BFM 2000 Article III: Doctrine of Man

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BFM 2000, Article III "Man". Format is a fairly scripted Sunday School, with minimal corporate questions.

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Article III

Good morning LBC, hello church family on line, welcome to our final session of our Summer Seminar series, taking us through the Baptst Faith and Message 2000. I’m very excited to have this discussion with y’all this morning. Let’s have a word of prayer, please join me.
PRAY

“Man”

Let’s read the article together...
“Man is the special creation of God, made in His own image. He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation. The gift of gender is thus part of the goodness of God’s creation. In the beginning man was innocent of sin and was endowed by his Creator with freedom of choice. By his free choice man sinned against God and brought sin into the human race. Through the temptation of Satan man transgressed the command of God, and fell from his original innocence whereby his posterity inherit a nature and an environment inclined toward sin. Therefore, as soon as they are capable of moral action, they become transgressors and are under condemnation. Only the grace of God can bring man into His holy fellowship and enable man to fulfill the creative purpose of God. The sacredness of human personality is evident in that God created man in His own image, and in that Christ died for man; therefore, every person of every race possesses full dignity and is worthy of respect and Christian love.”
There’s a lot to digest in this particular article, but fret not!, I’m going to spend the next 58min breaking it down for us. And, Lord willing, we’ll be able to see how God wants us to apply this doctrine to our lives. One of the elder’s goals for this Summer Seminar was to not only teach through the doctrine we profess and affirm in the BFM 2000, but to see how these doctrines relate to personal evangelism. WELL, I pulled the winning lottery ticket! Because this article, the Doctrine of Man, is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL to get right, if we are going to get our evangelism right.
In fact, zooming even further out from evangelism, I’d commend to you that this doctrine is ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL in order to get Christianity iteself right! There is wisdom to where this article is located in the BFM: if you’ve got the booklet with you, or if you’ve got the BFM in PDF/webpage format, if you turn a page left, swipe a page left, or scroll up, you’ll see that “Man” comes right after the doctrine of God in #2, and the Bible in #1. And if you go the other direction, you’ll find the doctrine of Salvation immediately follows in the #4 slot. This isn’t an accident. Getting a correct understanding of what the Bible is, who God is, and who Man is…these are requirements IOT get Salvation correct, and quite honestly, every other doctrine of the Christian faith, and every area of faith and practice.
And OBTW, the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith (which was based on the Westminster Confession of Faith from ~40yrs prior), the 1833 New Hampshire Baptist Confession of Faith and revised version in 1853 (which RGBC affirms, BTW), and many others throughout Protestant history post-reformation, they organized their confessions nearly the same. The BFM 2000, while a broader tent, does in fact rightly stand on the shoulders of faithful saints who saught to preserve the purity of the Gospel by codifying what we believe in doctrinal confessions, so us Pilgrims can stay on the narrow path, be protected from heresy or false doctrine, remaining faithful to God’s Word.
I will echo my fellow elders and re-affirm this important thought: we do not claim that doctrine or confessions or catechisms are infallible or inerrant. They are only infallible and inerrant insofar they accurately reflect Biblical Truth.
With that final comment, and knowing myself, I won’t eat up one more minute of introduction, let’s dive in!

BLUF

Many of you in this room or online, if you work for NAVAIR or have every been around a military person, you will be familiar with this acronym. B.L.U.F. or bluff means Bottom Line Up Front.
I’m going to give you the proverbial “answer to the quiz” right at the beginning, because I want you to know where we’re headed.
The Doctrine of Man could be summarized by two main components: how man is like God, and how man is unlike God. Both of these two facets are vitally important to how we understand all doctrine, and for today, particularly personal evangelism. We are going to see that due to our fallen nature, a human CAN NOT be saved apart from God working. And the means by which God designed salvation to happen involves us opening our mouths! By definition in the New Covenant, God has called us to be on mission with him: our personal evangelism is a component of God’s salvific design!
Now, let’s put a bookmark in this conclusion, and we’ll come back to it at the end of the session. Let’s take at the first few sentences of the Article...
Man is the special creation of God, made in His own image. He created them male and female as the crowning work of His creation. The gift of gender is thus part of the goodness of God’s creation. In the beginning man was innocent of sin and was endowed by his Creator with freedom of choice. By his free choice man sinned against God and brought sin into the human race. Through the temptation of Satan man transgressed the command of God, and fell from his original innocence whereby his posterity inherit a nature and an environment inclined toward sin...
In these first few sentences, we see the TWO main components I just alluded to.
Imago Dei —> alignment with God
Fallen creatures —> disalignment with God
We’re going to begin with item #1, the imago Dei, or, image of God.

