(upbeat music) It is Friday and it's time for another Friday phone call with Don Carson. This is a special episode of the Ask Pastor John podcast and it comes to you in partnership with our friends over at the Gospel Coalition. Dr. Carson is the co-founder and the president of the Gospel Coalition and he is also the editor of the new NIV Zondervan Study Bible which focuses on biblical theological themes as they develop from Genesis to Revelation all the way through the Bible.

And that's something of what we're doing on Fridays. On Fridays every three weeks or so, we pick up one of these themes for discussion and I pick up the phone. Don Carson. Dr. Carson, Tony Reinke, Desiring God, hello and thank you for joining us again. Last time you shared a historical overview of the entire Bible, the whole thing.

And today we need to focus in on one of the implications that we touched on last time which is creation, those first two chapters of Genesis. Can you explain to us a biblical theology of creation? Yes. All right, take it away. Today when Christians talk about the doctrine of creation, a lot of the discussion immediately turns to when creation took place, how it relates to claims of evolutionists, old earth, young earth and things of that order.

And certainly such questions are important but it's not the place where the Bible itself lays the primary emphasis. Let me explain what I mean by that. About 50 years ago, Francis Schaeffer wrote a book called Genesis in Space and Time. And in it, he asked a question that I've increasingly come to see as fundamental.

What is the least, he asks, that we must make of Genesis 1 to 11 in order for the rest of the Bible to be coherent and true? Now he is not asking what is the most that you can draw from Genesis 1 to 11 and Genesis 1 to 3 in particular but what is the least that we must be certain about, clear about for the rest of the Bible to be coherent and true?

That's a very shrewd question because it's a way of saying those are the things that we must most emphasize and that are least negotiable. So let me outline some of those kinds of things. This is a mirror survey. Each of the points I'm about to mention could easily be expanded into an hour's address.

And instead, I'm gonna go through a handful of them rather quickly. Number one, God comes first. This is such an elementary point but it needs to be articulated. Before anything else was, before there was a universe in the beginning, God, he comes first. And that is teased out in other scriptures to show that God in eternity past was not dependent upon us.

It is not that God needed the universe so he wouldn't be lonely. Eventually, the Bible fleshes out the notion of God in all kinds of ways to show that in the past, for example, the father loved the son and the son loved the father. So there was a perfection of love in eternity past.

That's very different from, for example, the vision of Islam where Islam is slow to speak of God being a God of love because that assumes the importance of other and in their insistence on God's uniqueness and sovereignty and separateness, they can stress God's bigness and greatness but it is hard for them to stress God's love.

The Quran rarely speaks in those terms. But the Bible as a whole insists that God is love because in the one God, miraculously, strangely, God is also other. In the oneness of God, there is a complexity such that God loves the son. The son loves the father, even in eternity past and he doesn't need the universe.

Number two, God speaks. He is a talking God. The first thing said of him in scripture that he does is he speaks. And by his powerful word, he calls the universe into existence. Now, that becomes paradigmatic of God disclosing himself in word right through the whole Bible. God is a talking God and he dares to speak in words that human beings can understand.

Number three, God made everything. That, of course, is against pantheism in which everything in the universe is God. God and the universe cannot be distinguished. It is also against panentheism in which everything in the universe is God but God is not everything in the universe. There is more to God than the universe, a little bit of God left over, as it were, apart from everything that is made in the universe.

But here in the scripture, there is a distinction between God who exists before everything in the universe and the created order. It is against any sort of ontological dualism that is a kind of dualism in which there is a good force and a bad force or one force with a good side and a bad side.

The Bible is not concocting a world akin to Star Wars. Number four, there is one God who is good and he made everything good. And so the origin of evil is not intrinsically some combination of a good principle and a bad principle that are in competition. Even when the serpent is introduced, he is introduced as the most subtle of the creatures that God made.

And thus there never is any hint of dualism or anything of that sort. There is one sovereign God over the whole. Of course, that raises all kinds of questions. How does God stand behind good and evil? Well, on the long haul, the Bible lays a lot of emphasis on God standing behind good and evil asymmetrically.

That is, he stands behind good and evil in different ways. He stands behind good in such a way that the good is always creditable to him. And the evil is always creditable to secondary causalities, like the serpent, even though it can't stand outside the sweep of God's sovereignty. So when Paul finds himself evangelizing pagans in Acts 17 in the great city of Athens, one of the things that he stresses is that God is so sovereign and other, the creator of all things, that he doesn't need anything.

