16 - The Purpose: Am I Following Trusting the Strategy of Envelopment to Resist the Cosmos?

© Charles A. Clough 2014
Charles A. Clough
1 John Series

Lesson 16 – The Purpose: Am I Following Trusting the Strategy of Envelopment to Resist the Cosmos?

26 Jan 2014
Fellowship Chapel, Jarrettsville, MD
www.bibleframework.org

… going to get into the section in 1 John 2:15–17. We won’t finish that block of text there; but we’ll get a sizeable chunk of it digested hopefully. You’ll notice at the beginning of the handout we’ve repeated the outline, the overall outline. We want to maintain the momentum of John’s writings and the flow of his thinking. Let’s pause for a few moments when we can prepare our hearts for looking at His Word.

(Opening prayer)

Just to pick up the flow again; and I’m following the outline [Slide 2]. We have John’s prologue and preamble. That was the section in a rhetorical address that was set and prepares the listeners for the argument, the central argument, of the text. We’ve seen that John is very Trinitarian, that when he speaks of fellowship he’s speaking of fellowship with the Father, fellowship with the Son, fellowship with the Holy Spirit. There are nuances to that fellowship. The nuance with having fellowship with the Father is:

^NKJ 1 John 1:5, “… that God is light and in Him is no darkness at all.”

That’s a confrontation of the real world, which is the real Creator of the world; and we have to be in harmony with His essence. That’s why we have to avoid having fantasies about how He really is. The Scripture says how He really is:

^NKJ 1 John 1:5, “… is light and in Him is no darkness at all.”

That means that the means (the protocol, the approach) to Him for believers once we have trusted in Christ is confession.

^NKJ 1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”

So that kind of fellowship is with the Father.

Fellowship with the Son:

^NKJ 1 John 2:3, “Now by this we know that we know Him, if we keep His commandments.”

We can’t know His commandments without historic revelation [Slide 3]. We come in contact with the Son primarily through the Scriptures, because the Scriptures are His revelation. So that’s that aspect.

Then we have fellowship with the Holy Spirit, though it’s not mentioned explicitly as having fellowship with the Holy Spirit. In that last section there where John is dealing with 1 John 2:9–11, if we love the brethren we abide in the light. That’s talking about other believers. It’s talking about our relationship within the body, which in our day with our culture going the way it is, the local community of believers is going to be very important.

Benjamin Franklin said during the Constitutional debates, he was reputed to have said, “We either hang together or we hang separately.”

That I think is going to be very much true of believers today.

So then we came and we started now in this section of the resistance. It’s that purpose, the purpose as we say in the outline, is called to resist the doomed world system and its Christ-denying teachers. This is the center of the apostle’s argument in this epistle. Everything in the epistle is directed to fortify his point of resistance. It’s the Christian resistance against the world.

We said in 1 John 2:12–14—this is that section where he dealt with the three: children and the fathers and the young men [Slide 4]. Again, we see three. Again we see the triadic structure. When he talks about us—when he refers to believers throughout the epistle, he always calls them little children, teknia.

But in this section, he departs from that use of the word teknia, and he has three words that he uses to address us. One is, he says, little children. I think as we said this is the viewpoint of our relationship with the Lord as little children. It’s focusing in particular—we confess our sins—which gets back to having fellowship with the Father. So we have fellowship with the Father as little children have fellowship with their daddy.

Then he says we can also be viewed as fathers. What’s the difference between children and fathers? Well, fathers have lived longer. They’ve made more mistakes; but they’ve also learned from them. They have a sense of history. So, he says:

^NKJ 1 John 2:13, I write to you, fathers, Because you have known Him who is from the beginning.”

“… you have known Him who is from the beginning.”

He’s talking about the Son here. The Son is the One who is from the beginning. How do we know and acquire that knowledge? A physical father acquires knowledge through experience of living year after year after year after year. As fathers in the spiritual sense, John says we have come to know Him who was from the beginning. How do we get that? We get that through the Scriptures.

Once again we’re having fellowship with the Son; and it’s primarily through the Scriptures, not through the church. The church may have traditions; but it’s through the Scriptures that we know the Son.

Then we have fellowship with the Holy Spirit. In that last phrase, if you look at 1 John 2:14, the very last part of verse 14 of chapter 2. If you focus in on that, we want to notice because verse 14 takes us to the next set of verses—15, 16, and 17. Notice what he does in verse 14 to set us up for verses 15, 16, and 17.

