We open the week with two episodes with a guest, a friend of ours, Dr. John M. Frame, who is the J.D. Trimble Professor of Systematic Theology and Philosophy at Reform Theological Seminary in Orlando. Dr. Frame has published more words in his lifetime than most of us will read in our lifetimes, and we get him for two days, and no doubt he's going to hit these out of the park.

Thank you for joining us, Dr. Frame. Well, I'm not a radio personality, and I'm not sure that I'll hit anything out of the park. Stop it. Just stop it. Tomorrow, I have a question for you on literature, so we're leading up to that. But first, you have an outstanding book coming out soon.

It's called A History of Western Philosophy and Theology, and it releases in mid-November from PNR. It's one of the most important books of 2015, I think. In the book, under the section titled Antithesis in Epistemology, you write this, quote, "We know God and the world because he has taken the initiative to reveal himself.

Otherwise, we could have no knowledge at all," end quote. Riff on this enormous reality for us for a few minutes. Fundamentally, how is all knowledge tied to God revealing himself? Well, God, first of all, is somebody who knows himself, the knowledge of the Father and the Son and the Spirit and the Holy Trinity for all eternity.

And so when God makes a world, he knows that world perfectly well, because this is a world that he has planned, this is a world that he has created, this is a world that he has complete control over, and so he knows everything that there is to know in the world.

Now, when he creates a creature that is also capable of knowing, he creates angels, he creates human beings, human beings are capable of knowing him in return. So the Bible says that God created Adam in the image of God, which includes the fact that just as God knows the world, so in a smaller sense, Adam knows the world.

But of course, Adam couldn't know anything unless God had made him so that he's able to know. And so as Adam goes through the world, he looks at the trees, he looks at the ground and the rocks and the sky and everything that there is, and he's always looking at things that God has made, he's looking at things that God has known beforehand.

And so Adam's job is to understand that world. Of course, God gave him the responsibility to keep the garden and to guard it and to till it, and for that, of course, Adam needs to gain knowledge of the world, but it's a knowledge that echoes God's own knowledge. It's a secondary knowledge, it's a knowledge of God's knowledge, if you will.

So from the very beginning, Adam is working according to God's revelation. His knowledge is the knowledge that God has permitted him to have, and it's the knowledge of the world that God has made. So we talk about how Adam's thoughts, thinking God's thoughts after him. And so that's the way we all are now.

Of course, the fall has messed us up in that regard because we suppress the truth, as Romans 1 says, but our job, if we're functioning rightly, is to think God's thoughts after him, to come to know the world in a way that's analogous to God's own knowledge of the world.

And when God repairs our minds, repairs our hearts as part of redemption in Christ, then we begin again to think God's thoughts after him. We begin to think in a smaller way of the great thoughts that God had when he first created the world. Fascinating, that's so true. Okay, now this leads me to ask a question that has been on my mind for a long time, especially how do non-Christian novelists who obviously suppress the truth in unrighteousness, how do they know so much about the human condition and so much about what is true and good and beautiful?

That's the question I want to ask tomorrow on the Ask Pastor John podcast with guest John Frame. Dr. Frame and I will be back tomorrow. Thanks for listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast. Page 1 of 8 Page 1 of 8