Imago Dei // Image of God

The first place we see this concept in the bible is Genesis 1 .
Genesis 1:27 “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Genesis 1:27 ESV
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
In this one short excerpt, 3 things jump out of the text to me:
“created”
“male and female”
“image”
In passing, before diving in to number 3, I’ll briefly address items 1 and 2.
One common and useful tool that confessional statements help us with is the concept of affirmation and denial.
Item 1, “created”
This text, and Article 3, affirms that man was created, and the associated denial would be that we deny man was evolved from something else. The work of creation was NOT a passive, detached, random, uncontrolled series of events. The act of creation was an INTENTIONAL, DESIGNED, ACTIVE WORK by God Himself. This concept is fundamental to the doctrine of man, and what the Bible says about the nature of human beings. Which, is in direct confrontation with the popular, secular worldview of today, and very likely what many if not all of us in this room, who were products of the public schools, were taught as “fact”.
Item 2, “male and female”
The Scripture is explicit here. There’s no maneuvering space, or “turning room” for the fighter pilots within earshot of me right now :)
The creation of humans as male and female was an INTENTIONAL, DESIGNED, ACTIVE WORK by God. The denial that goes along with this affirmation is that gender is NOT a subjective characteristic, or to put it another way, gender is NOT a characteristic dependent solely upon an individual’s feelings or self-perception within the mind. There is a BOATLOAD to unpack in this affirmation that we simply don’t have time to cover this morning, but needless to say, this is another aspect of the doctrine of man that’s on a collision course with contemporary thought, and one in which we must stand firmly on the solid rock of God’s Word.
OK, item 3, the word “image”
First question for the room,
What does “image” mean?
Make this query, repeat responses for online crowd, but don’t linger!
A broad answer: human characteristics that reflect, or replicate, God’s characteristics to some lesser degree. You can think of them as “areas of overlap” between us humans and God, that the rest of the created world, and created life, do not possess.
Let’s talk about some of them highlighted from the text. This won’t be an exhaustive list of everything that composes the title of imago dei, but certainly some of the most important ones:
Dominion
Genesis 1:28 ESV
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “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.”
We are able to have dominion over what was created. The Reformation Study Bible provides a useful illustration: God, as KING, can create out of his own, self-existent being (see Article II for that concept). Humans, as “vice-regents”, underneath and subject to God, have been given the ability to rule, order, direct, work, and care for what God created. Both animate and inanimate creation. Our dominion is real, but lesser than, a shadow of, God’s higher, authoritative dominion (specifically, over human souls, put a pin in that).
Summarize this…Genesis 2:19–20 “Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him.”
We’ve been given authority, as image bearers, over the animal kingdom. And due to God’s holy and totally GOOD character, we are to exercise this authority over His creation with the same love, wisdom, and care that God exercises over his “vice-regents”, us! And in the beginning, that is exactly what Adam and Eve did, in peace and harmony with the Creator and his created world.
We have a spirit, a soul
This is arguably the most important characteristic we’ll identify, fundamental to the Doctrine of Man as an image bearer of God.
Genesis 2:7 “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.”
God-breathed life into Adam. And did so in a way that was different, distinct from animals. We are different.
“…became a living creature [being]”......the word “being” in Hebrew literally means “soul”. Literarily speaking, this word is distinguished from the word for “body”. God gave the animal kingdom bodies, but He did NOT give them souls. God breathed his own being, the image of His own Spirit, into us to give us life. This DOES NOT mean we are god! It DOES mean we are spiritual creatures, conjoined with physical bodies; the former being eternal (as God the Spirit is eternal), the later, the flesh, being temporal. Before the fall, Adam and Eve had both an eternal spirit and an eternal body. The Fall changed this (much more on this later). But, in the new creation, we will again have an eternal body; and this applies to ALL humanity, those in Christ and those not in Christ. So, we are definitively distinct from animals. I’m sorry, but no, Rufus isn’t an image bearer with an eternal soul, that will be re-made into a new creation, re-made to be with God and worship Him forever.
1 Corinthians 15:45–49 ESV
Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.
v45a quotes Genesis 2:7. Then v45b explains that the last Adam (Jesus) goes beyond just having a soul like an image bearer. He, Jesus, was and is able to breath spiritual life into souls! So, again we see we have a characteristic of God’s, being spirit, but to a lesser degree than God Himself, who can breath eternal spiritual life into our spirit.
v46 refines the concept more. The natural comes first (from dust, from the ground the 1st Adam, and us, were made), then spiritual life (brought by the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus). vs47-48 echoes this idea, anchoring down the fact that in Adam, we are dust, we are earthly, and in Christ, we may become heavenly (Paul, I believe, has our “end state” in mind here: once we are made new at our glorification. Although, we do experience a shadow of this idea, a taste of it, through sanctification during our lives here on earth before Christ’s second coming).
