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I. The message of the Edenic lie. A. What kind of lie, if believed about God, would break fellowship with God, cause unbelief in the revealed Word of God, flood man’s soul with darkness and cause eternal death and separation from God?
1. Scripture indicates that the LIE THAT MURDERED OUR FIRST PARENTS was sown by Satan, the father of lies (Jn. 8:44). He was a murderer from the beginning, his weapon was the LIE perpetrated in Eden (GENESIS 3:1-7).
2. The lie was an attack upon the character of God and upon the veracity and absolute authority of His holy Word. The premise and conclusion found in the lie may be expressed in the following expanded paraphrase: The lie suggested that to make God’s glory one’s highest goal and obedience to Him one’s life direction, would be to miss out on one’s true potential for fulfillment, advancement and freedom. The lie impugned God’s character – it called into question His goodness and intentions toward mankind. As the lie suggested, if God’s glory is not joined to man’s highest good, humans have a rationale or justification for self-determination.
You may choose what you deem is best for yourself and you may choose right and wrong for yourself – for God is not absolutely trustworthy. If you choose this path of self-direction, your world will not fall apart, you will succeed and you will not face death and damnation in hell. God’s will expressed in His commandments is not really in the best interest of your happiness. God’s threats are exaggerated – actually they are idle threats to keep you under His control.
B. Satan defamed God’s character before he made his offer to Eve. 1. Satan’s question, “Indeed, has God said . . . ?” casts doubt upon God’s motives. Satan’s question also divorces the original prohibition from its context. 2. The context of the prohibition was God’s bounty (Gen 2:16, 17). By removing it from its context, Satan implies that the prohibition is unreasonable. 3. Satan depersonalizes God into an uncaring abstraction. (It is the personal covenant-keeping God who judges sin and rebellion. Those who know God to be personal, revere Him as a just God who is serious about the retribution of sin. Satan denies that sin results in judgment.)[i][1] C. Four aspects of Satan’s temptation: 1. Satan promised instant gratification. The satanic philosophy of blessing views reward as independent of God’s power and determination. Eve is to grasp “blessing” immediately through her own power. The satanic mindset is fulfillment through disobedience to God’s law, rather than the biblical way of obedience and submission to God and trust in His providence. 2. The promise of “eyes opened” offered an expanded consciousness that was not limited in knowledge, understanding and perception. 3. Satan promised dominion through going beyond creaturehood and finitude. The satanic way cancelled out obedience and submission. The temptation offered metaphysical advancement; Eve would be equal to God. She would no longer be dependent upon Him for meaning, ethics and truth. With “divine” self- sufficiency would come personal sovereignty; Eve would determine reality for herself. 4. The promise to be like God involved the knowledge of good and evil. The first couple would be like God in that they would determine good and evil for themselves (Gen 3:22). Eve followed Satan’s lead in that she assumed she lived in an impersonal, non-determined environment. Based upon this assumption, her method for achieving truth in a reliable fashion was to exercise human autonomy.[ii][2] II. Upon believing the lie, man ridiculed the truth of God. Man’s reasoning processes became a function of pride. A. All human pride is based upon ignorance. 1. Once the lie was believed and acted upon, our first parents became alienated from the life of God. Their thought processes were no longer capable of thinking correctly about God and themselves. The lie obscured the true knowledge of God and man. 2. Self love replaced love for God, for our first parents no longer believed that God was trustworthy. They also ceased to believe that God had their highest good in mind and that He loved them perfectly. (Upon believing the lie, the life of God in their souls and the knowledge of God in their minds were extinguished – darkness replaced the light.) (See Rom. 1:22-25.) B. The lie feeds man’s pride.
