you say, ‘Do you plan to go anywhere on holiday?’ And I don’t reply. You say to yourself, ‘I always knew Englishmen were curious, but this is very curious.’ As we get to the sweet, you make one last attempt, and you say, ‘Have you read any good books recently?’

I lift my head up, and I say, ‘I would like to tell you something. I think this food is absolutely marvellous, I’m enjoying it immensely. I think these oils and portraits on your walls are superb; they are works of genius. The background music you’ve put on is absolutely delightful and I’m enjoying it immensely. But as for you, I’m not interested in you. I can enjoy this food without you; in fact, I don’t believe that you exist. But even if you do, I don’t want anything to do with you. I want to go my own way. I’m enjoying this food, but I don’t need you and I don’t want you. I’m not interested in what you have to say.’

What would you do? You’d reach for the button on the ejector seat and press it hard, wouldn’t you? What a fool I should be! All the beautiful cuisine and everything else was lovely and to be enjoyed. In your mind, it was the basis of a friendship that would develop and perhaps become permanent long after the food was gone and had been forgotten.

All the lovely things in life that God has given us for our enjoyment are meant to lead us to him, to listen to him and through his word to find eternal life, which will last long after the pleasures of this life have gone like broken toys to the dustbin. But to suppose that we can enjoy and know life simply through physical satisfaction, the pursuit of beauty and intellectual satisfaction without God and his word, is the number one lie in this universe. And millions have been and still are deceived by it, are they not?

And then, it was not only the question of enjoyment. They had been forbidden to eat of the tree of life, because in their innocence, like toddlers in the nursery, they had no concept of evil. Being innocent, though fully grown humans, they would need to be told what was evil. To attempt to face evil by themselves and make up their own minds was a sure way to be deceived. Therefore, because he is the sole and final authority in morality, God forbade them to try to go their own way. He did it by setting down a positive commandment—‘You shall not do this’—and that is an exceedingly important thing.

I remember in my youth—I’ve had several stages of youth; I’m in the last one now— some of us Christians in the university devised a little way to get talking to our non-Christian friends. We set up what we called a Christian forum and invited sundry speakers to come and talk to us on anything they liked. The only condition was that when they finished talking, we might be allowed to ask questions. One of our delightful colleagues came, a very brave and majestic man who had been blinded as a commando in the war. Charming though he was, he was an atheist and had developed the thesis that you can be good without God. His view was that you don’t need God to tell you how to live; you can make up your own mind as to what is right and wrong. ‘It works this way,’ he explained. ‘You don’t have to call in God as an authority; you simply come to an agreement with one another. If you poke your finger in my eye, I shall poke my finger in your eye. When we’ve done that a dozen times, if we’ve got any eyes left we shall come to an agreement: I won’t poke my finger in your eye anymore, and you won’t poke your finger in my eye anymore. And when we’ve come to such an agreement, all shall be well. That’s how we can do without God and his morality in this world.’

At question time, I asked permission to speak and said, ‘Imagine that I’m Hitler, and I’m going to poke my finger in your eye in a very big way. And if you say to me, “Don’t poke your finger in my eye, because, if you do, I shall poke my finger in yours”, I shall say, “No, you won’t! Not for the moment at any rate, because I’ve got tanks and you haven’t. So I’m going to poke my finger in your eye in a very big way, and you won’t be able to stop me. And if at last you get enough tanks to defeat me, I shall blow my own brains out, so you won’t get me and I’ll have got away with six million murders.” Then what will you say to me?’

Said he, ‘I’ll tell you to go and get lost’, which I thought wasn’t altogether an adequate reply. In the end, morality—good and evil, right and wrong—is not a matter of taste, nor of our private judgment. Suppose I say to you, ‘I like oranges, and so should you’. And you say, ‘No, I shouldn’t. You may like oranges but I don’t; I like bananas.’ Who’s to say you’re wrong? It’s a matter of taste, and we can make up our own minds on it.

But morality is not a matter of taste, is it? What would you say to Hitler if he said, ‘I like killing Jews, and I’m going to kill them’? It’s not a matter of taste, is it? What is the final authority on morality? The Bible’s answer is that the final authority on morality is God, our creator. If you get rid of God and God’s right to lay down the law, then ultimately it will lead to moral chaos.

So Satan tempted Eve to grasp at life without God and his word, to abandon obedience to God’s authority on morality and behaviour, and to set herself up in the place of the ultimate authority—‘I am the authority; I do what I like’.

‘You shall be as God,’ said Satan.

Eve and Adam were deceived. The first result was that they realized they were naked, and they hid themselves in the trees of the garden. Satan had suggested that if they disobeyed God like that and grasped for independence, they would rise in the universe and be as God. But they found to their cost that, instead of rising, they had gone down somewhat and now had desires that they would find difficult to control.

If that was the temptation, and God had said, ‘In the day you eat of it you shall surely die,’ they didn’t immediately expire, did they? But they began to die at all levels, until eventually they turned back to dust.

The discipline of God

God’s reaction to the fall was, first of all, to speak to the serpent:

The LORD God said to the serpent, ‘Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.’ (3:14–15)

What majestic words! First, God’s pronouncement to the serpent, who thought he had won a victory over God and his purpose and ruined God’s handiwork. God defies him and announces his ultimate defeat. He says, ‘Not only shall there be a permanent enmity between your offspring and the woman’s offspring, but the woman’s offspring shall bruise, crush and break your head, though you shall bruise his heel’. These are marvellous words.

And now we stand in awe at the wonder of God’s strategies. Satan had filled the human heart with that insidious lie that man could be as God. What will God do in response to that? How will he overcome it? Here, in simple language, God is making known the wonderful mystery that God himself will become man. God had so built humankind that he could get inside his own creation and become man, and we recall the wonderful words of Philippians 2:

. . . Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (vv. 5–8)

These words cheer my heart enormously—how amazing are the wisdom and grace of God! I repeat, Satan was trying to get man to rebel against God, climb up, be as God and turn him off his throne. What would God do? Wipe out mankind before he succeeds? No, indeed not! His was the opposite strategy. God’s own predetermined counsel was to defeat man’s blasphemous attempt to become like God. He would become man, and at the level of man defeat Satan. He wasn’t going to give up and say, ‘Man is a total wreck; I’m finished with him and will create something new’. If God made man, God would see to it that he succeeds. Man is God’s handiwork and God will not be defeated. How would God get victory out of defeat? Well, God himself would become a man, and in the person of Jesus Christ, God made flesh, he would defeat Satan and eventually bring his works to nothing.

My brothers and sisters, the very contemplation of it is worth a Hallelujah! Think of it. How will you get over the honour? I guarantee you now that you will not get over it for all eternity. You are human and have come from the hand of the Creator, and the Son of God became human and has become one of us. That is why he is not ashamed to call us brethren. I could think of many reasons why our blessed Lord Jesus should be ashamed of me, and perhaps even of you at times. Why isn’t he ashamed? It’s not because he isn’t proud—of course he is proud. But he’s not ashamed to call us brethren, because ‘he who sanctifies [that is, the Lord Jesus] and those who are sanctified all have one source’ (see Heb 2:11). ‘Verily God, yet become truly human—lower than angels—to die in our stead.’²⁴ What an exciting thing our Christian gospel is; how marvellous are the ways of God! And one of these days, said Paul to the Christians at Rome, ‘The God of peace will soon crush Satan under your feet’ (Rom 16:20).

God had some solemn words for the woman and the man as he imposed disciplines on them, but in those very disciplines we note his mercy:

To the woman he said, ‘I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’ (3:16)

Notice in the great privilege of childbearing, which is the woman’s glory, that the very terms of his discipline indicate that God is going to continue with his plan, for she shall be allowed to have children. Adam was listening to God’s words with both ears, and Scripture says, ‘The man [Adam] called his wife’s name Eve, because she was the mother of all living’ (3:20). So, right in the middle of God pronouncing his discipline, Adam heard this glorious gospel message and thought, ‘God is not going to destroy my wife forthwith, she will live on and have children, and be the mother of all future generations’. That’s God’s mercy for you, and one day the very Saviour would come of that woman’s offspring.

But in spite of that there were disciplines, for now the man and woman were sinful. They couldn’t be allowed to go on as if sin didn’t matter and had no consequences. They must be put under discipline; otherwise sin might get complete mastery over them. Nature would now be made more difficult and more painful. In some sense, sexual relationships would be coarsened— ‘he shall rule over you’. The word rule is not altogether a nice word.

And it was similar with Adam:

And to Adam he said, ‘Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, “You shall not eat of it”, cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ (3:17–19)

Adam was allowed to continue with his God-given occupation, but under discipline. Now it would no longer be the joy and ease of a human innocent in paradise; he would be facing a world where evil has sown its seed and there would be toil and sweat. He had to toil to have the food grow, and to his endless frustration the only things that would grow without toil were the weeds. Have you noticed that in your garden? I’ve noticed it in mine. I do my best to make the roses bloom as they should, and sometimes they are very frustrating things. But the weeds need no encouragement and grow all over the place without my help, reminding me every time that I’m living in a fallen world.

When man rebelled against God, God allowed nature to rebel against man. That’s good, isn’t it, for if God had allowed this world to continue as a paradise, we should live under the misapprehension that even if we’re sinners it doesn’t matter after all. And every discipline, every pain, every weed, every ounce of hard labour and every drop of sweat is a reminder that we are sinful men and women living in a fallen world, and we need to get right with God. We need to learn the basic lesson that nature teaches us: ‘God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap’ (Gal 6:7). That is still an unbreakable law.

My brothers and sisters, I think we confuse ourselves sometimes in that we fail to make a distinction between the penalty of sin and the consequences of sin. The penalty is God’s judgment, his wrath. From that, we are saved forever by the precious blood of Christ. But the penalty of sin is one thing; the consequences of sin is another.

Suppose a Christian farmer has been told by the Lord that he should grow wheat in his field, and he knows it’s a command of the Lord for some reason or other. But the price of barley is much higher, so he decides to grow that instead. And when the barley begins to grow up and come into the ear, he begins to feel repentant. ‘O dear, I know I should have sown wheat, and this is barley. I’ve disobeyed the Lord, and that’s terrible.’ He goes to the Lord and says, ‘Lord, I’ve sinned; please forgive me. I’ve sown barley when I should have sown wheat.’ The Lord forgives him, for ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness’ (1 John 1:9). And then the farmer says, ‘Lord, change the barley into wheat.’ Do you think God would do that? No, ‘For what a man sows, he reaps’.

That is true in nature, and it is true in life. We need to remember it as believers. ‘If you will fight with one another,’ says Paul in that same context, ‘you’d better watch out that you are not consumed by one another; for if you sow enmity, you will reap destruction. The one who sows to the Spirit shall of the Spirit reap eternal life, but the one who sows to the flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption and endless tears’ (see Gal 5:15; 6:8).

These are the disciplines of life. And yet within it all, not only was there the promise that one day the woman’s offspring would gain complete victory over the serpent; but at that moment God himself made them garments of skins. He killed an animal, took its skin and made adequate clothing for them in the sight of God. This was a marvellous prototype of what God would do through Jesus Christ our Lord.

What a picture this story gives us of God’s heart toward mankind. Not only allowing human life to continue after the fall, though now under discipline, and using that discipline to teach important moral and spiritual lessons, but also providing the certainty of immediate acceptance with God and forgiveness, and the glorious hope that one day the Saviour would come.

Cain and Abel

So ends the story of chapter 3, and now we move on to chapter 4, which as we will see is related by the common use of the same word, ground.

Adam and Eve had two sons; the one was Cain, and the other was Abel.

Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground, and Abel also brought of the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his face fell. The LORD said to Cain, ‘Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.’ Cain spoke to Abel his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him. Then the LORD said to Cain, ‘Where is Abel your brother?’ He said, ‘I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?’ And the LORD said, ‘What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.’ Cain said to the LORD, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.’ Then the LORD said to him, ‘Not so! If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.’ And the LORD put a mark on Cain, lest any who found him should attack him. (vv. 2–15)

Our first task is to decide why it was that God accepted Abel’s sacrifice and rejected Cain’s offering. I suppose the most frequent explanation given is simply that Abel brought a lamb or a kid from the herd, shed its blood, and came to God on the basis of the shedding of blood for the remission of sins. Whereas Cain came offering the work of his own hands, the fruit of the field, and therefore was denied acceptance by God. There is a great deal of truth in that, but it is not quite the whole truth, is it? Let’s examine the matter a little more deeply. It says that they came to bring an offering, a present. The Hebrew word is minchâ. It is not said that they came to bring a sin offering, or even a burnt offering. They came to bring a minchâ, which in later times would be a meal offering to the Lord, as described in the book of Leviticus 2. Then why was Cain’s present rejected? In 1 John 3 we are told in precise terms why it was rejected:

For this is the message that you have heard from the beginning, that we should love one another. We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous. (vv. 11–12)

According to the Apostle John, the underlying reason for the enmity that sprang up in the heart of Cain was that Abel’s works were good, and Cain’s works were evil. That is why Cain was rejected, and why, of course, he was so jealous and envious of his brother that he killed him. It says, ‘Cain was of the evil one and murdered his brother.’ Do observe, as many have, that this murder took place in the context of religion. Cain was in the process of making a show of religion, by offering to God a sacrifice. God rejected it because, to begin with, God read the man’s heart and knew that Cain was just using a religious sacrifice to cover up the fact that his heart and his works were evil. There are many people today who treat religion like that. They have no intention of repenting. But they have the idea that they can bring God an offering, give something to the church or do a few good works in support of a charity, and God will accept it as a cover for the fact that their lives are unrighteous, their business deals are less than just and their ways break God’s law. God’s rejection of Cain’s sacrifice tells us plainly that God doesn’t want religion that is simply a cover-up for unrepentant evil behaviour. That’s one reason why God rejected his sacrifice, but there was a deeper reason, of course.