And to tie the bow on the concept of “image”, Paul gives us v49. We bear the image of Adam in our flesh, and those who are in Christ bear the image of Christ in heaven. Romans 8:29 drives this home.
Romans 8:29 ESV
For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers.
As we are conformed into Christ’s image (sanctification), it becomes self-evident that Christ was in fact the firstborn human with this PERFECT eternal spirit. Paul uses the term “brothers” because that’s exactly what those in Christ are: spiritual siblings, adopted by Christ into his family! I love this concept of adoption. But unfortunately we can’t linger here. Romans 8, Galatians 4, John 1, 1 John 3 are just a handful of places for further study on adoption. Additionally, JI Packer’s book “Knowing God” has a phenomenal treatment of adoption, and I whole-heartedly commend that to you.
I’ve got two more Scriptures that explicitly explain Jesus’s relationship with the word image, that I simply must include.
2 Corinthians 4:4 “In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”
Hebrews 1:3 “He [Jesus] is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power. After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high,”
Jesus isn’t AN image of God. He is THE image of God! An EXACT IMPRINT of God’s nature, in the flesh. THIS is who we, as Christians, are being conformed into, molded into, through faith, through the diligent study of God’s word, through repentance, through the highs and lows of life, through sin being exposed and mortified, through the persistant WORK of the Holy Spirit, Christ’s Spirit, on our souls! Set you eyes upon Him, brothers and sisters!
OK, back to the original question, what else is packed inside this word “image”. Let’s go back to Genesis, 1:28-30 and 2:16-25...
Probably don’t read these, maybe summarize them?
Genesis 1:28–30 “And God blessed them. And God said to them, “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.” 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. 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.”
Genesis 2:16–25 “And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Now out of the ground the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. The man gave names to all livestock and to the birds of the heavens and to every beast of the field. But for Adam there was not found a helper fit for him. So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, “This at last is bone of my bo…”
What is God doing here?
God is talking! He’s speaking to the first two humans! So, quite obviously, they were created with an ability to communicate. To understand complex thought. Here in 2:23 Adam speaks back this beautiful refrain of gratitude to God, extolling the greatness of God’s last work of creation, making Eve. Later on in ch3 Adam and Eve are conversing with God after they ate from the tree. But here in ch1 and 2, they are communing with God, in peace and harmony v25”and the man and woman were naked and were not ashamed.”
When God is speaking in this two excerpts, what kind of speaking is he doing?
Commanding! God is giving instructions, or commands, to Adam and Eve. The implications of this fact, that God gave commands to Adam and Eve, are vitally important. In the Bible we find several different types of God’s will. Without getting too deep into that big field of weeds, the type of command, or will, God is employing here would traditionally be called His “preceptive will”. This is different from His efficacious, or decretive will. When God spoke the world into existence, that was His efficacious will at play: the world couldn’t resist God’s desire for it to be made. God spoke, it happened. But, when God tells Adam to not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in v16, He’s employing his preceptive will. God provides His holy desire, a precept, that He wants Adam to obey. But as we all know, Adam clearly had the ability to resist that precept. Resist that desire of God’s, and do something else.
Soooo…where did Adam get this ability to resist a preceptive command of God’s?
From God! Adam was given a will by His creator to make decisions. And even more specifically, moral / spiritual decisions.
God’s command regarding the tree was of an eternal, spiritual nature. “Obey me” —> continued eternal life and eternal peace and eternal fellowship, a la ch2 v25. “Disobey me” —> DEATH. And as chapter 3 shows us, it’s spiritual death, eternal broken communion with God.
So, as image bearers, we can make a-moral decisions (like what to eat, what to wear, whether or not to scrath your nose, what color to paint your house [BTW, animals can do this, too!]), but we are given a will, and ability to make decisions, of a spiritual or moral nature! I firmly believe that intrinsically, if the unbeliever is honest with him or herself, deep down, they know this to be true: that humans ARE different from animals, that they know, potentially subconsciously, when they’ve made a spiritually unwise choice. In fact, I think this is exactly how the Spirit begins to call a soul to the gospel: bringing that subconscious, suppressed, darkened knowledge of guilt to the surface. We’ll talk a little more about this later.
So, what did Adam do with these commands? What did he do with this free will God gave him?? He DISOBEYED, and disobeyed unto death. Which brings us all the way back to the beginning of this lecture to the SECOND category within the Doctrine of Man for consideration today: the Fall.

