Dan Olinger

"If the Bible is true, then none of our fears are legitimate, none of our frustrations are permanent, and none of our opposition is significant."

Dan Olinger

 

Retired Bible Professor,

Bob Jones University

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Created. Now What? Part 6: Relationship

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We’re exploring what it means to be in the image of God. The context of Gen 1.26-27 makes it pretty clear that the image includes our dominion over the earth. And as we saw last time, we are persons, like God, and fundamentally different from the animals. But is there even more to it than that?

Well, thanks for asking.

I think there’s another way that we’re in God’s image, but it’s not something we can deduce from the Creation account, or even from our logical processes.

We’re going to need the New Testament for this one.

In Genesis 1, we notice that God’s name—Elohim—is plural, and we also notice that when he’s anticipating making man, he speaks to himself in the plural: “Let us make man” (Gen 1.26). That makes us go, “Hmm,” but it’s not enough evidence to develop a robust view of the Trinity. It’s the New Testament that provides that evidence.

I don’t intend to review all that evidence here—it’s available in lots of other places—but suffice it to say that with a completed Scripture we know that the one God exists in three distinct but not separated entities, or persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Since God is both eternal—he has always existed (Ps 90.2)—and immutable—he has never changed (Ps 102.26-27; Jas 1.17)—we know that God has always existed in these three persons.

God has always been in relationship. The relationship among these three persons is not exactly the same as our relationships with other humans—God is One, after all, and the Three are united far more perfectly and essentially than any two ordinary humans—but the fact remains that being relational is an essential, definitional part of who God is. He has never been alone.

A medieval church father, Richard of St. Victor—admittedly not one of the more well-known fathers—argued that if God is love, he has always been love; and if so, then he must always have had someone to love—for how can there be love if no other person exists? On this basis he argued that since only God is eternal, God must exist eternally in more than one person, and that thought in turn formed the basis of his argument for the deity of Christ—indeed for the Trinity itself.

He was right, of course.

So if God has always been in relationship, then it shouldn’t surprise us at all when he says, “It is not good that the man [in my image] should be alone” (Gen 2.18). As I’ve noted earlier in this series, God graciously allows Adam to realize his need for companionship before he gives it to him; and when he sees his match for the first time, he speaks (extemporaneously!) in poetry:

“This is bone of my bone
And flesh of my flesh!”

In other words, “This one is like me! This one is for me!”

We can imagine his joy at being, like his creator, in relationship.

Now, some caveats.

First, our Creator is creative, and he makes everyone different. While we all need social interaction, we don’t all need or approach it in the same way. Some of us thrive on social interaction; some of us are drained by it and need some alone time to recharge. The former we call extroverts; the latter we call introverts. We need to respect and appreciate one another’s differences in this regard; introverts are not “less” in the image of God than extroverts. There’s been a lot written on this; we would do well to learn about those differences so that we can be social responsibly.

Second, there are many kinds of social relationship. For most people, their primary relationship is with their spouse. But God has not ordained that life for everyone; many are called to be single. We should note that they are in the will of God, and the image of God, as well; no life lived in the will of God is a deficient one.

The social aspect of the image of God is a delightful gift. Of course not all relationships go well, and sometimes we’re tempted to just let go of all the drama and keep to ourselves. But we must not choose that as a lifestyle; we are here to image our Creator, and we need to represent him well.

To begin this series I noted that there are at least two ways that creation theology changes the way we think and live. The first is the image of God; in the next few posts we’ll consider the second.

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Created. Now What? Part 5: Personhood

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We’re exploring what it means to be in the image of God. The context of Gen 1.26-27 makes it pretty clear that the image includes our dominion over the earth. But is there even more to it than that?

This is where we move from biblical theology to systematic theology: we use our minds to discover and consider ideas that the Bible might not say explicitly, but that are within biblical limits.

Being in the image of God means to resemble him. So let’s sit and think for a bit. In what ways do we resemble God, beyond the already stated resemblance of dominion?

The Bible makes it clear that God is not an influence, or a force, or all that is good in the world. He’s a person. (Well, three persons, actually, but that comes in the next post.) He thinks: he’s self-aware (Gen 15.7), and he knows all things (Isa 46.9-10), and he invites us to reason with him (Isa 1.18). Further, he chooses: he likes some things better than others (Dt 17.1), and he makes decisions to do this or that (Jn 1.13). And he feels: he has emotions, both “positive” (love [Jn 3.16], joy [Zeph 3.17]) and “negative” (anger [Rom 1.18], grief [Eph 4.30]).

