A Theology of Creation in 12 Points

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | It is Friday and it's time for another

00:00:06.840 | Friday phone call with Don Carson.

00:00:08.760 | This is a special episode of the Ask Pastor John podcast

00:00:11.280 | and it comes to you in partnership with our friends

00:00:13.720 | over at the Gospel Coalition.

00:00:15.060 | Dr. Carson is the co-founder and the president

00:00:17.840 | of the Gospel Coalition and he is also the editor

00:00:20.920 | of the new NIV Zondervan Study Bible

00:00:24.000 | which focuses on biblical theological themes

00:00:26.360 | as they develop from Genesis to Revelation

00:00:28.600 | all the way through the Bible.

00:00:29.840 | And that's something of what we're doing on Fridays.

00:00:32.280 | On Fridays every three weeks or so,

00:00:33.880 | we pick up one of these themes for discussion

00:00:36.440 | and I pick up the phone.

00:00:38.220 | Don Carson.

00:00:39.060 | Dr. Carson, Tony Reinke, Desiring God, hello

00:00:41.160 | and thank you for joining us again.

00:00:42.740 | Last time you shared a historical overview

00:00:45.640 | of the entire Bible, the whole thing.

00:00:48.000 | And today we need to focus in on one of the implications

00:00:51.540 | that we touched on last time which is creation,

00:00:53.740 | those first two chapters of Genesis.

00:00:57.120 | Can you explain to us a biblical theology of creation?

00:01:01.240 | Yes.

00:01:02.060 | All right, take it away.

00:01:03.720 | Today when Christians talk about the doctrine of creation,

00:01:08.280 | a lot of the discussion immediately turns

00:01:12.320 | to when creation took place, how it relates

00:01:16.080 | to claims of evolutionists, old earth, young earth

00:01:21.080 | and things of that order.

00:01:22.540 | And certainly such questions are important

00:01:25.740 | but it's not the place where the Bible itself lays

00:01:29.960 | the primary emphasis.

00:01:31.520 | Let me explain what I mean by that.

00:01:33.360 | About 50 years ago, Francis Schaeffer wrote a book

00:01:36.360 | called Genesis in Space and Time.

00:01:39.120 | And in it, he asked a question that I've increasingly come

00:01:43.800 | to see as fundamental.

00:01:45.120 | What is the least, he asks, that we must make

00:01:48.660 | of Genesis 1 to 11 in order for the rest

00:01:51.520 | of the Bible to be coherent and true?

00:01:54.600 | Now he is not asking what is the most that you can draw

00:01:58.180 | from Genesis 1 to 11 and Genesis 1 to 3 in particular

00:02:01.940 | but what is the least that we must be certain about,

00:02:04.980 | clear about for the rest of the Bible

00:02:07.180 | to be coherent and true?

00:02:09.360 | That's a very shrewd question because it's a way of saying

00:02:12.600 | those are the things that we must most emphasize

00:02:15.260 | and that are least negotiable.

00:02:17.260 | So let me outline some of those kinds of things.

00:02:20.140 | This is a mirror survey.

00:02:22.420 | Each of the points I'm about to mention could easily

00:02:25.840 | be expanded into an hour's address.

00:02:29.100 | And instead, I'm gonna go through a handful of them

00:02:32.240 | rather quickly.

00:02:33.620 | Number one, God comes first.

00:02:36.400 | This is such an elementary point but it needs

00:02:39.140 | to be articulated.

00:02:40.260 | Before anything else was, before there was a universe

00:02:43.220 | in the beginning, God, he comes first.

00:02:46.280 | And that is teased out in other scriptures to show

00:02:48.460 | that God in eternity past was not dependent upon us.

00:02:52.740 | It is not that God needed the universe

00:02:55.100 | so he wouldn't be lonely.

00:02:56.520 | Eventually, the Bible fleshes out the notion of God

00:02:59.700 | in all kinds of ways to show that in the past,

00:03:02.260 | for example, the father loved the son

00:03:04.480 | and the son loved the father.

00:03:05.960 | So there was a perfection of love in eternity past.

00:03:09.360 | That's very different from, for example,

00:03:12.560 | the vision of Islam where Islam is slow to speak of God

00:03:16.140 | being a God of love because that assumes the importance

00:03:19.740 | of other and in their insistence on God's uniqueness

00:03:23.900 | and sovereignty and separateness,

00:03:25.900 | they can stress God's bigness and greatness

00:03:29.540 | but it is hard for them to stress God's love.

00:03:32.060 | The Quran rarely speaks in those terms.

