Be Fruitful and Multiply
What being the image of God means, and the implications of continued Christian growth and fellowship in eternity
Emily: Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we’re continuing our conversation from last time.
Last time when we ended we were getting caught up in the New Jerusalem and the body of believers and how we are united in Christ and have different gifts and how that glorifies God. We’re going to talk a lot more about that today. Where would you like to start?
Greg: I would like to start with the anecdote that you shared with us before we went live, because it’s a good intro.
Emily: Okay, here’s the anecdote. In a former life I was an intern at The Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, and when you are an intern at The Heritage Foundation, every couple weeks you get a lecture from some of the faculty there about first principles, things like what makes conservatives conservative and why are they conservative.
This particular lecture was on the difference between conservatism and libertarianism. The speaker posited that the difference between these two systems is a view of continuity, where conservatives see a continuity between a nation’s identity in the present and a nation’s identity in the future, and of course that connects to the past and that’s why conservatives value history.
In contrast in this framework, the libertarians would not see a continuity. They’d say your decisions are your decisions. You’re not bound by what your parents did, and so your children are not bound by what you did.
In discussing this difference, the speaker decided to draw on Genesis 1 and asked, “Why did God have to tell Adam and Eve to have children?” I thought about this and I raised my hand and I said, “Is it because God is infinite and therefore His image is inexhaustible, so multiplication of God’s infinite glorious image is pleasant to him and good and glorifying and a wonderful thing?” and the speaker said, “No.”
I was like, “Okay, where are you going with this?” and he said, “Clearly God had to tell Adam and Eve to have children because if he hadn’t told them, they would have decided that their life was too good and they didn’t need to have children. They were in paradise, so the command is necessary because they wouldn’t have thought of it themselves. They wouldn’t have valued it themselves.”
Greg: I won’t make the remark I made earlier when I heard that, but Emily your answer, of course, was a wonderful answer, and unfortunately probably not the one that would come to the mind of a lot of commentators and theologians.
First is the fact that God says, “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth” three times – have children, have children, have children. Second, that he might still sneakily want that is something that most conservative evangelical Christians don’t really think about. Even when they personally think that family values kind of go hand-in-hand with Christianity, and having children is kind of a Christian thing, it tends to be on a more personal level of, “My spouse and I want to have children and raise them for Christ and such,” but there seems to be no wider vision for, “And God wants all of his people to be doing this,” because there’s a game plan here that is bigger than bringing these individual families to Christ. It’s bigger than the next generation. It’s a lot bigger because the original scope of the command was “fill the earth.”
I think if you sat down with the average evangelical pastor/teacher/commentator and said, “Does God still want to fill the earth with his image?” some people would flat-out say, “Well, no. We lost that in the fall.” Others might say, “Well, he’d love to but it’s not happening because the fall.” Or third, “That would be great, I suppose. I’ve never thought about it.”
Emily: “But isn’t the earth over-full as it is?”
Greg: Yes, there’s that. “Isn’t the earth already full?” There you start asking eschatological questions. That’s more of a secular eschatology. “The world is already full and does not need to be any fuller. We are at the end of history. Everything that can happen has happened, and now the clock is ticking towards doomsday. We’re at 11:59,” or whatever the doomsday clock reads these days.
I suspect it’s rare to find people who would actually say, “Well, of course he does.” The one exception would be our premillennial brethren who say, “Well yes, those who pass into the millennium and who don’t have resurrected bodies incapable of having children.” Again, this is which brand of premil are you, exactly? They might see that in the future millennium after Jesus comes back that this finally will happen. There are brands of premillennialism that say, “God is still going to keep his promise. He just can’t do it through the gospel. He has to do it by force. So when Jesus comes this can happen.”
Most other flavors of Christianity either haven’t thought about it, look at it kind of wistfully like, “Well, it would be nice but…” or flat-out say, “No.” In fact, there are some that are so strong that say that to think such things is borderline Satanic because that’s off the table, and to try to put it back on the table would be I suppose something like Israel trying to enter the land after God has already said, “No, you’ve got 40 years of wandering.”
