JRS 78 THE ORIGIN OF MAN 5/31/2026 SELECTED SCRIPTURES JESSE RANDOLPH David Wells, a theologian from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary outside of Boston, He wrote this not too long ago. “Modernity stokes the fires of human pride by simultaneously marginalizing God and elevating the self as an alternative to God. It is in the self that meaning and morality are sought. And its authority is rendered absolute by the fact that it typically finds no substantial connectedness in the world and hence is simply left to itself. Defiance of God is quite unnecessary; he has been quietly replaced in a spiritual coup d’etat. The sun is now in eclipse, its bright light blocked by the impenetrable darkness of the self. The modern self has experienced the exhilaration of the complete freedom to choose a destiny without reference to God, without a thought to what is ultimately right or, for that matter, what anyone else may think or how they might be affected. In most quarters, however, this brief exhilaration has passed, and a weariness of soul has set in as the self creaks beneath the weight of all the functions it is now being called upon to serve. The tension, anxiety, and bewilderment that usually follow have become the calling cards of modernity.” I selected that quote from Wells, to kick off this year’s Summer in the Systematics study because it really highlights the heart of the topic we’ll be getting into all summer long as we gather here on Sunday nights and study biblical anthropology or the doctrine of man. Mankind has always been obsessed with self. That’s the very heart and the very root of the sin of pride. It’s the sin which a lot of the world will celebrate when the clock strikes midnight tonight but it’s a sin which, in reality has always been paraded and it’s really been pervasive since the fall of Adam. But never until our day, has man’s prideful pursuit of self, self-care, self-promotion, self-love, self-worship, been as openly promoted and patted on the head as it is today. And we’re seeing the fruit of it now, are we not? We most certainly are. The ways in which we’ve been created and designed are now regularly being challenged. Long-settled terms and definitions are now being re-defined. Long-established boundaries and guardrails for society and for mankind are being challenged. And what the Bible teaches about mankind, about humanity, about the world in which we live and our purpose in it, has long been thrown out the window having succumbed, in most circles to an anti-God, anti-Bible, anti-Christ spirit of the age. As Carl Trueman notes, “Our world is not characterized by a disillusioned indifference to values originally grounded in religious faith. Rather, it often seems to revel in an ecstatic destruction of all that was once considered sacred.” Well this year as we launch year five of Summer in the Systematics by studying biblical Anthropology we’re going to get back to the basics, to biblical basics on the doctrine of man. This is a fascinating topic. This is an essential topic. This is a timely topic, especially when we consider the days in which we are living. As Owen Strachan has noted, “If the major issue of the sixteenth century was that of acceptance, how many may be forgiven by God, (he’s referring to the doctrine of justification) and the major issue of the twentieth century was that of authority, whether the Bible is inerrant. Then the major issue of our time is that of Anthropology. Does the human person live in an ordered cosmos and have an appointed identity, or does he make his own identity in a world without God? Beyond the finer points of the various debates we face today, this is the question of our age.” And Strachan is right. As we start this study of biblical Anthropology, that is the stated premise and assumption of all that we’re going to look through this next 10 weeks that this is the central question of our age. I believe that for theologians and for pastors alike and for church members and your own children coming up alike. This will be the quesiton of our age. Less and less do we hear debates raging these days, they are out there but not the primary debate, are questions about are you pre trib or are you post trib. Or will the Holy Spirit have influence during the Millennium. And more and more the questions believers are being faced with today relate to the matters touching upon biblical Anthropology. Things like the value and the integrity of human life, When life begins, the meaning of marriage, the difference between the terms sex and gender and then this ever elusive and slippery term, identity. By the way, if you happen to be a visitor here this evening this is not the normal diet of what we get here on a morning here at Indian Hills. Normally, we preach through books of the Bible verse by verse, line-upon-line. But, in the summer months we change things up for a few months and we take on one of the traditional categories of systematic theology. Four summers ago it was the Doctrine of God, Theology Proper. Three summers ago it was the Doctrine of the Bible, Bibliology. Two summers ago it was the doctrine of Christ, Christology. Last summer it was the doctrine of the Spirit, Pneumatology. And now in the summer of 2026 we’re covering the Doctrine of Man, Anthropology. So back to our subject at hand. Let’s start with settling on a basic definition of what is Anthropology? Well anthropology is the doctrine of man. And specifically, man’s relation to God and the world in which God has placed him. That word anthropology comes from the Greek word anthropos which means man and logos which means word or discourse. So anthropology is a word about man or a discourse about man or, saying that more smoothly, the study of man. Now that term anthropology has to be fleshed out further because there are a variety of different fields of anthropology out there. So we want to be clear what we’re talking about all summer long here. There’s the discipline of physical anthropology which studies the physical body of man, or the physical makeup of man. Why do certain people groups have certain bone structures or hair color? That sort of thing. There’s the study of cultural anthropology, which studies the social structures of different people groups. This would be that study that looks at why certain cultures and peoples are patriarchal versus matriarchal. Or why in certain cultures, family groups are larger with more children, and others are smaller. Then there’s the discipline of material anthropology which studies things like the tools, and the weapons, and the