Dell Cook 0:10

Hi everyone, happy Tuesday and welcome back to Worldview Academy's QuickCast. I'm your host, Dell Cook. Thanks for allowing us into your week with thoughtful worldview content, encouraging biblical teaching, and some timely contemporary commentary. We're considering the world and everything in it this week as we continue our discussion in the basics of a biblical worldview. We're thinking through the false dichotomy between the sacred and the secular. Also, does man have dominion over Mars? We'll, think it through. As we consider the basics of building a distinctly biblical worldview, it's important that we maintain two good distinctions. The first distinction to make is between the Creator and the creation. And the second is between being in the world but not of the world. Now, while we maintain those distinctions, we also need to avoid two false dichotomies. The first false dichotomy to avoid is the dichotomy of faith and reason, which we addressed last week. When we start with that false assumption, we arrive at an array of false conclusions. We begin to divide the world and all that's in it into the sacred, that which belongs to the Creator, and the secular, that which belongs to the creation. Now that bifurcation cuts through and across every aspect of our world. We mark off areas like spiritual and physical, emotional and intellectual, mind and brain, soul and body, clergy and laity, heaven and earth, sacred work and secular work, Christian art and non Christian art, my stuff and God's stuff. The fractions are endless and the consequences can be disastrous. But the Christian worldview begins with a different set of assumptions. A Christian description of reality doesn't begin with a pantheistic one or a polytheistic many. It starts with a Trinitarian unity. Christianity describes ultimate reality as personality, an intimate, loving unity of distinct persons, three distinct persons united as one in eternal love. In Leviticus 23, verses nine through fourteen, God established a holy, that is to say, sacred day known as the Feast of Firstfruits. In this festival, celebrated at the end of the harvest season, the people of God were commanded to quote, bring the sheaf of the firstfruits of your harvest to the priest, where you shall wave the sheaf before the Lord so that you may be accepted. Offering the first of their harvest had the twofold effect of thanking God for his provision, as well as sanctifying or making sacred all that came after it. It was all God's because it all came from God, and it bears the marks of his nature. These actions on this sacred day, like all sacred acts, are not a dissecting or setting apart from, but a uniting or setting apart to. The sacred baptizes the secular and makes every moment holy. Abraham Kuyper, a Dutch pastor and theologian, a journalist and prime minister of the Netherlands, once said, There is not one square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is sovereign over all, does not cry mine. Jesus Christ made that very cry just before his ascension when he said, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. You see, Jesus Christ claims authority over all things, baptizes all things in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and consequently makes all things new, all things in heaven and on earth, all things sacred or secular. And he does that through the lives and work of those who he has called to himself, baptized in his name, and made saintly by his spirit. Last week, President Donald Trump presented the four astronauts of the Artemis II Moon mission with the Congressional Space Medal of Honor. NASA astronauts Reed Weissman, Victor Glover, and Christina Cook, along with Canada's Jeremy Hansen, orbited the far side of the moon during a nine-day mission in April. At the ceremony, President Trump called the four astronauts fearless explorers who traveled farther from Earth than any human had before. Their mission captured the imaginations of the world and paved the way for the next moon landing scheduled for 2028. It's also reintroduced an important question regarding the sacred secular distinction. What is the nature and extent of man's dominion over the universe? Two of our founding faculty members at Worldview Academy, Bill Jack and Jeff Baldwin, took up this very question recently: should man explore space? Let's listen in.

Jeff Baldwin 5:22

Which I think goes directly to this question. I think it does. How far is the scope of human redeeming and stewardship of this universe?

Bill Jack 5:34

And that's what we were called to be, to be stewards of God's creation. But there's an underlying point that needs to be made here, and that is the impetus for exploring could either be man's hubris, Tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel, and I think that's a great connection, that we will become as God, basically. But the other the other aspect of that is that as stewards, then we we are reflecting the nature of our Creator, and we create and we've been told to have dominion. Yeah yes. So I I I look at at the Garden of Eden much like oh, say Ford puts out a new model of car. Okay. Now, they're not gonna change every one of their production facilities for this new model. They're gonna take one of their manufacturing plants and they're gonna produce this model, and if it catches on, if it becomes popular, then they will expand the production to other facilities. I view the Garden of Eden as that production facility that was initial, and if Adam and Eve had not sinned, then their dominion would have had would have expanded and it would have then filled the entire earth.

Jeff Baldwin 7:11

Because there's still work for man to do, even if man is not fallen, right? That's part of it, right?

Bill Jack 7:16

Is that we were called to he was called to tend the garden. Yeah, everything was not complete in the sense of perfection. It was all good, but there was work, and work was good.

Jeff Baldwin 7:30

That's the key, right? And we shouldn't just pause for a minute and say that work is not a consequence of the fall. The difficulties, some of the difficulties that are presented to the worker, like thorns or you know, the the weeds or whatever it is, some of that stuff definitely makes worth work more of a curse. But the act of labor will be going on in heaven and uh should be going on on earth, isn't it?

Bill Jack 7:57

Correct. So in the new heavens and the new earth, we will continue to do that. We will expand. And uh my this and $3.50 will buy you a cup of coffee someplace, because it's just my opinion. But I I see that we live in this huge universe, yeah, but we have eternity to explore. And we look at the universe as a vast, empty space, but creation, all of creation was affected by man's sin. Not just just us, not just here locally, not just the whole earth, but all of creation groans for the return of Christ. I think we will be amazed at what the new creation, heaven and earth look like. They're going to be physical places. So why this vast universe? When you look at guys like Kepler, you know, and his fascination, Galileo, you know, what what they saw and what they discovered is just a glimpse of what can be done throughout eternity.

Dell Cook 9:09

You can get the whole of this fascinating conversation as well as a pretty riveting discussion on where the best donut in America can be found on the Radio Worldview podcast from our friends at Worldview Crux. So that's it for today. We'll be back with you next week with another installment of QuickCast thinking about my favorite subject, the Trinity. Until then, a word of wisdom for you. Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog, well, it's too dark to read. Grace and peace.