God is personal. And so are we. We’re not infinite like him, of course; he’s omniscient, and we’re just sortaniscient, but we do have minds that think and reason, reflecting the way his mind works. (How do we know how his mind works? He tells us, both in the Scripture—we can analyze its logical forms—and in the created world, where we see design elements that reflect his thinking.)

We’re volitional like him as well: we too express preferences and make choices based on those preferences, and on the reasoning we’ve previously conducted. And, as you know, we’re emotional like him too. We have loves and hates, likes and dislikes; we laugh, we grieve, we respond in anger to things we find unacceptable. Like God, except imperfectly.

Perhaps like me you’ve wondered exactly how we’re different from the animals in this regard, animals not being in the image of God. In some animals at least, we think we see evidence of thinking. Our pet dogs, we are convinced, pick up on our thoughts and respond sensibly. A chimpanzee uses a straw to pull termites out of a hole so he can eat them. An orangutan solves a problem to gain access to food. A whale shark seeks a diver’s help in getting free from a net. Bees show their sisters where the pollen is.

And what about will?

Have you ever tried to give a cat a bath?

And emotions?

Dogs rejoice.

Cats hate.

It’s sometimes hard to tell whether these animal behaviors are what they seem, or whether we’re projecting onto them the thoughts and feelings we would have if we were in those situations. Maybe we’re not seeing what we imagine we see.

But it’s pretty hard to argue that there isn’t some kind of thought, or choice, or emotion going on in many of these scenarios. So are animals in the image of God too?

The Bible seems to rule that out. Of course it doesn’t say that animals bear the image, but I think this conclusion is more than just an argument from silence. The Creation account draws a sharp contrast between what has come before—the creation of the earth and of the creatures who populate its air, water, and land—and the creation of man “in our image.” These things are not the same. Whatever some animals do by way of thinking, or choosing, or feeling is qualitatively different from the faculties that God has placed in us. The orangutan may be “thinking” in some rudimentary way, but he is not thinking about the consequences of being created, or choosing to act more consistently with that status, or responding in joyous worship to his creator.

What it must have been like to be Adam or Eve, in God’s image as persons, but with unbroken minds, and wills, and emotions! with thoughts that are reliable, with wills that always choose wisely and well, and with emotions that are servants rather than masters!

Take heart. Our brokenness is not permanent. The day is coming when, by the grace of God, we shall again “be like him” (1Jn 3.2), perfected, glorified, consistent and righteous.

What a day that will be.

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Created. Now What? Part 4: Dominion

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If the first takeaway from creation theology is that we’re all, male and female, in the image of God, despite our sinfulness and our damaged state, then we ought to figure out what that means.

What is the image of God, anyway?

I think the first hint toward an answer is in the text itself. As God meditates on what he’s going to do (Gen 1.26), and as Moses then describes what God did (Gen 1.28), the text emphasizes a single point: Adam is to have dominion “over all the earth,” including “every living thing that moves on the earth.” He is to fill the earth with descendants of himself (Gen 1.28), and these humans are to “subdue” the earth in their dominion over it.

So what’s that mean?

Several things:

  • God has given us responsibility for the state of the earth. We’re going to be accountable for how we use it. It’s not our playground; it’s our responsibility. That means we need to use it wisely and, dare I say it, sustainably. We should use our non-renewable resources with a view toward how long they’ll last at the current rate of use. We should prefer renewable resources wherever possible—and we should carefully think through what “possible” means, in both practical and financial terms. We should develop smart ways to conserve and extend what’s on and in the earth. Avoidable extinctions shouldn’t happen on our watch. We’re not drunken sailors—or we shouldn’t be.
  • And with the responsibility to use the earth wisely is the clear right to use it. Its resources are for our use, within the bounds of stewardship. We can harness the power of its energy sources; we can use our intelligence to make plants more productive or more useful in other ways (natural isn’t necessarily a more moral descriptor); we can domesticate animals and use them for work or for food, even as we care for them and seek their prosperity (Prov 12.10). We can kill them, but we do so humanely and only as needed.