We are coming to a chunk of three verses that deal with the subject; but he’s dealt with another subject in verses 12, 13, and 14. So at the end of verse 14 where he’s transitioning, notice what he says because he amplifies what he had said about young men in verse 13. Remember back in verse 13. If you look back there, look where he’s talking about the young men. Notice what he says about young men. He says:

^NKJ 1 John 2:13, “… I write to you, young men, Because you have overcome the wicked one.”

Now that’s the first time in this epistle he mentions Satan. But obviously he’s transitioning more from just light and darkness to a very specific kind of evil, a very specific kind of darkness. He says the young men, you have rebelled against the system.

“Because you have overcome the wicked one.”

What does he mean by that? It’s because when we trust in Jesus Christ, we have declared allegiance to someone other than the god of this world. This is a revolutionary act. John looks upon conversion as defection from the evil kingdom.

That’s why you’ll see these words like overcome. That’s a word for conquering. That’s the word for revolution. That’s the word for turning over everything, thrashing the furniture around. It’s a militant connotation here; and it’s used of that act in which we trust in Jesus Christ.

Then he says in verse 14 also talking about young men because remember he repeats this again. He says:

^NKJ 1 John 2:14, “I have written to you, fathers … I have written to you young men,”

Past tense. He’s repeating himself because testimony always requires two witnesses.

^NKJ 1 John 2:14, “I have written to you young men, Because …”

Now he says three things about the young men. He says:

“Because you are strong,”

This is looking on all believers, looking upon young men who are involved in an army, who are involved in combat. He says you are strong because ... He says:

“Because you are strong, and the word of God abides in you,”

That’s the spiritual strength. When the Word of God abides in us, that’s when we are said to be strong. If it doesn’t abide in us the implication is we are weak and overcome with the world, which gets back to the point that it’s the fight every day and every week to hang in with the Word of God.

The problem is that there are so many distractions around us. There’s television. There’s texting. There is all kinds of stuff. That’s not necessarily bad stuff, but the problem is if we don’t continue to rely every single day on the Word of God; we’re going to have a problem. We never know when something is going to hit. When we get in a middle of a crisis, that’s a hard time when your emotions and adrenaline are going to get settled in the Word of God if the Word of God isn’t there to start with. This is how John says we are to get strong. We get strong because the Word of God abides in us.

And then he says:

“And you have overcome the wicked one.”

That finishes his first section on resistance because the theme of 1 John 2:12–14 is that you can’t go into this conflict with the cosmos if you’re not sure of your relationship with the Lord. You have to operate from a position of strength, not from a position of weakness. If we don’t have confidence in our relationship with the Lord, we’re certainly not going to be able to take the world on. We have to have that inner confidence.

Now we come to 1 John 2:15–17 to the whole theme of the cosmos. If someone would read verses 15 and 16 for us. We won’t get to verse 17 today.

^NKJ 1 John 2:15, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

^NKJ 1 John 2:16, “For all that is in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—is not of the Father but is of the world.”

We talked last time because we introduced this a little bit. Notice the verb l-o-v- e, love. How do we say? It’s not talking about romantic love here. Love here is talking about allegiance. It’s love used the same way in the Old Testament.

^NKJ Deuteronomy 6:5, “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.”

That’s the kind of love that John is talking about. He’s talking about allegiance. You’ll notice in 1 John 2:15—if you look at l-o-v-e, that verb, you’ll notice that you see that it’s an either/or. It’s either one or it’s the other. There are not four choices here in verse 15. There are not three choices in verse 15. There are only two choices in verse 15, which means this is anonimical. It’s either this or it’s this.

This is addressed to believers. It’s addressed to us. So the convicting work here in the text is that we face a struggle day after day after day. It never goes away. It is always—are we going to be faithful and loyal to the Father and His Word or are we going to be sucked up with the world system? The fact that he’s talking to us as believers means that we live in a high-threat environment (to use the military term). It’s a high-threat environment every single day. We’re naïve if we don’t think we’re in hostile territory.

So it’s an either/or, which leads us now to a little study of cosmos. I put on the slide [Slide 5] here a quotation from Louis Sperry Chafer’s Systematic Theology of what cosmos means.

