Kootenai Church Conferences

Thank you so much for being here. Thank you, Pastor Jim, for having me. The team—thank you to Josh for that musical worship, and thank you all for giving your time on a Friday night to be here. We are here to cover momentous things because our whole culture, our whole civilization, is shaking over the issues that we will be talking about. Even think about this title with me for just a minute: Human Sexuality, Gender, and God's Creation. That's basically in summary form just about everything that has the church under fire in 2024. That's put probably a number of you in this room in interesting positions in your workplace, in your vocation. If we were to speak up, if some of you were to speak up where you work, where you ply your trade, you could be fired very quickly and very easily and become a headline, in fact, if you say some of the things I'm just going to lay out here in this strong, sound pulpit in this sound church this weekend. So this is momentous stuff, not because of me, but because of the subject matter.
If you want to open your booklet—before I move into my first message tonight, I just want you to understand this conference schedule page. I just want you to understand the flow of tonight and tomorrow. You'll see that we start with three sessions on God's design for humanity. That's intentional. We're going to begin in the opening chapters of Genesis, and we're going to see just what God made humanity to be. We're going to breathe pure oxygen. So all that madness that swirls out there, that's not in here, praise God. We get to breathe the pure oxygen of God's glorious design that is good for us. It's not just right, it's good for us. It brings flourishing. It brings joy when we live according to it by the grace of God.
Then in session 5, you see a turn there. That's intentional. Satan's design for humanity, and we do two sessions there. And I just want to map briefly with you—I won't be able to do it full justice—but I want to try to map the system that we're up against in order that we would understand it, but not just understand it and stand far apart from it and maybe throw a few rocks across the stream or something like that, but in order that we would be better equipped to then press into this world because we're not actually supposed to, even as we're surrounded by beautiful hills and mountains, we're not supposed to head for the hills. We're supposed to press into the darkness. It's not a natural instinct for any of us, but we're supposed to press in. So we're not just trying to critique Satan's design—we very much are; we are calling a spade a spade the whole weekend—but we are actually trying to be equipped to get into the darkness as the light in order to glorify God.
And then we go back to God's design there in session 7 and a Q&A, and on Sunday, I'll do a Sunday school on the gospel as our power and I'll do a sermon on David and Abigail. There aren't a lot of us I think that—who has heard—I'm just taking a survey. You can do this when you speak with impunity. Who has heard a sermon on David and Abigail in their life? OK, well we are about to break some barriers, baby—apparently. I expected a few hands, but should I be offended? No, it's not my book. But no, OK. Anyway, we're going to talk—there's so much to preach. I'm not throwing shots at preachers here. There's so much to preach in God's Word.
But actually the reason I'm in David and Abigail is because a lot of what we're talking about, as Pastor Jim rightly said, is the word complementarity. That basically sums up—as we'll be going, that sums up in my judgment beautifully God's design for the sexes, that we are complementary, that we are made distinctly, that we are definitely not the same, man and woman. We're the same race, but definitely not the same as human beings. We have our distinctions, and those distinctions are not bad. They can become bad in a sinful world, can't they? We can render those distinctions and differences something that is bad, and they present a real challenge to us in marriage, for example, and even in the home with raising kids. But in God's design, again, they're good. Our differences are not bad. They're not a matter of hostility. They’re to God's glory, just like God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit are one God, three Persons. They're not the same Person. They're not a carbon copy of one another just with a different name. They're distinct Persons. And so we have a foundation as Christians for both unity (one God) but distinction (three Persons), and that's true in humanity as well. Unity, one human race, all of us image bearers, every single person an image bearer without exception, fully an image bearer as we're just about to talk about, and yet man and woman, different, and that's good.
And that's the opposite, as we start off how our culture talks now about gender, because so much of how our culture discusses these things is it tries to melt everything down into one kind of omnigender where there's not really distinctions between men and women, and we're all the same. It's all gender-neutral gray, and with respect to gray, neutral tones in your household colors or something like this—my wife likes neutral tones, so I feel like I should say that in terms of the house color scheme—that's not actually how humanity is supposed to look. We're not supposed to be blended down into one indistinct color. We're supposed to be distinct colors. When you see a rainbow—remember it's pride month, yes? The rainbow's been co-opted, or they've tried to, but they haven't succeeded, by the way, because you can't edit what God has created, and you can't take anything back from God. If God has told you that He owns the rainbow, with a smile on our face, we say, “He owns the rainbow.” Nobody else owns the rainbow. But think with me just for a second. Think of a rainbow. Those are distinct colors, aren't they? But that's what makes it beautiful. They're not all the same. That speaks to the world that God has made.
