THE MESSAGE OF REVELATION (1)



“THAT YOU ARE MINDFUL OF HIM”

(Psalm 8)

SUBJECT: Biblical Humanism

F.C.F: How do we respond to the wonderful privilege of being human?

PROPOSITION: Since God made us wonderfully, we must live a grateful, grace-filled, and godly life.

INTRODUCTION:

Our psalm is one of the primary sources for a right doctrine of biblical humanism. Biblical humanism is something quite different from secular humanism, in fact, nearly its opposite.

I. SECULAR HUMANISM.

A. Secular humanism assumes that there is no God. Now if there is no God, then the next highest entity on the scale would be, well, let’s see, um…us! So people are the best thing going, and it’s all about us, eventually all about me. Sound familiar? Secular humanism was the big enemy to Christianity that reared its head back in the 1960s and 70s when I was growing up. Secular humanism said there was no God and so, if there is no God, then no Ten Commandments, nor any other absolute moral code except the one that you choose for yourself, and you can change it whenever you want.

B. The intellectual world was moving toward this conclusion in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, but they got stuck on one little wrinkle that they could not overcome: creation. Everybody knew that a wonderful world and universe like the one we live in could not have made itself: that was crazy talk. So they devised a religion that sought to push God to the edge as far as possible—a religion called Deism. In Deism, God made all things (of course, who could deny that), but then God suddenly became completely disinterested and totally left the scene. So people were pretty much free to do as they pleased, except that God would return at the end to judge everyone on their morality. Somehow the devisers of Deism instinctively knew that if they completely removed God with no divine Judgment Day at the end, the result would be the breakdown of society—anarchy!

And then in 1859 Charles Darwin timidly published his book, The Origin of the Species. He explicitly suggested that only plants and animals arose through a process he preferred to call “transmutation.” But on the second to the last page he subtly hinted that humans, too, descended from the animals by the same process. Everybody got the hint, and Darwin was nearly universally blasted across the boards for the insinuation that humans were not specially created but were mere animals like all the rest.

But the critical tide turned quickly. Unbelieving intellectuals saw their chance to dispense with a Creator (and God altogether). Deism died almost immediately, and a strident atheism replaced it. A mere fifteen years later, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche paid Darwin and his theory the highest compliment and declared: “God is dead.”

C. Two kinds of secular humanism arose. There was the hard kind that Nietzsche himself predicted. He foresaw that: “the ‘doctrine that there is no cardinal distinction between man and animal’ will demoralize humanity throughout the West; it will lead to the rise of ‘barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods’—he all but called them by name: Nazism, Communism, and Fascism—and result within one generation in ‘wars such have never been fought before.’” (cited in Tom Wolfe, The Kingdom of Speech, p. 51) Nietzsche wrote this in 1874 precisely forty years before the start of World War I in 1914.

But then there is the soft kind of secular humanism, the kind that I lived through in the 1960s and 70s, the kind that still stridently declared that “God is dead,” and was anti-Christian, but which proposed that you yourself are god, and so you must “god-like” care for the environment and “save the planet,” but also, your chief god-like responsibility was to work at self-improvement and self-fulfillment, especially self-actualization. Your main duty is to reach your potential. Your “chief end,” as it were, is to glorify yourself and enjoy life for, well, for as long as you want to before you shut out the lights for good through physician-assisted suicide. After all, we can’t have gods like us falling as mere victim of some lesser being like a virus or a cancer, of course!

So, long before the present “self-identifying” fad we see today, we had “values-identifying” or “values clarification exercises.” Since there was no God there could be no universal Ten Commandments or any other moral absolutes, and so each person was to choose their own morality or “values.” And here came the psychotherapists to help you clarify your values. Remember the “lifeboat” exercise? Ten people in a lifeboat that could only save eight? As a group, each play a roll and decide who to cast to the sharks. Would it be the paraplegic or the octogenarian with prostate cancer? How about the lesbian who had her tubes tied and so can’t reproduce? Certainly not the heroic doctor? What did the exercise say? It said that human life was not sacred, not created in the image of some God. Rather, as little gods ourselves, some gods were worth more than others. And choosing to deny life to some was supposed to clarify your values for you.

