Ask Ligonier: Made in the Image of God

Today on Renewing Your Mind, how can we confront feelings of despair for our friends and family who don't know the Lord?

Stay with us. Renewing Your Mind is next. That was just one of the questions our teaching fellows fielded at a live-streaming event we held not long ago. We focused on what it means to be made in the image of God. You'll hear the answer to that question a little later in the program. Our communications director, Nathan W. Bingham, moderated our time with doctors Sinclair Ferguson, Derek Thomas, Bert Parsons, and Stephen Nichols.

So let's get started. What are some ways a young Christian can avoid falling into dead orthodoxy or the mere semantics of theological study? THOMAS FERGUSON First of all, all students of theology should join a church and participate in church life and attend church on Sundays and be in a Sunday school class and have prayer times with folk who are more senior than they are. Keep a devotional life that the regular habits of reading the Scriptures and prayer. For me, as a theological student, that was a lifesaver for me because you can so easily slip into a study habit that is just rote and you lose touch with reality and you lose touch with what this is all about, namely walking day by day with Jesus.

And being involved in a local church is absolutely vital. It was a sermon Warfield preached at Miller Chapel at Princeton Seminary. The religious life of the theological student has been reprinted.

It's out there. I would definitely recommend that you track that down and read it. He talks about the importance of church. One of the things Warfield talks about is just the importance of recognizing your calling as a student. And in your work as a student, you're glorifying God. I think sometimes we think of studies as a means to an end and we don't realize that God's working on us now and God wants us to serve Him and worship Him now. And if you're studying for the ministry or you're studying for some full-time ministry position, you're not going to all of a sudden, once you become full-time ministry, just the button will come on and it'll click and everything you do will be for God's honor and glory.

That needs to be part of your habit now. And even as a student, you're cultivating that. So I would just recommend that piece, a great piece of historical advice. Just recognize that it's a calling as a student to study theology. And in that act, it can be done for God's honor and for His glory and as an act of worship and acceptable service to Him.

FERGUSON Yeah. You know, I think it's very important that we learn to do even our most scholastic studies doxologically, that we do them conscious that we are doing this in His presence before His face and for His glory. I think a couple of other things I would say is make sure you're getting your theology from your Bible because the tendency I think is in theological students that you get your theology from your systematic theology textbooks. And you know, all of us here would subscribe to the view that systematic theology and systematic theology textbooks are really important. But I think there is a different product in the life, in the person who has learned all this theology from a textbook, from the person who has ground that theology out of Scripture. The other thing I think I would say is, so, you know, those of us who are of a certain age, when we were students, we lived on a very impoverished diet of evangelical literature. Now there are libraries full of it, but not all of that literature that creates what I would think of as the architecture of how you think as an intelligent Christian, not all of that literature has in view the nourishment of your life. And so I think it's important, I think it's important for all students actually, however difficult it is to create a parallel program of preparation with, excuse the alliteration, it was not intentional, where you're reading the works the works of those who are able theologians, but who wrote their theology in a doxological context, because I think that will make a difference to your whole future.

Just real quickly, Nathan, to the question regarding dead orthodoxy, I think it's important that we understand fundamentally that there's really no such thing as dead orthodoxy and that we recognize that all orthodoxy being true doctrine of Scripture is alive and it transforms and the Spirit uses it and God's truth goes forth and it changes us. And so I think it's important that we recognize that. I'm certain the questioner understands that as well. I think another thing that is really important when so many books are being published right now by so many men and women who do not know the Lord, but are writing under the name of Christian and through Christian publishers, that students, depending on where they are in their studies, now if they're doing postgraduate studies, they're going to have to interact usually with authors and scholars that they're not going to agree with. But at undergraduate, graduate levels, I think it is very important that they spend the majority of their time reading those Christian authors, theologians who know the Lord and are pointing them to Jesus Christ. Brian on Twitter is asking, what should our approach be with friends who hold to different doctrines? FERGUSON First of all, remember you hold to different doctrines.

It takes two to tangle theologically. So there are all kinds of biblical considerations that first of all mean that you understand that, that you're speaking to another human being. Second, that you remember you probably did not come to the doctrines you hold overnight.