That’s kind of what we’re looking at today. Does God still intend this? What’s he up to? What are his motives? Is he still going to pull it off? How is it possible, given we’re a chapter away from the fall in chapter 3?
Back to what’s he up to. What is the real goal behind this? I think you came really close, and I think there’s some more we can say. Having thrown that out, I’m going to turn to the new kid on the block and ask, Rachel, what do you think? As I was rambling, what thoughts came to your mind?
Rachel: I think there are two aspects that we are going to be trying to address. A lot of what you’re describing I think flows from the individualism of American culture, where in the church it’s me and God. It’s my devotion. I can worship him by myself. And then it becomes just my family. We’re very bad at seeing the communal aspect of the church and of the body of Christ, so we forget that God is building something bigger outside of us.
We also tend to be very nationalistic, so we just think of America – what America has achieved, America is full – and we forget about the rest of the world. So I think some other cultures may have a little easier time understanding this that are more communal, although they miss the other side. Our side, where we are so focused on ourselves, we miss that it’s not about us.
The other thing I think is that in American Christianity the concept of the image of God is often not even discussed. As a kid growing up, this is sad to say but I had never heard of Genesis 1 in the part that we’re going to read until I came to the Christian school where I was taught in junior high and high school, where they read those verses and I went, “What are you talking about? What?”
I had never been told that I was made in the image of God, and I think many people in the American churches, that’s not the basic message of the gospel. It’s in the Old Testament so we kind of toss it to the side, but in the process we’ve lost the value of the human being and of children particularly, which I think has done a lot to erode our ability to counter a lot of the falsehood in our culture that tries to find value somewhere else, because we don’t even know where we can find the answer for that.
Emily: And sometimes we’re taught that the image of God just means we have a soul, which is not sufficient for understanding how we reflect God. What does it mean for God to have a soul?
Rachel: We don’t even really know what a soul is, often.
Greg: It’s kind of a wispy thing that lives in your head or something.
Emily: It’s a very Greek view.
Greg: It is. My wife faced this in her 5th grade Bible class yesterday. Our students were saying, “All God cares about is your soul. He’s really not interested in your body,” and she said, “Resurrection of the body?”
“Oh, but that’s a spiritual body.”
She accused them all of mass heresy.
Emily: Oh no, I’m recording in a different location, so I don’t have my Gnosticism bell ready. Ding!
Greg: But that of course is what we’re talking about. I mentioned that to my class and they all chimed in, “Gnosticism!” because that’s what it is, this contempt of the physical creation and the belief that the spiritual dimension is somehow by nature holier, better, closer to God.
“God is spirit and we have spirits, so that’s where it all meets, right? If we bear the image of God, and if we’re going to talk about it, that’s talking about our soul, right? That’s something spiritual and doesn’t have anything to do with our bodies. So even if you wanted to talk about the image of God, we’re still talking about internal spiritual matters. The body just kind of gets dragged along because for now we have it, but salvation – that means (here we go again) dying and going to be with Jesus.” No, it doesn’t.
Emily: Nothing before that.
Rachel: Nothing before, and we’re not really going to do anything after.
Greg: No, just that. We as souls stand in the presence of God and that’s salvation. It’s no wonder that so many young men find the prospect of eternity incredibly boring, because they’re just going to sit there and hum, apparently. Well, they won’t have throats or tongues or lips. I guess they’ll think the melodies. It’s a complete misunderstanding of what even a soul is, or what that spiritual dimension is.
I faced this back when I was in college, talking to an Intervarsity leader. I don’t remember very well how it all came about, but I was put in the place of thinking, “Wait a minute…image of God. Is that just internal?” I began to think, and it was something like this. “Well, as the confessions define the image of God, as Paul defines it, with a little help from Genesis, the traditional answer to the question, ‘What’s the image of God in man?’ is knowledge of the truth, righteousness and true holiness, with dominion over creation.”
So knowledge – let’s see, knowing and learning and understanding, without a head or brain. That might be difficult. Living out God’s commandments and exercising dominion over the lower creation without hands or feet or mouth or ears or eyes – do you think that maybe the body plays a part in this whole image of God thing?