And that brings other issues to consider:

  • Are there limits to this dominion? Selective breeding? Hybridization? Genetic manipulation? Cloning? What about cloning humans? Does that cross a line? How do we define the line?
  • Does our dominion extend beyond the earth? Space travel? Mining asteroids? How do we decide?
  • Does our dominion extend to “redeeming culture” in the Kuyperian sense? Should we embrace all cultural forms as morally neutral and exploit them for the advancement of the kingdom? What constraints would a biblical view place on that kind of activity?

The longer God gives us to steward the planet, the more complicated the questions get. Turns out we need to steward the questions about stewarding, as well as all the other stuff. Being in the image of God is serious business, and it requires us to know more about him than what he has revealed in us; we need to master the revelation he gives in his Word if we’re going to steward our dominion over the earth in ways that consistently please him.

Responsibility is hard work.

Next time, we’ll ask whether there’s more to the image than just dominion.

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Created. Now What? Part 3: Recognizing the Image of God

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So the first major takeaway from creation theology is the fact that we’re special—specifically, that we’re in the image of God.

Before we get to what that means, I’d like to take a post to note whom it involves.

It involves every human—everyone who’s descended from Adam and Eve.

First, it includes sinful humans, and that’s all of us, of course. Every descendant of Adam and Eve is sinful, in at least three ways:

  • We’re guilty of Adam’s sin, because Adam was our representative in the Garden. Paul tells us that in Adam, “all sinned” (Rom 5.12)—not “all sin,” or “all will sin,” but “all sinned.” There are different theories as to how that works, but no orthodox theologian denies the fact that the guilt for Adam’s sin has been imputed to us.

What’s that you say? That’s not fair? Sure seems like it, doesn’t it? But let me encourage you to take a look at the whole picture. Adam’s guilt is imputed to you; that really hurts. But your sin is imputed to Christ (Is 53.4-6), and that’s not “fair” either. And the coup de grace is that Christ’s righteousness is imputed to us (2Cor 5.21), so that God sees us through Christ-colored glasses.

That’s quite an arrangement.

You can whine about fairness if you want, but this is the best deal in the history of ever, and you’d be a fool not to take it.

  • As descendants of Adam, we’ve inherited his sinful nature, so that we’re inclined toward sin; we naturally lean in that direction (Rom 8.5-8; Eph 4.22). We like it.
  • And we sin. Even if Adam’s sin weren’t on our account, we have plenty of our own to answer for. We’re guilty (Rom 3.10-18), as guilty as sin. And if you don’t think so, consider how you’d feel if your thoughts were broadcast, 24/7, to everyone you know. I sure wouldn’t like it. I’m not the only one like that, am I?

But here’s remarkable thing. Even as sinners, we’re still in the image of God (Gen 9.6; Jam 3.9). God’s image in us is so powerful, so deeply embedded by his sculpting hand, that all the sin in the universe can’t blast it away. God is bigger than sin, and so is his image in us.

And one more thing. At the moment he placed that image in us, he said specifically that it involved both kinds of humans: male and female (Gen 1.27).

No, the woman wasn’t an afterthought. That’s ridiculous; God doesn’t have afterthoughts. She’s in the image of God too. I’d go so far as to suggest that neither sex completely reflects the image of God; the image is most clearly and completely displayed by the two together. Which means, I suppose, that the sexes image God most clearly when they’re friends, not enemies.

So why did God delay the creation of Eve? He didn’t say, but as a teacher, I have a suspicion.

He wanted Adam to realize his own incompleteness before he completed him with Eve. He wanted him to treasure what a remarkable and perfect gift she was. So he set him out to name all the animals (Gen 2.19), and here they came, two by two, each male with his perfect female complement. And Adam noticed the obvious: there’s no one like that for me (Gen 2.20). He recognized his need. (Discovery learning!) And when God met that need, perfectly (Gen 2.21-22), Adam burst into poetry (Gen 2.23).

Men have been writing poems to women ever since, with varying degrees of skill. And reception, alas.

Now, how do you treat the image of God?

Well, suppose I’m in London, and I see a bust of the Queen. And I spit on it.

I’m going to have to do a lot of explaining to a lot of Brits, some of them undoubtedly in an official capacity.

And what if I say, “I didn’t spit on the Queen; I spit on a chunk of marble”?

Nope. That excuse is not gonna fly. It’s a piece of marble that looks like the Queen, and that’s the whole point. My treatment of the image can reasonably be taken to reflect my attitude toward the original, the person depicted.