So be very careful about treating us stupid, somebody who doesn't share them, because you once were stupid. I think the third thing to say is you need to discern the difference between people who are coming down the hill and people who are going up the hill. And with people who are going down the hill, you need to think of ways of preventing them rolling down further.

And people who are going up the hill, you need to patiently help them up the hill. Because in these matters, when we think of how patient God has been with us before, suddenly it's clicked with us, oh, now I understand it. Then I think this is why Paul says to Timothy, you know, when you're trying to instruct someone else, you need to do it with great patience.

So those are a few things I think that are principles for me anyway. I think the emphasis on patience is very important, and that we remember that we are not the Holy Spirit in the lives of our friends and loved ones, that we really need to trust the Holy Spirit to do the work that He's going to do, and that we need to spend time pointing them to Scripture. Over the years when people have wanted to argue a point with me, I'll say, let's spend some time in Scripture together, not just reading it, but really studying it and getting some good commentary.

So just be patient, trust the Spirit, and pour over Scripture. And, you know, this is a very important question, because, you know, Paul seems to make the point in Corinthians that there are some truths that are first of all, in other words, they're primary truths. And by implication, there are truths that are secondary, and there are probably truths that are tertiary. So if the difference of opinion is over justification by faith alone and Christ alone, that's one thing. But if it's over the mode of baptism, that's another thing. So they're not all equal. And I think that our response to friends who have different opinions, it also depends on what the doctrine about which we are differing is as to how we respond, I think.

I've got this question coming in from Facebook. How do we make sure that we don't preach or teach imago Dei in the way word faith or prosperity preachers do? What should we avoid? What we simply need to emphasize, of course, is what the Bible emphasizes on the image of God and to have a very high view of man. This is something that Dr. Sproul throughout his ministry emphasized from the beginning in the way in which we honor others and the way in which we respect others because every individual is made in the image of God. And one of the things we saw throughout his ministry is that fairness and kindness and respect to all individuals, no matter their background, no matter their socioeconomic background, sociocultural background, no matter their race, that there was that respect and honor and love and fairness shown to all human beings.

And too often we're seeing just the opposite of that. And among the prosperity preaching, there seems to be a sort of a preying upon certain peoples from certain backgrounds and certain socioeconomic classes when we are to show the honor and respect to all those upon whom God has given dignity, those made in his image. You know, I think one of the things that helps here, if we think of human beings as having both dignity and depravity and recognizing that it is a fallen world and that's a huge problem for prosperity gospel. It doesn't see this as a fallen, falling, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it, a fallen, falling world that we live in.

And there's a sort of naive view of the impact of the fall. There's a naive view in prosperity gospel of the role of suffering in lives and even being human and our frailty as part of the condition of being human, but also as the fall. So, you know, the biblical portrayal of who we are is complex as both beings of dignity and depravity. And if we relax that tension either way, we're going to end up with a problematic worldview, a problematic anthropology, and ultimately we will not have the right gospel. We will have a false gospel. And you see that in the prosperity gospel. It's a false gospel because it has a false understanding of anthropology, well, of everything, God, Christ, and man.

You know, I've had something of an obsession with Job pretty much all of my adult life. And I mean, Job's friends were prosperity gospel preachers, that the reason why Job didn't have health and wealth was because he had sinned in some way. He didn't have enough faith. And that's classic health and wealth preaching. And in the context of the book of Job, that teaching is wicked.

It's wrong because God says it's wrong. And when I hear, as I have within the last couple of weeks, folks who are suffering from cancer and they're going through chemotherapy and radiation and possible surgery and so on, and then there are Christians who write to them and say they shouldn't do this. They should just trust and believe. And that is so unhelpful.

And that's not a strong enough word for what they're suggesting here. Luke, sending a note in through the Ask Ligonier Chat service, he's asking, I know that a true Christian can fall away and come back, but is there any possibility that a person could fall into deep sin and die and still be saved? We are not the final arbiters of any man or woman's final destiny. To me, that is a supremely important thing to grasp. So, we have relatively poor measures to understand all that God does in the lives of people who sin, and there are very grievous sins clearly that Christians commit. What Scripture does say is constantly to urge us not to receive the grace of God in vain in our lives, in the way we understand how God's grace works.