Yes, we die and the image of God remains in that dimension, and yet when we’re shown heaven, people are doing things. We don’t know exactly how the soul manifests itself, but when people look into heaven they don’t see gassy airy clouds. They see people. And certainly in this dimension and this world as we know it, if you start losing parts of your body, all of this becomes more difficult.
It is hard to exercise dominion – not impossible by any means – but it’s a lot harder if you’re confined to a wheelchair. It’s a lot harder if you have dementia. It’s a lot harder if you’re in a coma in the hospital indefinitely. We kind of need our bodies while we’re in this world, and how that works out in the other world we’re not told and it doesn’t matter. It’s none of our business or we would be told.
Emily: And those kinds of damages are the result of sin – not necessarily sin in someone in particular’s life, but the capacity to be damaged is the result of sin and it’s real damage.
Greg: Yes, it is damage. It’s not better.
Rachel: And we have to remember that we most learn or see the image of God when Christ became man. The church fought hard to declare him to be fully man, and that includes a body, and he best accomplished our salvation and therefore gave value to the body by doing that in the incarnation, not as a spirit that came and joined with a man or any of those things. The very body of Jesus is the Son of God, and therefore gives value to the physical actions that he does.
Emily: And we acknowledge this in worship, saying that God acts through means. If we say that God saves us just by zapping us, it’s the same mindset of this is something magical if it’s distinct from physical things. We know that knowledge on a physiological level – stuff is going on in your brain. There are neural pathways and it’s very confusing and mysterious, but we know that somehow these things are connected. Knowledge seems so abstract, but it happens in a place in your body.
Greg: And if that place in your body is damaged, then things get difficult. Now how that affects the soul we don’t know, because again we haven’t been told. Presumably the soul, the inner person, keeps functioning somehow. We often look say at someone with dementia and say, “Poor woman, but somewhere in there I know the real person is there.” That’s kind of an act of faith. We haven’t been told exactly how that works, but since there’s a resurrection and since God will fix everything one day, yes, there’s healing one day. What it means now is hard to say sometimes.
We’re kind of going off into “here are the problems.” Let’s pull it back toward my first question. We’re seeing what God was not doing. God is not a Gnostic. God did not invent the body as a stop-gap measure because he had something better in mind. God was not surprised or tricked by the fall and thought, “Wow, I had this great plan and now it’s all screwed up. I guess Satan got me on that one, but let’s write something completely different now.”
When God made man in his image and said, “Be fruitful and multiply…” – let me read the passage.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
Then he provides food, and he sees everything that he’s made and behold it’s very good.
So as you’ve both been saying from the beginning, this idea of man as God’s image is wrapped up with God saying, “And make more of you. This is not enough.” Since it says that God blesses them in this, it’s hard to understand how anybody who understands the Bible would look at this and say, “Well, having children was simply a cross they were going to have to bear. They wouldn’t have done it without God’s commandment. It takes away your freedom and your liberty to be what you want.”
Has this guy been married? And if he has, has his children heard this lecture?
Emily: I don’t think he’s married.
Greg: I can understand why. Moving on. As you say, God wants to fill the world full of his image.
I want to add something that maybe was implicit in what you said, but I’d like to make it a little more explicit. I’ve written someplace that even if God multiplied his image a billion times over in a billion different people, that still wouldn’t go very far because, as you say, God is infinite. So what God has to be after is something a little sneakier, a little trickier, or to put it differently, far more complex and deep than simply having lots of people, each of who bears the image differently. That would be wonderful, but as you said, there’s this communal aspect.
He puts all of these people together into what the New Testament will call a single body; that is, each of us becomes a cell in a living organism that’s growing and developing. Christ is the head, we’re the body, and we have to grow up, as in Ephesians 4. We have to grow up to his measure, and when we do and when that’s done, then those interrelating cells have made something far more beyond the sum of the parts. We have not simply individuals – lots and lots of them who are the image of God – but we have a body. We have a community. We have a bride that’s the image of God. And apparently, although it boggles the imagination, God thinks that that’s a sufficient reflection of who he is, so that he turns to his Son and says, “Here’s your bride.” So it’s more than individualism multiplied. It is very much communal and inter-relational.