00:03:35.360 | But the Bible as a whole insists that God is love

00:03:38.380 | because in the one God, miraculously, strangely,

00:03:41.740 | God is also other.

00:03:44.620 | In the oneness of God, there is a complexity

00:03:47.100 | such that God loves the son.

00:03:49.700 | The son loves the father, even in eternity past

00:03:53.620 | and he doesn't need the universe.

00:03:55.660 | Number two, God speaks.

00:03:58.100 | He is a talking God.

00:04:00.340 | The first thing said of him in scripture

00:04:03.960 | that he does is he speaks.

00:04:07.060 | And by his powerful word,

00:04:09.860 | he calls the universe into existence.

00:04:12.380 | Now, that becomes paradigmatic of God disclosing himself

00:04:16.180 | in word right through the whole Bible.

00:04:18.740 | God is a talking God and he dares to speak in words

00:04:22.160 | that human beings can understand.

00:04:24.340 | Number three, God made everything.

00:04:28.780 | That, of course, is against pantheism

00:04:31.400 | in which everything in the universe is God.

00:04:34.220 | God and the universe cannot be distinguished.

00:04:36.560 | It is also against panentheism

00:04:39.300 | in which everything in the universe is God

00:04:41.820 | but God is not everything in the universe.

00:04:43.900 | There is more to God than the universe,

00:04:46.820 | a little bit of God left over, as it were,

00:04:49.700 | apart from everything that is made in the universe.

00:04:52.860 | But here in the scripture,

00:04:54.500 | there is a distinction between God

00:04:56.260 | who exists before everything in the universe

00:04:59.100 | and the created order.

00:05:00.680 | It is against any sort of ontological dualism

00:05:04.900 | that is a kind of dualism in which there is a good force

00:05:08.800 | and a bad force or one force with a good side

00:05:12.380 | and a bad side.

00:05:14.500 | The Bible is not concocting a world akin to Star Wars.

00:05:19.500 | Number four, there is one God who is good

00:05:22.600 | and he made everything good.

00:05:25.700 | And so the origin of evil is not intrinsically

00:05:28.360 | some combination of a good principle and a bad principle

00:05:32.060 | that are in competition.

00:05:33.760 | Even when the serpent is introduced,

00:05:35.440 | he is introduced as the most subtle of the creatures

00:05:38.460 | that God made.

00:05:40.460 | And thus there never is any hint of dualism

00:05:42.660 | or anything of that sort.

00:05:43.740 | There is one sovereign God over the whole.

00:05:47.220 | Of course, that raises all kinds of questions.

00:05:49.240 | How does God stand behind good and evil?

00:05:51.740 | Well, on the long haul, the Bible lays a lot of emphasis

00:05:54.900 | on God standing behind good and evil asymmetrically.

00:05:58.640 | That is, he stands behind good and evil in different ways.

00:06:02.900 | He stands behind good in such a way

00:06:04.720 | that the good is always creditable to him.

00:06:07.660 | And the evil is always creditable to secondary causalities,

00:06:12.180 | like the serpent, even though it can't stand

00:06:15.180 | outside the sweep of God's sovereignty.

00:06:18.380 | So when Paul finds himself evangelizing pagans

00:06:21.780 | in Acts 17 in the great city of Athens,

00:06:24.440 | one of the things that he stresses is that God is so sovereign

00:06:27.800 | and other, the creator of all things,

00:06:30.500 | that he doesn't need anything.

00:06:32.660 | The pagan gods are finite.

00:06:34.820 | They have their needs and their fears,

00:06:36.800 | their psychological lusts, their joys, their sorrows,

00:06:40.020 | their triumphs, and so on.

00:06:41.700 | So a lot of pagan religion is just an attempt

00:06:43.900 | to make the gods happy.

00:06:45.220 | A lot of pagan religion is, you scratch my back,

00:06:47.820 | I scratch your back.

00:06:48.980 | You offer the right sacrifices to the gods

00:06:51.100 | and you end up with a fat, healthy baby.

00:06:53.060 | That is what religion is in a pagan world.

00:06:56.020 | It is arranged in terms of swaps.

00:06:58.780 | But if God made everything and needs nothing,

00:07:00.980 | how on earth do you trade with him?

00:07:03.300 | So already, the beginning of the necessity

00:07:06.940 | for the doctrine of grace is established by the storyline

00:07:09.980 | of the doctrine of creation.

00:07:11.320 | God made everything good.

00:07:12.560 | And that means, in the fifth place,

00:07:14.960 | that human beings are accountable to God.

00:07:17.600 | The grounding of our accountability to God

00:07:20.840 | is the doctrine of creation.

00:07:23.040 | It becomes the source of believers' praise.

