This is a lightly edited transcript of what I actually said when I taught this session at Spring Creek Bible Church on September 27, 2015, as Part 2 of The Doctrines of Man and Sin class. It differs from what I planned to say; for the prepared text, see the manuscript.
We’re jumping into part two of our ten-part series on the doctrines of man and sin, and today we’re talking about the origin of man—asking where it all started, which seems a fitting place to begin. Last week we gave a high-level overview and talked about why it’s important to study systematic theology, and these two doctrines in particular; if you missed it, it’s on the church website.
Let me situate our topic within seven major periods of time—“time” used loosely, since it encompasses eternity—so we can see where we fit in the big picture. First, God alone, but in Trinity: Father, Son, and Spirit existing in perfect fellowship and love, with nothing else. Second, before humanity, God creates his heavenly host—angelic beings who worship him. Third, some of them fall, rebelling against him. Fourth—where we come in—God creates mankind in the physical universe. Fifth, mankind rebels against God and plunges into sin. Sixth, God begins to provide salvation for his fallen human creatures—unlike the angels, for whom he provided none, as Hebrews 2 makes clear. And seventh, the restoration of all things, when God punishes sin and makes new heavens and a new earth where we dwell perfectly forever. Today we focus on the fourth—God creating humanity—keeping in mind that the angelic host had already been created and had already fallen.
The Bible and Origins
Before we ask where we came from, a word about the role the Bible plays as we harmonize its teaching with science. This isn’t a class on bibliology, but these doctrines tie together. At a high level, let me reaffirm some things about Scripture. It is inspired—breathed out by God, his very word. It is authoritative, coming from one who has authority (“Thus says the LORD”). It is infallible and therefore inerrant—God doesn’t make mistakes, so this divine book has no error. It is relevant—written for us, still speaking today though penned thousands of years ago. And it is sufficient—giving us everything we need to obey God and live godly lives. It is our ultimate authority for faith and practice, with primacy over everything else; there are other true things to consider, but Scripture trumps them all. This is the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura, Scripture alone.
Scripture testifies to its own inspiration, authority, and sufficiency: “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17). “No prophecy of Scripture comes from someone’s own interpretation…men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit” (2 Peter 1:20–21). And Psalm 19:7–11 beautifully exalts God’s Word as perfect, sure, right, pure, and true—“more to be desired…than gold…sweeter also than honey.” The Bible doesn’t directly answer every question of life—you can’t always point to a single verse—but it speaks to all of life, since “his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness” (2 Peter 1:3); the hard work is digging in to understand and apply it.
Special revelation isn’t God’s only revelation. Alongside it stands general revelation: God reveals himself through what he has made. “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork” (Psalm 19:1; cf. 50:6; 97:6). In Acts 14 Paul says God “did not leave himself without witness,” giving rains and fruitful seasons; in Acts 17 he made every nation “that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is actually not far from each one of us.” Most clearly, Romans 1: “What can be known about God is plain to them…his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived…in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.” Even those who deny God know deep down that he exists and is powerful. And Romans 2:15 adds an internal witness—the work of the law “written on their hearts,” the conscience bearing witness. General revelation, like special revelation, is authoritative and infallible because it comes from God; Paul even calls it “clear.” Our fallenness keeps us from seeing it as clearly as it is—there’s a difference between the clarity of a thing and our perception of it—but God’s self-revelation in creation is clear. It differs from special revelation only in being less direct and precise: special revelation communicates through words, general revelation through what God made outside us and the sense of him within our hearts and consciences. So the Bible plays a unique and central role as we weigh these questions of where we came from and why we’re here.
Where Did We Come From?
The most fundamental assumption the Bible makes about God is that he exists—he’s on every page. A close second is that he created all that is; he is Creator. And the Bible is clear about where we came from: God created us. Genesis 1–2 are the best-known and most detailed passages—“Let us make man in our image” (1:26); “God created man in his own image…male and female he created them” (1:27); “the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (2:7); and the making of the woman from the man’s side (2:18–23). But the theme runs throughout Scripture. Genesis 5:1–2 and 9:6 restate that God made man in his likeness and image. Job is full of it—“Your hands fashioned and made me” (10:8); “you clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews” (10:11); “the Spirit of God has made me” (33:4); all people “are the work of his hands” (34:19). So too the Psalms—“It is he who made us, and we are his” (100:3); “he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (103:14); “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (139:14); “let Israel be glad in his Maker” (149:2). And the Prophets—“the LORD, who…gives breath to the people” (Isaiah 42:5); “everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory” (43:7); “we are the clay, and you are our potter” (64:8); “Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us?” (Malachi 2:10).
