How God Can & Cannot be Known
15 Pages - 156K

This lesson covers the dangers of boxing God in to a HVP when attempting to learn who He is. We look at a couple examples of how unbelievers do this as well as a couple examples that believers fall into as well. This lesson is preparatory for beginning a study on God's attributes.

Preparing to know God
14 Pages - 148K

In our last lesson we looked at the strategies for interpreting Genesis. We dealt with the fact that evolution is not new! Rather, it’s an ancient belief of the Continuity of Being, that has come down through time and is now packaged in what we call Cosmic Evolution, the evolution of all things in the universe. It’s really nothing more than an outgrowth of that old HVP idea. It can be expressed mathematically, with slick equations, but after all is said and done it’s the same old belief in a Continuity of Being.

Even secular scholars admit that there’s a linkage going on between ancient paganism and modern paganism. Science really isn’t involved in this debate, its philosophy that’s involved, the philosophy of naturalism.

We also compared a brief list of characteristics in regards to Genesis and Evolution and saw that there were not only differences in the characteristics, but major differences in the sequence of things. One example we saw was in the Bible God created everything very good and death was introduced later so death becomes abnormal. Death is something that came in after creation because of man’s sin. Evolution uses death to bring about life. In the Bible we have life and then it descends into death.

Our worldview really determines how we interpret the book of Genesis. Even small influences from HVP can really cause us to get off track with the Scripture. We looked at three historical strategies that have been used to interpret the origins of the Bible:

• The Capitulation Strategy - using higher criticism, interpreters have influenced the church to completely surrender to cosmic evolution leaving Genesis behind as nothing more than a myth with individual spiritual meaning. We would call this the complete surrender strategy.
• The Accommodation Strategy - also called theistic evolution (God used evolution to create), this approach tries to get Genesis and evolution together and usually attempts this with one of three basic theories:
  • Gap Theory - interpreters place an indefinite period of time between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2 followed by divine creation in six 24 hour days
  • Day-Age-Day theory - interpreters places indefinite periods of time between the six 24 hour days
  • Day-Age theory - interpreters read each of the six days is an indefinite period of time.

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Strategies for Interpreting Genesis
13 Pages - 172K

In our last lesson we looked at Enuma elish and compared that ancient unbelieving text with the Bible and what we found was there are only two fundamentally different worldviews. There may be 101 varieties in the details, but when we boil it down in the final analysis there are only two views, the unbelieving worldview (HVP) and the biblical worldview (DVP).

When we looked at these two views side-by-side we emphasized two key differences. First, was the Creator-creature distinction vs the Continuity of Being. The Continuity of Being basically says that god(s), men, angels, rocks only differ in degree, they are all just part of the universe, there is only one level of reality. Everything is on a scale of varying degree. There may be gods and goddesses, there may even be a god, but the idea is that he differs from us only in degree. In other words, think of IQ, he has greater IQ than we do, we have less IQ than he does, but he and we are connected by a scale only differing in degree. Think of strength, he may be bigger, he may be stronger but in the end he too shares the same environment we do.

Over against that idea, the Bible throws that idea out completely, at a very fundamental level. The Bible says that there is a Creator and a creation, and these realities cannot be bridged; there are two levels of reality, and there is no way for the creature to ever become the Creator. So there’s that fundamental distinction. This is going to have tremendous implications when we get into the NT Christology, the hypostatic union, kenosis and other doctrines. We are preparing ourselves early on in the bible to recognize the coherence of Scriptures. It’s wonderful, it’s more than wonderful, it’s the greatest orchestration ever. Nothing compares.

Second, was Personal Sovereignty vs Impersonal Chance. To get a good picture of Chance, think about the gods and goddesses warring with one another in Enuma elish. Each one trying to fight the other one off and this somehow brings into existence the universe. Somehow in unbelief, chaos leads to order. It’s always that way. But the problem with chance and chaos is that you can never forecast what’s going to happen tomorrow. I mean, if weathermen or stock brokers were running the universe we’d be in a lot of trouble because no one knows what’s going to happen tomorrow. That has always been the dilemma of the unbelieving system. It never can stabilize. That’s the pagan picture of how the universe is run. Contrast that with Scripture, 1 Kings 22 and Job 1, who’s running the universe? Demons, even Satan himself, comes into His presence, do you see any of them warring with the Lord? There’s no war. They’re not going to take Him on. There’s not a challenge there. A Person who is absolutely sovereign is running the universe and He says what can and cannot happen in His universe. He says you will do this and you will not do that, and Satan has no real say about it. There’s no chance there. This is the opposite of chance. That is a fundamental idea that we go back to again and again in the scripture. If you don’t grasp this difference you cannot really come to know the God of the Bible. It’s that fundamental.

