Interlocked Series – Lesson #01, Part 1
The Creator God; Origin of the Divine Institutions
May 30, 2023
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Our Father, it’s a great privilege we have to come together to focus upon Your Word and to think through the overall message of Scripture, how all of the parts fit together and just get a good understanding and overview of these parts. Father, we pray too for the parents and for the prep/Sunday school teachers and others who will be teaching it to kids or grandkids.
“Father, we pray that it will be clear to them and that we can think through and really provide a good way for support for them in being able to communicate this information. We pray that as we look at this tonight, You’ll help us to start to see the parts and the pieces and how they fit together. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”
Slides 1 and 2
We are in the first lesson tonight. Last week was the overview, and it’s enumerated in the study, in the outline that you’ll see online. If you go to the Interlocked website, you’ll see that last week the overview was 00, so this is 01, the first lesson, part 1. I’d encourage you to go to the website, download the notes, and then read the notes, and read over them. I’ll make a couple of comments along the way.
Lesson one is called “The Origin of the Divine Institutions.” Each of these lessons really will take us, for the most part, two lessons to cover, two hours. I listen to these lessons online being taught to a group to see how it’s taught on Interlocked.
Sometimes these classes go three hours, but most are two hours long. The kids have some interesting questions. I wish I had written down all the questions I was asked teaching in Ukraine because they’re not the questions students in this country would ask. Part of it is because of the lack of biblical background the students there have. Part of it is they just look at things differently.
Every culture looks at things differently. And so they’ll ask these questions and some questions are things I never thought of looking at in the same way. It’s the same way here. We’re going to take our time going through these lessons so it’s taught in a way that can’t be forgotten.
This first lesson, which is on the origin of the divine institutions starts with Creation. What we’re looking at tonight is just the Creator God laying the groundwork for His creation of the divine institutions.
Slide 3
Last time we look at this chart which is an overview. We have 11 Old Testament events, and then we have eight New Testament events, 19 events in all. One of the things that I was asked at the end of the class last time is, what are these lines for here at the end? There’s a reason for it.
You have a section on the far left and far right that is completely white. Why? That’s because they cover the first two chapters and most of the last two chapters of the Bible—the only four chapters in the Bible where there’s no sin. So that sets that apart. Everything in the grayed background, we’re in the middle of a corrupt and fallen world.
(In order to learn the motions for the chart watch the video.)
I’m going to change up a couple of the motions. Last time when we looked at the conquest, when Joshua was taking the Israelites into the Promised Land and they’re defeating the Israelites, I had us just slashing with a sword. But I think a better motion is that we are going to march three or four steps because that’s what the Israelites did at the first battle going around Jericho, and then the walls came tumbling down.
Another change I’ve made is when we get to the Cross. We have the death where there’s the burial and then the resurrection and then the ascension. I think all of that has to go together. One motion for the death, burial, the resurrection, and the ascension.
Then comes the Church. Next Jesus comes back in the air in the Rapture and then He takes the Church Age believers to Heaven. Seven years go by, and then He returns to the earth and establishes His Kingdom. At the end of 1,000 years there’s the final judgment. The motion for that is just bang a gavel for that and just making a hammer like you’re banging a gavel for the final judgment.
Now let’s stand up. You’ve got the chart up there, and we’re going to go through all of these motions. You’ve been sitting long enough. Okay, ready? Creation, Fall, Flood, Tower of Babel, call of Abraham, Exodus, the Law, Ten Commandments, then you have the Conquest, then the Kingdom, And then there’s the exile, and with the exile you use two hands. Northern Kingdom and Southern Kingdom, two hands, the exile, everyone goes out. And then there’s just a partial remnant that returns.
Then we get to the New Testament, which begins with the birth of Jesus. At the end of His life we have the cross, we have the burial, the resurrection, the ascension, and then after the ascension, the beginning of the Church Age.
The Church Age ends with the Christ coming back in the air to rapture the church and take us to heaven. Next there’s the seven years of the Tribulation, and then Christ returns to the earth, establishes His kingdom, and then at the end of a thousand years, there’s the final judgment.