This is something that I tried to get out last time. I keep trying and I’m not sure I’m actually communicating because every time I say this it’s like people don’t process it, so please tell me if I’m not being clear.
What happens in a community is that some people are better at some things than others. Some people are more dexterous. Some people have more abstract reasoning abilities. Some people are physically stronger. Some people are more aesthetically talented. Some people are better at languages. You could go on and multiply this indefinitely, because once you’ve listed all the things you can think of, then you can start blending them in parts and measures. So everybody is different.
I once said that everybody bears the image of God differently, and one of our elders said, “Well, where’s the proof for that?”
Emily: The fact that there are different people all around us?
Greg: That was my first thought, but I went to the New Testament and said, “members of the body of Christ?”
“Oh okay, got it.” That was a shortcut for him and it worked.
If we’re going to go with the classic definition, do we all know God the same way and to the same extent? Do we all know his world in the same way and to the same extent? Do we all know each other the same way? Do we all keep his commandments? Have we all matured in obedience to his law in the same way and to the same extent? Do we all exercise dominion with the same skills and gifts in the same way? The answer really fast is, “Well, no, obviously not. We’re all different.”
Now, that being so, here are some things to follow. You know stuff I don’t know. You’re good at stuff I’m not good at. You may be good at it and you may be good at teaching it, and if so, maybe I need to learn it. If I don’t need to learn it today, maybe I need to learn it next year or next decade or next century or next millennium, because we’re talking about an unfallen world where there’s no death.
So if I don’t need to learn your great thing now, maybe in 1,000 or 2,000 or 10,000 years I will. Of course, by then you’ll be a whole lot better at doing it and knowing it and teaching it than you are right now. Meanwhile, I’m learning stuff from other people, and we’re all feeding into one another with what we know. We all are teachers after a fashion, and we’re all helping and encouraging one another.
Have you ever thought about this about heaven, about eternity, about the resurrection? Have you ever thought about how long forever is? I mean really.
Rachel: Yes, and I have to stop.
Greg: We have friends here and we think, “Oh, I’ll be with them forever.” Well, you know, let’s say there are only 10 billion Christians. I think that’s way under-estimating it, but let’s say there are 10 billion Christians. How many people can you really hang out with on any given day?
Emily: 150.
Greg: Okay, you can hang out with 150 a day. You’re doing pretty good.
Emily: It’s a scientific thing.
Greg: That’s supposedly the number of people you can know well, so let’s say 150 people, and you hang out with those 150 for a couple months. Think of all the people you’re not hanging out with. Let’s just keep it even numbers – you hang out with those 150 for a year, and then you move on to a different 150, and then a different 150, then a different 150. We’re talking 10 billion people. I’ve not bothered to do the math, but I think probably that’s going to come out to be a really, really long time.
Now here’s the thing. While you’re hanging out with each new group of people, you’re learning new things, having new experiences, sharing new adventures, developing new skills, so by the time you cycle back and meet those first 150 again, guess what?
Emily: You’re a different person.
Greg: You’re a different person and it gets to start over, but this time you’re all more mature than you were by probably several tens of thousands of years. Again, I haven’t done the math. And that keeps going through eternity.
What if you get to spend that first year with – let’s see, who can we count on to be a Christian? James Clerk Maxwell? I’m trying to go through the scientists who we know were Bible-believing Christians. You can go down the list, like Faraday. You hang out with those people, and you come back after that time and you are a great expert on electromagnetism.
Then the next time you hang out with a bunch of Renaissance painters. Wow, 150 years hanging out with these guys? You think maybe you might learn to do more than stick figures? Possibly. And then you start putting these things together.
Emily: Electromagnetic stick figures!
Greg: Exactly! Well, probably something a little more than that.
This is the nature of eternity. Now let me add something while I’m just speculating about eternity and let me throw this one at you. My grandmother on my dad’s side was born in the very late 1800s. Her mother was a little girl during the Civil War, so my grandmother lived about the time that the automobile was becoming a thing, and about the time I think just before the Wright brothers invented the first plane. And she lived to see men walk on the moon.