clothing that people use. Why are certain people nomadic? Why do certain people avoid wearing certain colors in their clothing? Why do other people groups adorn themselves with certain jewelry? Well, we’re not going to be studying any of those topics this summer. If you’d like to learn more of that, you can sign up for a class at Southeast or UNL. We are going to be studying rather biblical anthropology. That’s what we’re defining here. The doctrine of Man. It’s also referred to as theological anthropology. As I’ve already mentioned this is a timely, beyond timely, a very timely topic for today because we do live in a time of anthropological chaos. In Psalm 8:4, I read in the Scripture reading this evening, David was asking, this was a few thousand years ago, what is man? And as he did so, he was thinking quite naturally about his own existence. The big word for that is he was thinking ontologically. David was thinking ontologically. He was thinking about His existence. And he was thinking about how his own existence relates to the existence of the God that he knew was there and how he relates to that God. So that’s David and David’s a shepherd. David is a shepherd king thinking thoughts like that. But now, all these years later the driving ethos of the people who we live among and around is that we are autonomous, we’re independent, that we’re unrestrained, that we’re unaccountable beings, that we have no supernatural origin or no transcendent or eternal purpose, no supreme being to whom we will one day give an account. Now, how did we get here? How do we get from David in Psalm 8:4, a shepherd king asking questions like what is man, thinking ontologically to finding ourselves in this state of affairs we live in today? Well, a lot of this has to do with the progress or the downward progress of the development of human thought. In recent centuries, we have changed as a people, as a world about how we think about ourselves, about deity and relationship between the two. For much of human history, mankind all over the world thought in terms like David here. They were asking ontological questions. Questions about existence. Questions about being. The hunter in the middle of the Siberian forest in the year 400 BC was probably asking questions of themselves like why am I here? Who put me here? What am I supposed to do here? Those were the questions that naturally pervaded. But then came this phase of history philosophical history known as the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment took place between the late 1600s and moved on into the late 1700s, trickled into the early 1800s. And it was marked by different philosophers like Kant and Rousseau and Voltaire and Locke. And through the Elightenment the question that was being asked shifted from ontology, the who am I question, to epistemology which is the how do I know things question. How do I know what I know, type of question. So, by the time of the American Revolution and in the earliest years of the American republic, there was already a shift of thought in thinking that was happening in the world. With more people asking the question not so much like David, what is man or is there a God or do I believe in God, but more so why do I believe in God? And what makes me believe in God and are there other ways I should be thinking about why I believe in God. Now this point in history, I’m at the early 1800s now, most would have still held to some form of theism, meaning some belief in the existence of some God somewhere. But there was a clear shift in in that already happening. A shift which only intensified in the 19th century as the 1800s wore on, and with the introduction of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis, which we can certainly now see a century and a half later, led not only to the decline of theism, or the belief in God, but also to a rise in belief in man which would be known as humanism. So now we get to the turn of the twentieth century, into the early 1900s with Darwinian evolutionary model becoming more and more entrenched in scientific circles and academic circles man’s view of himself and his potential is reaching its peak. Humanistic thought is on the rise. It’s at its apex. But then a number of different events happened in the early 1900s which really rocked the foundations of humanism. One of those is World War I, and the other is the rise of Nazi Germany. History-shaping events like those caused people to really question when this rise of humanism was otherwise at its peak, whether man is actually good and the significance of human values. And it was during this time that humanism really took a hit. Well after humanism hit its peak and then started declining, then entered nihilism which denies all human values and looks at existence as utterly meaningless. We usually associate nihilism with Friedrich Nietzsche, who is famous for declaring that God is dead. Here’s what he said, by the way. This is not merely him making a declaration. You can see here that this was his sincere wish that God would be dead. He says “After Buddha was dead, his shadow was still shown for centuries in a cave. A tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead, but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown. And we, we still have to vanquish his shadow too.” So that is nihilism, which still finds its way in certain book discussions in coffee shops in places like Berkeley and Austin and Madison and probably Lincoln. But it is not the dominant secular worldview today. Rather today, what we see is the dominate secular world view is some form of postmodernism. A worldview that is anchored in the denial of the existence of absolute truth and which is committed to the idea that all meaning and all ideas, all knowledge, they’re all socially derived. They’re all birthed out of the environment in which we were raised. Postmodernism challenges theism. Postmodernism challenges humanism. Postmodernism challenges nihilism. And at the core of its challenge is its question how can we be really sure about anything? That’s the Postmodernism question. How can we be sure about anything. I mentioned a few moments ago as I was quoting Owen Strachan, that anthropology, our study for the summer is really the critical issue of the day. And this is why. The days in which you and I are living in this really burnt-over period where we’re living in the middle of the fallout of these different eras of history and philosophy and human thought, we’re living in the middle of this postmodern mess, where no one is really sure about