Let’s go through that again. We have Creation, fall, Flood, Tower of Babel, call of Abraham, we have the Exodus, then the Ten Commandments, then the Conquest, then there’s the establishment of the Kingdom, and then there’ll be the exile, two hands, and then partial return, one hand, and then there’s the birth of Jesus, beginning of the New Testament,
At the end, there’s the Cross where He dies for our sins. Then He’s buried. He’s risen from the dead on the third day. Then He ascends to Heaven. And then the Church Age begins. At the end of the Church Age, Christ returns in the air and takes us to Heaven.
Next there’s a seven-year tribulation. And then Jesus Christ returns to the earth. There’s the thousand-year Millennial Kingdom shown on the chart with a crown. See, kind of point your fingers up like it’s a crown. And at the end, there’s the final judgment.
Children will enjoy going through that many times. You can watch it on video with them and rehearse it as often as you like. That chart gives us an overview of the whole Bible. We went through the whole Bible there in about less than 60 seconds.
Slide 4
Once you know the events, let’s switch over to the coat hanger metaphor. Each of the 19 events is like a hook or a coat hanger and you can put the details of that event on the hanger according to the age of the child you’re teaching.
When the kids are very young, you’re going to just teach them some key Bible stories that go along with each event. Just take these events in chronological order and teach them the stories with a little more detail as they grow older.
As they get into kindergarten, first grade, second grade, add to the stories so it’s comprehensible. The authors of the Interlock system, Amos and Jen, are working on a children’s edition targeting about 10 year olds. The version on their website was written for 16 years olds. For now, when you look at each of these lessons teach what the children seem to understand about it, the major points.
Each lesson has five or six points under it so select different ones for different age groups. You might start off just putting a scarf on the coat hook. And then when they get three or four years older, you’ve got a scarf and a hat on the coat hook. Then three or four years later, you’ve got a scarf, a hat, and a coat on the coat hook. So you just build it over the course of their time.
One thing I didn’t point out last time is one of the reasons that these events are chosen is because when you get into later periods of the Old Testament, and then when you get into the New Testament, these events are referred to over and over again in the rest of the Bible. It’s important to lay this groundwork.
You’ll notice all of the first five—Creation, Fall, Flood, Tower of Babel, and Abraham—are all in Genesis. The historical accuracy of those chapters and even the historical accuracy of much of the rest of Genesis is what’s disputed by so-called scholars who want to reject the accuracy and the truth of the Bible.
The truth is these are foundational chapters so it’s important to spend a lot of time teaching kids these. This is where the Christian worldview comes and the foundation is laid.
It’s where your understanding of God, your understanding of man, your understanding of sin, your understanding of God’s grace, and your understanding of salvation is all grounded. It’s all there in the first 12 chapters of Genesis.
If you take those out of the Bible, the rest of the Bible just falls apart because it’s built on that foundation. That’s why it’s so important to build that as historical reality into the thinking of your kids.
Slide 5
In this chart, what I’ve done is to show how things that are said at Creation, Genesis 1:26 to 28, and then after the Fall, you have things that are said to address the serpent, address the woman, and address the man. Those same categories are restated when you get to the covenant with Noah after the Flood.
Some of those are going to be restated by Jesus when He asks the Pharisees if they haven’t read that “In the beginning God created them male and female.” He quotes that from Genesis chapter 1 and then He adds a verse that says “for this reason man shall leave father and mother and the two shall become one flesh.”
Jesus takes a verse out of Genesis 1 and a verse out of Genesis 2 and puts them together with equal authority in the Scripture. Modern scholars would say that Genesis 1 was written by one person, Genesis 2 was written by somebody else. They claim it’s just based on fables and you don’t need to pay attention to it because now you can marry and you can have all kinds of different marriages.
They assert that we don’t have to stick with the biblical definition of marriage. You can see that these are very important foundational chapters. All of these events, all these red lines, are just to show the importance of understanding those events because they’re foundational to later events and things that God says later on.
Slide 6
So the focus of this lesson tonight is breaking it down into two sessions on God’s Creation, but especially in His creation of all things and the creation of the human race. After God does that, He lays the foundation for the social structures, which are the divine institutions. We’ll talk about those next time.
Slide 7
This first lesson just focuses on the Creation and the Creator. We’re going to look at three basic things. We’re going to look at the fact that God created out of nothing. Then the second thing that we’re going to look at comes out of Genesis 1and it’s the distinction between the Creator and the creature.
