Chapter 10 Sin, the Devil, and Misery

　The Lord God commanded man, saying. From every tree of the garden you may eat as you wish, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. But from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For from that tree you will surely die when you eat from it.” (Genesis 2.16-17)

　In describing human sin, the Bible avoids abstract arguments and describes it in terms of the steps taken by specific people and peoples. The events we will discuss are the first couple's rebellion against God over the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, as recorded in Genesis 2 and 3. As you read here, you will notice that human beings are placed in five relationships. The five relationships are: relationship with God, relationship with the serpent (devil), relationship with self, relationship with one's neighbor, and relationship with other creatures. Adam's breaking of his relationship with God, symbolized by the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, through the temptation of the serpent, has caused disharmony in the other relationships as well.

1 The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil - The Nature of Sin

　When God created man and gave him the cultural commandment to “till and keep the garden” and made him heir to the Garden of Eden, He told him that he could take from any tree in the garden and eat from it, but only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for if he broke this commandment, “you will surely die. By reserving this one tree for man, God demonstrated His sovereignty over the Garden and demanded obedience from Adam. From this perspective, the essence of sin is the refusal of God to be sovereign.
　In terms of covenant, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a sign of the covenant. When God makes a covenant, He often establishes a sign of the covenant, such as the rainbow in the Noahic covenant, circumcision in the Abrahamic covenant, and bread and wine in the covenant of Christ. In the creation covenant, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the sign of the covenant. The central point of the sign was that God is sovereign, as mentioned earlier, but why was it called the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil”? The meaning is read in the context of Genesis 2 and 3. The serpent said to the woman. God knows that at the time you eat it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like [sidebar] God, knowing good and evil [/sidebar].” (Genesis 3.5, side point author) After man ate of the fruit of the tree, God also said, “Behold! Man [sic] became like one of us, knowing good and evil [/sic].” (Genesis 3.22, author's footnote). We can see from this that “to be like God” means the same thing as “to be a knower of good and evil.
God alone has the authority to know and determine what is good and what is evil, autonomously and independently of anything else. On the other hand, it is the Creator's nature for creatures to accept and follow the good and evil that He has ordained. The Creator is sovereign over the good and evil in human life. As God's creatures, we human beings are to live according to the standards of good and evil that the Creator has ordained. For example, we are to accept and obey the laws of the Ten Commandments, such as not making idols, honoring parents, not killing, not committing adultery, not stealing, and not bearing false witness, without debating their merits or demerits. Symbolic of this is the commandment, “Do not eat only from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Why was it forbidden to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? It is because God forbade us not to eat from it. Humans were to obey God without reason.
　But since the Fall of Adam, man has turned his back on God, becoming independent of God and trying to become like God, who determines good and evil for himself. In “Crime and Punishment,” Dostoevsky portrays the hero Raskolnikov as the epitome of a man who has lost sight of God. He murders a stingy old woman and takes what little money she has, not because he wants the money. His motive for killing the old woman was to prove that he was an “extraordinary man. According to Raskolnikov, there are two types of people: ordinary people who must obey the law, and extraordinary people who have the right to make new laws for themselves and transgress all moral codes. So Raskolnikov killed the old woman to see if he was a “Napoleon” or just a “louse. Raskolnikov confesses to Sonya. I wanted to kill her, Sonya, for no reason at all. I wanted to kill for myself, just for myself.” By “without reason,” he means that he is God. The essence of sin lies in stepping over the Word of God with authority and trying to be God. They do not doubt that living a self-centered life without God is good. Therefore, the nature of self-centeredness is at the root of all sins such as filial piety, murder, adultery, stealing, and perjury.
　The result of rebellion against God's commandments and rejection of God's sovereignty was death. The essence of death is the severance of fellowship with God. In the days of the gentle breeze, the Lord used to walk around the garden and talk with Adam and Eve after they had finished their day's work of tending the garden. Eirenaeus deduces that this is the Son, given the role of the “divine form” that allows us to see the “invisible God” [ Eirenaeus, “The Apostles' Explanation of the Apostolic Faith,” 12 (translated by Minoru Kobayashi and Reiko Kobayashi), (in The Original Medieval Thought, 1, Heibonsha, 1995)]. I think this is an accurate inference. For human beings, originally, looking up to the face of the Lord and communing with God was “life” and bliss. The writer of the book of Revelation also describes the bliss at the end of man's life as “God's servants will serve Him and look up to His face” (Revelation 22.3-4). However, as soon as they sinned against God, the face of the Lord, which had been so adored, became an object of fear. Adam and his wife “hid themselves among the trees of the garden to avoid the face of the Lord their God” (Genesis 3.8). (Genesis 3.8). Although communion with God is “life,” they fell into sin, which prevented them from communing with God, and they fell into a state of spiritual death. Their bodies were still alive, but they were already dead in spirit.

2 Under the power of the devil
　
(1) Serpent, dragon, god of this world, ruler with authority over the air.
　See the introduction of The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis in  . Since the Devil welcomes both the materialist who says, “There is no such thing as the Devil,” and the wizard who takes an undue and unhealthy interest in the Devil, as he says in the preface to “The Devil's Letters,” I will try to keep the discussion of the Devil where the Bible goes and to stop where the Bible stops.
　Now, the “serpent” that tempted man “was wiser than any other of the creatures of the field” (Gen. 3.1), which refers to the animal serpent. But since Revelation says that this old serpent is the devil, Satan (see Revelation 12.9), it can be interpreted that the devil used the animal serpent as a tool to tempt the first couple. The devil is a spiritual entity that is referred to in other biblical expressions as the great red dragon [ Revelation 12:3], Beelzebul [ Matthew 12:24], the ruler with authority in the air [ Ephesians 2:2], and the god of this world [ 2 Corinthians 4:4].
　In the book of Jude, we read, “Jesus also locked up in everlasting chains under darkness the angels who did not keep their own domain but left their place where they belonged, for the judgment of the great day.” (Jude 6). Some of the angels became arrogant and fell beyond their portion. Satan seems to be the chief of the fallen angels who became arrogant. The demons that frequently appear in the Gospels are probably the lower class of such fallen angels. The words of judgment against the king of Babylon in Isaiah 14:12-15 and the words of judgment against the king of Tullo in Ezekiel 28:11-19 have been read throughout the history of the church as alluding to God's judgment against the pride of Satan. The words of Isaiah are quoted here. Here is a quote from Isaiah.

O son of the dawn, the morning star, how did you fall from heaven? How did you fall from heaven?
O thou that overthrew the nations! Why were you cut down to the earth?
And thou saidst in thine heart.
I will ascend to heaven. I will raise my throne far above the stars of God,
I will sit on the mountain of meeting in the farthest north.
I will ascend to the top of the dense clouds, and I will be like the Most High.”
But thou shalt be cast down into darkness, and into the bottom of the pit. (Isaiah 14.12-15)

　Indeed, the words “Let us be like the Most High” are a cry of satanic pride. Incidentally, the word translated as “bright star” was translated into Latin as lucifer in the Roman Catholic Urgata, which came to be used as another name for the devil in the West.

(2) The Power of Darkness (The Kingdom of the Devil)
　The Devil's end is set for eternal destruction in Gehenna (see Revelation 20.10). Therefore, the devil tempts mankind in various ways, hoping to deceive them, persecute God's people, turn as many of them against God as he can, and increase the number of those who will suffer the eternal fire of Gehenna.
　The woman became autonomous in the sense that she disobeyed God's Word and did selfish things as a result of eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil after being beguiled by the serpent's words, but in reality, she became a slave of the devil and tempted her husband into sin. Thereafter, man was placed under the devil's “power of darkness” (Colossians 1.13) and became his slave. 'Now you who were dead in your transgressions and sins, and once walked in those sins according to the course of the world, according to the ruler who has authority in the air, the spirit that is still at work in the children of disobedience.' (Ephesians 2.1-2). Paul makes a powerful statement in Romans 6 that those who follow Christ have become “slaves of sin” to “slaves of righteousness” or “slaves of God,” but it has been pointed out that the personified singular “sin” (rare: hamartia) here should be understood as the devil [ see chapter 16, verse 2, of this book]. [see Chapter XVI, Section 2 of this book].
　One of the obvious signs that since Adam man has been deceived by the devil and placed in spiritual darkness, in the kingdom of the devil, is idolatry and witchcraft. Since God created man in His own image, man has been given a much greater intelligence than other creatures and has produced a spectacular civilization, but in spite of this, he is ignorant of the true God and is carving idols in the image of gods, such as man, birds, beasts, insects, mountains, large trees, and celestial bodies, which are only creatures. They carve idols in the likeness of gods, such as humans, birds, beasts, insects, mountains, trees, and heavenly bodies, which are only creatures, and they sin by worshipping them (cf. Rom. 1.18-23). It is the devil who lures human beings into spiritual blindness and the sins of idolatry and witchcraft. Since demons and evil spirits are obsessed with the ambition to surpass their own portion and become like the Most High, they take pleasure in being worshipped by humans behind such idolatry and witchcraft. Incidentally, when Paul says, “What am I trying to say? Am I trying to say that the flesh offered to idols has any meaning, or that idols have any meaning?” (I Corinthians 10.19), some have argued that idolatry is merely a doll carved of stone, wood, or metal, and therefore it is okay to worship anything, but they are wrong. In the following verse 20, Paul points out that the offerings of idolaters are “offered not to God but to demons” (I Cor. 10.20). What Paul means in verse 19 when he says that idolatry is meaningless is that “it is bullshit, as the world says, that if you worship Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, you will become a beautiful woman, or if you worship Apollo, the god of art, you will become a great sculptor. It is not the beautiful gods who are behind idols, but evil spirits. To offer an offering to an idol is to offer it to an evil spirit and to commune with it. This is what the Lord Jesus meant.
　It is the idolatry of mammonism, or worship, that the Lord Jesus told us to be especially wary of. No one can serve two masters. You will hate the one and love the other, or you will esteem the one and esteem the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Matthew 6.24) In the land of Gerasa on the other side of Lake Galilee, when the Lord released a man who had been taken captive by a great number of demons who called themselves Legion and had become like wild beasts, and he came to his senses, the Gerasaites, rather than rejoice, drove Jesus out of the region [ Mark 5:1 See -20]. [ Mark 5:1-20 ]. This was because they feared that the death of their property, the pigs, was an economic loss and that they were bound to suffer even greater damage if they welcomed Jesus. They probably thought they were normal people who were not possessed by evil spirits, but in reality, they were also captives of mammonism and slaves of the devil. Whether they are rationalists who believe that there is no God or devil, idolaters, occultists, or worshippers, all people who disobey God are inhabitants of the devil's kingdom. To explain somewhat ahead of time, the Lord Jesus suggested that when He cast out demons from one man, He bound the strong one, the devil (Beelzebul), and recaptured him from the devil's kingdom to the kingdom of God (see Matthew 12.22-29). The arrival of the Kingdom of God means that the kingdom of the devil is falling apart. A work that beautifully expresses this situation in a narrative form is C. S. Lewis's The Lion and the Witch.
　However, it is a mistake to overestimate the devil as well as to underestimate him. Overestimation will lead to a dualism that treats God and the devil as if they are equal, and the devil will turn up his nose at you. In reality, as we see in the Book of Job, even the devil cannot do evil without God's permission, and God, in His providence, will eventually turn that evil into good. According to the Bible, the devil and God are never equal, and the only equal to the devil are the good angels who serve God. While we should be wary of the devil, we should be careful not to overestimate him.

　By “the earth” is meant the whole creation, represented by thorns and thistles. Paul describes the state of creation in disobedience to man as being subject to emptiness and under the bondage of perdition (cf. Rom. 8.20, 21). Since God gave the labor/culture imperative before the Fall of mankind, labor and culture formation are inherently a blessing, but a curse has been added to it, so that when people work, they feel joy and purpose in life in one aspect, but in the other, they are stressed by work. In addition, creation is no longer obedient to man as it was before the Fall, and since then, the history of mankind's relationship with nature has been a struggle between man and nature. We have fought ferocious wild beasts, we have battled pests and diseases, we have fought typhoons and earthquakes. The created world has not yet come under the dominion of man [ cf. Hebrews 2:8]. [ Hebrews 2:9]. In modern times, mankind has attempted to dominate creation through the power of natural science, but as a result, it suffers from the contradiction that it is destroying the foundations of its own survival through environmental destruction.

4 Original Sin and Total Depravity, the Devil and Misery

(1) Original Sin and the True Meaning of “Total Depravity
　As described above, Adam, the head of the covenant, committed the sin of rebellion against God after being defeated by the devil's temptation. This is the so-called original sin. Since Adam is the head of the covenant, the representative of mankind, all mankind that came out of him in Adam became the bearers of original sin before God. There are two aspects to this: the legal/relational aspect and the nature aspect. The legal and relational aspect is the guilt of disobedience to God, while the natural aspect is the tendency toward sin and moral corruption in rebellion against God.
Adam's descendants fell into spiritual death, which is a severance from God, and as a result of losing the relationship of holy life fellowship with God, man lost his original righteousness (original sin) and became inclined to sin and corruptible. The basic nature of original sin is to be self-centered and selfish, turning away from God. This is because the root of sin is the attempt to drive out the true God, who is originally on the throne of life, and to sit on the throne as God himself. Man who rebelled against God began to commit idolatry, filial piety, murder, theft, adultery, perjury, covetousness, and various other real sins, and you will notice that this self-centered and selfish nature dwells at the root of all sins.
Let me explain the term “total depravity” in theology. One might argue, “Reformed theology speaks of total depravity, but surely there are some people in the world who are very fond of filial piety, violence, and theft, but there are also many people who are very fond of filial piety and charity. I am sure there are some who would argue that there are people who like filial piety and charity. When I was a resident of Shinshu, I saw people in my neighborhood who would get up in the winter when the snow was piling up, even though the sun had not yet come out, in the freezing cold (more than 10 degrees below zero), and silently shovel snow from the path to school. Perhaps the phrase “total depravity” is inappropriate, since the doctrine of total depravity is usually misunderstood as such; L. Berkoff wrote, “This [total depravity] does not mean that everything that all men do is so evil that they cannot do good in any sense of the word and have no sense of praise for truth, goodness, or beauty. It does not mean that they have no sense of praise for the true, the good, and the beautiful.” After a bit of exculpation, he adds that total depravity “means that the inherent corruption spills over into every part of humanity, so that there is in him no spiritual goodness, that is, goodness in relation to God, but only moral distortion. [ L. Berkoff, General Reformed Theology, p. 164.” The following is the case. The doctrine of total depravity means that man in his total depravity does natural, civic, and outwardly religious good deeds, but these good deeds do not lead him to love God or mankind. What the doctrine of total depravity means is that all men who are guilty before God in Adam and have fallen into a state of separation from God have become totally incapable of turning to God on their own. In other words, this is the human understanding that is the premise of Grace Salvationism, in the sense that no human achievement will save man before God.

(2) Satanic oppression and misery
　By the way, we said that man became self-centered and selfish as a result of his disobedience to God in Adam, but then, if we say that man became truly in control of his own life, this is not really the case; he came under the oppression of the devil. The first woman was tempted, “You can be like God,” and after eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, all she did was work as a servant of the devil, tempting her husband into sin. Moreover, not only they, but all who would be born of them, rebelled against this God and came to live in fear of death, under the oppression of the devil's darkness, experiencing numerous miseries between themselves, their neighbors, and their creatures. The apostle Paul describes the miserable condition of man under the oppression of sin, death, and the devil since Adam. 'Now you were dead in your transgressions and sins, and once in those sins you followed the course of the world, walking according to the ruler who has authority in the air, the spirit that is still at work in the children of disobedience. For we also were all once among the children of disobedience, living according to the lusts of our flesh, doing what our flesh and heart desired, and like all others, by birth deserving of His wrath.” (Ephesians 2.1-3)
　When Cain was born, Eve seems to have expected that he would be the savior who would crush the head of the serpent (the devil), saying, “I have a son by the Lord” (Genesis 4.1), but in fact, Cain was tempted by sin and became the first murderer (see Genesis 4.7). Original sin was inherited. After David's carnal desires were stimulated by the devil and he committed the sin of adultery by taking the wife of his loyal retainer Uriah and then conspiring to kill Uriah, he was accused by the prophet Nathan and confessed before God as follows. He was accused by the prophet Nathan and confessed before God: “See, I was born condemned and sinful. I was born iniquitous and sinful, and my mother carried me in her womb.” (Psalm 51.5) He was a sinner from the time he was conceived in his mother's womb. Paul tells us that “through one man sin entered into the world, and through sin death entered into the world, and in this way death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5.12). The mechanism by which original sin is transmitted is controversial and cannot be fully explained, but the reality is that we are “born-again children of wrath” (Ephesians 2.3). Indeed, “There are none righteous, no, not one. Not one. There is no one who understands. No one seeks God. All have gone away, and everyone has become useless. No one does good. No one does good.” (Romans 3.10-12).
　We know that the oppression of the devil and all the misery that results from rebellion against God extends to everyone. Although a distinction is made between sin, which refers to man's inner life, and misery, which refers to the external environment, they are closely connected. Man tries to say, “God does not exist,” or he carves various creatures into images and kneels to them, or he is unable to control himself because his desires overtake his will within himself. As a result, they experience distrust and discord in their relationships and are troubled. They are also afflicted by the viruses and pathogens that are creatures, wasps, bears, earthquakes, and typhoons. However, this is in large part the result of the sin that overflows from within the human being. Moreover, the civilization created by human beings has plundered and destroyed the created world, shaking the foundation of human existence by itself. We need a Savior who will resolve our guilt against God, restore our fellowship with God as legally righteous, cleanse man's inner tendency to sin, and destroy the oppression of the devil.

5 The view of sin is the Archimedean point of the theological system.

　We have looked at human sin and misery and the oppression of the devil. Theology is a logical system in which one part harmonizes with the whole. Reformed theologian A. A. Hodge, reviewing the history of theology, noted that the view of sin is the Archimedean point, or fulcrum in the principle of leverage, that drives the entire theological system. The fulcrum, he says, is the difference in view of how bad human sin is, which has driven the entire system and created three types of theological systems: grace salvationism, self-help salvationism, and the God-man cooperation theory that falls between the two [see A.A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, chapter6 for a discussion of the three types of theological systems]. 
　
The first is grace salvationism. ＜Man is totally depraved and spiritually dead through original sin. Since man has free will but can only choose sin, he can only be born again by the secret preemptive work of the Holy Spirit, be made aware of his sin, have faith, and be saved by faith in Christ. ＞Grace Salvationism asserts that the only way to be saved is to be born again through the secret, prior work of the Holy Spirit. Grace salvationism emphasizes omniscience, omnipotence, holiness, and righteousness in the view of God, and the theory of salvation emphasizes predestination and penal substitution. The Christ view teaches both Redeemer and Exemplar, but the emphasis is clearly on the Redeemer. Augustine in ancient times, and the religious reformers Luther and Calvin in modern times, are its representatives. Nevertheless, Luther dealt with the sanctification of Christians in his “Freedom of Christians,” and Calvin further emphasized sanctification as well as justification, and in this context he stressed the normative use of the law.
　The second is self-help, or Pelagianism, which is the opposite of grace salvationism. Self-help salvationism holds that since there is no original sin in human beings, we are all born in the same condition as Adam before the Fall. This is the position of liberal theology since Augustine's opponent Pelagius in ancient times, Sozzinism in modern times, and Schleiermacher in modern times. Since man without original sin can save himself on his own, Christ need not be the Savior from sin. In Pelagianism, Christ is at best a role model and a teacher of love, which is sufficient for man. The view of God is that of an infinite embracing being who does not require any sacrifice for the atonement of sin. As for atonement, it rejects the theory of penal substitution, in which Christ atoned in the place of the sinner, and advocates the theory of moral inspiration, in which Christ is the exemplar. Thus, self-help salvationism leans toward the theory of universal salvation.
　The third is the God-man cooperation theory, which has been called semi-Pelagianism on the part of grace salvationists. This holds that man is not spiritually dead, but spiritually seriously ill. It is the idea that salvation can only be fulfilled with a little human cooperation in God's great grace that seeks to save man. The Anglican Church, from which Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages and Arminius in the Early Modern period, and the Methodist Church, from which the Methodists, and the Holiness and General Baptist Churches, which flowed from the Anglican Church, and the General Baptist Church, which flowed from the Methodists, do not hold to the limited atonement theory of Christ but hold to the general atonement theory of atonement. Baptist churches that do not hold to the limited atonement theory of Christ and adopt the general atonement theory. It is to be distinguished from the PARTICULAR BAPTISTS who hold to the limited atonement theory]. These are positions such as. The recently popular “open theism” also belongs to this category. According to their argument, God foreknew that some would repent and believe, and based on that foreknowledge, He scheduled them. In the case of the God-man cooperation theory, the balance between self-help and grace is diverse, depending on how one perceives the degree of human cooperation between self-help and grace, somewhere between self-help and grace. The view of Christ is that He is both Redeemer and Exemplar, and the salvation theory emphasizes sanctification rather than justification.

