Chapter 1: Mans Highest Good (TWWOG Bavinck)

What is Man Highest Good?

As we enter our study today of Chapter 1, we will be discussing what mans highest good is.

Asking people this question after I had read this chapter showed me just how much people don’t understand what that means in general.

It also showed me that after they knew what it meant, they were still very far from the correct answer.

I can tell you that before I was saved I thought that mans highest good was being happy.

I pictured myself a rich man with a great job and a beautiful family, traveling anywhere I wanted and doing whatever I wanted to do at any given time.

At that point I felt that I would have craved nothing more out of life.

Some of the answers that I got from others were not far from my before Christ answer.

One person I asked said that they believed that mans highest good was honesty, which showed me that they understood the question as what is the best quality a man can possess and honesty is a good one although I would not say it is the best one.

Another person I asked answered and said that hope is mans highest good.

I thought that he may have been on to something but then I said, hope in what?

He answered by saying that hope in living/not dying.

I responded by saying what about someday that the doctor tells will die in the next few days or the next month?

Do they no longer have anything good in their life?

The point I am getting to is that there is only one correct answer when speaking of mans highest good.

The third person I asked the question actually got it right but not intentionally.

I asked him the question and he used the Lords name in vain because I was asking him a question to this nature.

The books starts off with the sentence:

God and God alone is mans highest good.

What makes God mans highest good?

First of all, he is the creator and sustainer of all things says Bavinck.

He also states that “man is a creature who right from the beginning, was created after God’s image and likeness, and this Divine origin and Divine kinship he can never erase or destroy.

We were all made in this image and likeness of God.

He mentions 3 attributes that were lost as a result of this fall but still partially remain.

Knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.

English Standard Version Chapter 1

7  The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;

fools despise wisdom and instruction.

I believe when speaking of this knowledge we see one example in Romans 1:19-23

Romans 1:19–23 NIV

since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

We can see here how man is faulty in his wisdom.

The Bible tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and we see here there is no fear of the Lord in the heart of natural man.

They neither glorify him or give thanks to Him and it says their “FOOLISH” hearts were darkened.

Although it is clearly perceived that there is a God through creation, they exchanged the glory of the true God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles.

It is clear how natural man suffers from a lack of wisdom due to the fall.

By the grace of God, those who have been chosen by God are born again and given the Spirit of God, who puts the fear of God in their hearts which is said to be the beginning of wisdom.

Not only does this Spirit of God make us wise in the fear of the Lord, but the Spirit of God sanctifies us progressively making us holy.

Because of Christ, we are justified, clothed in his righteousness before God.

What was lost in the fall by Adam has been restored and is continually being restored by the better Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ.

As we continue in the chapter, Bavinck mentions that mankind cannot be satisfied with what the whole corporeal world has to off.

Why is that?

Because of mans understanding and reason, he is able to, as Bavinck says, “raise himself up out of a world of sensuous images to a world of incorporeal thoughts and to the realm of eternal ideas.”

It seems to me that when you have the ability to entertain incorporeal thoughts and eternal ideas, you find this satisfaction that comes from this world incomplete and unfulfilling.

I believe that is why people who are said to have it all in this world, all the things that I thought were mans highest good before I was saved or all of the things they thought would make them happy, they still find something lacking.

Why is it that some of the most successful people in the world commit suicide?

The corporeal world cannot satisfy mankind.

He goes on to say that above the sensuous desires that man has, food, drink light and air, he also has received a will which reaches out to other and higher goods.

Because of this will that he has been given, he says that man requires and seeks a good which does not become good because of circumstances, but which is good in and through itself, an unchanging spiritual, eternal good.