Interlocked Series — Lesson #02, Part 2
Pagan View of Origins: Pagan Worldviews
July 23, 2023
Dr. Robert L. Dean, Jr.
www.deanbibleministries.org
Opening Prayer
“Our Father, what a great privilege it is that we can come before Your throne of grace because Jesus Christ died on the Cross, opened the way, and is now our High Priest. Because He is our High Priest, He is the one through whom we come into Your presence. He is the one, along with the Holy Spirit, who also intercedes for us.
“Father, we know that even if we do not articulate our prayers just precisely, and if we don’t know exactly how to pray, God the Holy Spirit interprets those and communicates them correctly to the Father. We’re thankful for that, Father, and we’re thankful that we can come together to study these things and to have our minds fortified and are to take down these fortresses of thought that have been erected against You so that we might come to honestly understand Your Word and apply it in every area of our lives.
“We pray that we might do this without government interference so that we may go about Your business. We pray that You will continue to give us those opportunities and restrict the evil that is taking place in this country just right under our very noses. It’s everywhere. Father, we need to be prepared mentally for what we will face and we pray this in Christ’s name, Amen.”
Slide 3
We are going to stand up and start off with our Interlocked timeline. This is Lesson 2, Part 2. We’re looking at the pagan view of origins. I didn’t see anybody stand up. I don’t know if I need to go back to being a drill instructor or not. Ready? Remember, we just go through this with the motions.
Creation, Fall, Flood, Tower of Babel, Hall of Abraham. That takes care of Genesis. Then we have the Exodus, when the Jews come out of Egypt, and then God gives them the Law, ten. Ten commandments. Then they will go into the conquest, and after they take the land, then after the period of the judges, they will establish a kingdom.
The Northern Kingdom and the Southern Kingdom will divide and then both kingdoms will go out into exile. At the end of the Old Testament, God brings a remnant back, and that’s only a partial return. So that’s the whole Old Testament. We did that in about 20 seconds.
Then we come into the New Testament. That begins with what? The birth of Jesus. And then Jesus is going to die on the Cross for our sins and pay the penalty for our sins. He will be buried. On the third day He will be raised from the dead. Then He will ascend to Heaven from whence He sends the Holy Spirit to establish the church. Today we are still in the Church Age and the Church Age ends with the Rapture. Jesus comes back in the air. He takes us to Heaven.
Next there’ll be the seven years of the Tribulation. Then Jesus Christ will return to the earth and establish His kingdom. At the end of a thousand years there will be the Great White Throne Judgment. Okay? Very good. You needed a little exercise, got the blood flowing, now you’ll stay awake for the next hour. So that’s our timeline.
Slide 4
We’re looking at this in terms of these events. These 11 events from the Old Testament and 8 events from the New Testament, are sort of like coat pegs. You have these coat hooks, and on these coat hooks we have Creation first. On each coat peg will hang different events. By getting these 19 events in your mind you can then organize the other details that come along.
I’m getting good reports from a lot of people who are teaching this to their kids, and a lot of adults are enjoying this because it gives them a great handle on the Bible. The reason we pick these particular events is because they are referred to later on in Scripture. They’re constantly either quoted about something in the past, talking about an event in the past, or tying an event in the past to something that is going on in a future time.
What that tells you is that these events, like the Creation, the Fall, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, call of Abraham, the importance of Israel, all of these events are the foundation on which the rest of the Bible stands. If those events did not take place as they are described in the Scripture, if they are not historically accurate, then the rest of the Bible is not trustworthy.
Slide 5
We know that the Lord Jesus Christ, who is omniscient, often referred to these events in one way or another. And so in this graphic, what I’m showing is that there’s an interconnectedness to all of these events. They are interlocked. That’s why that name was chosen for this curriculum. They are interlocked, so that they are interdependent. If you take one away, then the whole structure begins to fall.
These are the areas where there are attacks, intellectual attacks, over and over and over again by people who are in positions of authority and influence, such as attacks by schoolteachers. We have been studying about Creation and when I was in the sixth grade, I remember a favorite teacher of mine decided one day to read us a story on how the solar system came into existence. It was a purely evolutionary description, talked about how at that time they believed that the moon somehow escaped from the mass of the earth or something like that.
I went home and I told my mother that story I’d heard. My mother asked me what I did. She had me get my Bible and she read through Genesis 1 and afterwards asked me to tell how the moon and the solar system came into existence.
I sat down and read it. It was the King James version so it was tough reading. In those days they didn’t have children’s version of the Bible but I’ll never forget that day. It was the first time I really realized that the Bible knew more than my science teacher. I’m still talking about it. You parents need to train your kids to do this because when they go to school they’re going to hear their teachers say things that are the opposite of what the Bible says and what you’ve taught them. Tell them that when that happened to come home and talk to you about those things. My mother told me I was not to correct the teacher in class whether it’s the 6th grade or 10th grade or even graduate school because they are the authority in that room. Tell your children or Sunday School students they can give the teacher’s answers on tests and in class and not make an issue out of it.