By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain, through which he was commended as righteous, God commending him by accepting his gifts. (Heb 11:4)

The first thing we have to notice is that it was by faith Abel offered a better sacrifice. It doesn’t say, ‘by faith Abel did better works than Cain’; but ‘by faith Abel offered a better sacrifice’. What does the writer to the Hebrews mean, ‘by faith’? Well, faith in Scripture is always a response to something God has said. Faith isn’t me saying to myself, ‘I have every confidence that if I do this, God will be pleased with it’. No, faith is listening first to God, hearing what God says, believing his word and acting according to it. The secret of Abel’s sacrifice being more acceptable than Cain’s was that he offered it in faith—that is, in response to God’s own invitation.

You say, ‘Where had God said anything about sacrifice?’

In my humble opinion, having pronounced his disciplines upon Adam and Eve, God indicated the way when he took an animal, killed and skinned it, and made garments himself for Adam and Eve to cover their shame. In those solemn moments in the garden, when they faced their maker over the question of sin with the terrors of a guilty conscience, they found acceptance with God and covering for their shame on the basis of the shedding of blood—an innocent victim dying in the place of the guilty. The lesson had not been lost on Abel. Coming to God was an exercise in faith, following the very example that God had given. Abel brought his kid from the flock, shed its blood, offered that to God as his sacrifice, and God was well pleased with it.

It’s not wrong, of course, for believers to come and offer their apples and oranges, carrots and potatoes, if they want to. Many believers do give such things for the Lord’s sake to help the needy and the distressed in famine-stricken countries. There’s nothing wrong with believers bringing the product of their hands to God and giving it to him; but that is not the way we come to God and find acceptance and forgiveness of sin. To find forgiveness with God we must come on the basis of the great sacrifice of our blessed Lord and the shedding of his blood, put our faith in God and in the propitiation of Christ, and then be pronounced just in the sight of God. ‘For the just shall live by faith’ (see Hab 2:4 KJV). And it is God who justifies us on the grounds of the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ. You cannot do like Cain did and come to God unrepentant and think that by offering him some good products of your hands, all will be well. Some folks do think that way, don’t they?

‘But I’m a good mother,’ says one woman—and doubtless she is. ‘I look after my children and I love them. I’m kind to my husband, more than he deserves.’

That’s excellent and I believe it. But it’s not the ground of salvation.

This is a solemn matter. The principle to be followed is that we have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God (see Rom 3:23). The just penalty of the law of God hangs over our heads, which is eternal death. We have to face that first, and then let God point the way to the only sacrifice that is adequate to make our peace with God: the sacrifice of our blessed Lord Jesus Christ.

You will notice in the story that God came and pleaded with Cain. Cain was intensely angry, and his face fell at the thought of God rejecting his sacrifice as inadequate and then taking Abel’s sacrifice. God pleaded with him. ‘If you do well, Cain, will you not be accepted?’ That is to say, ‘If you do well, you’ll be forgiven. Do what Abel has done and you will be accepted too. Come and recognize your sinfulness and that you need atonement through the blood of an innocent sacrifice. There is no difference, there is no favouritism. If you come and do what is right you will be accepted. But learn this, Cain: if you persist in doing what is wrong, sin is crouching at the door like some wild beast and it will master you.’

That is a very solemn lesson. It might be that we feel infuriated because somebody has told us that they’re saved. We can’t say that ourselves, so we get very angry. ‘Who do they think they are? I’m as good as them. Why doesn’t God give me that assurance of salvation?’ And God pleads with us, ‘Look, there’s no favouritism. If you would do well and come the way you’re supposed to, you too will be accepted. But be careful if you allow resentment and anger to arise in your heart against those who do come and trust the Saviour, because you will not accept the way of sacrifice for salvation, for in the end sin will rise up like a wild beast and tear you to pieces.’

That is the seriousness of sin. It is like trying to meet a wild beast; we shall not conquer it by ourselves. That is true in life. Watch a little child, who stamps and exhibits all his resentment, goes red in the face and cries and shouts because he is angry at his mother for telling him not to do something that is very sensible and in the child’s best interest. If that child’s temper, anger and resentment towards authority are never dealt with, it could tear the child’s life to pieces in the end.

If sin isn’t pardoned, if we’re not reconciled to God, if we continue demanding to have our way instead of God’s way, God’s solemn warning is that sin in the end will overpower us. That is the solemnity of the lake of fire. Under that final judgment, human beings will not cease to exist. They shall suffer, and some people say, ‘But that’s terrible; why does God allow people to keep on suffering like that? They had only seventy or so years to live, and for their sin in those years they’re now going to suffer for eternity. Surely that’s not fair.’

My friend, to talk like that is not to face reality. Those who pass from this life unsaved, and are condemned at the final judgment to the lake of fire, don’t then automatically become saints and believers. They remain sinners; sin will churn them up and ruin their humanity for all eternity, for the pangs of hell will never convert anybody. God doesn’t have a heaven full of people who have been forced to go there by first suffering the pangs of hell. God wouldn’t lower his dignity to do any such thing. God will save people by his love. He most certainly provides warnings of judgment, but he will save people by his love through the sacrifice of Christ. He ‘so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16). But if we pass by his love and will not come in God’s way because we resent God, his law and his command to repent, then instead of having our own way, like a wild beast sin will master us. Those who are in the lake of fire shall remain unrepentant sinners forever.

What pathos there is in God’s appeal to Cain. Just think of it: the almighty God coming to plead with a little creature of his own hands, who is defying him. What a God he is! The New Testament has a phrase that never ceases to surprise me: ‘God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom 5:8 KJV). Would God ever do such a humbling thing as to commend his love to us?

For me, it conjures up thoughts of people in the old days who had cleaning brushes to sell. When they knocked on the door of a house and the lady answered and said, ‘No, thank you very much; I’ve got oodles of brushes,’ the salesman would put his foot in the door to stop her from shutting it, so that he would get a chance to commend to her how good the brushes were. Well, he is a salesman! But think of God not only giving his Son, but coming to each one of us and commending his love—putting his foot in the door, so to speak, to stop us shutting it in his face, if he possibly can. How astounding the thought of God Almighty of heaven commending his love towards us, such insufficient creatures and sinners.

So God said to Cain, ‘If you do well, if you come the right way, you shall be forgiven and accepted just as much as your brother Abel’. But Cain wouldn’t. He not only wouldn’t, he defied God. He said, ‘If God won’t have what I have brought, then he won’t have what Abel has brought either’, and he murdered Abel.

What would you do if you met a man like that? Suppose you had a beautiful garden, with a conservatory and all the rest of it. Now that you’ve retired, you decide to go and stay for six months with your daughter-in-law in New Zealand, so you appoint a gardener to look after things while you’re away. You take him around and say, ‘Now, Gardener, while I’m gone I’d like you to grow tomatoes here in the conservatory, but whatever you do, don’t grow cucumbers and melons. I love tomatoes, but I don’t like cucumbers and melons.’ So you come home after your holiday in New Zealand, and go into the garden to see how the tomatoes are getting on, but there aren’t any tomatoes. The place is coming down with cucumbers and melons. You summon the gardener and say, ‘I thought I told you I wanted tomatoes and not cucumbers and melons; you’ve gone and filled the place with cucumbers and melons. What’s this all about?’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I know you said tomatoes, but I don’t like tomatoes and I decided to plant what I like, not what you like!’

What would you say to him? I think you’d say, ‘My dear man, here are your cards. Get going.’

The ancient story in Genesis 2 says that man was made to till the ground, and Cain was a tiller of the ground. He not only defied God and refused the way of forgiveness, but he murdered Abel; thereby saying to God, ‘If you won’t have what I bring, you won’t have what Abel brings either’. So God said to him, ‘Cain, you can get out, for when you till the ground it won’t yield its strength to you’. Cain saw the point and he said, ‘My punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground, and from your face I shall be hidden.’ Yes, it began to dawn on him that he had lost the very reason for which he had been made.

What is the purpose of life? Why were we made? I remember years and years ago being on a train just after the war when food was very scarce, and opposite me was a young gentleman. I too was young at the time and we shared our sandwiches and coffee. We got talking about spiritual things, and I happened to use the word ‘sin’. He told me he didn’t believe in sin. He said it was a silly word that didn’t mean anything to him.

I said, ‘Suppose you were clever enough to make a motorcar and when you sat behind the steering wheel, nine times out of ten it went where you wanted it to go. But what would

you do, if once in ten it just took no notice of you and went off anywhere, no matter how you moved the steering wheel?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I would scrap it.’

‘I can understand you doing that, if five times it went where you wanted it to go and five times where it wanted to go. But suppose that nine times out of ten, it went where you wanted it to go, and just one time out of ten it took no notice of you and went wherever it liked, what would you do then?’

He said, ‘I’d scrap it. If I made a car, I’d want it to go where I wanted one hundred per cent of the time’.

I said, ‘I thought so. The Bible says that God made us, and by his will we were created (see Rev 4:11). But the trouble with us is that “all we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way” (Isa 53:6). We have gone where we wanted to without regard for God. My dear friend, you will have to be careful that God doesn’t put you on the scrapheap of eternity.’

Cain said, ‘Whoever finds me will kill me’.

‘No, they won’t,’ said God, ‘I’ll put a mark on you so they don’t kill you’ (see Gen 4:14–15).

There is something more serious, more terrible than death, and that is to end in eternity and realize you’ve lost the very reason for your existence, but must still exist in your hopeless, tormented soul.

Cain’s successors went out and developed a very pleasant civilization. Their work in metal, music and the crafts was delightful; we are not to despise it. But the chapter ends with a very sad and sorry thing. They had learned the art of poetry and lyrics. They had their ‘top of the pops’, as we do, and one man made up a lyric for his wives to admire:

I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold. (4:23–24)

In other words, he was saying, ‘If anybody dares to touch me, I’ll smash him’. He turned it into a lyric, which no doubt became popular, for it was a culture that was on its way to glorifying violence. As I read it I shudder to think of how much modern entertainment, having lost its grip on God and morality, is going steeply down that hill, taking violence as a means of amusement and pastime. In glorifying violence, it loses a sense of the sacredness of human life.

These are solemn things, but the chapter doesn’t end on that solemn note. The final words say that Eve conceived again and bore another child in place of Abel, whom Cain murdered, and history was to go on. Thank God that he let history go on until the time he sent his Son that we might be redeemed. And thank God that he has let history go on until the year 2001, and we are here tonight still hearing the loving call of God, our Saviour, to make sure we are right with God and on our way to his eternal heaven.

Questions

There are several questions tonight, so I hope you will forgive me if I answer them briefly. It is not because I wish to dismiss them casually, but the time suggests we ought to try to get through them as quickly as we may.

Light on day one day four

On the first day, God made light. Light is vital for the existence of life. Why was this initial light not good enough for the sustenance of animate and animals, which now require sunlight for life, and why was the sun not made right at the start?

There are several questions here, as you see, and it is a topic on which we shall have to bear with one another as we think about it and come to our tentative conclusions.

Some people hold that the sun, mentioned at day four in Genesis, was created at day four, and not before then; so that the light of day one, when God said ‘Let there be light’, and there was light (1:3), was not the sun’s light. It is perfectly understandable, even in scientific terms, that the original light was simply photons, and God caused a bursting out of photons in the mechanism of the universe, which provided Earth with light.

That theory is given credence by the fact that in Hebrew, two different words for light are used in these passages. There’s the word ʾōr, which means ‘light’ and is used of the light in day one; and then there is the word māʾōr, which means ‘light-holder’, ‘light-giver’ or ‘lamp’, which is used of the sun and the moon in the sky in day four. There’s a difference, then, between light as such, and a light-holder, light-giver, or lamp. So if you wish, you can say that the original light was photons and then the sun was made subsequently on day four.

The question goes on to say, ‘Why was this initial light not good enough for the sustenance of animate things and animals, which now require sunlight for life?’

If you hold that the sun was not made until day four, it raises a question about the plants and other things having been made on day three, as they require light for their growth and health. So, I’m not quite sure. But if you regard the light of day one as merely being photons, it wouldn’t be enough to sustain plant life. That’s perhaps a supposition; but I have a difficulty with the idea that it was just photons, for the simple reason that day one tells us that when God made the light, he ‘separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night’ (vv. 4–5); which seems to me to be talking in our everyday language, and refers to the fact that here on Earth we experience daily about twelve hours of light and about twelve hours of darkness. That’s easy to understand, if our light is coming from the sun and the earth is twizzling around it so that you get alternating day and night, light and darkness, with the sun in the same place vis-à-vis the earth. But if you had photons coming in from outer space in all directions, you wouldn't get alternating light and darkness, day and night, unless you somehow had the light of photons focused at one position in the heavens, which then becomes rather complicated. And I’m not scientist enough to solve that one.

My own view is that when day four talks about God making the sun, moon and stars, its chief point is the purpose for which they were made. You will notice that God says he ‘let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years’ (v. 14). God made ‘the greater light [sun] to rule the day and the lesser light [moon] to rule the night—and the stars’ (v. 16). These all were then planted by God, as far as we’re concerned, for signs and guidance. We know how important that was in the ancient world. Farmers had to rely each year upon the constellations, their risings and settings, to know when it was time to sow their seed. The revolution of the earth around the sun once a year gave us the idea of years and the passing of the years; and then the cycling return for the mechanisms of harvest and sowing, and so forth, and so on.

I think, therefore, that the sequence is likely to have been that when the earth was first made it was shrouded in water. When the sun was created, therefore, there might have been some indication of the change between light and darkness, as there is to a certain depth in the oceans, though not at the real bottom. When God created the firmament and made space, and the waters were gathered together in one place, the sun would have become visible, even though it would have perhaps been there all the time. When it became visible, then day four explains God’s purpose for making it and the other lights. That is the thing that seems most likely to me, but of course I would not want to be dogmatic and rule out other explanations.

Earth's appearance before the flood

The earth’s surface was reshaped after Noah’s flood. Is there any indication of the earth’s appearance before this?