THE FALL

Let’s go back to Article III for this next segment.
“By his free choice man sinned against God and brought sin into the human race. Through the temptation of Satan man transgressed the command of God, and fell from his original innocence whereby his posterity inherit a nature and an environment inclined toward sin. Therefore, as soon as they are capable of moral action, they become transgressors and are under condemnation.”
God created a paradise on earth for his crowning creative work, Adam and Eve, to live in, to have dominion over, to work, to rest, to enjoy perfect fellowship with Him. And He gave them one imperative moral commandment
Genesis 2:16–17 ESV
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Genesis 2:16–17 ESV
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
It’s easy for us, on this side of Adam’s decision, to look back and see this commandment as punitive, but the exact opposite is true. This was a preceptive command of LOVE! The purpose was to preserve the right relationship between the Creator and His created. God is telling Adam, “Believe me! Trust me! If you obey this command, you and I will live in perfect peace and joy forever!” Obedience = LIFE, Disobedience = DEATH.
There’s so much more that could be said here, but a key thing I want us to remember is that God didn’t “leave them out to dry” here, He didn’t abandon them and leave them to fail to obey. Remember...
As an image bearer, God breathed life into them and imprinted Himself on their very souls!
God was with them in perfect fellowship, and they were naked before Him and unashamed!
God provided for their EVERY need, physically and spiritually
Acts 17 and Romans 1 refines this concept, and connects it to US.
Acts 17:25 ESV
nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.
Key concept here: God gives mankind EVERYTHING. The food they need to survive, protection, shelter, family, governmental structure, every beat of every heart and every breath of every single human. Ever. To put it in technical terms: God’s provision is mind-bogglingly enormous.
Romans 1:19–20 ESV
For what can be known about God is plain to them, 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.
In creating a human, God has made his “eternal power and divine nature” CLEAR to us humans: in both the majesty of the world that we will live in, external to us, and the image of these character traits imprinted into our very souls, internal to us.
Yet, what did Adam do with this knowledge of God? Furthermore, what do all humans now do, in their natural state, with this knowledge of God? If you’re following along in Romans 1, run your finger down to verse 25...
Romans 1:25 ESV
because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.
Yes, Paul is most directly speaking about the “ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness supress the truth” among the people of Paul’s present time. But where did those pagan Greeks he was speaking to get that inclination, to supress the truth that could be “clearly perceived” in their unrighteousness? Where did they get that behavior from?
ADAM!
Employing his God-given, image-bearing ability of choice that we’ve previously defined, Adam FREELY CHOSE to disobey God’s command.
Adam freely chose to...
Deny God’s imprint on his soul
Allow his mind to be twisted by Satan’s influence
Deny the Truth of God’s Word
Deny the perfect fellowship with his Creator
Deny the perfect provision of God
And for what? Why did Adam do this?
Quite simply, Adam did it to be god (with a little “g”) unto himself.
So, then what happens? Genesis chapter 3 happens.
Open the text and give a synopsis of chapter 3
In the aftermath of that infamous decision, in Adam and Eve we see
Fear. When confronted by God, they were ashamed, they were hiding, they were aware they were naked, exposed. They CLEARLY were aware of their disobedience, and knew they would have to give an account.
When they gave an account, we see the shifting of blame (first, Eve blames the serpent, then Adam blames Eve [husband of the year, am I right?]) Deceitful, selfish, prideful, lies pour out of their mouths.
Brothers and sisters, raise your hands if you’ve ever been pulled over while driving at night time?
The first thing that happens is your heart rate quadruples. You start thinking “how fast was I going? did I miss a stop sign? was I swerving in the lane? Surely it wasn’t that bad. I was barely going over the speed limit, plus I’ve got important things to do, places to be, I didn’t hurt anyone did I? I don’t deserve this ticket! In fact, how dare this cop do this to ME!”