I had a song leader at a church I pastored about 30 years ago, and he was in a graduate school in paleontology at SMU. He was a very strong creationist. I asked him one day what he thought about the department he was in. Did he ever have any problems? He said they didn’t know what he believed. If they knew, his funding would dry up and his opportunities would dry up. They would just disappear. And you wouldn’t have any evidence of how it happened. All of a sudden, you just have a black mark against your name, and you won’t go anywhere in your career.
Some of you remember Dr. Steve Austin who spoke to us at two different Chafer conferences. Some of you have been on a raft trip with him through the Grand Canyon. In fact, I just found out that Dr. Petrovich went just a month ago on a Grand Canyon trip with Steve Austin. Steve Austin went through graduate school at, I think it was University of Pennsylvania, and he wrote a lot of articles on Creation under a pseudonym. Because if he had put his name on those articles, he would have lost all of his scholarships, funding, opportunities, and everything else. That was some 50 years ago.
It’s worse now. Now you just get canceled. All of a sudden you go to classes, and you’re no longer enrolled. You just disappeared. All kinds of things are happening. Part of parents’ and grandparents’ job is to train and prepare your Christian kids to be able to function in a very hostile world, which was not what you and I faced.
Slide 6
We’re in the second lesson. I’m trying to do most of these lessons in two classes. I’m trying to break it down so that you can see as a parent or as a Sunday School teacher or as a prep school teacher, how to teach this, how to take material that’s written for maybe an age group that’s a little higher than what your kids are.
In the Interlock series, which is for 16 and up, 15 and up, that age group, the chapter headings are first the spirit beings which talks about angels. We covered this last time, and then the second section is on the shining star, which is, I think, a fairly decent translation of Helel ben Shahar, the bright star, sun of the dawn, which is how it would be literally translated in the Hebrew. It’s not Lucifer. Lucifer was from the Vulgate translation based on identifying that bright star with Venus. That was the Latin name for Venus. So, it’s a good English name.
We went through the origin of the angels, that the angels were present when Creation started, and then who Lucifer was, or who Satan was at the beginning, and we looked at those passages. When teaching the kids, this curriculum says the problem is with the shining star that he wanted to level up and be the creator, to take over. He was denying the Creator-creature distinction, a very important principle that we have to keep in mind.
It’s tremendous whenever we look at many of the things that you see in headlines or you hear on the news, especially that relate to the environment, that relate to ecology, relate to meteorology, or relate to global warming. This summer in Houston we might all change our minds and become believers in global warming.
What lies at the root of all of that so-called science is a rejection of the Creator-creature distinction. It underlies all of that. And so everything that’s built on that has to be suspect. There’s a lot of things that go on with that. So that’s the first half.
Tonight, what we’re going to do is look at the second half. We talked about the biblical view of origins, or where everything came from, how God created the heavens and the earth and all that is in them. So, we’ll look at some definitions and some key terms.
Where did this pagan worldview come from, when did it start, and then what this pagan worldview looks like today. For the younger kids, we talk about Satan the serpent, Satan the deceiver, and how he deceived Eve by telling her, “no, no, no, God was wrong, you won’t really die, and you will be like God. God’s just jealous and doesn’t want you to be like Him.”
Adam and Eve believed Satan’s lies, and then when God confronted them, they said, “oops, not my fault.” Have you, do you know any kids that ever said that? Not my fault. And then they point at their brother or their sister or somebody else. So Adam was pointing at God. He said, “it’s the woman you gave me.”
Slide 7
Just by way of review, the focus of lesson one broken into two sessions was on God’s creation. The main part was in relation to the human race. We focused on those social absolutes that God created within the framework, the way He created the human soul, that we were made to function best in certain ways. That’s these Divine Institutions.
Those are very important to understand. They are under attack. We will eventually see there are six Divine Institutions, but they are under attack in every way possible in every sector of our culture. Personal responsibility has been especially under attack.
Ever since the time of the rise of humanistic psychology with Sigmund Freud, everything related to that type of psychology is grounded in the fact that we’re just not responsible. It’s all these other things. It’s all in our environment. It’s not us.
They have made a science out of what Adam said. It’s not my fault. It’s the environment. It’s my wife. You gave her to me, but not me, not my problem. So personal responsibility has been under attack. Marriage, of course, is under attack with the whole LGBTQ+++, whatever. That attacks marriage. Without marriage, you destroy the family. Without the family, you destroy the next generation. Without a next generation, you destroy … what we’ll see next, which is the nation and government. All of those things fall apart.
Lesson two then focused on wrong views of Creation. So we looked at spirit beings, and then shining star’s fall, and then the angelic rebellion, and the deception of Adam and Eve. There’s a connection of the angelic revolt to the creation of man.
