Summary
God’s created universe (both man and all of our supporting ecosystem) is created in His likeness, and is therefore recognized by God as “good”. There is a subtle distinction between the goodness of the Creator and the goodness of His creatures. The goodness of the Creator is divine in itself. The goodness of His creatures cannot be divine, by definition, but they are nevertheless attributed “divine goodness” by God’s adopting them into His own divinity. This adoption is motivated by an intention to enable His creatures to be as much like Him as they can be. Predestinating His creatures to be like Him is an act of divine love. Man’s sin in rebellion against God’s divine love causes disorder and death among His creatures. God provides a solution to this separation from His creatures: God sends Christ Jesus to adopt man (and by extension all the rest of creation which is attached to man’s legacy) back into God through salvation.
Prior to the advent of sin, God’s intention was for man to cultivate His created Eden into a form more like God in appearance. Man would be sharing in God’s work of divinely inspired creation, effectively becoming an apprentice to God. This activity is necessarily infinite, because God’s unboundedness is infinite, thus providing endless opportunities for moving ever closer to God. The contribution from each unique soul towards the divine cultivation of creation matters, and is adopted by God as if it had been His own work. The sum of our intellection of God’s purpose, wrought in our cultivation of creation, is a communal, living icon of the face of God. Maintaining endless attention to this task, requires that we avoid the distraction of sin, which dulls our spiritual sense and directs us towards worldly intentions.
God’s sacramental cleansing of the earth in the form of the flood that He sent, leads to the establishment of His first covenant with man and the created world, which is symbolized by the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds. God promises to never again unleash a deluge of this magnitude. The scale of this first covenant is world-wide, meaning that all of creation is now God’s tabernacle, in which He is immanent and will guide us to salvation. We will be cultivating God’s likeness in this New Eden, at the same time as we will be sinning and corrupting it. As history and our sins unfold, the remnant of man through which God will work to provide salvation is successively narrowed in scope until God’s presence on earth is immanent in Christ Jesus, the one man without sin that is capable of carrying out the Father’s will. The triune covenant of Father, Son and Holy Ghost cannot be defiled by the sin of man.
God’s covenants with man are made with communities. The covenantal structure is defined as a singular responsible headship with distributed plural leadership. The divine example of this structure is the Father at the head of the Trinity serving with the Son and Holy Ghost. The distributed plural leadership in the divine example is implicit in that the Son and the Holy Ghost are begotten of (and thus distributed from) the Father, while at the same time they are all co-eternal, and their divine wills are always in complete harmony with one another. Worship in isolation has its place, but it is understood that even isolated worshipers are members of a community of God’s redeemed people. God’s covenants are intended to support the natural community structures that emerge in human societies, the basis of which is marriage and the family. The natural example of the covenant structure is man at the head of the family serving with woman as equal image bearers of God. Sin disorders the family covenant by disrupting the trust between family members in shared obedience to God. It must be condemned to ensure salvation after judgement has been rendered.
Bible Study Notes