Or do you remember the “values auction?” Each participant was given $1,000 in make-believe money and a list of items to bid on. Some were hedonistic: a color TV, a nice car, a nice home, a beautiful, compliant spouse. Others were altruistic: helping the poor, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless. And some were religious. I remember sitting through a values auction. I think I had bought a car, and maybe good looks. And a Christian girl who was a friend immediately bid her whole $1,000 on “eternal salvation in heaven” to the gasps of many. Then she embarrassedly sat through the rest of the auction while other good people bought the right to care for the poor, hungry, and homeless, and she sat there not helping anyone clutching her “eternal salvation in heaven.”

What was the trick? The trick was the “either-or” scheme in which you had to choose between heaven for yourself (selfish!) and helping the needy (kind and merciful!). The truth, however, has generally been the opposite, that biblical Christians have followed their Savior’s command to love their neighbor and care for the sick and hurting. Atheism has produced very few charity schools, hospitals, orphanages (except by killing lots of parents and creating lots of orphans), and works of mercy. Atheism has tended to liquidate the unwanted weak and sick as burdens and useless drags upon limited resources. But we’re back to Nietzsche and the harder kind of secular humanism, aren’t we, which is where it always seems to go. Even the “lifeboat” exercise and throwing the undesirables to the sharks also smells a lot like Nietzsche.

II. BIBLICAL HUMANISM.

A. Biblical humanism, as we said, is practically the polar opposite of secular humanism. In biblical humanism, God is still our Creator, still incomparably great and good and generous. Human worth and dignity are not absolute or even comparative, but are completely derivative. We have been so steeped in secular humanistic thought, even in the church, that it almost seems like blasphemy to suggest, as I suggest, that people have no “intrinsic” that is, “in or from themselves,” worth. Contrary to the purely sentimental, non-biblical notion so prevalent in our day, the human soul is not of “infinite worth.” If it were, then the secular humanists would be closer to the truth, for anything of “infinite” worth, any “infinite” anything is in fact God. God alone is “infinite,” literally, not finite or limited in any way beyond his own holy, morally perfect character. It is quite blasphemous to speak of “the infinite worth of the human soul.”

And in support let me cite none other than Clive Staples (C.S.) Lewis. Listen to C.S. Lewis in an address called “Membership”: “The infinite value of each human soul is not a Christian doctrine. God did not die for man because of some value He perceived in him. The value of each human soul considered simply in itself, out of relation to God, is zero. As St. Paul writes, to have died for valuable men would not have been divine but merely heroic; but God died for sinners. He loved us not because we were loveable, but because He is Love.” (127)

B. So human worth is merely a derived, dependent worth. And this is precisely what we learn in Psalm 8, this wonderful statement of biblical humanism. God is great. Humanity is great only because God has made us great. We are not independently great apart from him. He has merely loaned us life and even being, and so our glory, our life, and our very existence itself all depend entirely on him.

C. Like bookends, the psalm starts and concludes with the majesty of God’s name:

1O LORD, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

“Name” is not simply a handy or even clever set of syllables, but really speaks of one’s whole being known by his words and works. The Hebrew for name is “shem” which rhymes with “name” and also “fame” which may be closer to the mark.

And then he describes God’s fame, his glory evidenced everywhere, “above the heavens” and on the lips of “babes and infants,” the sum of which puts the enemy to shame. The heavens, the moon and stars, which God has set in place show his glory. Now we will come back to this when we get to Psalm 19, but in Scripture we find two sources of God’s revelation, general or natural, in nature, his creation, and also specially in his words. But we should note that while both are true, God’s works are not divine, but his words are divine. That’s an important distinction.

But the point here is the great question and the surprising answer: “What is man?” And this is not in some philosophical pondering, but specifically that God is both mindful of him and also cares for him? In view of the majesty of God himself and his great glory in the heavens, what are we that God spends so much time on us? Ultimately, that God would not only think of us and care for us, but trade the life of his Son to redeem us? That his own Son would become one of us to save us, and to make us his own sons and daughters?