The third thing we’ll look at tonight is the unique design of the human race, of mankind. And so those are foundational to many, many other things throughout Scripture.
In the second lesson, which we’ll pick up next time, we’ll focus on the social structures that God created in terms of individual responsibility, marriage, and family, all before there was sin on the planet.
Let’s begin with Creation and we will talk about what God has done as the Creator. We’re going to look how God’s creation is unique among all stories that the human race tells and has told over history about how things originated.
Everybody wants to know where they came from. That’s their origin story. They want to know how old the earth is and all of those kinds of questions. There’s only one Book in all of history that says it was written by an eyewitness to Creation.
Slide 8
Every other origin story is different. There are certain things that set the biblical story apart from all other creation stories. And so, we’re going to start there. The first thing that really sets the biblical account is that it says that God creates out of nothing.
There are a lot of things that we can learn about God because He created out of nothing. First, what does it mean to create out of nothing? I want you to just think about this for a minute. I want you to imagine what nothing looks like. You can’t do it.
Whatever you have in your mind, you’re probably thinking there was air. But there wasn’t even any air. There wasn’t any light. There wasn’t any darkness. There’s no universe. The only thing that existed was God and He had existed forever and ever and ever.
We can’t grasp that because our minds are so structured by God that we think only in terms of space and time. And God doesn’t create space until Genesis 1:1. He doesn’t create time until Genesis 1:1. So not only is there nothing physical present, but there’s also not even any space that’s there for anything to be in.
There’s no space, and there’s no timeline. Now, with God, there are things that happen before and things that happen after, so there’s sequence. But that’s about as far as we can go before our brains just can’t go any further. We just can’t quite understand that at all. So, I have up on the screen, out of nothing, and then the phrase ex nihilo.
Now, ex nihilo is a phrase that you may run across a lot of times, and it’s a Latin phrase meaning “from nothing.”
Slide 9
We’re introduced to Creation in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. “That tells us that before that there was God, but there was no time.
Is there any place else in the Bible where you see a significant use of the phrase “in the beginning”? What about John 1:1? “In the beginning was the Word.” John writes that under inspiration of the Holy Spirit because he wants you to think about Genesis 1:1.
He’s talking about this point when time began, when space began, when God began to fill the universe with things. So, we have this in the beginning, And the NLT there is the New Living Translation. In fact, in there, in the introduction to that translation, it lists who the key translators were that worked on each Book of the Bible. And the key translator for Genesis was Allen Ross.
Slide 10
Allen Ross spoke at the Chafer Conference about three or four years ago, literally right before COVID. He was one of my Hebrew professors. In second-year Hebrew, you translated Genesis 1 to Genesis 11. This indicates God created everything out of nothing. He didn’t need any tools. He didn’t have any pre-existing material.
In origin stories in mythology, there is already something there that the gods use to create the earth. They may say the gods kill another god and from that body they make the heavens and the earth. With God, with the Bible, there’s nothing there. He just will speak and it will come into existence.
The third thing I want to point out is that when we see the phrase, “the heavens and the earth” that includes everything. That’s just a way of talking about everything. If you say the heavens and the earth, what else is there? There’s nothing else.
God creates everything. That’s really a clear statement there. Genesis 1:2 tells us that the earth was formless and empty. And darkness covered the deep, the deep waters, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Something very interesting we see here is that darkness covered the deep waters.
1 John 1, this is just a little higher level teaching on this passage. In 1 John, it says, “God is light.” So, if God is light and dwells in unapproachable light, where did the darkness come from?
Slide 11
You may have heard me and others teach on this and say the darkness indicates that something had happened. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody ask how the darkness got there. When did the darkness come? When we look at the end of the Bible, in Revelation 21 and 22, there’s not going to be a sun, and there’s not going to be a moon, there won’t be any stars, and everything is illuminated by the glory of God. So, if that’s true then, and it would be true also before Genesis 1:1, then where did the darkness come from?
We also know from Job 38 that the angels, all of the angels together, shouted for joy or probably sang for joy when God laid the foundations of the earth. So, we know that the angels were already created. When we’re teaching the little kids, we need to teach them first there’s God, then He created the angels, then He created the universe, and then He created man.
The earth then is covered in darkness. So we’ll talk about that later when we get to Genesis 3 and talk about this serpent and what was going on there. What we learn here is that God created everything out of nothing.
