This week my teaching partner and I concluded a Bible Survey course over Zoom in South Asia. It is a powerful thing to reflect, in just a few short days, on the entire sweep of the Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. It is a story of both ruin and of gracious restoration.
In the affluent Western world, it is not always easy to see the “ruin” part as clearly. At least if you are middle class or above, your basic needs (food, shelter, plus many luxuries; probably companionship as well) are always met, and you have no reason to anticipate that they ever will not be. Yes, culturally we may see the effects of the fall in a morally downward trajectory; but we are not often confronted with even those effects on a daily basis.
In the South Asian context where we taught the Bible Survey courses (Old Testament and New Testament) the ruin is more obvious. While the leaders we teach (we call them “Timothys”) generally have good jobs (that is why they can afford to take off the days to attend the course), we know that many of those they will teach are subsistence farmers in villages, or day laborers (who, if they do not have a place to work one day, they may not have much to eat the next day). In addition to that, they all live in a predominately Muslim world—and most of them are themselves first-generation believers from their Muslim heritage.
Surveying the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, however, helps to make clear the depth of the ruin that sin has brought into the world. In his book The Church between Temple and Mosque, J. H. Bavinck has a chapter devoted to the full effect, in the Scriptures, of the ruin of sin, not only on individuals, but on the entire cosmic order.
He points out that when man fell, he dragged the entire created order with him onto his ruin. In Genesis 3, not only the relationships between people, and between men and women, is degraded; not only is child-bearing made more difficult; but the whole created order is brought low. The ground no longer yields its fruit as it did before.
In Romans 8 Paul writes that, because of the fall, all creation groans, longing for the renewal of all things. When, because of sin, man, whom God made “a little lower than the angels,” and gave “dominion over the works of [his hands]” (Psalm 8; also Gen. 1:28), fell, all creation—following man in his dominion—fell with him (and her). It all looks very bleak.
But more powerful still is the restoration of all things that accompanies the redemption of God’s people.
Not only men and women are restored; the goal, or God’s endgame, is cosmic in scope. In Isaiah 11:6-9—in the day of the “root of Jesse”—the wolf will dwell with the lamb; the cow graze with the bear; the nursing child play near the cobra, among other things. That is what will happen when “the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.”
And all this, God Almighty will certainly bring about. That is why, in all our courses, we aim to teach the “Doctrines of Grace.” It is God who brings it all about.
For when you come to see the ruinous effect of sin—what in the Doctrines of Grace is called “total depravity”—what Paul names in Ephesians 2 as our being “dead in trespasses and sin,” not only injured or disabled, but dead—then it becomes clear that the remedy, or the restoration, is not in our power at all. It must be God’s Initiative.
In the Doctrines of Grace (Unconditional Election, Definite Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Preservation of the Saints), grace is applied to God’s people, to men, women, and children. And they are glorious truths.
But the effect of these biblical truths exceeds the people of God. If sinful man has dominion over “all that [God] has made,” a dominion that man retains even after the fall, by which he leads all of creation into his ruin; then, when God’s people are restored from that ruin, so will all of creation be restored. The wolf will lie down with the lamb. Or, as Paul describes it in Ephesians 1:9-10, God’s purpose—his plan for the “fullness of time”—is nothing less than to “unite all things in [Christ], things in heaven and things on earth.” A redeemed people by whom Christ ushers in a renewed creation, and creation order.
The particular South Asian country where we taught last week is, to say the least, not a tourist destination. I took my wife there earlier this year, and she agreed. Our home in rural Pennsylvania has more outward attractiveness than anything we saw there. (With the exception, my wife said, of the women. Women in South Asia, she said, were the beauty of the country. They are beautiful, and beautifully and colorfully decked out. It is an observation she can make—I had better not!).
The brothers and sisters we taught, and that I spend time with when I go in person, are, however, a delight (not only the women, but the men as well!). A foretaste of how God is going to renew not only their country, and not only our country but all of creation. And all by grace. Soli Deo Gloria.