Well, I don’t know! That would be an interesting question to put to geologists. One of the very big advances in the last century was the knowledge of tectonic plates and the way the earth’s surface and the tectonic plates are moving. This was discovered by investigations of the bed of the oceans, and you can measure how much these tectonic plates are moving in the course of a year. Some of their movements are the cause of our earthquakes, New Zealand being a case in point. As you know, on the eastern side of New Zealand the big plate coming in from the sea is buckling under the earth’s surface, getting hot below and producing volcanoes. On the other side of New Zealand, the two plates are sliding against each other and causing friction, and so forth; so that in some parts of the country you get the effect of steam coming up out of the ground. In one place, it is so abundant that they run a power station from it.

I don’t know how we would determine what the earth was like before the flood.

God’s power and love

You said you cannot prove love by the exercise of power. The Scripture says, ‘For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth’ (Heb 12:6 KJV). Is this not the exercise of God’s power to prove his love?

Well yes, in a sense that is correct. So I stand corrected, or at least I will modify my absolute statement. When God chastises us, it isn’t pleasant at the time, says the writer to the Hebrews. But we are to believe that he does it in love, like our parents used to tell us when they chastised us. ‘It hurts me more than it hurts you’, they would say. (As a child I found that very difficult to believe, and I’m not quite sure it was true. Psychologically, it might have hurt them, but it hurt me physically! Anyway, they did it in love—of course they did.)

But if we talk about the ultimate question in the universe—who shall win in the battle for human allegiance?—how does God bring the rebel to repent and trust him? Is it by simply putting on a display of almighty power that frightens the wits out of us and gets us cowering like insects in the mud?

‘Well, no,’ you say, ‘God doesn’t convert us that way.’

It is through the cross of Christ that he wins us. Of course, the Holy Spirit comes and powerfully presents the message and pleads with us; but the evidence God gives that he is the true creator is his loyalty to his creatures and his love for them. It is not simply, ‘I beat Satan because I have more power’.

To put it crudely, if God had said to Satan after the fall, ‘I’m now going to destroy you’, though Satan knew that God is almighty and could do it, he may well have replied, ‘Yes, God, you can destroy me, but I’ve defeated you. You made the creature: you were powerful enough to create him; but you didn’t have the ability to retain his love and loyalty. So I have won, even if you destroy me.’

God’s answer to that is given in Revelation 5: ‘Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?’ (v. 2). Breaking those seals will set loose the judgments of God upon the earth, but who has the worthiness to do it as well as the power? Who has the moral worth to set loose those judgments? And the answer comes: ‘The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals’ (v. 5). How and why? Well, he is worthy to do it, for he was slain (see v. 9). God wins our hearts by his love in Christ at Cavalry and not by the exercise of tyrannical power.

Leadership in the man-woman relationship

In Genesis 3:16, it says that he [her husband] shall rule over Eve. Was there a difference here in ruling over Eve as opposed to what God originally intended?

What God originally intended in the man-woman relationship is stated in Genesis 1 towards the end, and then in the early verses of chapter 2. Paul expounds on chapter 2, which concerns man and woman before the fall, and he makes the point that Adam was formed first, not Eve (1 Tim 2:13). Secondly, we notice that the woman was formed out of Adam, not Adam out of Eve (see Gen 2:22). And thirdly, we are told that the woman was made as a helpmate for the man (see Gen 2:20–22). It is not said that man was created to be a suitable help for the woman, though undoubtedly he was to look after her. That is the order in God’s creation; it’s a question of rank.

Many people don’t like the idea of rank; they see it as some nasty thing. But we all believe in rank, don’t we? In a game of football, you have to have rank. There are eleven players, but one has to be the captain; above him is the manager and above him is the chairman of the board. That’s how the thing is run. When they’re off the field, the captain himself is subject to the manager, but on the field the captain has to decide who is going to do this, that and the other. That’s how the game has to be run. There would be confusion if you didn’t have rank. And in the kingdom of Christ there is rank. Adam and Eve were both to have dominion—if he was king of the earth, she was his queen. But God had given the leadership role to man, even before the fall.

After the fall, the word rule is used: ‘Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you’ (3:16). As I understand the Hebrew, though I’m not an expert Semitist, this is a strong word. It inclines to mean ‘mastery over’. In husband-wife relationships, this seems to denote that they would not become the ideal they had been to start with, but there was now an element of coarseness and mastery. It’s not always true, of course, but you only have to study the history of the ancient world to see how often it has been, and still is true in our modern world, though it shouldn’t be among Christians.

Loss of purpose and final reward

Cain lost the purpose of his existence. Can this be true of the believer? Will losing out at the bema remain with us in any sense throughout eternity?

I don’t think a believer can lose the purpose of his existence in the sense that Cain did. When we repent, believe and receive the Saviour we are born as the children of God, and our purpose for existence is to serve the Lord gladly and willingly, and to grow up in his family. But as believers we often stray; and instead of doing the will of God as we should we then have to be brought back and repent and confess our sins. But the mark of all true believers is that they will eventually repent. Looking at it through the eyes of the shepherd, he will not lose any sheep that God has given him and will bring them all home safely at last (see John 6:39).

But when the questioner asks, ‘Will losing out at the bema remain with us in any sense throughout eternity?’, I would want to say yes, because, as I made the point earlier, we must distinguish between the penalty of sin and its consequences.

You see, as Paul said, if anyone has built wood, hay and stubble as their life’s work, it will be burned up at the bema. Scripture says explicitly that they shall be saved—their salvation isn’t put in question. But if their work is burned up, they shall suffer loss because they will get no reward. They are saved but have nothing to show for their life’s work. This is an extreme case, of course. If it should happen to any of us, it would be a sorry thing to stand before Christ and have our life’s work burned up. I don’t suppose we should shout with joy, ‘I’m glad it’s all gone’. We shall ‘suffer loss’, it says (see 1 Cor 3:12–15).

Then there is the other side of it; it’s not merely our works. Second Peter 1 bids us to make every effort in the power of our faith to add the Christian virtues of goodness, knowledge, self-control, steadfastness, godliness, brotherly affection and love. ‘In this way,’ says Peter, ‘by practising these qualities you will never fall, and in this way the entrance into the eternal kingdom shall be richly provided for you’ (see vv. 5–11). There is a difference between having an entrance, pure and simple through the blood of Christ, and an abundant entrance (kjv). Entrance into the eternal state by the blood of Christ is the same for everybody: ‘Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates’ (Rev 22:14). But according to 2 Peter 1, an abundant entrance will depend on our adding those Christian virtues.

Here we have a dear sister, who was saved in her teens and has lived a godly life. Not only does she work for the Lord, but allows him to mould her character and she strives daily to be ever more like Christ. It isn’t possible, is it, that when she arrives in eternity she will be exactly the same as the man who was saved but squandered his life and did not make much effort in ‘perfecting holiness in the fear of God’ (2 Cor 7:1 KJV)? If you say that they are exactly the same, you’re saying that it doesn’t make any difference in the end whether they developed as a believer or not. Paul makes it abundantly clear how he strives that he might present everyone grown up, spiritually mature in Christ (see Col 1:28). But not all believers will arrive home spiritually mature.

That’s the position I take. Now, I must pass on quickly.

Creation of the species—Adam

In Genesis 5:2 it is stated that God created them, male and female, and blessed them, and called their name Adam in the day when they were created (KJV). Does this infer that God created a race of people called Adam, of which Adam and Eve were the federal heads, and is this perhaps where Cain and Seth got themselves wives?

As I said the other night, ‘Adam’ is the personal name of the first human being. But ‘Adam’ in Hebrew is also the name of the species, humankind, as distinct from angels or animals. And Genesis 6:7, which God willing we shall study tomorrow, says, ‘I will blot out man whom I have created’. In the Hebrew, that is referring to the species. The Hebrew also talks about the sons of man or the daughters of man, which again is referring to the species. ²⁵

²⁴ H. D’Arcy Champney (1854-1942), ‘Jesus, our Lord, with what joy we adore Thee’.

²⁵ Unfortunately, the audio ends here, but Dr Gooding does refer to this subject in the next session.

5. Is Mankind's Constitution Nothing but Matter?

This is the fifth study in the early chapters of the book of Genesis. We have spent the last two sessions considering the second creation story, which begins in chapter 2 with the creation of man’s body out of the dust and the breathing of God into him so that man became a living soul. The story continued with the fall of the man and woman through the temptation of the serpent, and the discipline that God then imposed upon our fallen first-parents. We found that the story went on to the record of Cain and Abel, Cain’s defiance of God and his refusal of God’s way of salvation. That sorry story continued on into several generations of Cain’s posterity, and comes to its end in chapter 4.

We move on this evening therefore, to study the third account of creation, and as I’ve said it is often overlooked by many students that there are three stories. So, if you have a Bible with you—never mind if you haven’t—just open it at chapter 5 of the book of Genesis and notice there with me how, after the story of Cain and his succeeding generations, the writer once more takes us back to the creation:

This is the book of the generations of Adam. When God created man, he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man [Adam]. (Gen 5:1–2)

The creature Adam

Chapter 5 returns, so to speak, from the story of Cain’s posterity and brings us back once more to the beginning of things and the creation of the human race. ‘This is the book of the generations of Adam’ (v. 1). The Hebrew word here translated as generations is perhaps a little difficult to translate into English. It means the family history of, and true to its meaning it recounts the many generations of Adam’s descendants.

Two nights ago, when we were considering the second creation story in chapter 2, we found there a description of the material from which man was made. His body was made or moulded by God from the dust of the ground, and into his nostrils God breathed the breath of life, and man became a living soul. In this third creation story, we are going to read not so much of what man was made of—the ingredients, the basic materials—but of man’s constitution.

Let us begin by examining the terms of Scripture and spend the initial part of our study trying to get them clear in our thinking. ‘This is the book of the generations of Adam’ (5:1). The Hebrew word ādām can mean two things. It is, of course, the name of the first male human being, like your name might be George or Thomas or something; but then it is also the name of the human species, i.e. man. In this chapter, particularly in the opening verses, we should do well to notice that. If we’re going to make sense of what it says, it is important to realize that the word ādām also stands for human being.

So we read in verses 1 and 2: ‘This is the book of the generations of Adam [ādām, the first male human being]. When God created man [ādām, the same word], he made him in the likeness of God. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them and named them Man when they were created.’ Notice that it is not Adam and Eve: he ‘named them Man’, ādām, that is, human being.

So we’re now being told about this strange new creature, the like of whom there had never been before. There are those who would tell us that before homo sapiens, there were all kinds of hominids—creatures very much like man—that evolved in different stages in different places, and that gradually by little changes (accidental changes, indeed) in the human genome our modern version, homo sapiens, came forth from one of these pre-Adamic creatures. Scripture gives us no authority for believing any such thing. Certainly, the identification of a human being, homo sapiens as he is called, is not to be found in the shape of his jaw or the angle of his forehead. According to Genesis, the distinctive mark of homo sapiens is that he was made in the likeness of God (1:26). You’ll not measure that from the shape of his jaw or the inclination of his skull.

The constitution of man

To repeat, when God made man, the human being, both male and female were included under that general label. ‘Man’ therefore refers to the species, human being. We shall find this as we go through the succeeding chapters of the third creation story.

For instance, we read in chapter 6:

When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. (Gen 6:1–2)

Notice that it does not say ‘when men began to multiply . . .’. It’s not a question of one or two men who got married and began to multiply; but ‘when man [this strange new creature] began to multiply, daughters were born to them’. They are called daughters of man, meaning female human beings.

Or again, ‘And the Lord was sorry that he had made man . . .’ (6:6–7). Not men, but man, this new creature. ‘So the LORD said, “I will blot out man . . .”’—not some men, but man; meaning the whole creature, the class, the species.

God’s statement in verse 3 is crucial to understanding the third creation story: ‘My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh . . .’ (KJV). Let me spend a little while on that verse, because it is one that has been much preached by very noble preachers and to great effect in evangelism. Very often it is preached in this sense: ‘My Spirit’, meaning the Holy Spirit, ‘will not always strive with man’, and the preachers have expounded it to mean, when the word of God is preached, the Holy Spirit, who inspires that word, strives with men and women. He speaks to their hearts and consciences, bringing their sins to mind and calling on them to repent, pleading with them to accept the Saviour. When the Holy Spirit so strives with people, often they do not yield at once to his gracious persuasion. Sometimes they harden their hearts, and for years go on hardening their hearts. God is patient with them, but will not be patient forever. And that is true. You can say ‘no’ to God for the last time, and God will take you at your word. So the preachers have cited this verse to bear witness to that, and interpreted it as, ‘My Holy Spirit shall not always strive with man and eventually he may depart’.

I offer it as no criticism of the great gospel preachers. May God bless them. But when we look at what the verse is actually saying, in my humble opinion we need to take note of the reason God gives for his Spirit not always striving with man. It is because ‘he [man] is flesh’. God is commenting here upon what man is. You’ll notice it does not say, ‘My spirit shall not always strive with man if he constantly says no to the gospel and rejects salvation’. At this juncture that isn’t the point of his remark. God is not commenting on man’s refusal to obey the gospel. He is commenting on man’s constitution— on what man is—‘for he is flesh’.

Secondly, we shall notice that some translators have translated the Hebrew verb that occurs in this verse as ‘strive’, in the way that our wonderful Authorized King James Version has done. But the better translation is to recognize that this Hebrew word is an ancient form of a verb meaning not to ‘strive with’ but to ‘abide in’, and the verse can be translated, ‘My Spirit shall not always abide in man’. You will see what that means when God carried out his warning and brought the flood upon the earth. The result was:

v]And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind. Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. (Gen 7:21–22)

When it says, ‘Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died’, the Hebrew literally means that they expired. God removed his spirit, just as he said in verse 3 of chapter 6: ‘My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh’. So, what we are now going to consider in the third creation story is not so much the ingredients of man—the materials he is made from—but man’s constitution. In other words, what man is.

You say, ‘What do you mean, what man is?’

I invite you to come with me to the book of Job, where God describes that wonderful morning of creation, when by his almighty creatorial power he laid the foundations of heaven and earth. In his conversation with Job, according to God at that moment ‘the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God [the angels] shouted for joy’ (Job 38:7). I’d love to have been there, wouldn’t you, as the angels stood by and witnessed God’s creation unfolding in front of their very eyes? The sheer ingenuity of the creator and the marvellous variety of his work filled them with joy.