The pagan gods are finite. They have their needs and their fears, their psychological lusts, their joys, their sorrows, their triumphs, and so on. So a lot of pagan religion is just an attempt to make the gods happy. A lot of pagan religion is, you scratch my back, I scratch your back.

You offer the right sacrifices to the gods and you end up with a fat, healthy baby. That is what religion is in a pagan world. It is arranged in terms of swaps. But if God made everything and needs nothing, how on earth do you trade with him? So already, the beginning of the necessity for the doctrine of grace is established by the storyline of the doctrine of creation.

God made everything good. And that means, in the fifth place, that human beings are accountable to God. The grounding of our accountability to God is the doctrine of creation. It becomes the source of believers' praise. Psalm 33, Revelation 4. Repeatedly, it's built into the storyline. We owe God praise because we're made by him and for him and accountable to him.

It's only right and good. It's sensible. Within this framework, then, when people say today, listen, I don't mind if you have your religion, your Jesus, and your Bible, but I'm a spiritual person too. I have my own religion. I have my own approach to the divine and the spiritual.

Don't keep cramming your Jesus down my throat. Then sooner or later, although it might be the part of wisdom and diplomacy and care and love to back off a little and have a go another day, yet sooner or later, the loving Christian is going to have to say, very gently and over coffee, and within the framework of trusted relationships, the Christian is going to have to say, the one thing I can't do is back off because God made you and therefore you owe him and you will give an account to him.

So the grounding of our accountability to God, our responsibility to him, and the fact that because he's God, he is the final judge of our reactions to him, are all laid in principle in the opening chapters of the book of Genesis. Then in the sixth place, there are hints, not more than that, there are hints of God's complexity in an expression like, let us make mankind in our own image.

Some people have tried to understand that to be a royal we, but there's no real hint of that in context, or that it's God and the court of heaven or something like that, but there's no real hint of that in context. I think that in the book of Genesis, chapters one, two, and three, there are many, many themes that are introduced without making them clear.

That is, they're pregnant expressions. They're expressions that are fleshed out. It would be wrong to read into, let us make, an entire doctrine of the Trinity. It's not there, the components aren't there, but there's a hint of it. There's an adumbration that God is not simply one-ish. He is one God, and yet there is in God complexity such that there is also other.

You find those things teased out already in an incipient way in the Old Testament, and very clear in the New Testament, when you find, oh, let's say a passage like John 5, God is determined that all should honor the Son even as the honor of the Father, before, in the beginning, John's Gospel says, was the word, and the word was with God, God's own fellow, and the word was God, God's own self.

And so you have more and more and more adumbrations until you get to the kind of formulation that you get in the fourth century AD. But although the New Testament is much clearer on such things, you have seedlings planted already in the doctrine of creation. And I would argue that you have other seedlings.

I'll just list three or four of them. They'll come up later in this series. For example, Christians have long argued whether there is a covenant, a covenant of works, it's often called, with Adam in chapters two and three. And some have said very strongly yes, some have said very strongly no.

Those who say no point out the fact that the word covenant isn't used. It's true that word covenant isn't used. But nevertheless, there is a kind of established agreement imposed by a sovereign God that demands obedience with threat of judgment unless there is obedience and so forth. Many of the elements of what goes into covenantal thinking are already there in Genesis one, two, and three.

Or again, you don't get mention of the tabernacle till the time of Moses. And then temple, not until the time of David and Solomon. And yet many have pointed out that the tabernacle, the temple, is the meeting place between God and his image bearers. And now the Garden of Eden is the kind of meeting place between God and his image bearers.

And so then they start pointing out many, many adumbrations of kind of temple theology that's already beginning to take place in the garden. And if you want to, you can point out that the word temple isn't used. But nevertheless, the adumbrations, the first steps toward this sort of thing are already built right into the Genesis one, two, three account.

And if I had time, I could show you that there are about a dozen of these themes that are already built right into the structure of things. I'll mention one more just in passing. The word king is not used. God presenting himself as king. Yet there's no doubt that he reigns.

He reigns over that which he has made. And so the notion of God as king is built into the storyline. Then in the seventh place, human beings are introduced made in the image of God. That becomes a major theme that runs right through the entire scripture. God makes human beings in his own image and likeness.