What did God use to create things? He used His words. He just spoke and it came into existence. And so, when we think about that, can we speak anything into existence? Can we sit there and, you know, I love ice cream, can I just say, I want an ice cream sundae and just poof, there it is right in front of me? Well, I’ve tried that and it just doesn’t work. But God has the ability to speak something into existence.
What He created was perfect. What God created was perfect because God is perfect and because God is omniscient. That means He knows everything, and He would have had a perfect design in His mind.
When He said, spoke it into existence, it would be exactly like He planned it, like He thought it. So this tells us a lot about God right there. God is able to create things out of nothing. There’s no space, there’s no time, and suddenly there is space and time.
Slide 11
As we continue to look at this, we’re going to see that God then begins to create something that wasn’t there before. At first the earth is dark. It is just absolute pitch black.
Slide 12
Then in Genesis 1:3 we read that God said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” He just spoke it.
If you study physics, you learn that the science of light is extremely complex, and it has a lot of different qualities. There’s been debate among scientists. Is it a wave? Is it particles? What is it? It’s a little bit of both. So light is extremely distinctive.
God just spoke and the light came into existence. And then Genesis 1:4 says, “And God saw the light and said that it was good.” We use the word “good” sometimes in contrast to “bad,” but that isn’t how the word’s used here. The word here is used in the sense of it was exactly what God intended.
At this point it’s not good or it’s not dealing with something evil or bad. God called the light good, then He separated the light from the darkness. He called the light day and the darkness night. And evening passed and morning came marking the first day.
A lot of you may have heard people say these weren’t really literal 24-hour days. Even before God created the sun and the moon and the stars as the time keepers, which doesn’t come along until the fourth day, He’s marking a 24-hour time already. He’s made a division between light and darkness.
There is some kind of rotation on the earth so that you get this phrase evening and then morning, and it was the first day. If you read that language anywhere else ,you’d say that’s talking about a 24-hour day. That’s exactly what Moses, the human author of Genesis, intended. That’s what God did. It was a 24-hour day.
Slide 13
Now, there are many other passages in the Bible about this but I’ll just mention Psalm 33:6–9 which says, “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of His mouth.” He just spoke and the universe came into being.
As you go through the creation week in Genesis 1, He creates the stars, He creates the planets, He creates the sun and the moon. And it’s just by His breath, by His spoken word, that it comes into existence.
In Psalm 33:7, “He gathers the waters of the sea together as a heap. He lays up the deep in storehouses”. Now, why is that important? Well, later on we’re going to read about the Flood, and where does that water come from? The fountains of the deep will open, and that’s what this is talking about.
Then we read in Psalm 33:8, “Let all the earth fear the Lord; Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him.” Why? Because we don’t know anyone or any creature or anything else that could do what God did in that creation. That goes beyond anything that anybody else can come close to.
We’re going to be focusing on the uniqueness of God in this lesson. No one else, no other god, no other deity in any story, in any mythology, could do that. For He spoke and it was done. He commanded and it stood fast.
We see that even as human beings, our words have significance, our words have power. We can get really mad at somebody and call them names, or just scream at them, or say something very critical of them, and they’ll never forget it. I remember 50 years ago, sitting at a table with some people I had known for almost my whole life and looked up to, and all of a sudden the wife got just really mad at me and just reamed me out, and I’ve never forgotten that.
That was destructive, but also by saying kind words and loving words and encouraging words, we can change the dynamic. So, our words have some significance, some power. But God’s words can bring something into existence out of absolutely nothing.
Slide 14
We see something else in Jeremiah 32:17, which reads, “O, Lord God, behold, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and your outstretched arm. There is nothing too hard for you.” Nothing, there’s not one thing, we can’t think of anything that God can’t do.
God is omnipotent. The word means all-powerful. It’s important even with the younger kids to teach them these words. I think I was learning these words at least by the third grade. I knew them before they were ever taught or expected at school. And to parents, we have to raise our expectations of what kids can learn.
I’ve heard parents say that those are really long words or big words, and I just don’t think they can handle it. Well, go to Russia. You know, listen to these little babies speak Russian. Those words have seven, eight syllables, and those little babies can say it. So don’t be thinking that your kids aren’t up to it. They’re American kids. They’re up to it. It’s the parents with the low expectations.