When I was a little kid we had this thing called a party line. I don’t know if you know what that means.
Emily: Yeah, I watched the Andy Griffith Show.
Greg: Exactly. To get long-distance you had to call the long-distance operator and have her put through the call. Even when I was married my wife couldn’t just call her sister who lived in South Carolina because the rates were too expensive. She had to limit herself to calling once a week because we couldn’t afford any more than that.
Now you pick up any phone and you hold the sum knowledge of the world (at a very shallow level), you have an orchestra, you apparently have diagnostic tools for medicine, because anytime I get sick my family flips open a phone and tells me what’s wrong with me, you can talk to anybody anywhere, and the average teenager, by saving his allowance apparently or badgering his parents, can hold one of these things in his hand. This has happened in the course of my lifetime.
We’ve hit an exponential curve on technology. Now whether or not that can sustain itself in the absence of a Christian worldview is another question, but you know what? In eternity that’s not a problem.
What if you have all of the brightest minds of Christendom for 10,000 years together, working together, seeing each other, communicating, and after 100 years, 1000 years, 10,000 years, we’ve lost it. We have no idea what kind of technology, and this is one reason God doesn’t bother telling us. It wouldn’t mean anything to us.
If he just said, “Look, here’s a technology you’re going to invent,” probably we would say, “Wow, that’s magic.” If older generations could come forward and see what we’re doing, what would they call it? It’s magic. They have no reference point.
This is what happens when you put a community of people together, who work together peacefully, joyfully, honestly, in love, each preferring one another, each learning from one another, each humbling himself. They not only grow morally and ethically – and even in a fallen world that’s a thing. Jesus in his humanity, though he were a son yet learned he obedience by the things he suffered. In an unfallen world there’s no pain, there’s no death, but there is testing.
“I can run faster than you can run.”
“Let’s see!” No pride or rivalry, just fun.
“Look at that mountain!”
“That’s not a mountain. That’s a sheer cliff.”
“Let’s climb it!”
“Okay! If we slip, what’s going to happen? The angels catch us?” That’s still kind of hard.
“Here a calculus problem. It’s only a fourth differential.”
“Yeah, let’s work on that, right.”
“I know, let’s build a starship and let’s see if we can do it within 40 years!”
“Okay, that’s a challenge.”
At each point you trust God, you ask for wisdom, and you ask for help from other Christians, because that’s all that’s in the world. You die to self. You push on to trust God more, to obey him more fully, more deeply. There’s a greater growth in righteousness, and the image of God grows, and that includes both dominion, righteousness, holiness, and knowledge. And this goes exponentially into eternity.
That’s what was set before Adam and Eve, and I think in our gray dreary world Christians are not ready for that vision. It takes too long to explain it, for one thing. This is the longest I’ve ever taken trying to communicate that kind of scene. Feel free to tell me that I still didn’t do a very good job.
Emily: This kind of resonates on the level that we’re seeing a revival of hands-on hobbies. People have realized that they don’t know how to make bread, so they’re going out and learning to make bread. They’ve realized that making your own clothes is amazingly satisfying, that they feel better after going out and picking flowers and putting their toes in the grass – real life, the things that make up a real embodied life. They notice that they’re incredibly important for being whole people.
Greg: And you probably had to call Grandma or Aunt Sally to get some advice on how to make the bread.
Emily: Or you pick up your Oracle of All Knowledge that you can hold in your hand.
Greg: Which was posted by somebody’s Aunt Sally someplace, or someplace they learned, because the technology speeds up the communication and makes it possible to learn things from people on the other side of the world who are dead now. But they passed it on to their kids, their kids remember, their kids put it up on the internet, and now you can learn from them through this incredible technology, that can keep getting better if we don’t rebel against God and bring it all down in a crash.
That’s always a possibility because the idea of this hope is not the same thing as saying, “Oh, and this is guaranteed, evolutionarily certain, social gospel, straight earth to heaven, no problem. Nothing could stop us now.”