I raised an important question that I had to think it through a little bit. Once I thought it through, I thought, well, why didn’t you just think about that first? And that was, if angels have mentality, and they do, they have volition, God created them with volition, they have a conscience, they know the difference between right and wrong, they certainly have God consciousness and self-consciousness. Usually that’s what is defined as the image of God.
Angels are not ever said to be in the image of God. So what is the image of God? I think what is the image of God is in that immaterial part of man. God designed man to represent Him as the sub-ruler over the planet. We were designed to rule the planet, to rule over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the beasts of the field, and the animals in the sea. All of that was part of God’s intention for man.
Angels were never designed to rule over anything. They were to serve God, and their name means messenger. So I think that’s part of it. It’s not just that we have those elements in our soul, but that our soul was designed for that leadership role.
Last time we looked at the spirit beings and shining star’s fall. This time we’re looking at the angelic rebellion and the deception of Adam and Eve. Then the second part of the lesson helps us to understand why there’s so many wrong views and where we came from.
Slide 8
We started with Creation and Fall. Remember how I talked about these coat hooks? The first coat hook is what? It’s Creation and on that coat hook we can hang the Creator-creature distinction. The second coat hook is the Divine Institutions. Then the third coat that goes on that hook has to do with the spirit beings—what we’re studying now—and the angelic revolt.
Slide 9
I’ve already reviewed the Divine Institutions.
Slide 10
And just to remind you again, because we’ll come back to this tonight, the Creator-creature distinction. God is the Creator. He’s in that upper level, the first level. He’s the infinite-personal-creator God.
The second level says that everybody is finite. God is infinite. He has no boundaries. Man is finite. He has great limitations. And so God created everything out of nothing. He’s a God of order and purpose. And this sets him apart from who we are. We can never, ever level up to the Creator level, but that was what the temptation was.
Slides 11 and 12
We talked about the Divine Institutions already. So by way of review, God looked over everything at the end of the creation week, took pleasure in it, and now He expected Adam to exercise that same creativity and authority over the creation and to take pleasure in it.
Second, as an image-bearer, mankind was to imitate what the Creator had done and to represent the Creator.
And third, a man in this perfect, unflawed image of God was sinless, but that was only at the beginning. Only the first two chapters and last two chapters of the Bible have no sin.
Fourth, God, as part of responsible choice, the first Divine Institution, gave man this volition. the ability to make choices. We may make choices that God may override sometimes. Sometimes God allows us to make bad choices, that’s from His permissive will. He has given us the ability to make choices, and each one of us is accountable to God for our choices.
There’s a lot involved in that first Divine Institution, but it’s important to understand because our lives are the result of the choices we make. If we make bad choices, and it’s amazing how many kids and adolescents make bad choices that will limit the rest of their lives. They’ll never have certain options because of certain bad choices they make early on. Sometimes God overrides that with His grace.
Slide 14
When we talk about this, we talk about a worldview, and a worldview is a way people look at the world. You have all kinds of things that happen around you, and the way you filter them and try to make sense of them and understand them, that’s your worldview. It’s built into you as you grow and develop as a child, and you learn all the different things related to that.
The foundation of a worldview is how we think of ultimate reality. Where did we all come from? People either think that they came from God, who created everything out of nothing, and then from some things that He created, for example, after God created the planet Earth from the dust, isn’t that interesting? He created the planet, but when He created the planet, He created the planet with certain chemical components in the dirt.
When He was ready to create man, He had already created out of nothing those chemical components He would use to make the body for Adam. Then it’s out of Adam’s body, He made the woman’s body. God has a plan, a careful procedure all the way through.
The other thing we see is how we understand that God is a personal God. He is a sovereign God. He is capable of personal relationships, and He rules over His creation. And then third, He’s the ultimate authority. Those three elements are very important to understand the contrast we’re going to see with Satan’s deception.
Slide 15
We saw that the spirit beings were created, they were present in Job 38:4–7, when God created or laid the foundations of the earth all the morning stars sang together. They’re united. The fall of Satan has not taken place at that time.
Slide 16
We see that time really begins from man’s perspective. There’s all kinds of ways in which we could measure time, but the biblical time is from the perspective of a person who is living on planet Earth. Even in eternity, there’s a progression of events, but it’s not clocked like the Bible is.
Slide 17
We see that before the laying of the foundation, God had created the spirit beings. There were different kinds.
Slide 18
There were seraphs who had six wings. How do you remember that? Seraph starts with an S. Six starts with an S. Seraphs have six wings.
Slide 19
A cherub has four faces. And they’re of what later become animals because these animals weren’t created at the time the angels were. God creates these angels and later He creates eagles and lions and oxen and humans.
Slide 20
Another kind of angels are called the Living creatures mentioned in Revelation 4. They are full of eyes and have four faces. One’s like a lion. One’s like a calf. One’s like a man and the fourth like an eagle. Each of them have six wings. Some people think they’re like the seraphs.
