Lesson: The Eyes Of The Lord - The Biblical Worldview

I highlighted down all the good points I learned from the weekly Sabbath School lesson. Unfortunately, I didn't have enough time to convert it to a quiz. But I still need to share the message anyway so I just put it this way.

For almost 2,000 years many of the world’s smartest and best-educated people thought the earth sat immobile in the center of the universe. Today, many of the smartest and best-educated people think that humans evolved from what was originally a simple life form.

We always look at the world not from a neutral position but through filters that impact how we interpret and understand the world around us. That filter is called a worldview.

An Oxford university professor has theorized that everything is not real. Instead, we are the digital creations of a race of aliens with super-powerful computers.

Only one is rational

What is the nature of reality? There are two very broad possible answers, even if only one is rational.

Everything in the universe is just is, purely material, natural - nothing created it.

Some divine being (or beings) created the universe.

Our God is a God of miracles who, though using natural laws, is not bound by those laws and who can transcend those laws when He wills (such as in the virgin conception of Jesus).

In the Bible the existence of God is just assumed.

Christian worldview

The doctrine of creation is also foundational to any Christian education. Everything we believe as Christians, everything, rests on the doctrine of the six-day creation.

The Bible didn’t begin with a statement about the law, the resurrection, or the Second Coming. No, it began with a statement about God as Creator, because none of these other teachings makes any sense apart from the reality of God as our Creator.

God asks us to spend one seventh of our lives, every week, to remember the six-day creation, something He asks for no other teaching. What should that tell us about how foundational and important this doctrine is to a Christian worldview?

Again, none of us view the world from a neutral position. An atheist may look at a rainbow and sees nothing but a natural phenomenon but someone eyeing it from a biblical worldview sees not just the natural phenomenon but also a reaffirmation of God’s promise not to destroy the world again by water (Gen. 9:13-16).

Redemption

We must firmly adhere to the teachings of the Bible, for this is God’s revealed truth to humans, explaining for us many things about the world that we would otherwise not know or understand. Hence, all Christian education must be rooted and grounded in the Word of God, and any teaching contrary to it must be rejected.

The doctrine of creation often comes coupled with, even inextricably tied to, the doctrine of redemption.

Morality

Years ago, in France, advocates for the abolishment of death penalty asked a famous French writer and philosopher, Michel Foucault, to pen an editorial on their behalf. What he did, however, was advocate, not for abolishing just the death penalty, but for abolishing the whole prison system entirely and letting all the prisoners go free. Why? Because for Michel Foucault all systems of morality were merely human constructs, human ideas put in place by those in power in order to control the masses.

To restore the image of God

The gospel really makes no sense apart from the law of God, which is one reason we know that the law is still binding for us, despite its inability to save us.

If education is to help restore the image of God in us as far as possible in this life, then even at the most basic level God’s law must be held up, in light of Christ’s example, as the moral code that shows us what truly is right in God’s eyes

“The true object of education is to restore the image of God in the soul.”—Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 595.

Fields of education

Education in and of itself is not necessarily good. People can be educated, even highly educated, in ideas and attitudes that are contradictory to the principles found in the Bible.

That’s why, as Seventh-day Adventists, our educational system must be based on the Christian worldview. This means, then, that all general fields of education, science, history, morality, culture, and so forth will be taught from that perspective as opposed to one that contradicts or even just ignores it.

What it means to be human

It is intellectually naïve and narrow-minded to explain atrocities simply by calling the perpetrators “monsters” or some other dehumanizing epithet without getting to the core of why people do what they do. Many “monsters” of history showed love to their wives and children, cracked jokes with friends, bounced their giggling grandchildren on their knees, and proceeded to get up each morning to perform the day’s atrocities. This is why worldviews matter. And this is why the answer to the psalmist’s question, “What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” (Ps. 8:4) must always begin with “in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Gen. 1:27).

Is there any religion or philosophical system that places a premium on human life higher than Christianity’s proposition that humans are the created, beloved image bearers of the one divine God? This truth entails the belief that Christians, Seventh-day Adventists included, are in a sense the protectors of the worth and dignity of humankind and should be flanking competing worldviews, marshalling a high view of what it means to be a human.

In a now-famous debate between Christian apologist Greg Bahnsen and atheist Gordon Stein, someone asked from the floor why “Hitler’s Germany” was wrong. Stein, representing the atheist position, could come up with no better answer than to say that what Hitler did went against Western civilization’s moral “consensus.”... Within this moral worldview, if the decision had gone the opposite direction for some reason, then all that was done by the Nazis could just have easily been deemed moral.

Stein is a Jewish-American scholar having a debate at the University of California, Irvine, USA, in the year 1985.

Right in his own eyes

Eventually, the person, or persons, who subscribes to this moral worldview will logically conclude that there is no objective moral obligation to go along with the majority and will simply do “whatever is right in his own eyes” (see Prov. 21:2, Deut. 12:8, Judg. 21:25).

Most people would agree that they subscribe to worldviews that encourage some form of law-keeping. However, if their concept of law-keeping is primarily influenced by the legal codes of their countries, there may be a crucial difference between a Judeo/Christian understanding of law and other formulas

He offers an illustration of a conniving teenager who reflects on securing his financial future by marrying a wealthy older woman, killing her, and facing seven to twelve years of prison. He weighs the consequences; he would get out of prison at about thirty years old but would be wealthy for the rest of his life. He decides it’s worth it. Hoffman then says that there is nothing in the entire body of American law that says you are not entitled to make that calculus. Nowhere does American law state that if you are willing to do the time, you still shouldn’t do the crime.

What a privilege

This is where the Ten Commandments stand out in contrast, precisely because they don’t state specific consequences for disobedience. They are moral law, not legal law. Of course, later these commandments also make up the legal code of the nation of Israel. But the commandments tell us what to do and what not to do, not in order to avoid certain specific consequences but because God is communicating what is morally right and what is morally wrong, something American law (America is likely representative of other countries in this respect) doesn’t do.

As Seventh-day Adventist Christians who find ourselves in positions of teaching, we need to communicate the uniqueness of the law of God to the next generation. We often contextualize the Ten Commandments as a legal code to “scare” young people into obedience, but in doing so, we may divest God’s law of its unique moral authority.

Instead of motivating people to obey God’s laws by listing severe consequences, perhaps we as teachers can communicate what a privilege it is even to know and understand what the moral law of God (and the universe) is. And that is just the beginning. To have these moral laws and principles inscribed on our hearts and minds by the Spirit of God so that we may reflect His character is a privilege almost beyond comprehension, not to mention the tremendous and innumerable blessings that follow (Jer. 31:35, Rom. 8:4).

Sabbath School Lesson | Christian Education | Lesson 4 | October 17-23, 2020 |“The Eyes of the Lord”: The Biblical Worldview