6 How to Think about the Arminian Argument (Arminian Controversy)

　A. A. Hodge's view of original sin as an Archimedean point and his categorization of theological systems into three types is certainly useful for looking at the systematic development of theology, but we must be wary of the possibility of easy labeling of other schools and of going too far in theological reasoning beyond what the Bible says. Easy labeling of others gives us immediate relief but prevents us from learning from others, making us foolish while thinking we are wise.
In the seventeenth-century Dutch-settled controversy over the theory of predestination, Arminianism has accused Calvinism of a theory of predestination that makes God the author of sin, and Calvinism has criticized Arminianism for neglecting God's sovereignty and for being half a self-help theory. In response to Arminianism's five-point protest against Calvinism, Calvinists have argued that man is totally depraved and cannot turn to God on his own (total depravity), that God's election to salvation is totally unconditional (unconditional election Unconditional election), that Christ died an atoning death for the sins of the elect and not for all mankind (Limited atonement), that man cannot resist and reject God's saving grace if God decides to offer it to him (Irresistible grace Irresistible grace is that God has chosen the saints to persevere in their faith to the end, regardless of the twists and turns that may come their way (Perseverance of saints). In English-speaking countries, TULIP is the acronym for the five points, and is referred to as the five characteristics of Calvinism. Is it a pun that the tulip controversy is set in the Netherlands? Calvinists accept all five, moderate Calvinists often accept all four except limited atonement, and some Protestants accept all four except saints' perseverance, etc. The position varies among Protestant denominations. Calvinist theology, which emphasizes coherence, would probably say that since all five points are logically and necessarily connected, it is impossible to accept one part and not accept the others, but just because they are logically and necessarily connected does not mean that all five points should be treated with the same weight. However, just because they are logically and necessarily connected, it does not mean that all five points should be treated with the same weight. As to the degree of emphasis that a doctrine should be taught, it is proper for us as believers to follow the context in which and the degree to which the Bible emphasizes that doctrine.

Despite this controversy, as modern Enlightenment thought flourished and liberal theology emerged under its influence, which denied the authority of the Bible and held that human nature is good and that the kingdom of God will come by living according to the morality of Christ, the differences between Calvinists and Arminians, who believed in the authority of the Bible and shared the confession that original sin dwelt in human nature and the atonement of Christ was absolute and indispensable, came to be seen as relatively small. The differences between Calvinists and Arminians, who share the confession of the indispensability of original sin in human nature and the atonement of Christ, came to be seen as relatively minor.What should we think about the Scheduling Argument today? I would like to make three points.
The first is that we need to be humble enough to listen to what the other school's arguments intend.The intention of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin in preaching the schedule from the Bible is to thoroughly reject self-salvationism in salvation and to praise the glory of God's grace.This was Paul's intention in Romans 9 and Ephesians 1 in preaching the schedule.On the other hand, the intention of the Arminian school in insisting that minimal human free will remains is the concern that an overemphasis on God's sovereign election may result in making God the author of sin and neglecting human freedom before God and responsibility to respond to God.
The second is that the designation “semi-Pelagianism,” which has been used for many years, is a label for the negative image of Arminianism by the Calvinist side, and that, in fact, if one reads the claims and sermons of the Arminianists, it would be more appropriate to call it “semi-Augustinianism”This is to say.This is because Arminianists also place considerable emphasis on grace.John Wesley, who is considered an Arminian, claimed that “the ‘one great and fundamental difference between Christianity as a system of doctrine and the most refined paganism’ is whether or not it recognizes the fall and total corruption of man” [ Sermon #44, Original Sin, iii. 1-5, Mitsuru Fujimoto, Wesley'sTheology of Wesleyanism,” in Evangelical Literature Publishing Society, p. 132]. The pagan authors, he points out, know about various human vices, but they never admit the total corruption of man. So what is the difference between Wesley's Calvinism and Calvinism? Wesley says that sinners in total corruption can be converted because “grace, which leads to salvation, extends to the whole human race because of the atonement of the cross of Christ [ Fujimoto ibid. p161],” but “grace precedes and takes the initiative but does not force; it precedes but does not pre-ordain; it precedes but does not pre-ordain. It is possible to accept grace and make active use of it, or, on the contrary, to ignore it and reject it [Fujimoto, ibid. p. 161]. In this respect, it differs from Calvinism, which believes that God's grace is irresistible.

Third, I propose that the difference between the two views on the subject of predestination can be explained in terms of differences in perspective. Calvinists see things from the heavenly perspective of God's sovereign plan, while Arminians see things from the earthly perspective of the actual evangelistic and pastoral work on earth. From a heavenly perspective, God's election and salvation are certainly immutable. The conversion of one chosen person to become a Christian does not end with that person alone, but is connected like a chain through which the conversion of another person occurs, a Christian home is born, and the descendants of that person are born. If God's chosen person resists God's grace and can perish without conversion, then if that person is converted, those who should be saved will not be saved, Christian homes will not be born, some will not even be born, and so on in a chain ...... In this way, God's plan or election is effectively nonexistent. This is clearly unbiblical. From a heavenly perspective, God's plan and election are perfect and unchanging. The proof scriptures are listed below. The Scriptural evidence is that “God chose us in him before the foundation of the world, to be holy and without blemish before him, so that we might be holy and without blemish before him. For God has predestined us in love to become his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will.” (Ephesians 1.4-5) The Lord Jesus also said, “I give unto them eternal life. They shall never perish, neither shall any man take them out of my hand. (Matthew 5:16) And the Lord Jesus said, “I will give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; and no one shall take them out of my hand. No one can take them out of my Father's hand.” (John 10.28-30). This affirmation of the Lord Jesus is a sure basis for the saints' perseverance.
On the other hand, from the perspective of evangelism on the ground, a pastor who makes every effort to preach the gospel will probably receive more converts than a pastor who does nothing but roadside evangelism, document evangelism, personal evangelism, and the like. In earthly churches, we have also seen unfortunate cases where people who were so passionate about their faith have stopped coming to church and have left the world while denying their confession of faith. In the Bible, from the perspective of evangelism, pastoral care, and life of faith on earth, there are countless words, especially in the epistles, that urge unbelievers to repent, encourage them, and warn them. These are words that appeal to the human will and force a decision. Let me give you just one example. Once they have been illuminated, once they have tasted the heavenly gifts, once they have been partakers of the Holy Spirit, once they have tasted the wonderful Word of God and the power of the world to come, and then they fall away, there is no turning them back to repentance again. For they are the ones who will crucify and expose the Son of God once again by themselves.” (Hebrews 6.4-6) These words seem to contradict the words of the Lord Jesus quoted earlier (John 10.28-30), but this is the difference between a heavenly perspective and an earthly perspective. From a heavenly perspective, the struggles of the evangelists on earth, the conversion of people, the interference of the devil, and the stumbling of believers are all part of God's plan.
This should be considered in Christ Himself. The Lord Jesus, who was truly God but took on true humanity, had both the heavenly/eternal perspective and the earthly/temporal perspective in their perfect form. The Lord Jesus was the Father's plan for Himself.

We should consider this in Christ Himself.The Lord Jesus, who was truly God but took on true humanity, had both a heavenly/eternal perspective and an earthly/temporal perspective in perfect form.The Lord Jesus foretold at least three times that He would be handed over to His enemies and executed according to the plan of God the Father, but that He would rise on the third day.“Then Jesus began to teach His disciples that the Son of Man must suffer many things, be abandoned by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, be killed, and after three days [sic] rise [sic] [/sic].”(Mark 8.31).The expression “must” (rarity: dei) is used in the New Testament to express the certainty of God's plan.In the Garden of Gethsemane, however, the Lord Jesus said, “Abba, Father, you are able to do anything.Please take this cup away from me.But may it be done not as I desire, but as Thou desirest” (Mark 14.35).(Mark 14.35) He prayed for several hours with sweat pouring like drops of blood.Confident of the Father's unfailing plan, the Lord Jesus willingly offered Himself, struggling with the mission that the Father had given Him [ see Chapter 12, Chapter 2, “The Two Persons of Christ,” in this book].[see Chapter XII, 2, “The Two Persons of Christ” in this book].The Lord Jesus' words of lamentation concerning the betrayal of Judas Iscariot are also striking in their interplay of heavenly and earthly perspectives.He said, “The Son of Man goes away, just as it is written about Him.But woe to the man who betrays the Son of Man.Such a one should never have been born.”(Mark 14.21) The certainty of God's sovereign plan and man's free will and responsibility are beyond our logic, but we should accept both as fact because they are the Lord's words.We do not become God just because we believe in Christ, but as those who have been allowed a glimpse of God's eternal plan through the Bible, we are to live as those who have been placed in time, struggling and willfully offering ourselves to God, praising the glory of the grace revealed in His sovereign election.When the apostle Paul was escorted by ship to Rome as an unconvicted prisoner, the ship was once caught in a storm and drifted through the Adriatic Sea.At that time, the Lord gave Paul a revelation that “not a hair” of the ship's crew would be lost.But later, the sailors were almost held back from running away, and when the ship ran aground, those who could swim were encouraged to swim and those who could not swim to hold on to planks and go to shore, and the people swam to shore in desperation (see Acts 27.23-44).God's unwavering promise is thus fulfilled.
　From an Arminian perspective, it would be tempting to criticize Reformed theology for denying human free will and teaching determinism, which makes God the author of sin, but in fact, this is not the case.The Westminster Confession of Faith confesses in chapter 3, verse 1, the eternal sanctification of God as follows.
“God, from all eternity, by the wisest and most wise plan of his own will, hath freely and immutably ordained whatsoever things shall come to be, that he may not be the author of sin, nor violence be done to the will of his creatures, nor the liberty or accident of the second cause be taken away, but rather. so that it may be established.” (Translation by the Committee of the Christian Reformed Church of Japan)

　As one can see, this confession does not rationally explain the relationship between God's plan and human free will.It is simply a confession of what the Bible teaches in both cases, as it is, though it cannot explain it.
　For the positive significance of what the Bible says about the doctrine of predestination, please refer to Chapter 14, Section 3 of this book.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)

Chapter 9 The Composition of Man - The Outer Man, the Inner Man

May the God of peace Himself make you perfectly holy. May your spirit, your soul, and your body all be kept without blame at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (I Thessalonians 5.23)

1 The Composition of Man

　Another aspect of human beings that we would like to consider is that of human composition. The Western Church tradition holds that the composition of man is dichotomous, consisting of spirit and body, but the trichotomy, consisting of spirit, soul, and body, has also been advocated. The Reformed L. Berkoff favors the dichotomy, while the Baptist H. Siesen favors the trichotomy. In recent years, however, there is a strong belief that the New Testament, although written in Greek, should be read from a Hebraic perspective, and M. Erickson, citing A. T. Robinson, supports the monistic view.
　For example, Psalms 7:9, “A righteous God searches the heart and the thoughts.” (New Revised Version, 3rd ed.), in which the word “libar” translated as “heart” originally means the heart, and the word kiryah translated as “thoughts” originally means the kidneys, may indicate that the body and spirit are one and the same. The New Testament describes man's ultimate salvation as “the resurrection of the body,” and the resurrection body is “the body that belongs to the Spirit” (I Cor. 15.44), which certainly indicates that the Bible views man in a unified manner. It is monism that man cannot be divided into two or three entities, whether spirit, soul, and body, or mind and body.
　Certainly, there is no Gnostic dualism in the Bible, which holds spirit to be good and body (matter) to be evil. Gnosticism taught that the God who created the material world was an evil God called Demiurgos, and that God the Father, who created spirit, was something else. But according to the Bible, the body (matter) as well as the spirit is God's creation and is good insofar as it is God's work.
　In Paul's letters, there is a statement that “what the flesh desires is against the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is against the flesh” (Galatians 5.17), which seems to indicate that the spirit is good and the body is evil, but the “flesh (sarx)” Paul refers to does not mean the body (soma). Paul's “flesh (sarx)” does not refer to the body (soma), but to man's self-centered nature, whether physical or spiritual, which is contrary to God's will. This is evident in the following words: “The works of the flesh are evident. The works of the flesh are evident. For the works of the flesh are evident: lasciviousness, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, wrath, partisanship, division, faction, envy, drunkenness, revelry, and the like. (Galatians 5.19-21) This list of “deeds of the flesh” includes not only the physical sins of lewdness and licentiousness, but also the mental and spiritual sins of idolatry, hostility, and resentment. Whether physical or spiritual, self-centeredness in opposition to God is “carnal.
　By the way, is the modern trend in biblical scholarship that “Hebrew thought is the original teaching of the Bible, and the New Testament is merely a Greek expression of Hebrew thought, so to speak, so monism is correct” correct? If so, then a strict exegesis of the Greek text of the New Testament would be pointless. To cite one example, in John 21, the Lord Jesus asked Peter, who had rejected Him three times, twice if he loved Me with agape love, or one-sided love, to which Peter responded twice that he loved with philos love, or mutual friendship. In response, the Lord asked Peter a third time if he loved me with the love of Philos, and Peter answered that he loved the Lord with the love of Philos. The effective use of the Greek words agape and philos has been interpreted as a wonderful expression of Peter's realization of his own limitations, his realization that he could love the Lord only with the support of the Lord's love, and the Lord's acceptance of this realization. Some commentators, however, argue that the language they were speaking is Aramaic, not Greek, and that since there is no such distinction in Aramaic love, the two different ways of expressing love in this passage have no special meaning. However, those who hold the view of linguistic inspiration that every word of the Bible is the Word of God, respect the fact that God adopted the Hebrew language as appropriate for the revelation of truth when He revealed the Old Testament and the Greek language as appropriate for the revelation of the New Testament. I believe that the traditional interpretation, which carefully interprets each language, is correct.
　It is true that the Old Testament emphasizes the unity of man, and it is also true that the ultimate salvation in Christ is not that the spirit alone will go to be with Christ after the death of the body, but that the body will be resurrected and live in the new heaven and new earth at the second coming of the Lord. At the same time, however, the New Testament also teaches that there is an intermediate state in which a person exists only in spirit after the death of the body until the resurrection. In the story of the rich man and Lazarus, after death Lazarus was taken to the bosom of Abraham, while the rich man fell into burning Hades. This teaches that one can be a spiritual being apart from the body, albeit in an intermediate state until the resurrection (see Luke 16.19-31). And as Paul said, “I am in a dilemma between those two things. My desire is to leave the world and be with Christ. That is far preferable. But it is more necessary for you that you remain in this body.” (Philippians 1.23-24), we see that there is an intermediate state in which a person remains with Christ after death until the resurrection. Although the Bible views man as basically unitary, it also teaches that during the intermediate state, the spiritual part that makes up man can be separate from the physical body. Therefore, from the viewpoint of faith that “the Old and New Testaments in their sixty-six books are the Word of God without error,” today's fashion in biblical scholarship, which takes the Hebraic view as absolute and dismisses the teaching of the intermediate state as Greek, is a mistake. Also, from the perspective of the pastoral field, as it becomes clear that the Lord's second coming and judgment will not come until the Gentile mission is completed, it makes sense that the spirits of the saints who have left this world, though in an intermediate state, were valued as being in the presence of the Lord.

2 The Dichotomy Theory

　The dichotomy theory, widely held in the Western theological tradition, views man in terms of both material and spiritual aspects. It holds that spirit (rarity: pneuma) and soul (rarity: psyche) are synonymous terms referring to the same spiritual aspect. This is based on the fact that there are two biblical passages that describe man as consisting of psyche and soma (rarity: the body) and two biblical passages that describe man as consisting of pneuma and soma. First, the passage that describes man as consisting of psyche and soma is as follows: “Therefore I say unto you, That ye are not yourselves, but that ye are the children of God. Therefore I say to you, “What shall I eat? Therefore I say to you, do not be anxious about your life (psyche), what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body (soma), what you shall put on. For is not life (psuche) more than food, and the body (soma) more than what we wear?” (Matthew 6.25) “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body (soma) but do not kill the soul (psyche). Rather, fear Him who is able to destroy both the soul (psyche) and the body (soma) in Gehenna” (Matthew 10.28). (Matthew 10.28)
　On the other hand, the following is a biblical passage that describes man as consisting of pneuma and soma: “I am the body (soma), and the soul (pneuma) is the body (soma). On the other hand, the biblical passage that describes man as composed of soma and pneuma is as follows: “I have already judged those who have done such deeds, as if they were actually there, though they were apart in body (soma) but present in spirit (pneuma)” (I Cor. 5.3). (I Cor. 5.3)
　Taken together, these passages certainly make the dichotomy seem correct, since psuche and pneuma seem to be interchangeable synonyms. Other passages such as I Corinthians 5.5, II Corinthians 7.1, Ephesians 2.3, and Colossians 2.5 also seem to support the dichotomy theory.

3 Ttrichotomy Theory

　It is often explained that the trichotomy of the human being, consisting of spirit (rarity: pneuma), soul (rarity: psyche), and body (rarity: soma), was influenced by ancient Greek metaphysics. In fact, however, in Greek philosophy, both pneuma and psyche are words that mean “breath,” and there is not much of a formalized distinction between the two. The fourth-century B.C. philosopher Plato says that psyche is the seat of knowledge and virtue, and his disciple Aristotle distinguishes between vegetative, animal, and rational psyche, so it is appropriate to translate psyche as organism or life. The third-century Origenes does not clearly teach a trichotomy, saying that the soul (ki: psyche, luo: anima) means the state of decay of the spirit (ki: nous, luo: mens), although he does say that “the soul is situated between the weak flesh and the burning spirit” (“On Principles,” 2, ch. 8).
　One of the most representative passages in the Bible that supports the trichotomy is “May your spirit (rarity: pneuma), your soul (rarity: psuche), and your body (rarity: soma) all be preserved beyond reproach at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” (I Thessalonians 5.23) only. Also, Hebrews 4:12 says, “The Word of God is living and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, joints and marrow,” which shows that the soul and spirit can be distinguished, though they are indeed difficult to distinguish. As we saw earlier, the interchangeability of the terms psuche and pneuma in several biblical passages is probably due to the fact that both are, as the book of Hebrews says, difficult to distinguish. However, from a different perspective, it could be said that they are strictly distinguishable.
　Furthermore, to understand 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:10, a trichotomy would be preferable to a dichotomy. 'Therefore we are not discouraged. For even though our outward man declines, our inward man is being renewed day by day.” (II Corinthians 4.16) This is followed by a passage that speaks of leaving the earthly dwelling, the tabernacle (cf. I Corinthians 5.1, 6), and putting on “the heavenly dwelling” (I Corinthians 5.4), the resurrection body. Thus, “the outward man” refers to the earthly dwelling place, the tabernacle. The difference between the “outer man” and the “inner man,” by the way, is that the “outer man” of the born-again person deteriorates, but the “inner man” is renewed daily. If this is the case, what aspects of the born-again person belong to the “outer man”? It is not only physical functions such as eyesight, hearing, arm strength, and leg strength that deteriorate with aging. The intellect declines and memory becomes questionable, the will also declines and loses the ability to act, and the emotions become dull. Thus, the intellect, emotions, and will belong to the “outer man,” not to the “inner man.
　If we distinguish the composition of human beings into body (soma), soul (psyche), and spirit (pneuma), and if we assume that the functions of intellect, emotion, and will belong to the soul, then the body and soul are the “outer man” and the spirit is the “inner man. In other words, for the Christian who has the Spirit residing within, the spirit is renewed daily, even when the functions of the body and soul fail due to disability or illness.
　Incidentally, there is a Greek word in the Bible, kardia, often translated “heart,” which, according to Thayer's Dictionary, means the center and seat of physical and spiritual life, so it is safe to assume that it means the dwelling place of the pneuma.
　Another Greek word sometimes translated as “mind” is nous (see Romans 12.2), which is not the heart but rather the mind, so it is better to translate it as “thought” or “thinking. It should be taken to mean knowledge, which is one of the three functions of the soul: intellect, emotion, and will.
　I would like to mention one more biblical passage that favors the trinitarian theory. The “born-again (rarity: psuchikos anthropos) do not accept that they belong to the Spirit of God. They are foolishness to him and he cannot understand them. For to belong to the Spirit is to be judged by the Spirit.” (I Cor. 2.14)
'Brethren. I could not speak to you as to those who belong to the Spirit (r. pneumatikos), but as to those who belong to the flesh (r. sarkinos), to infants in Christ.” (I Cor. 3.1)
　Here, Paul first distinguishes between the “born-again (psuchikos)” and the Christian, and then further distinguishes between the Christian “who belongs to the Spirit (pneumaatikos)” and “who belongs to the flesh (salkinos). He then says that “those who belong to the flesh” walk as “mere men,” or “born-again (psuchikos)” (see I Cor. 3.4). In other words, even a Christian who has received the Spirit has two states, one governed by the pneuma (Spirit) and the other by the psuche (soul). Unfortunately, there is not much difference between the born-again and the soul.
　I used to think that the traditional dichotomy was the way to go, but as I have worked in the pastoral field, I have come to believe that a trichotomy is more appropriate than a dichotomy in the composition of man. This is because even if a person is congenitally intellectually challenged, if God gives us the Holy Spirit in him or her, he or she will certainly be saved and renewed. Because of the intellectual disability of the soul, the person cannot explain the joy and certainty of salvation as logically as an able-bodied person, but he or she certainly begins a new life before God. Also, if the “outer man” is acquired by brain damage due to an accident or illness and no longer functions adequately, the person's soul functions of intellect, emotions, and will will not function properly. If one were to stand on the dichotomous theory, then words and actions would immediately mean that the person's faith before God is no longer normal. However, if we take a trinitarian view, we can understand that even if the brain, which belongs to the “outer man,” becomes sick and the person's intellect, emotions, and will no longer function properly, the spirit, which is the person's “inner man,” is being renewed daily before God because of the Holy Spirit. This is comforting. The Bible does not despise the “outer man” (soma and psuche). The “outers” are also God's entrustment to us, and we should steward them with care. However, when the “outer man” is broken, it does not mean that the person is lost to God. Ultimately, on the Day of Resurrection, the Christian will receive a resurrection body belonging to the Spirit and will serve for the glory of God as king and heir of the Kingdom.