God's grace always reigns through righteousness in our lives. And in a sense, it seems to me to be our chief responsibility not to speculate about what may happen if, but to respond to our own sin the way Scripture encourages us to respond to it, and that is to resist it with all our might and main. It is possible to commit grievous sins like Simon Peter. My own conviction is if you'd bumped into Simon Peter on the evening of Christ's crucifixion and then bumped into Judas Iscariot, you would not have been able to tell the difference, not have been able to tell the difference. What made the difference was the intercession of Christ for Simon Peter that led to his repentance.

And again and again in Scripture, Hebrews chapter 6 is a notable example. It's possible to experience many aspects of the power of the kingdom of God, and yet apparently, as I understand that passage, not actually to experience salvation, not to experience salvation because he says, we're persuaded of better things of you. And there, what Hebrews is urging on us, do not mistake the things that accompany salvation in your life for the reality of repentance towards God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.

So, I think these two things are what give us balance. We're not the final judge of anyone's life. We don't know what happens in the secret places of their minds, even when they sin in their last breath, but we do have a responsibility for ourselves. And this, I think, is how Jesus responds to that kind of question. Just, you know, are there going to be many who will be saved or many who will be lost?

Make sure you are. And I think when we do that, we refocus on the things that are central, and we know that the Judge of all the earth does right. Andre on Facebook is asking, when speaking about the Trinity as three persons in one essence, what do we mean by person and what do we mean by essence? By essence, we mean that God is one being.

Essence comes from the Latin verb esse, to be. So, what we mean is that He is one being. When we speak about Him as being three persons, I think the best way to understand this whole approach the early church had is this, God has made us as His image, and because we are His image, there are things about our life as well as about our world that reflect who He is and what He is like. And so, we have this privilege of using language that is terrestrial, because we have no other language, that is legitimated by the fact that we are made as the image of God to speak about Him. But when we use that language, in this sense, there is this connection between us because we are image, we are persons, and we see in Scripture that there are so many statements about God made that are what we would call personal.

What the early church was seeking to do when it spoke in these terms was to use this language that is terrestrial to describe the celestial, but use that language in a way that was open to and defined by God Himself and not either by our experience of the vocabulary or our dictionary definition of the vocabulary. So, when we say that God is a person, yeah, we are persons, but we are the microcosm. We exist in bodily form.

We exist on the earth. We understand that God is also a person. In other words, what makes us a person reflects that which is true of Him, but it's not identical with what is true of Him. And all of our language about God is like this. It's always the language of those who are the analogy of God, and we use that language.

We have no other language to use. It's legitimated by the dynamic that we are made as the image of God, but we are always recognizing He's given us this privilege of using that language that enables us to know Him without totally comprehending Him, which is what those early theologians also meant when they spoke about the incomprehensibility of God, but at the same time insisted the wonder is the God we know is the incomprehensible God. We don't know Him as He knows Himself, but we do really know Him who knows Himself. So, all of our theological language is of this order, legitimated by the fact that we are made as the image of God. And that's why it's so important for us not to begin with ourselves and then to impose that language on God, but to realize that God has imprinted Himself into our lives, into our world, legitimating this vocabulary that's born in this world, but is a bridge to that world so that we may really know Him.

And all knowledge of persons is actually like that. I sometimes think when I see a young man or a young woman in front of me, and the young man is about to pledge himself forever, and I can see in his eyes, no man has ever known and loved women the way I know and love this woman. And I'm kind of standing there thinking, come back in two years' time, son, and tell me, you had no idea who she was. And when you've been married the length we've been married, you're still able to say, yes, you need to say it with a smile, but your wife is still incomprehensible to you.

That doesn't mean you don't know her, but you realize there are depths and mysteries to this other person because I'm not that other person. How much more with the Lord? And it's wonderful when it's true of your wife because of the fellowship that you have with her, and it's even more wonderful of the Lord because He is even greater than your wife.