Well, we are running ahead of ourselves. We need to begin by thinking together about the image of God, a doctrinal, biblical reality that is often not treated in much detail. We don't have a super long session here tonight, so don't worry. We're not about to sit here for four and a half hours. But we do need to give some attention to the image of God. The image of God is the foundational reality of the human person. You can't understand who a human being is without understanding that we are all an image bearer, every single person. We're going to cover that at some length.
But before I get into the image of God, from Genesis 1—we're starting in session 1, in Genesis 1. I want to give you five different cultural views of the human person, and all of these relate to these topics: human sexuality, gender, God's creation. I want to give you then five wrong views of who humanity is, five bad answers to the question, “What is a person?” Because that is actually the most commonly debated subject today in 2024 in America. What makes you human? So much of the debate is right there. Five bad views, and then we'll transition to a sixth view, and that is the biblical view: man is the image of God.
The first cultural view that's around us, that's coming at us from different angles, is this: man is mere matter. Man is mere matter. This is often called materialism. It can also go under the name naturalism. All we are is just a collection of atoms. We are, not just that, a meaningless collection of atoms. It's kind of like when you pick up a toy and there is some kind of company, their logo, their name on said toy. I have three kids, fifteen, thirteen, and ten. My wife and I are currently in that weird stage of grief when there are not that many toys being played with in the house after years and years and years and years and years and lots of money being spent on toys. So I know toys well even as they are fading from our life together as a family, as two of the three have launched into teenagedom. When you pick up that toy, you see the brand, you know it's from something. This scientistic view—many atheists around us, many skeptics around us say when you look at the human person, you pick us up, you look at the bottom of our feet, there's nothing stamped there. No one has made us. There's nothing purposeful about our existence. No one's designed us for anything bigger. Again, we're just a collection of atoms. We just happened to have come into existence.
Yes, this is an evolutionary worldview. You're well familiar with it. In an evolutionary worldview, there is no, at least in the secular form, there is no divine creator. There is no being guiding our being. There is just what is and nothing more. So no one has shaped you. No one has made you for any purpose. You are just atoms colliding. When you die, as you often hear people say, especially nowadays in 2024, there's no place you go. There's no Heaven. There's no Hell. John Lennon, that great theologian of the Beatles, told us this some decades ago, right? It's just fade to black, or maybe it's some kind of, I don't know, blissful nonexistence, however that is defined. In this view, we're just matter. You and I know some different thoughts about that, and I'm guessing in this kind of church you get some equipping for how to respond to that kind of perspective. Certainly you do from the Scripture itself, just from preaching the word, preaching the gospel, you do.
It's important for us to know though that lots of people live according to this view. This is the view, for example, that drives the culture of death. This is the view that funds abortion to the tune of tens of millions of babies aborted in this first-world, civilized country. There's lots of different worldviews, of course, that factor into a decision, a horrific decision, to abort, but one of them, one of the key ideas, is that the baby in the womb is just a clump of cells. It's just tissue in a woman's womb. That's all it is.
And you and I know the complete opposite. We know that when a child is in a mother's womb, it is being knit together by God Himself. It is not simply that God has set up certain processes and stepped away, and now He's kind of a deistic figure out there in the clouds somewhere, unconcerned with the world He has made. No, David and the psalmist tell us that every human life is fearfully and wonderfully made. But that view goes the exact opposite direction of the “man as mere matter” view. It's very much a common way to think about humanity today.
Second view—man as a technological project. We're now in the age, as you may have heard eighteen thousand times, of AI. Every company that is at all trying to be cutting-edge is right now trying to figure out AI and how to use AI, and for some of us in the room, how to get rid of us so that AI can replace us. Because that is—it is going so well. They told us technology, by the way, was going to make our lives easy. Do you remember those? Do you remember that line, by the way? Anybody remember that being—oh, technology. First of all, we're going to be flying to the moon on a regular basis like the Jetsons, yes? And then technology is going to solve all of our problems. Have you tried making a phone call to your spouse recently in a moment when you really need to reach them? Have you ever had a phone call drop? Have you ever had a text message not go through? I wouldn't be so quick to believe the idea that technology solves all our problems. It's still difficult to get your toaster to work on a reliable basis. If you have solved that particular human quandary, see me at the break.