1. Satan’s self-deception regarding his creaturehood and dependence upon God was in essence “passed on” to the human race when the lie of Eden was believed. 2. Though the lie is based upon gross ignorance, it fuels man’s pride because it allows man to live as if he is not a creature utterly dependent upon God. The natural man sears his conscience (1 Tim. 4:1-3). The unbeliever is arrogant (2 Tim. 3:1-5). The natural man is an enemy of God (Rom. 5:10). The sinner does not seek or understand God (Rom. 3:11). Man’s problem is ethical and moral, not intellectual (Jer. 9:6; Luke 13:34). 3. Man’s ignorant pride is demonstrated in his view of creation: “It’s not enough to know that cows eat grass. True apprehension of cows and grass reveals the providential power and care of God and the task which was given to man to subdue every other creature to God’s glory (Gen. 1:28). The distance between the earth and the nearest star is truly to be understood only as its disclosure of God is recognized, for the multiple light years of distance is the mere work of God’s fingers ad displays to man his need for humility before God and thanksgiving for His grace (Psalm 81:5).”[iii][3] III. The “Eve theory of knowledge” is now the way that man’s darkened intellect is used to determine knowledge. A. The non-Christian’s approach to knowledge. 1. The unbeliever does not want to talk about where he came from. He avoids the subject of the source of his existence. He is opposed to God’s moral authority and does not wish to admit that he is accountable to God. 2. This refusal to retain God in his thoughts directly affects his approach to knowledge. 3. The unbeliever seeks to answer the question of knowledge without addressing the question of being. He claims to know independent of God. (“If the Being of God is what, on the basis of Scripture testimony, we have found it to be, it follows that our knowledge will true knowledge only to the extent that it corresponds to His knowledge.” [iv][4] B. By believing the lie, Eve placed herself and God on the same level. 1. Eve sought to gain knowledge while ignoring the question of being. She erased in her own mind the infinite distance between Creator and creature – she forgot her creaturehood. (God is the self-existent great “I am.” All existence is upheld every moment by His thought and power. Eve was dust and clay, taken from her husband’s side. 2. The lie functioned as Eve’s method of determining what was true and false. (The lie became her working epistemology – her method of determining and knowing truth.) C. Every unbeliever duplicates Eve’s approach to knowledge.
1. Instead of seeing God’s revelation as His unbreakable, authoritative Word and as life itself for the creature, Eve accepted Satan’s prevarication. 2. The structure of Satan’s lying “logic” was as follows: there were two “beings” with two differing opinions. God had one “opinion,” the serpent had another. Therefore, it was up to Eve to decide for herself (she would be an autonomous interpreter). She could decide who was right. She would be the final court of appeal. Her mind would be the final authority. 3. Eve assumed equal ultimacy of the mind of God, of her mind, and the mind of Satan. Her reasoning excluded the exclusive ultimacy of the mind of God. She denied God’s absoluteness epistemologically.[v][5] 4. By reasoning and experimentation (by eating the fruit and seeing its effects and reflecting upon those effects), she would determine what was “true for her.” (Note what a clear picture this is of modern man’s approach to moral choices.) 5. By being in control of truth and knowledge, she would be “number one,” she would be in the driver’s seat. Thus, the lie was an offer to rise above creaturehood. It offered independence, it offered autonomy, it offered omniscience, it offered divinity. In seeking to have the impossible – what belongs to God alone – the human race lost the glorious blessings they did have. They lost their life in God and they lost their unity in God.
D. Through original sin, mankind lost unity in God. 1. By man’s apostasy from God, he has cut himself off from the source of unity. Man’s unity has been ravaged by the separations caused by sin. 2. There are four major separations that occurred as a result of the fall. They are as follows: a.) Theological – man became separated from God. b.) Psychological – man became separated from or within himself (there is no unity in his thought nor in the components of his soul – conscience, will and intellect are antagonistic in the unbeliever). c.) Sociological – man became separated from others. d.) Biological – man became separated from nature (the curse). 3. Only through the redemptive work of Christ will these separations be ultimately healed. False religion and manmade philosophies attempt to find lasting solutions to these divisions but they all ultimately fail and end in destruction because they do not look to Christ’s Lordship over the universe. E. The non-Christian’s god is a false god because he is finite like himself. Like Eve, the non-Christian in his sin wipes out the distinction between absolute and derivative thought. He makes God a corroborator with man. Instead of thinking God’s thoughts after Him, he, together with God, “thinks out thoughts that have never been thought by God or by man” (as if God is stuck in time). 