God is truly amazing. By His Holy Spirit, He continues to nourish us with His Word week in, week out. I hope that the previous Rebuild Series through Nehemiah was edifying and it gave us, as one church, a vision of what it means to rightly restore God’s community from the desperate prayers of the saints all the way to God’s covenantal faithfulness to His people.
This Sunday, by God’s continuing grace, we are entering into a new 3 month series called Biblio-Anthropology. What does that mean? Glad you asked. Biblio is simply referring to the Book, the Scripture, the Word of God, the Bible, and anthropology is the study of the essence of humanity. Put them together, and the series title, Biblio-Anthropology, is pointing us to how the Bible answers the very question, “What does it mean to be human?”
As Christians, we must clearly understand and embrace the fundamental vision of who we are as human beings. There’s a lot of conflicting opinions out in our culture concerning this very topic. Many worldly philosophies undertake the massive task of constructing an economy of human flourishing without the Biblical vision of God’s creation and the gospel of Christ’s redemption of his bride. In a world of thousand voices, more than ever before, we need to dig deep into our Christian roots and the ancient wisdom grounded in the Word of God. However, we must not only intellectually understand but we must wholeheartedly embrace and love the vision of humanity that God intended in creation from the beginning. I hope that this series will help us to both understand and embrace the beauty of God’s design and intention.
Few things to keep in mind as we jump into this series.
- We will be spending a bulk of our time in Genesis 1-3. In these first few pages of the Bible, God lays out his heart for creation and his purpose for creating humanity. If God is the designer-creator of all things including human beings, then it makes sense to start here. We don’t start with human philosophy but we start with the very blueprint and the letter of the Creator Himself. Let God tell us His vision. We start with the One who made us. And then from there, we seek to understand our cultural worldview, philosophies, and ideas from this lens. Yes, secular studies can teach us many things! Science has quite a bit to show us about God’s wonderful world. Yet, we unapologetically begin with God’s Word.
- We will be tackling hard and even controversial topics such as sexuality, gender, masculinity, femininity, sex in marriage, and more. I hope that we will all engage with humility as well as critical thinking. We come with an open-hand posture to receive from God His vision of humanity, and then we robustly engage with our minds on how we can best apply and practice this vision in real life. Don’t let this series pass without personally applying it to your own life.
- My hope and desire is that we will learn to embrace the beauty of God’s purpose and design for humanity. Unless we are convinced that God’s creational intention is beautiful and good, we will not wholly live by it but instead adopt a secular definition of humanity. God’s design is good, and we need to understand why and how. Let’s get ready to engage our heart and our mind.
- Just some basic background information about Genesis. It was written by Moses roughly around ~1,500 BC. There is rich poetry and prose intertwined in the first 3 chapters of creation and Eden. We need to interpret these chapters with the literary genre in mind. To simply read Genesis 1-3 from a modern scientific lens is anachronistic and we would be guilty of imposing modern categories into an ancient text. Let it speak for itself. God’s Word is sufficient to teach us all we need to thrive as human beings.