Then, what happens when the cop walks up to your car and you roll down that window? He shines a bright light right into your retinas. You’re momentarily blinded. You’re exposed. He reads off the speed of your vehicle measured by a laser range finder that simply doesn’t lie. You’re caught. Your guilt before the law is laid bare.
This is EXACTLY what Adam and Eve experienced, but there was a WHOLE lot more on the line in their disobedience when compared to paying a couple hundred dollar speeding ticket. And, the gaze of the Creator is a WHOLE LOT brighter than that 500 lumen LED cop flashlight!
Additionally what we see in chapter 3 is God’s righteous judgement
God pronounces enmity between man and Satan
Enmity between man and God’s creation
Pain in child-bearing
Pain in work
God casts Adam and Eve out of the paradise He had created for them to live in and enjoy
And, most tragically, God pronounces DEATH on humanity, just as He forewarned them.
Genesis 3:19 (ESV)
By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
The Hebrew word “adamåh” means “earth” or “red clay”
The Hebrew word “Adam” means “son of the red earth”
It’s truly a visceral image that’s painted here in the text. Adam, flesh and blood, RED blood, is named after the red clay from which God created him. And due to this cosmic transgression, he will now suffer DEATH and return to the red clay from which he came.
Now, it’s easy for us to read this and feel disconnected from it, to look down upon Adam, to think “well, that was Adam, how is this connected to me? I wouldn’t have done made that decision!” Uh uh uh! Let’s take a look at how God’s word combats that sinful, self-centered thought that I know each one of us has thought at one point or another in our lives.
Romans 5:12 “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—”
and
Romans 3:9–18 “What then? Are we Jews any better off? No, not at all. For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin, as it is written: “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.” “Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive.” “The venom of asps is under their lips.” “Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.” “Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.” “There is no fear of God before their eyes.””
There is no exclusion here. Flesh begot flesh in childbirth, and every descendant has a broken relationship with God because of sin. We are sinners.
Before we think too highly of ourselves…if Adam, in his pre-fallen state, was susceptible to the temptation of Satan and freely chose to sin, how much more susceptible are we to the devil’s wiles who are enslaved to sin apart from the work of God??? We would have done exactly what Adam did.
Every human being, in sum total since Adam’s fall, is corrupted by sin, in his or her totality. Which brings us to our next theological term: Total Depravity.
Total Depravity, sometime’s called Radical Corruption. Explain this.
Who’s heard of this term? It may sound like a scary concept, but I assure you it’s not.
What it isn’t:
Man is as bad as he can possible be. Not every human is a Hitler.
Man has lost his ability to know right or wrong, or have a conscience. See first half of this lecture.
Here’s some double negatives coming up, hang with me. T.D. isn’t Man being unable to do “good” things…like cutting your neighbor’s grass, organizing a group to clean up your neighborhood, protecting baby sea turtles, etc. More on “good” in a second.
What TD. is:
The Fall affected Adam’s personhood comprehensively, in totality, mind/body/soul/conscience. All of it, every last molecule in his body, every synapse firing in his mind was affected. As Adam’s descendants in flesh, we inherited this characteristic. So, now, we too are affected by sin across our entire personhood, mind/body/soul/conscience. We are totally affected by sin. Full scope, not necessarily full depth. Romans 3 doesn’t leave any maneuvering room here.
Therefore, remember those good deeds we just mentioned? What we consider to be a good deed (saving baby turtles is great, right??), God may or may not have favor upon it. It depends on the condition of the heart, the motivation behind the deed. Objectively speaking about the physical act, yes, caring for these baby turtles is likely a good thing to do. It aligns with God’s mandate for us to dominate, run, order, care for His creation. (Unless, the sea turtle population explodes and sends the entire ocean ecosystem out of balance and the oceans freeze over ;) BUT INWARDLY…the unregenerate heart will save sea turtles, in the final analysis, because it thinks doing good things will bring favor upon himself/herself, and therefore the good deed was actually a prideful, self-centered, and SINFUL action. Where is the glory going? To man? Or, to God?
“No one does good. No, not even one”

…But GOD!

