Good morning!  Last Sunday we examined the word Philosophy. Philosophy is a wonderful thing! It is the search for ultimate truth and reality.  It involves thinking, reflecting, using our minds for something more than a hat rack. What could be more important or noble?

 

Anyone remember the definition of the word Philosophy?  Philosophy means “the love of wisdom”.   Is wisdom important?  Absolutely! Without wisdom, all the knowledge of the world is not only useless, it can be downright dangerous.  What is the opposite of wisdom? Foolishness.

 

Prov. 2:6 says, “Wisdom comes from God”. Who ever gets wisdom gets a wonderful thing!  Dismissing God from our search for wisdom, always ends in foolishness. That’s why the Bible says, “The fool says in his heart, there is no God.” Ps 14:1 Without God, our knowledge will never be able to discern TRUTH.

Last week we learned that the greatest lie ever foisted on the human race is this, “There is no God. Or if there is a God he isn’t trustworthy, he’s unreliable, he doesn’t know what he’s doing, you don’t need him, you’re better off without him, he’s irrelevant, you can be your own God!”

Anyone here besides me ever listened to that lie? Anyone besides me believed it? Not sure?

Every sin that trips us up, hurts us, causes us to hurt others is rooted in this lie. Whenever we hear it, it sounds so desirable, so attractive.  We want to believe it. We want to believe that we are autonomous, independent, self-directed, self-sufficient, sovereign, self-ruling, but it’s a lie.

 

Let’s read this verse from Colossians again to set the context for our lesson today. “See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world rather than on Christ.”  Col. 2:8

 

Paul is laying before us two opposing philosophies or world views. One built on a belief that God exists and that he is the source of ultimate truth and reality and wisdom.  We can only thrive it we remain attached to him, draw our life and wisdom from him.

 

The other world view built on the belief that there is no God or if there is he’s irrelevant.  We’ve been trying to make this world view work since the Garden of Eden and it always ends the same place. Despondency, emptiness, vanity, absurdity, illusion, foolishness, like a branch detached from the vine, we are withering and dying, we just don’t know it yet.

 

This week we look at how these two opposing world views influence our understanding of anthropology. Anthro means “man or human”  and ology  means the word or wisdom about.

Let’s begin with the world view that denies the existence of God, “What is man?” “Who is Henry?”

 

Henry’s biologist girlfriend would answer the question this way: Member of the animal kingdom, phyla chordata, Class mammalia, Order primate, Family hominidae, Genus/specie Homo sapiens.

 

Henry’s bio-chemist girlfriend would say: 65-90% water. 99% oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. 65% oxygen, 18.5 % carbon, 9.5% hydrogen, 3.2% nitrogen. 3.9% made up of very specific salts without which homostasis could not occur. And 0.5% trace elements vital to the formation of enzymes critical for metabolic function.  That’s why I’m always after him to take his vitamins!

 

All in all, considering present stock fluctuations, and buying the stuff at your local chemical supply store – Henry’s worth $100 tops.  If you just go out and get some mud and pond water you could assemble Henry for next to nothing. But is that all there is to Henry?

 

What about personality? What about spirit? Who can stand beside the lifeless body of a person you love without being strikingly aware, there’s more to Henry than dust and water.

 

No wonder David gazed into the sky and said, “O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens… When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him? Ps 8:3-4

 

How does God answer the question, “Who is man?”   God doesn’t deny our bodies are made up of stardust. He said to Adam after the fall, “from the dust you were taken and to the dust you shall return”.  But there is much more to Henry than stardust! 

 

God’s word reveals we were created in the image of God! That doesn’t mean our bodily form. God is spirit, not body. The image of God means we were created for eternity. We were created for relationships, with the ability to love and be loved. 

 

We were created with a free will, which we lost through the fall.  As a result, we have been taken captive to a hollow and deceptive philosophy. We no longer possess the capacity to choose God or follow him. Instead, we only have the capacity to reject God and choose that which is against God and God’s nature. The Bible calls this evil. It is anti-God, it is stands in rebellion against the holiness of God and it is hideous.