Slide 21
Then we have the Archangels. We only know of two of them in the Bible: Michael and Gabriel.
Slide 22
We saw in Revelation 5:11 that there are myriads and myriads and myriads of angels.
Slide 23
The term “angel” means messenger, so they’re God’s servants.
Slide 24
We talked about the shining star who’s the greatest, most brilliant, most intelligent, most capable musician, fully talented in every area. He’s called the shining star or Lucifer.
Slide 25
He wants to level up from being a creature to being the Creator.
Slide 26
He’s also described as the Anointed Cherub in Ezekiel 28:14.
Slide 27
In both Isaiah and Ezekiel, God is addressing the power behind the human king. So the power behind the king of Tyre, the power behind the king of Babylon, was this angel.
Slide 28
His original name was Shining Star or Morning Star. Now he’s known as Satan, which means accuser, or devil, which is from the Greek, which also means accuser or adversary.
He’s the ruler of this planet now, and he is the prince of demons.
Slide 29
So in the timeline, we have spirit beings created. Then there’s the creation event of the planet Earth.Tthen shining star falls. And then Adam and Eve are tempted.
Slides 30 and 31
Next we come to our topic tonight, the pagan view of origins. First of all, everyone has some way of understanding reality. Every single person, whether you are living in a Stone Age primitive tribe in Irian Jaya, or whether you are living in upper crust, intelligent, affluent New York City. Wherever you are, whether you’re living in Africa, whether you’re living in Russia, whether you’re living in China, you have some way of looking at the world. In those different countries, they have different cultures.
Most of them have different religions than Christianity. There used to be a lot of different pagan religions other than Christianity. They understood reality through their religions. Many of them had rejected God’s truth at one time.
Everyone has some way of understanding reality. It’s learned as you grow up. You learn it from your family at first. You learn it from your friends at school. You learn it from your teachers. You learn it from everything around you. All of those things shape your way of looking at the world.
You’re either going to look at the world on the basis of finite human beings, or you’re going to look at or interpret the world on the basis of the Word of God. Those are the only two options. Now within the view that you’re looking at it the way that a lot of humans look at it, there may be 20,000, even 50,000 options. But they all exclude the God of the Bible. They all start from a different point.
Christianity starts with the Bible. So one of the key elements in developing your worldview is to understand how it began. Where did it all come from? How did the universe get here? How did the solar system get here? How did planet Earth get here? Is the planet, does it have a lifespan? Is it really going to just burn up at some time in the future?
What about all the people that live here? Is the earth really billions and billions of years old or is it much younger? How do we understand these things? Basically as I said a minute ago, you have one of two ways. Either something, someone created everything out of nothing or everything is created out of something that has always existed.
Those are the only two options, basically. It’s either created out of nothing by an all-knowing, all-powerful God, or it is created out of something that has just always existed. But how did it come into existence? If you have matter and energy and this just always existed, where did it come from? How did it have its origin?
You know, if the laws that are in effect today were in effect then, then we have laws of physics that say that there’s a finite amount of energy. But the Second Law says that that energy is running down. And since time is infinite, it would have already run down long before this.
That may be a heavy thought for you, but we have those two laws. They’re called the laws of thermodynamics. And the first is you start with a finite amount of mass and energy and the second is it’s running down. Well, if those two things are true, then we would have run everything down a long time ago.
This is part of a major weakness in evolutionary theory. As Christians, we recognize that only the all-powerful, all-knowing God ultimately made everything out of nothing. And if there’s a God who made everything out of nothing, then that means that He had a plan and a purpose. What that ultimately means is that God has a plan and a purpose for everybody’s life. We’re not just accidents.
If on the other hand, any of the other views are true, that things just sort of happened as a result of time plus chance, then we’re just an accident, every one of us. We’re just an accident because of an accidental discharge in a mass of goo somewhere, and somehow it shifted from inorganic to organic material.
How did that happen? We’ll see that nobody knows and nobody’s been able to reproduce that. So those are the only two options. There may be a lot of details that vary, but those are really the only two options. We’ll talk more about that as we go forward.
Slide 32
Fourth, this way of thinking about everything is called a worldview. All worldviews have some explanation of how the universe and the world came into existence. It doesn’t matter whether you are some primitive who is worshiping spirits, spirits of ancestors, or whether you are a sophisticated Scientologist worshiping whatever they worship. Everybody has an idea of how the universe and world came into existence. They have an idea of what existed before the present universe and what that looked like.
Third, we have a view of how we learn things, how we come to know things. And that’s part of a worldview. We also have an understanding of the beginnings of humanity. Where did we come from? It was interesting that on my vacation this last week, we went whitewater rafting down the Nautahala River in North Carolina. We had about a 70-year-old hippie as our guide. He’s been doing that for 43 years, he said.