4 Human Individuality and the Work of the Holy Spirit

　Although not based on strict exegesis, the twentieth-century Chinese evangelist Watchman Nee's “The Liberation of the Spirit” [ see chapter 1 of Watchman Nee's “The Liberation of the Spirit,” New Life Publishers, 1971]. I would like to introduce an interesting spiritual solution to the problem of the trinitarian theory and attempt to explain the individuality of Christians and the work of the Holy Spirit against the backdrop of the trinitarian theory. On the day the entry into Jerusalem was imminent, the Lord Jesus' group visited the homes of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus in Bethania. This was right after the Lord had raised Lazarus from the dead. The disciples had been nervous before entering Jerusalem, but now that they had been shown the miracle of the resurrection, they were at the table prepared by Martha with a brave and ambitious look on their faces. The Lord Jesus, however, looked downcast. His eyes were looking beyond the entry into Jerusalem to the cross of Golgotha.
　　Mary wanted to comfort the Lord Jesus, so she anointed Him with the perfume of Nard, which she thought might have been a memento of her mother's or a bride's gift. As the Lord said, “She anointed my body with perfume in preparation for the burial of ......” (Mark 14.8), we can infer that unlike the ambitious disciples, Mary alone, who loved the Lord with a simple heart, sensed the sorrow hidden in the Lord's bosom. Mary alone, who loved the Lord with a simple heart, seems to have sensed the sorrow hidden in the Lord's heart. The perfume oil of Nardo was sealed in a plaster jar because of its high volatility, but Mary broke it open and poured it generously on the Lord Jesus. Then the house was filled with the fragrance of perfumed oil (see John 12.3). If Mary had not broken the jar of perfume, the fragrance would not have filled the house. It was only because she broke it that the fragrance came from within.
　　Watchman Nee likens the jar to the soul (rare: psuche) and the perfumed oil to the Holy Spirit. Every Christian has the Holy Spirit within him, but the fragrant aroma of the Holy Spirit does not come out of him until his soul is broken. But if his soul is crushed, the fragrance of the Holy Spirit comes from within him. Each person lives with something to be proud of in the “outer man,” that is, in the soul and body. Some are proud of their beauty, some of their strength, some of their intelligence, some of their artistic sensibility, and some of their will power. And by what one boasts, one keeps one's ego strong. Every born again person has received the Holy Spirit, but until the pride is broken, the fruit of the Spirit will not begin to be produced and the free work of the Holy Spirit will not begin. This is because the ego, like a plaster jar filled with the perfumed oil of Nardo, prevents the release of the Holy Spirit.
　　By a wondrous providence, the young Moses was raised in the Egyptian court as the son of “Pharaoh's daughter” and was “instructed in all the learning of the Egyptians, being mighty in word and deed” (Acts 7.22). He learned eloquence, political science, military science, jurisprudence, and literature. At the age of forty, Moses, with a burning sense of justice, took a heroic stand to save his fellow Israelite by leaving the court and killing an Egyptian in a fit of bloodlust. But the Israelites reject Moses. Eventually, Moses is left with nowhere to go and flees to the wilderness of Midian, where he spends forty years as a shepherd. At the end of his wilderness course, the Lord God spoke the name “I AM” to Moses from the burning bush and called him to be the leader of God's people Israel's exodus from Egypt.
　　At that time, Moses was adamant about God's call, saying, “I am a talker” (Ex. 6.12). It is natural for a man to become loose-tongued after spending several decades dealing with sheep. Now he has no pride “in word or deed. His title and fame were already gone, and his learning and eloquence were completely rusted. In fact, the Lord was waiting for Moses to lose all his dependence on Him. For a servant of the Lord must rely neither on his own wisdom nor on his own strength, but must rely solely on the Lord. If a servant of the Lord realizes that his former pride is nothing but dust before God and becomes a person who solely trusts in the Lord, then God will allow him to use the learning, power, and experience that He has given him to accomplish His work. The political and military science he had acquired in Egypt and his experience as a shepherd in the wilderness would be used by Moses to lead hundreds of thousands of Israelites through the wilderness against the enemy, and his literature and jurisprudence would be used to write the Five Books of Moses. When the “outward man” is broken, the Holy Spirit makes full use of his gifts, just as the plaster jar releases a fragrant aroma when it is broken.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Chapter 8 Man is a “Image of the Image of God”

What is man? What is man that thou shouldest esteem him, and be mindful of him? (Job 7.17)

1 Creation and the Four States in the “Image of God

　What is man? From ancient times to the present, thinkers and biologists have given various answers to this question, such as “social animals,” “bipedal animals,” “tool-using monkeys,” “machines that are controlled by their environment and behave according to their desires,” “bundles of genes,” and “life that has acquired language.
So what does the Bible teach about man? It teaches that there are four states of being in four ages. The Bible first teaches about man in creation. God said, “Come, let us make man our own. Come, let us make man in our image [sic], in our likeness [sic]. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle, over all the earth, and over everything that creeps upon the earth. God created man in His own image [sic]. He created man in the image of God, male and female He created them.” (Genesis 1.26-27, New Revised Translation 2017, translated by me only for the side points) Man, created in the “image of God,” was in the wonderful state of being placed in personal communion with God. This is the state in the first creation.
　But man rebelled against God in Adam and fell into sin and misery. Thus sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned” (Romans 5.12). (Romans 5.12). Pascal describes it as “the misery of man is the misery of those who have been driven from their thrones” (Pascal 5.12). This is the second state of depravity.
　God has forgiven man in his sin and misery in Christ by grace and made him a child of God. This is the third state, the state of grace. Though forgiven by grace, we still have a sin nature and misery, but we live with hope for the future. Through Christ we have been brought into this grace in which we now stand by faith. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God.” (Romans 5.2)
　When Christ comes again to complete the Kingdom of God after judgment, the saints will inherit the Kingdom of God with His Son in blissful communion with God. 'There is no longer anything to be cursed. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the midst of the city, and His servants will serve Him and look up to His face. And the name of God is written on their foreheads. There is no longer any night. For the LORD their God will shine upon them, and they shall have no need of the light of the lamp or of the sun. They shall reign as kings for ever and ever.” (Revelation 22.3-5) This is the fourth state of ultimate perfection.
　Thus, according to the Bible, there are four periods in the history of salvation: Creation, Fall, Grace, and Ultimate Perfection, and correspondingly, there are four states of man before God.

2 Conventional Understanding of the “Form of God

What distinguishes the creation of man from other creatures is that he was created in the “form of God,” and M. Erikson divides the various views on the meaning of the “form of God” in Genesis 1:27 into three categories: substantive, relational, and functional views [ M. Erikson, Christian Theology, 24 ].
　The substantive view is the understanding of the “form of God” as a human quality. The Roman Church traditionally draws on the interpretation of the ancient Fathers Eirenaeus and Origenes in Genesis 1:26, 27, noting the use of two Hebrew words, “in our form (be-zerem-nu)” and “likeness (ki demut-nu),” and the natural gift is zerem and the supernatural gifts are demut, and that the Fall caused the loss of the supernatural gifts, but left the natural gifts in place. Protestants, however, generally hold that since tzelem and demut are used interchangeably (cf. Gen. 5.1 and 9.6), there is no basis for distinguishing between the two. On that basis, Reformed theology, working backward, so to speak, from the statements in Ephesians 4:24 and Colossians 3:10 that the born again person is restored to the divine form, has held that the human qualities originally given as “the form of God” in creation are knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. He “put on the new man. The new man continues to be renewed according to the image of Him who made him, and comes to true knowledge.” (Colossians 3.10) “He was to put on the new man, created in the image of God, righteous and holy in truth.” (Ephesians 4.24). Knowledge is understood as intellect, righteousness as morality, and holiness as religiosity.
　The relational view is, according to Erikson, “man is in the form of God when he stands in a particular relationship. According to E. Brunner, “God made man in His own image. He made you and me to be like Him, to be a mirror of His heart and His love. [E. Brunner, I Believe in the Living God (trans. Hideo Ohki, 1962), p. 18. According to K. Barth, “According to Genesis 1.27 and following, God made man in his own image, which means that he made him 'male and female. For God Himself is not a solitary being, but a being in relationship, and He made man to be in this relationship. K. Barth, Christian Ethics II (translated by Masahisa Suzuki, Shinkyo Press, 1964), p. 12]. [p. 12]. Perhaps influenced by this, the modern Roman Catholic Church has stated in its “Charter for the Modern World” that “God did not create man as a solitary thing. God from the beginning 'made man male and female' (Genesis 1.27), and their communal life is the first form of personal communion. Man is a social being by his deepest nature. ......[“The Complete Works of the Second Vatican Council” (edited by Nanzan University, Chuo Press, 1986), p. 334."] He stated.
　Incidentally, the background of Barth and Brunner's conception of the “form of God” as a “relation” is the idea of “intersubjectivity” of existentialist philosophy and its underlying phenomenology. Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy in the 17th century, attempted to construct a worldview centering on the unshakable “thinking-self” on the basis of “I think, therefore I am,” and this had a strong influence on the way modern science views things. However, in the view that sees the object with the “thinking-self” at the center, the object is regarded as a thing. In other words, it is a relationship between “I and it. The “self and it” became the basis of modern science, which views the object object objectively. In the past, surgical treatment was considered a lowly practice because cutting up the human body with a scalpel was regarded as an unthinkable thing. However, by viewing the human body as a kind of robot, modern medicine has been able to perform daring surgeries and even replace organs, increasing the number of diseases that can be treated. On the other hand, it has also caused the problem of viewing human beings as objects. The relationship between personality and personality is not “I and it,” but “I and thou” or “I and I.” In other words, they know and influence each other. The functional view is the view of man as “I facing God,” or as “man and woman” facing each other.
　The functional view is that man, as heir to the created world, was given the function of exercising ruling dominion over creation, and that function is the “form of God. The New Revised Bible 2017's translation, “God created man in His own image.” The functional view is the background for the translation “God created man in His own image. God created man to have a second-in-command in the likeness of His divine nature to rule over His creation.
　The New Testament reveals the “form of God” that encompasses these three meanings.

3 The “Image of God” is the Son

[ For more information on this section, see chapter 1 of my article “Christ, the ‘Form of God’” (“Evangelical Theology”, No. 41, 2010). This article is available on the website “Pastor Mizusa's Writings” -> “Doctrinal and Biblical Studies”].

　God created man “in the image of God” after preparing the created world in six days.Unfortunately, however, the New Revised Translation 2017 translates Genesis 1:26-27 as follows.

'And God said. 'Now let us make man in our image [sic] and in our likeness, and let him be as the fish of the sea, and as the fish of the air, and as the fish of the sea, and as the fish of the sea, and as the fish of the air.Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” God created man in His own image.He created [/ by] man in the image [sidenote] of God, and created them male and female.”(By the author)

　Although the translation is “in the image of God,” I believe it would be more appropriate to translate it directly as “in the image of God.In fact, most English translations of the Bible translate it as “in the image of God.The most common translation of the Hebrew preposition “be” translated “as” is “in.If translated “in the image of God,” the “image of God” would be man, but if translated “in the image of God,” the “image of God” can be read as the creationist mediator between God and man.Incidentally, Genesis 1 in the Old Testament of the Seventy, which Paul was familiar with and usually quoted from, replaces the Hebrew preposition “be” with the Greek preposition “kata” (according to ~) and translates it as “created in the image of God”.In the Japanese translations of the Bible, the literal translation translated “as in the image of God.We present it here with kana, punctuation, etc. changed to modern notation.

God said, “Let us make man in our image, and let him rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every kind of insect that creeps upon the earth.God made man in His image.He made him in the image of God, and made him male and female.

Whether “in the image of God,” “according to the image of God,” or “in the image of God,” taking “the image of God” as the mediator between God and man is in harmony with the New Testament description of the Son as the mediator between God and creation in creation.In Colossians, Paul writes: “The Son is the mediator between the invisible and the invisible [sidereal]. The Son is the image [/ by] the invisible [sic] God, begotten before all things that are made.For all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or principalities, whether dominions or authorities, were created in the Son.All things were made by the Son and for the Son.The Son existed before all things, and all things consist in him.”(Colossians 1.15-17, by the author)
　I ask the reader to consider: when Paul, who was familiar with the Old Testament in the Seventy Translations, said “the form of God (rarity: eikon tou seu)” in the context of the above discussion of creation, which biblical passage did he have in mind? Needless to say, it would be Genesis 1:26, 27.Verse 27 of the Seventy says that God “created man in the image of God (rarity: eikorn).Thus, in fact, many early and late Greek Fathers interpreted the “form of God” in which man was created according to that person to be Christ the Son himself [ Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture,Genesis1-2, IVP, 2001,p. 27].[Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Genesis1-2, IVP, 2001, p. 27].
　Eirenaeus states.“'For ...... [God] made man in the likeness of God.'And the likeness was the Son of God, and man was made in the likeness [of the Son of God]. [“The Apostles‘ Explanation of the Apostles’ Credo,” in “The Medieval Philosophy in its Original Form, 1: The Early Greek Fathers,” translated by Minoru Kobayashi and Reiko Kobayashi, Heibonsha, 1995, p. 217]. Origenes states: “Then, in the likeness of his image, he is the image of the Fathers of the Church. What then is there in the image of God, in whose image man was made?This is He who was 'begotten before all things were created' (Colossians 1.15), 'the brightness of the glory of God and the perfect expression of His nature' (Hebrews 1.3), who said of Himself, 'I am in the Father and the Father is in Me' (John 14.10), 'He who has seen Me He is the One who said of himself, “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me” (John 14.10) and “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14.9).[ Origenes, On the Principles, translated by Takeshi Odaka, Sobunsha 1978, vol. 3, chapter 6, verse 1]. gifts are demut, and that the Fall caused the loss of the supernatural gifts, but left the natural gifts in place.Protestants, however, generally hold that since tzelem and demut are used interchangeably (cf. Gen. 5.1 and 9.6), there is no basis for distinguishing between the two.On that basis, Reformed theology, working backward, so to speak, from the statements in Ephesians 4:24 and Colossians 3:10 that the born again person is restored to the divine form, has held that the human qualities originally given as “the form of God” in creation are knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.He “put on the new man.
　The new man continues to be renewed according to the image of Him who made him, and comes to true knowledge.”(Colossians 3.10) “He was to put on the new man, created in the image of God, righteous and holy in truth.”(Ephesians 4.24).Knowledge is understood as intellect, righteousness as morality, and holiness as religiosity. The relational view is, according to Erikson, “man is in the form of God when he stands in a particular relationship.According to E. Brunner, “God made man in His own image.He made you and me to be like Him, to be a mirror of His heart and His love.[E. Brunner, I Believe in the Living God (trans. Hideo Ohki, 1962), p. 18.According to K. Barth, “According to Genesis 1.27 and following, God made man in his own image, which means that he made him 'male and female.For God Himself is not a solitary being, but a being in relationship, and He made man to be in this relationship.K. Barth, Christian Ethics II (translated by Masahisa Suzuki, Shinkyo Press, 1964), p. 12].
　[p. 12].Perhaps influenced by this, the modern Roman Catholic Church has stated in its “Charter for the Modern World” that “God did not create man as a solitary thing.God from the beginning 'made man male and female' (Genesis 1.27), and their communal life is the first form of personal communion.Man is a social being by his deepest nature. ......[“The Complete Works of the Second Vatican Council” (edited by Nanzan University, Chuo Press, 1986), p. 334."]He stated. Incidentally, the background of Barth and Brunner's conception of the “form of God” as a “relation” is the idea of “intersubjectivity” of existentialist philosophy and its underlying phenomenology.
　Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy in the 17th century, attempted to construct a worldview centering on the unshakable “thinking-self” on the basis of “I think, therefore I am,” and this had a strong influence on the way modern science views things.However, in the view that sees the object with the “thinking-self” at the center, the object is regarded as a thing.In other words, it is a relationship between “I and it.The “self and it” became the basis of modern science, which views the object object objectively.In the past, surgical treatment was considered a lowly practice because cutting up the human body with a scalpel was regarded as an unthinkable thing.However, by viewing the human body as a kind of robot, modern medicine has been able to perform daring surgeries and even replace organs, increasing the number of diseases that can be treated.On the other hand, it has also caused the problem of viewing human beings as objects.The relationship between personality and personality is not “I and it,” but “I and thou” or “I and I.”In other words, they know and influence each other.The functional view is the view of man as “I facing God,” or as “man and woman” facing each other. The functional view is that man, as heir to the created world, was given the function of exercising ruling dominion over creation, and that function is the “form of God.The New Revised Bible 2017's translation, “God created man in His own image.”
　The functional view is the background for the translation “God created man in His own image.God created man to have a second-in-command in the likeness of His divine nature to rule over His creation. 
Therefore, if man is not the likeness of the Father but the likeness of the Son, then the Son does not resemble the Father. He then attempted to explain the threefold structure of human mental action, “being, knowing, and will,” or “memory, understanding, and will,” by seeing a shadow of God's threefold nature, but I do not think he succeeded in his attempt. I do not think they have succeeded in their attempt, for they do not represent the personal communion of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit revealed in the Scriptures. However, Augustine's influence in church history was so great that after him, the teaching of Colossians and the ancient Greek Fathers that the “form of God,” the model of man in the article on human creation, refers to the Son, was overshadowed.
　To Augustine's concern, we would respond, “Man was created in the image of the Son and therefore also in the image of the triune God. For the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are identical in essence. The Bible says that man was created in the likeness of the Son, and sometimes man is also called the likeness of God (see I Corinthians 11.7), and therefore God's children are expected to be perfect like the Father (see Matthew 5.48), and it is promised that man will be like the Son (see II Corinthians 3.18). Corinthians 3.18). Since the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are identical in essence, to be like the Son is to be like the Father. The fact that the Son played the role of mediator in the creation of man does not mean that he was inferior to the Father in essence. The Father, Son, and Spirit are of the same nature and equal in power and glory, but there is a distinction in their function.
The Son's mediation in the creationist sense seems to have been forgotten for about a thousand and five hundred years since Augustine. Since I am a teacher in the Church, it is not my duty to advocate new theories. However, I would like to present here the creationist mediatorial nature of the Son, which was widely shared in the ancient Church, because it is the foundation of the redemptive mediatorial nature of the Son, and because it is an important and useful key to understanding and teaching the entire Bible consistently, linking the Old Testament and the New Testament.

4 Man is created “in the image of God's image” to complete God's Kingdom

God has predestined those whom He knows in advance to be conformed to the image of His Son. For the Son will be the firstborn among many brethren.” (Romans 8.29)
　Although man was created in the likeness of the Son of God, that is, in the image of God, the first man, Adam, was in an unfinished state. He was “sinless, capable of sin. In fact, it was because of his imperfection that Adam fell, defeated by the temptation of the serpent, and fell into a “sinful state in which it is impossible not to sin. The state of perfection (state of glory) is “a sinless state in which one cannot sin,” a state of perfection in the likeness of the Son. The Son is the firstborn, the family of God, and the Kingdom of God is completed. This perfection will be realized on the day of the Last Judgment and the coming of the New Heaven and the New Earth. The consummation of salvation in that day is not merely the restoration to the state of creation before the Fall. The state in the glorified Kingdom of God is the state of perfection that was intended at the time of creation.
　The Church Fathers had this point firmly in mind as well. Eirenaeus and Origenes thought that a distinction should be made between the two terms, tzelem and demut, which are similar to God or form in Genesis 1. To simply dismiss this as having little exegetical basis would be to squander their theological legacy. They distinguished between the two terms because they had in view the incompleteness of man at creation and his perfection at his end. They grasped the salvation that Christ would bring, not as a mere restoration of creation, but as an eschatological consummation.
　Eirenaeus compared the Son and the Holy Spirit to the two hands of God the Father, relating the Son to “form (tzelem)” and the Holy Spirit to “likeness (demut),” and asserted that God created man with two hands, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and that “form” in man is found in his nature, such as body, reason, freedom, and autonomy, On the other hand, the “likeness” given by the Holy Spirit means “immortality” as God's true nature that ultimately completes the salvation of the body [ Yoshifumi Torisu, Eirenaeus' Theology of Salvation History, Shinseisha, 2002, p. 92]. 
　
Origenes, in On the Principles, vol. 3, distinguishes and interprets these two words in Genesis 1:26. The fact that God says in verse 26, “Let us make man according to our image, according to our likeness,” but then says in verse 27, “Let us make him according to the image of God,” and is silent about the likeness, “shows that when man was first created, he was given identity as an image (form), but the perfection of likeness was reserved until the time of completion. The fact that he is silent on the subject of likeness is nothing more than an indication that when man was first created, he was given the status of an image, but the perfection of likeness was reserved until the time of perfection. [Origenes, ibid. pp. 267, 268]. In other words.
　L. Berkoff (1873-1957) also said: “Adam is indeed active. L. Berkoff (1873-1957) also said, “Adam was indeed created in a state of active holiness and did not succumb toward death. But he still did not possess the highest privileges of humanity, nor did he overcome the possibility of error, guilt, and mortality. He still did not possess the highest degree of holiness, and he still did not fully enjoy life. [L. Berkoff, “A General Theology of the Reformers” (translated by Chuichi Oyama, Seiei Shiryosho, 1979), p. 14. Berkoff is saying that the highest degree of holiness and fullness of life should have been obtained by Adam's passing the test of the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the covenant of creation. The highest degree of holiness and fullness of life, which was no longer possible due to the Fall of Adam, should have been attained when Jesus, the Redeemer, returned to complete salvation.
Since the terms tzelem and demut are used interchangeably in Genesis (cf. Gen. 5.1 and 9.6), certainly in a narrow sense the reasoning developed by Origenes and Eirenaeus by distinguishing between tzelem and demut would be an overreach. However, their view that ultimate salvation is not merely the restoration of the pre-fall state of creation, but the eschatological perfection aimed for in creation, is legitimate and significant as it clearly links creationism and eschatology and clarifies the whole picture of God's plan. While traditional Reformed theology tends to grasp salvation as the restoration of creation, and modern theology tends to grasp salvation eschatologically, the Bible teaches salvation in terms of both creation and eschatology, and it is Christ the Mediator who runs through creation, salvation, and eschatology. In this regard, there is much to be learned from the biblical interpretations of the Greek Fathers before Augustine.