That’s why murder is wrong, you know. Not primarily because the human has a right to life (which he does), but because murder is an attack on, a defacing of, the image of God (Gen 9.6).

So how do you treat the image of God that you see every day? In the rich? The poor? The white? The black? The male? The female? The stronger than you? The disabled? The respectable? The death-row inmate? The countryman? The refugee?

Images of God. All of them. Better not spit on them, or you’re going to have to answer to the Original, and he’s not going to be happy about it.

You disrespect certain kinds of people? Then you need to ask yourself why you despise God so much. You need to repent, and you need to make restitution. You need to repair the damage you’ve done.

Creation theology means that there shouldn’t need to be #metoo hashtags. Or any other campaigns to end abuse, physical or verbal, or even simple disrespect. It’s all ungodly, and in that sense it’s also subhuman.

Get with the species.

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Created. Now What? Part 2: Implementing the Image of God

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We’re six days into Creation week. God has issued orders, as a sovereign from his throne, and the universe is running like clockwork.

It’s all good.

But now, on day 6, God changes everything. He comments to himself that he’s about to do something qualitatively different; he’s going to make someone “in our image” (Gen 1.26).

And he rises from his chair.

Why do I say that?

The account in Genesis 1 is tersely straightforward: God makes man in his own image (Gen 1.27), as he had said he would. But Moses, the narrator and cinematographer, has kindly given us a close-up shot of the same scene in the next chapter:

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 (Gen 2.7).

Unfortunately, we’ve become so familiar with these words that their significance escapes us.

This is physical, not verbal, language. God is not speaking Adam into existence; he’s sculpting him, forming him, shaping him, with his hands. He’s “rescue breathing” into him, with his lungs and mouth.

This is shocking language. God is a spirit (John 4.24); he has no hands, lungs, or mouth. What’s this all about?

I’d like to engage in a little biblically informed theological speculation for a moment.

We know that the active agent of creation was the Son (John 1.3; Col 1.16; Heb 1.2). We also know that the Son is the person who later, in God’s eternal plan (Heb 10.5, quoting Ps 40.6-8 LXX), became incarnate, permanently united with a human nature, including a human body, which he retains to this day (Acts 1.11; Col 2.9) and apparently will forever. We’re also fairly confident that Jesus appeared in bodily form repeatedly in the Old Testament, before the incarnation, as the “Angel of YHWH.” In Genesis 18 Abraham has an extended conversation with God, apparently this same “Angel of YHWH,” after sharing a meal with him in his tent—a very physical activity indeed. (Centuries later, Jesus would ask for a piece of fish to eat [Lk 24.41-43], specifically to demonstrate to his disbelieving disciples that he was indeed with them physically.)

So here’s what I imagine.

The Son, Jesus, is the one speaking all things into existence. In embodied form, he rises from his chair and steps to an area of clay. Kneeling, he begins to work the clay with his hands—physical hands—and fashions a body—a recumbent statue—that looks like him. (Isn’t it more appropriate that our body is in the image of the Son’s than that his is in ours?) When the sculpture is complete, he leans back on his heels and surveys his work, not to inspect it for flaws but simply to take joy in it.

It’s good.

But it’s not complete. It’s not human. It’s not alive.

The Son leans over the lifeless form and, placing his lips on the clay mouth, he exhales.

Once? Twice? Several times?

One thing we know. There is none of the desperation that accompanies CPR today: Come on, buddy; breathe for me now. Don’t die on me, man. Breathe for me!

The Son exhales with sovereign authority, and this statue, this clay mass, pinks up. It comes to life.

And there, sitting in the clay, is a living, breathing image of God.

Adam.

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Created. Now What? Part 1: Anticipating the Image of God

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Once you’ve settled on the fact that God is the Creator, the world never looks the same. A number of ideas immediately become obvious. I’d like to meditate on two of them for the next few posts.

One of the most obvious is that you and I are special.

I don’t mean that in the fawning sense, the way moms tell their children that they’re special. I mean it in the most life-changing way possible.

The creation account makes it obvious.