anything. That is the time in which we live. Very few are willing to stand up and make propositional truth claims. Very few are willing to stand up and say things square and say things true out of fear of being labeled intolerant, or unloving, or uneducated, or backwards or anything like that. Strachan again is helpful here. He writes, “The prevailing view in critical circles today is that mankind is a blank slate, evolved from an eons-old combustion of gases. Humanity has no divine origin, but an accidental one. No creative figure guided the human race’s formation or shaped the human person’s identity. Chaos and randomness account for the order such as it is, that we find before us. The human race is not really distinct from the beasts; we are a higher animal, nothing more. We have no greater story, no telos, no ordained end to which we are traveling. Atoms collide, and so does mankind. Because of our godless origin, we have no greater body of ethics, no summons to a certain code of conduct. We are here; we die; we dissolve into nothingness. Nothingness is whence we came; nothingness is whither we go. Until then, we create our realities; we become who we want to be.” And then with that being the backdrop of the times in which we live, and that being the outlook of our times, we have this stack of issues that’s now landing daily in our laps, and more and more coming our way. We are being asked questions and facing questions like how should we think about the technological advances in our day? How ought we think about AI? How ought we think about the legitimacy of the various spheres in which government’s intruding more and more into our lives? How ought we think about pandemics, or procreation, or sterilization, or contraception, or abortion, or euthanasia, or genetic engineering, or gender issues, or the definition of marriage? The list goes on and on. See David’s seemingly-simple question in Psalm 8:4 what is man, it’s proven itself to be a timeless one, and it’s actually a staggering one. Let’s take back a step up in our own thought about this question that David’s asking what is man. The fact that David in his humanity and the fact that we are able to as human beings, as image bearers, that he was able to wrestle with such a question. The fact that we are able to sit like we’re sitting here this evening with me communicating the thoughts I am, and you being able to track them and process them and think through them with me, it actually says something about man, and it says something about mankind. As Trueman again notes, he says “To ask the question ‘What is man?’ is to reveal the staggering nature of what it means to be human even in advance of any answer. No other creature on the face of the planet can ask such a question of itself. No amoeba pauses to reflect on the nature of amoebic existence. And as close to human beings as they are in many ways, there is no evidence to suggest that chimpanzees and gorillas ever meditate upon the meaning of their existence. Only man has the capacity to pose the question about his own nature and significance.” That’s right. And our ability to ask that question, what is man, and our ability this summer to study anthropology, not only reveals something about who we are, that we can process at that level as these created beings. But importantly as we’re going to see this summer, this study is going to reveal who our God is. James Montgomery Boice is helpful on this point. He helps us see that one of the reasons it’s important to study anthropology or the doctrine of man, is that when we study man biblically, we are actually studying God. He says “Mankind reveals aspects of God’s being that are not seen in the rest of the created order but must be seen if we are to understand God.” And then he says “since we cannot have a genuine knowledge of God unless it is accompanied by a corresponding knowledge of ourselves, we must at least know ourselves, made in God’s image, fallen and yet redeemed, if we would truly know and reverence our Creator.” Well that was all background. Just to get us sort of some runway on a ramp into our study for this evening, this first session of our study of anthropology this summer as we look at the the origin of man. That’s our topic for this evening, the origin of man. Very foundational, very basic study this evening as we look to build out a biblical doctrine of man or anthropology this summer. We start with the question of the origin of man. Really with this question, where did we come from? That’s our question for tonight, asking a simple question, one I’m sure you who are parents, who are grandparents have talked to your kids or your grandchildren about it at some point and surely one you have wrestled with at some point in your life. Where did we come from? Now I’ve got a super basic outline for this evening if you have worksheet or one of the half sheets, it’s going to be this. First we are going to look at, this is your first blank, several UNBIBLICAL VIEWS OF MAN’S ORIGIN. And then second, we will be looking at THE BIBLICAL VIEW OF MAN’S ORIGIN. Singular. The biblical view of man’s origin. Let’s start with the UNBIBLICAL VIEWS OF MAN’S ORIGIN. Now as we get into this I should say that I don’t plan to go into some sort of full-on Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham presentation tonight. That is far above my pay grade. Those folks are great at AIG and also at the Institute for Creation Research. And they can give a much more robust presentation working through this scientific dimensions of this questions of man’s origin. Tonight’s presentation is going to be far more basic, far more rudimentary and more so focusing on what the Bible says or doesn’t say about the origin of man. And I think I’m on solid ground there when I say that we’re going to look specifically not at slides of pictures or images. We’re going to be looking at the Bible because as Ramm notes here, “It is, to speak as a theologian, the task of the scientist to explore the works or creation of God, and that of the theologian the speech of God in the Bible.” We’re going to be focusing more on the speech of God in the Bible, not so much visual depictions or me trying to pretend I’m a scientist up here this evening. We’re going to start here. This is our first unbiblical view of man’s origin. Atheistic Evolution. The view of Atheistic Evolution is one that is wholly unsupernatural in its perspective. It goes back to Charles Darwin there are others as well but he is sort of the poster boy for Atheistic Evolution. And in his very famous work, The Origin of