The angels must have been saying, ‘What is that thing over there?’

Well, eventually Adam called it a giraffe. I don’t think the angels had seen one before.

‘And that thing over there, what’s that?’

It was to be called a butterfly!

But among all these things, there came this new creature that was not like the others they’d seen. Of course, there had been angels before, but angels are spirit beings and they do not normally have bodies. According to Scripture, some angels were later able to appear in the form of human beings. We have the record of it in various parts of the Old and New Testaments. But as to their constitution, angels are spirit beings; so what was this new creature? Parts of him were very much like the animals, but he wasn’t altogether an animal, was he? I don’t want to insult you, but lions have a stomach as you have, a heart and lungs as you have, so we do have a lot in common with animals. But we’re not just animals. Neither are we angels—we scarcely need to be told that! Well, then, what are we? What is this creature called Man? The answer these chapters will give us is that man is both flesh and spirit.

Some theologians will tell us that man is a tripartite being comprised of body, soul and spirit. Other theologians will tell us that soul and spirit are the same thing, so man is bipartite. I do not propose to enter into the gist of that discussion this evening. I do notice, however, that in the course of Scripture it will sometimes talk about a man’s soul doing certain things, and then the man’s spirit is said to do the same things; but that doesn’t necessarily imply that soul and spirit are the same entity. When speaking about the soul, Scripture tends to contrast it with man’s body—‘body and soul’. When speaking of man’s spirit, the contrast is made not so much with the body as with man as flesh—‘flesh and spirit’. It is that particular bipartite composition that we are to think about in this third creation story.

What is man? He is flesh. But not merely flesh: he is also spirit. He is spirit. But not merely spirit: he is also flesh.

I know that many scientists deride the Christian Bible, and Christians themselves, for believing that there is this non-material part to the human constitution. Indeed, I was listening just the other evening to ‘The Moral Maze’,²⁶ as I do sometimes on BBC Radio 4, and there Steven Rose was talking to a panel of experts. When one good lady made the point that human beings are not just their genes but are more than their genes, I clapped my hands for joy to hear somebody say it so positively. We’re not just our genes, are we? Indeed, the recent announcement from the Genome Project has come as a shock to many scientists. They have now discovered that, as far as genes go, human beings have fewer than was previously thought. In fact, we don’t have many more genes than fruit flies and things. That is a bit disturbing, because you are more than a fruit fly, are you not? Considerably more.

The fact is that genes do not control and compose everything that a human being is. Indeed, it is not the genes that specify whether you are a human being or not. That is probably controlled more by the cell. One specialist told me, condescending to my ignorance of course, that the genes and the DNA are much more like a builder’s supply man. If you want to build a house, he will come in and provide all the timber; if you’re going to have a steel framework he’ll measure out the steel and things; so that the whole thing can then be taken to the site and put together. That’s what the genes do. If the cell is the cell of a fruit fly, the genes will work out all the material that is needed in the right proportions. They carry information on the chemicals required to do that, depending on the cell. So it is with a human: the genes are programmed with information to produce, or manufacture, so to speak, the necessary bits and pieces to make a human. But that’s all they do. They do not control what the cell shall be, which is a vastly important thing for the question of our behaviour as human beings. It has long been observed that genes by themselves don’t finally control what kind of person we are. Of course, the genes lay down the material for our brains, but then comes life’s experience. You can have identical twins, born with the same genes, but as they grow up one goes here and one goes there and they’re quite different persons. That’s because life’s experience helps to frame the kind of person we are.

Richard Dawkins of Oxford, in his book The Selfish Gene,²⁷ tells us that man is nothing more than his genes. If that is so, then you can’t blame me for what I do wrong nor give me credit for what I do right, because I am controlled simply by these chemicals of my genes. Richard Dawkins himself can see that that would lead to very unfortunate situations; therefore he says that we have to learn to rebel against our genes.²⁸ That’s very nice, but if I’m nothing but genes how can I rebel against them? What bit of me is left that isn’t a gene that could rebel against my genes? You can see that his concept is nonsense.

We are far more than our genes: we are bodies, and we should never forget that. In fact, we shall have bodies for all eternity. But we are more than just bodies, more than just flesh. As the Bible would put it, we are spirit. Many scientists will mock Christians for believing that. In that radio programme to which I referred earlier, when the dear lady was insisting that there’s more to us than our genes, Steven Rose replied, ‘You must give up the idea that there is a little person inside your head, a little ghost. You are really nothing but your genes.’ You see, many scientists find it difficult to believe in the existence of a spirit. They will say, ‘If you have a spirit that is non-material, how can your spirit impinge on your brain?’ Forty or fifty years ago, the scientist Gilbert Ryle invented the term ‘ghost in the machine’.²⁹ In the light of modern science, and evolution in general, he was anxious to prove that we should give up the idea that inside the machine of our body and brain there is a kind of ghost in the machine—a spirit.

More recently, scientists Paul Davies and John Gribbin wrote a book called The Matter Myth,³⁰ expounding the idea that there is nothing but matter. At the end of their book, they said:

Today on the brink of the twenty-first century, we can see that Ryle was right to dismiss the notion of the ghost in the machine—not because there is no ghost but because there is no machine.³¹

For Christians, the notion that spirit cannot impinge on matter is silly. God is spirit, and who can doubt his marvellous power to create matter and to control it? Shouldn’t even scientists humbly admit, and many of them do, that we don’t know what energy is? Energy is invisible. Nobody has ever seen energy, yet it can turn itself into matter. As Einstein told us, ‘Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared’—E = mc². (Those of you who don’t like science have five minutes now to nap, and wake up more refreshed when I shall be on to more interesting things!)

Einstein taught us that energy can be changed into matter. And, of course, matter can be undone and turned back into energy. Don’t we know it? And the Japanese know it too, with the atomic and hydrogen bombs in which the atoms in matter are split with the release of colossal energy. So, what is energy? Scientists can tell you what it does; they can tell you how they can measure its effects; and they can tell you that it is always conserved—but they don’t know what it is. The late Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, who was brilliant among the scientists, states it in his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!—‘It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is.’³² And yet, who would be so silly as to say that energy—which you cannot see because it is invisible and we don’t know what it is—cannot impinge on matter?

So let’s leave those difficulties behind. If you’ve been napping, now is the time to wake up and think about what man is. Unashamedly, we believe that man is flesh but not merely flesh; he is spirit but not merely spirit. You will find that world religions go to one extreme or the other. Some will tell you that matter—flesh, is very unworthy. You ought to try and get away from matter—from the body, as far as you can get, and return to the universal soul. That’s false. It’s God who made us with flesh and bodies. Our blessed Lord became flesh, assumed a human body and will have a body eternally. Others go to the opposite extreme and want to say that man is merely matter. That’s likewise false. We are flesh plus spirit. And what God is now saying in response to man’s sin and corruption is, ‘My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh’ (Gen 6:3 KJV)—rebellious and sinful flesh at that.

You say, ‘Why does God say here “My spirit”? Doesn’t that mean the Holy Spirit? Were these dreadful sinners indwelt by the Holy Spirit?’

Surely they weren’t. When we think of ‘spirit’ and ‘spirit of God’, we are thinking of different shades of meaning in the terms. So then, why does God here call it my spirit? Let me read you a verse from Psalm 104:

When you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. When you send forth your [spirit], they are created, and you renew the face of the ground. (vv. 29–30)

The psalmist refers here to ‘your spirit’ because God creates the spirit and imparts it. The psalmist is talking about the animal creation, but it is so also with man. Scripture says that God is ‘the Father of spirits’ (Heb 12:9). We are used to thinking of the third person of the Trinity as the Holy Spirit, and we recognize him as a person; equally a person as the Father and the Son. But when the activity of the Holy Spirit is referred to, Scripture talks in these terms:

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. (Gen 1:1–2)

The Spirit of God moved like some great wind or energy.

You say, ‘Wait a moment, do you mean the Holy Spirit himself, or what?’

Well, let me use a humble analogy. We think of the sun up in the sky, which is the source of our light and heat, and then we think of the sunbeam that alights on our hand, maybe. Now tell me, is the beam the sun?

‘Well, no,’ you say, ‘you wouldn’t call it the sun. The sun isn’t on your hand; it’s a sunbeam.’

Oh, I see. Well, where does the sunbeam come from?

You say, ‘It comes from the sun’.

Just as we distinguish the sun from the sunbeam, though the sunbeam comes from the sun, sometimes God will use the term ‘spirit’ in the sense of energy. Let me quote you a famous verse referring to the power that raised the Lord Jesus from the dead:

. . . the exceeding greatness of his power to us-ward who believe, according to that working of the strength of his might. (Eph 1:19 RV)

Three terms are put together in this verse to describe the vast input of divine energy that God made when he raised his Son from the dead—power, strength and might. And, ‘he declared him by the spirit of holiness to be the Son of God by the resurrection from the dead’ (see Rom 1:4); and as believers, we are ‘strengthened with power through his Spirit in [our] inner being’ (Eph 3:16), which refers to the energies of God in us.

Zechariah 12 is talking of all mankind and not just believers:

. . . Thus declares the LORD, who stretched out the heavens and founded the earth and formed the spirit of man within him. (v. 1)

Man has a spirit, and it is God who formed it. We are not talking here about the Holy Spirit, whom we receive when we’re born again; we’re talking about what is the normal constitution of a human being, flesh plus spirit. There are two references to this in the book of Numbers; I’ll read you just one:

And they fell on their faces and said, ‘O God, the God of the spirits of all flesh, shall one man sin, and will you be angry with all the congregation?’ (16:22)

So, Scripture is saying that it is God who formed the spirit of man and woman within them, even as yet unregenerate (unconverted) men and women, for this is mankind’s basic constitution: flesh and spirit.

The Epistle to the Hebrews says—talking to Christians, of course: ‘Shall we not much more be subject to the Father of spirits and live?’ (12:9). God is the Father of spirits because he formed the human spirit, and we, especially as believers, are meant to be subject to the Holy Spirit.

I think I can hear the whirring of somebody’s mind, and you’re thinking, ‘At long last we’re going to find out this man’s theology about the difference between soul and spirit!’

I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to tell you—I’d love you to tell me afterwards. As far as I can see, Scripture doesn’t define the soul or spirit; but it does describe them. I’ll just mention some of the descriptions of the spirit in man.

Paul observes:

For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. (1 Cor 2:11 NKJV).

What goes on in a person, and what are typically human things? It’s not just a matter of logic and intellect; it is something more basic—something only the person’s spirit knows.

You see, you have a lot in common with your dog, if you’ve got one. If your Bonzo, or whatever you call him, sees you seated at the table eating a beefsteak, he’ll come in—if you allow him into the dining room—wag his tail and nudge you to make sure you know he’s there. He sees you eating the beefsteak, and he knows exactly what you’re feeling because he has a stomach as you do. As he sees that beefsteak descending down your gullet, he can sense all the wonderful tickling sensations, the beautiful taste and everything else, because he can taste things as you do. But the dog doesn’t understand things that are typically human, and never will. For example, you take him into your lounge and say, ‘Look at that beautiful picture there, Bonzo’, but he won’t know what you mean. Because you’re pointing to it, he’ll go and try to find out. First, he licks it, but he doesn’t get much out of that, so he smells it. He uses all his faculties to try and see, and then decides it’s nothing. Yet you go into raptures about it. Why is that? Well, it has something to do with the human spirit.

We’re told in holy Scripture that for those who have been born again, ‘The Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God’ (Rom 8:16). All of you who are believers will know exactly what that means. Above all the ebb and flow of emotion and the tides of feelings, how do you know the witness of the Holy Spirit to your spirit? With the central part of your being—your spirit—you know what it means for the Holy Spirit to witness to you that you are a child of God. And if you don’t know that, please start talking to some of your Christian friends and let them tell you what it means.

Perversion, judgment and salvation

But we come back now to consider man in his raw state—flesh and spirit, and what eventually happened to the development of the human race from Adam. We have already thought about man’s constitution—spirit plus flesh; now we have to think about man’s perversion and the consequences. We shall think of the nature and effect of man’s destruction by water under God’s judgment, then the means of salvation through the ark that God instructed Noah to build. We shall not have time in this session to go into detail, but you can check my explanation later by referring to a passage in the New Testament that refers to Noah and his ark (1 Pet 3:18–4:6). When you look at the passage you will find that it uses the question of flesh and spirit as its principal term. So, to conclude our session now, we’ll think about the beginning of the new human race in Noah.

The perversion of mankind

In Genesis we are told that ‘God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on the earth’ (6:12). Verse 5 tells us, ‘The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually’. Here was man in spiritual rebellion against God, particularly in the thoughts and imagination of his heart. The New Testament talks similarly about the ruin of the human race and what we were all like before we were converted, if we have been, and what was wrong with us.

And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience—among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. (Eph 2:1–3)

This is a sorry state, affecting the mind and then the desires of the flesh. How did it come about? ‘Under the influence’, says Paul, ‘of the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience’. He is referring to the story that we’ve studied in these last two nights of the temptation of man and woman by that sinister archfiend, Satan, a spirit-being created by God and originally of exalted position.

What was Satan’s transgression? It was a spiritual sin: not a sin of the flesh, because he has none. The spirit of Satan said, ‘I will ascend to heaven; above the stars of God I will set my throne on high; . . . I will make myself like the Most High’ (Isa 14:13–14). He wanted to make himself equal with God. It was the spiritual sin of pride and self-glory that would usurp the Creator’s place. A fallen spirit himself, Satan tried the same tactic on human beings. He told them, ‘Take that forbidden fruit. Disregard God’s word, for in the day you eat of it, you will be as God.’ He was appealing to that evil spiritual motive to be as God, to be independent of God, which affects our mental makeup. ‘And you . . . once were alienated [from God] and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds’, says Paul (Col 1:21).