5 The relational, substantive, and functional views of the “Image of God” are unified in Christ.

　The Father and the Son live in the communion of love in the Holy Spirit. Man was created as a reflection of that Trinitarian communion of love. In creation, the Son, as the representative of the Trinity, assumed the role of mediator between God and creation and became the model for the creation of man. Man, created with the Son as his model, is by nature a person who should love God with his whole heart and soul and love his neighbor as himself. Therefore, there is an opportunity for truth in the relational view that sees the “form of God” in the relationship between God and neighbor. Moreover, after the Son took on human nature in taking up His abode in the virgin Mary some 2,000 years ago, even in a redemptive sense, He became the mediator between God and man, interceding for us in the priestly ministry of restoring our relationship with God and neighbor (I John 2.1).
　What, by the way, is the goal of God's plan? It is that the Son will rule the world as King, the heir of creation, and that we, too, will rule creation as His co-heirs, kings. God has appointed the Son to be heir of all things, and has made the world through him.” (Hebrews 1.2) For this purpose God created man in the image of his Son. If we are children, we are also heirs. For we are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, since we have suffered together with Him to share in His glory.” (Romans 8.17) The Son, as the firstborn, the King, rules the created world at the right hand of the Father, and those who believe in Him are the family of God. God has predestined those whom He knows in advance to be conformed to the image of His Son. For the Son is the firstborn among many brethren.” (Romans 8.29) And he will rule the world as a king with a humble heart as a servant of God. The Book of Revelation describes the ultimate consummation of the Kingdom as follows. There is nothing to be cursed any more, for the throne of God and of the Lamb is at hand. The throne of God and of the Lamb is in the midst of the city, and His servants will serve Him and look up to His face. And the name of God is written on their foreheads. There is no longer any night. For the LORD their God will shine upon them, and they shall have no need of the light of the lamp or of the sun. They shall reign as kings for ever and ever.” (Revelation 22.3-5)
　Thus, there is truth in the functional view of the “image of God” because God has given the office of king over the earth to those whom He has called into the family of His Son, the heir of all things. The qualities necessary for that ministry were knowledge (intellect) to fear God, righteousness (morality) to obey God, and holiness (religiosity) to serve God. The Heidelberg Confession of Faith, Q. 31, states that the office of Christ is a threefold office of prophecy, kingship, and priesthood, and Q. 32 states that the office of the Christian is also a threefold office.

Q31 Why is the Lord called Christ, or the Anointed One?
Answer The Lord was appointed by God the Father and anointed by the Holy Spirit,
He is our foremost prophet and teacher, appointed by God the Father and anointed by the Holy Spirit.
He has told us about our salvation,
He fully reveals to us His hidden will and intention concerning our salvation.
　　He is also our only [sidenote:] High Priest [/sidenote:].
He saved us by sacrificing His body as a one-time-only sacrifice. He always stands in our place before the Father through His intercession.
　　And He is our eternal [sidenote:] King [/sidenote:].
He rules over us by His word and by His Spirit, and He protects and preserves us by the salvation He has accomplished.

Q32 Why then are you called a Christian?
A. Because I am one of Christ's hands and feet by faith.
By so doing, I share in the anointing of the Lord.
By this I also confess His name (Author's note: prophet),
I offer myself as a living offering of thanksgiving to the Lord.
And in this life, with a free conscience, I will fight against sin and the devil, and in the future, I will be with the Lord forever,
In the future, I will rule with the Lord over all creation for eternity. Knowledge is primarily related to prophethood.

　Knowledge is primarily associated with prophecy, righteousness with kingship, and holiness with priesthood. Man fulfills the prophetic office by receiving knowledge, the royal office by receiving righteousness, and the priestly office by receiving holiness as the qualities necessary for being the heir of the earth. The reason why these three offices are called “threefold” instead of “three” is that they are distinct but inseparable and overlap each other. The prophetic office, which receives and delivers the Word of God, is closely related to knowledge, but it is also inseparable from righteousness and holiness. Likewise, kingship requires knowledge and holiness, and priesthood requires knowledge and righteousness. Thus, there is a basis for the substantive view of the “form of God.
God plans to have His Son inherit the created world in the last days and rule over it as King. He has spoken to us in His Son, “In these last days. God has appointed the Son to be heir of all things, and has made the world through him.” (Hebrews 1.2) He then commanded human beings, whom He had created in the model of His Son, to govern creation as joint heirs with Christ. This is usually called the cultural imperative. The functional view is also meaningful because man has the task of representing creation, worshipping God as priest, receiving God's word as prophet and delivering it to the created world, and governing creation according to his will as king.
　The creation story in Genesis 1 teaches us that, in the cosmic perspective, everything other than the Creator is a creature, and that man is the Creator's agent. The creation article in Genesis 2 further elaborates on the cultural imperative by narrowing the focus to the creation of man and his task. Here the cultural imperative is described as “to till and keep the garden [ Genesis 2:15].” Since “to till” is the same root word as “servant” (ebed), it suggests the function of taking care of the earth and tapping into the potential God has given it. The mention of underground resources in Genesis 2:11 and 12 also suggests the function of man's utilization of creation. On the other hand, “protect” implies the preservation of creation. Man, as God's agent, has the duty to preserve the earth while drawing out and utilizing its potential.
　The biblical claim that man has the task of governing creation as God's agent seems to have a bad reputation among environmentalists. Since Lynn White's 1967 book Kikai to Kami: The Historical Roots of the Current Ecological Crisis [ Lynn White, Kikai to Kami: The Historical Roots of the Current Ecological Crisis, translated by Yasumi Aoki, Misuzu Shobo, 1999], the following claims have been made by many people, as if in a judgment call. Christianity promoted the destruction of nature through its anthropocentric teaching that God placed man in the world as the ruler of nature. In contrast, Eastern nature religions teach that humans are just another part of nature, that humans respect nature and do not destroy it.” However, when one examines the specific history of environmental destruction, there is no basis for this assertion. The Mesopotamian civilization, which was a nature religion, destroyed forests and caused desertification. The Chinese civilization destroyed forests to burn large amounts of bricks to build the Great Wall of China, creating the Gobi Desert. The deforestation caused by the agricultural revolution in the late Middle Ages in Europe, the deforestation caused by the warship-building competition among the powers in the early modern period, and the destruction of the global environment since the Industrial Revolution in the modern period up to the present day are all caused by unrestrained economic activities and the wars that accompany them. Today, both China and India, both of which have a tradition of pantheistic religions, are destroying the environment at a tremendous rate. In other words, the sin of greed called mammonism (money worship) is the real cause of environmental destruction.
　Originally, human beings were created in the likeness of the Son of God, but they lost sight of the true God and became slaves of mammon, and their interpersonal relationships became hostile, until God said, “The earth shall grow thorns and thistles against you, and you shall eat grass of the field. [ Genesis 3:18],” and the relationship with creation became hostile as well. The solution lies in Christ, the Son whom God sent as a man. Through Christ, we are restored to communion with God, made children of God, restored to the likeness of Christ, and transformed to live in love of neighbor. And as little kings, heirs and kings of the world, we work in harmony with God's will, cultivating and protecting creation, so that our relationship with it may be normalized.
　If we are children, we are also heirs. We are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ because we share in suffering with Him to share in His glory. I believe that the tribulations of this present time are insignificant compared to the glory that will soon be revealed to us. The creation is earnestly looking forward to the manifestation of the children of God.” (Romans 8.17-19)
　This is the future, but our responsible Christian life in the present world is a prelude to it. If we serve faithfully according to the talents that Christ the King has entrusted to each of us, when He returns, He will entrust us with more and we will rule the next world as co-heirs of Christ.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Chapter 7 Providence

　God sent me before you that I might leave the rest of you in the land, and that you might live through the great salvation. Therefore it is not you who have sent me here, but God.” (Genesis 45.7-8)

1 Sanctification, Creation, and Providence

　God put his predestination into action through creation and providence. Providence refers to God's care in the unfolding of His creation throughout history. The word translated “providence” is “providence” in English, which etymologically means “to see in advance,” but its most common translation is “consideration. The word “providence” has an impersonal or inorganic impression similar to “natural law,” as in “providence of nature,” but it should never be thought of that way. The word “care” has the nuance of the work of a more personal being. There is also the translation “dispensing,” in which a doctor prescribes this medicine or that medicine for a patient. However, since “providence” seems to have already become established as a theological term, we will use the word “providence.
　Sometimes I see people confusing God's predestination with providence. While predestination is God's unchangeable plan that was established before the creation of all things, providence is God's provision and dispensation that is now at work in creation to fulfill predestination. Providence is the work of God working through the visible and invisible, the macroscopic and microscopic creation from the cosmic to the microorganism and atomic level. God's providence includes the free-will actions of human beings, angels, and demons. The “Heidelberg Confession of Faith” poetically explains God's providence.

Q27 What do you think God's providence is?
I believe that it is God's omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnipresent power that is now at work everywhere. By that power, God preserves and controls the heavens and the earth, together with all his creatures, as if by his own hand. For the leaves of the trees and the grass, the rain and the sunshine, the fruitful and unfruitful years, eating and drinking, health and sickness, wealth and poverty, are all given to us, not by chance, but by the hand of God as our Father. (Translated by Hiroyuki Kusuhara)

　On the other hand, the “Westminster Small Catechism” defines providence in a simple and clear manner, which is interesting because it shows the individuality of both books.

Q11 What is the work of God's providence?
A. The work of God's providence is the most holy, wise, and mighty preservation and government of the whole creation and all its actions. (Translation of the Japanese Christian Reformed Church's Criteria of Faith Translation Committee)

2 Retention

　Despite their differences in individuality in expression, the above two Q&As both address “retention” and “governance” as two aspects of God's providence. Retention means that God keeps the created world from collapsing and coming to nothing. The covenant of God that is closely related to the work of retention in the world we now live in is the Noahic Covenant made after the Flood.
God said to Noah and to his sons who were with him. Behold, I will establish My covenant with you, and I will make My covenant with your descendants after you, and you shall be My sons and daughters. And with your descendants after you. And with every living creature that is with you. nbspBirds, and cattle, and all the beasts of the earth that are with you, from all that came out of the ark, even every living creature of the earth. nbspI will make my covenant with you, and I will be with you, and ye shall be my bondmen, and ye shall be my witnesses. nbspAnd all flesh shall not be cut off again by the deluge of the flood. And the Flood shall not come again to destroy the earth.” (Genesis 9.8-11)
　Based on the Noahic Covenant, the God of grace and truth keeps us alive today by causing the sun to rise and the rain to fall, and preserves the world so that the Flood will not destroy all mankind. In natural scientific terms, God uses the laws of physics that He has established to keep the earth at a perfect distance from the sun, and by orbiting it and rotating it on its axis while maintaining the tilt of the earth's axis in balance with the moon, He pours the appropriate amount of energy onto the surface of the earth to generate water vapor from the oceans, form rain clouds, and cause atmospheric circulation or rain. God meets our needs by creating atmospheric cycles and rainfall.
Some people say, “The more natural science develops, the narrower God's domain becomes. Natural science is the activity of reading the laws that God uses in His ordinary providence. Seventeenth-century geniuses such as Galileo, Kepler, and Pascal believed that God gave us two books, the Bible and the created world, and that the activity of science is to read God's book, the created world. Galileo believed that the language in which God wrote the letter called the world was mathematics, and he expressed the laws of physics in mathematical formulas.
　Let us return to the story. After God has guided history, He will once again return heaven and earth to nothingness at the Last Judgment. I saw the great white throne and the One who was seated on it. And the earth and the heavens fled away from his presence, and there was no trace of them” (Revelation 20.11). (Revelation 20.11). After that, He will bring a new heaven and a new earth. Reading this word makes us realize that the world exists only because of God's preservation.
　According to rationalism, the world has always operated autonomously according to God's laws, so there can be no miracles that God intervenes and performs in the world. However, the Bible teaches that God ordinarily uses the natural laws of creation in directing the world, but that He may strengthen or suspend natural laws in special cases. Miracles are special providences.

3 Reign

　The governing aspect of providence implies that God carries out His will with immeasurable wisdom and power in spite of the movements of His creatures, especially the interference of those with free will, such as humans and demons, who are hostile to God. For example, the sons of Jacob committed the sin of selling their brother Joseph into slavery in Egypt out of envy, but God guided this evil deed in providence and used it to rescue the Israelites from famine. Joseph, with his faith in Providence, comforted his brothers who feared vengeance, saying. Joseph comforted his brothers who feared vengeance, saying, “Do not be afraid. How can I take the place of God? You have conspired evil against me, but God has made it an arrangement for good. For God has made it an arrangement for good, so that many may be made alive, just as they are today.” (Genesis 50.19-20)
　The greatest example of God using demons and even evil spirits to carry out His plan was the crucifixion of His Son Jesus. The devil, the ruler of this world, and his minions worked among the chief priests, the governor, and his disciple Iscariot Judas to commit the greatest evil in history, the crucifixion, humiliation, and death of the Holy Son. But the devil was unwittingly allowed to contribute to the fulfillment of His plan for the salvation of the world. The devil and his minions were ignorant of God's wisdom in the salvation of mankind through Christ's death on the cross, which had been hidden from before the world began.
We speak of the hidden wisdom of God in the depths, which He ordained before the world began for our glory. None of the rulers of this world knew this wisdom. If they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory.” (I Corinthians 2.7-8) God is the One who has the wisdom to turn the worst into the best. On the morning of Christ's resurrection, the devil must have gnashed his teeth when he learned that he had been made to serve God's salvation of mankind.
　Many readers may have noticed that C. S. Lewis wrote “The Lion and the Witch [ C. S. Lewis, The Lion and the Witch (translated by Teiji Seta, Iwanami Shoten, 1985)]” with this passage from 1 Corinthians 2 as its motif. The Witch seduced Edmund with sweet pudding and made him betray his own brothers. The Witch then says to Aslan You know the magic that the great emperor cast when he created this Narnia. You must know that every traitor is a natural enemy of the straw according to the law, and that every time there is a betrayal, I have the right to give death to it. And so it shall be. Edmund was about to be executed by the witches, in accordance with a magical demand from the beginning of the world. But Aslan offered himself as a substitute for Edmund. The Witch was so overjoyed that she and her minions beat him and killed him on the stone stage. However, when the long night began to dawn, the stone slab of the stone stage cracked with a tremendous roar, and Aslan was resurrected. In fact, there was an even more ancient fate before the beginning of the world that the witches did not know about. It was “an ancient law that when a man who has committed no treachery is willing to be sacrificed and is killed instead of the treacherous one, the tablets of the law will be broken and death will return to the beginning.

4 Everywhere

　As the “Heidelberg Faith Questions” tell us, “God rules over all things in the world, great and small, leaf and grass, rain and shine, fruitful and unfruitful years, eating and drinking, health and sickness, riches and poverty. In the larger scheme of things, God is also in charge of the celestial bodies in the universe, the weather on the earth, and crustal movements. But the LORD made a great noise of thunder over the Philistines that day, and stirred them up, so that they were overthrown by Israel.” (I Samuel 7.10) “God moves the mountains, but they do not notice. God is angry and overturns them. When God causes the earth to tremble at its base, its pillars shake. When he commands the sun, it does not rise, and the stars also are contained.” (Job 9.5-7)
　God also ordains the life and death of all living creatures, even the number of your hairs. The life of every living creature and the breath of every fleshly man is in his hand.” (Job 12.10 also Psalm 104.21, 27-29) “Are not two sparrows sold for an asarion? Even one such sparrow will not fall to the ground without your Father's permission. Even every hair of your head is counted.” (Matthew 10.29-30)
　God also controls the history of the nations, not to mention the history of His people Israel. Of Israel's history, the psalmist sings. “Thanks be to Him who smote the firstborn of Egypt. His grace is everlasting. He brought Israel out of the land. The grace of the LORD is everlasting. With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. nbspThe grace of the LORD is everlasting. Give thanks to Him who divided the sea of reeds in two. nbspThe grace of the LORD is everlasting. Thus did the LORD cause Israel to pass through it. nbspThe grace of the LORD is everlasting. And he cast Pharaoh and his hosts into the sea of reeds. nbspThe grace of the LORD is everlasting. Give thanks to Him who led His people in the wilderness. nbspThe grace of the LORD is everlasting. To Him who smote great kings. For His grace is everlasting.” (Psalm 136.10-17) The history of the nations is as follows. God makes the nations prosper and destroys them. He spreads out the nations and takes them away.” (Job 12.23) “Kingship belongs to the Lord. The Lord rules and reigns over the nations.” (Psalm 22.28) “God has made every people out of one man, and has made them to dwell in all the face of the earth, and has appointed to each an appointed time and a boundary of dwelling.” (Acts 17.26)

5 Providence and Sanctification

The Bible teaches, among other things, variously about God's care for the transformation of His people into the likeness of His Son Jesus.Traditionally, theology has referred to the maturing of God's people as “sanctification.This term has its problems, which we will deal with later, but it is correct that the means of grace for sanctification are often the Bible (sermons), the sacraments, and prayer. But the Bible also teaches one more thing: it repeatedly teaches that God's providence, especially trials, is an important aspect of the maturity of God's people.
Providence also has the translation “laying on of hands.According to the Daijirin, “ponyo” means: (1) The seasoning of food. (2) The condition of things.(2) The condition of things.(2) The condition of things.(3) The condition of the body.The state of health. (4) To handle things moderately.(5) To arrange things moderately.The word is used to describe the state of health.Just as a chef skillfully combines various ingredients to create a delicious dish, God is understood to finish the history of all things, especially the history and life of God's people, according to His will. Q27 What do you think God's providence is? I believe that it is God's omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnipresent power that is now at work everywhere.By that power, God preserves and controls the heavens and the earth, together with all his creatures, as if by his own hand.For the leaves of the trees and the grass, the rain and the sunshine, the fruitful and unfruitful years, eating and drinking, health and sickness, wealth and poverty, are all given to us, not by chance, but by the hand of God as our Father.(Translated by Hiroyuki Kusuhara)
On the other hand, the “Westminster Small Catechism” defines providence in a simple and clear manner, which is interesting because it shows the individuality of both books.
Q11 What is the work of God's providence? A. The work of God's providence is the most holy, wise, and mighty preservation and government of the whole creation and all its actions.
(Translation of the Japanese Christian Reformed Church's Criteria of Faith Translation Committee) 2 Retention
Despite their differences in individuality in expression, the above two Q&As both address “retention” and “governance” as two aspects of God's providence.Retention means that God keeps the created world from collapsing and coming to nothing.The covenant of God that is closely related to the work of retention in the world we now live in is the Noahic Covenant made after the Flood. God said to Noah and to his sons who were with him.Behold, I will establish My covenant with you, and I will make My covenant with your descendants after you, and you shall be My sons and daughters.And with your descendants after you.And with every living creature that is with you.nbspBirds, and cattle, and all the beasts of the earth that are with you, from all that came out of the ark, even every living creature of the earth.nbspI will make my covenant with you, and I will be with you, and ye shall be my bondmen, and ye shall be my witnesses.nbspAnd all flesh shall not be cut off again by the deluge of the flood.And the Flood shall not come again to destroy the earth.”
　(Genesis 9.8-11) Based on the Noahic Covenant, the God of grace and truth keeps us alive today by causing the sun to rise and the rain to fall, and preserves the world so that the Flood will not destroy all mankind.In natural scientific terms, God uses the laws of physics that He has established to keep the earth at a perfect distance from the sun, and by orbiting it and rotating it on its axis while maintaining the tilt of the earth's axis in balance with the moon, He pours the appropriate amount of energy onto the surface of the earth to generate water vapor from the oceans, form rain clouds, and cause atmospheric circulation or rain.God meets our needs by creating atmospheric cycles and rainfall. Some people say, “The more natural science develops, the narrower God's domain becomes.Natural science is the activity of reading the laws that God uses in His ordinary providence.Seventeenth-century geniuses such as Galileo, Kepler, and Pascal believed that God gave us two books, the Bible and the created world, and that the activity of science is to read God's book, the created world.Galileo believed that the language in which God wrote the letter called the world was mathematics, and he expressed the laws of physics in mathematical formulas. Let us return to the story.After God has guided history, He will once again return heaven and earth to nothingness at the Last Judgment.
　I saw the great white throne and the One who was seated on it.And the earth and the heavens fled away from his presence, and there was no trace of them” (Revelation 20.11).(Revelation 20.11).After that, He will bring a new heaven and a new earth.Reading this word makes us realize that the world exists only because of God's preservation. According to rationalism, the world has always operated autonomously according to God's laws, so there can be no miracles that God intervenes and performs in the world.However, the Bible teaches that God ordinarily uses the natural laws of creation in directing the world, but that He may strengthen or suspend natural laws in special cases.Miracles are special providences. 3 Reign The governing aspect of providence implies that God carries out His will with immeasurable wisdom and power in spite of the movements of His creatures, especially the interference of those with free will, such as humans and demons, who are hostile to God.For example, the sons of Jacob committed the sin of selling their brother Joseph into slavery in Egypt out of envy, but God guided this evil deed in providence and used it to rescue the Israelites from famine.Joseph, with his faith in Providence, comforted his brothers who feared vengeance, saying. Joseph comforted his brothers who feared vengeance, saying, “Do not be afraid.How can I take the place of God?
　You have conspired evil against me, but God has made it an arrangement for good.For God has made it an arrangement for good, so that many may be made alive, just as they are today.”(Genesis 50.19-20) The greatest example of God using demons and even evil spirits to carry out His plan was the crucifixion of His Son Jesus.The devil, the ruler of this world, and his minions worked among the chief priests, the governor, and his disciple Iscariot Judas to commit the greatest evil in history, the crucifixion, humiliation, and death of the Holy Son.But the devil was unwittingly allowed to contribute to the fulfillment of His plan for the salvation of the world.The devil and his minions were ignorant of God's wisdom in the salvation of mankind through Christ's death on the cross, which had been hidden from before the world began.
　We speak of the hidden wisdom of God in the depths, which He ordained before the world began for our glory.None of the rulers of this world knew this wisdom.If they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory.”(I Corinthians 2.7-8) God is the One who has the wisdom to turn the worst into the best.On the morning of Christ's resurrection, the devil must have gnashed his teeth when he learned that he had been made to serve God's salvation of mankind. Many readers may have noticed that C. S. Lewis wrote “The Lion and the Witch [ C. S. Lewis, The Lion and the Witch (translated by Teiji Seta, Iwanami Shoten, 1985)]” with this passage from 1 Corinthians 2 as its motif.The Witch seduced Edmund with sweet pudding and made him betray his own brothers.The Witch then says to Aslan
　God, in His providence, takes care of this entire universe, the workings of the earth, the history of mankind, the history of the Church, and the lives of each of us, and carries out His will.