 

The secular view of man as animated mud has no way of recognizing or naming evil. Since the secular view refuses to recognize God it must also refuse to recognize that man has a spiritual nature.  When God is removed from our world view, we no longer have a paradigm with which to discern good and evil. We must say that evil is an illusion. Yet evil is not an illusion, it is real!

 

The Bible tells us that the reason we experience evil in the world is because man is fallen. We are in a state of rebellion against God. A state from which we cannot deliver ourselves. But God refuses to abandon us. He has redeemed us. He has paid the penalty for our sin himself through Jesus’ death on the cross.

 

Who are we as human beings? Henry/Henriette?  1. We are created in the image of God.  2. We are fallen. 3. We have been redeemed through the blood of Jesus on the cross.

 

All of this points out just how precious we are in God’s sight.  If we were merely mud, God could have tossed the whole rotten mess out to be trodden under foot. But he didn’t.  He sent his one and only Son to become one of us.  Incarnated in our mud, living in the midst of our sin, he loved us and gave his life to restore our dignity, our holiness, our relationship with him.

 

Jesus treated every person he encountered with great love and dignity – no matter how muddy they were.  Jerusalem must have had its share of homeless children wandering the streets in Jesus day.  Maybe that’s who Jesus was talking about when he said, “The kingdom of God belongs to such as these!”  When others didn’t see them, or shooed them and cursed them with words like, “You never should have been born.”  Jesus bent down and hugged them, talked to them, played with them. Why? What did he see in them that others didn’t?

 

The lepers, the outcasts, the shunned, the sinful, the poor, the “in the way” ones, the “nuisance” ones, the “the world would be better off without you” ones. He saw in them what they could not see in themselves. He saw in them what no one else could see. What was it? The image of God! Why?

 

Because he’s the one who called them into being and breathed his spirit into them so that they became living beings. They were in his mind from before the creation of the world. He called them into being at the moment of their conception, he made them in his image, the image of God!   

 

When Jesus said the Son of man came to save that which was lost, he meant us, the ones who can no longer identify the image of God in ourselves nor in others. Who are tempted to see only mud.

 

There is much more to this image of God. Our rational mind, our ability to choose rather than simply respond. Our ability to create, paint, compose, appreciate, judge, calculate, organize, share, sacrifice, envision, imagine, love, forgive, participate in abstract reasoning. These things are not meaningless mud, but the intelligent, intentional design of our creator.

 

We have a moral compass. We can choose to obey or disobey. We can make laws and break laws, we can recognize evil and either shun it or embrace it. We experience guilt and shame. We know what it is to desire God and at the same time shun God. We know the difference between selfishness and selflessness.  We are spiritual beings, created in the image of God.

 

The Bible says we are created to be stewards of creation. We have a God given responsibility to be about what God is about, to do what God does, to take on the character of God in the world.  So what is God like?  We’ll look at that next week. But let me give you a pre-view.  The place where the nature is God is most clearly seen is not the glory of the stars, it’s the cross.

 

What does it mean to be created in the image of God?  It’s not just an intellectual game for philosophers. It’s the key to unlocking the mystery and reality of our existence. It’s what Jesus was inviting us to discover when he said, “Come, pick up your cross and follow me.” 

 

Who Am I?    Who am I? They tell me I stepped from my cell’s confinement calmly, cheerfully, firmly, like a squire from his country-house.  But who am I? They tell me I spoke to my warders freely and friendly and clearly, as though it were mine to command.  But who am I? They tell me I bore the days of misfortune, smilingly, proudly, like one accustomed to win.

 

Am I really all that which other men tell of? Or am I only what I myself know?  Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage, struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat, yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds, thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness, tossing in expectation of great events, powerless and trembling for too distant friends, weary and empty at praying, at thinking, faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?

 

Who am I? Am I this or the other? Am I one person today and tomorrow another? Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others, yet before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling? Or is something within me like a beaten army, still fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

 

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine. Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!