I can't wait to go home and tell Amber that she's incomprehensible to me, and that Dr. Ferguson said I could say that to her. Amen. Larissa on Facebook, she's asking, how can we confront feelings of despair for our friends and family who do not know the Lord?

And I presume this is a question being asked in the context of COVID-19. I think there probably are multitudes. If they watch the news for 12 hours all day long, they are going to be full of despair and gloom. And I think these are gospel opportunities to reach out. And I think we do need to minister to folk who are understandably in despair because this is something that is completely and utterly beyond our control. And it almost looks at times that it's beyond the control of governments.

It's beyond the control of trillions of dollars that are going to be thrown into this. And I don't know what's true and what's not true, but we're way past that, it seems to me, and we now need to sort of use this opportunity, a wonderful gospel opportunity to say there's hope, there's assurance, and it's found in Jesus Christ in trusting and believing in Him alone, having the assurance that whatever lies around the corner, we are in a right relationship with God. This world is not our home. We're going to be with Jesus.

We're going to a new heaven and a new earth for eternity. And I think those are wonderful gospel opportunities. The question is these folks that don't know Christ.

And I think that's a really hard thing. We can't live without these truths. We go back to that classic apologetics text of 1 Peter 3.15. It's because of these truths that we have hope. And I think one of the hardest things for us as Christians is we just so want this to be true for all these people we love and know. And we almost sometimes feel like all the burden is on us for that person being regenerate or unregenerate. And I think it just takes that true handing them over, recognizing that they are in God's hands. And we have that responsibility to be faithful witnesses, but we don't have that responsibility for them to become converts.

And that's hard. I think it's just hard for us to say this truth means so much, and we just want other people to have it too. And it really takes that just resting in God's wisdom and in God's all goodness and trusting in Him with the lives of these people that we love.

That's well said. I know many people who are unbelievers and I think they need us to clearly and simply explain to them what it is we do believe, not only about the gospel, but what it is we believe about God. And then we need to exemplify before them what it means to follow Christ in times like this and what it means to truly trust the Lord. That we exemplify a spirit of calm, of truly resting in our God.

And I think we also have to remember to pray for them. Our thanks to Dr. Burke Parsons there and Dr. Stephen Nichols, along with two of our other teaching fellows, Sinclair Ferguson and Derek Thomas. They were part of an online streaming event that took the place of our Ligetier National Conference just as the pandemic broke out back in March. We wanted to hold the conference. We realized we couldn't do that in person, so we switched to this online streaming event.

And what you heard there was one of the question and answer sessions that we held, timely questions and answers at that time, as they are even now. You know, as we witnessed the unrest around us, the incivility that's on full display, we are reminded that we must be different. We have to view everyone in every situation as image bearers of God.

And to help us do that, we're offering Dr. R.C. Sproul's book, The Hunger for Significance. In this nearly 270-page paperback volume, R.C.

explores our worth as human beings and our destiny. We're happy to send you a copy for your gift of any amount. Call us at 800-435-4343 to make your request, or you can go online to renewingyourmind.org. Today is the last day we're making this offer available, so request it with your gift of any amount.

Again, our web address is renewingyourmind.org and our phone number, 800-435-4343. Well, when the shutdown began because of the pandemic back in March, we made the decision to open our online library free to stream. We've seen an incredible increase in traffic on our website. People from all over the world are accessing the truth of God's Word. Our president and CEO, Chris Larson, says that in ways we are only beginning to understand, it seems that the Lord has prepared Ligonier for this challenging moment to bring needed reinforcements to God's people. Dr. Sproul fixed our purpose as a ministry to awaken as many people as possible to the holiness of God. We've been doing that since 1971, and it's a kindness from the Lord that he's allowing us to do that during these turbulent times. So thank you for your continued support. Well, many observers believe we are living in a post-Christian era. Against that backdrop, we'll bring you several messages from Dr. Sproul's series, Defending Your Faith. We hope you'll make plans to join us beginning Monday for Renewing Your Mind.