Emily: Is that Jefferson Starship I hear?
Greg: A lot of things could stop us now, mostly our own sin and unbelief.
In the beginning, as long as Adam and Eve were faithful, this is what was before them. The New Testament calls it a new Jerusalem. We can call it simply at this point Jerusalem, Zion, the kingdom of God, whatever you will, God’s kingdom on earth.
It would have embraced all of life and all of their activity and everything they did, and everything would be worship and everything would be Christian love and charity, or godly love and charity. But there was this tree in the way. Actually, there was man’s potential sin in the way.
In order for this to work there is one thing that is absolutely essential, and that is that man must learn to live by every word of God, simply because it is the word of God. The moment man thinks, “Got this covered. I can figure this out. Thanks, God. Don’t need you know. I’ve got this going,” the whole thing comes crashing down, which of course is what happened.
That brings us beyond to, “So, when man fell into sin did God abort the plan?” Did God say, in effect, “It was a great idea. Satan screwed it up. Satan, you got me once,” and does Satan get to go through all eternity saying, “Yeah, I’m suffering here in hell forever and ever, but God, I got you. I screwed it up for you. You didn’t get what you wanted. Ha! Have that!”
That’s the alternative unless we believe that God didn’t give up, that God did something incredibly Yahweh-like and say, “You think so? Watch this, as it were with one hand tied behind my back, with all the odds against me, with your own sin, with death and hell, with Satan and man’s own failure, man’s own rebellion, I can still pull this off.”
Now here’s the thing. If you don’t believe in a sovereign God, there’s a problem. You may think, “God would really love that. He’d love to see a world that loved him and that served him and everybody loved each other and worked together. That would be great, but you know what? Man has this thing called freewill. And although in theory it should come out 50/50, somehow it always seems that people just reject Jesus most of the time. It turns out that the gospel has not been terribly successful, for whatever reason. Sin is just really strong, sin that’s greater than all his grace. That’s a nice vision but it can’t happen because sin is simply too strong, too powerful.”
Emily: Either that or the fault lies in our technique. We haven’t perfected the technique of evangelism in order to persuade enough people to believe in Jesus, which makes it our fault, which makes us again sinning and worthy of damnation.
Greg: It leaves open for us a couple things. First, we are now bound to find that right approach. Within my lifetime we’ve gone through a number of fads in evangelism and apologetics, each one disdaining the simple gospel presentation for something that tugs at the emotions, the intellect, our traditions, our history, scientific knowledge and expertise – something that surely will convince people to submit themselves to Jesus.
Emily: If we’re looking for the perfect thing, anything less is unacceptable, which is why it leads to despair.
Greg: “And if you’re not on board with this, you’re part of the problem.” Here’s a wonderful attempt for more guilt dumped on Christians, who really would like to see people saved.
Here’s an example. An older couple in our church a number of years ago now said, “You know, we’d like to be more evangelistic and try to share the gospel of Christ, but we’re just afraid we’re going to sound like Arminians, so we don’t say much.”
Emily: That’s so sad.
Greg: Yes, isn’t it? And these were not stupid people. I don’t know what went wrong there. We told them, “Then sound like Arminians. Say something. That’s a dumb worry. Just tell them what you know.”
Emily: Actually, I have a little rabbit hole from here, if we can take it. I wanted to ask your opinion on this children’s book. It’s a fine book. It’s called A Tale of Two Kings. It’s a gospel presentation that tells the story of the fall and redemption, so I enjoy reading it to Gretchen, but there’s always something to nitpick, right, because there’s only one perfect book.
This is talking about the effects of God’s salvation and Jesus’ resurrection. It says, “Through Adam’s one act of disobedience we were all made into sinners. Through Jesus’ obedience on the cross, everyone who trusts in him will be made righteous. In Adam we all died. In Jesus we are made alive.”
True, I have zero theological problems with these statements, but I notice every time that in this paraphrase of Romans they have left out the word “all” – In Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive. Paul wasn’t afraid to say that, but these authors are and that bothers me.
Greg: Well, they don’t want to sound Arminian.