So that in some ways, they're very much like the rest of creation made by God out of the dust. And in other ways, they're unique. And it would be, it would well be worth our while to tease out some of the things that are bound up with this notion of image of God.

One of the reasons why Christians have such a hard job agreeing on exactly what goes into this notion is because once again, I think that it's a pregnant expression. It's an expression that adumbrates what will be filled out in much more detail in subsequent chapters, subsequent books that run right through the entire scripture so that human beings are unique creatures.

On the one hand, we're supposed to reflect God, where his image, and on the other hand, we too belong to the dust, we're made from the dust, we're part of the created order and not to be confused with God. So this sort of created order is extraordinarily important. Then in the eighth place, there is stewardship over creation.

In the ninth place, there is, in Genesis 2, a kind of ordering and structure. In chapter one, verses 26 and 27, "Let us make humankind in our image." So men and women are both made equally in the image of God, but in a kind of binary way. There's a male and a female, and both of them are made in the image of God.

In chapter two, then the account of creation is teased out in greater detail so that one is made first and the other is made for the one. That is, Adam is made first and she is made from him, thus part of humankind, and for him, in a way that is unique.

It's not a reciprocal relationship at that point. So men and women gets teased out in a variety of ways, and that's part of the setup, likewise, for the account of the fall. And those sorts of things are teased out in terms of man-woman relationships later on in Scripture, too.

First Corinthians 11, First Timothy 2, and elsewhere. Then, I think we're about the 10th place. There is eschatology that is anticipated by all of this. It's not for nothing that the prophet Isaiah, in the eighth century, anticipates that what God will do at the end for his people is provide a new heaven and a new earth.

And that language is full of anticipation and glory of what is yet to be revealed, and finally it shows up in Revelation 21, but it's harking back to the first creation. And even when the expression, new heaven and new earth does not occur, as it does in Revelation 21 or 2 Peter and so forth, yet the theme is bound up with the details of Romans 8, for example.

The whole created order is subjected to death and decay by God's decree because of sin and rebellion, and it groans, waiting for the adoption of sons. That is the culmination of the glorification of believers. So that anticipates the Bible storyline in huge ways. Two more, the beginning of Sabbath is bound up with God's rest.

The text does not say that Sabbath is imposed at this point. It says that God rests on the seventh day, but when the Sabbath is instituted legally in the Decalogue, the text self-consciously looks back to creation. You are to remember the seventh day and keep it holy for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth and so on, so on, so on.

So that is picked up likewise, even in Revelation 4 to build a whole theology of rest that we can't tease out at this juncture, but it begins in the opening chapters of Genesis. And finally, this is not an exhaustive list, but an apostolic number will do for us. There is a huge emphasis in the rest of the Bible on the greatness of God testified by his creation.

You think of passages like Psalm 8 or Psalm 19 worth reading at this juncture and meditating quietly on them, or some of the spectacular texts in Isaiah 40 to 45. Reading through those chapters reminds us that God is sovereign over creation, knows the end from the beginning, and everything is accountable to him.

He's the sovereign pottery maker. The created order is simply what he makes. So texts like Isaiah 40, verse 12, Isaiah 43, 15, chunks of Isaiah 44, verses 2 and 24, Isaiah 45, 11 and 12, and so on. These are texts that call us back to worship God because of his greatness and the display of his own glory in creation, which is a point that is also found in Romans 1.

God has not left himself with witness because his existence and glory are already displayed in the created order itself. So in other words, Genesis 1, 2, and 3, I haven't even mentioned much about the fall, but Genesis 1 and 2 and the focus on creation is itself the seedbed of a vast number of biblical theological themes that tell us a great deal about God, human beings, the structure of the storyline that issues finally in the coming of Christ and in the denouement of all things, issuing in the glory that is yet to come in the new heaven and the new earth.

- Yeah, huge implications indeed. Thank you, Dr. Carson. - Good, blessings on you, Tony. - Our Friday phone call with Dr. Don Carson is brought to you in partnership with The Gospel Coalition. And for more information about this podcast, you can find us online at desiringgod.org/askpastorjohn. Well, the weekend is upon us and John Piper will return on Monday to answer, how do I know if my dating relationship is idolatrous?

I'm your host, Tony Reinke. I'll see you on Monday. Enjoy your weekend. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)