First of all, what does the word itself mean? Cosmos is the word for order. It has a good connotation, and it has a bad connotation. Both connotations are in the Bible. So we have to be careful here. As I work through this quotation, I want you to see a qualification in it lest we walk away thinking that all order is bad.

This word means order, system, regulation, and indicates that the world is an order or system, but in every instance …

This is the qualification now.

… and there are many, where a moral feature of the world is in view …

That’s the qualification right there. We want to look at that. It means order or system. It can be good things but

where a moral feature of the world is in view, this cosmos world is said to be opposed to God. It is declared to have originated—in His plan and order—with Satan. … This cosmos is largely characterized by its ideals and entertainments. … These features of the cosmos are often close counterfeits of the things of God and in no place does the believer need divine guidance more than when attempting to draw a line of separation between the things of God and the things of Satan’s cosmos.

That sort of isolates the battle. Now to show you that the cosmos doesn’t always mean something evil—because remember Satan can’t originate anything. What he does is he counterfeits things. If he’s counterfeiting something and it appears to have order, he’s counterfeiting God’s order. That’s why this is so confusing, because God has created an orderly universe. Satan appears to have created a universe; but he hasn’t created it.

(Question)

Joel is very good at anticipating where we’re going. No, that’s good. I’m glad you’re doing it because we’re going to go exactly where Joel says. What Joel’s raised here is very interesting and Joel did something right. Notice what he did. He went to the Scriptures, and he picked out a key event. That’s framework thinking. This is what we need to master. When we run into these ideas, we have to go back to some place that calibrates our mind. What he did is he’s going back to the event, which is the Garden of Eden. Exactly right! We’ll get there in a minute.

But before I get there, I want to share with you interesting insight from this Indian Christian philosopher that I mentioned last week. In the introduction to his book, he’s talking about the suicide of a very famous pop singer Kurt Cobain. He’s talking about after he committed suicide there were 66 teenagers that also committed suicide around the world in sympathy with this rock star. It’s because they all thought the same way—basically that this world is chaotic. There is no meaning. There is no purpose so why not commit suicide?

We laugh at people at committing suicide, but it’s sad. All they’re doing is living out a philosophy. We have a secular education that teaches you can’t talk about any serious purpose in the classroom because obviously that would start reminding people of God, so we create a generation that has no purpose by definition at taxpayer’s supported education.

Then we wonder, “Gee, I wonder why people are committing suicide.”

They’re just doing what they’re taught to do for heaven’s sake. Here’s his comment about cosmos and how Christianity introduced the idea of order into world history and in particular Western civilization.

He uses Augustine (and I didn’t even know this) that Augustine wrote six volumes on music. He studied the whole structure of music. One of the things that puzzled Augustine was that—how come you can have physical instruments that generate musical notes? Here’s what Augustine did.

Why are these physical instruments able to make music? Augustine saw that the scientific basis or the essence of music lies in mathematical numbers or scores at the core of creation. Since music is mathematical, Augustine argued, it must be rational, eternal, unchangeable, meaningful, objective. In consists of mathematical harmony. We cannot make a musical sound from any string. To get a precise note, a string has to have a specific length, thickness, and tension. This implies that the Creator has encoded music into the structure of the universe.

So Augustine started thinking about this and he promoted this insight because the Bible presented a view of Creation that explains why matter could make music.

He said:

The Bible taught a sovereign Creator, governs the universe for His glory. He is powerful enough to save men like Job from their troubles. This teaching developed the Western belief in a cosmos.

Here is the good idea of cosmos. Here we are talking about order. I’m not talking morality involved. We’re talking about structure involved.

Then he goes on to this—and this is another case of thinking about the moral side of culture today.

Here is his next paragraph.

This belief in a Creator as a compassionate Savior became an underlying factor in the West’s classical music and its tradition of tension and resolution. Up until the end of the 19^th century …

Notice the qualification.

… Western musicians shared their civilization’s assumption that the universe was cosmos, not chaos. They composed consonance and concord even when they experience dissonance and discord. That is not to suggest that classical music did not express the full range of human emotions. It did. A bereaved composer would write a tragic piece. Someone abandoned by his love would explain his desolation, but such outpourings of a broken heart were understood as snapshots of real life. Given the cultural power of the biblical worldview no one thought of them …

(as Kurt Cobain did)

… as evidence of the breakdown of cosmic order or the nonexistence of order in the universe.