Emily: Exactly, and I think that’s a problem. That’s a failure to trust scripture. I can appreciate wanting to be precise and correct, but if it’s leading you to reject the words of scripture, you’re not being correct.
Greg: Or the words of scripture are only for the elite who are intelligent enough to appreciate and understand them and not go astray. I’m not accusing these people of that, but there are people who did that, and that’s a scary road.
Rachel: There’s a lot of temptation to speak because you won’t say it right. That’s so common, or I have to be able to explain it well enough or you have to understand this well enough before you can be called a Christian or become a member of a church. We’ve created these false standards that then cause us to shrink into the background, and we don’t speak because of the fear that we’ve put on ourselves. Instead of saying the work is the Lord’s and he uses my poor meager sad little gifts, we say, “I must make perfect gifts,” and then we make it about ourselves and not about Christ.
Emily: That does make it about ourselves.
Greg: There was a young man who was joining our church quite a few years ago, and he came from a family where the father was a church officer, so he was not ignorant of theology, to be sure. We the elders were asking him, “How would you present the gospel to somebody if you only had a minute or two?” and he hesitated and said, “I don’t know. There’s so much.”
I could see his mind clicking through Christian worldview, systematic theology, and everything, because he was well-taught. I think in his mind there was the temptation of, “You’ve got to say all this,” and a man who was one of the older elders at the time and I both looked at each other. We asked him, “What did Paul say?” and he said, “I don’t remember.”
“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved and thy house. How about that one?”
“Oh.”
Emily: That is the gospel.
Greg: Yes, it’s simple and straightforward. My wife credits her conversion to the verse, “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in thine heart that God has raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” It can be that simple. It may not be, and you may have to go back and bring help next time.
Now, something I don’t appreciate is when one of my younger friends or students comes and says, “This guy has a question and we’d like you to answer it.”
“Why? I’m sure you would do fine.”
“Yeah, but….”
The next time that happens I think I’ll say, “You give it a shot. I’ll stand here and listen.” It’s the idea of “I may screw it up.”
All of this has been a tangent.
Emily: But I’m not done with my tangent on the tangent. This tangent does actually return us to the topic. This is again from this children’s book, A Tale of Two Kings: God’s Story of Redemption. There’s an aspect that I think I really like, but I’m going to throw it out for discussion.
At the beginning it’s talking about how God created the world and it says, “God made people to be his representatives, to do his will, and to show the universe what he is like.” Then later after telling the story of Jesus’ life and death and resurrection it says, “Jesus the king is alive today and he’s still doing the job his father gave him to do. Jesus is filling the world with more and more people who show the universe what God is like.”
I appreciate that there’s a continuity there. “This was Adam’s job that he failed at, filling the world with people who show the universe what God is like.” I think that’s a beautiful portrayal, but what are some of the shortcomings or the strengths of expressing it that way, do you think?
Greg: Thank you for giving me lots of time to think about this in advance.
Emily: You’re welcome. You’re not on the spot at all.
Greg: I would have liked them to have done one more sentence to make clearer what they meant. I assume I know what they mean, and I believe it’s sound, but it does raise the question of, “So are we talking about just Jesus saving people?” That’s a huge thing, but how about all those people who display God’s glory without ever coming to faith in Christ?
I’m uncomfortable with the term “common grace” but I’ll use it – who in God’s overflowing mercies to his people, let us say, nonetheless show the incredible power, wisdom, and mercy of God in their inventions, their paintings, their books, their art, their compassion. That’s still part of what Jesus is doing.
Then the dark part -- The wrath of man shall praise thee; the remainder of wrath you shall restrain. Even in hell there is a sense in which Jesus is still glorifying himself in those who, to some degree, positively and intentionally showed the goodness of God, and yet turned from that, rebelled against him, and are suffering the consequences for all eternity.
Now, this is a children’s book so you may not want to go there, and there would be a valid reason for not, but I just would want to close the door against any hints on the one hand of universalism, or on the other of thinking that Jesus’ kingdom is just saving people, and the only people who contribute to glorifying God in this world are born-again Christians, because that path would lead to, “Was Shakespeare really born-again? I mean some of his jokes and his language – I don’t know.”