1. Non-Christian thought interprets reality in terms of an existence independent of God (e.g. the non-Christian would insist that there must be succession of moments in the consciousness of God in order to think of God as appreciative of the passage of time in the universe. As if God cannot relate to time without being subject to it. The unbeliever explains God in his own way). 2. A sinful conception of God is chosen by man in order to blunt the truth of man’s utter dependence upon Him. The unbeliever can’t think of a God who is above His creation. He cannot conceive of a God who is transcendent and not part of His creation. 3. By contrast, Christianity interprets reality in terms of the eternally self-conscious divine personality. Truth and reality have been eternally joined in the mind of God. By rejecting God’s authoritative revelation, sinful man tears truth and reality apart and plunges himself into irrationality. 4. The unbeliever holds to the ultimacy of the created universe and of the mind of man. He denies the necessity of thinking God’s thoughts after Him in order to interpret the creation accurately. In this context, mistakes in the interpretation of God, man and the creation are thought of as natural and to be expected – not as sin.[vi][6] IV. The lie sown in Eden was an expression of Satan’s own sentiment toward God. A. The lie was a version of Satan’s own deception. 1. He had tried to sin his way to independence, he had tried to outgrow his creaturehood by rebellion against God. But the result was that he corrupted himself, degraded himself and deceived himself. He cut himself off from the love, light and life of God. 2. He and his kingdom are now careening (like an accelerating avalanche or meteor) toward eternal shame, destruction, ruin and torment. (Jesus warned that those who remained in the kingdom of darkness would share its founder’s fate, Matt 25:41). B. Satan’s lie offered independence, but delivered death and bondage (Gen 3:1-19). 1. In the garden, Adam was denied the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil to test his obedience and prove that he was willingly under God’s command. 2. The serpent contradicted God (“you shall surely not die”) and the Creator-creature distinction (“you will be like God”). 3. When Adam ate the fruit, his sin was rebellion against recognizing his dependence upon God. In reality, Adam was no less dependent, but simply refused to acknowledge his dependence. – “thinking themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Romans 1:22; Proverbs 28:26; Ephesians 4:17,18). 4. Through this act, Adam’s sinful condition passed upon all men (Romans 5:12-19; 1 Corinthians 15:22). The human race is under the influence of Satan (Ephesians 2:2). Judgment day will expose the great lie; sin did not create a new reality nor did it produce human independence from God. V. The lie our first parents believed is now reproduced in the minds of all of their unbelieving offspring. Note the passages that teach the present universality of the lie – John 8:32-36; Rom. 1:21; 3:10-18; 2 Cor. 4:3,4; Eph. 2:1-3; 2 Tim. 2:25- 26. (The lie is the darkness spoken of in the Scriptures.) A. The lie drives the present world system with its philosophies of human autonomy and rebellion – Col. 2:8; 1 John 2:15-17; 5:19. (The lie provides the “justification” for loving the world and for living a self-directed life.) B. The lie sits enthroned in the sinner’s reasoning processes. The lie drives the present reign of sin – Romans 5:12, 17, 21. The present satanic world view bears a close resemblance to the lie sown in Eden: · The Word of God is vague and untrustworthy. · Man can only achieve truth by forsaking the Word of God and pursuing truth autonomously. · Freedom and blessing come through casting off God’s law-word. · The path to power is not by submission to God but by determining right and wrong for oneself. · Man’s problem is not ethical, but metaphysical. The solution is to become like God and shed one’s finitude. · Man deserves godhood, blessings, power, enlightenment and salvation by right, not by grace. · Sin and rebellion against God will be without consequences in history and the hereafter.[vii][7] C. To repent is to acknowledge that we have been of the lie. 1. Repentance involves intellectual submission to the Word of God – it is a turning away from self as the authority for our moral choices. 2. Those who die without repenting of the lie shall die in their sins and be eternally condemned (Mark 16:16; John 8:24). (God will forever hang error on the gallows. The lie and those who stubbornly remain subscribers of it will be an eternal object lesson to the universe.)
VI. No one is delivered from the lie except by the power of the gospel. A. Jesus explained that He was the truth and the life (John 14:6). Christ is the truth of God incarnate (John 1:1-3). In Christ, all that was lost in Adam (the knowledge of God, the life of God, the light of God and the love of God) may be recovered and more. (Note that the justified believer has a higher status than unfallen Adam!) B. Consider the majesty and scope of God’s plan. By His sovereign grace and power He will take the redeemed from dust to glory and fashion them into a bride for His Son. In Christ, believers go from death-bound slaves to free men (John 8:31-36).