Species, he laid out the tenets of his evolutionary hypothesis. This includes variation results in some offspring being superior to their parents. A struggle for existence eliminates the weaker, less fit varieties. A process of natural selection is constantly at work by which the fittest survive. Through heredity, new and better qualities produced by variation are passed on and gradually accumulated. And then new species come into existence by this method, after the passage of sufficient time. Now again I don’t plan to pick apart Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis tonight. That’s not for tonight’s purposes all that significant. One thing I will mention is that this theory, as it was first articulated by Darwin in the mid 1800s has taken on, it’s evolved itself. There have been many who have taken the baton from him and articulated something like what he has articulated. But at it’s heart this is an anti-supernatural theory. An anti-God theory. And the idea is that through some combination of atoms, and motion, and time, and chance and circumstance, the world as we know it today was fashioned together over billions and billions of years. Robert Lightner, not an evolutionist, he’s a theologian and a good one. He says “What, then, is the answer of evolution to the question of man’s origin? It is that he came into existence through a completely natural process, having his beginning in lifeless matter.” So according to evolutionary theory everything ultimately came out of nothing. You understand that is a ludicrous statement on its face to say that everything came out of nothing. Since nothing by definition is incapable of producing anything, let alone producing everything. Nothing is literally nothing and so nothing produces more “nothing.” Not everything. Not anything. Well, Darwin’s evolutionary theory has been, as I mentioned, refined and developed through the years. There have been men like this, George Gaylord Simpson. He was an American paleontologist. He said “all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely naturalistic or materialistic factors. Therefore, mankind is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind.” And then you have one of the more modern evolutionist, Richard Dawkins who says “In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, and other people are going to get lucky; and you won’t find any rhyme or reason to it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference.” So it’s all random, it’s all purposeless. Like Thomas Hobbes once said, he lived some two hundred years before Darwin, “life is nasty, and brutish, and short.” There’s sadly some significance to this line of thinking, whether it be Darwin or Hobbs, many many years before, or Dawkins. Because if there is no God who created this world, then that means very simply that man is not accountable to anyone. And there are no moral absolutes to which man must adhere. He’s just floating along for his 70 year or maybe 80 year or maybe 90 years, heading nowhere in particular. And then the wick of his candle is eventually blown out and poof, that’s it. Nothingness. That’s Atheistic Evolution in a nutshell. Then we have Theistic Evolution. That’s another view of man’s origins that falls into the unbiblical category. This is the teaching that in the created realm, plants, and animals, and mankind, we all eventually and gradually evolved from some lesser form over many many years. But what this view also teaches, and you can see it there in the word Theistic, is that somehow God was involved in the process of evolution. God supervised the process of evolution. Theistic evolutionists, they generally accept Darwin’s evolutionary hypothesis. And what they’ll do is try to square it with the Bible and fit the square peg in the round hole. Individuals and groups who hold the theistic evolution. Some of these you’ll be familiar with, would be William Lane Craig of Biola University, C.S. Lewis fell into this camp. BioLogos is a nonprofit group that was founded by a Christian geneticist named Francis Collins. The Roman Catholic Church has officially embraced this as their position on origins. Well this view is rife with problems as well. Whereas atheistic evolution, what we looked at first, as its name indicates, fully denies that God even exists, or that God played any process in origins. Theistic evolution levels a different attack on God’s Word, by denying ultimately the historicity of Adam. Here’s William Lane Craig, I just mentioned his name, who in 2021, wrote a book titled In Quest of the Historical Adam. And in that he writes “the primordial history of Genesis 1–11 includes elements which, if taken literally, would be so extraordinary as to be clearly false. Take, for example, magical trees with fruit that, if eaten, would impart the knowledge of good and evil or immortality, or the presence of a talking snake that tempts the man and woman to sin.” You can hear in Craig’s words not only his denial of what the Bible plainly teaches, but really his disdain for the plain revelation of Scripture. Take out the word magical there and I’m good with his summery of what he thinks is happening in Genesis 1-11. There is a tree with real fruit and if it’s eaten, it would impart the knowledge of good and evil. There is a talking snake and he does tempt man and woman to sin. Yep that’s exactly what was recorded in the book of Genesis. But Craig says, take that literally, it’s so extraordinary as to be clearly false. Now if Craig were right in his assessment, he’s not right, but if he were, that would mean that the Bible is not inerrant. Because the Bible presents Adam as an actual person. Not a mystical figure, not a figment of our imagination, but a historical figure. So while atheistic evolution, what we studied earlier, outright denies the existence of God, Theistic evolution like that presented by Craig here, it undermines the very veracity of the Word of God, which really is in no better. The reality is, the Bible itself forecloses this full notion of theistic evolution. Because the Bible teaches that mankind is derived from a true and a real historical human ancestor, one who God formed from the dust of the ground, as we’re told in Genesis 2:7. “Then Yahweh God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and so the man became a living being.” That is pretty cut and dried. There’s no evolution here. There’s no moving from one status within the created realm and evolving up to the next status. God formed man out of the dust of the ground. So we’ve looked at Atheistic Evolution. We’ve looked