00:07:26.300 | Psalm 33, Revelation 4.

00:07:29.680 | Repeatedly, it's built into the storyline.

00:07:31.920 | We owe God praise because we're made by him

00:07:35.520 | and for him and accountable to him.

00:07:38.400 | It's only right and good.

00:07:39.820 | It's sensible.

00:07:41.500 | Within this framework, then, when people say today,

00:07:45.440 | listen, I don't mind if you have your religion,

00:07:49.040 | your Jesus, and your Bible, but I'm a spiritual person too.

00:07:53.940 | I have my own religion.

00:07:55.060 | I have my own approach to the divine and the spiritual.

00:07:58.880 | Don't keep cramming your Jesus down my throat.

00:08:02.000 | Then sooner or later, although it might be the part

00:08:05.080 | of wisdom and diplomacy and care and love

00:08:08.140 | to back off a little and have a go another day,

00:08:10.760 | yet sooner or later, the loving Christian

00:08:12.960 | is going to have to say, very gently and over coffee,

00:08:16.880 | and within the framework of trusted relationships,

00:08:21.440 | the Christian is going to have to say,

00:08:22.800 | the one thing I can't do is back off

00:08:25.000 | because God made you and therefore you owe him

00:08:29.360 | and you will give an account to him.

00:08:31.560 | So the grounding of our accountability to God,

00:08:34.500 | our responsibility to him, and the fact that

00:08:37.440 | because he's God, he is the final judge

00:08:40.000 | of our reactions to him, are all laid in principle

00:08:43.800 | in the opening chapters of the book of Genesis.

00:08:46.320 | Then in the sixth place, there are hints,

00:08:50.000 | not more than that, there are hints of God's complexity

00:08:53.200 | in an expression like, let us make mankind in our own image.

00:08:58.000 | Some people have tried to understand that to be a royal we,

00:09:01.040 | but there's no real hint of that in context,

00:09:04.600 | or that it's God and the court of heaven

00:09:06.760 | or something like that, but there's no real hint

00:09:08.200 | of that in context.

00:09:09.800 | I think that in the book of Genesis,

00:09:12.000 | chapters one, two, and three, there are many, many themes

00:09:16.420 | that are introduced without making them clear.

00:09:18.900 | That is, they're pregnant expressions.

00:09:21.240 | They're expressions that are fleshed out.

00:09:24.200 | It would be wrong to read into, let us make,

00:09:27.960 | an entire doctrine of the Trinity.

00:09:29.840 | It's not there, the components aren't there,

00:09:32.240 | but there's a hint of it.

00:09:33.360 | There's an adumbration that God is not simply one-ish.

00:09:38.360 | He is one God, and yet there is in God complexity

00:09:43.040 | such that there is also other.

00:09:44.720 | You find those things teased out already

00:09:47.800 | in an incipient way in the Old Testament,

00:09:49.960 | and very clear in the New Testament,

00:09:51.760 | when you find, oh, let's say a passage like John 5,

00:09:54.480 | God is determined that all should honor the Son

00:09:56.480 | even as the honor of the Father,

00:09:58.140 | before, in the beginning, John's Gospel says,

00:10:01.840 | was the word, and the word was with God,

00:10:03.480 | God's own fellow, and the word was God, God's own self.

00:10:06.600 | And so you have more and more and more adumbrations

00:10:09.920 | until you get to the kind of formulation

00:10:12.440 | that you get in the fourth century AD.

00:10:15.460 | But although the New Testament is much clearer

00:10:17.760 | on such things, you have seedlings planted already

00:10:21.040 | in the doctrine of creation.

00:10:22.280 | And I would argue that you have other seedlings.

00:10:24.640 | I'll just list three or four of them.

00:10:27.560 | They'll come up later in this series.

00:10:29.760 | For example, Christians have long argued

00:10:31.880 | whether there is a covenant, a covenant of works,

00:10:35.280 | it's often called, with Adam in chapters two and three.

00:10:38.660 | And some have said very strongly yes,

00:10:41.640 | some have said very strongly no.

00:10:43.340 | Those who say no point out the fact

00:10:45.040 | that the word covenant isn't used.

00:10:47.160 | It's true that word covenant isn't used.

00:10:50.320 | But nevertheless, there is a kind of established agreement

00:10:54.760 | imposed by a sovereign God that demands obedience

00:10:58.420 | with threat of judgment unless there is obedience

00:11:01.000 | and so forth.

00:11:01.820 | Many of the elements of what goes into covenantal thinking

00:11:05.920 | are already there in Genesis one, two, and three.