So here we have again—never taught in schools—that it was the Christian position that created what we call the whole classical music situation.

(Question)

Well, here’s an example. Sharia was a music student there. That’s what she’s getting in music class because there’s a debate going on whether a symphony or a chair falling over … Both are sounds are they not? So which one should be considered as coherent?

So it’s debated; and this is what the whole book was about in his section of the book. He’s talking about Cobain and his suicide and the whole idea of his smashing of life and everything else because his music reflected that because that’s the way he thought. But notice the qualification. The idea of cosmos, not chaos, got seriously eroded around 1900. That was a major change in our culture. We are living the other side of 1900. We are living now in the chaos stage where people can’t distinguish order from chaos.  

(Question)

Western civilization has that characteristic. In the East it doesn’t. This man, by the way who is an easterner and who has become a Christian, so he actually can give a lot more insight than we because we live in the West. But it’s interesting that he talks about the fact that out in those areas of the East he says:

… to say that music is a new phenomenon in Buddhist temples is not to suggest that pre-Buddhist Tibet or China had no music. Music is intrinsic to the universe …

But he said that Chinese fertility cults and sexual rights involve choirs of boys and girls singing alternately and together to symbolize ying and yang dualism as early as 2000 BC. As early as a thousand years prior to that the worshippers in Sumeria and Mesopotamia used music in their temple rituals.

Then he goes on about the Hindus. But he says that Hindu monks and priests did not develop music into the complex medium that Western music became.

This is the foolishness that we’re getting in our culture. We demean the Scriptures. We can’t even bring it into the classroom. Yet it’s that Book that changed Western civilization. So now we need to challenge a teacher that says that.

Say, “Oh teacher, you’re saying that I can’t bring the Bible that was the foundation of Western civilization into this classroom? Is that what you’re saying?”

Probably the teacher has never thought about it. But this is the point we’re getting. This is why we have tremendous theological ignorance throughout our whole culture because the Bible has been thrown out, out of ignorance.

Let’s go on and look at John now. John says and we want to blend back to what Joel is saying here. So we’re going to go through three events, actually four things. You’ll see in the outline there, four events to gravitate toward out of biblical history, the flow of biblical history. We want to go to these four events because these four events tell us loads of information about the cosmos morally.

Remember Satan doesn’t create, he perverts; so even Satan needs an order. He uses the order to tempt us, to twist us, to confuse us, and to mislead us. If he showed up with his nametag, that wouldn’t be deception. Satan doesn’t show up with his nametag. He shows up as a counterfeit angel of—what does the Bible say? Angel of light. He doesn’t show up as an angel of darkness. He’s not stupid. He shows up with order, apparent order—the same apparent order as the Father—but not really. So we look at the first one, which is what Joel did very properly, the Garden of Eden, Genesis 3, key event.

There’s a fantasy associated with this. If we think back through, here is Eve and she hears the Word of God.

^NKJ Genesis 2:17, “… you shall not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil …”

But she also hears another voice that says you will not die if you eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Now does Eve at this point face an antithesis? Right? Either/or? She hears two contradictory propositions. She hears both of them. What does Eve do? What is her thinking before she takes food? Let’s try to project ourselves back with Eve. She’s sitting there.

If you were a screenwriter and you had to write this out, what instruction would you put into the script to show people what is going on in this woman’s mind when she hears, “You will not die. You will die if you eat.”

Can anybody try to get in her head why she went ahead to eat it? What must have been going through in her mind? Let’s try to reengineer, backward engineer this thing. What would have been a thinking process that she would have used having faced these two contradictory propositions to say, “I’m going to eat it.”

(Audience) “What I see is so good.”

(Audience) “I’m going to gain something by it.”

Implicitly what is she saying about the truth credibility of those two statements? In other words, let me spin back, come back, sit back, and ask this question. If Eve faces these two opposition statements that are exactly opposite, how is she going to determine which one is true?

(Question)

George is saying that the way she had to deal with this either/or was to try to think through which one is more credible than the other. But did she really do that? Anybody?

Excuse me. All right. She tested them, didn’t she?

“Let me eat and see which one is right.”

So, she makes the decision.

“I’m facing these two things. I can’t tell whether I’m going to die or live so I’m going to test them by eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.”

But if she’s going to test by eating it, what has she already decided that she can do? She can determine what is right and what is wrong. When she argues that she can determine what is right and what is wrong, what has she done with the credibility of the sources of both sides?