Thank God the story doesn’t end here! Back to Genesis 3, sorry for making y’all flip all over the place!
Genesis 3:15 (ESV)
I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
You can see a parallel comparison happening in this verse. The serpent’s offspring are the reprobate, those who deny God; Eve’s offspring are the redeemed. I believe there is sort of a two-fold application of this verse: firstly, it characterizes the general relationship between the children of darkness and the children of light, a contentious relationship that will persist until the last day when all things are made new. And speaking of which…secondly, this verse speaks directly to the finality of the relationships between darkness and light.
If we look at this verse through the “then and there” or “here and now” lens, they went on to suffer, and we will suffer “bruised heels” in this life. I’m sure I need to give zero lines of evidence for the veracity of that statement :) We’ve all felt the pain of sin and Satan nipping at our heels. But along with the bruised heels, we will “bruise some heads” every time we resist the tempter, mortify our sin, and glorify God.
However, having the benefit of possessing Matthew through Revelation in our hands, we can view this verse through the lens of an ultimate or final end state. We know Christ bears ALL of the “bruised heels”, and in the end, Christ will CRUSH the head of the serpent, slay him with the word of his mouth, and cast him into the lake of fire for all of eternity! AMEN.
You may have heard this term before, but theologians call this verse the “protoevangelion”, or, “the first gospel”.
It’s absolutely marvelous that on, what, the 2nd of 3rd page of the Bible, God promises redemption to his image bearers in the same exact moment they made redemption necessary! If that isn’t LOVE, I don’t know what is! Don’t ever let anyone convince you that the OT is nothing but “wrath of God” stuff…it’s ABSOLUTELY not. Remember Gen 3, and God’s promise of redemption.
OK…back to Article II
“…Only the grace of God can bring a man into His holy fellowship and enable man to fulfill the creative purpose of God…”
I’ll address the second part of the sentence, first.
What is the creative purpose of God?
Or, put another way, for what purpose were we image-bearers created?
Westminster Shorter Catechism (no, we’re not Presbyterians haha, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use their high quality stuff from time to time!;)
Q1: What is the chief end of man?
A1: To glorify God and enjoy him forever.
OK, back to the first part of the sentence, “only the grace of God”
There’s a ton of texts I could use to explain how the Article gets from our current fallen, Total Depravity state, to the end state of the catechism question. I’m going to use Ephesians 2, which the BFM cites. Turn with me there, we’ll go verse 1 through 10.
Ephesians 2:1–3 ESV
And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Ephesians 2:1 “And you were dead in the trespasses and sins”
Completely consistent w/ Gen 3. @ the Fall, death and condemnation entered the human race. The curse was placed upon us. We are pronounced guilty, with no intrinsic capability to fix the problem ourselves.
<Dead men can’t make themselves alive.>
Potentially go into the life-raft analogy, if there’s time.
Ephesians 2:2–3 “in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience— among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.
Yep, all are dead. I gotta tell you brothers and sisters, I really appreciate how clear God’s Word is here. Have we beat this horse dead yet? ;)
Ephesians 2:4–5 ESV
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—
Ephesians 2:4 “But God, [the two best words every written in human history] being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us,” this is the same exact love that we saw in His command to Adam, employing His preceptive will in order to protect his creation from sin, and it’s the same exact love we saw in the protoevangelion, where immediately after pronouncing His righteous judgement on Adam + Eve’s sin and rebellion, God promised them and their seed ultimate victory over the very judgement He just metted out to them, and then He clothed them with animal skins, lovingly preparing them for what was to come. God, even in judgement, pours out his love, because He is rich in mercy.
Ephesians 2:5 “even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—”
“even when we were dead” AMIDST/DURING our dead, still, incapable state, God…“made us alive together with Christ”: our spiritual rebirth is caused by and made possible by the power at work in Jesus’ resurrection. To say it another way: no resurrection, no rebirth, no “making alive”, no salvation.
Time to pull a Jason: the Greek for “make us” is in the aorist indicative active 3rd person