00:11:08.540 | Or again, you don't get mention of the tabernacle

00:11:12.040 | till the time of Moses.

00:11:13.960 | And then temple, not until the time of David and Solomon.

00:11:17.920 | And yet many have pointed out that the tabernacle,

00:11:20.840 | the temple, is the meeting place

00:11:22.620 | between God and his image bearers.

00:11:24.960 | And now the Garden of Eden is the kind of meeting place

00:11:29.640 | between God and his image bearers.

00:11:32.040 | And so then they start pointing out

00:11:33.520 | many, many adumbrations of kind of temple theology

00:11:37.720 | that's already beginning to take place in the garden.

00:11:40.280 | And if you want to, you can point out

00:11:42.520 | that the word temple isn't used.

00:11:45.440 | But nevertheless, the adumbrations,

00:11:47.600 | the first steps toward this sort of thing

00:11:49.880 | are already built right into the Genesis one, two, three

00:11:53.960 | account.

00:11:54.800 | And if I had time, I could show you

00:11:57.000 | that there are about a dozen of these themes

00:11:59.680 | that are already built right into the structure of things.

00:12:03.360 | I'll mention one more just in passing.

00:12:06.260 | The word king is not used.

00:12:07.760 | God presenting himself as king.

00:12:09.760 | Yet there's no doubt that he reigns.

00:12:11.360 | He reigns over that which he has made.

00:12:14.320 | And so the notion of God as king

00:12:16.320 | is built into the storyline.

00:12:18.240 | Then in the seventh place,

00:12:19.720 | human beings are introduced made in the image of God.

00:12:23.280 | That becomes a major theme that runs right

00:12:26.440 | through the entire scripture.

00:12:28.400 | God makes human beings in his own image and likeness.

00:12:32.600 | So that in some ways, they're very much like

00:12:34.560 | the rest of creation made by God out of the dust.

00:12:37.940 | And in other ways, they're unique.

00:12:40.080 | And it would be, it would well be worth our while

00:12:44.480 | to tease out some of the things that are bound up

00:12:49.480 | with this notion of image of God.

00:12:51.440 | One of the reasons why Christians have such a hard job

00:12:54.240 | agreeing on exactly what goes into this notion

00:12:56.800 | is because once again,

00:12:58.200 | I think that it's a pregnant expression.

00:13:00.520 | It's an expression that adumbrates what will be filled out

00:13:05.320 | in much more detail in subsequent chapters,

00:13:09.040 | subsequent books that run right through the entire scripture

00:13:12.320 | so that human beings are unique creatures.

00:13:16.360 | On the one hand, we're supposed to reflect God,

00:13:19.920 | where his image, and on the other hand,

00:13:22.620 | we too belong to the dust, we're made from the dust,

00:13:24.960 | we're part of the created order

00:13:26.360 | and not to be confused with God.

00:13:28.560 | So this sort of created order is extraordinarily important.

00:13:33.560 | Then in the eighth place,

00:13:37.280 | there is stewardship over creation.

00:13:40.200 | In the ninth place, there is, in Genesis 2,

00:13:45.200 | a kind of ordering and structure.

00:13:49.360 | In chapter one, verses 26 and 27,

00:13:53.000 | "Let us make humankind in our image."

00:13:55.760 | So men and women are both made equally in the image of God,

00:14:00.160 | but in a kind of binary way.

00:14:01.960 | There's a male and a female,

00:14:04.760 | and both of them are made in the image of God.

00:14:07.120 | In chapter two, then the account of creation

00:14:10.000 | is teased out in greater detail

00:14:12.240 | so that one is made first and the other is made for the one.

00:14:17.020 | That is, Adam is made first and she is made from him,

00:14:20.500 | thus part of humankind, and for him,

00:14:24.240 | in a way that is unique.

00:14:25.760 | It's not a reciprocal relationship at that point.

00:14:28.720 | So men and women gets teased out in a variety of ways,

00:14:33.720 | and that's part of the setup, likewise,

00:14:36.400 | for the account of the fall.

00:14:38.560 | And those sorts of things are teased out

00:14:41.160 | in terms of man-woman relationships

00:14:42.920 | later on in Scripture, too.

00:14:44.520 | First Corinthians 11, First Timothy 2, and elsewhere.

00:14:48.320 | Then, I think we're about the 10th place.

00:14:51.520 | There is eschatology that is anticipated by all of this.

00:14:55.720 | It's not for nothing that the prophet Isaiah,

00:14:58.480 | in the eighth century, anticipates that

00:15:02.600 | what God will do at the end for his people

00:15:05.500 | is provide a new heaven and a new earth.