(Question)

Yes, that’s the point—very important point here. She is saying by going ahead to eat that, both of those statements have equal credibility. What is wrong with that statement? One statement comes from the Creator; the other statement is coming from a creature. So she has automatically in her response set the fact that the Creator’s authority is no greater than the creature’s authority. Has she not?

Which leads us ...

(Question)

George is raising the point that if she’s going to denigrate the Creator’s statement she’s basically not sure that He’s there. Now that can’t be true because the Scripture says that we are made in His image and we know He’s there. So now we’ve got a problem, don’t we?

(Question)

I think we can summarize a lot of these comments by this. This is an important apologetic, epistemological point. This is misunderstood by a lot of people. The Word of God is self-authenticating. Now it’s true evidence does support the Word of God; but if you’re going to come to the Word of God with the attitude that you’re going to first devise a proof and then if the Bible meets your proof then you’re going to have confidence in the Word. The challenge to you is on what basis are you erecting your standards of proof? Where are you getting them?

The point is that when God speaks, because we’re made in His image, the heart recognizes the voice of its master. There was no doubt of the people that sat there at the base of Mt. Sinai. When they heard the Ten Words, they didn’t think it was the loud speaker up there. They knew where that sound came from because they’re made in God’s—spirit and it resonates. The Word of God resonates with them.

Eve and Adam both knew God. After all, they talked with Him, had they not, in the Garden? Had they not already been taught the Creation narrative? They carried on a conversation.

All of a sudden a new individual shows up on the stage making a counterclaim to the first one. Now we have the idea that the Word of God must be subservient to man’s epistemology. The Word of God somehow isn’t sufficient unto itself to show itself. This is a vital point and this undercuts.

This is why the idea of fantasy that the Word of God is self-authenticating, that it doesn’t have a capacity within itself to show itself. The idea for example of the laws of logic—the laws of logic don’t follow from anything other than if the universe is a cosmos; then there’s a basis for the laws of logic and then we can talk about evidences and proofs. Otherwise your laws of logic are simply hanging in thin air.

This is a fundamental aspect of the moral character of the cosmos that Satan has counterfeited from the genuine cosmos. The counterfeit cosmos that Satan has created is that we creatures, we are the ones who judge God. We are the ones that have a moral capacity. We have an epistemological capacity. We are self-sufficient in other words. That is an illusion. The finite fallen mind is not self-sufficient. It can’t generate universals. It can’t do any of those kinds of things. It’s trying to accomplish something it’s incapable of accomplishing.

So now we come to the second statement. You see there item number 2. So we’re moving forward in biblical history. Here’s how we think through framework wise. We move forward through biblical history and we gravitate to those events that are crucial in our understanding of this cosmos theme. In the time we’ve got left—we might get to all four of them; but that’s all we’re going to do.

The Tower of Babel—one of the things I regret about the Framework series that I did years ago is I didn’t spend enough time on the Tower of Babel. As I’ve watched and I’ve participated in the science debates going on about global climate change and world governments, etc.; it has become very, very obvious to me that we are in a stage of human history where there’s a thrust, a desire, because of financial problems, because of currency problems, because of environmental changes, because of various things; there is a tremendous gravitation on all countries in part to try to get together for a global governance.

When you hear global governance, it ought to ring a bell. What event do you go to in the Scriptures where global governance first appeared? It’s Babel. When you read the narratives of Babel, what is the motive in Babel? Let’s just recall the event. What is the thinking that led to the Babel project? First of all, they’re after the Flood. What had God told the human race to do after the Flood? Disperse; settle in all the ecological niches.

“I selected the DNA. When I selected those two animals, male and female, to come aboard that Ark we now understand (we didn’t then) it was a DNA selection. It was a genetic selection. He was selecting deliberately those creatures who had the correct DNA information that they could fill all the ecological niches in the post-Flood climate. Noah didn’t know that. He didn’t even know what the changes were going to be.

That’s why God didn’t say, “Noah, you go out and pick male and female.”

No, it says the Lord brought the male and female in because He was picking. He was genetically selecting. That’s what He was doing there. Now we understand that; but we didn’t then. So we have a genetically selected zoological stock in the Ark. They’ve already been picked so they are fully sufficient to go out. The bears can be Artic white bears and survive the ice and the freezing temperatures. The black bears and brown bears can be in the temperate zone. They all came from the same pair. That pair had that capacity.