at Theistic Evolution. Next is Progressive Creationism. You might have heard it presented as the Day-Age Theory. That’s another word for Progressive Creationism, the Day-Age Theory. And what this theory of origins does is that it tries to harmonize the seemingly old age of the earth, with modern evolutionary teachings, and also with the teachings of the Bible. This view, Progressive Creationism, it acknowledges the direct creation of man by God. But it rejects a literal six day creation. What it does is it states that the days of creation that are recorded in Genesis are not to be understood literally as 24-hour periods, six 24-hour periods, but rather as ages. So each day in the Genesis account according to this view, represents thousands, or perhaps millions, or perhaps even billions of years. Now there are a number of different objections to this view and again I have to be brief here so I’ll mentions just a couple. But here’s one. Exodus 20:9-11 draws a very clear parallel and analogy between a person working six days, and resting on the seventh, and God creating six days and resting on the seventh. “Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath of Yahweh your God; in it you shall not do any work, you or your son or your daughter, your male or your female slave or your cattle or your sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days (here’s the parallel, the link, the analogy) Yahweh made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day; therefore Yahweh blessed the sabbath day and made it holy.” This whole picture here demands six 24-hour days. Not prolonged ages but six literal 24-hour days. Further under this theory of Progressive Creationism which again, equates the days of Genesis to long ages, ages that span millions or maybe billions of years, presumably there would have been some sort of death in that model that would have proceeded the Fall. Here’s what I mean by that. At least in that model, one ladybug, or one blade of grass would have died before it reached it’s 12 billionth birthday. It must have happened. But Romans 5:12 tells us that there was no death in the world until Adam sinned. “Through one man sin entered into the world.” So the fact that the Day-Age Theory or Progressive Creationism at least creeps open the door to the possibility of the existence of sin before Adam’s Fall, is yet another reason it fails. Here’s another one. The Gap Theory. This is another one of these unbiblical perspectives or views of the origin of man, the Gap Theory. This one has been taught in a number of different ways. But in essence if you look up here at the words of Genesis 1:1,2, where it says “in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void and darkness was over the surface of the deep.” What this view theorizes is that there are billions of years between the word “earth” and “and.” So in verse 1, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, then there were billions and billions of years and then you get to the earth being formless and void and darkness hovering over the surface of the deep. So there’s a gap, a 13,14 billion year gap according to some theorists. And then what happens is the world God that God created in Genesis 1:1 is destroyed, and then it’s recreated in the six-day creation account later in Genesis 1. This is one way that those who hold to this view, try to account for the fact that the earth appears very old. So they’ll argue that there was an original creation. It was all destroyed by God. And then there were billions of years for it to just start looking older and older and older, and then God created the earth in those 6 literal days, but it was a recreation of a very old earth. Well a major issue with that theory and a problem with that theory is the text of Scripture itself. The grammar of verses 1 and 2 here, it really doesn’t allow for any sort of gap of any sort. Verse 1 here is an independent clause. And then verse 2 is composed of these three circumstantial clauses which are explaining the condition of the earth when God began to create everything as mentioned in verse 1. These are interconnected in other words. You can’t so easily divorce them to migrate into it or to move into it some multi-billion year gap. The Hebrew language doesn’t allow it. So there’s no gap grammatically. There’s no room for evolutionary theory based on the very words that God gave Moses to write here. So according to the Bible none of these theories that we’ve just run through. Atheistic Evolution, Theistic Evolution, Progressive Creationism, The Gap Theory, actually captures the reality of man’s origin. Each is indeed unbiblical. That takes us to our second point this evening, where we’re going to now look at the THE BIBLICAL VIEW OF MAN’S ORIGIN. The biblical view of man’s origin is what is most properly known as Literal Creationism. This view holds, simply that God created everything in six literal 24-hour periods. And as He did so, He did so directly, meaning by His very divine hand and He did so instantaneously. And He did, and there’s room for debate here, somewhere around 6,000 years ago. You’ll lose jobs by taking that position. No secular faculty will ever hire you for taking that position. Your friends and neighbors who hold to some of their form of evolutionary theory will think you’re crazy for taking that position because we’ve been steeped in some 150 years plus years of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Or you’re not allowed to be so crazy as to say that the world in which we live is but 6,000 years. But where we are starting as in all things is with the authority of the Word of God. And men smarter than me and with more expertise than me have tracked through going back through genealogies and such, how old the earth actually is and it would be somewhere in that 6,000 year range. Some might say 7, I’ve heard some credibly argue for 10, I’m going to stay in the safe space here of around 6,000. And that’s all based on piecing together the actual biblical record. But again the name of the game here is biblical authority. As Floyd Barackman notes here, “the facts of man’s origin, nature, and destination cannot be known apart from what God has revealed in His Word. Any opinion that is not grounded on and governed by this revelation will be conjectural and faulty. As human beings, we should seek to learn what the Creator has revealed about mankind. As saved people, we should accept this revelation as absolute truth and base our understanding on it.” That’s right. And then there’s this observation, from Anthony