And then here is the relative, derived (not intrinsic) worth:

5Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings (that would include God and angels)

and crowned him with glory and honor.

6You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;

you have put all things under his feet,

7all sheep and oxen,

and also the beasts of the field,

8the birds of the heavens, and the fish of the sea,

whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

No wonder he concludes not with Walt Whitman’s secular humanistic “Song of Myself” but a biblically humanistic ascription of praise to God:

9O LORD, our Lord,

how majestic is your name in all the earth!

APPLICATIONS

Now quickly, three applications in response:

A. We must live grateful lives. The implicit gratitude of this texts flows from the wonder of considering the highest of heights and the lowest of depths. God himself is glorious, his name is majestic in all the earth, acclaimed above the heavens and in the nursery, so that his enemies are made to look utterly foolish. For example, last time I checked, Nietzsche was dead and God is still very much alive. Foolish. Ridiculous. A sheer and shamefully squandered life. Wasted.

And yet, compared to the feast of glory we behold every day, God has selected us for his special attention and care. Amazing! Wonder beyond all reckoning! Absolutely beyond all hope, more than all we could ask or imagine.

And so the response is worship and service, sacrifice of all out of an eternal debt of gratitude that can never be repaid. The Heidelberg Catechism is right, the great, energizing motive behind the whole Christian life is gratitude, thankfulness, thanks. In every circumstance of life, work your way, fight your way to gratitude, and you will live the happiest, most productive and God-honoring, reality-revealing life possible. Which is precisely what Paul declared in Ephesians 5:20: “giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ….”

B. We must live grace-filled lives. We find once again that the Psalmist is true, dead on right as far as he knew, but that the New Testament Gospel supplements and fills out the story. As we noted, the wonder of God’s being mindful and of his care went far beyond his provision for our day to day needs. He gave his Son. And as I read through the gospels it constantly strikes me that the first believers were so continually surprised by Jesus. He was clearly foretold in the Old Testament, this ultimate form of God’s mindfulness. The word translated “mindful” means that God “remembers” his covenant promises as we saw last Sunday morning in the Magnificat. And that being mindful was to send his Son to prove his power and authority and love and then, the big surprise, to go to the cross to destroy our true enemy: sin and death. And then, biggest surprise,” to rise again for our justification.

And so we must live grace-filled lives. We must live by grace, acknowledging our continual sin and failure, yes, but going forward in the joy and confidence of our Savior’s love. From there, joining a community of grace, sacrificially caring for one another, and reaching out with the same grace we have received, which has drawn and settled and is transforming us.

C. And we must live godly lives. When we hear the word “godly” we often think in terms of morality: don’t do bad stuff, but do good stuff, like God does. And, of course, to be godly is that. But it’s even more. It implies stepping up into the noble and honorable life that recognizes that sin is both behind and beneath us. To be godly means not only to act godly but to be godly.

And, Beloved, this is truly to the heart of biblical humanism. It is a right perspective on who we are as God created us. It is not the haughty hope that we are really hot stuff, the hottest thing going in the universe, nor the idle tinkering of trying to become all that we can be for ourselves, to reach our potential “Hey, look at me, admire me! I’m pretty cool!”

To be godly is rather to recognize the astonishing gift of God’s creating us in his own image, with minds that can understand, affections that can feel deeply, and wills that can choose and act on our choosing. It is to acknowledge that sin has utterly twisted and ruined those good gifts, binding them in slavery to the wicked self which is itself enslaved to sin. And it is to delight in God’s kindness, restoring us through the new birth, and through the continual ministry of the Holy Spirit, conforming us to the glorious image of true humanity, the true humanity of his Son.

That’s biblical humanism, not pushing God off the top and proclaiming self as king of the hill, but accepting the astonishing privilege of being made “a little lower than the heavenly beings” and being “crowned with glory and honor” and then living honorable lives, reflecting the surpassing, incomparable glory of the one who made us to resemble himself. (

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