We were rebelling from the life of God through our trespasses and sins, and in subjection to the father of lies (John 8:44), which leads to corruption of the thoughts. With a spirit no longer subject to the Father of spirits (Heb 12:9), the spirit in man will go perverse, and instead of controlling his flesh he indulges it. Do remember that when the Bible talks of flesh, it isn’t just talking of sexual sins. The brain is as much flesh as any other part of our body. Get rid of the notion of the Father of spirits, rebel against him, strike out in independence of him, and it will affect your flesh in the sense of your brain, your thoughts and your mental outlook, which in turn will approve of and allow indulgence of the flesh.

So it was with mankind. Eventually, after years, centuries maybe, man had become corrupt. And not only by his own volition, there was also an attempt to pervert the race:

The sons of God [angels] saw that the daughters of man [human females] were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose . . . the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. (Gen 6:2, 4)

Some people have doubted that the ‘sons of God’ in this passage could be angels, because, according to our Lord Jesus, angels don’t marry (see Matt 22:30; Mark 12:25). That is true; angels in their ‘proper habitation’ don’t marry. The Lord didn’t say that they can’t marry, but that they don’t. The New Testament indicates that among the various revolts in the spirit world, there were angels ‘which kept not their own principality, but left their proper habitation’ (Jude v. 6 rv). The word translated ‘habitation’ in this verse is the Greek word oikētērion. Paul uses the same word in 2 Corinthians 5:2 to refer to our heavenly body, ‘longing to be clothed upon with our habitation which is from heaven’ (rv). Jude tells us that, like the men did in Sodom and Gomorrah, angels left their proper habitation and went after ‘strange flesh’. It was an attempt by evil spirits therefore to pervert the human race. It wasn’t a question of the sin of this man or that man, or of this woman or the other; the race, if left to itself, would have been destroyed and the gene pool wrecked.

And so God decided to intervene. He said, ‘My spirit [the life-giving spirit that God had formed in man] shall not always abide in man’—‘It grieved him to his heart’ that he had made this new strange creature (see Gen 6:3, 6). Therefore, God devised the judgment. After waiting for one hundred and twenty years in his grace and mercy, pleading with them through his servant Noah, God sent the flood and destroyed them.

The manner of judgment

It is interesting to notice the form that God’s judgment took on corrupt mankind. When the inhabitants of Sodom proved irredeemably evil, God burned them up (Gen 19:24–25). But this time he drowned the world, which was not only a judgment in itself but it served as an object lesson. You see, if you burn a body, you get ashes. But what happens if you drown a body? You don’t need to put it under water for a very long time. After just five minutes or so you’re left with a body, with flesh, and without breath it goes rotten. It is an object lesson of the more serious state. When God summons the human spirit out of its body, the body goes rotten. It’s an unpleasant thought, isn’t it? And that also has a lesson to teach us. When man rebels against God at the spiritual level, he loses control of his flesh—his brain and his body, and his flesh goes morally bad.

That is why salvation, as we read of it in the New Testament, has to start at the very key to the problem. God doesn’t start saving us by remedying the ills of our bodies; he starts by dealing with our spirits. Christ points out that shallow ideas of salvation are useless: ‘That which is born of the flesh,’ says he, ‘is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit’ (John 3:6). Our trouble does not lie so much in the flesh, as at the level of the spirit. If our spirits are alienated from God, they are dead (see Eph 2:1–5). It’s like what the father of the prodigal son said about his son while he was in the far country: ‘For this my son was dead . . .’ (Luke 15:24). Or, you might say, ‘I phoned my friend the other day, and the line went dead’. So, between the Father of spirits and the human spirit outside of Christ, the line has gone dead.

You can attempt to deal with the flesh: you can apply religion and try with all your might to improve your brain, your mind, your morals and all the rest of it. But that will not suffice, for ‘that which is born of the flesh is flesh’ (John 3:6). There needs to be a rebirth, a regeneration at the spiritual level by being born of water and the Spirit (v. 5). In his unconverted days Paul the apostle found it to be so. Zealous to make himself exceedingly religious by pursuing disciplines of all kinds and shapes, he became completely frustrated in the end. He was trusting in the flesh, that is, in his own independent efforts to make himself right with God. And likewise our efforts are bound to be disappointing. Nothing can do it except the regeneration of God’s Holy Spirit and the gift of new and eternal life. But don’t let me say it as though it were an awful, a difficult, thing; it’s a glorious thing! It’s not that we have to put ourselves right, for we can’t do it. God has a marvellous way of salvation in which he does the saving and the regeneration, and we’re begotten again of God’s Holy Spirit.

In the ancient Testament, the ark that God told Noah to prepare is an example of salvation. When he and his family were at last called to enter in, the door was shut and they were saved from the judgment of God. But notice, they were not saved from the flood; they were saved through the flood.

You say, ‘Why is that important?’

Well, it’s a marvellous illustration, for if Noah and his family had gone through the flood just as they were, they would have drowned. But God provided an ark for them to be inside, which could go through the flood and come out the other side. When we Christians think about that, we remember at once the great reality of which it was an early prototype. How are we saved? In a sense, we’re not saved merely from the judgment due to our sins. When we trust Christ, God puts us in Christ. And then we learn this tremendous thing: when Christ died, he suffered the wrath of God; and now that we’re in him, we died with him. He bore our judgment; and because we are joined to him, his death is counted as our death. In other words, the judgment of our sins was on him, and being in him we have come through the judgment out to the other side (see Rom 6).

We were buried with Christ—that’s what our baptism symbolizes (Rom 6:4). When we are baptized as believers, the water doesn’t do anything to us, except make us cold maybe. It has no magic in it; it is but a symbol. Baptism is a symbolic burial.

When we get baptized, we are saying, ‘I was so bad that all my efforts to improve myself were inadequate. To escape the judgment of God, Christ didn’t just come alongside to give me a helping hand; he died at Calvary for me. He took my place and bore my judgment, and now God has put me in him, so to speak. I deserved to die. It wasn’t that I’d told a few lies and done one or two other rather unfortunate things for which I repented, but on the whole I was good. I accepted God’s judgment that I had sinned and deserved his wrath as the penalty for my sin and admitted that I was absolutely hopeless in the face of his judgment. When I was prepared to repent like that, God pointed me to the Saviour; and when I came to the Saviour and entered in, God put me in Christ. God says that when Christ died, I died. The judgment of my sin was borne by Christ, and my baptism symbolizes the significance of the death of Christ for me.’

But baptism is not merely a symbolic burial, is it? I think you’ve noticed that when folks get baptized they’re not left under the water. It is also a symbolic resurrection, and that’s the other side of the story. Christ bore the judgment for me; the judgment has now passed and he’s come out the other side. He’s risen, never to die again; and because I’m joined with Christ, I am risen with him to ‘walk in newness of life’ (Rom 6:4 again). Marvellous, isn’t it? It’s a glorious salvation and I’m a little bit surprised you can’t manage to say Hallelujah! You’ve said it in your hearts, of course.

So then, the ark is a picture of Christ, in and through whom we are delivered from the judgment of God. In a sense, we have come through it; and with the judgment now past we’re risen in newness of life.

Walking in newness of life by the Spirit

There came a new beginning after the flood (Gen 8). The flood waters began to recede, and Noah needed some guidance as to when it would be safe to get out of the ark and tread upon the earth. He only had a window in the top of the ark and not the sides, so apparently he couldn’t stretch his neck to look out. He decided to test it by sending out some birds. First, he sent out a raven, which didn’t come back again because ravens eat carrion meat and I suppose there was plenty around. Then he sent out a dove, and it eventually came back with an olive leaf in its mouth. This was guidance for Noah.

That’s a very interesting story, and of course it’s true to history. In the ancient world, mariners often took birds with them because, if they were far from the shore and couldn’t see land, how would they know where the nearest land was? The old ships didn’t have a compass. When the sky was dark with clouds and they couldn’t see the stars at night they were in a difficult quandary, so they would let a bird go. Birds have an instinct for where the nearest land is, so the bird would fly off and the mariner would follow it. In the same way, Noah was guided by birds and the dove in particular.

As you hear about Noah coming out of the waters of judgment being guided by the birds, I can’t stop you Christians from thinking about the story of our blessed Lord. At the beginning of his ministry, sinless as he was and coming to be our Saviour, he went down into the waters of Jordan, where there were sinners galore, confessing their sins. He had no sins to confess, but in his magnificent grace he was coming to identify himself with a fallen human race and was baptized by John the Baptist in the Jordan. When he came out of the water, God could not forbear any longer. Unless we should mistake the significance of his baptism, the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit alighted upon him as a dove. Immediately afterwards, he was led, indeed driven, by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. Then, having come through that triumphantly, once more led and anointed by the Spirit, he came back again and began his ministry (see Matt 3:13–4:17).

And then we think of ourselves in Christ, who bore our judgment. Now that we are risen with him, how shall we live right? Our sins are forgiven, but it’s not simply for us to do the best we can. Certainly, we must do the best we can, but that isn’t the secret. The secret of the gospel is nothing less than this: ‘For all who are led by the Spirit of God are sons of God’ (Rom 8:14). Having risen with Christ, we are now to be led by the Holy Spirit. That’s how our characters are developed. We are not left to our own independent efforts to live the best Christian lives we can (which, if we’re not careful, will turn us into Pharisees).

The new beginning for the human race

When Noah comes out of the ark, we observe four things. I must deal with them very briefly, for if I keep you any later than I’ve done on other nights, you’ll never come and hear me again!

Security

The very first thing he did was to build an altar and offer a sacrifice, a burnt offering, to God. In the humble words of the text, ‘the LORD smelt the pleasing aroma’ (Gen 8:21), which in Hebrew literally means ‘a savour of rest’. Now that he was beginning a new life in a cleansed world, God promised Noah, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man’ (Gen 8:21). It was security always and forever, on the basis of the sacrifice. The burnt offering points forward to our blessed Lord Jesus who gave himself to do the will of God, which he did perfectly: ‘For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified’ (Heb 10:14). Don’t ever forget it, my dear brother and sister. Never leave the cross of Christ behind and go on to something ‘more advanced’. That is always an error. As a believer, the basis of your progress is, first of all, security in being accepted for the sake of Christ and having the Holy Spirit to lead you.

New mandate

And secondly, the new mandate. Noah was the re-founder of the human race, so whereas before we all came from Adam, now we all come through Noah. He is the second man—there would be another ‘second man’ in a far greater sense, of course (1 Cor 15:47). Therefore, Noah had responsibilities and God told him what they would be. In particular, he was to guard the sanctity of human life: ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed’ (Gen 9:6). He was to judge, which obviously means in this context the institution of legal justice by Noah. As our talk comes to an end this evening, we will follow its spiritual implications.

If we have been delivered from the judgment of God through Christ, having been buried with him, raised with him and led by the Holy Spirit, then we are asked to judge ourselves. As we come to the Lord’s Supper in remembrance of his body given and his blood poured out, we are to judge ourselves, discern ourselves. Not morbidly, of course, but we all know that things are not always one hundred percent and we have ideas and attitudes that are not what they should be. Our friends see it, even if we don’t. We are asked to judge ourselves and confess our sins. If we don’t, we shall be disciplined of God (see 1 Cor 11:27–32).

The covenant and rainbow

Thirdly, there was the covenant and its token, the rainbow. God covenanted with Noah that seedtime and harvest should not fail and that he would never again destroy the world by water. One day it will eventually be destroyed by fire, but never by a universal flood as it suffered in Noah’s day. He said to Noah,

I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth. . . . This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth. (Gen 9:13–17)

I think if I had been Noah, now outside the ark in this new world, and had seen the rain clouds beginning to rise up, I should have been weak at the knees, wondering if God was going to judge again.

God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake [still alive] or asleep [physically dead] we might live with him. (1 Thess 5:9–10)

Noah’s indiscretion

The last sorry story is of Noah’s indiscretion. He got drunk and lost control. Wasn’t it sad? You see, it is still true that ‘the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do’ (Gal 5:17). ‘We are wise then,’ says Paul, ‘to sow to the Spirit’, for of the Spirit we shall reap all the good benefits and potentialities of eternal life. ‘For the one who sows to the flesh will from the flesh reap corruption’ (see Gal 6:8).

The resurrection body

We’ve been thinking about Noah as the second man, but I have a better story to remind you of before I finish (see 1 Cor 15:35–56). Adam begat sons and daughters in his own image, and all of us are born in the image of the earthly man as to our bodies. But there’s a second man, and he’s the Lord from heaven. Whereas Adam was a living soul, the blessed Lord is a life-giving spirit. Praise God, one day not only shall our spirits be redeemed and sanctified, but our very bodies shall be saved and transformed. ‘Just as we have borne the image of the [earthly man], we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven’ (v. 49). There is a soulish (natural) body, and there is a spiritual body: ‘Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed’ (v. 51). Our very bodies shall be made ‘like his glorious body’ (Phil 3:21), a fit habitation and expression for our redeemed spirits for all eternity. And so may God fill our hearts with joy through reading his word.

Questions

The lifespans in the genealogy of Adam

The genealogy of Adam is recorded in Genesis 5. The amazing part of the account is their ages: Adam, nine hundred and thirty; Seth, nine hundred and twelve; Enosh, nine hundred and five. Is there an explanation for this longevity as compared with today’s lifespan of seventy years?

I think if I had been Noah, now outside the ark in this new world, and had seen the rain clouds beginning to rise up, I should have been weak at the knees, wondering if God was going to judge again.

You know, I’ve met some believers like that. They’re saved godly folks, but they live with a certain trepidation in their hearts, wondering if they might be lost at last. If you are a genuine believer and you feel like that, my dear brother or sister, see the rainbow against the dark cloud and be assured thatThat question has interested and still interests many biblical scholars, and as usual they don’t necessarily agree. That’s why we have biblical scholars! But, seriously speaking, various explanations are given. The one is, and quite possibly it is true, that Adam, as originally created, did not have inherent physical immortality. God alone has immortality, and therefore it was necessary for Adam to eat of the tree of life if he were to be maintained in life forever. When he sinned he was driven out of the garden, so that he should not stretch out his hand and eat of the tree of life and live forever in that fallen state. Eventually he would return to the dust. He didn’t immediately die, as people have observed; he kept on living physically. So perhaps in those days, having come comparatively recently from the hand of the Creator, the human race gradually declined. Originally they lived long years, but after the flood their ages are noticeably reduced, and later on they are reduced still further.