Fundamental to God as Creator is that God is owner—he has authority. Because he made us, he has the right to tell us how to live; that’s why Scripture repeatedly roots its commands in God as our Maker. Interestingly, the New Testament has relatively few verses explicitly about God creating man; its emphasis falls more on God creating all things (John 1; Colossians 1; Hebrews 1). But it’s there—Jesus grounds marriage in “he who created them from the beginning made them male and female” (Matthew 19:4); Paul says God “made from one man every nation of mankind” (Acts 17:26) and contrasts “the first man…from the earth” with “the second man…from heaven” (1 Corinthians 15:47); and James warns against cursing “people who are made in the likeness of God” (3:9). The fundamental relationship between God and man is that of Creator and creature. One thing to notice: these passages repeatedly point back to Genesis 1–2 and treat them as literal historical accounts. However we interpret Genesis 1–2, our interpretation must be consistent with the way the rest of Scripture reads them—the principle of interpreting Scripture by Scripture.
The Historicity of Adam
Some wonder why we’d even discuss this—of course Adam is historical—but a growing number of evangelical scholars are caving on it. Solid people who write fine books, and whom you’d welcome to preach here, are increasingly conceding that maybe Adam wasn’t historical, but merely representative of an early group. So it’s important to be established in why we believe what we believe. Was Adam a real historical figure, the first human being and father of all the living? There are two main biblical arguments that he was.
First, Adam’s name appears alongside undisputed historical figures, especially in genealogies. Genesis 4–5 places him with Cain, Abel, and Seth, and gives specific lifespans (“all the days that Adam lived were 930 years, and he died”)—the same pattern used for people no one doubts. If Adam wasn’t historical, then neither were Eve, Cain, Abel, or Seth, which quickly becomes untenable. First Chronicles opens its genealogy with “Adam, Seth, Enosh”; Luke 3 traces Jesus’ line back through “the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God”—at what point would you break the historical chain? And Jude 14 calls Enoch “the seventh from Adam.” As we discussed, the pressure against Adam’s historicity usually comes from trying to harmonize Scripture with the scientific claim that humanity is hundreds of thousands of years old, along with puzzles like where Cain’s wife and the surrounding civilization came from. Some put the emphasis on science and bend the Bible to fit; I’d argue we should put the emphasis on the Bible and not on an overconfidence in science, which is ever-changing and less reliable than God’s Word.
Second, Paul ties the gospel to Adam in a way that makes it questionable if Adam wasn’t historical. In Romans 5, “sin came into the world through one man”—Adam, “a type of the one who was to come”—and just as condemnation came through the one man’s trespass, so justification comes through the one man Jesus Christ. First Corinthians 15 does the same: “For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive….The first man Adam became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” Paul is treating Adam as the federal head of humanity and Christ as the federal head of the redeemed. Other passages assume Adam’s historicity too—Hosea 6, Acts 17:26 (“from one man”), and 1 Timothy 2:13–14 (“Adam was formed first, then Eve”). Lose the historicity of Adam and you open real questions about the gospel Paul builds on it. The biblical evidence is compelling that Adam was a historical person and the father of the whole human race.
The Time of Creation
When did creation happen? The Bible doesn’t give a date, and that’s instructive. In his infinite wisdom God made sure we have everything we need in Scripture, so what he left unstated isn’t essential for us to obey and please him. We sometimes wish God had revealed more, but that kind of thinking can actually dishonor his wisdom in giving us exactly what we need. Here’s what we do know: he created man “at the beginning” (Genesis; Mark 10:6), on the sixth day of creation, and the genealogies don’t fit with millions or even hundreds of thousands of years of human history. If we hold to a literal six-day creation with no gap, we’re left with a relatively young earth—how young, we don’t know, and I don’t think it’s essential to nail down.