So, all you have to do to discover whether a worldview is biblical or human is ask two questions. One, "How many levels of reality are there?" One or two? Every movie, every book, every religion will give one of those two answers. Second, "Who or what is running the universe?" A sovereign person or impersonal chance? There are no other options. Download the entire lesson

Review Questions (Lessons 1-5)
5 Pages - 76K

In learning any subject, repetition is key! You have to review the content in order to get it stuck in your mind so that it can be recalled when you need it. The following questions will serve as a review for you and help to get the sweeping review of what has been covered in the past five lessons. You will need to refer back to the notes on the site to answer some of these questions. Just remember that this is not homework it is all a part of the journey to learning to see your world through God's eyes. Take some time to think through this stuff...it will help! Download the review questions

Comparing Origins (DVP vs. HVP)
11 Pages - 152K

Avoiding the trap of religious neutrality was the main topic of our last lesson. If you learn nothing else in this course, it would a great thing to learn the fact that no one is ever neutral. Neutrality is an illusion usually offered up as some sort of open-mindedness! But no one is an empty cup when it comes to the basic assumptions of life. It’s important to not buy into what someone says without examining it.

Often this issue of neutrality crops up in the realm of education. While public schools make an effort to be neutral they cannot avoid the humanist religion as taught through evolution. All throughout the scientific training of our schools there exists this commitment to remain neutral, that is, to not commit to a certain god for the origin of mankind.

However, we discussed that humanism is really just another religion with man set up as the final authority of everything. They exclude the God of the Bible from the schools in effort to teach another worldview. But we stand on the final authority of the Scripture, and it tells us that God is the Creator and is therefore important for every subject.

Let’s think about the logic. If God is who the Bible says He is, then He has structured the universe His way and the universe reflects His character and His being. So is God important in every subject?

What does the neutrality theory start with? If somebody believes in the neutrality theory, they’re saying math is math, whether or not God exists; history is history whether or not God exists; literature is literature whether or not God exists. But if that’s so, they’ve already by implication denied that the God of the Bible can exist, because if He did exist He would be important for all these subjects. And they’re saying He’s not important for these subjects because they say the subjects don’t change, whether or not He’s there. The moment they said that, they denied the existence of God. So, the myth of neutrality is not neutral. It denies the existence of God.

This way of thinking may be difficult at first if you have never thought about it before, but you must start to think more critically about what lies underneath the HVP.

In our last lesson we also discussed the fact that man has eternity in his heart, meaning that he has a built in desire to press to the furthest context of his existence to understand who he is, where he has come from, what is truth, and what is the ultimate reality. This desire can never be satisfied with HVP as Solomon shows us in the book of Ecclesiastes. Only a relationship with the Creator will satisfy eternity in man’s heart.

In this lesson we move on with our focus of the creation event and begin to think through the DVP of origins verses the HVP of origins. We will establish some very important differences between the two ways of thinking that will lay the foundation for many other HVP lies. This lesson contains the most fundamental point of the book of Genesis and it must not be missed if you want to understand DVP throughout the Bible. Download the full lesson

The Importance of Origins (Part 2)
8 Pages - 120K

Understanding the importance of origins in developing a DVP was the topic of our last lesson. We discovered how the following foundational questions will be answered through our study of Genesis:

• Who is God and what is He like?
• Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?
• Is truth absolute and where does it come from?
• Where did evil come from? Is there any escape from it?

The answers to these questions form what we would call our ultimate assumptions or beliefs needed to know anything. Without answers to these questions you would never attempt to gain knowledge on anything.

So much of what we need to make sense of this world is found in God’s first book of the Bible. Also, we looked at several passages in Revelation to see the symmetry of the Bible. The Creation event was such a monumental event that we will still be praising God for it in heaven. This event will be remembered and recalled eternally!