In our modern world, with modern biological techniques, good nutrition, healthcare and so forth, the average length of life has much increased since I was a boy. These help to maintain good physical condition, which tends to help promote a longer life. But even then, for somebody to reach one hundred or one hundred and ten years of age is unusual. If medicine and other things go on improving, reaching over one hundred years may become more normal.

With all that in mind, I would suggest that the long ages recorded in Genesis 5 were due to the fact that the human race was originally not far, so to speak, from creation itself, and only gradually declined after the fall. There are, however, complications to consider. If you look at the histories of some other ancient nations, they also record longevity. But they have kings living for thirty thousand years and things of that order, which surpasses credulity and has given rise to all kinds of questions about these dates.

Is it a way of saying that people lived a long time? Or could it be that some of these names are not those of individuals but of nations? I find that explanation difficult because, in the list of Genesis 5, you have the age of a man before he produced children and his age after he produced children. It seems to me, therefore, that it cannot possibly be talking of nations. Although it is true that some men’s personal names also became the names of the nations in which they lived, I don’t think it can be applied to Genesis 5.

These are some ideas on the topic, but I have to confess that when it comes to adding up the numbers, I find it very difficult. I was never very good at sums; I don’t have that kind of memory. I read and hear what the experts say, but by the afternoon I’ve forgotten it. To get a full answer to this question, I would suggest that you seek out serious, believing commentators on the topic. It is a fact that in the ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, the dates are somewhat different. The reason for that is again a matter of interest, but for the ordinary believer it is nothing to worry about.

The earth was without form and void

Now we come to another question, which the questioner has very graciously signed. It comes from a senior missionary.³³ Let me say publicly how much I admire his grace to come night by night with his great experience and encourage a junior like me. It’s very kind of him. His question is:

Would you kindly help us concerning the following passages?

For thus says the LORD, who created the heavens (he is God!), who formed the earth and made it (he established it; he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited!): ‘I am the LORD, and there is no other’. (Isa 45:18)

The earth was without form [waste] and void . . . (Gen 1:2)

I looked on the earth, and behold, it was without form [waste] and void . . . (Jer 4:23)

Now, bearing those three quotations in mind, can the verb ‘was’ in Genesis1:2 actually be made to mean ‘became’, such that the passage would read: ‘The earth became without form [waste] and void’?

I say at once that many scholars, better scholars than I am, and experts in the Semitic tongue have suggested that it could be translated like that. The questioner hasn’t told me what he thinks, but many people have deduced that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth—but he didn’t create the earth waste and empty. Because Isaiah says that he didn’t, they deduce that the verb probably means became, rendering the passage in Genesis 1:2, ‘the earth became waste and void’. This would imply that there had been an original creation, which fell under the judgment of God for some unexplained reason. Therefore, the earth became waste and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. On day one, then, when God said, ‘Let there be light,’ that was the beginning of this new creation. Some critics call this the gap theory, meaning a gap between verses 1 and 3.

As I say, that view has been held by excellent scholars and able expositors, and I think one should perhaps also entertain the possibility that ‘waste and void’ (tōhû wābōhû in Hebrew) does not necessarily imply an absolute disaster. It can be used of disaster, as you see from Jeremiah 4:23: ‘I looked on the earth, and behold, it was without form and void’—God had dealt with it in judgment. But in Isaiah 45:18 it says, ‘he did not create it empty, he formed it to be inhabited’. Isaiah seems to be saying that God’s purpose for the earth was that it should be inhabited, not to be waste and void.

There are two forms of chaos, aren’t there? I will use the illustration of cooking—not that I know much about it. Here’s a dear lady, and she’s making a cake for the coming of age of her daughter. She starts with neatly packaged sugar, flour, orange peel and currants—all very orderly. She opens the packets, pours them all out into a mixing bowl and stirs them up. Now it’s chaos, but very good chaos—a necessary process towards making a beautiful cake. She hasn’t made it chaos to leave it in that state—of course not. It’s a necessary step in the process of making a jolly good cake. That’s one form of chaos on its way to becoming something marvellous. There could be another form of chaos. She’s made the cake and iced it beautifully, when in comes her clumsy husband and accidentally knocks it off the table onto the floor, where it smashes into a thousand pieces. That’s a very bad form of chaos.

In those terms, I think you would have to judge whether the chaos of Genesis 1:2, ‘The earth was without form [waste] and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep’, was a bad chaos—the results of God’s judgment on a former creation; or a good chaos on the way to becoming something marvellous.

I myself hold the view that those verses may well cover many years. We are here talking about cosmology, and in order to get an earth, all kinds of things will have gone on in the heavens, which, by the kind of time it would use for cosmology, might well have taken millions of years. Though relative to our earth-time it might have seemed a day or so, out there in space it could be vast ages of time. I am thinking here of what is called in science the relativity of time and other such things, like gravitational time dilation, which says that time can be stretched by gravity. But these are big matters, and I wouldn’t want to appear to be dogmatic in my view.

Thank you, sir, for raising the question and all the interesting implications of it.

The ‘sons of God’ as demonic forces

Do you believe that the sons of God in Genesis 6:1–2, as spirit beings, inhabited the bodies of men, such that the men were demon-possessed? And by the devil’s direction they used the bodies of these men for their evil purposes to infiltrate the human race?

I think it is very possible that it was done that way. Once more, I wouldn’t be dogmatic because the Bible doesn’t explain how. These verses also have been a matter of sustained controversy that continues still. Wherever I go, whatever topic I’m speaking on in many different countries, one of the questions that is sure to come up is regarding the sons of God in Genesis 6—so much so that I vowed at times to make a record of it so I could play it back!

That is not to belittle the question; it is an exceedingly important one. As you will have heard in the talk I gave (see pp. 83–84), I hold that the sons of God here are angelic beings; as are the sons of God both at the beginning and end of the book of Job. It’s a normal phrase in the Bible for angels or spirit beings.

Campbell Morgan and others have said that the one thing they couldn’t possibly be was angels. Why not? ‘Because,’ they say, ‘our Lord said that in the resurrection, we shall neither marry nor be given in marriage, for we shall be like the angels, and they don’t marry’ (see Matt 22:30; Mark 12:25). That is perfectly true. Our Lord said that angels that keep their proper habitation don’t marry. But that is not to say they can’t marry. And in the Epistles, we have strong phrases used about this. In the book of Jude, we read:

And angels which kept not their own principality, but left their proper habitation, he hath kept in everlasting bonds under darkness unto the judgement of the great day. Even as Sodom and Gomorrah, and the cities about them, having in like manner with these given themselves over to fornication, and gone after strange flesh, are set forth as an example, suffering the punishment of eternal fire. (vv. 6–7 RV).

Those two verses coming together seem to me to suggest there is a similarity between what the angels who did not keep their proper habitation did, and what the people of Sodom and Gomorrah did; namely, perversion in sexual relationships.

Secondly, as we’ve seen, it is said that these angels didn’t keep their own principality but left their proper habitation. The word translated as habitation in this verse is the Greek word oikētērion. It is the word that Paul uses in 2 Corinthians 5 for the house, the eternal habitation; or in other words, the body that we shall have when the Lord comes and gives us a body like his glorious body. What that spirit body shall be like, we don’t really know, do we? It will, however, be like the body the Lord Jesus has. But it interests me that Jude uses the same term in referring to these angels, namely that they left their proper habitation, their proper oikētērion. Their sin was that they went after strange flesh; they went after union with humans.34

Footnotes to Sermon 5

²⁶ Live debate examining the moral issues behind one of the week’s news stories.

²⁷ The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1976.

²⁸ The Selfish Gene, p. 215

²⁹ The Concept of Mind, Hutchinson’s University Library, London, 1949.

³⁰ The Matter Myth: Towards Twenty First Century Science, Viking, London, 1991.

³¹ The Matter Myth, pp. 302–303.

³² Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, Norton, New York, 1985.

³³ Mr George Orr, Brazil.

³⁴ Once again the audio ends here.

6. Gospel Implications of a Personal Creator

We have come to the last in our series of lectures this week. I would like publicly to express my gratitude to the organizers for their gracious invitation to come and be among you, and to thank all of you who have persevered with great powers of endurance and have come along each evening to attend the lectures. You have made it so easy for me by your evident interest and enthusiasm. I nearly got round to thanking you for allowing me to go on so long, but I think that could be an exaggeration. You may well have voiced your complaints in that regard to the organizers, but in self-defence I point out that they didn’t relay your criticism to me. That was kind of them. Normally, lecturers in this place do not so abuse the patience of those who attend, so don’t be discouraged from coming to other series where the lecturer will behave more modestly.

Christianity and Greek philosophy

I would like to preface my remarks, by reading to you the historical account of the way the Christian gospel first came to the ancient city of Athens. It was bought by Paul the apostle, and the record of it is to be found in Luke’s history, called the Acts of the Apostles.

It is true to say that in the first century AD Athens as a city was no longer the place it once had been three to four hundred years before then. It had lost something of the glory and majesty of the days of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and the whole ferment of philosophy and natural science that had then reigned supreme from Pythagoras in the west to the Ionian philosophers in the east. They were great days of glory that contributed indelibly to the onward march of natural science in Europe and eventually in the whole world, and also to philosophical thought, which was largely the invention of the Greeks of that period.

In the days when the Christian gospel first came to Athens, Athens was still what you might call a university city, with various schools of philosophy represented. It was a city, therefore, to which wealthy people around the Roman Empire would send their sons in the hope of giving them a good education and introducing them to its culture.

It was to that city that Paul came, and for a week he talked and gossiped the gospel in the manner of Athenians to anyone he could find in the famous Agora. Among his listeners from time to time were certain philosophers. Luke names them as some Stoics and Epicureans. Understandably, they found Paul’s teaching novel and strange. Of course, the Christians themselves knew that their gospel would sound not only strange but foolish indeed (see 1 Cor 1:23). To tell a learned philosopher that the salvation of the world depended on the crucifixion of a man from Nazareth, would seem exceedingly foolish to a Greek—how could it possibly be true? Nonetheless Paul preached it, because he knew it was true, of course. And he preached it, knowing it would be seen as foolish in that kind of climate. Along with the death of Jesus Christ as the Saviour dying for the sins of the world, he also preached the resurrection of Christ, which was then a recent historical fact. It piqued the interest of some of the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers, and they invited Paul to their place and asked him to hold forth and expound the Christian gospel in more detail.

I would like to read what he actually said to that learned community.

So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said: ‘Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, “To the unknown god”. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way towards him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said, “For we are indeed his offspring”. Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.’ (Acts 17:22–31)

Epicurean, Stoic and other Greek philosophies

Paul is addressing the Epicureans, Stoics and other philosophers, and I confess immediately that these ancient philosophers compel my admiration. Here were men who were not prepared just to idle their way through life or wander aimlessly. Surrounded by the spectacle of the heavens, as we are ourselves are, they longed to know how it all came about and how it worked. And then, not only to know how the universe around us works and what it’s made of, but also what our goal should be as men and women in this world. They posed the questions: Is there some purpose? What should our main objective be in life? What should we actually seek? In other words, they were not prepared to freewheel through life and end up just any old where.

The great thinker Aristotle said that if we want to pursue the chief good in life, what we ought to be aiming at above all other things is what he called ‘an end in itself’—something you seek for its own sake and not simply as a means for some other thing. That is a piece of wisdom that we would do well to heed. For instance, suppose I come along to some good man in his thirties or forties, and I say, ‘You really do put yourself under stress in your business life. Wow, how hard you work! Why do you do it?’

‘Well,’ he says, ‘I have to do it to get money.’

‘Oh, I see. And why do you need the money?’

He says, ‘I’ve got a boy and two daughters, and they’ll soon be of university age. I need the money to send them to university. I’ve got to support them and my wife, let alone pay the mortgage on the house and all the rest of the things—no small matter.’

‘Why do they need to go to university?’

‘You won’t get a good job unless you have a good qualification.’

‘So you need to make the money to send them to university so that they can get the qualifications and a good job. Tell me, why would they need a good job?’

He says, ‘Don’t be so silly. To get some money.’

‘What for? To send their children to university so they can get qualifications, a good job and some money?’

Wait a minute! It seems to me we’re going round in circles. What is the point? Yes, by all means get the qualifications and make as much money as you can, but what’s the point of it all in the end? What’s the end objective? As I say, these philosophers compel my admiration because they seriously asked themselves, ‘What is life’s main business and objective?’

The Epicureans said that the main objective of life was pleasure. They didn’t mean self-indulgence, like getting drunk every weekend or doing anything stupid like that, for they counted those things not to be pleasures. They give you such terrible hangovers and disease of the liver and who knows what else. No, by pleasure they meant the quiet life. If they could, they tended to withdraw from the hustle and bustle and aimed to lead a placid life without too much emotional disturbance. The Epicureans produced some very kind and gracious characters.

The Stoics, on the other hand, were made of sterner stuff. They denounced the Epicureans as pleasure-loving people: ‘Fancy making such an incidental thing as pleasure the main objective in life’. Perhaps we need a few more Stoics nowadays because, if I’m a true observer of things, there are some people who would give the same reply as the Epicureans to the question, what is the main aim of life? They’d say, ‘Pleasure: if it feels good and is enjoyable, that’s enough justification for it’. The Stoics said, ‘No, it surely can’t just be that, given this amazing universe and all that’s in it’. They gave a lot of thought to the matter, and some of their insights are still very interesting. As they sought to know how things worked, they saw that this universe was designed by some rational power, and they decided that the main goal in life ought to be to live in accordance with the rational principle that is so evident in the way the universe works. Other philosophers in Athens at the time held different views, of course.