Mankind in this vision, and this relates to an evolutionary worldview, is basically an evolving animal. That's what we are. We're an evolving animal. And again, lots of people around us think not only that we can use technology to upgrade ourselves, they go beyond that. They think we should use technology to upgrade ourselves. They think that is—what's the word I'm about to say? That is progress. Progress, interesting. Now, we do make forms of progress as time goes on in human civilization. Air-conditioning is nice. I prefer air-conditioning. I like refrigerators. I'm guessing many of you do. Probably don't have a whole lot of ice chests represented in this room. And yet, be careful with that. Yes, be careful with that whole view that humanity is, as a whole, progressing. That vision has funded a lot of the worst ideas of the last two hundred years or so.
But many people are believing this. They are believing that whatever science comes out with, it's good. Take it. Update yourself. Elon Musk, who's doing a lot of good for free speech with what is now called X, which yes, Elon, if you're listening, that's way cooler than Twitter, by the way. But Elon Musk, on the other hand, is doing a lot to try to implant AI, neural technology, into human brains, and thereby effectively upgrade the human person. So good on the free speech stuff. Thank you for saving free speech in America and the West, Elon. But no bueno on changing the human person itself, changing anthropology itself. That is not a sound project. We are not just technology. We are not software to be upgraded. God wrote this code. God wrote the code of the human person. We're not an open-source system in that regard, but many people around us think that we are.
Third view, man as an expressive-therapeutic being. That's a mouthful. Man as an expressive-therapeutic being. What are we after here? Well, this is again grounded in what is often called a secular vision of life. The idea is that at the core of flourishing and thriving human living is expressing yourself. So a healthy life, a healthy existence, is not about following anyone else's script, even God's. A healthy human existence is about chucking any other script and expressing whatever comes naturally to you. Whatever comes naturally, whatever flows from your inmost desires and passions, that's what is good. Whatever outside forces try to tell you to do, including religious authorities, including churches, including preachers and theologians, that is bad. That is very bad.
And that is what our young people today—and I see a bunch in the room; praise God for that—that is what the younger generation today is inundated with. That view. Far more than any of us even know. It’s part of why we have to be so careful with phones. I'm not here to give a new law, pronounce a new eleventh commandment on technology, the perfect age when kids get phones today. Our kids basically are going to get phones today, at least in a lot of cases, but be careful when they do. Be careful. I would urge caution in terms of age. I won't get us into sticky disagreements tonight or something like that in session 1, but I will just say think that one through. Don't just give a phone because you've got a teen in the home that really wants one and all the kids in the peer group have one.
My kids back in Arkansas where we live—we're moving to Kentucky soon. More on that in the Q&A to come. My kids do feel a little bit weird because they don't have phones yet. My daughter, I guess, now has a dumb phone. She's fifteen, about to turn sixteen, but we're trying to be careful on that in part because even if she's discipled and hopefully somewhat trained in a Christian home under my wife and I, certainly not perfectly, there still are going to be a ton of messages that hit her on those platforms, and friends, do not overestimate the maturity of your children. These platforms are serious and they are calibrated to get your kids to do nothing other than believe lies about humanity, including the lie that we are expressive-therapeutic beings, that our greatest need is to express our true self, or to switch the lingo to Disney's language, to follow our heart. To follow our heart. Same idea, yes? If somebody says follow your heart, that's expressive humanity talking.
And the therapeutic part of this third view comes because that's seen as working on yourself. That’s seen as improving yourself. You get the lie there as well. The lie is that, again, those authority figures who tell children how to live from something like the Bible, those figures prevent us from discovering our true self, and so we don't work on ourself. You even hear that language as well. I'm doing work on myself. I'm working on myself. You see this a lot on Instagram and this sort of thing, especially with some of the mom circles and that sort of thing.
Now it's true that we all need to grow. That's a fundamentally Christian reality. But that's not what this view is after. This is after your own self-directed, therapeutic growth. You getting more in touch with you. You living as you want to live. That is seen as being healthy. That is the new gospel, at least one of the predominant ones. The new gospel is you need to forgive yourself and you need to discover yourself and you need to work on yourself and you need to affirm yourself.