Slide 15
God is all-powerful, and the word for that is omnipotent. Then we come to Psalm 139:7. David is writing and he says, “I can never escape from your Spirit! I can never get away from your presence! If I go up to heaven, you are there; if I go down to the grave, you are there. If I ride the wings of the morning, if I dwell in the farthest oceans, even there your hand will guide me, and your strength will support me.” The words—hard and strength—they speak of God’s power.
We can’t go anywhere where we can get away from God’s presence because He’s present everywhere. We can’t get away from His power because He’s all-powerful. Psalm 139:11–12 says, “I could ask the darkness to hide me and the light around me to become night—but even in darkness I cannot hide from you. To you the night shines as bright as day. Darkness and light are the same to you.”
Some people have a problem with this. What does it mean if I go to Heaven, You’re there? If I go to the grave, You are there. You mean God goes to where the dead people go? God goes to hell? God goes to the lake of fire?
Slide 16
Yes, God is present to everything in His Creation. And God created even the lake of fire. So, what we learned so far is a few things about the essence of God. We learned that He is the Creator. And as the Creator, He’s in charge of His creation. We call that sovereignty.
God is the ruler. A sovereign is a ruler. So He is the ruler over His creation. Another thing we learned is that He is present to every part of His creation. He is omnipresent. Another word we’re going to connect to that in a few minutes is the word infinite. The word finite means limited. The word infinite means unlimited.
That means God’s presence is unlimited. There are no boundaries to His presence. We also see that in the word omnipotent. Omni means all. Potent means power. So, He is all-powerful. And so God is able to do whatever He intends to do. Whatever He chooses to do, God can do it. There are certain things God won’t ever do because they violate His character. God is able to do whatever He intends to do.
Slide 17
As we’ve gone through this, what was it that God used to create everything? He used His words. He spoke everything into existence.
Slide 18
In Revelation 4:11 we read, “You are worthy, O Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power. For You created all things, and they exist because You created what You pleased.” God’s will was involved in what He created, what He desired. Everything was exactly as He intended it.
Another thing we learn about God is that He is a planner. That means He is orderly. He is rational. He knew exactly what He was doing and He approached Creation with a specific plan.
Slide 19
If we go through the six days of Creation, on the first day, He created light and He separated it from the darkness. On the second day, He creates the oceans and the atmosphere, but they’re empty. There’s no life in the oceans or in the waters. There’s no life in the air. He’s creating the place where He’s going to later put the animals.
If you’re talking to little kids, if they have a brother or sister come along that’s younger than them, then they would have seen their parents getting ready for this new baby to come into the house. And that they would see them preparing a room, painting the room, getting a bed, getting the diapers, getting all the things you need to take care of a baby. First you get ready and then you get the baby. If you wait to get the baby and then plan for it, you’re going to have some real problems.
God is very orderly in His approach to creation. So, on the first day, He created light and darkness. Then on the fourth day, He created the sun for day and the moon and stars for night. Then on the second day He created the sea and the air. And on the fifth day, He creates fish for the sea, birds for the atmosphere.
On day 3 He had separated the dry land from the water. Then, on the sixth day, God created animals for the land and man to rule over the fish and the birds and all of the animals. That was man’s purpose.
God does this in six days. There are people and seminaries who say that the six days is just a literary structure that Moses used. That’s even taught by some at Dallas Theological Seminary where I went. No one held that kind of garbage when I went there.
Slide 20
We find in Exodus, which comes after Genesis, a principle that is laid down. In Exodus 20:10–11, man was commanded to work for six days and then rest on the seventh day, the Sabbath, because that’s the pattern God had at Creation. If these weren’t six 24-hour days but were long ages such as 100,000 years, that wouldn’t make sense. That would be like God was saying you should work 600,000 years before you could rest. Since we haven’t been around that long, it would mean we would never have to rest.
Slide 21
That’s important. God is saying you’re doing it exactly like I did it. I worked for six days, and I made the heavens and the earth and then rested. And that is what we are to do. In 1 Chronicles 16:26, the last part of the verse says, “the Lord made the heavens!” We see that God is the Creator God. And He has set forth this particular pattern. That’s where we learn about God being an orderly God.
Slide 22
What have we learned so far? First of all, we’ve learned that God is the Creator of everything. And before anything existed, there was nothing. And God made everything from nothing. He just spoke and it came into existence.