Emily: It’s a monasticism, a retreating from the world, and it closes you off from a lot of God’s glory.
Greg: Yes, it does, so that would be a concern. I don’t believe from what you’ve described that that’s where they intended to go, but you asked me to be picky so there you go.
Emily: Yeah, we’re being overly picky. I will read this to my child with zero qualms.
Rachel: I think it is important to say that it is getting at something we may often miss, that a lot of bearing the image of God is the fact that we’re reflecting the character of God to other people. Often we get skewed in our beliefs or in the way that we live because we focus too much on the commandments as rules rather than as reflections of who God is, that we then live best by following those things because we’re made in his image. So I think that is a good aspect of it’s not just that we’re telling people about Jesus so they can be saved in that more generic sense, but we’re showing people who our God is because we should know more than other people do.
Greg: And I think given our time constraints, this may be a good place to stop and we can pick it up here next time.
Emily: Sounds great. Let’s close out with some recommendations. I’m going to recommend this children’s book, since we’ve already talked about it. It’s called A Tale of Two Kings: God’s Story of Redemption by Gloria Furman. It’s lovely. I cried the first time I read it.
Greg: I don’t know the authoress, so that sounds like a wonderful recommendation.
Emily: It’s from Harvest House Publishers. I don’t think I have anything else from them. And if any listeners are concerned, there are artistic portrayals of Jesus, but there’s always light over his face or it shows him face-down praying in the garden of Gethsemane, so it’s Presbyterian-friendly.
Greg: Or at least Presbyterian-lite friendly. Rachel, do you have anything?
Rachel: I was thinking of the book that I recently got my husband David to read, which is Robinson Crusoe. The reason I was thinking of that is because he and I were talking about it today as he’s been reading through it and he got past the point where Robinson Crusoe is converted and how that changes his approach to everything, and also the way that he sees his entire life and sees that everything he went through was preparing him to live on that island.
It’s a great example of working out the image of God, and yet we also see in the story that it only goes so far until he needs somebody else, or somebody else comes, but his immediate response is to share everything with that person, not to keep it to himself, to teach Friday and then to work together to get off the island. So as David and I were talking about it, it was kind of making me think of some of these things that’s a small microcosm of what we would see throughout the world, or we would hope to see.
Emily: That’s so cool. I’ve never read Robinson Crusoe.
Rachel: It’s difficult at first, it can be, to get into it, but once you get him to the island it’s fascinating. His ingenuity is amazing, and the story of his conversion where he realizes he can’t do everything by himself, even though he’s living by himself on an island. It becomes the Lord and his Bible as his connection to the Lord that in a sense becomes his community.
Greg: And he’s grown up in the Church of England, so his language is theological. It’s not American evangelical. “Through the mercies of the new covenant and the shed blood of Christ…” and that kind of thing, rather than, “Just Jesus and me. I asked him to help me and he did,” which is not bad, but this is much richer. But you must must must get an unabridged copy, and not every abridged copy will tell you it’s abridged, because it’s way out of copyright and the publishers don’t feel they have to tell you anything.
Rachel: The abridged version normally cuts out his conversion, which rips the heart out of the whole book.
Greg: Yeah, as unnecessary because this is an adventure story.
I’m going to recommend now rather than next time a book by Dr. Gary North called Millennialism and Social Theory. Why? Read it and find out. No, there is too much. I cannot sum up. We’ll talk more about this in the future.
Emily: Sounds good. Thank you both for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. Thank you to you, our listeners. We appreciate you tuning in.
You can find us on YouTube, Rumble, and any of your favorite podcast catchers. If there’s a place where we should be and you can not find us there, please let us know. You can email us at haltingtowardzion@gmail.com.
A big thank you also to our financial supporters. You guys are the bomb diggity. Thank you for keeping the show rolling. We appreciate you. Good night, friends.
Scripture: Genesis 1:26-28
Recommendations:
Emily: A Tale of Two Kings: God’s Story of Redemption by Gloria Furman
Rachel: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
Greg: Millennialism and Social Theory by Gary North