Now I'm not going to encourage you, by the way, to hate yourself, as if there is no image of God and there is no grace and mercy in the cosmos. Christians can even crank up the doctrine of sin to the degree that we effectively are communicating like if you don't hate yourself, you're not a good Christian. I actually don't think the Bible teaches that we should hate ourselves. We hate our sin, but we don't hate who God made us to be in terms of the image of God and a Christian person. But fundamentally we've got to recognize we don't need to be true to ourselves. We need to be true to God. And I need to say just a word, especially to the young people in the room. The affirmation you need is not your own affirmation or your peers’ affirmation or anyone else's affirmation or some group online who you kind of gravitate toward and they take you in and they give you an identity. You don't need their affirmation. It might feel good, but the affirmation you need is that which comes from God. You need the forgiveness and grace and transforming power of God which overcomes your sin and makes you who you truly are made to be. That's what we need.
Fourth view, we are sexualized beings. We are sexual beings. You can put it different ways. We're going to be talking about this at length. I'll talk about this tomorrow in the unit or the message on paganism at some length, but for here I'll just quickly identify this with Freud. In psychological circles, Sigmund Freud, the European psychologist, really the founder of the modern psychological movement—Freud argued that the human person is a simmering cauldron of desires in our core and a key part of our desires is sexual desire. In fact, Freud argued that sexual desire is the engine that drives the personality. So what makes up a human person? What drives us? What moves us through life? For Freud—sorry for the straightforward talk here, but for Freud, it was sexual desire. In fact, Freud believed that both men and women are bisexual in nature and that it is natural for us, therefore, to have all sorts of sexual interests in lots of different directions.
Does that sound a little bit like the way the culture encourages us to think about ourselves? Have you heard someone reference their masculine side or their feminine side? No one talks about their masculine side, by the way. I don't think I've ever heard a woman say, “I'm getting in touch with my masculine side.” Isn't that interesting? I'm not even passing judgment on that. I'm just saying I don't think I've ever heard a woman say that. I don't think lots of women are trying to get in touch with whatever the masculine side—I think they're trying to get far away from the masculine side. OK, like the masculine side of the bathroom is like you be over there. And the feminine—there is a feminine side in terms of husband, wife, bathrooms. We can say that. And you're supposed to mind those lines very carefully if you're the man.
Men, though, do talk about getting in touch with their feminine side. Their feminine side. And I have a friend named Gavin Peacock. We've written some books together. He played Premier League soccer in the UK. He was a star in the UK for years. Captained Chelsea, if any of you like soccer out there. And he said at one point when we were preaching together, “I didn't know I had a feminine side. I don't think I do.” And that's exactly right. That kind of thinking, in all seriousness, goes back to figures like Freud. The Bible doesn't teach men that they have a feminine side. We can talk about different traits and we can talk about men and women showing overlapping traits or things like that, but fundamentally, if you're a man, you're a man, and if you're a woman, you're a woman.
And by the way, just to cut to the quick here and give you the jeopardy answer at the beginning of the game, there are only two sexes. God made them. You can't change your sex. No one has ever changed their sex. No one has ever become a woman who is a man. And no one who is a man has ever become a woman or vice versa. It's never happened. No one has ever changed their sex. You can't change your sex. You can, tragically, get on very powerful drugs. You can go through body-altering surgeries. Yes, you can be told all sorts of lies. You cannot change your sex because God made it. God is the one who formed it. And you can't change it. Just like you can think you can become a mouse, but you can't become a mouse. And some of you are still chuckling, but there are people around us who think they can become a mouse, OK?
So the confusion is very real today, and we can laugh at that. We really can because it's crazy, but people are in these positions. And even if that thought is wild and wildly off base, these are people who need the gospel. These are people we've got to go toward, not away from, and reach in compassion, and there but for the grace of God go us. Without the grace of God, I know this is strange to think, but you might not just be a garden-variety sinner. You might end up thinking that you are a cat, that you are a furry. This is a thing now. In public schools, there are increasingly litter boxes for kids who identify as furries and think that they are cats or this sort of thing. Now that is altogether ridiculous. It is. But these are lost sinners just like us who need the gospel. We've got to go to people who think they're furries. But again, just to establish the point, just to nail it to the wood here at the outset, no one has ever become a mouse who was a person, or no one's ever become a tree or changed back, because what God makes you can't alter. You think you can, you can try, but you can't.