The second thing we learn is that God is different from His creation. We’re going to develop that in the next section. He’s different from His creation. The creation wasn’t made with His body parts. The creation wasn’t something that He morphed out of Himself. There was nothing, and then there was something. And that’s the most amazing thing. One skeptical philosopher once said, the most important question of all is, why is there anything? Now that gets a little deep, so that’s more for the college age to start wrestling with.
Third, we learned that God, in order to do this, had to be all-powerful. God has to be all-powerful to be able to do that. The word we learned was omnipotent.
Slide 23
This takes us to the second part of our study tonight, and that’s on the distinction between the Creator and the creature. Now if I were to say to you I’ll just try to speak a chocolate cake into existence and then that chocolate cake appeared, then that would be made from nothing. And I would be the creator. So I get to determine who gets to eat that chocolate cake.
God is the Creator, so He gets to determine. That makes Him different from all human beings. They’re creatures. And we have to understand this very important distinction.
There are two things that come across here. The first level is that God is an infinite personal Creator. Now what does infinite mean? Without limits. There’s no limits in time. That’s what we call eternal. He’s everlasting. There never was a time when God did not exist and there never will be a time when God does not exist. He is infinite with respect to time. He is infinite with respect to space.
He is present to everything. So that is called omnipresent. There’s no limitations on God with relation to His space or His time or to His power. He is infinite in power. He is able to do whatever He intends to do.
He is also infinite in knowledge. So there’s nothing He doesn’t know. He knows everything. He knows everything that could have happened, would have happened, should have happened, and didn’t happen, and what will actually happen. He is infinite, and infinite means that you can’t contain Him anywhere.
He is everywhere, but He’s also personal. Personal means that He can relate to each one of us on an individual level. You have some religions in the world where the gods are so distant that you don’t really know anything about them. And they’re not personal.
In other mythologies, you have gods that are very personal, but they’re not infinite. Only in the Bible is God an infinite, personal God. That is not a concept that would occur to anybody to invent. This is the beginning of understanding this Creator-creature distinction.
Slide 24
To review that at this first level, there’s God, who is infinite, but also a personal Creator. And at the second level, there’s creation of man and nature. Now, I really don’t like using the word nature that much. Because we often hear people say, well, nature does this or nature does that. They’ve personified nature as if nature thinks.
Sometimes you may hear somebody say, well, the universe is really against everything I’m doing today. And I want to ask if they think the universe thinks? Do they think the universe is personal? Where did they get that idea? Where does that come from?
We need to talk about God’s creation and not say that we like go outside to look at nature. We like to see all of the wonderful things that God has made in His creation. I think nature is a term that is often used by people who don’t believe the Bible as if it’s something that just sort of happened by chance. So we need to recognize that there’s created man and God’s creation, and they’re very different.
Slide 25
Here’s another diagram that I’ve made about this. [Left side] It is that God is a personal infinite God, and here there is a black wall that separates God from the universe. The universe is finite, it had a beginning, an end, it has limitations. And mankind, animals, vegetation, matter and energy, they’re all finite. They had a beginning, they’ll have an end.
[Right side] But this is how many people in the world and many religions look at everything other than in the Bible. You have the universe that’s infinite and impersonal. And that’s what this circle describes. It’s this infinite, impersonal universe. And their idea of God and man and nature are all inside that circle.
Slide 26
Another way that they looked at this, even in the ancient world, is that this grayed triangle here represents what is called existence. We all exist. We’re all here. But there’s different levels of existence. The highest level of existence is God, and the lowest level would be your stars in the sky or rocks or dirt or water on the earth, vegetation, then animals, then human beings.
You have this gradation here. God has the most existence. Angels or spirit beings have a somewhat less level of existence. And it goes all the way down this chain. And in the ancient world, they called this a chain of being. Being is just existence. And this is how most people think, in that everything in the universe is inside that box.
Slide 27
What have we learned so far about God? Well, we’ve learned that He is the sovereign Creator. And because He is the sovereign Creator, there are two terms that apply to Him. The first is the word holy. A lot of people don’t use the word holy in a correct way. Holy means someone who is completely set apart to the use of God. If you have a building that is a church and you dedicate it to God, it would be called holy. It’s set apart to the service of God.