He told us a story about how the earth came to be based on Cherokee legend. And it was, I’m not going to go into it, but it was interesting because, of course, Pam and I were there, and then one of the board members for Dean Bible Ministries, Craig Williams, was with us. And we were all kind of, you know, glancing over at each other while this guy was telling the story.
The legend he told us was one of these many, many stories that you can fit in a degraded memory of the Flood. In the legend, the whole earth is covered with water, and there’s a bird, and the bird’s trying to find dry land, and so the bird goes down deep in the water, brings up some dirt, and when he drops the dirt on top of the water, it spreads out into the continents.
You have legends like that indicate that the whole earth at one time was covered with water and that would go back to the Flood. So that’s how they explain the beginnings of humanity and the purpose of humanity. The purpose of humanity is going to be directly related to how you understand the beginnings of humanity. And that’s going to be directly related to how the universe came into existence and whether or not there’s a God.
I remember hearing this saying when I was in college. “If you don’t have a God, then nothing matters.” I thought, you know, that really captures it. If there is no God, then nothing matters. On the other hand, if there is a God, then everything matters.
That’s just really simple. If there’s no God, then nothing in life matters. You don’t have any basis for right or wrong or doing anything or trying to better yourself or improve anything. Where do we get our ideas of what is right and what is wrong?
When the creature decides to be the Creator, he makes it up as he goes along every day. What’s right today is wrong tomorrow, and what’s right the next day is wrong today. It gets very confusing and it just leads to chaos.
Slides 33 and 34
To summarize the pagan worldview, we’ve looked at the biblical worldview, now the pagan worldview. It starts with something call the Continuity of Being. We need to ask what the word “being” means. “Being” is the stuff that makes it something. If it doesn’t exist, it’s non-being. If it exists, it is being. It is either being or it isn’t being. If it’s being, it’s got something that makes it exist. In the pagan worldview, there’s a sliding scale from the so-called gods all the way down to the rocks, which is what I’ve got pictured here on this chart.
You’ve got the gods at one end, and then they have all the stuff of existence. And then a little bit less would be the angels. Little bit less than that would be the humans. A little bit less than that would be the animals. And then the plants just have some, but not very much. And then the rocks have some, but not a whole lot. So that’s this scale.
In paganism, you can slide up and down this scale. Going back and forth, you have examples in reincarnation. So let’s say you’re a mosquito and you land on a nice piece of warm flesh, and you’re sucking some blood, and somebody slaps you, and you’re dead. Well, three days later, you can come back as a little more advanced form of an insect. Maybe you’ll become a bee, and then the bee dies after a while, and then it comes back as a lizard. And so you’re moving up the chain. You’re sliding up and down the scale. And that’s basically what reincarnation is.
The idea of reincarnation is very much a part of several different religious systems. You also see this in various stories, myths, and legends. You have Greek myths, stories about the gods and how they came into existence. You have the Norse legends, and all these are, of course, very important if you look at Marvel comics and all the Marvel comic movies that have come out. They promote all of these kinds of things, but you basically are seeing these “gods”, sliding across this scale of being from human to divine.
What continuity of being basically means is that there’s no absolute distinction between gods, man, or animals. They’re all made of the same stuff. Some just have more of it than others do.
Another term that we need to define, is ultimate reality. What is that? It’s when we get past all the physical things that we can see, such as we can see the stars, and we can see the planets, and we can see the sun, and the moon, and planet Earth, and we can see people. When we get beyond all of that, what is it that lasts forever? What’s that ultimate, ultimate reality?
In Christianity, it is God who is a person, and He is personal, but He is also infinite. What happened with the Greeks is they have gods that are personal, but they’re not infinite. What happens in some of the New Age religions is you’ve got deities that are infinite, but they’re not personal. They’re transcendent, but they’re not imminent, in other words.
You’ve got to bring that concept down to help kids understand it. Ultimate reality in all of the pagan systems boils down to impersonal fate. Not personal. Fate is impersonal. It’s random chance. Random chance. You just take the dice and you roll the dice and however they come up, that’s what you have and it can be one thing one day. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. There’s no purpose.
The ultimate authority is the self in that system. Each person becomes their own ultimate authority. Now, what we’ve seen in our culture is scary, because when you trace the ideas, and always remember, ideas are important. The most important thing you can study is ideas. That’s what the Bible is, a book of ideas.
It’s not just ideas. It’s ideas that are the ideas of God. But when you have people today have a set of ideas and all ideas have consequences. And the ideas that came percolating out of Western Civilization about 130 to 160 years ago are ideas that we’re seeing now that are self-destructive. And one of the ideas that came out of that is that the only thing that really matters is you.
Now I disagree with that because the only thing that really matters is me. And we all say that. And we all act like that. And that’s embedded in our culture. We’re told we need to find out what makes you happy. If you buy into that as a Christian, you’ll never make it in the Christian life. Because the Christian life is not about being happy. The Christian life is about serving God.