Hoekema. He says “One of the basic presuppositions of the Christian view of man is belief in God as the Creator, which leads to the view that the human person does not exist autonomously or independently, but as a creature of God.” That all comes not from Hoekema, but ultimately from the revelation of God’s Word. Well this view, literal creationism, teaches consistent with the inspired words of the Bible, that the first man Adam, was created directly and supernaturally by God. On Day Six of the creation account, God announced His intention to create mankind, and what He said He would accomplish was in fact accomplished. Look at the language here of Genesis 1:26-27. “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness, so that they will have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ (And then now look at how quickly it moves into what God actually did in verse 27) And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Well the account then continues where we see that God formed man out of the dust and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being. That’s picked up here in Genesis 2:7. “Then Yahweh God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and so the man became a living being.” In both of these passages, Genesis 1:26,27 and here in Genesis 2:7, the verb forms in Hebrew, tell us that the creation of man was both direct and immediate. There was no process involved. There certainly was no room for evolution to occur during the immediate and direct creation of man by God. In Genesis 1:27 which we just looked at, the verb for “create” is bara. And it suggests immediate, supernatural creation. And here in Genesis 2:7 where it says that Yahweh God formed man of dust, the Hebrew verb is yatsar. And again it suggests immediate, supernatural creation. In neither case was there a process, evolutionary or otherwise involved in God’s formation of man. So the language of Genesis itself affirms a literal creation. Not only that we have Jesus affirming His conviction of the literalness of the Genesis account, when He said, in Matthew 19:4,5, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE, and said, ‘FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH.” So Jesus was a literal creationist. Now, another thing to highlight from the literal account of creation in Genesis, is that the body of the first man, Adam, was created from previously-existing matter namely, dust, dirt. Genesis 2:7 says “Then Yahweh God formed man of dust from the ground.” That is not poetic language. That’s not figurative language. That is literal language. Man was taken from the actual earth. The word is afar in Hebrew. The actual dust, the actual dirt. And we know also from other places in the Old Testament, that is the place that man will return. Genesis 3:19. “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That’s God saying to Adam these words as He imparts the curse upon Adam. Or consider these words from Solomon, in Ecclesiastes 3:20. “All came from the dust, and all return to the dust.” Now note. Though God fashioned Adam out of dirt, dust from the ground using previously-existing material. The very dirt or dust that He created on day 1 of creation. So you have five-day-old dust here that He’s making Adam from. God’s acts in creating man, though used from an existing substance, was no less creative, no less direct, no less supernatural, than when he created something out of nothing, like when He created the heavens and the earth, ex nihilo, out of nothing. Now as it relates to what we’re told in Genesis 2:7, that God breathed into the man’s nostrils the breath of life. What that is saying is that Adam’s spirit was created and his soul came to life as he was breathed into directly by God. That’s what’s being described here. First, God animated Adam’s body by imparting to him a human spirit. That’s picked up in one sense here in Zechariah 12:1 which says that “God stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him.” That’s what God did with Adam as the first man. And then God imparted upon Adam His divine image. He made man and He made Adam, He makes us, in His image, Genesis 1:26. We’re going to get into that next Sunday night. And finally God gave the man spiritual life, that is He gave him life as a spirit being, as He “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” Fascinating study and topic, we do not have time to get into this tonight, is whether animals, what do we think about animals. And what has God given them. We know He’s given them life. We know there’re references to them having the spirit of life at various points in the Old Testament. The breath of life I should say. What does that mean? Are they image bearers? Will they go to heaven? Do all dogs go to heaven? Stay tuned. Here in (Genesis 2:7.) We see the union of Adam’s body made from dust. And his spirit, his human spirit, being breathed into his nostrils by God. It wasn’t until the spirit of Adam joined his body, that Adam had any sort of existence, true existence, true personhood. Before then, he was nothing. He wasn’t evolved. He wasn’t evolving. No. He had no physical life apart from having spiritual life, and apart from being made God’s image bearer, until the breath of life was breathed into him, He was not alive. It was only when his physical being was joined to the spirit God had given him that Adam became what’s called in Hebrew a nephesh, a soul. We’ll be looking at that more in the next couple of weeks. The relationship between soul and spirit and the image of God. Until then though, I think it’s important to note we’ve been focusing up to this point on Adam, this man who was created directly and instantaneously and supernaturally by God. Well woman was too. Woman was also created by God in a different way but in a way that was similar. The biblical account is also very clear about the creation of woman. God stated in Genesis 1:26, that He wanted to make image bearers. “Let us make man in Our image.” And then in the very next verse, (Genesis 1:27) we’re told that “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” Here’s Genesis 5:2 asserting essentially the same thing. God “created them male and female, and He blessed them and named them Man in the day when they were created.” And then when we come over to Genesis 2, we see this in Genesis 2:21,22. “Yahweh God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then He took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place. And Yahweh God fashioned the rib, which He had taken from the man, into a woman.” So from Adam’s rib, Eve was taken. It’s possible that God used more than just a rib, maybe even some of the flesh surrounding the rib to create Eve. Hence the expression in Genesis 2:23 where Adam says “this one finally is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh.” That might mean there was some rib adjacent flesh that was used to compose Eve. But the real point here is that the first woman, Eve, was given individual existence by a special creative act of God. God created her after He created Adam on day six. The order is laid out for us very clearly in Genesis, but in other places in the Bible, as well. For 1 Timothy 2:13, Paul notes that “it was Adam who was first formed, and then Eve.” And like Adam in his creation who was created from the dust, Eve was made from previously-existing material. In her case, Adam’s rib and maybe some rib adjacent flesh. 