Chapter 6: Biblical Creation Text and Theory of Evolution

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
The earth was a vast and empty void, and darkness was over the face of the great waters, and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.
And God said, “Let there be light. Let there be light. And there was light. (Genesis 1.1-3)

1 On a proposal to avoid the conflict between evolution and creationism
　
　The New Revised Bible 2017 translates Genesis 1:2 as “The earth was stark and empty, and darkness was over the face of the great waters, and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” The translation reads, “The earth was stark and empty. The Hebrew word translated “stark and empty” is “Tohu wa Bohu. Since “Tohu” means “formless, vain, empty” and “Bohu” means “empty,” the first and second editions of the New Revised Bible translated “The earth was formless and empty.” The first and second editions of the New Revised Bible translated it as “The earth was without form and void.
　On the other hand, the New Common Translation translates “tohu wa bohu” in Genesis 1:2 as “chaos. This translation is based on the hypothesis of pan-Babylonian scholars that the creation myth of the Babylonian myth of “Enuma Elish” is behind the Genesis 1 article. According to Enuma Elish, a male god named Apsu and a female goddess named Tiamat (Chaos) arose in the beginning, and when they merged, the gods were born. Apsu was killed by one of the gods, and his wife Tiamat plotted revenge. However, the god Marduk killed Tiamat and used her remains as material to form the world. But despite the hypotheses of pan-Babylonian scholars, if you actually read the Enuma Elish epic, it is as alien to Genesis 1 as it is to Genesis 2. Even though it is difficult to read the cuneiform script, nowadays one can read a partial Japanese translation on the Internet by searching for “enuma elish,” or a full English translation by searching for “enuma elish. The validity of the translation “chaos” is very doubtful.
　We learned earlier that in interpreting God's revelation, the Bible, we should look for parallels with the culture of the time in which the volume was written, but we should also look for differences. Since God reveals through the vessel of the culture and language of the time in which the biblical text was written, there are similarities between the biblical expressions and the language of the time, but God is rather trying to speak a unique message that is foreign to that vessel [“Characteristics and Interpretation of Biblical Revelation: The Two Natures of Christ and the Bible” in Chapter 2 of this book; see also “The Two Natures of Christ and the Bible” in Chapter 3 of this book]. See also]. [“The Two Natures of Christ and the Two Natures of Scripture”].
　Another book I would like to highlight is John Walton's “Rediscovering Genesis 1,” which was published in Japanese translation in 2018. In the book, Walton proposes an interpretation of Genesis 1 that fits the “temple theology” framework of the mythological cosmology of the ancient Orient world. According to Walton, the creation myth in ancient cosmology is the process by which the gods impart function to already existing material, and the gods inhabit the universe as a fallen temple. Walton fits the Genesis account into this framework, interpreting the six days as an account of the imparting of functions to pre-existing inanimate and animate materials as elements of a cosmic temple, and the seventh day of God's rest as an indication that God will dwell in a completed temple.
　Where, then, does Walton say that the inanimate and animate materials that were already there came from? He assumes that God created the materials from nothing long before the seven days of Genesis 1, and that they had undergone a long period of evolution, say 4.6 billion years, before they were ready to be given roles. He says that dinosaurs and fossil humans predate the seven days of creation [ see John Walton, “Rediscovering Genesis 1: Reading the Bible with an Ancient Worldview,” Inochino Kotoba, 2008, pp. 197,198]. [“The Bible is a book of the Bible,” p. 197, 198, 2008]. Thus, Walton suggests that a confrontation can be avoided by maintaining the doctrine of “creation from nothing,” but by placing evolution before the seven days of creation, thereby segregating evolution and creationism. However, Toshio Tsumura, an expert in Oriental studies, whom Walton mistakenly cites as the basis for his theory, raises a number of doubts about Walton's theory, some of which are excerpted below [“Bible Missionary Society News” No. 174 and “Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology” ” Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology”. By John H. Walton, Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2011.] .

The method of embedding the Bible in the flow of ancient Orient cultures belittles the uniqueness of the Bible.
The claim that the Hebrew word bahrāh means “to give function to” rather than “to create” is based on a misuse of the word study.
It is fatal that it does not deal with the uniquely biblical matter of “creation by the Word of God.
It is impossible to accept the existence of dinosaurs and fossil mankind before the seventh day of creation as a literal interpretation.
From Genesis 1 to 11, there is no mention of God creating this world as His home.

　Leaving the response to Tsumura's criticism to Walton, I will explain that, as for us, we are compelled to deal with the issue of evolution. This is because we have no choice but to declare that it is a ridiculous interpretation that defies the principles of biblical interpretation to hold that there was a “creation out of nothing” and a prolonged period of evolution long before the seven days of creation. If such a reading were permissible, anything could be said. There is a theory of “breakdown” popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible in the nineteenth century. According to the Scofield Reference Bible, there was a long break between Genesis 1:1 and 2, during which time there was the fall of the angels. In other words, the disconnection theory attempts to explain that the world, which God supposedly created as good in Genesis 1:1, became stark and covered with darkness in verse 2, and the devil emerged. But this is, in all likelihood, reading too much between the lines. Walton's assumption of the long geological interval required for evolution before Genesis 1:1 is similar to what the Scofield Bible did.
　The essential difference between the creation myth of the Orient and the creation article of the Bible is that the former is fiction, while the latter is divinely revealed fact. If the Genesis 1 article were fiction, we would have no need to take issue with the theory of evolution. Just as biologists need not take issue with the creation of Momotaro. But if the Genesis 1 account of God's creation of the world tells us a fact that occurred in time and space, albeit in a different form of expression than that of modern science, then it is probably an important issue to understand how the Genesis 1 account relates to the theory of evolution. This is because evolution is a theory that claims to tell us facts about the origins of our elaborate world and the origin of the diversity of living species.
　The subject of Genesis 1 is, as noted earlier, that the Creator alone is to be worshipped, and that man, made in His image, is to reign righteously, not to worship other creatures. As a corollary, however, we must deal with the theory of evolution as an issue of the modern era.

2 Atheistic Evolution

(1) Overview of Aristotelian Evolutionary Theory
　I had been interested in biology and believed in the theory of evolution since junior high school, when I first read the article on Genesis 1 in my late teens, I wondered if the “first day” and “second day” could be interpreted figuratively, and if God created diverse species of living things using the method of evolution. I wondered. I later learned that this way of thinking is called atheistic evolution. Many atheistic evolutionists interpret the seven days of the creation story as referring to the billions of years it took for life in the universe and on earth to evolve. They take a single primate that emerged at the end of a very long period of evolution from the first single-celled organisms, and they say that God breathed into it the first human couple, and so on. It is true that “day” can also mean a long period of time (cf. Isaiah 4.2; Psalm 90.4), and some leading conservative theologians are theistic evolutionists. Whether or not God employed the method of evolution in creation should not be seen as a litmus test for identifying orthodoxy and heresy.
There are two merits to the theistic theory of evolution. The first is that Christians are not labeled as “ignorant people” in today's society, where evolution is considered common knowledge. While I am willing to be humiliated because of the “word of the cross,” it would be a shame if evolution were to make people think that the Bible is too silly to even listen to. The second advantage of atheistic evolution is that it seems to cover the flaws of atheistic evolution. As “the invisible nature of God, that is, His eternal power and divinity, is known and clearly recognized through His creatures from the time the world was created, they are without excuse.” (Rom. 1.20), this world, God's workmanship, points to “God's eternal power and divinity. The Bible asserts that if we take a moment to observe the operation of the vastness of the universe, the beauty of a single wild flower, or the intricacies of the mechanisms of our bodies, it is clear that there is a highly intelligent designer behind them all. Nevertheless, the reason why many people in Japan today do not even know the existence of the Creator is due to the blindness of Satan, the ruler with authority over the air (see Ephesians 2.2), the original sin since the fall of Adam to reject God's rule, and the so-called social common sense that we have been receiving since our childhood through schools and the media. information and the so-called social common sense formed by it [ see chapter 1, section 2 of this book]. (1) The fact that we are not aware of the truth of natural science.

(2) The Nature of Truth in Natural Science
Before dealing with the theistic theory of evolution, I would like to make two points about truth in natural science in advance. The first is that all scientific truths are essentially tentative hypotheses. Pascal's treatise on this subject is entitled “Introduction to the Theory of the Vacuum. At the time of the 17th century, it was a matter of debate whether there could be a vacuum, a state in which nothing exists in space. The ancient philosopher Aristotle believed that there could be no such thing as a vacuum in the natural world, and left the following words: “Nature abhors a vacuum. Eventually, in the Middle Ages, on the basis of Aristotle's authority, it was held that there could be no vacuum in nature. In the 17th century, however, Torricelli demonstrated the existence of a vacuum when he experimented with atmospheric pressure in a column of mercury. In the experiment, a test tube filled to the mouth with mercury was inserted upside down into a vessel filled with mercury, and the column of mercury in the test tube dropped until it reached equilibrium with atmospheric pressure. The space at the bottom of the test tube above the mercury column in the upside-down test tube was then considered to be a vacuum.
Descartes, a generation older than Pascal, denied the existence of a vacuum, claiming that the space above the mercury column of Torricelli's test tube contained “an unprecedented fine matter that cannot be perceived by the senses. Since Descartes' philosophy held that expanse is an attribute of an object, it seems likely that he denied a vacuum because there could be no vacuum state, meaning that there is no matter there even though there is an expanse. However, by conducting experiments on high mountains with low air pressure and at the foot of mountains with high air pressure, Pascal demonstrated that the space above the column of mercury in Torricelli's test tube is still a vacuum. Pascal held that the epistemological principle of natural science is experimentation, and that those who hold, on the authority of Aristotle's writings, that there cannot be a vacuum, are not aware of the epistemological principle of natural science, nor are Descartes, who put his philosophical reasoning before experimental results. Pascal left us with a chapter entitled “Descartes the Futile and Uncertain” (L887).
Remarkably, however, in his “Introduction to the Theory of the Vacuum,” Pascal says that Aristotle was right in saying that science is correct when he said that “nature abhors a vacuum. Thus, in the matter of the vacuum, they were right when they said that nature does not tolerate a vacuum, since all their experiments have always confirmed that nature abhors a vacuum and cannot tolerate it. （When we say that a diamond is the hardest of all objects, we mean all objects as far as we know them, and we cannot and must not include in that what we do not know. （In other words, since Aristotle and his disciples conducted the possible experiments of their time and the results of their experiments showed that there is no vacuum in nature, it is scientifically true that they concluded that “there is no vacuum. In other words, scientific truth is essentially a matter of truth. In other words, scientific truth is essentially provisional and can be updated as more rigorous experiments are conducted. All scientific truths are essentially tentative hypotheses, since they are theories derived from the results of a series of experiments.

Second, it is important to point out that people construct theories based on certain paradigms (frameworks of thought and fundamental assumptions). However, many people are so convinced that their paradigm is absolute that they are unaware of the paradigm in which they stand. Today, many scientists are unaware that they are building theories based on a particular paradigm, naturalism, and assume that science is only objective and neutral. Naturalism is “a general term for a position that considers nature at the root of existence and value. In general, it is a paradigm that does not recognize the uniqueness of the supernatural (ideals, norms, transcendentals, etc.) and takes things on the basis of natural things (matter, sensation, impulse, life, etc.) [“Daijirin” (3rd edition, Sanseido, 2006)]”. Naturalism is a specific paradigm, not neutral or objective.
Those who look at things from a naturalistic paradigm would say, “There is a stepping stone-like place in the shallows of Lake Galilee,” referring to the Gospel account of the Lord Jesus walking on the lake to the boat in which the disciples were to board. Jesus must have walked around there and approached the boat. The disciples must have seen this and misunderstood.” It is satisfying to find naturalistic explanations such as the following. On the other hand, those who hold to the supernaturalistic paradigm of Christian atheism, believing that Jesus was God's human form coming to rule over all things, would think that it is natural that Jesus would have walked on the water if he wanted to, and that it would be absurd if he could not have done so. From the naturalistic paradigm, it would be “of course by chance” that Jesus commanded the storm on Lake Galilee to “be still,” but from the Christian atheistic paradigm, “It is easy for God to calm the storm because He is the One who became man. If Jesus had commanded the storm and it had not calmed down, it would be rather absurd. This would be the case.
What the Bible teaches about the relationship between God and the created world is that God created all things out of nothing and ordinarily uses natural laws to provide for them, but also works special providences (miracles) when necessary. Therefore, Pascal, who stood on the atheistic paradigm, found the laws of physical phenomena through experimental methods, and in his “Panses,” a draft of Christian apologetics, he distinguishes between biblical prophecies and fulfillments as God's special providence. From a theistic perspective, the physicist's job is to read and formulate in an experimental way the laws that God ordinarily uses in providence, and to explain special providence (miracles) in a naturalistic way, that is, without God, is a cognitive method error. We cannot recognize correctly unless we use the method appropriate to the subject [ Pascal pointed out that there are diverse orders of reality (French: ordre), and that each order has its own principles of recognition. The spirit of geometry (deductive logic) is the principle of recognition for the world of numbers, experimentation for natural science, the spirit of delicacy for human life, and the authority of books for theology and history. Descartes' mistake in the vacuum problem was the application of deductive logic to the objects of natural science. See section 4 of my “Notes on the Biblical Perspective of Modern Thought,” in “History, Thought, and Ethics” in the HP “The Writings of Pastor Waterweed”]. .
So the first thing we should discern about the biblical creation article is whether the Bible teaches the creation event as being due to natural laws that God still uses to run this world, or whether it is due to a special act of God (a miracle). If we read the Bible normally, the creation article in Genesis 1 is described as an unusual and special act of “creation by word. Therefore, the writer of Hebrews teaches that the events of God's creation can be understood by faith, not by natural observation or experimentation. Through faith we realize that this world was made by the Word of God, and consequently that the things which are seen were not made out of things which are visible.” (Hebrews 11.3) In this regard, the atheistic evolutionist who strives to explain the miracle of creation, which occurred in the past, somehow convincingly by natural laws that are in place today seems to miss the point. It is as off the mark as the article about the Lord Jesus walking on the waters of the Lake of Galilee and desperately trying to explain that it was a ford. As a result, various absurdities arise in atheistic evolution.

(3) Difficulties with the Theistic Theory of Evolution
　There are at least three drawbacks to atheistic evolution, which interprets the “days” of Genesis 1 as geologically long periods of time required for evolution. The first is that all of the supposed bases for evolution are weak, the second is that it is unreasonable to consider the six “days” of creation as a very long period of time, and the third is the influence of the naturalistic paradigm.

(i) The various bases for the theory of evolution are weak.
　First, I will briefly list and critique five points on which the theory of biological evolution has been based, based on high school biology and geology textbooks. First, regarding the origin of life, it is incorrect to say that Miller's experiment of passing electric sparks through the “primitive atmosphere” based on Urey's hypothesis is said to have demonstrated the origin of life forms. The amino acids he successfully synthesized are not life forms, but merely materials for proteins. In this experiment, they synthesized four of the 20 amino acids, which are the materials for proteins, by passing electric sparks through the “primordial atmosphere” consisting of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor.However, there are right-handed and left-handed types of amino acids, and all proteins in living organisms must be left-handed, not a single right-handed type.However, in the experiment, half of the right-handed and half of the left-handed forms were produced.Why life on Earth uses only left-handed amino acids is still a mystery today [ see “Medicine and Life: The Origin of Life from Precise Measurements of Left- and Right-handed Amino Acids.
http://www.jsac.or.jp/tenbou/TT68/P17.html].So, Miller's experiment proved that rather than an electric spark in the primordial atmosphere, life could not have been created.So, today, in a distressing twist, the panspermia hypothesis is in vogue, that meteorites brought extraterrestrial life to earth. But nothing has been done to solve the problem.Naturally, the question must be asked, how did this extraterrestrial life originate?
　Second, if it is true that mutations, called evolution, occurred gradually in the past, then intermediate species, the transitional type from one species to another, which should have been found in countless numbers in the strata, have not been discovered, and the fossils of primitive birds and coelacanths, which were once expected to be intermediate species, have turned out not to be intermediate species at all.It was once taught that the coelacanth was a fish that lived 350 million years ago and became extinct.Based on the morphology of their pectoral fins, evolutionists assumed that they were an intermediate species between fish and amphibians, and they made plausible evolutionary fantasies such as that if they could see their internal organs, their floating pouches would have turned into lungs, or that they came ashore at night to eat insects. However, in 1938, a living coelacanth was discovered in South Africa and found to be just a fish.Living organisms that are still alive in the same form as those found in geological strata that are believed to be from long ago are called “living fossils.” Like the nautilus and horseshoe crab, the cycad, cockroach, and bivalve shells that are very common today are contained in very deep strata.If you keep a cool head, you will realize that these “living fossils” are not evidence that evolution occurred, but evidence that evolution did not occur.Not from a Christian standpoint, but from a medical doctor, Michael Denton, who states the following about fossil evidence: “From the eighteenth century to the present, the gutter has been a place where people have been living for centuries.“The fact that the gulf has not narrowed even slightly from the eighteenth century to the present does not mean that there has been a deficiency in specimen collection, but that it has deprived Darwin of the objectivity of his concept that each segment of nature can be made continuous by a progressively changing array of intermediate types.Darwin's prediction and his hope, noted in The Origin of Species, that future discoveries would bridge the gap, were never realized, as long as the evidence is viewed without prejudice.”[Michael Denton, Anti-Evolution (translated by Seiichiro Kawashima, Dobutsu-sha 1990), p. 451.The translator, Seiichiro Kawashima, was a professor in the Faculty of Science at the University of Tokyo at the time of publication.
　The third, homology of vertebrate skeletons, is not objective evidence of evolution, but only a subjective interpretation to the extent that “it might be interpreted that way.The homology of vertebrate skeletons can well be interpreted from a special creationist viewpoint that the same designer made the skeletons of species belonging to the same clade into a common mechanism.Evolutionists in the field of molecular biology, which has been rapidly developing in recent years, also make the same argument for homology. The basic system of life - based on the genetic information of the combination of four nucleotides - is the same, and therefore, without a doubt, we are all a family connected to the same tree.”[ Kiyotaka Koyama, ibid., p. 64]” This can also be interpreted, from a special creationist perspective, that all species have adopted the same basic system of life because the same designer created them.
　What about the fourth chromosome number?Like skeletal homology, this too is not objective evidence of evolution, but only a subjective interpretation.Humans have 46 chromosomes and chimpanzees have 48. Cockroaches, however, have 47.Cats and pigs have 38, and mice have 40.In this way, the number of chromosomes is of course not evidence of evolution.Recent advances in molecular biology and DNA analysis have pointed to similarities in the gene sequences of related species, which can also be interpreted in terms of special creationism.
Fifth, the familiar textbook figure that various vertebrates are similar at the embryonic stage of ontogeny is a fabricated figure that Haeckel conveniently redrew to fit his theory, as exposed in a popular book [ Francis Hitching, “The Giraffe's Head: Where Did Darwin(translated by Hiroyoshi Higuchi and Masataka Watanabe, Heibonsha, 1983), pp. 249-252.The author does not take the position of creation science]. .In fact, vertebrates are fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals, each considerably different from the embryonic stage.
　The last fact against evolutionary theory that I would like to point out is the fact that, because of the diversity of the gene pool, variation within a “species” pact can occur to adapt to the environment in any number of ways, such as a St. Bernard, a Chihuahua, and a Shiba Inu being one species of dog, but crossing species and species pacts, or evolution, can never occur.Evolution, in other words, does not occur.Since mutation within the species paw and mutation across the species paw are two completely different dimensions, it is deceptive for evolutionists to call mutation within the species paw “minor evolution” and pretend that it is evidence of “major evolution. The study of mutations that were once expected to promote evolution instead demonstrates how fixed the species is.Toshitaka Hidaka, a professor at Kyoto University and former president of the Entomological Society of Japan, is not a Christian, but he says the following about the difficulty of crossing the species barrier: “Each species has its own distinct identity.This means that no matter how many different mutations occur, they can never escape from the clear creek.[The firmness of the species program has become increasingly clear through studies in experimental ecology and embryology.[“Hidaka, ibid., p. 118]” “We have a strong feeling that species are unchanging things, quite the opposite of the impression that biology has given us in the first half of the 20th century, that is, until now.Biology tends to emphasize only evolution, that species change one after another in pursuit of progress and development, but this seems to have been mistaken.We should have paid more attention to the constancy of species.[Hidaka, ibid. p. 124]”　