A lot of people will get married and they are infatuated with each other. Some of these people have great marriages and they started off because they were infatuated with each other, but they grew in maturity and in the Word of God and developed a deep and profound relationship with one another.
You have a lot of people who don’t do that, and they have conflicts because you have a man and a woman who were thinking this when they were standing before the pastor, that they’re so happy to be marrying their new spouse because he or she makes them feel so wonderful. They make me feel like I’m the most important person in the world and since I believe I’m the most important person in the world, I’m giving him/her the chance to make me feel like that.
They believe that since they are the most important person in the world, they’re giving their new husband or wife the chance to make them feel like they’re the most important person in the world for the next 50, 60, or 70 years. They’re both thinking that. That’s laying down the groundwork for some real problems in marriage. The worst of it is that we have a whole culture like that. They are taught that the new spouse needs to do what makes you happy. The Bible certainly doesn’t say that.
Most people get married thinking that marriage is designed to make them happy. That’s not Christian. That’s not biblical. The Bible says that man and woman are brought together in a union in marriage for the purpose of bringing glory to God by their relationship and the way they are going to live together and the way that they are going to serve God. If they do that, they will have a happiness but it’s not how they would have defined happiness when they were 18 years old. Happiness in marriage is to be the result of a rich, deep, profound relationship with God. And they are going to realize the purpose for which God made mankind.
In all of the pagan systems, it’s all about the individual. Individual pleasure, individual wealth, having all the things that I want and all the toys that I can possibly have.
Slide 34
In the past, I’ve taught on this whole chain of being idea, and this was one way I diagrammed it but there are different ways. You see that in the pyramid here everything in the pyramid partakes of this substance that we call existence.
God’s inside that triangle. He has more of it than the rocks and the dirt. But they have some of it. But everything here shares in that same substance. And so there’s no what? Right, no distinction. There’s no Creator-creature distinction, because the Creator is just as much a part of existence as everything else.
Slide 35
Here’s another ancient way that this was done. This idea goes back before Aristotle, before Plato, before Socrates, and it goes back into antiquity.
Slide 36
In all of these mythological systems, you have, at the very beginning, chaos. Something always existed, and it was chaos. And out of this come these finite, limited gods. This whole chain of existence comes out by chance from this chaos.
There’s no difference between the gods and goddesses and the universe in which they live and it’s full of chaos.
Slide 37
They look at this whole scale of being and they believe that man can just slide one way or the other way, and he can make himself more like God or less like God.
Slide 38
The next reality is that ultimate reality is impersonal fate or chance. It’s like throwing the dice. You just don’t know what’s going to happen. Sometimes life looks like that, doesn’t it? It looks really random. But we know that God is in control and so He is governing these events that appear to us to be out of control, but are not.
In the pagan view, ultimate reality means there’s no personal god or gods, and that there’s never-ending time, and everything is purely random chance. When there are many gods, which is called poly-, a word that means many, theism, a word for God, polytheists have many gods, These gods are just like supermen. They’re not really a god like the God of the Bible at all. They fight amongst themselves a lot, and they have all the little petty sins that human beings have.
Slide 39
In polytheism here’s something higher than them which is called fate. Fate is impersonal. And so that’s what they ultimately rely on. Those who don’t believe in a deity believe in chance. Everything is just random chance. There’s no purpose. There’s no meaning in life. And anything can happen given enough time. Chance is impersonal.
Slide 40
That leads to the last point that if everything is impersonal, everything is random, then I’m the one who’s ultimately in charge. There’s no God that’s in charge. I am the ultimate reality. I determine everything. I determine right from wrong. And today it will be one way, and the next day it will be something else. We say, “I am the ruler of my future. I will determine everything.” So it’s everything’s about me. And I have to be true to who I am. But that’s not what the Bible says.
Slide 41
What we have is that there’s no personal God, plus a world run by fate and chance so that means that I’m not answerable to anybody. That’s antinomianism. That’s the big word. And what that means is lawlessness. And that’s what we have today. Everybody just does what they want to do.
We have a president and his family who appear to be just doing whatever they want to do. And it’s not just this president. There’s a whole series of presidents from different parties who have exhibited a lot of these characteristics. When everybody is saying, “I am the boss,” what do you end up with? Power struggles. The human race will deteriorate into nothing more than big gangs or cartels fighting each other. There’s no universal law to bring meaning out of the chaos.
Slide 42
So we asked the question at the beginning, where does a pagan worldview come from and how did it begin?
Slide 43
The Bible says that when God created everything in the Garden, He created it perfect. Now this wasn’t a moral perfection, but there was nothing that was not as God intended it. There is no sin in the human race because God had created them morally perfect, and so that was normal.
Ever since the beginning of Genesis 3, we’ve been living in an abnormal world. Death is abnormal. I point this out every time I have a funeral, that when you lose a loved one, a close friend, and they die, you feel your gut is just torn. And that’s because God put that grief there to make you realize that it’s not normal.