In the Old Testament they had the tabernacle. And so they had bowls and they had knives and forks and other physical instruments. And those were called holy. That doesn’t mean they were good or bad. They’re set apart to the service of God. The root idea of holy is to be set apart.
God is set apart. He is totally unique. He is distinct. He’s one of a kind. And the other word is infinite. He’s unique because He is infinite, and there’s only one infinite being, and that’s God.
We’ve also seen that God is present everywhere to His creation, so He is omnipresent. We’ve seen that God knows everything, so He is omniscient. And then we know that He is all-powerful. He can do whatever He wants to do. He is omnipotent. We’ve also seen that when you take infinite and apply it to time, it means God is eternal. He’s always existed. There’s never a time when He didn’t exist.
That applies also to His love. He has an infinite love. And His love is beyond anything that we can know. It is distinctive. He’s holy in His love. He’s holy in His omniscience. He’s holy in all of these. You could say He’s holy in every one of these because He’s unique. in each one of these.
He is righteous. That means He is absolutely perfect in everything He does. When God does things, it’s always right. It’s always correct. He never does anything in a wrong way. And therefore, He is always just in every decision He makes because He knows all the facts. He’s omniscient, so He knows every detail. And so He can make a just decision.
Slide 28
In Psalm 50:12–13, we read, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you, for all the world is mine and everything in it.” God is speaking. He said, “Do I eat the meat of bulls? Do I drink the blood of goats?” What He’s saying is, No, I don’t. I don’t need to be fed. I don’t need to eat.
Slide 29
In the New Testament, in Acts 17:24–25 we read, “He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since He is the Lord of heaven and earth …” that means He is sovereign. He is the sovereign Creator. He is the Lord of Heaven and earth. He doesn’t live in man-made temples. And human hands can’t serve His needs, for He has no needs. He Himself gives life and breath to everything. And He satisfies every need, but He has no needs.
Slide 30
In Isaiah 44:24, “This is what the Lord says—your Redeemer and Creator: ‘I am the Lord who made all things. I alone stretched out the heavens. Who was with me when I made the earth?’ ” Who was with Him when He made the earth? The angels were there, but no humans were there.
Slide 31
Isaiah 46:9, “Remember the things that I have done in the past. For I alone am God! I am God, and there is none like me.” And many, many times you have this statement made in the Scriptures that there’s none like God. The writers of Scripture are saying this, and the prophets are saying this. There is none like God. That makes Him one of a kind. That makes Him distinct. That means He’s holy. There is none like Him.
Slide 32
When we look at the Creator-creature distinction here in this chart, at this first level of the Creator, God is infinite. He’s all-loving. He’s all-knowing, which is what word? I’m not hearing you. Omniscient; all-powerful, omnipotent; and He is holy, which means He is unique, distinct.
What are we? All creatures, everything we’ve seen, we’re finite, we’re limited. And we’re limited in love, we’re limited in our knowledge and understanding, and we’re limited in our abilities, and we have a conscience, but that conscience can be wrong.
Slides 33 and 34
The third thing we’re talking about tonight is we’ve moved from the Creator-creature distinction to the highest creature that God made. He had made the angels, He had made all of the animals. Why do I say that man is the ultimate, the highest creature that He created? Because He didn’t create any other creature in His image. That’s what makes human beings different from angels and different from everything.
Angels are beings that can think and that can act and do many marvelous things that we can’t do. But they are not created in God’s image. Only human beings are created in God’s image. Genesis 1:26, “Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image, to be like us.” The “us” refers to God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Man was created to “reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground. So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God, he created them; Male and female he created them.”
Slide 35
Image doesn’t refer to a physical form, okay? So God doesn’t exist as a bipedal hominoid. He doesn’t exist like a man with two legs, two arms, a head. God is spirit. He may have form, but we don’t know what that form is.
No one has seen God at any time. We’ve only seen the physical manifestation in Jesus Christ, who came as the eternal God, took on humanity so that He could reveal God, explain God.
Slide 36
What we continue to see here is all of these different attributes about God, that God is all-loving. We can love but not like God loves. God’s love is perfect and it is not dependent upon the object of His love being good or not. God loves every human being with a perfect love even though they are sinners and in rebellion against Him.