(ii) Interpretation of the “Days” of the Six Days of Creation [ Mitsuru Nishi, “The Six Days of Creation: Various Interpretations on the ‘Days’ of Genesis 1,” Inochino Kotoba, 1995, introduces various theories on the issue of “days”].
　Next, I would like to point out two difficulties that arise when interpreting the six days of Genesis 1 in evolutionary terms as a geological long period of time.The first is that since the elements that make up this world form an interdependent system, from the macro to the micro, if “day (yom)” means a long period of millions of years, then the world cannot function as a system. To take one of the simplest examples, plants that require pollination were created on the “third day,” but bees and butterflies were created on the “sixth day. If “days” were millions or hundreds of millions of years long, plants would have become extinct in one season.
　Second point. There are two kinds of works of God: ordinary and extraordinary. For example, when God heals a sick person, he heals him using the natural healing power of the human body, an encounter with a good doctor, the doctor's knowledge and skill, prescribed drugs, and lifestyle guidance, which is normal providence. On the other hand, healing by special providence, so-called miracles, are cases where, for example, the Lord Jesus instantly created the missing auditory nerve by commanding the deaf man to “epatha” [ see Mark 7:24-37]. [cf. Mark 7:24-37]. Moreover, in the case of the healing of the Deaf man, He also instantly gave him the vocabulary, grammar, and other language skills that he would have acquired through his life experiences over the following decades, beginning with the speech from his mother that he would have received as an infant if he had been normal. This miracle was an amazing feat of instantaneous creation of decades of life experience that he could not have experienced due to his disability. In other words, special providence is a miraculous way of “creation from nothing,” which includes historicity.
　Naturalists, by the way, use evolution as a theory to explain by natural law the emergence of the diverse species that exist in the world today without God. For the atheistic evolutionist, this means that the diversity of species came about through God's ordinary providence. So, does the Bible teach that God used either a normal or a special method of creation? The “creation by word” of Genesis 1 is a special method. That is why Hebrews tells us, “By faith we realize that this world was made by the Word of God, so that the things which are seen were not made out of things which are visible.” (Hebrews 11.3). The event of creation by word can only be understood by faith, not by ordinary means of perception. The interpretation of Genesis 1 by atheistic evolutionists is that those who hold to naturalism would say that the Lord Jesus walked on the surface of the lake, “It was a ford that Jesus walked on.” or the feeding of the 5,000: “The boy generously offered two loaves of bread and two fish, and the adults were embarrassed and offered their own lunches, so that everyone ate to their fill and there was even a surplus. This is similar to the painstaking efforts to reinterpret the situation rationally and morally, such as “The adults were embarrassed and gave their lunch boxes to each of them, so that everyone had enough to eat and there was a surplus.

(iii) Impact on the interpretation of the naturalistic paradigm

The Lord Jesus freed the deaf man from his deaf condition by declaring to him, “Epatha.The fact that he was able to speak normally meant that he had instantly acquired a language that would normally have taken decades to learn.Now, if Mr. A met the former deaf person for the first time a few hours after this healing miracle, he would not believe that the person was deaf and unable to speak until a few hours ago.If Mr. A were of the atheistic paradigm, he would begin to think that Jesus might have performed such a healing miracle.However, if Mr. A is from a naturalistic paradigm, he would consider the testimonies of himself, his family, friends, and acquaintances to be false.Depending on the paradigm one holds, the same phenomenon can be interpreted differently.
　Evolutionists often naively believe that evolution is a neutral scientific theory, when in fact it is not. Evolutionists do not question the validity of the naturalistic paradigm, but rather build their theory on it.They do not recognize any special intervention (miracles) of supernatural wisdom or power in the development of the first life and its mutation into extremely diverse species.That is the paradigm of naturalism.Since no special intervention of God is allowed, everything must be regarded as an accidental phenomenon, and therefore the theory holds that it must have taken a tremendously long time to happen.Aristotelian evolution appears to commit the contradiction of believing in an evolutionary theory built on a naturalistic paradigm that does not recognize God's intervention in nature, while believing in an atheistic theory that does recognize God's special providential intervention in nature.

3 Special Creationism

　Special creationism is the theory that God created the world not according to the so-called natural laws of ordinary providence, but by a special method, the Word of God.Even on this premise, there is naturally a wide range of biblical interpretation, but here is what I understand.

(1) Historical Preface of God's Covenant
　Basically, what is the nature of the book of Genesis?How should we read Genesis?In view of the manner in which God chose to describe it, it seems appropriate to read it as a historical preface to the covenant document that God gave to His people.Studies of covenant documents in the ancient Orient have shown formal similarities between the covenant below Exodus 20 and the international treaties of the 14th and 13th centuries B.C. found in the Hittite texts of the Bogazkiye.It is also known that there are important formal differences between these late millennium B.C. treaties and those of the first millennium B.C. [see K.A. Kitchen, ibid. pp. 119-134].In other words, God adopted the form of the suzerainty treaties of the 14th and 13th centuries B.C. in making a covenant with the Israelites.Since Deuteronomy is also written in the form of a late millennium B.C. treaty, the theory since De Wette that places the establishment of Deuteronomy in the period of King Josiah's reformation (7th century B.C.) is an anachronism. The outline of the Treaty of Sovereignty and the outline of Deuteronomy correspond as follows.

　（The Sovereignty Treaty and Deuteronomy correspond to each other as follows
　Preamble and Historical Introduction Chapters 1-4
　General provisions of the covenant Chapters 5-11
　Theoretical provisions of the covenant Chapters 12 - 26
Blessings and Curses Chapters 27-28

　Meredith G. Klein draws further inferences from this fact to discuss the nature of the Pentateuch of Moses, the Old Testament, and the Bible as a whole as covenant documents.Note especially the historical preface.The combination of historical statements and legal articles is characteristic of the treaty documents of the second millennium B.C. The historical statements are the preface to the treaty.The historical preface describes the circumstances that led to the making of the covenant and the relationship between the suzerain and the subject peoples.If the Pentateuch of Moses is considered a unified set of covenant documents given by God the Sovereign to the Israelites, then Genesis and Exodus, chapters 1-19, are considered the historical preface to the covenant below chapter 20 [ M.G.Kline, The Structure of Biblical Authority, Eerdmans, 1972, p. 53]. .If we are allowed to apply Kline's relationship between historical preface and treaty, then Genesis 1-16 would be considered the historical preface to the Abrahamic Covenant of chapter 17, and Genesis 1-8 would be considered the historical preface to God's Noahic Covenant with all creation in chapter 9.Genesis 1-8 is positioned as the historical preface to the Noahic Covenant to God's entire creation in chapter 9.The article in Genesis 1 can be interpreted as the historical preface to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil Covenant in chapter 2, which describes the creation event that is the foundation of God's creation covenant with mankind and creation.

(2) Creation from nothing (Genesis 1.1)
What does Genesis 1:1 mean when it says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.This is a declaration that God created everything from nothing.The expression “heaven and earth” is a Hebrew expression, melismus, which indicates all that is in them by putting opposites side by side.When Christ says in Revelation, “I am the Alpha and the Omega” (Revelation 1.8, 22.13), it is also melismus, which probably means that Christ is everything from beginning to end.Similarly, “heaven and earth” in Genesis 1:1 means the heavens and the earth and everything in them.In other words, “God created the heavens and the earth” means that God created all things out of nothing.

(3) Meaning of “Tohu wa bohu” (Genesis 1.2)
　Then, what does Genesis 1:2, “And the earth was a vast waste, and darkness was over the face of the great waters, and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.”What does theIn the New Revised Translation 2017, “The earth was stupendous and nothing” is the Hebrew tohu wa bohu.Since Hermann Gunkel, pan-Babylonian scholars who believe that behind this text is the Babylonian mythology of the Enuma Elish epic, whose motif is the battle of the male god Marduk against the goddess who brings “chaos” translate “Tohu wa Bohu” as “chaos.” But in fact, “Enuma Elish [”The War of the Gods,” in H. Gaster, The World's Oldest Story: The Babylonian Hatti Kanaan, translated by Fumio Yajima, Liberal Arts Library, 1973, pp. 75-99]” If you read the “Genesis 1,” it is as dissimilar to Genesis 1.If it is said that they are similar, “Enuma Elish” is rather similar to the beginning of “Kojiki,” in which the gods appear one after another.
　To begin with, “Tohu” originally means “wilderness,” and “Bohu” means “empty” or “nothing,” not “chaos.As Toshio Tsumura says, “to-fu wa bo-fu”
rather indicates “the initial state of the created earth,” like a wilderness where no plants, animals, or people still live [see Toshio Tsumura, “On the Earth and Water in Genesis 1 and 2,” in Evangelical Theology, No. 20, 1989, p. 125].It is reasonable to interpret this as follows.I think it is appropriate to interpret that God first prepared the earth in a state of “tohu wa bohu” and then constructed the world in six days, the first day and the second day .......
　In the book of II Peter, we read, “The heavens were from of old, and the earth was formed by the word of God, out of water and through water” (II Peter 3.5).The Bible teaches that the creation of “heaven” was long before the creation of “earth.It is possible that this “heaven” includes the heavenly bodies and that they were assigned their roles on the fourth day.However, if this is the case, then verse 16, “God made two great shining things.（And he made the stars.” The word “arthur” translated “make” in verse 16 is “do” and “make,” according to Strong's, but this could be interpreted as “gave a role to ~.

(4) Understanding “day” (yom) 
　How should we understand the seven “days” (Hebrew yom) of Genesis 1?There are three theories.First, some believe that “day” refers to a geologically long period of time, but we have already discussed the impossibility of this.The second is that a “day” is 24 hours long.The third theory does not specify the length of a “day,” but rather says that it indicates the framework of the stages of creation.
　The second, the “24-hour theory,” is simple and has probably had the most supporters in the 2,000 years of Church history. The twenty-four-hour theory suggests that the earth is at most 6,000 to 10,000 years old, which is an order of magnitude greater than the 45.5 billion years of the “old earth theory,” which is the conventional wisdom of evolutionists.According to the book, the 45.5 billion year figure is calculated from the half-life of radioisotopes, and is based on the mineral ages of meteorites using either the uranium-lead, potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium, samarium-neodymium, or other dating methods.The reason is that any of these methods, including the uranium-lead, potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium, and samarium-neodymium methods, calculate the age to be 45.5 millenniums [ see Mineo Imamura, “Aging” (Japanese Standards Association, 1991), pp. 67-69].In contrast, the Institute for Creation Science's “New Earth Theory,” which is labeled pseudoscience by evolutionists, criticizes the radioisotope dating method.Its criticisms include the followingIf a candle melts one centimeter per hour and is now five centimeters old, how can you tell how long it has been burning? How can we know? We do not know the length of the first candle, because we do not know the length of the first candle.Similarly, radioisotope dating is inherently flawed as a method, as the results can be quite different depending on how the initial values are assumed.
      Another thing to note is that methods of measuring the half-life of radioisotopes, such as the uranium-lead and potassium-argon methods, are not applicable to measuring the antiquity of fossils. This is noted in high school geology textbooks.Fossils are found in aqueous rocks, but radioisotope dating cannot be applied to aqueous rocks because aqueous rocks are igneous.This is because aqueous rocks are igneous rocks that have been solidified by the action of water, so this method can only determine the age of the igneous grains in aqueous rocks, not the age at which the rocks were formed.
The only radioisotope method that can be used to measure the age of biological remains is the carbon-14 method.Here is a summary of how the method works from the website of Kunio Yoshida, an expert in dating and a professor at the University of Tokyo's National Research MuseumThe half-life of radiocarbon is 5730 years.It is assumed that only a trillionth of a trillionth of a carbon atom is always present in the atmosphere.Plants take in carbon dioxide through photosynthesis, and animals take in carbon dioxide through breathing and eating, so as long as the organism is alive, its body contains the same proportion of carbon 14 atoms. However, when an organism dies, it no longer takes in new carbon, and from that time on, carbon 14 begins to decay, halving in 5,730 years, so if a trillionth of carbon 14 in a relic is reduced to a trillionth, it means that the organism died 5,730 years ago [ HP See Kunio Yoshida, “Dating with Radiocarbon (Carbon-14).
http://umdb.um.u-tokyo.ac.jp/DKankoub/Publish_db/2000dm2k/japanese/02/02-12.html]. This is why the carbon-14 method is useful for measuring the age of Jomon artifacts from when the wood and other materials were cut. However, with a half-life of 5,730 years, this method is said to be valid for at most 26,000 years, making it impossible to measure hundreds of millions of years. Nevertheless, the geological columnar map created by evolutionists, for example, shows that fossils from the Jurassic period are 200 million years old.The source of these figures is a mystery, as far as I have been able to ascertain.By the way, the late Reverend Nobuharu Horikoshi introduced a dialogue he had when he visited Dr. N, who is an authority enough to give scientific names, at the National Museum of Nature and Science in Ueno on a young day.Let me quote a few words.
Dr. N. knew what my friend was talking about, and when I went to see him, he showed me into a room in the institute. After I introduced myself, I immediately asked him a question.
I am interested in fossils, but I have a lot of questions.One is whether there is anything that can be used as an objective calendar to determine the age of fossils.
Dr. N. says quite clearly, 'No, there is no such thing.
Then what is it that determines the age of the fossil,' I asked.
He replied, “That is my subjective answer.
Do you have any objective data?
No.'” [See Nobuharu Horikoshi, The Day Man Was Born, Inochino Kotobuki-sha, 1983, p. 32].[“The data are not objective,” p. 32].
It is an appalling story.However, in fact, the dating method using the half-life of radioisotopes is problematic in principle, and the method using the half-life of radioisotopes cannot be applied to the age of rocks containing fossils in principle, and the only method available for the age of living organisms is the carbon-14 method, which has a measurement limit of 26,000 years, so it is impossible to determine the age of a geological columnar map of hundreds of millions of years.years, the only available measurement limit of the carbon-14 method for biological antiquity is 26,000 years, so it stands to reason that the geologic columnar figure of hundreds of millions of years is subjective to the authoritative scholars. The “Dr. N” is an honest man.
The “new earth” theorists have introduced several other dating methods.For example, in a slightly older book, Sylvia Baker introduces some as followsEven assuming that the oceans were freshwater in the beginning, the amount of salt in seawater today is only 200 million years maximum.Old earth theorists kick off by saying that we cannot rely on the salt concentration in seawater because of crustal movement, but it is doubtful that this is enough to refute the theory.They also point out that even assuming that there was no helium in the atmosphere at the beginning, the maximum age of the earth is only 26 million years, based on the current helium content in the atmosphere.Other examples include that there is no evidence of annual accumulation of meteorite dust on the earth's surface for 4.5 billion years, and that if the rate of geomagnetic decay is constant, the earth would be much younger [ see Sylvia Baker, Controversies in Evolution, Bible and Science, 1983, pp. 76 -96].[see “The Controversy of Evolution,” The Bible and Science, 1983, pp. 76 -96]. Various methods have been used to attempt to date the earth, but the fact seems to be that the results are actually disparate.No objective method for measuring the antiquity of fossils back in time seems to have been established.
　Be that as it may, if, as Christ explained in the miracle where he commanded the deaf man to “Epatha,” God performed a series of creation that began when he commanded “Let there be light,” and there was light, in a short period of miracles, then the pace of operation of the universe by the natural laws that are currently functioning can be used as a yardstickas a measure of the pace of the operation of the universe by the natural laws that are currently functioning, it is nonsense to estimate the timing of the beginning of the earth.This is because, as is the case with the miracle of Epatha, God's miracles are instantaneous creations of long-temporal states. The person who was freed from that deafness symptom was given instantaneous language and vocabulary skills that would normally be acquired through decades of experience.The first Adam and his wife were created not as one-day-old babies, but as adult men and women who appeared to be about twenty years old.Naturally, we must assume that the entire world in which they lived was also created as a perfected state with a seemingly “old” appearance, imbued with a long timelessness.Otherwise, they would not be able to live.The Andromeda Nebula is said to exist 253,700 light years away, so it would take 253,700 years for light to reach the earth from the nebula.M. Erikson calls this view the “ideal point in time theory,” which “clearly regards God as a deceiver [ M. Erikson, Christian Theology, vol. 2 (Inochino Kotoba, 2004), p. 151; see also M. Erikson, ”Theology of Christianity, vol. 2 (Inochino Kotoba, 2004), p. 151. ]” But it is not that God is deceiving, but that man, who does not believe in the creation of a short time period by the Word, has simply misunderstood that it must have taken billions of years on his own.It is a disrespectful misunderstanding of God to say that “God is deceiving.
　Nevertheless, since the sun, moon, and stars were given the role of marking the calendar on the fourth day, it is unreasonable to assert that the first three days were also 24 hours a day.Moreover, the Bible itself teaches that “the heavens were of old, and the earth was formed by the word of God, out of and through water” (II Peter 3.5), so the first day was a very long period of time.We do not know how long the second day was when the sky and the sea were created, and the third day when the land and plants were created, but considering the interdependence between the plants of the third day and the animals of the fifth and sixth days, it is unreasonable to consider them as geologically long periods of time. Since the celestial body begins to function as a calendar on the fourth day, it would be reasonable to view it as a 24-hour period.Note that the seventh day is not concluded with the phrase “there was evening and there was morning” as the other six days are, and it was Augustine who interpreted this rest to mean an endless blessing with God [ see Augustine, Confessions, Book 13, Chapter 36, 51].[see Augustine, Confessions, Book 13, Chapter 36, 51].
　Thus, since the Bible teaches that the length of each of the seven “days” of creation is a very long period of time for the first day, and it seems reasonable to view the other “days” as twenty-four hours, it is unreasonable to assert, as the Institute for Creation Science does, that the claim that all “days” are twenty-four hours is the only Biblical truth It is not reasonable to assert, as the Institute for Creation Science does, that all “days” are 24 hours long. Rather, it seems more consistent with the biblical account to understand the “seven days of creation” as a framework or stage in the creation process. Some people argue that the first three days of the six-day period correspond to the first three days of the second three days of creation. In other words, the first day of the creation of light corresponds to the fourth day of the creation of the celestial bodies that govern the calendar, the second day of the creation of the sky and the sea corresponds to the fifth day of the creation of flying animals and animals living in the sea, and the third day of the creation of land and plants corresponds to the sixth day of the creation of land animals and humans living there. However, there is no proof that this is the case. However, as a kind of framework theory, it would be going too far to say that the order of the “seven days” does not reflect the creation process at all. The description of the first, second, and third days ......, when read honestly, clearly indicates an order, even if the length of each day varies.