I first learned this when I was about 12 years old, and my dog died. I hardly remembered a time when I didn’t have that dog. That dog went to the veterinarian hospital down the street and he had some condition and he didn’t survive the surgery. I mean, I was broken up. And trying to get your mental fingers around death that someone you love is there one moment and not the next and you’ll never see him again, It’s phenomenal. And it hurts.
What do you say? This isn’t right. You’re right. It isn’t right. It’s not normal. It’s not normal because of sin. And so today we try to answer that, why it’s not normal, with all kinds of other garbage.
Slide 44
So what happened in the Garden, this is the development of the original pagan view. You have the serpent. You have a real serpent who is taken under control by Satan, we learn later, and he is said to be the shrewdest, the smartest, the craftiest of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. And one day he asked the woman, did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the Garden? Now, what’s going on here?
Satan uses the generic term for God, not the personal name of God. See, Satan’s crafty. He’s getting the woman to think about God in an impersonal way, by the way he uses language. In Genesis 3:2–3, the woman replies and says, “Of course we may eat fruit from the trees in the garden. It’s only from the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that we’re not allowed to eat. God said you must not eat it—or even touch it. Did God say that? No. She’s making it up—you will die.”
Slide 45
Satan’s being crafty. What’s he doing? He says he’s promising Eve in all of this that she could be like God. That she could go up the scale. She could level up from creature to creator. So the pagan worldview suggests man can move up the scale to be godlike. And we have a lot of people who teach this in various philosophical and religious systems.
Slide 46
In Genesis 3:5 Satan says, “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil”. Eve’s thinking she can become like Yahweh.
Slide 47
Genesis 3:6, “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for fruit [NKJV] …” That’s a pretty accurate literal translation from the Hebrew. But I think the New Living Translation captures the sense of what’s happening here. She looks at the fruit. She sees that it’s good. And she becomes convinced. That’s how they translate it. The woman was convinced. What was the authority? Herself. She’s shifting the authority to herself. It looked good to her.
What were her options? What could she have done? She could have thought, well, now wait a minute, Snakey. That’s not what Yahweh told us. And He’s been pretty good to us, and He’s provided us a pretty good life. So I think that instead of listening to you, I’m going to go ask Him what He says about it. That was a real option for her, but it appears she didn’t even think about it.
That’s what happens a lot of time. Once we make this mental shift that’s almost imperceptible, that we’re the authority and not God, then we’re already sliding into sin. “She saw that the tree …” She’s relying on her own experience. How much experience does she have? Not much, three or four days. I don’t think she was there a long time. Some people want to say, oh, we got to load up all this time, but I don’t think it had been a long time. Her knowledge at this point is pretty limited.
On the basis of her limited knowledge she’s going to decide that she knows more than omniscient God. She takes the fruit and she eats it and she gives it to her husband, Adam, and he eats. And ever since then we’ve had problems.
Slide 48
What’s happening here? They’re following the example of the shining star, Satan. He wanted to promote himself to be God. We saw in the five “I wills” in Isaiah 14 that Satan wanted to promote himself and be like God. Arrogance was found in him. What happens? He entices and deceives mankind into thinking they can be God, too.
What he didn’t realize was now there are three people who think they can be God. That’s called competition. Now we have a planet where we have about six and a half billion people, I think that’s close to the latest, full of people who think they can be God. That’s a lot of competition.
Slide 49
So, the second thing we should observe is that by using Elohim instead of Yahweh, Satan is subtly introducing the idea of impersonal fate and chance. He’s not a person named Yahweh, he is just another elohim. Now you have to capture what’s going on here in the Hebrew. We’ve often been taught that Elohim always means God, capital G. But we saw in our study of the Angelic Revolt three or four years ago that there are a lot of passages where the angels in the angelic council are referred to as elohim, as gods. Okay, so what Satan is doing is, and what we see there is Yahweh is the authority as the creator God over the council of the angels, also referred to in many places as the Elohim.
What Satan has just done by calling him Elohim is he brings him down to the level of the angels. He’s just another creature. And you can be like Him. You’re a creature too, and you can be like Him as well.
Slide 50
Here are some of the verses that use that. Psalm 77:13, “Oh God, your ways are holy. Is there any Elohim as mighty as you”? Now, don’t just think that he’s talking about the false gods. He’s talking about the angels.
Psalm 82:6, “I say, ’You are gods;”—talking to the angels—you are all children of the Most High’.” They’re called the sons of God because God directly created each one of them. Psalm 86:8, 10 says, “No Elohim is like you, O Lord. None can do what you do.” That indicates that there are other elohim, but they’re not Yahweh who created them. “For you are great and perform wonderful deeds. You alone are Elohim.”
Psalm 96:5, “The elohim of other nations are mere idols, but Yahweh made the heavens!” Notice it goes right to that Creator-creature distinction.