00:15:08.720 | And that language is full of anticipation

00:15:13.720 | and glory of what is yet to be revealed,

00:15:18.580 | and finally it shows up in Revelation 21,

00:15:21.400 | but it's harking back to the first creation.

00:15:25.000 | And even when the expression,

00:15:26.960 | new heaven and new earth does not occur,

00:15:29.520 | as it does in Revelation 21 or 2 Peter and so forth,

00:15:33.200 | yet the theme is bound up with the details

00:15:37.740 | of Romans 8, for example.

00:15:40.060 | The whole created order is subjected to death and decay

00:15:44.780 | by God's decree because of sin and rebellion,

00:15:48.220 | and it groans, waiting for the adoption of sons.

00:15:51.340 | That is the culmination of the glorification of believers.

00:15:56.100 | So that anticipates the Bible storyline in huge ways.

00:16:01.540 | Two more, the beginning of Sabbath

00:16:06.060 | is bound up with God's rest.

00:16:08.100 | The text does not say that Sabbath is imposed at this point.

00:16:12.100 | It says that God rests on the seventh day,

00:16:15.360 | but when the Sabbath is instituted legally in the Decalogue,

00:16:20.360 | the text self-consciously looks back to creation.

00:16:24.520 | You are to remember the seventh day and keep it holy

00:16:27.080 | for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth

00:16:29.780 | and so on, so on, so on.

00:16:31.220 | So that is picked up likewise,

00:16:35.420 | even in Revelation 4 to build a whole theology of rest

00:16:39.580 | that we can't tease out at this juncture,

00:16:42.500 | but it begins in the opening chapters of Genesis.

00:16:46.780 | And finally, this is not an exhaustive list,

00:16:50.700 | but an apostolic number will do for us.

00:16:54.500 | There is a huge emphasis in the rest of the Bible

00:17:00.540 | on the greatness of God testified by his creation.

00:17:04.260 | You think of passages like Psalm 8 or Psalm 19

00:17:10.740 | worth reading at this juncture

00:17:16.020 | and meditating quietly on them,

00:17:18.020 | or some of the spectacular texts in Isaiah 40 to 45.

00:17:23.020 | Reading through those chapters reminds us

00:17:26.980 | that God is sovereign over creation,

00:17:29.340 | knows the end from the beginning,

00:17:31.260 | and everything is accountable to him.

00:17:33.140 | He's the sovereign pottery maker.

00:17:36.300 | The created order is simply what he makes.

00:17:39.820 | So texts like Isaiah 40, verse 12,

00:17:43.140 | Isaiah 43, 15, chunks of Isaiah 44, verses 2 and 24,

00:17:48.140 | Isaiah 45, 11 and 12, and so on.

00:17:52.980 | These are texts that call us back to worship God

00:17:56.920 | because of his greatness and the display

00:17:59.640 | of his own glory in creation,

00:18:01.700 | which is a point that is also found in Romans 1.

00:18:04.920 | God has not left himself with witness

00:18:06.580 | because his existence and glory are already displayed

00:18:10.240 | in the created order itself.

00:18:12.220 | So in other words, Genesis 1, 2, and 3,

00:18:15.400 | I haven't even mentioned much about the fall,

00:18:17.640 | but Genesis 1 and 2 and the focus on creation

00:18:20.540 | is itself the seedbed of a vast number

00:18:24.000 | of biblical theological themes

00:18:26.620 | that tell us a great deal about God,

00:18:28.560 | human beings, the structure of the storyline

00:18:31.680 | that issues finally in the coming of Christ

00:18:34.080 | and in the denouement of all things,

00:18:37.620 | issuing in the glory that is yet to come

00:18:40.300 | in the new heaven and the new earth.

00:18:42.880 | - Yeah, huge implications indeed.

00:18:44.800 | Thank you, Dr. Carson.

00:18:46.080 | - Good, blessings on you, Tony.

00:18:47.480 | - Our Friday phone call with Dr. Don Carson

00:18:49.760 | is brought to you in partnership

00:18:51.120 | with The Gospel Coalition.

00:18:52.720 | And for more information about this podcast,

00:18:55.380 | you can find us online at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn.

00:19:00.380 | Well, the weekend is upon us

00:19:02.080 | and John Piper will return on Monday to answer,

00:19:05.000 | how do I know if my dating relationship is idolatrous?

00:19:09.020 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:19:10.040 | I'll see you on Monday.

00:19:11.360 | Enjoy your weekend.

00:19:12.920 | (upbeat music)

00:19:15.500 | (upbeat music)

00:19:18.080 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

A Theology of Creation in 12 Points

Chapters