We also looked at how origins is really at the heart of all men. It’s very important to realize that whenever you discuss origins you’re really discussing a person’s ultimate belief, and that ultimate belief is part and parcel with their view of God. A person’s view of origins will always reveal a persons view of God (or god) - they are that closely related.

Our last lesson also covered the importance of origins for meaning. All communication requires a certain set of basic truths. We looked at three:

1. Meaning Requires Classification - What are the necessary conditions of the world needed to classify things?
2. Meaning Requires Stability - Is the universe stable so that I can depend on my classifications remaining the same.
3. Meaning Requires Context - Does my classification fit in the immediate context of what I see and ultimately to the entire context of the universe?

As we learn more about the doctrine of Creation we are going to see how God created man in His image so that man comes with the needed abilities to understand his environment. Because man is made in God’s image he can classify things with language that is meaningful. Because the universe is stable we can be sure that what we learn about our classifications isn’t going to transmute into something else later. And because God created the entire universe, our classifications can be meaningful within their contexts. This context only makes sense in light of ones view of origins.

Let me briefly expand this idea of how meaning is found in context. We always classify things with the context in mind, this is the only way to get the meaning. If I’m going to get meaning in life I’ve got to push the boundaries of context out all the way to eternity. However, the problem for the unbeliever is that when you push as far as you can go there’s nothing there. According to their worldview there is only mystery and chaos and you don’t get meaning from mystery and chaos.

We summed up our thoughts on the importance of origins for meaning when we said: you can't say anything about anything without saying (by implication) something about everything. The term "everything" points unmistakably to origins our ultimate context. If this is true, then is it possible for anyone to be neutral on the origins issue?

In this lesson we want better understand the idea of neutrality so that we can avoid buying into its agenda. This will greatly help us to make sense of the controversy surrounding origins and how it robs us of real meaning.

Finally we will turn to what God has said in His Word concerning all of mankind’s heart desire to understand the issue of origins and their place in it. Download the full lesson

The Importance of Origins
8 Pages - 104K

Our objective up to this point has been to prepare our minds for continual change. We want to be transformed in our way of looking at the world so that it agrees with God’s view. As we saw in our last lesson God’s viewpoint does not coincide with man’s. Man may harden his heart to God, but this does not change the truth of God and His final authority.

Remember how God confronted Adam and Even in the garden? He came to them in hiding and approached them with the question, “where are you?” God used a question to help Adam and Eve think through their own HVP. He then took them back to the historical command that He had given them, specifically not eating from the tree of good and evil.

Adam and Eve had considered themselves as the final authority of what was right and wrong. They wanted to weigh out what they thought best; to believe God (the Creator) or to believe Satan (a creature). In the end they made the decision and they followed Satan’s direction. We will talk more about this in future lessons, but we need to realize that God did not accept their attempt to be a final authority. Nor did he accept that they could appeal to some neutral ground in which there was no responsibility. Rather God held them responsible and judged them according to their sin. In the end, Adam and Eve changed their HVP to reflect God’s DVP.

We want to change our HVP as well. Our desire is to see our HVP overcome by a deep trust in DVP. By studying God’s Word in the present we can prepare ourselves for the stressful situations that are sure to come in the future. Rather than waiting for a difficult circumstance to come and take us off guard, we want to think through our DVP strategy now. Establishing what God has said on the major areas of life is where we will start; remembering to apply what we learn through the ReConnecT drill.

Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ. (Romans 10:17)

We also discussed the importance of being prepared with a DVP strategy in order to respond to the questioning unbeliever. When you apply the ReConnecT Drill in your life, there will be a time when others notice how you respond to difficult circumstances. This will bring questions from the unbeliever about how you are able to deal with this or that. 1 Peter 3:15 tells us to be ready to respond to these questions giving a reason for the hope that we have with gentleness and respect.

In this lesson we want to begin to look at the importance of studying origins and how these truths effect the foundations for making sense of the world around us. Download the full lesson

If you have some time, read through Daniel 4. This is a great example of the DVP vs. HVP confrontation. Add a comment to this entry and share what you learn. Keep in mind the goal of the viewpoint confrontation, which we studied in our last lesson.

Divine Viewpoint Strategy (Part 2)
8 Pages - 132K

In our last lesson we discussed the importance of developing a Divine Viewpoint (DVP) Strategy to deal with the difficult circumstances we face in life. Looking at the person of Joseph as an example, we learned that he interpreted his situation of dying through the viewpoint of his biblical worldview.

