In our “Faith” studies we’ve been hammering away on the goodness of all the “stuff” of creation.  Christianity is not a gnostic religion.  Are you familiar with gnosticism?

Gnosticism was an early heresy that denied the fundamental goodness of creation.  The gnostics taught that this world was not created by the Supreme Good God, but by an evil, rebellious, “lesser” deity.  And so the world that this “lesser” god made was an evil place… a prison from which we need to be rescued.

For the gnostics, salvation consisted of withdrawing and detaching one’s self from this evil world.  And if you withdraw and detach yourself sufficiently from the “stuff” of this world, then you can achieve a sort of mystical/spiritual union with the Supreme Good God.  And that’s how you achieve salvation.

As I said — heresy.  This teaching declares outright war on everything that the Bible has to say about this life and this world.

Consider what Paul says in 1 Timothy 4.1–5.  He says that it is a departure from the Christian faith (in fact, he says it’s the teaching of deceitful demons!) to withdraw and detach one’s self from a world “that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.”

And then he says this:  (Someone once called it a “manifesto.”) “For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer.”

And then in verse 6 Paul tells Timothy that IF he drives this particular point home to the believers whom he serves (as their pastor), THEN he “will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed.”

It’s very plain.  False teachers accuse / malign / incriminate / denounce / blame / besmirch God’s creation (or some parts of God’s creation).  Faithful believers declare the GOODNESS of God’s creation.

In fact, right here we find one of the great reminders of the world of difference between Christianity and every other religion, worldview, opinion, or philosophy that you could line up against it.

All the other options will single out some feature (or features) of the created order as THE CAUSE of all of humanity’s problems.  “The problem with the way things are today is…”

Fill in the blank:  our bodies.  what we eat.  what we drink.  our emotionality.  our poor thinking.  our terrible leaders.  our rugged individuality.  our conformity to culture.  the liberals.  the conservatives.  our tradition.  our new innovations.  our wealth.  our poverty.  our racial differences.  our commitment to racial equality.  our technology.  our education.  our entertainment.  Etc.

There is literally no end to the scape–goating.  Everyone knows that this world is broken in some way.  We obviously were not made for abuse, violence, sickness, heartache and death.  But here all those things are.  The question is “What Went Wrong???”

Only Christianity goes all the way to the root of humanity’s problem.  The root of the problem is our rebellion against our good creator.

Human mutiny against God is the one thing that was NOT originally a part of God’s good creation.  It was added later.  See Genesis, chapter 3. 

As sons and daughters of Adam, we have an inherited tendency to blame some aspect of God’s creation (and by implication, to blame God Himself) for all the misery in which we find ourselves. 

That’s exactly what Adam did.  He blamed some other part of creation — the woman.  And we’ve been pointing the finger ever since.

But the true problem with the way things are is our own disastrous rebellion against a good God who made a good world for his children to enjoy.  The disaster from which only Jesus can deliver us.

In our continuing studies of the three central, foundational themes of the Bible — Creation, Fall, Redemption (which began with the “What You Believe” post of July 17, 2007) — we’ll next turn to humanity’s catastrophic fall into this thing that the Bible calls “sin,” and it’s counterpart, this strange, bizarre, and sad thing that the Bible calls “death.”