Slide 51
Satan is subtly moving Yahweh down the scale of being to be just an elohim like all the other created angels.
Satan wanted to be the Elohim of the elohim, and now he’s convincing Eve that she can be an elohim also. She can move herself up the scale of being.
Slide 52
His tactic is to diminish the sovereign nature of Yahweh and that He is personal and just reduce Him to something not so special. By not using His name, Satan is removing this personal relational aspect of God. It’s very different to say, Yahweh told me to do this, and then Joe Smith around the corner told me to do this. So, the name of God is very important.
Slide 53
Third thing we’re seeing here is that Satan tricked Eve into thinking she had ultimate authority over her own life, not God. It’s the idea of self being the ultimate authority.
Slide 54
He appeals to her in the question, did God really say? She has to decide this question. He set her up. It’s sort of like the person who comes up and says, have you quit beating your wife? You’ve got to think about it a minute. If you say yes, you’re in trouble. If you say no, you’re in trouble. It’s a loaded question.
Satan sets her up. Then he completely rejects God. He says that God said you would die but you won’t die. God lied to you. God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil. Satan puts Eve in a decision to judge God, and she goes right for it.
Slide 55
Remember, we talked about D Institution #1, personal or responsible choice. God gave them real choice, and she made a real choice and rejected God. Because she exercised it wrongly or irresponsibly, it plunges the human race into everything we see that’s sin and horrors. Everything you can think of is the result of eating a piece of fruit. Who knew that fruit was so bad for you?
Slide 56
Where did the pagan worldview come from? Number one: Satan’s the source of the pagan worldview. Number two: Satan deceived Eve into thinking she too could change who she was as a creature. Now he’s trying to convince people you can change from being a man to a woman or from a woman to be a man.
Third: Satan planted the idea, but Eve and Adam freely chose, and they used their ability to choose to choose wrongly.
Slide 57
When the woman saw that the tree was good for food she made that decision.
Slide 58
I ran across this in my Bible, and I thought I would share it with you. This is from something I know some of you have listened to Charlie Clough’s Framework series, but I don’t know that any of you have ever read the first Framework pamphlet, which he allegedly is rewriting. I have a copy of it, and it’s about apologetics.
In there he says, quoting Cornelius Van Til, an apologetic philosopher-theologian, “Adam and Eve originally sinned by trying to start from a non-existent neutral position in which God’s Word did not have inherent self-attesting authority.” When God speaks everywhere else in the Bible you know it’s God. You don’t have to say, well, wait a minute, prove you’re God. Nobody says that. When God speaks to anybody, they know it’s God. His voice has self-attesting authority.
Adam and Eve put themselves a step back and they go, I have to judge God. That’s what Van Til is saying. “Faced with one proposition from God, (‘in the day you eat of it you will die’), and an opposite proposition from Satan, you shall not surely die, Adam and Eve chose an independent testing method to see whether God’s Word was true.” They put themselves in authority over God.
Slide 59
“Adam saw Satan’s point. ‘You’re right, Satan, I must first decide whether such a God often speaks to us (1) He knows what the good is for us, (2) I know God controls history so that He can determine what will happen if we disobey Him, and (3) God has the right to demand obedience from us.”
Adam is saying that after he decides these issues, if the answer is yes, then I’ll obey Him. He’s already sliding into the cesspool of carnality.
Slide 60
Adam had some choices here. Choice one is to ask God, go back to God and say, the snake says this, what do You say? Choice two is we’re going to determine what’s right or wrong for us.
Slide 61
When you compare the biblical worldview with the pagan worldview, the biblical worldview says there’s a Creator-creature distinction. God, hard stop. Mankind, hard stop. Nature, creation, the animals. Number two, God is a personal sovereign God. And number three, the ultimate authority is God.
(1) Every pagan worldview is going to say that you can move up and down that scale because you’re the boss. (2) It’s all based on impersonal fate and chance. There’s no real meaning in life. It’s all random. (3), therefore, I’m the ultimate authority.
Slide 62
We need to look at what that pagan worldview looks like today, and I’m out of time, so we’ll start looking at those last two boxes next time. Be sure to download the notes, read the third lesson, and we’ll be ready to go forward. We’re just going to finish up with this last part of lesson two, and then we’ll go on to lesson three.
Closing Prayer
“Father, thank You for this opportunity to study these things, recognizing that we need to learn to think in these categories, with these ideas, as we listen to people talk about their beliefs and about the issues of the day related to global warming or related to economics or related to law and related to justice.
“Are we going to start with what You say in the Bible? Are we going to go there first or are we going to go to somebody else to find out what the answers are? That’s the real issue. Are You the one in authority over our lives or are we going to try to figure it all out on our own from our limited perspective? It starts there.
“Challenge us with an understanding of that and its implications in our own lives. We pray this in Christ’s name. Amen.”