In the midst of his death, Joseph didn't loose control of his thoughts. He refused to see things they way an unbelieving Egyptian would. Rather, as a follower of God, he used God's word to direct his actions and calm his heart. We called this thinking strategy the RCT (ReConnecT) Drill. We want to reconnect our thoughts with the God's Word when things get difficult. There are three components that Joseph used in order to maintain his Divine Viewpoint (DVP). These included:

• Recall - when a stressful situation arises you recall a Scriptural text, fragment, promise, or story to quite down and focus on the Lord.
• Connect - once you have the appropriate Scripture in your mind you have to connect it to your situation. This often happens as you talk to God in prayer about your choice. Thinking through the Human Viewpoint (HVP) and Divine Viewpoint (DVP) choice you have before you.
• Trust - we keep God's Word circulating in our mind, encircling our situation, until we can trust the Lord and move forward.

Developing this strategy takes focus and time. We can't apply this approach to thinking when we are in the middle of an emotional situation or under high stress. We must train our minds with this strategy before we get caught in a jam.

In working through this strategy in my own thinking, I find that each step in the ReConnecT Drill can present its own set of challenges. The first two steps require that you understand what God has said concerning your situation. This of course takes time and commitment to learn and remember.

The third step of trusting is often the most difficult. This is because we cannot make ourselves trust God's Word without first being convinced.

Faith comes from hearing the message, and the message is heard through the word of Christ. (Romans 10:17)

Being convinced of God’s Word is essential because we have to deal with so many hang-ups in our mind. We have thoughts bouncing around in our heads like, “why are you doing this to me God...I can’t see the purpose for this terrible thing...if God really loved me He wouldn’t have let this happen.” These kind of thoughts are so familiar to us because we spend the majority of our time feeding the Human Viewpoint (HVP).

Trying to combat this in our mind is very difficult because our bible training is so little that when we get in a jam and we recall a fragment of Scripture the HVP, being so much stronger, just swallows it up and destroys it. The end result is our inability to walk by faith.

The strategy to overcome this problem is to reverse the trend. We want to develop a DVP that outweighs our HVP. We want to be convinced of God’s truth when we are not in the thick of life’s stressful circumstances. We need to transform our minds and swallow up temptations with truth in order to maintain our walk of faith.

This lesson builds on a few biblical confrontations of DVP vs. HVP and then further develops the need for training in the Christian worldview in order to be ready to give an answer to the curious unbeliever.

Divine Viewpoint Strategy (Part 1)
8 Pages - 208K

Have you ever noticed that with every area of life there is a type of training designed to help you get the most out of your work? For example, if you want to build houses you have got to start with an apprenticeship and work your way up to being a contractor. Or if you wanted to be a farmer, you would begin as a hired hand and slowly learn the ropes. With military personnel there are years of training and ranks that must be climbed before you can command any leadership. Finally, if you desired to be an athlete, you must train your body to perform a certain way so that in the thick of competition you can respond without having to constantly refer back to the very basics.

So if training is so crucial to every other area of life, how is that when we get to our Christian walk there seems to be an exception to the norm. Often when it comes to spiritual things the general feeling is that no focused training is needed. Everyone just approaches it from his or her own direction. More often than not this approach leads to little or NO spiritual training and preparation. It's like a soldier who is thrown into battle without any training except what was given at the recruiter's desk, they just have to figure it out from there.

In other cases there is training provided, but the focus ends up in the wrong place. It starts with our actions and begins to identify the things you "should" and "shouldn't" do as a Christian. This is like teaching a soldier how to use a weapon but not helping him understand the strategy of battle. He operates in one dimension not having the skills to see his situation and adapt to it. To be sure there are going to be changes in our behavior, but is that where it starts?

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is -- his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Rom. 12:2)

The Bible offers us a strategy for walking by faith that starts in our minds. A training that challenges us to begin seeing the world through the eyes of the Lord (DVP) rather than looking at things from our own perspective (HVP). A way of continually shaping our minds to prepare for the battle of life. A way of starting with the correct thinking strategy and ending up with a proper behavioral response.

