The Nicene Creed teaches us that Jesus Christ is both fully man and fully God. “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not created …and became incarnate, and became man”. John 3:16 tells us that God did this because He loved us.
And I cannot think of a higher honour that God could have placed on man, and the value of man, than to become a man in order to redeem us.
This is the difference the gospel makes. It elevates man. It tells us that humanity matters. It acknowledges that man is uniquely the image of God and worth preserving. Worth sustaining.
When we talk about our worldview, which is the thing I am about to do, the first question might be, “What is a worldview?” The second question might be, “Why does it matter?”
Our worldview is our overall understanding of reality. The way we think things really are.
Perhaps you’ve heard it said of someone that they see the world through rose-coloured glasses. That’s a worldview. The expression is used of someone who sees everything as, well, rosie. That is, they see the best in people and things.
Another way to understand what it means to have a worldview is with the metaphor of a map. You’re driving along the road with Google Maps installed on your phone, and it says you’re at a crossroads with a monument to your left. You look out your window, and you see the monument. The map corresponds with reality.
Another way to describe a worldview is as a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle with a picture of the completed puzzle on the box.
Having a worldview is inescapable. It’s the means by which we navigate the world we live in and answers four very important questions.
- Who am I?
- What is my function or purpose in this world?
- What is wrong with the world (or my job, or my hair, or my neighbour)? and,
- How do I fix it?
While there are a multitude of worldviews circulating at any one time, they all boil down to two. A worldview that acknowledges the one true God as revealed in scripture, and a secular worldview, of which evolution is the current reigning queen.
We can distinguish these two worldviews by asking the questions above.
Who am I?
According to Genesis 1:27, man was created in God’s image and the crowning act of His creation.
So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them. (Genesis 1:27)
A biblical worldview enables us to say, “I am a man or, I am a woman, designed and created by God.”
An evolutionary worldview looks out the window and sees it as an assemblage of moving parts. Man is just the random pop and fizz of neutrons and protons banging into each other. Man is accidental. Man is the result of time and chance acting on matter.
While a biblical worldview elevates man as being the crowning act of God’s creation.
An evolutionary worldview, and all of her children, does just the opposite. It demotes man to little more than either a beast or a machine. The baby you’re holding in your arms and the grandchildren around your table are an accident.
With enough creative storytelling, evolution works for many people because when I look out my window, I can readily agree that man is often a beast. The idea of man as a machine works because I can see all the moving parts and even swap them out if needed.
In ages past, evolution at least had the merit of being something you could point to. Namely, your biology. It was bad biology, but at least it had gonads. But because the direction of an evolutionary worldview is always downward, always involves a demotion of man, we now live in a world that cannot even define the beast. After all, what is a woman?
Your worldview at this point has significant consequences for everything that follows, starting with your purpose.
What is my purpose?
In Genesis, God goes on to describe the activity of man.
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. (Genesis 1:28)
Be productive, multiply, exercise dominion. There’s a scary word. Dominion.
The specific task of our first parents gives proper shape and boundaries to that dominion.
Just as God had created a garden in Eden, He now places the man and the woman in that garden and tells them to keep and guard it (Genesis 2:8, 15). This will necessarily mean expanding the garden and making it more and more fruitful.
So, in addition to man’s dignified status, he also has a high calling. Imitating the God in whose image he has been made, man is to engage in productive labour for the benefit of his neighbour and himself.
In an evolutionary worldview, man is reduced to an accidental beast of burden.
And so his purpose or function is also reduced and demoted. His purpose is survival. Food, shelter (comfort) and pleasure. In society, his productivity is reduced to a cog in the machinery, and his task is to respond to the demands of the machinery. Stand here, press this button.
And, if man is simply a cog in a larger machine, just another ox treading out the grain, then it follows that some cogs are less fit for purpose than others. Some cogs can be justifiably thrown in the bin. Having passed their use-by date, some oxen can be taken out of the barn and shot. No harm, no foul.
What’s wrong with the world?
The next question to test our own worldview is to ask what the problems are.
A biblical worldview reads that man is sinful and that his sinfulness has corrupted the world around him. This is easily verifiable by looking out the window. The puzzle pieces fit the image on the box. Here, the word of God corresponds with reality.
On this fact, Romans 3 is worth quoting at length.
There is none that understandeth, there is none that seeketh after God. They are all gone out of the way, they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.
Their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips: Whose mouth is full of cursing and bitterness: Their feet are swift to shed blood: Destruction and misery are in their ways: And the way of peace have they not known: There is no fear of God before their eyes. (Romans 3:10-18)
In an evolutionary worldview, the problem is also man’s sin, which, again, with some creative storytelling and some redefinition, can be seen out my window. Man is a cancer on the climate and the environment, or he is underdeveloped, or there are way too many of us.
Like a beast in the field, he needs proper handling and fencing. Which leads us to the final question we might ask to determine what worldview we are operating under.
How do we fix the problem?
An evolutionary worldview prescribes more education and more government.
Man needs to be trained and controlled. Training means moulding or coercing mankind to fit the machine he is living in from one generation to the next. Control can take on many forms, including removing the right to private property, dictating your earnings, licensing your travel, right down to controlling your reproduction. One of the ways to control the population, for example, is to simply remove the least useful, needed or wanted cogs.
Examples can be multiplied; you don’t need to use your imagination. Just look out your window. Again, the trajectory is always a demotion. Man is worth less until he finally becomes worthless.
By contrast, a biblical worldview does not advocate getting rid of man but getting rid of the stain of sin. This, Jesus did by becoming man and taking that sin upon Himself.
He Himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed. (1 Peter 2:24)
Mankind is broken, but he is valued, treasured and loved. Man is wicked, but he is not beyond repair. Man has lost his way, but he has not lost his purpose. The image is damaged, but he is still the image of God.
One of these worldviews brings hope and life. It elevates man as well worth the effort of redeeming and preserving. The other, a secular, humanistic, relativistic and material worldview, demotes men to disposable, shapeless objects, and leads them to whimper in despair, just as they did in the last days of the Roman Empire, “I was not, I am not, I care not.”
One worldview slowly crushes and degrades mankind, the other dignifies man beyond imagination by granting him brotherhood and communion with God in the flesh. God, the light and life of men.