This is a good place to add in the gospel, that God demonstrated His love toward us by sending His Son in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Man has the ability to love, but it’s not a perfect love. It’s often very changeable. We love somebody one day and we love somebody else the next day. And so it goes.
Love often depends on how people respond to us. If they like us and they say the right things, then we like them and we grow to love them. But if they say something wrong, then we’ll stop loving them. So we’re imperfect in our love, but God is perfect in His love.
God has omniscience. He’s all-knowing. He knows everything. His knowledge is perfect. He doesn’t say, oh, wait a minute, I’ve got to go look that up. He knows every single detail about everything, and He never has to learn anything, and He never forgets anything. He knows every single detail.
In contrast, we have some knowledge, and for a while we’ll remember most of it, and then there’ll come a time when we don’t remember most of it. And maybe 10 or 20 years goes by and we used to know something really well, and then all of a sudden we think, wow, I haven’t thought about that in 20 years. I’m not sure I remember everything I used to know. Our knowledge is incomplete and it’s imperfect. So there’s a lot of things that are true that we don’t know.
Our knowledge is limited. Also, God can do anything, anything that’s compatible with His character. And He never tires out. He never has to take a nap. He never is going to say “I need to have a vacation.” God’s not that way, but human beings are that way.
Have you ever tried to stay awake for three or four days straight without any sleep and try to accomplish anything? You can’t. You have to get some rest. You have to sleep. Man is limited in his power. We also need food and we need water, and rest. But God doesn’t need food. God doesn’t need water. He doesn’t need anything to sustain Him.
We see that God is also righteous and just. And so He’s the ultimate authority on what is right or wrong. Whereas human beings often just make up right and wrong however it fits them on the occasion.
Slide 37
Man has a conscience and if that conscience is anchored in the Bible, then he has a certain and true idea of what right and wrong is. If he’s not anchored on the Bible, then he’s going to be tossed around like a ship on the ocean, and everything will change all of the time.
Slide 38
We look at this distinction between the Creator and the creature, and we realize that man is a reflection of God. That’s what it means man is in the image of God in terms of his immaterial makeup, his mind, his soul. He reflects in a limited way what God is.
Slide 39
Here we have in this chart that finite man can know some truth, but he doesn’t know all truth. Finite man runs out of truth, and then he just creates lies to explain things. Whereas God is infinite in truth, and His truth never runs out.
Slide 40
In Psalm 119:160 we read, “The very essence of your words is truth.” Now think about that. What did God use to create things? Words. So His words that He spoke were all true, were all accurate. And when He reveals Himself in the Bible, He uses words. And so those words are absolutely accurate.
All of God’s commands will stand forever. Now we know people who change a lot. Some of us have changed our opinions on a couple of things today, one thing or another but God never changes.
Slide 41
In Numbers 23:19, we’re told, “God is not a man, so he does not lie. He is not human, so he does not change his mind. Has he ever spoken and failed to act?” The answer that’s expected is no. “Has He ever promised and not carried it through?” Again, the answer is no.
What we learn here is that on the Creator level, God is totally different from the way the creature is. But there are similarities. The creatures are a finite or limited representation of God. That sums up the basic principles of God as the Creator in Genesis 1.
When God creates mankind in Genesis 1:26–27, there are going to be some ways He structures man’s thinking and structures the way he is to interact with other human beings. There are certain ways that when they follow God’s social structures, then they will have blessing and they will have prosperity and they will be able to be secure in their future. If those social structures are violated, then it will bring chaos and disaster into his relationships. Those are what we refer to as the divine institutions.
We’ll do this next time. It’s divine because God established them. And they’re institutions because they’re not debatable. They’re not changeable. They are for all time in all of history in the human race. So we’ll come back next time and start looking at these first three divine institutions.
Closing Prayer
“Father, we thank You for the opportunity to look at these things this evening, to come to understand what it means that You are the Creator, how You created, that You spoke things into existence out of nothing, and that no one but You could do that. There is no god, there is no human being, there’s no angel who could speak and create something out of nothing.
“Father, we pray that we might come to understand the importance of this distinction between the creature and the Creator. And that above all, we might understand that You, our Creator, designed us a certain way. When sin entered into the human race, it created a flaw in us. But You provided a perfect solution to solve that problem of sin. That is why Jesus came to die for our sins, that we could have eternal life simply by trusting in Him. And we pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”