When Paul came to talk to these men, he knew what they believed. And if you are acquainted with their philosophies, you will see that in the course of his address, he gently touches on some of the main points of their beliefs. But, for all their tremendous learning and thinking, he knew them to be men who ultimately had no hope in this life. The Epicureans certainly didn’t. For their physical theory, the Epicureans embraced the atomic theory. As a teacher of Greek all my life, my chest heaves with pride, for it was the Greeks in the fourth—fifth century BC who invented the atomic theory. The refinements are new, but the atomic theory itself is very ancient. It was marvellous in those days that they hit upon the idea that the whole of the universe is composed of atoms, which are bits of stuff that can’t be split. Nowadays we have split the atom; but then we come down to the fundamental quarks inside it that perhaps can’t be split.

The Epicureans embraced the atomic theory invented by Leucippus and Democritus, but were then inclined to take it to the conclusion that a man or a woman is just made up of atoms. They have a body and a soul, but both the body and the soul are made of atoms. When they die, it’s because the atoms of the body and the soul all come apart, and there’s nothing left. The atoms go into the ground; they get into the grass; the cows eat the grass; and who knows where the atoms are now? When someone like Paul came along and preached the resurrection of the body, they thought him a little bit sub-intelligent. How could God resurrect a body and a soul when they’d all come to bits and pieces and were in the grass and the cows, etc.? So they held the view that there’s nothing after this life.

I mentioned the other night that some people liked that view. But there was a Roman poet by the name of Lucretius, who wrote six books on the atomic theory—books of poetry, if you please, so excited were people in those days about these wonderful discoveries. At the beginning of his work, he tells the public why he finds the atomic theory so encouraging. He says that it delivers you from fearing that there might be a judgment after death. When you die, if all the atoms come to bits and that’s the end of you, you don’t have to fear that you will be brought before God to be judged. I always think that it was very honest of Lucretius to have confessed that in his poetry.

I imagine there are still many people who find the atomic theory comfortable and comforting. They would like to believe that when we die, that’s the end of everything and there is no final judgment. But what does that mean? It means that there is no hope beyond death either; no hope for the individual. They would say, ‘If you’ve had a good time in life, you’re like somebody who’s invited to a banquet where you can eat what you want and enjoy yourself. But then you have the grace to retire gracefully, and say, “I’ve had enough,” and let the new generation come and have their turn.’

That sounded right to them, but what about the people for whom life has not been a banquet? Life has been full of sorrow, sadness, injustice and oppression. There have been millions and millions of people down the centuries whose lives have been like that. If it’s true that death is just the end, then not only was their life here a misery, but there’s no hope beyond it either. The Epicureans had no ultimate hope for the individual.

The Stoics were made of sterner stuff. They said that it was evident there was an intelligence behind the universe and that it works according to reason. They therefore endeavoured to live rationally, trying not to live impulsively nor to be simply driven by their emotions; but rather to live according to the rationality they perceived in the universe. They didn’t believe in God. To them, the reason and the rationality behind the universe was merely part of the stuff of the universe itself. They held that because the universe is rationally constructed, this world is the best of all possible worlds, and you shouldn’t complain. For instance, if you saw a child accidentally slipping into the river, it would be rational of you to try to rescue the child. But if, in spite of your attempts, the child drowned, you shouldn’t grieve over it. You must now admit that it was part of the destiny fixed by the rationality behind the universe that the child should die that way. If you saw six million Jews being gassed by Hitler, rationally you could try to save them. But if your efforts to save them were useless, then, according to Stoic philosophy, you had to admit that that was for the best. The Stoics had no hope beyond the grave either. Fancy asking millions and millions of people, who had known terror and starvation, to believe that this world is the best of all possible worlds. It isn’t, is it? They could offer no hope.

The Christian gospel

Here was Paul, the Christian gospeller, coming to preach to very thoughtful people like this about the real, living God of heaven, our creator. First, he compliments them: ‘I perceive you’re very religious’, he says (see Acts 17:22). Though he hastens to distinguish the Christian gospel from all the pagan superstitions with their endless idols and temples, because sometimes that form of religion is very difficult for rational, thinking people to take on board. It seems to them to be very superstitious, as indeed it is. So he quickly distinguishes the Christian gospel from that kind of religion. Then he proceeds to make certain major points, and for a while now I want to think about some of them with you.

The significance of human beings

‘Gentlemen,’ said Paul, ‘we ought not to think that God is like these images of gods around your city—statues of Zeus, Aphrodite or whoever—carved by men from stone, or formed in metal or what have you. God isn’t like that’ (see v. 29).

First of all, of course, God himself forbids us to try and make images of him. We cannot reduce the invisible Almighty to any physical, material object. But there’s a deeper point, isn’t there? Why oughtn’t we to think that God is like these images? ‘It’s because we are his offspring,’ says Paul. We are God’s creatures. That bit of stone, that marble, that golden image is impersonal; it’s not a person. Yet we human beings know in our very bones that we are persons. It’s no use talking to a tree—some people think it is, but normally it’s not—because there’s no person there. We are persons, aren’t we? And we find it comparatively easy to recognize a person when we see one.

It’s a marvellous thing when we look out into greater space and we get overawed. But we’ve no need to be. Take the sun up in the sky. From our perspective it’s enormous, but it’s a small thing in the gigantic universe. And then there is my brain, which is so small. Yet, without exaggeration, even my brain, let alone yours, is more significant than the sun up in the sky. Thanks to the scientists we know how the sun works, but the sun doesn’t know how we work. I know the sun is there, but the sun doesn’t know I’m here. (It might shine a bit more if it did!) The sun, mighty great thing that it is, is just so much gas. Why, a little baby’s brain is more significant than that.

We don’t measure significance by size, do we? For example, take a load of hay, which is very bulky, and a diamond, which is very small. Which is more valuable? Size is not a measure of significance. We may feel ourselves to be insignificant as we look out at the great galaxies in space, but they’re all made of gas and rock and atomic furnaces and other things; they’re not personal. It is the great burden of much of the Old Testament to persuade people not to bow down superstitiously to the likes of a sun god and a moon god. It is too derogatory and insulting to the human personality. God made us, and he wants us to stand up on our two feet and realize our human personality. We are more significant than the mere stuff of the universe. I think you can see that it is so. If you put ten thousand suns together, they wouldn’t have the significance of your brain. They’re only gas.

A personal God

If that is so, then something follows. We oughtn’t to think that God is like gold, silver or stone, because, if we are persons, our creator is no less than personal. He is not just a force; he is not just rationality. ‘We are made in his image,’ says Scripture (see Gen 1:26). God is most certainly personal. He is a personal God—more than a person perhaps, but certainly not less. And herein is the wonder of the Christian gospel. Like the Old Testament, it is so insistent that we do not grovel before this universe. Don’t go and read your lucky stars and imagine they control you. Stand up on your feet and accept the honour and dignity of being a human being made in the image of the Creator.

THE PROBLEM OF PAIN AND SUFFERING

But some people find it difficult to think that God the creator is personal. As I mentioned in a previous session, from time to time one of my colleagues at Queen’s and I would have lunch together, and we would fall to talking about things. Being a mathematical physicist of some eminence, he would say to me, ‘Yes, I have to admit, there must be an intelligence behind the universe; but not personal. I can’t believe that intelligence is personal.’ My good friend is like the Stoics, who thought that intelligence was part of the stuff of the universe.

I said, ‘Why not personal?’

‘Oh,’ he said, ‘look at the suffering in the world. I’m not talking about man’s inhumanity to man; that’s man’s fault. But what about the landslides, the earthquakes, the volcanoes and all that kind of thing? How can I possibly believe in a personal creator who is supposed to be almighty, all-powerful and all-loving, and who would create a universe like this, in which so many people suffer?’

The matter has been impressed upon us recently by the earthquakes in India and El Salvador. If there’s a God in heaven, why do people suffer so many bad things? What is the answer to it? Well, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t suppose tonight I have the final answer, for these things are not just intellectual puzzles, are they? When somebody is hurting on the inside, intellectual arguments are not enough to soothe the pain. But when my friends talk to me like that and say they can’t believe there’s a God because of all the suffering in the world, then my first reaction to that will be to say, ‘All right, I admit to you, I have a problem. How can I carry on believing in a God that’s all-powerful and all-loving when he allows such catastrophes and pain?’ And then I say, ‘Friend, let’s get rid of the problem then. Let’s suppose now that there is no God: will that will solve the problem?’ And then I quickly add, ‘But it won’t get rid of the pain, will it?’

Ladies and gentlemen, I trust I say it with all sympathy: if you get rid of God because you have suffered so much in your life, do be careful. You may get rid of an intellectual difficulty, but you won’t get rid of the pain that way. Indeed, you’ll make the pain ten thousand times worse. Why’s that? Well, because if there is an almighty God—as indeed there is—we have this great ground for hope. Whereas we cannot understand or explain everything, we have hope that God will bring good out of the evil. Those who know God through Jesus Christ our Lord will talk like this: ‘We know that this earthly suffering, which is for a little while, can, under God, work for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory’ (see 2 Cor 4:17).

Can we find any other considerations that might help us? Yes, surely, we can. Not all pain is bad. If you put your finger where it shouldn’t be, and you catch it in the bacon chopper, you feel a smart and you withdraw your hand. That’s God’s merciful provision. If you felt no pain, like someone with leprosy, you would leave your hand there until it was chopped to mincemeat. If you feel pains in your chest, that’s a very good warning and it should cause you to see your doctor. If you don’t heed the warning, it could lead to a heart attack.

Pain also develops character. Who do you think would form the more attractive character: a bright girl of seventeen years old who isn’t concerned with anything more than the latest hairstyle; or the girl who’s training to be a nurse in the cancer ward, with all that that means of self-sacrifice and diligence on her part? You say, ‘The latter, because helping folks who are suffering will form character in her’. We recognize that, don’t we?

Then there are some people who go out fifteen at a time to meet another fifteen from the other side in the game of rugby, knowing jolly well they’re going to get hurt. If you ask them, ‘Why on earth do you go out to get hurt?’, they’ll say, ‘It’s worth it for the game’. But let’s take bigger things. What a marvellous story mankind’s development of the planet has been. God encouraged it right from the very start, of course. Think of the things that we have discovered. Take electricity, for instance. We benefit from it in a thousand and one different ways, and yet its discovery and development have cost a lot of lives. What is your honest opinion about it? Ought people never to have tried to discover electricity? Or would you say, ‘Yes, it has caused human sacrifice, but it has been worth it’? Wouldn’t you say that it’s been worth it? If a project is big enough, we would say it’s worth quite a lot of suffering.

I get that picture from the New Testament too. If you were to ask God, ‘Why have you made a world anyway?’, he would tell you what the scheme is. It is so magnificent and wonderful that once you see it, you will agree that it’s worth all the pain.

The scheme, so the Bible says, is that God should eventually have what he calls ‘children of God’. We must not be confused by that term. Some people will tell you that all human beings are children of God. What they mean is that God, as a faithful creator, treats them in a fatherly fashion. Yes, that is true. Don’t let it shock you, but in the technical sense of the New Testament, not all people are children of God. We are all equally creatures of God and equally valuable to him. He made us; but the Bible says he made us as creatures and puts each generation on this temporary planet for a few years, so that while we live here we might have the opportunity to become children of God.

So then, what’s the difference between a child of God and a creature of God? A creature is a person that God created, like a sculptor might create a statue. When God made me through my parents, he didn’t ask my permission. Did anybody ask you if you would like to be born? Nobody asked my permission. God did it of his own sovereign choice; he made us as his creatures without consulting us. He made a planet to put us on and made us creatures, not only with physical and intellectual life but also with the ability to develop moral qualities and make moral decisions, and he gave us free will. He did all that without asking our permission because that was the necessary start. God had to start there; but the next stage that he offers—that we become children of God—that’s a different process. Let me quote the verse in the Bible that describes it so well. In referring to our blessed Lord, the Son of God incarnate, the Gospel of John chapter 1 says:

He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were [begotten], not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God. (vv. 11–13)

Do you see the difference in process? A sculptor with an image might make a beautiful lifelike statue of Goliath or something. That’s one process: he made it. When the sculptor gets married and has a child, he doesn’t make that child; rather he begets the child and transmits to them his own life. That’s the marvellous scheme that God has, and that’s why he brought you and me onto this planet and went to the trouble of having a planet. It’s only a temporary thing, as anybody will tell you, but it’s an opportunity for the next stage. Though we are born creatures of God, the possibility exists of our ‘being born again’, as the Bible puts it, now to be begotten by God and for God to transmit to us his own very life so that we become children of God. That’s the exciting thing about the Bible. I nearly said, ‘This is the true evolution’, but it isn’t evolution, is it? This is God’s purpose. Who shall measure the vast progress towards it?

So then, we are born as creatures with the opportunity to become children of God. It is such an exciting thing that I think we could all do with pausing for five seconds and asking ourselves in our innermost hearts, ‘If that is the scheme, certainly I have been born into this world as a creature of God; but have I got hold yet of the next bit? Have I become a child of God? Have I been begotten of God? Do I have the very life of God—eternal life, as the Bible describes it?’ That is the thing. In spite of the temporariness and the suffering of this world, which is all out of joint partly because of man’s sin and partly because it was never intended as anything other than temporary, those who have become children of God, with all the eternal potential and glory that it implies, will tell you straight that it is well worth it.

And I’ll tell you something more. God didn’t just sit up in his heaven with this scheme to have children, so he made a planet and put us on it, knowing that we would suffer a great deal; but as long as he got his purpose fulfilled he couldn’t care less. It wasn’t that way round. I’ll tell you the staggering news. To achieve his objective that we become his children, God himself in the person of his Son came down to our world. He suffered more than all of us put together so that we might be forgiven and delivered from the bondage and guilt that chained us to the past. ‘For the wages of sin is death’ (Rom 6:23), and the wages had to be paid out. The marvellous story of the gospel is that, when we were rebellious creatures who had gone our own way and didn’t care about God, the very creator of the planet came to seek us; not only to find us but to suffer the penalty of sin so that we might be saved (see Luke 19:10; Isa 53:6). God is a personal God, and he was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself (see 2 Cor 5:19). And the argument is, ‘He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?’ (Rom 8:32).