As we study through the Bible, you will notice that we are constantly looking at each teaching through two different perspectives. We first and foremost want to train our minds to understand how the Lord sees a situation (DVP), but in order to sharpen our vision we will also look at how man alters and manipulates God's word to meet his own needs (HVP).

This lesson offers you a strategy for dealing with the situations you face in life. A mental approach to thinking through a circumstance in life from a Divine Viewpoint (DVP). As your understanding of God's word expands and as you learn how it better fits together, you will become stronger in your ability to perform this strategy. However, I want you to see how you can apply your biblical worldview to your real life issues. This isn't pie in the sky stuff. It has real implications, and it must be applied.

Well hopefully some of the previous entries have given you a few reasons to begin re-considering your worldview and how important it is to your walk with the Lord. Even though you likely have some good Christian teachings in your mind, you still need a system to begin organizing them so that they can be recalled when it matters most.

You may have noticed that Bible is not constructed as a theological dictionary or textbook. God did not reveal Himself to us this way. Rather, He used stories or historical events with specific teachings embedded within them. So if we want to know the Lord’s thinking on a matter, we need to know both the historical events and the teachings associated with them.

In order to develop a Christian Worldview, we need begin where God began and study through all the major stories of the bible in a chronological order. Each story will lay a foundation of knowledge in a specific area of our thinking. As we progress through the stories, our knowledge will grow as the Lord reveals more.

I will use the diagram above to help our minds catch the “big picture” of what we need to understand. We will add to this diagram throughout our study, but to keep it simple now we will just take a look at the major 22 historical events found in the Bible. As I mentioned, each event has a basic set of teachings associated with it. Learning these events and their teachings as well as learning to tie them together is the purpose of this study.

So why are we only using these 22 historical events? Simply because they are referred to more often than other events, meaning they are more popular amongst the writers. This study is not completely comprehensive, but gives you the big "filing cabinet" so you can continue to learn more and file it in the proper place as you go.

We are going to focus on the most important content and develop our thinking one story at a time. Keep in mind that we will constantly set God’s divine viewpoint (DVP) against the human viewpoint (HVP). This is very helpful because you will not only know God’s thinking on the matter, you will also see the most popular view of man on a matter. This is a huge help because it makes the teachings of Scripture much more clear and our choices more distinct.

Learning to view the world around us through the eyes of the Lord may sound like a worthwhile goal, but what does it really mean, and how do we propose to actually accomplish this? With all the bible studies, books, programs and seminars, how is this approach to studying the Bible any different?

More than any other time in history there is an abundance of information available about the Bible. There is literally a specialized study on just about every topic you can imagine. But all too often these specialized studies provide us with a little bit of insight into a particular area but don't show how they're connected to other major teachings in the Bible. They ignore the "big picture".

I relate this issue to a kind of mental office desk. For example, each topic we learn about in life is like a piece of paper. Every time we learn something new, our desk gets a little busier with paper. Before long, our entire desk is filled with all these teachings just scattered and stuffed wherever they seem to fit at the time. Do you feel like your knowledge of the Bible is pretty scattered at the moment? Keep reading, there is a solution!

Here is where this particular study is different. When you learn at the worldview level, you won't be adding to the clutter of your mental desk, rather you will have the opportunity to begin the process of organizing and making sense of what you have previously learned. It's like a big filing cabinet with all its proper storage drawers and labeled folders. By studying the Bible in the order it was revealed and learning how to tie each of the major teachings together, you will essentially create for yourself a mental filing system. This will be helpful moving forward as you continue to study the Bible as well as give you the tools to go back through all those messy papers in your mind and file some of them away in your worldview; others you will want to discard.

Ok...maybe this is a little out there, but this organizing process reminds me of a cartoon I saw as a kid: Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land. In this episode the Spirit asks Donald to play a mental game, but he finds Donald's mind to be too cluttered. After some mental house-cleaning, Donald is able to discover some cool inventions made possible through math. If you want you can see this part, push play then move the playhead to 2:02 and watch until 1:28.

As you get started, I'm not sure if you will have dust and moths coming out of your ears like Donald did, but you can imagine what it would be like to see the world through a more organized approach to thinking. I can honestly say that this study has done that very thing for me. It has built up my faith in God's Word! It has changed my life and stabilized my understanding of what the Bible says. I literally can understand the major flow of the scriptures and have the "big picture" context in my mind.