1 Corinthians 11:8. “For man does not originate from woman, but woman from man.” And again God’s act of creating the woman was no less creative than if she had been formed out of nothing. It was still a divinely creative act. In fact the word in Genesis 2:22 which describes God fashioning Eve from Adam’s rib. The verb is bana and it means “to build.” It’s synonymous with that word bara in Genesis 1:27 where it says that God created them, male and female. The point is this was, these were both, whether it was the man being created or the woman being created, direct, creative, divine acts by God. Now when God fashioned the woman from Adam’s rib, He did so that she might fulfill Adam’s need of companionship. That comes out in Genesis 2:18 where He says “It is not good for the man to be alone.” The first man needed a companion. One who was like him, yet different. One with whom he could have a loving, and intimate relationship. The one by whom he would be completed. But Adam needed not only a companion, he needed a helper. And even though what I’m about to say would cause your typical Women’s Study major to shoot through the roof, the reality is that God made woman to be man’s helper, his ezer. He couldn’t have said it more plainly than He does here in Genesis 2:18. “I will make him a helper suitable for him.” Eve was made to be a helper who would complement Adam to correspond to him in every way. Like him she was made in the image of God. But she was created to fulfill a role that no one else could fulfill for him. No other man, no other friend, no other hang out buddy, no other four footed creature like a dog. It was a woman who was to be his helper, his companion. In fact it was after the naming of the animals in Genesis 2:20, that we’re told that “for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.” Meaning though there were animals everywhere, he still didn’t have someone adequate for him, someone compatible to him, somebody corresponding to him, serving as a counterpart to him. That is until God created Eve. So taking into account all that we’ve been working through now, what we see in the Scriptures from the Scriptures, is that taken literally they give this very clear and thorough explanation of the origin of man. And there’s more. Aside from those passages that we’ve already looked at here, there are many other places in the Bible, where the divine origin of man is affirmed. I’ll run through a few of these briefly. Deuteronomy 4:32. “Ask now concerning the former days which were before you, since the day that God created man on the earth.” Isaiah 45:12. This is God speaking in first person. “It is I who made the earth and created man upon it. I stretched out the heavens with My hands, and I commanded all their host.” Psalm 100:3. “Know that Yahweh, He is God; it is He who has made us, and not we ourselves.” Exodus 31:17. “For in six days Yahweh made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day He rested and was refreshed.” Acts 17:26. “He made from one man every nation of mankind to inhabit all the face of the earth.” And then I love this line from Henry Clarence Thiessen in his Lectures on Systematic Theology. He says “Even if evolution could prove its doctrine of the survival of the fittest, it cannot account for the arrival of the first.” That’s right. In other words evolutionary dogma cannot hold a candle to what God has said in His Word about His creation of mankind. So that’s a bit about THE BIBLICAL VIEW OF MAN’S ORIGIN. Now what I’d like us to do in our remaining few minutes here is spend our time now working through a few theological implications of mankind having been created by God. Having his origin in God. For starters, having been created by God and made in the image of God, the reality is, men and women are the most important part of God’s creation. Dogs are great, horses are beautiful, cats are fine. But sitting atop them all, in terms of their value and their purpose is mankind. James Montgomery Boice says “To say that humanity is the most important part of creation might be thought to be a provincial or chauvinistic statement (that is, as if we were fish, we would undoubtedly say that fish were most important). But men and women actually are, and sense themselves to be, higher than forms of the creation around them.” He’s right. Mankind stands at the pinnacle of creation. And as we’ll see in a later study he rules over creation. He has been given dominion over creation. Francis Schaeffer writes “it is as though God put exclamation points here in the creations account to indicate that there is something special about the creation of man.” So that’s one theological reality considers that we are chief in God’s creation. Here’s another theological reality to consider. Man is a creature, yes, but he's also a person. Mankind has personhood. So as the pinnacle of God’s creation we contemplate things. We decide things. We feel things. We have emotions the way that, let’s say a mop or a house plant doesn’t have. We’re different. Right? Men and women, we’re both creatures. We’ve been created by God and we are persons. We have personhood. We are created persons. And that as Anthony Hoekema notes, is the central mystery of man. He says “how can man be both a creature and a person at the same time? To be a creature means absolute dependence on God; to be a person means relative independence. To be a creature means that I cannot move a finger or utter a word apart from God; to be a person means that when my fingers are moved, I move them, and that when words are uttered by my lips, I utter them. To be creatures means that God is the potter and we are the clay. (Rom. 9:21); to be persons means that we are the ones who fashion our lives by