3rd person = God // active means God is the active agent of the verb // and aorist means the action has already been completed in the past.
GOD DID IT. “—by grace you have been saved—” IT IS DUN. D. U. N. DUN.
No where in any of this did we do ANYTHING. God did it ALL, and to Him may ALL the credit, ALL the glory be rendered.
Ephesians 2:8–9 ESV
For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
There is nothing we can do, have done, will do, or are even capable of doing, that can save us. Just as our infection of sin affects 100% of our being (mind soul body) and though we inherit this nature from Adam (flesh begets flesh), we are responsible for our own, personal sin nature and, left unresolved, will pay the due penalty for it, the responsibility is internal…well flip the coin… “for by grace you have been saved through faith” Salvation, the redemption of our souls from the consequences of our forefather Adam’s action, is 100% EXTERNAL, 100% God’s gift to give, you “have bee saved”, you were not the active agent, you can’t be because you were dead! It’s external to us, and furthermore, our salvation will lead to the 100% redemption of not only our souls, but our minds and our physical bodies. The 100% effects of the Fall (Total Depravity), will ultimately be 100% glorified in spirit and flesh.
Ephesians 2:10 ESV
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
We are His workmanship, from start to finish. Reborn in Christ Jesus for a mission, to carry out His good works that He identified, defined, and assigned to us. How can we summarize what these good works are? TO GLORIFY HIM and enjoy Him forever! This is what the BFM article is talking about when it says “fulfilling His creative purpose”. God does work on souls, creates them new in Christ, for us to do work to bring Him glory!
Let’s finish Article III
The sacredness of human personality is evident in that God created man in His own image, and in that Christ died for man; therefore, every person of every race possesses full dignity and is worthy of respect and Christian love.
ALL humans…
were created in God’s image
have eternal souls
are descendants of Adam and are now, in their natural state, condemned in the flesh
are aware of God’s existence, externally evidenced by His creation and internally evidenced by His moral/spiritual imprint in their souls
have an extrinsic dignity as image-bearers, because God so loves the world He created. His love, extrinsic from our perspective, bestows His dignity on to us, because our own intrinsic dignity was fatally wounded by the Fall.
may receive forgiveness, redemption, justification, salvation, glorification by the FREE GIFT of GRACE through FAITH in Christ Jesus.
***SO WHAT ARE WE TO DO WITH ALL THIS INFORMATION ABOUT WHO WE ARE?***
In closing, let’s turn a couple more pages to Ephesians chapter 4, and we’ll put a bow on this discussion by letting the Word apply this doctrine to our hearts. And I’m going to keep the application of the Doctrine of Man to our personal evangelism straightforward and, hopefully, clear…
Ephesians 4:21–25 (ESV)
…assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness. Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.
In Christ, we are members of His body
In Adam, we are members of the entirety of the “human body”, humanity at large
Out of a humble, repentant, reverent, and thankful heart toward God, we are to speak TRUTH to our…
Christian neighbors: encouraging one another, building up one another in Christ, as fellow spiritual siblings should, loving one another and bearing each others burdens, etc.
And we are called to walk in the good works prepared for us beforehand by speaking TRUTH to all our neighbors. Period. Dot.
ALL humans are image bearers. ALL humans need the TRUTH of the gospel.
All humans desperately need Christ. Humanity is eternally lost without Him.
We are to love all, for Jesus has first loved us.
We are to speak TRUTH, these truths, to ALL, for Jesus IS THE TRUTH (John 14:6)
We are to remember, as we do this, that salvation is GOD’s WORK, HE is the effectual cause
It is NOT our job to berate people into a confession, or attempt to forcibly conform people’s minds, will, or consciences to Christ
It IS our job to trust God’s sovereign, perfect will for the hearts of the lost
It IS our job to obey God’s command to put on the new self and be a faithful soldier for His Kingdom
And as we step in to this mission, we must remember, and this is absolutely key:
GOD WILL SUPPLY for all your needs in your evangelism. Proclaiming the TRUTH to ALL…this is holy work. Kingdom work. From a 30,000ft view, God WILL secure His victory in the proclamation of the gospel. So, LBC, fear not, for you are on the winning side!!!
LET’s Pray.
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