Freud did a lot of damage, as did Alfred Kinsey in the same period of time in the 1940s. He famously did a lot of experiments about human sexuality. I'll spare you the details in polite company, mixed company, with a lot of kids in the room, but basically now all sides acknowledge, the political right and the political left, the academic right and left acknowledge that Kinsey's subjects were in many cases people who for various reasons, many of them tragic, were inclined to what we would call deviant sexual practices. So Kinsey treated these people, many of them prisoners and this sort of thing, people who really do need a great deal of help along these lines, he treated them as if they were normal. And then he did all this research and presented it to the public as if everybody is effectively a sexual deviant, and that is not true. We all struggle with sin, and sinful desire runs through all of our hearts in some form, but Kinsey cooked the research from the start.
This is a majorly impactful view, that we're a sexualized being. I don't even really have to keep going in that regard, but let us just note that for now. We'll be engaging that view as we go.
Fifth view, man is a racial being. We are a racial being. I don't have time to go into this in depth, but the academic theory most associated with this view is critical race theory, which teaches you that the world is made up of power dynamics. It owes to what is called critical theory, behind even critical race theory. And critical theory argues just that, according to Marx and others, the world is made up of two categories, oppressor and oppressed. The people who are in the majority become the oppressor. The people who are in the minority are the oppressed people. They are wronged by the majority. That was applied to race, starting at about the 1980s and 90s, in legal studies under Kimberlé Crenshaw and other figures, and what this has come to mean in layman's terms in America in the last ten years, roughly, as critical race theory got out of the tiny little discipline of legal studies and somehow went viral and went global, what this all means is that in the most basic form, white people as the majority group, “white people” in air quotes, are the oppressors of people of color.
And we're racial beings, it's argued, and so this is the most important fact about us, and this is the most important fact of our civilization, and this is why it has been argued, as many of you have heard in lots of different forms, that we are in a systemically racist or systemically unjust society. Who has heard some form of those terms in the last five to ten years? Most of you, OK. That's because we have been fed that vision.
The concept of race itself is not a biblical concept. The concept of ethnicity is—different peoples who have a shared culture, shared language, shared region and background. That's valid. There's Jew and Gentile, of course, in New Testament categories and Old Testament categories, to be sure. But there's not a sense that because we have slightly different shades of melanin, we are effectively different people groups and we have no unity as human beings. That owes to secular thought as well, and that whole argument, again applied to America in the most direct form, has caused horrific division in this country in the last roughly five to ten years. It has caused many so-called white people to be told that they are oppressors and they commit injustices against people of color at all times without even meaning to and basically just by virtue of a lot of us being a majority group. For example in America, we are a wicked people group.
The same thing of course could be said of any majority people group in any society, right? So you could take that argument and apply it to Asian territories or African countries, etc. But it has been used here to do great damage in the church, for example, and teach people that they have an extra sin that they need to repent of—the sin of whiteness, for example. And so that has done, as I say, great damage, because, just so that you hear this, it is not wrong to have what is called white skin. The Bible does not extra condemn you if you are white. The Bible does not condemn you if your skin is not white. In past generations in America, people thought that people who did not have white skin were inferior. Nowadays, people with white skin are called inferior. Suffice it to say, we are believing the same lies, just directed at different people, that we were believing in the nineteenth century, with the same horrible results.
Can I give you a better vision, just quickly? We're all one race (Acts 17:26). We're all one human race. We do have differences in terms of culture, and there can even be distinctions in terms of how people live, and some of that clusters around skin color, let that be said. But there's nothing hard and fast that makes us a different kind of vision of humanity from one another. We have way more in common than we have apart, and there is no biblical basis for labeling a majority people group, for example, an oppressive group just by virtue of being a majority group.
There's a lot more to say about these things. As Jim kindly said some minutes ago, I wrote a whole book on this. There's a lot of complexity here. There's a lot of things to unwind. My book, Christianity and Wokeness, gets at that. I'm going to sign—I'll sign every stinking book you buy tomorrow at lunch, OK? So they're all twenty dollars. I shipped them from my author account with my publisher. I tried to give you a sharp discount. You can see the salesman up here, sorry. But if you want to buy it, it's twenty bucks, and I'll sign every book tomorrow at lunch. Books aside, I'm just trying to get these units shipped and sold so the church doesn't have eight hundred books sitting in some corner somewhere for the next four years. That does happen, sadly, to some of us.
