The Spirit of Truth
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Genesis 1:1
The lines are clearly drawn between those who believe Genesis 1 is true and those who don’t. But the science which tries to prove Genesis 1 to be false has failed to discover a law that allows something to come from nothing. There is no known scientific law that explains how non-living things come to life. And what is more, there is no known scientific law that can explain how one kind of creature can naturally turn into an entirely different creature.
Yet people will do their damnedest to try and prove that there is no God. Such are those who live in bondage to the will of this world. Originally mankind was created in the likeness of God.
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
Genesis 1:26
That this indeed happened has never changed for it is in the will of God that all that He created, including mankind, behold His Glory. Just as the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters (Genesis 1:2) so it was out of the depths of this same Spirit of God that mankind was to be formed. And those plans were never changed. But we have changed, having been taken bondage by the elements of this world and held bondage to another language. By elements Paul is referring to a language we speak which is hostile to God. Romans 8:1 There is a language born of God that does not need man’s mind to either prove or disprove God. It is the language of a living truth given to us through the Word of God. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth. John 1:14
Genesis 1:26 reveals the magnanimity of God. John 1:14 reveals the personality of God. This He made known to us through Jesus Christ. God is personal and will not allow anything to come between Him and mankind which bare His trademark. To be created in the image of God means that He can communicate with us and we can communicate with Him. He is personal and we can speak a language that He understands. That is what the incarnation of Jesus Christ was all about. And when the material world and all its genius tries to overwhelm us, we are called to testify to the truth that we know in Jesus Christ.
In his book, Death in the City, 1982, Francis Schaeffer writes about the direction our culture has taken in distancing itself from the Word of God. I borrow some of what he has written. The world has taken our present culture captive. And as Christians we must speak to the ideas that are leading to moral death. Don’t try to imagine but rather realize that God is looking at the direction our culture is taking at the same time as He is looking at those to whom God has revealed His Word. Schaeffer says that we are to live our lives in reliance on God.
We are living in a very complicated world in which we can probe deeper into the universe and at the same time discover smaller and smaller things. What we once thought of as reality is fast slipping away. And here is what Schaeffer writes that greatly concerns me. “Not only for the Christian, but the materialist alike, mankind seems to be slipping into oblivion and what he knows overwhelms him.”
Supposing, Schaeffer writes, that we imagine a room and nothing exists outside of that room. One man, a materialist, the other, a Christian, sit on two different chairs in that room. The materialist sees this room as the universe and he sets about to analyze it. He uses the sciences of chemistry, biology, and physics to do this. He examines everything from the paint on the wall to the more basic particles. All this takes him a very long time. At a very old age he gives the Christian a big set of books. So the Christian takes a number of months, even years, to study these books with care. Finally the Christian says to the materialist, “Well, this is a tremendous work. You have really told me a great deal about my universe that I wouldn’t otherwise have known. However, my friend, this is all very fine, but it’s drastically incomplete.”
We are living in what is called the post-Christian, post-modern age, a drastically incomplete age. A moral and spiritual death is suffocating the truth. The answer Francis Schaeffer gives is that we must make a greater commitment to God’s Word as truth. I might add that this will cost us everything. For this to happen we will need to be given the spirit to speak the truth to the intellectual, moral, and philosophical battles of our day. God will give us the spirit to do so in a world that is held in bondage. This is spirit that is given to us through the Word of God.
Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.
Do not deceive yourselves. If any of you think you are wise by the standards of this age, you should become “fools” so that you may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight. As it is written: “He catches the wise in their craftiness” and again, “The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile.” So then, no more boasting about human leaders! All things are yours,whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future—all are yours, and you are of Christ, and Christ is of God.
1 Corinthians 3:16-23