The call to seek God

And then in his address to the philosophers Paul added, ‘God has set the boundaries of our dwelling place so that we might feel our way towards him’ (see Acts 17:26–27). The word translated ‘feel’ is used perhaps of a blind man trying to grope his way along. God expects us to feel after him. Every Friday when you came back from the supermarket, if there was a bunch of the most beautiful flowers on your dining room table, you would wonder who on earth had put them there. Perhaps the first time it happened, it was February ^14th or something, so you didn’t bother too much. But when you began to find that it happened every Friday, wouldn’t you try to find out who was putting them there, or would you say, ‘I don’t care; it’s insignificant’?

My good friends, think of the ten thousand wonderful things that we enjoy every day—our food, landscape, friends, family and every other good and lovely thing. God says, ‘I’ve given them to you so that you should start seeking and asking, “Who gave them to me, and why does he give me these wonderful things?”’ That is a command of the Bible, actually: ‘Seek the LORD’ (Isa 55:6). If you’ll allow me in this lecture to be a bit of a preacher, we’re not to do what the Stoics did and just sit there and wait for fate, saying, ‘If it’s going to be, it will be’. The Stoics were fatalists; the Christian gospel isn’t fatalistic. It says there is something you can do about it. Do you want to find God? Seek him! And if you seek him, Christ guarantees you’ll find him (see Luke 11:9–10).

The New Testament tells of a very wealthy man by the name of Zacchaeus who had a heart to know who this Jesus was (see Luke 19:1–10). He was somewhat small in stature, so, on hearing that Jesus was to come that way, he climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him. He thought the leaves would hide him, but to his amazement and shock when Jesus came to the bottom of the tree he stopped. Looking up into the tree, he said, ‘Zacchaeus, come down’, and as Zacchaeus peered through the leaves he was looking into the very eyes of God. Here was a man trying to seek his creator, and here was the Creator having come right to where he was. The Creator knew him, knew his name and everything about him. He had come to seek and to save the lost.

We are to seek the Lord. Not to do so is outrageous ingratitude on the part of a creature, to say the very least. Though Paul added, ‘Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for “In him we live and move and have our being”’ (Acts 17:27–28). And that is true, of course. As we are together this evening, God is here. If you feel yourself at a distance, it’s you who’s far off, not God:

. . . Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down) or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). . . . The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart . . . because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Rom 10:6–9)

Salvation is a gift

Paul says another lovely thing: ‘As creator of the whole universe, God is not served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he owns everything anyway’ (see Acts 17:24–25). Some parents have told me how their little toddler bought a birthday present for his dad. He went with his pocket money to one of the local shops and bought a jug or something rather brightly coloured, and gave it to his dad. The youngster was so pleased that he’d bought Dad a present. He forgot for the moment, of course, that it was Dad’s money he was buying it with.

Sometimes it is true of us that we are grateful to God and want to show our gratitude by making him a present, so to speak. Well, that’s lovely, but we mustn’t get the wrong idea into our heads. We cannot buy salvation; we cannot buy acceptance with God; we cannot buy forgiveness or eternal life. Ladies and gentlemen, God is not in business—he doesn’t sell things. ‘The free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ our Lord’ (Rom 6:23). What kind of monster would God be if, first of all he made us without our permission, and then set impossible standards that we had to attain by our own effort, and if we failed we should be lost forever? God isn’t that kind of God. Knowing and foreseeing all our failures, he has devised a salvation that is utterly free.

For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Eph 2: 8–10)

It is true that in the minds of so many people, religion has made them think that salvation is on the terms that we struggle to do our very best to improve. We can’t know whether we have improved enough until the final judgment, so we have to live our lives in uncertainty. That’s a slander upon the Creator. With all his divine authority, our blessed Lord informs us that we can have eternal life, forgiveness and acceptance with God now, because it is offered to us as a gift through simple faith in Jesus Christ our Lord.

A coming day of final judgment

And then Paul says, ‘Therefore, now is the time when we must start repenting, for there’s been such a very big change in history’ (see Acts 17:30). There were centuries before Christ came, but the final judgment could never have been then, for the great sacrifice for sin had not yet been offered. But now that Christ has come, died and risen again, the next step is that God will judge the world in righteousness through that man whom he has appointed, of which he’s given assurance to all by raising him from the dead (see v. 31).

How does the assurance, the absolute certainty that there is going to come a day of judgment strike you? Do you find it a gloomy topic you’d rather not think about? Many people do, of course. But if you go back to the Old Testament, to Psalms 94 and 96, for instance, you will find that people took a very different view. They said, ‘[the Lord] will judge the peoples with equity. Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice . . . Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the LORD, for he comes, for he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness, and the peoples in his faithfulness’ (Ps 96:10–13). There’s going to be a day of judgment, and the Lord is coming to put things right. It’s marvellous good news.

I confess that half of my heart joins with them. Doesn’t yours? Would you have the world go on forever like it is now? Don’t you want sin and crime to be punished? What sane man or woman could want sin to go on utterly unpunished, such that not only do the Hitlers, the Stalins and the Pol Pots get away with millions of murders, but all the cheating and hurt caused in lesser circles goes unpunished? What kind of person would you be if you wanted the world to go on forever like it is? What kind of morality would be yours if you didn’t want sin to be judged and to stop?

There’s another side to it. We don’t mind the State prosecuting crimes, but it’s a different thing with sin, isn’t it? Crime is an offence against the State and we expect to see criminals locked up. But sin is an offence against God, and the truth is that we all have sinned. When God rises up to judge, there can’t be any favourites. So it’s not just the outrageous sinners like Hitler who will be judged, but all who have sinned. That dampens some people’s enthusiasm for the final judgment. What is the answer? The answer is to be found in our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us—‘the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God’ (1 Pet 3:18); it is to be found in ‘the Lamb of God, who [by his sacrifice] takes away the sin of the world’ (see John 1:29).

Let’s listen once again to the appeal of God, our maker, through Paul:

. . . in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor 5:19–21)

He’s a personal God. He knows each one of us, knows our record, and as our creator he is loyal to us, his creatures. So loyal that rather than we perish, he would give his Son to die for us. Seek him, and you will find him (see Luke 11:9); ‘call on the name of the Lord and you will be saved’ (see Rom 10:13).

And let our final word be the assurance from Jesus Christ himself:

Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgement, but has passed from death to life. (John 5:24)

So may God use his word to enrich our minds and then to reach our hearts, touch our consciences and provoke our faith, lest we miss what life’s supreme purpose is. For we were created so that we might come to know God and receive Christ as our Lord and Redeemer, and from being simply creatures to becoming children of God.

Questions

We have come to the last question time, and you may be relieved to hear there is only one question. It’s profoundly philosophical and I will do my best to answer it.

Pleasure and discipline

The Stoics taught discipline, and the Epicureans taught pleasure. Does Christianity exclude or incorporate these two concepts?

If we take the English words as they stand, there is a fairly easy answer to this. With regard to pleasure, Psalm 16 says ‘. . . at your right hand [there] are pleasures for evermore’ (v. 11). So yes, Christianity surely includes the idea of pleasure. And as for discipline in the Stoic sense, namely self-control, of course Christianity preaches it very strongly. Part of the fruit of the Spirit is self-control (Gal 5:23), and we are to develop it.

We also talk about discipline in the sense that God disciplines us. Now, different people sense a different emotional meaning in the word discipline. For some people it is simply painful chastisement. But it’s a general word used in the New Testament for parents educating or training a child. It needn’t be of the painful kind, but rather, general training; though discipline of the more painful sort is necessary at times. Hebrews 12 tells us that, as our father, from time to time God needs to discipline us, and it seems painful and not pleasant for the time being. But we are assured that he does it for our good, so that we might be partakers of his holiness (see Heb 12:5–11). So in that sense, discipline is also taught in the New Testament.

My short answer to the question would be, yes, the concepts of pleasure and discipline are incorporated into Christianity.

But, having said that, do remember what the Epicureans meant by pleasure. They weren’t talking about self-indulgence. The concept of pleasure has a varied meaning in modern language. We talk about pleasure-seeking crowds, who make pleasure their god, and very often it’s the grosser forms of self-indulgence. The Epicureans didn’t teach that; they warned against that kind of thing because of its backlash. They preferred to retire from the hustle and bustle of life, and many of them had the money to do so. They met in a garden, and were very gracious people, and so forth and so on. Pleasure to them meant the absence of anxiety, emotional upset and storm and everything else. Their goal was to lead a tranquil life.

Christians are not called upon to run away from the world like the Epicureans did, nor are we meant to treat pleasure as our main objective, even in Christian and spiritual experience. If we make pleasure our main objective, it is liable to mislead us. Our main objective should be serving God and believing his word, and to let pleasure come as a side product, so to speak. If you go for pleasure, in the end it will elude you. If you go for serving God, there will be a lot of pleasure on the one hand, but also a lot of sacrifice, pain and struggle on the other. Pleasure will make a very bad guide.

Genesis 27 tells us that the time came when Isaac was due to bless his son, and he was determined to bless his elder son, Esau, and not his younger son, Jacob. God had told Rebekah, their mother, that the elder should serve the younger, and the younger was to have precedence. Whether she had told Isaac that, I don’t know. Anyway, Isaac was determined to bless Esau, and when it came to this critical point in his life he was old, his eyes were dim and he couldn’t see.

On the day, he was going to get himself ready and in the right mood to pass on the blessing. It was a very, very important thing, of course, for the patriarch of the house to officially pass on the blessing. So, to get himself in the right mood, he said to Esau, ‘Please take your bow and arrow and go and find me venison, such as I love’ (see Gen 27:3–4). He was going to enjoy this venison and after dinner he would bless Esau, whereas the word of God had said that the blessing should go to Jacob. Anyway, Esau went off to find this venison.

When their mother Rebekah, who was of the crafty kind, heard what her husband had told Esau, she put Jacob up to a scheme because he was her favourite. He would bring two good young goats, which Rebekah would make it into a beautiful meal—ladies can sometimes make goat meat seem to be the best venison. Then she told Jacob to take the skin of the goat with all its hairs and put it on the nape of his neck and the backs of his hands. He was to take the dish to old Isaac, whose eyes were dim, and deceive him into blessing him.

So, in came Jacob and Isaac said, ‘Who are you?’

And he said, ‘I’m Esau’.

‘You don’t sound like Esau. Are you sure you’re Esau?’

‘Yes. I’m Esau,’ said Jacob.

Isaac said, ‘Come near so that I may feel you. You’re hairy, like Esau,’ he said. When Jacob came near to kiss him, Isaac said, ‘Yes, the smell of my son is as the field that the Lord has blessed’. So he enjoyed the meal and gave Jacob the blessing.

Instead of going by the word of God, he was being led by his senses and sensations. His eyes were dim, so he couldn’t see and trust their evidence. He felt the hands and thought that was solid evidence—it wasn’t and he was deceived. He heard the voice. It didn’t seem to be Esau’s voice, but instead of trusting his ears and the sound, he said, ‘Come near and kiss me’, and he was deceived by the smell. It’s a funny criterion, isn’t it, to smell a man when he’s been out hunting, and then to say, ‘Here is the blessing of the Lord’? Going by his senses and sensations, instead of by the word of God, he was deceived. Even the food he ate wasn’t venison; it was a sort of ‘takeaway’.

If you go simply by your sensations and pleasure, they can deceive you. It’s better to go for God’s word and let the pleasure, or whatever, come as a side issue. That is very important in our individual spiritual experience and our church experience. You see, it’s right that we enjoy ourselves singing the praises of God—may God give us a heart to sing more praise. But just to work up emotions, instead of letting the word come and have its effect of joy or, if need be, repentance and sorrow, can deceive us. We’re better off going by God’s word.

The Epicureans made pleasure their chief goal, whereas we’re called upon to serve the Lord and love him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength (see Mark 12:30). And you can’t do that, of course, without God then blessing you with pleasures galore in this life and eventually eternal pleasures in the life to come.

My one criticism of the Stoic concept of discipline is that it became inhuman. For instance, if a man lost his favourite daughter and his wife, he wasn’t supposed to grieve. He had to say to himself that universal rationality had allowed it, so it must be for the best.

When he found himself grieving, he would rebuke himself. He mustn’t grieve; he must agree with the rationality behind the world.

Some people have thought that that is the same as Christianity, for Christians will say, ‘We know that for those who love God all things work together for good’ (Rom 8:28). But there is a world of difference between Stoicism and Christianity. We do not say that this world in its present state is the best that ever could be; and we’re allowed to grieve when our loved ones part from us, but it’s not as others do who have no hope (see 1 Thess 4:13). We have sorrow and we do grieve, for we don’t serve a God who has no feelings.

Some Christians have understood, and it has been taught for centuries that God is what they call impassible; meaning that it’s impossible for God to suffer, as he doesn’t feel anything. They didn’t get that from the Bible, but from Aristotle’s philosophy and it isn’t true. ‘Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and for ever’ (Heb 13:8); and Jehovah says, ‘For I the LORD do not change’ (Mal 3:6). Listen to him talking to Israel as he puts up with their folly and disobedience. He says in Amos, ‘Behold, I am pressed under you, as a cart is pressed that is full of sheaves’ (2:13 KJV). And in Isaiah we read, ‘In all their affliction he was afflicted’ (63:9). This is talking of almighty God; he is not some unfeeling person.

That is to be remembered. And would it not be an extraordinary thing to believe that God felt no sorrow or pain when his beloved Son was suffering at Calvary? So, in all our afflictions, he too is afflicted, and we trust that God will work even the grievous and painful things together for good. That’s a marvellous thing. But his own Son wept as he stood outside the grave of Lazarus (see John 11:33–44). It was repugnant to him as the living God, when they took away the stone and he saw and smelt the ghastly results of death.

We Christians are not called upon to be Stoics and to always keep a stiff upper lip, pretend that we don’t sorrow and blame ourselves if we do find ourselves grieving. There’s a world of difference between Christianity and Stoicism.

Oh, there seems to be another question here after all. It says, ‘When are you coming back again?’

Well, that’s a very easy one to answer—as soon as possible!

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David Gooding