But these are complex matters, and they're divisive matters, but, praise God, we have the image of God, as we're just about to talk about briefly, and we have the gospel. And the gospel is what unites us as Christians, and wherever the gospel takes root in a people and in a community, at least in a lot of different places, there's going to be some form of diversity, and that is beautiful, and that is glorious, and we love that, and we want that. We're not trying to artificially manufacture that in a cheesy way, and there's plenty of that out there, but wherever the gospel goes and sinners get saved and Christians join churches, that diversity naturally comes, and that is a beautiful thing, and we're the people then who have the biggest stake in diversity because we are a global body of believers from across centuries and millennia. So we have a big stake in the diversity of the body of Christ.
And just a final word here. Be wary of critical theory on the other side. Be wary of critical theory that would tell you that because white people are targeted today, and they are, that therefore we should go into some kind of project on the opposite side, not of hating our whiteness and repenting of it, but of making our whiteness something to be celebrated and that's our identity more than the gospel is, more than unity and Christ is. That is a rising danger today. Our Savior is not an Anglo-Saxon European. Our Savior is a Middle Eastern Jew who died on a Roman cross for us. So you be careful about those message boards that tell you that your whiteness is your identity.
You may have one form of skin color or another. It honestly doesn't matter like the world tells us it does. You know what matters most is that a Man named Jesus Christ died for you and died for a whole bunch of people, some of whom look something like you and a lot of whom don't look a lot like you, but you have unity in Christ. In fact, Paul says in Ephesians 2:15, we are one new man in Christ. That is what the world needs to hear. That's the message of the gospel.
Sixth view. Those are five bad views. This is the sixth, and it's this: man is the image of God. We are the image of God. So we learn in Genesis 1:26–27. After making everything except for the human person, on the sixth day God said this:
26 “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. They will rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, the livestock, the whole earth, and the creatures that crawl on the earth.”
27 So God created man in his own image; he created him in the image of God; he created them male and female. (CSB)
This is where we go in fundamental terms. We have more to say than this, but we can't say less than this about what it means to be human. This is the core doctrine of humanity, that every single person is made in the image of God. What that means then, and this is quite a statement, is that when you see another human being, you're seeing a little, little, but real reflection of God. That's remarkable. This shows us that we are made in glory. We are fearfully and wonderfully formed. We are not genetic accidents. We are not atoms colliding. We are not purposeless beings. We are not evolved apes. God specifically made the human person in His image. In fact, it's broader language, it's plural language, it's “let us make man in our image.” Theologians debate, exegetes debate, what exactly that means. But I think you have to say at minimum that it means that we are reflecting the trinitarian God as human beings.
This means that every person has dignity and worth. The image of God is not something that is unlocked when a person gets married. You don't become more human based on your marital status. The image of God is not dependent on intellect. Those who are geniuses are not more human than the rest of us. The image of God is not inhibited by physical difficulties so a person who is born with physical challenges is less human than others. The image of God is not kind of present in a baby in the womb, such that yeah, you kind of can abort that baby if you need to because of convenience, a classic, modern American value. But then when the baby's born, yeah, I mean, it really does kind of get upgraded to a full image bearer. No, a baby in the womb is fully made in God's image, though growing and developing of course. And on the other end of that, you don't lose the image of God as time goes on and your capacities, maybe at least in some categories, diminish a bit. So for example, an elderly person who needs care toward the end of their life in at least some ways, if we're being honest, they aren't less human then. You're not more an image bearer if you make a big salary than if you don't make a big salary.
The image of God, to use a single word, is ontological. That's a big word, but write it down please if you're taking notes. Trust me. It's ontological. O-n-t-o-logical. Ontological. And that means that it's in us. It's our structure. It's in our being. The image of God isn't something we do. The image of God is what we are. And that is why we get involved in all these swirling issues and debates and controversies about God's creation, about the human person. Because you see, we are the ones who know who our fellow human beings are. And we know that the baby in the womb is just as much an image bearer as you and I are, just as much an image bearer as the most famous, lauded athlete on our TVs. We know that the elderly family member who we go to visit when we're traveling or we go to visit in a nursing home or we take into our home at the end of their life and they don't even remember their name, we know that they are still an image bearer, that they have not lost their God-given dignity and worth. And to repeat myself, they never can. They never will. No one can take it from them.