(4) “Every kind”.
     Genesis 1, in describing the creation of plants and animals, repeats the expression “in kind” (see Genesis 1.11, 12, 21, 24, 25).The Bible teaches that God did not create a single species by chance through ordinary providence, as evolutionary theory suggests, and then accidentally branch out into a variety of species over a very long period of time, but that God created a variety of species from the beginning.The apple is the apple from the beginning, the tangerine is the tangerine from the beginning, the vine is the vine from the beginning, the sparrow is the sparrow from the beginning, the sardine is the sardine from the beginning, the tuna is the tuna from the beginning, the dog is the dog from the beginning, the cat is the cat from the beginning, and the human is the human from the beginning.God prepared a blueprint, DNA, for each species.
　The statement “for each kind” is also consistent with the vast amount of experimentation in breeding. Within a single species, genetic diversity is provided so that it can adapt to its environment, but there is no evolution beyond species.Using the diversity of the gene pool, we have created rice that is suited to cold climates, and today we can produce delicious rice even in Hokkaido, but no matter how much we breed, rice will never turn into wheat or buckwheat.Various brands of apples have been produced through breeding, but they cannot become pears.There is great potential for variation within a species, but there is no evolution beyond the species.You can cross a closely related donkey and a horse to produce a mule, but it will only last one generation and no offspring will be born.Let me quote another quote from Toshitaka Hidaka, the animal behaviorist I mentioned earlier.
In reality, a species, no matter how closely related, is disconnected from the species next to it.Even if this is true in terms of form and color, there is a clear distinction in terms of physiology, behavior, and other aspects of life.Even if there appears to be a continuous connection in this respect, when the two species interbreed and create a hybrid, the hybrid is infertile and no longer produces any more offspring.There is a break between the two species. [ Hidaka, ibid. p. 171].” 
　We would be wise to realize that this world was created by the Word of God through an honest faith in the Bible.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Chapter 5: Decrees, Creation, and Providence

God has made known to us the mystery of His will. He has made known to us the mystery of his will, that in Christ God would gather together all things in heaven and on earth in accordance with his predestined will, in the fullness of time, to put his plan into effect. (Ephesians 1.9-10)

1 The goal of God's plan - the Kingdom of God

　In theological terms, God's plan for the world is called “derees." In order to see the whole picture of God's plan, the first essential thing is to determine its goal.         Unfortunately, however, traditional theology does not seem to have paid much attention to that point. This is partly because the goal belongs to the future, that is, to the end of time, and is not revealed in great detail in the Bible. However, it is important to have a basic knowledge of the goal as revealed in the Bible. If we start running without having a goal in mind, we will lose our way.
　The goal of God's plan, as described in apocalyptic terms in the final chapter of Revelation, is that the Son will return to inherit the glorified created world, become king, and rule the glorified created world, the Kingdom of God, with His coheirs, the sons of God, or the people (God's family). God has “appointed his Son heir of all things” (Hebrews 1.2). In the Last Days, the Second Coming of Christ the Son will inherit the created world and rule over it as King.
    With that goal in mind, “God chose us in him before the foundation of the world,  that we should be holy and without blemish before him” (Ephesians 1.4). God has chosen us “in Christ". In election, Christ is the mediator between God and us. Without Christ, our election is impossible.
　God chose us in Christ that we might be His children and joint heirs with Him, ruling the Kingdom according to His will. In Christ we have become heirs of the kingdom.” (Ephesians 1.11) “If we are children, we are also heirs. We are ...... heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. The ...... creation earnestly awaits the manifestation of God's children. ...... The creation itself, too, will be freed from the bondage of perdition, and will be in the freedom of the glory of the children of God.” (Romans 8.17-21)
     We are chosen in Christ, we are made children of God in Christ, we form the Church, the people of God, and we are heirs of the Kingdom of God in Christ. Apart from Christ, we have nothing. In the first place, the heir of the Kingdom of God is Christ on the throne with the Father, and we are His people. As co-heirs of the Lord Christ, the most important thing for us to do His will is to be humble toward His will. The Lord Jesus said, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5.5).
　The ultimate fulfillment of God's plan is described in apocalyptic terms in the last chapter of the book of Revelation. In the center of the new city is the throne of God the Father and Christ the Lamb, from which the rivers of the water of life flow to moisten the world. The river of the water of life means the Holy Spirit in the Johannine text (cf. Jn 7.39, 40). In that day the whole creation will be delivered from the curse and brought into glory, and Christ the King will inherit the Kingdom of God. We, God's people, will enjoy the bliss of looking up to the face of God and rule the world forever as joint heirs of Christ, God's servants and kings (see Revelation 22.1-5).
　
2 Creation and Providence

(1) Sanctification and human free will
　God unfolds what He has planned through creation and providence. Creation means that God made the world from nothing through His Son, and providence means that God preserves, cares for, and governs the created world through His Son. For “all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or principalities, whether dominions or authorities, were created in the Son. All things were made by the Son and for the Son. The Son existed before all things, and all things consist in him.” (Colossians 1.16-17)
　However, since God conforms Himself to us so that we, who are under the bondage of time, can understand Him, and describes Himself according to a temporal order as “God makes plans and carries them out through His creation and providence,” we are in danger of getting the impression as if God is also under the bondage of time. In reality, however, God is timeless and eternal. Before the eyes of God, the past and future of the created world are as the present.
　The doctrine of divine sanctification was the subject of a controversy in modern times brought against the Dutch Reformed Church by Jacobus Arminius (1560-1609), a teacher of that school, over the sovereignty of God and the free will of man. After his death, the Arminian school (also known as the Remonstrants), who took over his arguments, said, “Covenanting is advantageous to exalt God's sovereignty, but does it not make God the author of sin and endanger His justice?” The Reformers argued, “If God ordains everything, what about human free will and responsibility?” The Reformers argued, “To hold that man can reject the grace God has purposed is to neglect God's sovereignty and to make salvation by works and not by grace.” and they argue with difficulty to explain God's sovereignty without making God the author of evil. I suspect that these arguments stem from our being in time and trying to explain away a timeless God.
　The Bible teaches both the fact that God's plan is indeed in place before the world began and the fact that human beings are responsible beings given free will before God. In the Bible, the certainty of God's predestination is an undeniable fact, and man is treated as a responsible being with free will, an example taken up by J. I. Packer in “Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God” [see J. I. Packer, “Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God,” translated by Kazuhiko Uchida, 1977, p. 20]. In terms of, according to experiments in physics, there is ample evidence that light is made of waves, and ample evidence that light is made of particles. Human logic cannot explain these two facts, but we must accept them both as they are, because what they say about the two properties of light is indisputable. Human logic has its limits, even in the perception of created physical phenomena. The Bible reveals the certainty of God's predestination, and it also reveals that man has free will and responsibility before God. This cannot be explained by human logic, but it is a fact that must be taken as it is. Since the purpose of Ephesians 1 in speaking of God's sanctification is to glorify the glory of His grace, we should use our intellect only in accordance with that purpose and stop further impious reasoning that would question God's justice. When this kind of reasoning tries to take an ungodly turn that would make God unjust, Paul says, “Is there injustice in God? Never.” (Rom. 9.14), he put the brakes on the wishy-washy reasoning. The Bible teaches that God unfolds His plan through providence into history toward a goal, and that human beings are kept alive in that history as responsible beings before God. We have no choice but to accept what is revealed in the Bible as it is, even if it cannot be explained by our limited human logic. The Westminster Confession of Faith confesses the following about divine predestination and human free will.
　“God, from all eternity, by the wisest and most wise plan of his own will, hath freely and immutably ordained whatsoever things shall come to be, that he may not be the author of sin, nor violence be done to the will of his creatures, nor the freedom of second causes, nor chance be taken away, but rather . so that it may be established.” (Chapter 3, verse 1, translated by the Japanese Christian Reformed Translation Committee)
　This matter will be dealt with in a little more detail in chapter 10, “Sin, Death, the Devil, and Misery,” section 6 of this book.

(2) Distinction between creation and providence
　The Bible distinguishes between creation and providence. The eternal God first created the created world, which is a temporal entity, and then He provides for it. Considering that at the time of the Last Judgment, the earth and the heavens will flee from his presence and leave no trace (cf. Revelation 20.11), heaven and earth certainly exist insofar as God wills that they should exist.
　A.N. Whitehead (1861-1947) developed the idea that the world is dynamic and ever-changing, and that the process of creation contains the essence of existence, or God. This is called “process theology. This is called “process theology. According to Whitehead, God is also being generated from imperfection to perfection. Modern atheistic evolutionists, who now boast that the rapid development of molecular biology allows them to explain the mechanisms of biological evolution at the level of DNA, argue that “the biological diversification that evolutionary theory shows is really a billions-year process of uninterrupted, multifarious biological creation by God.” [ Kiyotaka Koyama, The World of Genesis Revived Now (Jobel, 2020), p. 75]. Whitehead is describing a kind of theodicy that, in this light, the various calamities and bad things that happen in this world can be explained as a step from imperfection to perfection. This kind of theodicy, however, is nothing more than an old-fashioned theodicy.
　Ideas similar to process theology have existed since ancient Greece. The idea that the essence of all things is generation and change is found in Anaximandros and Heraclitus, the ancient Greek natural philosophers of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., and in modern times in Hegel, who claimed that “world history is the self-development of the Absolute Spirit. As we learned in theism, the idea that God is part of the process of developing world history or that God is the process itself is pantheism, which is anathema to the biblical teaching that distinguishes between Creator and creature. We must remain with the truth that the eternal Triune God is real, that He first created the created world out of nothing through His Son, and that He preserves, cares for, and governs it in His providence.

3 The Son is the Mediator and Heir in Creation

　When we look at the work of the triune God, whether creation or salvation, we can make a distinction between the Father making the plan, the Son carrying out the plan, and the Holy Spirit completing it.
The Son created all things according to the Father's plan.In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God.He was with God in the beginning.All things were made by him.And there was nothing made that was not made by him.(John 1.1-3) The “this one” refers to the Son.
　When John the Evangelist called the Son “the Word (Logos),” he seems to have had two kinds of readers in mind. The first was the Hellenistic world of his day.When people in the Hellenistic world heard the word “logos,” they would have remembered Heraclitus and the Stoics' logos, the constitutive principle of the world.If one observes the movement of the heavenly bodies, there are laws of reason, and there are mysterious laws in the world of geometry and music. If we observe the world in detail, it is obvious that there is a law that orders these things, and this is what the Stoics called the Logos.It is thought that John introduced the Savior born in Nazareth to those whose background was Hellenism, as the Logos who originally created the world and became man.
　Another kind of reader that John was aware of was the Jews who knew of Genesis, which tells us that God created the world by word.That Word of God is also referred to in Proverbs as “Wisdom (Hochmah),” the personal being who was at God's side and assembled all things (see Proverbs 8.22-31). At the time of creation, “the earth was a vast nothingness, and darkness was over the face of the great waters, and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters” (Genesis 1.2).(Genesis 1.2), the Holy Spirit was above the waters, waiting for the Word of God to sound, and was involved in the creation of all things (see Psalm 104.30).The Son created all things according to the Father's design.In other words, if the Father was the architect, the Holy Son was the master builder, and the Holy Spirit was the carpenter who carried out the work according to the Son's words.One day when I meet the Lord Jesus, I will say to Him, “Jesus.When you came to this world as a man, did you choose a carpenter's house because you loved to make things?”I would like to ask him. In the first century, the Hellenistic and Hebraistic backgrounds were already mixed to some extent, and Philon of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher active in the first century, used the Logos and Idea theories of Plato's Themaïos to interpret the Old Testament [ Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Philo of Alexandria, Philo's doctrine of creation,9 see https://iep.utm.edu/philo/#H9].[see also.
Colossians also teaches that all things were created “in, by, and for” the Son (see Colossians 1.16).The Father, who “dwells in unapproachable light, whom no human being has seen or can see” (I Timothy 6.16), is the mediator between God and creation in the sense that the Son created finite creatures in accordance with the Father's plan.And being created “for the Son” means that the Son is the heir of all things.That is why, later, when man and creation were in dire straits, the Son became man in order to be the mediator between God and man.

4 Creation from nothing

　The biblical teaching that God alone is eternally self-existent and that creation is a dependent entity that exists because God wills it is necessarily linked to the “creation from nothing” (Luo: cleatio ex nihilo) concerning God's creation.This is because if God did not will, but the materials pre-existed, then the materials would also be self-existent.　
　Myths about the creation of the world that do not originate in the Bible suggest that something chaotic existed in the first place, from which the gods naturally emerged, and then the gods ordered the chaos to create the world.For example, the beginning of the “Nihon shoki” (Chronicles of Japan), which was written in the 8th century, reads as follows Long ago, when heaven and earth were not yet separated, and the yin-yang distinction had not yet arisen, something dim and dim was growing in the midst of the unfrozen contents of a hen's egg. Soon, that clear and obvious thing soared up and became the heavens, and that heavy and muddy thing covered and stagnated below and became the earth. The clear and manifest thing was easy to unite, but it took time for the heavy and muddy thing to solidify.Therefore, the heavens were formed first, and the earth was formed later.And later, God was born in the midst of it.[The beginning of the Babylonian myth “Enuma Elish” written in the 18th century B.C. is as follows.“When the heavens above were unnamed, and the earth below also had no name.There was a primordial apse, which gave rise to them. Chaos, or Tiamat, was also the mother from which all came forth.Their waters were mingled together, and the fields were without form, and no moist place was seen.And among the gods there was none that was born. [ ENUMA ELISH, THE EPIC OF CREATION, L.W. King Translator, (from The Seven Tablets of Creation, London 1902)
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ane/enuma.htm]]” Apsu is a male god and Tiamat (Chaos) is a female goddess.The myths of the Chronicles of Japan and Enuma Elish are essentially the same as the evolutionists' theory of the spontaneous generation of life.In other words, “In the beginning was chaos.Chaos was accidental and coincidental, and an orderly world arose.
　But the Bible says, “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God.The Word was God.And in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.The world was created only when the eternal and omnipotent God willed it.Therefore, the heavens and the earth exist only as far as God allows them to exist, and if God does not allow them to exist, they will come to nothing.In fact, Revelation tells us that when the white throne of the Last Judgement appears, “the earth and the heavens have fled from his presence, and there is no trace of them” (Revelation 22.11).(Revelation 22.11).

5 The First Creation Article

　There are two creation stories in Genesis.The first is Genesis 1:1-2:3, and the second is Genesis 2:4 onward.Since the 19th century, it has been a common theory that the first article uses the common noun “God (Elohim),” while the second article uses the proper noun “Lord (YHWH),” which is bolded in the New Revised Bible, and therefore is based on a different source.However, what is crucial in understanding the Bible is rather what the intention of the Genesis reporter was in using different names for different gods.Since the name Elohim tends to be used to express the greatness and glory of God, and YHWH tends to be used to express God's intimate presence with His people, we may conclude that Genesis 1 expresses the greatness of the Creator and Genesis 2 the nearness of God who comes to man and makes a covenant with him. Genesis 2 expresses the closeness of God who comes to man and makes a covenant with him.Let us now consider the message God speaks to us through the first creation article.
　In biblical exegesis, the immediate goal is to read what the reporter of the volume intended to communicate to his supposed first readers. What did the Genesis writer intend to communicate to his first readers, the Israelites, by his creation article in chapter 1? Given that the Israelites lived in an Orient society in which all manner of creatures were worshipped as gods, the subject matter is clear. The first theme is that “the sky, the sea, the earth, the trees, the moon, the stars, the sun, the fish, the birds, the insects, the beasts, and man, who were worshipped as gods by the surrounding peoples, were all merely creatures of the great Creator God.It is the Creator alone who is to be worshipped, not His creatures.”This is what I mean. The second theme is that “the surrounding peoples carve idols in the likeness of creatures and fear and worship them, but since God created man in His own image, it is foolish to kneel before these idols and worship them.Rather, man should rule over them.”This is what is meant by “God created man in His own image.When man turns his back on the Creator, he loses sight of who he is, because he is created in the image of the Creator.When man loses sight of the Creator, he makes two mistakes.One is that he loses the distinction between himself and other creatures, worshipping wild beasts, large trees, and insects, and becoming a slave to the creatures.The other, on the contrary, is to become tyrannical over other creatures, ruling and destroying them as if he himself were God.Only when we human beings return to the Creator and restore our position under His sovereignty, created in the original divine form, can we rightly and humbly govern the world, which is God's work.

6 Characteristics of the created world - Unity, diversity and temporality
(1) Unity and diversity
The central messages of Genesis 1 are the above two, but Genesis 1 further teaches that this world was completed as a system of diverse elements exquisitely combined in stages over the “seven days.On the first day the heavens, earth, and light are created; on the second day the atmosphere and the “waters above” and “waters below” are created; on the third day the land and plants of every kind are created; on the fourth day the celestial bodies that govern time are created; on the fifth day sea creatures and birds are created; on the sixth day land animals and people are created; and the seventh day is rest.
The operation of the heavenly bodies, the circulation of the atmosphere and water on the earth, and the plant and animal worlds form a single system.For example, we need sunlight and heat to live.However, solar energy alone is not enough to keep the earth at an appropriate temperature.If the earth were not spinning on its axis, half of the earth would be a scorching hot hell and half would be a pitch-dark cold hell, just like a whole roasted pig that you forgot to turn.Moreover, because God rotates the earth around the sun while tilting the earth's axis, the four seasons rotate on the earth's surface, and the earth maintains a wide area with suitable temperatures for living creatures to inhabit.The Earth also has a solar-energy-driven atmospheric circulation system that transports clouds of water vapor generated from seawater heated by solar energy to inland areas. The earth's rotation and revolution maintain the proper temperature of the earth, the four seasons rotate, sunlight evaporates seawater to form clouds, and atmospheric circulation occurs, and these various elements work as a system that allows us to live today.The apostles Paul and Barnabas cried out to the people of Listera, “Nevertheless, [God] is not a man, but a God.Yet [God] has not left us without testimony of Himself.He has been gracious to you, giving you rain from heaven and seasons of fruitfulness, filling your hearts with food and joy.”(Acts 14.17) It is obvious that animals live off plants, but plants are also dependent on animals.Many plants are able to leave behind the next generation only with the help of insects for pollination. Plants are also able to photosynthesize only with the carbon dioxide produced by animals.Also, many plants depend on birds to carry their seeds far in exchange for fruit.Given these facts, it would be nonsense to assume that the “days” in Genesis are millions of years long.Plants were created on the third day, but insects were created on the sixth day.If there had been no bees or butterflies when the violets blossomed, they would have perished in a generation.The operation of the sun, the rotation of the earth, the circulation of the atmosphere, the interdependence of plants and animals, the workings of the microbial world, and the workings of the molecular and atomic level, this world full of diversity is not an accidental and meaningless accumulation of a vast number of fragments, but a complex and exquisite unified system.This world can never function unless it is assembled precisely according to an elaborate design in a short period of time.
　Diversity and unity are important for everything in the created world, which is the work of the triune God.The same is true of the Church, the Body of Christ.God gives some people eyes, some people mouths, some people hands, and some people ears in the Church. The church is healthy when diverse people form a worshipping community by the unity of the Spirit in Christ (see I Corinthians 12).In society, totalitarianism with its emphasis on unity will trample on the individual, while individualism alone will destroy society. The ideal society is one in which the individual is respected and the whole is in harmony.It is important for both music and writing to have a consistent theme, but if only the theme is repeated, the audience and readers will become bored with the monotony.Diversity is necessary.However, if you emphasize diversity too much, you will end up with a meaningless accumulation of fragments. If the onigiri is too tightly packed, it becomes like a dumpling and is not tasty, and if it is too weak, it becomes disjointed and difficult to eat. Onigiri that are ontologically excellent are those that maintain unity and yet each grain of rice is alive.What is important is the balance between diversity and unity.
　　In the Middle Ages in Europe, there was the “universal controversy.The Platonic theory of universal realism held that ideas (universals) existed and that individual things were manifestations of them.This position emphasizes the “one.On the other hand, Aristotle's materialism held that individuals are real, and that they are merely categorized and given the name of an idea.This is the position that emphasizes “many.Universal realism, which emphasizes universals, was a position that regarded the will of the papacy as absolute, while materialism, which emphasizes individual things, placed importance on church councils.Although the universal controversy has never been settled, the Bible teaches that both diversity (individual) and unity (universal) are equally important.

(2) Temporality, Spiral Structure of Time
　Another characteristic of the work of creation is that in creating the world, God did not create everything in an instant, saying, “Let there be a world,” but created it in stages and development over seven days. Furthermore, on the fourth day, God said, “Let there be shining things in the firmament of the heavens. Separate the day from the night. Be signs for the appointed times, for the days and years.” God has the moon, stars, and sun inscribe a calendar that repeats itself and moves forward. These things imply that the created world in which we live is imbued with temporality.
　Historical consciousness did not arise in ancient Greece, which considered time to be a mere circle. There is no specific point on the circle; it is simply a repetition. However, the Bible teaches that the world is imbued with temporality. Its primary meaning is that the world has a beginning and an end. Because the world has a beginning and an end, today comes only once. Our lives also have a beginning and an end, so today comes only once. This is where the historical consciousness comes in. Historical consciousness is the awareness that each day, month, and year has a specific meaning.
　However, the fact that God gave the earth's repeated rotations and revolutions the function of marking time means that time has a spiral structure, moving forward repeatedly from creation to the final judgment. Since time moves forward in a spiral, we observe that “history repeats itself. But the repetition in history is not going back to the beginning like a circle, but is coming back in the next phase. That is why it makes sense to learn from the reality of past history without turning away from it. If we have an accurate understanding of the mistakes of the past, for example, when a country is about to move into a bad situation similar to what happened in the past, we will be able to make a different choice from the one before in order to avoid making the same mistakes. As German President Weizsaecker said, “He who closes his eyes to the past is ultimately blind to the present.” Let us keep in mind the words of German President Weizsaecker: “Those who close their eyes to the past are ultimately blind to the present.
　Let us also apply this spiral structure of time to our personal history. We are all ambitious at New Year's, saying, “This is the year! but at the end of the year, we are sometimes disappointed to find that we have accomplished nothing. However, the spiraling forward of time means that when the New Year dawns, God allows us to start over and say, “Now, this is the one and only year in my life! and start over. It is the tension and comfort of living under God's providence.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

Chapter 4: God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. (II Corinthians 13.13)

1 As a Mystery, Not a Mystery

　From the Sozzini school of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries down to the Unitarian and Jehovah's Witnesses, the doctrine of the Trinity is claimed to be a nonsense teaching that is a synthesis of the simple gospel of Jesus and Hellenistic thought. The fact is, however, that God's trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit was revealed by God in the Bible, and is not a doctrine that man has invented through philosophical thought. The term “Trinity” is not found in the Bible, but a careful reading of the Bible with love and fear of God reveals that the one God has in Him a loving communion with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. As Q25 of the “Heidelberg Faith Questions and Answers” puts it

Q25 Why are there three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, when there is only one God?
　Answer: Because God has revealed in His Word that these three distinct Persons are the one, true, and eternal God. [“Heidelberg Faith Questions and Answers,” translated by Takemori, Misakazu, Shinkyō Shuppansha, 1961].

