Dell Cook 0:11

Hello everyone and welcome to the inaugural episode of Worldview Academy's Quickcast. I'm your host, Del Cook, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to come into your week to share a little biblical wisdom and encouragement. Quickcast will come to your phone each week as a text link that you can click on at your leisure for thoughtful worldview content, encouraging biblical teaching, and timely contemporary commentary. You don't need to do a thing other than click, listen, and enjoy. As your student has no doubt learned at Worldview Academy, a worldview is best described as the lens through which we encounter, understand, and interpret the world around us. A worldview is the set of assumptions that undergird all our thinking about and our living in reality. Everyone has a worldview, and that worldview informs and impacts every thought we have and every action we perform. Now, a biblical worldview would be best understood as our base assumptions that are aligned with and informed by God's revelation of Himself in Scripture. A biblical worldview is a set of assumptions that are, in the words of St. Paul, taken captive in obedience to Christ. So, what does having a biblical worldview involve or look like? Well, that's what we're going to explore week by week in our times together on Quickcast. So let's examine some basics today. A biblical worldview begins with discernment. This discernment comes in the form of making two good distinctions while also recognizing some false dichotomies. The first good distinction we need to make is the foundational distinction between the creator and the creation. Every worldview is based on and emerges from one's assumptions about the nature of God or ultimate reality, what has always inherently without fail been there. Now the atheistic worldview, grounded on the assumption that there is no God, asserts that ultimate reality is matter. What's always been there in some way, shape, and form is stuff in some way, shape, or form. Ideas, consciousness, emotions, these aren't things that exist so much as they are concepts that emerge from the energetic motion of matter. So from an atheistic worldview, we have always been there. Not we in the way we presently understand ourselves, but we is this, the physical matter that is careening through space on the back of the laws of thermodynamics. So according to the atheistic worldview, there's no distinction between creator and creation because in the end, or rather in the beginning, there is no creator. The pantheistic worldview is rooted in the assumption that everything that is is God, or at least part of God. Like the atheistic worldview, pantheism believes that matter is eternal, but unlike atheism, the pantheistic worldview would describe matter as the emanation of a life force that permeates and pervades all matter. This assumption about reality ultimately results in one's inability to make a distinction between the creation and the creator. There is no creator creation distinction because there's no creation. The polytheistic worldview, believing that the spiritual world is populated with many gods, asserts that superhuman projections of humanity have somehow simply become, not existing through any act of will causing them to exist. These gods are essentially accidents or meaningless emanations, and once again we're left with no explanation of or accounting for the difference or distinction that we find in the world we encounter. Now the biblical description of creation provides us with a fundamentally different description of reality that accounts for all that we encounter. In the very first words of the Bible, we are told that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. There wasn't a material universe, and then there was. That's a simple statement, but with significant cosmic implications. With the opening words of Genesis and the following description of the act of creation, the Bible portrays a unique and compelling perspective on reality. What's always been there? It's not matter or an impersonal disembodied ideal or a dualistic balance of forces. What's always been there is a personality. The Bible describes that the world and all that's in it comes about through the spoken word, language. Words are the specific purview of persons, not things. Words are also the result of will and choice and desire. So before rocks and soil and atoms and molecules or energy, there's always been personality, a creator who decides to create something other than himself, not by accident or emanation, but by an act of personal will. Now maintaining a distinction between creator and creation enables us to account for the presence of any number of things in the reality that we encounter. First and foremost would be personality. A personal creator accounts for the fact of our personhood and personality itself. Secondly, is morality itself. A personal creator accounts for our inherent sense not only of what is, but what ought to be. Thirdly, it accounts for meaning. The universe is a cosmos, which literally means an ordered reality, as opposed to chaos or disordered reality. And finally, it accounts for authority. As our creator, God commands and deserves our obedience. I'm sure you're familiar with one of the great sports movies of all time, Rudy, in which Rudy Rudiger chases a lifelong dream of playing football for the University of Notre Dame. Now the odds are quite long against Rudy as his prodigious lack of size and, well, let's be honest, talent make him a rather poor candidate as a Division I college football player. When consulting his priest, Father Kavanaugh gives some pretty profound advice. Rudy, he says, in thirty-five years of religious studies, I've come up with only two hard, incontrovertible facts. There is a God, and I'm not him. Now that is a great starting place for a solidly biblical worldview. Next week we'll explore the second good distinction that a biblical worldview makes the distinction of being in the world, but not of the world. Until then, a word of wisdom for you. If at first you don't succeed, skydiving may not be for you. Grace and peace.