During the 6 days of active creation, God spends most of the time, metaphorically speaking, sitting in his chair and issuing orders. As I’ve noted before, sometimes he just speaks and items spring into existence: he says, “Let there be light” (Gen 1.3), and there is; he says, “Let there be an expanse” (Gen 1.6), and there is; he says, “Let there be lights in the heavens” (Gen 1.14), and the sun, moon, and stars come into being; he speaks (Gen 1.20), and fish swim in the seas, and birds fly through the atmosphere. Sometimes, when he speaks, he’s acting on things he has already created: he orders the waters to gather so that dry land becomes visible (Gen 1.9), and he causes plants (Gen 1.11) and then animals (Gen 1.24) to spring from the ground.

Through all of this activity (again, metaphorically speaking), God has never left his chair; he has spoken, and his will has been done. But now the story changes dramatically.

To begin with, God speaks, not to command his creation, but in meditation with himself. He says not, “Let there be man,” but “Let us make man” (Gen 1.26). He counsels with himself on what he is about to do.

In the hindsight of the New Testament, Christians see the Trinity here: the persons of the Godhead, perfectly one, speak among themselves, with the Father as administrator and visionary, the Son as active agent, and the Spirit as nurturer and protector. I don’t doubt that all that is true, but the picture here in Genesis, at the outset of God’s self-revelation, is murkier. God is speaking to himself, and he’s using the plural. Is this a majestic king planning his next action, or is it a consultation between or among infinitely exalted equals?

Well, neither, exactly. This is complicated by the fact that God doesn’t think of things, or through things, in the sense that we do. Sovereign and omniscient, he never hatches a plan or finds a solution. So why is he talking to himself, appearing to think through what he’s about to do?

It seems pretty clear what he’s doing. He’s pausing to relish what’s coming. This is not just another step in the long process of creating stuff. This next step is different in kind from what has happened so far; God is about to do something really extraordinary (as if speaking the cosmos into existence in an instant [Gen 1.16] isn’t extraordinary enough!).

In what way is this next step extraordinary? His joyous words tell us plainly: “Let us make someone like us! In our image! Exponentially greater than everything else!” (Gen 1.26a, paraphrased with abandon). May I say reverently, it’s as though he says, “You think that’s impressive? Just watch this!”

And then, metaphorically speaking, he rises, majestically and purposefully, from his chair. No pointing and giving orders now; he’s going to get involved. He’s going to roll up his sleeves and plunge into his creative work clear up to his elbows. Foreshadowing the coming incarnation, he’s going to step right into the middle of his creation.

In the next post we’ll consider what that means.

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How Atheistic Educators Teach Theology in Spite of Themselves 

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Every day in every school, millions of schoolchildren are learning about God. In every subject. 

Don’t think so? 

Watch. 

If there were no Bibles, we’d know a lot about God. For starters, we could just look around. If God created the world—and he did—then it’s a piece of art. And art tells us a lot about the artist. Just a glance at Picasso’s work tells us that he distorted the female form. Hmmm. I wonder if he had issues with women. Turns out he did. 

So when we study the cosmos, the created universe, we’re studying the work of God—and we’re consequently studying him. In school we call that science. And for some reason we’ve gotten the idea that science and religion are in conflict. 

Nope. It’s all about him. 

What can be known about God is plain to [mankind], 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. So they are without excuse (Rom 1.19-20). 

But there’s more. When God created the universe, he used a design language—a coding language, if you will. There are relationships between the parts of the universe. In school we call that language math.  

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures (Galileo). 

I would suggest that math is the most intimate look we get at the mind of God outside the Bible. It’s theology writ large. And we didn’t invent it; God did. He was counting before there were any humans around (Gen 1.5). 

Even more. When God created humans, he made them, as Scripture puts it, “in his image” (Gen 1.26-27). That means that when we study mankind—when we study the humanities—we’re studying God too. Language. Literature. The fine arts—music, speech, art. It all reflects the creative impulses of mankind, and in so doing it reflects the creative God who created us. It’s theology. 

And the sourcing doesn’t end with creation. Theologians call creation God’s first work, but they recognize another one as well. Since day 1, God has been directing in the affairs of men, telling a story that he has written from eternity past. 

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 (Acts 17.26). 

He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings (Dan 2.21). 

And what do we call that in school? 

Theologians call it providence, or more specifically, government. Schoolteachers call it history. 

Every school subject is about God. Science, math, language, literature, fine arts, history. All of it. 

And no surprise, because it all comes from him. 

It’s a shame more schools don’t recognize that. And it’s ironic—downright comical—that thousands of educators are teaching about the God they deny without even realizing it. 

He who sits in the heavens laughs. 

And I like to chuckle right along with him.