A few years ago—we're almost done with this first session—a few years ago on British TV there was a program that makes me angry even as I'm talking right now because it was a program that featured a broadcaster walking through all stages of society with a person who has the condition we call Down’s syndrome, and the purpose of the program, I'm not making this up, was to show the person with Down’s syndrome that they cost society a lot. I believe the program even tabulated the cost of caring for a handicapped individual, a challenged individual, however you want to frame that, and it was something like thirty million dollars or something like this. The cost was pretty staggering, you know, in terms of human money. And the takeaway of the program was that basically these people with this condition aren't worth the cost, and that's where you see these visions of the human person coming to roost, people being told their life is too expensive to play itself out, and that's what we're up against, brothers and sisters.
We're in a culture of death. I don't mean this in a shouting, angry way. I mean, these ideologies truly come from the realm of darkness, and they prey on people, and they take people out of this life and send them into a Christless eternity. The stakes are so high here, and that is why it is so vital that you and I know from the Word of God who the human person is. Every person is an image bearer. And if you and I—listen, you want to do something about this, I hope, you know, coming out of this. You don't have to do anything fancy, OK? You don't have to—you do whatever you want for the glory of God that's moral, but you don't have to be the person who saves the world in an afternoon. You just need to be a Christian who believes these things, lives by these things, and yes, at some level, let me push a little bit here, by God's power in you, by the Spirit in you— the Spirit indwells every single Christian there is—you speak up. You speak up for these things. Speak up on a Facebook thread. Speak up in a conversation at work. Speak up in a classroom of high school sophomores. Speak up with your coworkers at work. Whatever it may be. And tell people the truth about who the human person is.
Here's my final word for this session. We're not supposed to just look at the human person and say, “Image bearer, made in God's image, a little reflection of God.” We are supposed to be living displays of the purposeful existence God has given us. Said more simply, we love life. We love life! Because God loves life. God didn't make nothing. God made something. God wanted a theater, as Calvin called it, for His glory. God wanted, of His own desire, there to be this created world where there would be people roughly four and a half feet to eight feet tall, depending on the tallest NBA player currently, who would roam the earth—at least normally those heights—and then give Him glory. That's what verse 28 says of Genesis 1:
28 Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.
29 And God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.
30 And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so.
31 And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. (Gen. 1:28–31 ESV)
God made this world to flourish. God is a generous God. God is a good God. God is the one who provided little tiny plants yielding seed, not just for the human person initially but for the birds, for the beasts of the earth, to everything that creeps on the earth.
So we're not actually just talking about the human person as we begin our time together this weekend; we're ultimately talking about God and the character of God. And the God we're talking about, the God of the Bible, is a God of justice, as we will see. He is a God who judges sin to the uttermost. He is a God who sends the wicked and unrepentant to an eternity we call Hell. And so we're not here to soften the hard edges of God's Word. We affirm them and we affirm them without blinking. We must. We cannot move the ancient mark that God has set.
But I leave you with this. The focus of the Bible is not on God damning the wicked. That's a subtheme. The focus of the Bible is on a good God, a God who creates a world where there is food, abundant fruit for the man and the woman, where they can, once placed in Eden, as we'll talk about tomorrow morning, they can eat from every tree that God has made except one. We focus on the one. We focus on the one and we say, “Is God really good? Oh dear, I need apologetics for this.” And God said there's fifteen thousand trees you can eat from. We need those conversations. We all do. We all hit those moments, me included. But some of those conversations can be helped by the fifteen thousand trees that Adam and Eve could eat from. Don't focus on the one they couldn't eat from. That was good. That was right that God said, “Don't eat from this one.” But don't miss this. There weren't two trees. There's a forest of trees. You understand this in Idaho. My goodness, I don't have to sell this to you. You live in trees, you stinkers. They're everywhere. Those of us in different regions, we yearn for your trees. I'm actually from Maine. I love trees. I miss trees. My dad was a forester. My dad walked the woods of Maine for a living, so I'm all in on trees, and trees are at the center of the biblical narrative. It is the tree of life that we'll eat from in the new heavens for all eternity to come, bearing its twelve kinds of beautiful fruit.
OK, so all this to say, don't lose sight of the creative vision of God. Don't lose sight of who humanity is. We’re made in God's image. And don't lose sight of the God who made humanity. Don't focus on the one tree. Focus on the 14,999 that the man and the woman could eat from. In your life—dare I say, most of you are Christians, many of you are—don't focus on the one. Focus on the 14,999 blessings God has given you.