C. The power of the gospel is necessary to restore man’s ability to understand God (John 1:5,14,18).
1. When we see God in our nature, bleeding and dying in our place that we may be forgiven and go free, we respond with amazement at such infinite love and compassion. 2. The true knowledge of God comes ONLY through the Person of Christ and His work on the cross (2 Cor. 4:6). The glorious gospel of Christ’s substitutionary death and resurrection has the power to dispel the ancient lie. 3. In Christ, God’s glory and man’s highest good are rejoined again in man’s thinking – one believing look at Christ and a person’s mind is renewed and he is saved for all eternity. (The enslaving lie that attacks the character of God and the Word of God is removed by faith in Christ.) VII. The Christian view of knowledge. A. The Bible has to be taken to be the final standard of truth. No areas of known reality exist that may be compared to the Bible.
1. God is ultimate being and hence ultimate absolute authority. He is the final court of appeal. All we know is rooted in God’s objective truth. Because God knows about His creation, we can know about creation. 2. The question, “How do we know?” – knowledge – is based on “What do we know?” – being. The Christian’s true knowledge is only such as it is based on God’s knowledge. “In Thy light, we see light” (Psalm 36:9). “In Him (Christ) are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). B. Knowledge with correct interpretation is truth. Things “known” without God constitute “false knowledge,” – facts without understanding. (e.g. Life flourishes on earth because of the abundance of water. The unbeliever takes this for granted – even though water is a precious and rare commodity in the universe. In seeking a naturalistic explanation, the natural man postulates that myriads of snowballs (comets) slammed into a cooling planet to make our oceans. Like the tortoise upon which Atlas supposedly stood, the unbeliever is always left with a fanciful solution to support his invention. The non-Christian has a “false knowledge” of the blue planet, see Genesis 1:1-10; 2 Peter 3:5.) C. One cannot separate truth from God. To try to separate truth from God is an attempt to make God dependent upon an external body of truth existing by itself, outside of God (this would be pantheism – God existing as one of the parts of the whole universe). 1. The Bible affirms that God’s knowledge of the world is based upon His knowledge of Himself (Psalm 139). God knows Himself, THEN He makes a dependent universe. (e.g. a man who writes an autobiography constructs a piece of literature based upon self-knowledge.) 2. Our knowledge is cumulative, finite and fallible. God’s knowledge is of a completely different kind. His knowledge is determinative – that is, His knowledge determines what shall be and what is real. By God’s knowledge, we move, exist, reason, work, plan and play. God has planted every human faculty and body part that allows us to function. D. Man can only know and interpret aright when he does so by God’s revelation. Only in regeneration (the new birth), when man sees himself as God’s creature does he once again receptively reconstruct knowledge given him by God.
E. Non-regenerate consciousness cannot know God, creation or self apart from God’s interpretation. 1. In the anthropocentric world of the unbeliever, man develops his own sense-perceived-truth in an “a posteriori” manner (inductive truth – reasoning from particulars to the general or universal. It is futility because unbeliever because he is committed to an erroneous world view.) 2. By contrast, Christian epistemology is ultimate rationalism and sets forth incomprehensible knowledge about man from God. Non-Christian epistemology is ultimate irrationalism and sets forth comprehensive knowledge about man and God from man.
3. Only by God’s common grace does man have a residual or “shadow unity.” Without these remnants of unity, man would fall into complete disintegration in his world. The sobering warning from God in Scripture is that when man’s faculties are used to serve sin, the consequence is disintegration of the image of God. Complete disintegration follows in hell (Romans 2:1-11). 4. The Christian must recognize the seriousness of the non- Christian’s dilemma. The unbeliever’s darkness places him in a situation of total inability. His consciousness will not allow him to accept the Christian position. Man is NEVER epistemologically neutral. He either loves God or hates God. He is for Him or against Him.
Endnotes: [i][1] Brian Schwertley, The Temptation of Eve, (www.reformed.com), pp. 5-7. [ii][2] Ibid., p. 8. [iii][3] Richard L. Pratt, Every Thought Captive, Phillipsburg, P&R Publishing, 1979), pp. 14, 15. [iv][4] Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1955), p. 33. [v][5] Greg L. Bahnsen, Van Til’s Apologetic, (Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1998), p. 152. [vi][6] Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, pp. 47, 48. [vii][7] Brian Schwertley, p. 10. [viii][8] Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, p. 39.
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