I appreciate Charles Hodge on this. A contemporary of Darwin, writing at the dawn of these scientific challenges, he noted that “the extreme uncertainty” of biblical chronology is shown by the fact that some 180 different calculations had been made—the longest putting 6,984 years between Adam and Christ and the shortest 3,483. He argued that the method of adding up genealogies and assuming an average generation is suspect, because “the design of those genealogical tables is not to give the regular succession of births in a given line, but simply to mark descent”—generations are sometimes skipped (compare Genesis 10:15–18; 46:18 with 15 and 20; Matthew 1:11). If there are gaps there, there may be gaps elsewhere, so we can’t simply sum the generations to date the human race. Hodge concluded that if science or history should require it, admitting eight or ten thousand years since the creation of man is not inconsistent with anything the Bible teaches. Scripture does seem to teach a relatively young human race, but how young we don’t know for certain—and it isn’t essential to our faith to pin down the exact year.
The Reason for Creation
Why did God create us? The purpose is the same as for everything he does: his own glory. “Everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory” (Isaiah 43:7)—consistent with his purpose for all creation, since the heavens too declare his glory (Psalm 19). The New City Catechism’s first question asks how and why God created us, and answers: “God created us male and female in his own image to know him, love him, live with him, and glorify him.” The Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.” We see it, too, in our being made in God’s image—little likenesses of himself. Consider: God made billions of little reflections of himself to display his glory. If you walked into someone’s home and saw hundreds of pictures of themselves on the walls, you’d be concerned—but that’s essentially what God has done, in man as his image and in all creation, things that shine with his glorious radiance. God can do that, because he is God and is all-glorious. And even our salvation serves this end: “he chose us in him before the foundation of the world…to the praise of his glorious grace” (Ephesians 1:4–6). So stop and ponder—in the rush of a busy life it’s easy to forget that God created us for himself. Our whole existence is about his glory. Are you wrapped up in God’s glory at home, at work, all through life? God created you for that very purpose.
A deeper question theologians sometimes ask is why God created at all. Before creation, God was infinitely and eternally happy in himself—perfect fellowship, love, and joy in his triune being, lacking nothing, needing no creature to fill any need. So why did he create? We only have to say we don’t know, in the sense that nothing compelled him; we affirm that he didn’t have to create—he could have continued for all eternity in the perfect fellowship of the Trinity—yet he chose to. Some object that creating implies weakness or need in God. The best answer I’ve seen is that it is of God’s nature to give, to overflow. Jonathan Edwards uses the image of a fountain: “It is no argument of the emptiness or deficiency of a fountain that it is inclined to overflow.” However we frame it, the key is that God didn’t need his creation; he was perfectly complete. (If you want to reflect further, John Piper’s message “Why Did God Create the World?” is very helpful.)
A related question: why did God create us knowing we would rebel? Scripture doesn’t directly answer, but it gives truths to help us think it through, and there are a few views. Open theism escapes the tension by saying God simply didn’t know man would rebel—holding that the future isn’t knowable, so God can’t know it (they still claim he knows “all that is knowable”). This is a modern invention, thoroughly refuted, and it distorts many passages; I don’t find it faithful to Scripture. A second view emphasizes free will: God wanted genuine love, and genuine love requires free moral agents who can choose good or evil, which explains how sin entered. But this doesn’t really resolve the question. It pictures God wanting free human love—but at what cost? He knew many would reject him, so the decision to create included the decision to punish the unrepentant; free will doesn’t separate sin from God’s plan or explain why he created in the first place.
The view I prefer is the third: God was pursuing his own glory. God is sovereign over all things, even evil, and his sovereignty doesn’t cease when sin enters; his plan of election and salvation was settled before he even created. Being infinitely wise, he chooses the best means to his ends—and creating a universe in which sin would exist and man would rebel was part of his wise plan for pursuing his glory. Romans 9 gives us glimpses: “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy….Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath…in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy?” The glory of God’s grace shines all the brighter against the backdrop of sin. These are deep questions, and we mustn’t go beyond Scripture—so it’s fitting to end where Paul does in Romans 11: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!…For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.”
There’s more to cover, so we’ll continue next time, but let’s wrap up. Father, thank you for this time in your Word, considering our origin—where we came from, and how you created us. Thank you that you are our good Creator, and that you created us for your glory and for our good and joy. Help us as we think about these things in the coming weeks; instruct our minds and hearts, that we might delight in this truth and live in light of it, and that you might use us to defend the truth and present it to those who need you. In Jesus’ name, amen.