The climate was bad after the Flood. It was probably scary. You probably had tsunamis. You probably had continental tectonic plate shifting and so on. Yeah, it was scary.

But the people at the Tower of Babel said, “We don’t want to be scattered.” They also said something else. What was it?

“We will make a name for ourselves.”

Ooooo… Does that sound like Eve? See! Here we go again except this time it’s not a lone man and woman in the Garden. This time it’s a corporate entity because the kingdom—the word “kingdom” in the Bible first occurs in that passage. That’s Nimrod and his kingdom. The kingdom doesn’t start with the Kingdom of God. The kingdom of Scripture starts with the kingdom of Babel.

Here we have government because now after the Flood we have government, civil governance. It’s the instrument of civil governance that was designed by God to preserve society that now is transformed. Now the instrument (the tool) of government becomes not just a preservative function or agency; but now it’s going to be a redemptive agency.

“We’re going to use the power of the state. We’re going to use civil authority. We’re going to use political structures to redeem ourselves and make a name for ourselves.”

Does this sound familiar? That’s what we’re having today. We’re having imposed … as Christians we’re sensitive enough I think we can see this. We’re living in an era where the government is establishing a pseudo-religion.

You say, “Where? I didn’t see any state religion.”

Yes, you do. The fact is that if a Christian businesswoman or businessman can’t conduct their business with Christian ethics; aren’t you substituting another ethic for them? Why would you object to a Christian businesswoman or a Christian businessman doing their business in the public square if you (that is the state) didn’t have your ethic that you thought your ethic was better than their ethic? Aren’t you imposing an ethic on the Christians? Of course, you are.

This is the rise of the state’s own religion. They don’t recognize it by the noun religion. But, that’s in effect what’s happened.

Babel was one of the first instances. What did they say when they built Babel?

Oh, by the way, the other thing about the Babel statement is it was a government project. It wasn’t private business. Private business didn’t build the Tower of Babel. It was a government project. What was the label of the government project? We are going to build a tower that what? Reaches unto heaven. Does that sound a little religious?

Notice what’s happened here. Babel is a tremendously significant event. It shows rooted within the psyche of the civilization itself, there is a ground motive that wants to “redeem us by our own bootstraps and we are going to use the power and the force of the state to do it. Everybody better go along with us because we’re going to build a tower that reaches to heaven.”

The Babel thing shows you another thing. Is it orderly? Were the engineers that built the Tower of Babel using equations and building order? You bet. This is why this cosmos thing is so—it’s still that word. We’re still back to cosmos. We haven’t gotten any further because when Satan counterfeits, he counterfeits the order also. So now we have an orderly rebellion against God.

Then we have the third one and that is the ancient theocracy of Israel. Very few people understand this because very few Christians ever read the Old Testament.

“Well it’s big. It’s hard” [they say].

Just read it. The Old Testament is important because the New Testament presupposes you know the Old Testament. When Paul went around and he wrote these letters, he wrote it to people he thought knew the Old Testament. That’s how he could make allusions to the Old Testament. He makes all kinds of allusions to the Old Testament so that must indicate he thought the people knew the Old Testament. Well Paul, it’s a bad assumption now because we don’t. But the Old Testament is very, very crucial here.

In the ancient theocracy of Israel, look at the dates. How many centuries are we talking about here? Eight centuries—for 800 years we had the opportunity to watch what would happen if God Himself created government policies. What was the end result after 800 years of a Law that created, not with 2500 pages, but with ten words? What was the end result after 800 years of God ruling a nation? Was it a big success? No. It was an utter failure. What does that tell you when we learn about Eden, when we learn about Babel, when we learn about 800 years of God’s reign in history ending in a failure?

Then finally the fourth one, when God Himself comes down to our level, incarnates Himself as a human being, how did He wind up? Crucified! Now does that give us a real positive picture of human society? So when we talk about cosmos, we’ll deal more with it next week. This is what we’re talking about. Do we love the Father or do we love the cosmos?

(Question)

George is saying I’ve left everybody thinking God can’t do it. But if you look further in the text (remember the text), how does John end it in 1 John 2:17?

But then the resurrection—it wasn’t part of Israel anymore. It was a rejection.

(Closing prayer)