Creatures God Made Communicate
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Dr. Jeff Myers: The Bible is very unlike any other religious book in the world. And, as a side note, all people are religious. Not just Christians. In fact, if you look in the Merriam Webster Dictionary, you’ll find the definition of religion as:
Almost all creatures God has made, communicate. Fish communicate. I remember going on a diving trip one time, in Indonesia. And I was told we were going to do a night dive, and this was going to be awesome because all of the creatures that are awake during the day, go to sleep, and all the creatures that are asleep during the day, wake up. So you’ll get to see all new things. Out of 26 people at the dive resort, only two of us showed up for the night dive. Apparently, 24 people don’t want to see what wakes up in the ocean in the middle of the night.
So I was very excited. It was scary and a little bit nerve wracking at first. We had small flashlights we took down into the water with us. Other than that, it was completely dark. At one point, I saw a puffer fish. Now, puffer fish, you don’t want to touch them, but they’re very cute. You know what I mean? They’re just like in Finding Nemo, they’re just so cute. And they have great big eyes, and they don’t dart away like other fish. If you approach, they just back up and just keep staring at you.
So I motion to my dive guides, what I had found. And he came over, he pointed his flashlight at his hand and he did this, and then he held his hand and the puffer fish came down and landed in his palm. And I was thinking, “This is incredible. My dive guide is the puffer fish whisperer.” I was amazed, until I woke up the following morning and saw some people take their breakfast bread out into the water, and stand in the water and go like this, to crumble the bread up and attract tropical fish. I realized that this is the universal sign to tropical fish that you have something for them to eat.
So it wasn’t, in fact, that the puffer fish and my dive guide were communicating, using the symbolic language that I think of as communication. Animals don’t seem to communicate this way. You might think they do, but you might be actually imposing on them meaning they don’t possess. Let’s say you have a dog at home and you come home at the end of the day, and your dog is laying on the kitchen floor, looking very sad. And you think, “Oh, the dog is sad.” You don’t really know the dog is sad. All you know is if you had to stay at home and lay on the kitchen floor all day, you would be sad.
People are so good at taking what they understand to be true about language and imposing it on things, they actually do this on inanimate objects. Very near Summit Ministries is the Garden of the Gods Park. The most prominent feature of which is a huge rock that appears on the top, that have two camels sitting next to one another and kissing. I have heard people at the visitor center say, “Oh, isn’t that cute? They’re kissing.” It’s a rock, people.
But you see, we’re so good at language and bearing God’s image, that it never even occurs to us that the things we impose on the world around us, to make other things appear to be orderly, may actually say more about us than they say about those individual things. Now, that philosophy can be taken way too far. I don’t want to dig into it too deeply. But I just want you to simply understand that God communicates with his creation. In fact, God doesn’t just communicate with only the leaders. God communicates with everybody.
There was a guy in Scotland, many, many years ago, named Samuel Rutherford. And he wrote a book called Lex Rex, which means what? Law is King. You see, all of the leaders, up until that point in time, taught that the King was the law. Whatever the King decided is what was going to happen in that country, because the King was a direct descendant of Adam. And Samuel Rutherford went through and did a Bible study, and found out that the King is a direct descendant of Adam. And so are all the rest of us. So the King does not get the privilege of telling everybody else what to do.
In fact, we will establish a law and the King will obey it. The King was unhappy with Samuel Rutherford’s book, as you can imagine. He was so unhappy, he decided he was going to kill Samuel Rutherford. And Samuel Rutherford very rudely, in the meantime, died on his own. So the King, not to be deterred, had his bones dug up and burned. So there. I don’t understand some things about history. That’s what happened. But this is so important to grasp, that God communicates with everybody, about all kinds of things. Not just about theology, not just about what we ought to do on Sunday mornings, but about everything.
Lesslie Newbigin was a missionary to India, and he had a Hindu friend who said to him, “I can’t understand why you missionaries present the Bible to us in India as a book of religion. It is not a book of religion, and anyway, we have plenty of books of religion in India. We don’t need any more. I find in your Bible, a unique interpretation of universal history, the history of the whole of creation and the history of the human race. And therefore, a unique interpretation of the human person as a responsible actor in history. That is unique.” This Hindu person said, “There is nothing else in the whole religious literature of the world to put alongside it.”
So the Bible is a special book. It’s a revelation from God, is unique among all the religions of the world. But what is the Bible’s actual story? Because you see, when Sally Lloyd-Jones claimed in her children’s story, that the Bible has a lot of stories in it, but they’re all really telling one big story, a lot of people don’t grasp that. They say, “No, that’s not true. There are 66 books in the Bible. They were written by a whole bunch of different authors, over the course of 1500 years. They can’t possibly be telling the same story.”
But scripture itself, when all of the books are put together, creates a coherence that has at least three parts. Some people break this up into four parts. Some people break it up into six parts. For the sake of simplicity, we’re going to say there are three parts to it. And these three parts are creation, fall, and redemption. Creation, fall, redemption. That God created the world, that human beings fell into sin, and that God is in the process of redeeming his people as well as creation. There’s a whole lot to this. So let’s take a look at each one of those points individually.
First of all, creation. The doctrine of creation says, “A relational creator made human beings in his image, releasing them to do two things.” What? To relate and to create. To relate and to create. Relationship is something that is part of who God actually is. It’s not just something God does. Do you understand that? The biblical idea of God is the Trinity, the father, son, and the Holy spirit. That there is communication within the Godhead itself. Communication, relationship is not just something God does. It’s something he is.
And then God enabled the human beings he created to actually turn around and create. Scripture says, in Genesis chapter one, “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness.'” If you look at the words for image and likeness, you see that they refer to shape or bodily resemblance. This does not mean to say that God has a body. God is spirit, does not have a body as we do. But we are made in such a way that our persons, our identity can be seen to be bearing God’s image.
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