our own decisions (Gal. 6:7,8).” Now in any field of secular anthropology, they’re going to ignore the fact entirely that we are creatures because they reject the notion of man having been made by God because they reject the existence of God. But in doing so, they present a very distorted view of man as person only but not as creature. But on the other side of the scale are those who in the realm of biblical anthropology, can find themselves not doing proper justice to the reality of human personhood. And they can present an equally distorted view of man, one that is purely deterministic in its view that the hyper-Calvinist comes to mind, that looks at us and views us as mere puppets, mere robots, with God pulling the strings and pushing the buttons but ignoring the fact that, we as God’s image bearers do have intellect and we do have consciences and we do have wills. We are not mere pawns in this whole world and this existence with no role and no responsibility. As Hoekema notes here we need to embrace both biblical streams of information. Both sources of biblical revelation. Those that speak to our creatureliness and those that speak to our personhood. He says “Though we cannot rationally comprehend how it is possible for the human being to be a creature and a person at the same time, clearly this is what we must think. Denial of either side of this paradox will fail to do justice to the biblical picture. The Bible teaches both man’s creatureliness and man’s personhood. Sometimes it addresses the human being as a creature: for example, when it speaks of God as the potter and man as the clay (Rom. 9:21). More often however, it addresses him or her as a person. ‘Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve’ (Josh. 24:15) ‘We implore you on Christ’s behalf, Be reconciled to God’ (2 Cor. 5:20).” Another theological knot to unravel here as we consider the truth that man has been created by God, is this, that there is really only one race on this earth. The human race. We could make the world a better place, by simply affirming that biblical truth. We know that racism as it exists in human terms has been pervasive in various pockets of world history, but there’s ignorance of the reality biblically speaking that there really is only one race. We all descend from Adam. Acts 17:26 says “He made from one man every nation of mankind to inhabit all the face of the earth.” That is describing the physical unity of the human race. We all trace back to one man and and one woman, Adam and Eve. So there’s that physical descent. There’s also a spiritual unity within the human race, which is based on the physical unity. The physical descent we have from Adam. And by spiritual unity I’m referring to what’s taught in Romans 5, which teaches that Adam’s guilt and his depravity has been transmitted or imputed to every single member of his line, to every member of the human race. Romans 5:12. “Through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men, because all sinned.” And note it’s Adam not Eve who is depicted as the representative of the human race in terms of the transmission of the sin that’s been imparted now to the entire human race. God went to who in the garden when sin was committed? He went to Adam. 1 Corinthians 15:22 says that in Adam all die. Well, it is now then through the physical procreation process, first with Adam and Eve, and then with every subsequent physical union between a man and a woman, that the sin of Adam is passed down to every member of the human race. So Eve plays a part in it as well through the physical conception of the next child. Rolland McCune highlights it this way. He says “while the guilt of Adam’s first sin is imputed immediately (judicially) at conception, the depravity and moral/spiritual pollution of that sin runs down through the genetic bloodlines, i.e., the physical unity of the race from Adam through Eve.” So Adam is the head but Eve and her progeny play a part as well. Here’s a final theological implication to consider stemming from the fact that man has been created by God and that our origin is in God. And that is the reality that God didn’t need to create us in the first place. Let’s remember that truth. God is self-existent. There was perfect love and fellowship among the members of the Trinity going back to eternity past. That’s alluded to by Jesus here in John 17:5 where He says “Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was.” John 17:24, Jesus says to the Father “You loved me before the foundation of the world.” So knowing that, knowing that there was this perfect Trinitarian love and fellowship within the members of the Godhead before the world was, this highlights the fact that God did not need us and had no inherent need to create us. So why did He create us then? The answer is He created us for His glory. God wasn’t lonely. God wasn’t moving on to Plan B in the creation of the world or mankind. God didn’t need us for any reason. But He created us anyway and He did so for His own glory. I’m just going to show you 2 references if you’re taking notes. Israel was created for God’s glory. Isaiah 43:6,7. We are created for His glory. Everything we do is to the praise of His glory, Ephesians 1:11,12. God is the Creator. He made all things. He is worthy of receiving all glory. And I bring that up at the end here because going back to what I covered at the very beginning of the lesson tonight, about how there is so much hopelessness and despair in the world today. The fact that God created us for His glory and all that we are to do is for His glory. That actually invests our lives with an incredible amount of purpose and meaning and significance. To think that God didn’t need us, that He didn’t need to create us, that might for some in our self-esteem-driven generation, lead us to conclude wrongly that we are of no importance at all. But the fact that we have been created to glorify God and that God assigns value to our worship of Him in that it glorifies Him, that gives great significance and great importance and great meaning to the worship that we offer Him. I don’t know what else we would want to chase after with our lives. We’re going to end here with 1 Peter 1:8. It says “And though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory.” We’re back out of the gate for Summer in the Systematics 2026. We’ve gotten off the ground by just looking at a high level at the origin of man. Next Sunday night we’ll keep laying down these building blocks as we get into the study of the image of God in man and the soul, the spirit of man. Let’s pray.