　However, the doctrine of the Trinity should not be dismissed as an incomprehensible “mystery,” but should be regarded as a “mystery” that should be further understood if we accept what is revealed in the Bible through faith. Augustine, in his book “The Trinity,” based on 1 Corinthians 13:12 in the Latin translation of the Bible, “We see (in enigma) in a mystery through a mirror,” considered the Trinity as a mystery to be solved (a enigma), and thought that solving that mystery would lead to the cleansing of the soul, We thought that this would lead to the cleansing of the soul and seeing God. For “he who is pure in heart will see God” (Matthew 5.8). The New Revised 2017 translates 1 Corinthians 13:12 as “dimly,” but the literal translation of the Greek text is “in a mystery (rarity: en aenigmati). Interestingly, the second half of Augustine's Trinitarian treatise is a sanctification treatise.
Although it is doubtful whether Augustine succeeded in his attempt, I would like to learn from his attitude of not simply saying, “I don't understand the Trinity,” but of prayerfully and persistently listening to the Old and New Testaments in order to solve the mystery. If we do this, we will receive the rich spiritual nourishment hidden in the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Christian life of faith is a Trinitarian life that consists in praying to God the Father in the precious name of the Son, prompted by the Holy Spirit from within. That God is triune is a reality of the living God and is closely related to our daily life of faith.
　
2 Old Testament

(1) “We.”
　Hear, O Israel. The Lord is our God. The LORD is one and only.” (Deuteronomy 6.4), the Bible asserts that there is only one God to worship, the Creator. The reason why the uniqueness of God was emphasized especially during the Old Testament period is probably because mankind, having turned its back on the Creator, began to worship various creatures as gods, and it was necessary to thoroughly emphasize the uniqueness of God first. However, the saints of the ancient church were already aware that even in the Old Testament there was implied an interaction of multiple personalities in that one God. In Genesis 1:26, we find an expression in which God refers to himself as “we.”
　God said, “Come, let us make man our own. Now let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1.26). (Genesis 1.26, my translation)
　God said, “Let us make man in our image.
　Many scholars seem to explain this expression “we” and “our” as God speaking to His angel, or God speaking to the created world, or as a “plurality of dignities. Certainly, it is unreasonable to think that the Genesis reporter already knew of God's Trinity and wrote “we.” If the goal of exegesis is to clarify what the biblical writers intended to convey to their first readers, then the “we” can only be interpreted as a “plurality of dignities. Unlike materialists and theists who deny revelation, however, we must also consider the possibility of revelation in which things that were a mystery to the Genesis writer himself are gradually revealed in later years, since the ultimate goal of exegesis is to arrive at the intention of the Holy Spirit, the author of the entire Bible.

(2) Wisdom and Words
　In the Old Testament, the revelation that explains the meaning of “we” in Genesis 1 is the “wisdom” (Hebrew: Hofmah) that appears in Proverbs 8. Here “wisdom” is represented as a personal being who has been with God since before the creation of all things, and who constructs the world according to God's design.
　In the beginning of his work, at the beginning of his works, the Lord had me (wisdom). I was set up in the beginning, long ago, before the beginning of the earth. When there was no abyss, nor source of flowing water, I was brought forth. Before the mountains were set up, before the hills, I was brought forth. When the Lord had not yet made the earth, nor the fields, nor the first dust of the world. I was there when He set up the heavens firmly; I was there when He drew the circle on the face of the deep. When He drew a circle on the face of the abyss, when He fixed the firmament above, when He established the source of the abyss, when He placed its boundaries in the sea, so that its waters would not transgress His command, when He established the foundations of the earth, I was there beside Him, the framer of it. I rejoiced daily, and always had pleasure in His presence. I had pleasure in the land of the Lord, in this world, and I rejoiced in the sons of men.” (Proverbs 8.22-31)
　From this, it can be understood that when God created man, He spoke to him, “Let us make man in our image,” and that the person to whom He spoke was a personal being named “Wisdom.
　The Old Testament teaches us here and there that God carried out His creation and providence by word, and Genesis 1 is the first verse of the Old Testament. In Genesis 1, God says, “Let there be light. And God said, 'Let there be light. And there was light.” (Genesis 1.3), God created the sky, the sea, the land, plants, celestial bodies, flying creatures, sea creatures, land animals, human beings, and everything else by his word. By His Word the heavens were made. And by the breath of His mouth all things in heaven.” (Ps. 33.6) The Word of God is called “wisdom” in Proverbs, where it is revealed as a personal being.

(3) The Spirit of God
　You will also notice that at the beginning of Genesis, along with the Word of God, “the Spirit of God (Hebrew Ruach)” was involved in the creation of all things. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was a vast waste, and darkness was over the face of the waters, and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. (Genesis 1.1-2) “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made. And all things in heaven by the breath of His mouth.” (Psalm 33.6). The Spirit of God (Ruach) is involved in creation, along with the Son, who is the Word of the Lord. Ruach is translated as spirit, breath, or wind.
　Also, after the judgment of the Flood in the days of Noah, when God brought the Flood to an end and restored order to the earth, God caused the Ruach to blow over the earth (see Genesis 8.1). Most English and Japanese translations of the Bible translate ruach as “wind” in this passage, but since this is an article about a fresh start in history that corresponds to the “Spirit of God” in Genesis 1:2, the first creation article, if they had translated Genesis 1:2 as “Spirit of God,” they would have wanted this translated as “Spirit” instead of “wind” as well. I would have preferred to translate this verse as “Spirit” instead of “wind”. As far as I know, only the ISV (International Standard Version) translates it as “God's Spirit.
　The Spirit of God is omnipresent (cf. Ps. 139.7) and renews the face of the earth (cf. Ps. 104.30). The Spirit, along with the Word of God, is involved in creation and providence, the Old Testament teaches. God's benefits include general benefits given to believers and non-believers alike and a special benefit of eternal life given only to believers, but the Holy Spirit works not only in the special benefit but also in the general benefit.
　
3 New Testament

(1) The Son, “the image of God
　The eternal deity of the Son, which was implied in the Old Testament, is clearly revealed in the New Testament. At the Last Supper, the Lord Jesus prayed to His heavenly Father as follows: “Father, now you are the Son of God. Father, now reveal to me my glory in your own presence, that glory which we had together before the world began. That glory which we had together before the world began.” (John 17.5) “Father, I ask of you what you have given me. I ask this of you concerning what you have given me. Where I am, let them be with Me. That they may see my glory. For thou hast loved me before the foundation of the world, and hast given me glory. (John 17.24) In other words, the Son existed before the creation of the world.
　Remembering the prayer of the Lord Jesus at that Supper, the Apostle John began his Gospel as follows. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made by him. Nothing was made that was not made by him. (John 1.1-3) The “beginning” here refers not to the beginning of creation but to the beginning of eternity. No one has ever seen God. But God the only begotten, who is in the bosom of the Father, hath revealed Him” (Jn 1.18). (John 1.18) In other words, the Lord Jesus lived with God the Father from the beginning of eternity, before the world existed. Then we can understand why God said “we” in Genesis 1:26. The One who calls Himself “Wisdom” in Proverbs 8 is the “Word” of John 1.
　Colossians 1:15-17 also reveals that the Son was born before all things were created, that He existed before all things, that all things were made by Him and for Him, and that they consist in Him. The Son is the form of the invisible God, begotten before all created things. For all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or principalities, whether dominions or authorities, were created in him. All things were made by the Son and for the Son. The Son existed before all things, and all things consist in him.” (Colossians 1.15-17) Moreover, he teaches that the Son is “the image of the invisible God (rare: eikon). Paul, who was familiar with the Old Testament, had, of course, Genesis chapters 1 and 2 in mind when he discussed creation. The “form of God” in those chapters is the “form of God” (rarity: eikorn in the Septuagint) of Genesis 1:26, 27, so according to Colossians, man is a “form of the form of God” made in the model of the Son, who is the “form of God” [ see Chapter 8 in this book for details]. [see chapter 8 of this book for more details].

(2) Holy Spirit
　With regard to the Holy Spirit, some people mistakenly believe that it is impersonal energy. In the Bible, the Holy Spirit is compared to water (John 7.38, 39), fire (Matthew 3.11, Acts 2.3), wind (John 3.8), and oil (Isaiah 61.1), and is described as being “poured out” or “filled,” so people tend to have such a misunderstanding. However, water, fire, wind, and oil cannot be personalities, but personalities can be like water, fire, and wind, just as Kanbei Kuroda called himself “Josui,” Elijah was called a prophet of fire, and Ryoma Sakamoto was described as a man like the wind. The Holy Spirit is the One who quenches thirst like water, quenches like fire, acts freely like the wind, and gives energy like oil.
　The Lord Jesus spoke of the Holy Spirit as another equal Helper who replaces Himself in returning to His Father in heaven. And when I ask the Father, he will give you another Helper, who will be with you forever. (John 14.16, cf. also 14.26 and 16.7-15, Romans 8.26)
　We also see from the following passages that the Holy Spirit is a personality with intellect, emotions, and will. Regarding the intellect of the Holy Spirit, “He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I have spoken to you.” (John 14.26), and as for the emotions, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God” (Ephesians 4.30). (Ephesians 4.30), and as for the will, the Apostle Paul said, “When we were thus near Mysia, we were about to go on to Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow it” (Acts 16.7). (Acts 16.7).
　We also see from the following passages that the Holy Spirit is God. To deceive the Holy Spirit was to deceive God. Ananias. Why did you [sic] deceive the Holy Spirit [/sic] by being enticed by Satan, and keep for yourself a part of the price of the estate? Had you not sold it, it would have been yours, and even after you sold it, it would have been at your disposal. Why did you plot this? You have not deceived men, but [sic] God [/sic].” (Acts 5.3-4, by the author)

(3) Fellowship of love
　In the Gospel, when Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus in the form of a dove, and from heaven he heard the voice of God the Father saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. In this event, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit manifested themselves. Moreover, the Father as the one who loves, the Son as the one who is loved, and the Holy Spirit as the bond of love that unites the Father and the Son, poured out from the Father to the Son (see Matthew 3.16-17). We are invited into the fellowship of God's family of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by believing in Jesus, the Son of God, who came as a man and made us his brothers and sisters. What we have seen and heard, we also pass on to you. We are here to bring you into fellowship with us, so that you too may have fellowship with us. Our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.” (I John 1.3) Even at the Last Supper, the Lord Jesus promised to send the Holy Spirit as “another Helper” after He left, and He told us that when He was given the Holy Spirit, we would be placed in the fellowship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He said, “And when I ask the Father, He will give you another Helper, who will be with you forever. He is the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept Him because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. You know Him. He is with you and will be in you. I will not abandon you and leave you as orphans. I will come back to you. In a little while the world will see me no more. But you will see Me. For I will live, and you will live. In that day you will know that I am in the Father, and you in Me, and I in you.” (John 14.16-21)
The Trinity is also revealed in the words of the Lord Jesus in His command to His disciples concerning world missions and baptism: “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are one God. In the words “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” (Matthew 28.19), “His name (rarity: onoma)” is singular. Grammatically speaking, “His name” should normally be plural, but the singular “His name” is used to indicate that there is only one person in the three persons.
　If you read Paul's letters carefully, you will also notice that “God (the Father),” “the Lord (Jesus),” and “the Spirit” are often mentioned in one set. In describing the diversity and unity of the Church, the Body of Christ, Paul first describes the diversity and unity of God, the Lord, and the Spirit. Now there are many gifts, but the giver is the same [sic] Spirit [/sic]. There are many kinds of service, but the one whom we serve is the same [sidenote:] Lord [/ sidenote:]. There are various ministries, but the same [sidenote] God [/sidenote] does all the work in everyone.” (I Cor. 12.4-6) Also in the book of Ephesians, when speaking of the church, he speaks of God, the Lord and the Spirit. In Ephesians, too, he speaks of God, the Lord, and the Spirit when he speaks of the church: “Ye also, being built up together in Christ, are the habitation of God by the Spirit.” (Ephesians 2.22), and “Just as the hope of your calling, in which you were called, was one, so the Body [sic] is one and the Spirit [/sic] is one. The [byword] Lord [/ byword] is one, faith is one, and baptism is one. There is only one God [sic], the [sic] Father of all, who is above all things, who pervades all things, and who is in all things.” (Ephesians 4.4-6) Paul would say that the diversity and unity of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is the model or rather the foundation of diversity and unity in the church. The Christian faith is not an individualistic faith, but essentially a communal or ecclesial faith. It is a faith prepared by the Triune God.

4 Relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and the moral nature of God

(1) Relationship of the three persons　
　The Trinity is expressed as “the three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are one in essence. The personification is the Greek word hupostasis and the Latin word persona. Essence is supposed to correspond to ousia in Greek and essenzia in Latin.
　However, there is a different theory called Monarchianism, which holds that there is only one Godhead and that there are three manifestation modalities: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In Greek, “mono” means “only one,” and “arche” means “sovereignty” here, so mono + arche = “monarchia” means a system in which sovereignty is concentrated in one person, in other words, a monarchy. In English, monarchy means monarchy or kingdom. It is called the theory of subordination, which holds that God the Father is sovereign and the Son is subordinate to the Father. There are two types of monarchism: the modalistic monarchianism and the dynamic monarchianism.
Since modalistic monarchianism was advocated by Sabellius, it is also called Sabellianism. It rationalizes that God is manifested in three aspects: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, just as there are three aspects of a person: father to a child, husband to a wife, and manager to a business associate. Others use the analogy of the three states of water as solid, liquid, and gas. This view is consistent with the theory of the Passion of the Heavenly Father, in which God the Father became incarnate and suffered on the cross. Modal Monarchianism would also make the prayer of the Lord Jesus a mere soliloquy. However, if we read the Lord Jesus' prayer at the Last Supper and the prayer in Gethsemane, it is clear that it was not a soliloquy but a personality-to-person communion with the Heavenly Father, so the modal Monarchianism is not correct.
Positivistic Monarchianism also holds that God the Father is sovereign. Jesus of Nazareth was only a man, but when he was baptized in the Jordan River, the “power” (dunamis) of God dwelt in him and he became the adopted son of God, hence dynamic monarchianism. Since dunamis is the spiritual power of God, it would be easier to translate the term “dynamic monarchianism” as “spiritual monarchianism” rather than “dynamism. Spiritual monarchianism interprets the article about the descent of the Holy Spirit at the baptism of the Lord Jesus in terms of the pagan phenomenon of possession by evil spirits (ruby: hail). Even today, there are mediums and gurus of new religions who are possessed by the power of evil spirits and do wondrous things, and it is psychic Monarchianism that misinterpreted the Gospel articles from such a point of view.
Monarchianism is thought to have arisen from the concern that saying that God is three might lead to polytheism. In order to emphasize that there is only one God, the Son was taken as a type of God, or the Son was adopted by the power of God from a mere man. However, as we have seen, the Bible is clear that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are in essence one God, and that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are distinct persons. This is a biblical revelation that transcends human logic.
In the Western Church's formulation of the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Father begets the Son (Colossians 1.15), the Son is born of the Father, the Holy Spirit emanates from the Father and the Son, and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are in essence the same God. The Eastern Orthodox Church, however, holds that the Holy Spirit emanated from the Father, but does not accept that He also emanated from the Son. The Nicene Constantinopolis Creed (381) originally stated that “the Holy Spirit emanates from the Father,” but in later years the Roman Church added the phrase “and from the Son (Luo: filioque)” and stated that “the Holy Spirit emanates from the Father [sic] and the Son [/sic]. controversy” arose. Incidentally, in Latin, filio means “from the Son,” and que “also” means “to also. Both the Eastern and Western Churches are orthodox churches that believe in the Trinity, but as a tendency, the Eastern Church is a manifestation of its emphasis on the Father as the source.

(2) Distinction of roles
　God the Father may be called the Maker, the Son the Savior, and the Holy Spirit the Comforter. It is said that God the Father is most prominent in creation, Jesus the Son is most prominent in the redemptive work of the cross and resurrection, and the Holy Spirit is most prominent in encouraging and comforting the Christian in his or her life of faith. However, if we read the Bible a little more carefully, we realize that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit work together in creation, in redemption, and in the comfort of the life of faith. If we observe the division of roles in this collaboration, we see a distinction in roles: the Father presides and plans, the Son carries out the Father's plans, and the Holy Spirit completes the Son's work.
　In creation, the Father presided, the Son made the world according to the Father's will (John 1.3, Colossians 1.17), and the Holy Spirit worked together (see Psalm 104.30).
　As for the work of salvation, according to the Father's plan, the Son was conceived in Mary's womb by the Holy Spirit, lived a life of perfect obedience to the Father, accomplished redemption through the cross and resurrection, and rose again by the Holy Spirit (Romans 8.11).
When it comes to the application of salvation, the Holy Spirit applies to us the blessings that the Son won before God through His perfect life to the cross. It is because the Father sent the Holy Spirit as “another Helper” (John 14.16) in response to the desire of the Son, who was seated at the right hand of the Father.
In the completed City of God, the Son, symbolized by God the Father and the Lamb, was on the throne, and from that throne flowed rivers of the water of life, representing the Holy Spirit, to moisten the entire city (cf. Revelation 22.1-2). In the John document, the water of life represents the Holy Spirit, as seen in the Lord Jesus' questioning of the Samaritan woman. Here, too, we see the division of roles among the three Persons.
　As mentioned above, there is a distinction in roles of presiding, executing, and perfecting (applying) for the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, since the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are so closely connected, it is interesting to note that in the Bible, although rare, the Son is called the “Eternal Father” (Isaiah 9.6) and is described as “the church that God purchased with His own blood” (Acts 20.28), which is an expression that is slightly reminiscent of the modalistic Monarchianism and the patristic doctrine of the suffering of God the Father. (3) Fellowship of love

(3) Communion of Love
　The Reformers did not discuss the Trinity in much detail, inheriting the achievements of the ancient church, which is somewhat unsatisfactory. Ancient and medieval theologians had a lot to say about the Trinity. Augustine, in his book “Trinitarian Theology,” argued that God made man in His own image, and therefore the three pairs of spirit, knowledge, and love in man [ Augustine, Trinitarian Theology, 9-4-4, translated by Nobuo Nakazawa, University of Tokyo Press, 1975]. Also, the triad of memory, understanding, and will [see Augustine, ibid. 10-11-17]. and so on, and endlessly speculate and argue about the shadow of the Trinity, but unfortunately they do not seem to have succeeded. Augustine seems to have thought of the triad in the consciousness of a single person in this way because of his awareness of the Alethian heresy, which held that Christ is a creature, and because he placed more emphasis on the three being one in essence than on God being three persons. Because of this, Augustine said, “There is the Beloved and the Beloved and Love [ see Augustine ibid. 8-10-14].” even goes so far as to say that the distinction between the three Persons of God revealed in the Bible and the communion of mutual love does not seem to have been fully captured.
In the Gospel of John, when we read the Lord Jesus' prayer to God the Father and his introduction about the Holy Spirit, the Helper who replaces him, we can read the communion of love in the three personas of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. (John 1.1-2), the New Revised 2017 translates, but the expression “together” is the usual Greek prepositional pros, which is also translated as “toward.” The image is of the Father and the Son staring at each other. The phrase “God the only begotten, who is in the Father's bosom” (Ibid. 1.18) would seem to suggest such a translation. However, the Latin translation of the Urgatha Bible translates the Greek pros as “apud,” and the King James Version follows suit, translating it as “with,” as do all subsequent English translations. However, in the same context, “God the only begotten, who is in the bosom of the Father” is used to refer to the eternal exchange of love between the Father and the Son, so “the word was toward God” would be more appropriate. was to God” would be more appropriate.
Regarding the relationship between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I would like to introduce the words of Richard of Saint-Victor Abbey, rather than those of Augustine.

　In God, who is the Supreme Good, the utterly perfect Good, all goodness is full and exists in its perfection. So where all goodness is fully present, there can be no lack of true and supreme love. One who has self-love, then, cannot be said to have love (caritas) in the strict sense of the word. ...... Therefore, for affection to become love, it must be directed toward the other. Therefore, if there is not more than one persona, love can never exist.
　If someone does not take pleasure in the primary pleasure of another, his love is not yet complete. Therefore, not allowing a third party to participate in love is a sign of terrible weakness. If it is good to allow it, it is even better to accept it willingly. The most excellent thing is to desire and seek its participant. The first is great. The second is even greater. The third is the greatest. Therefore let us attribute the greatest to the Highest. To the Most High let us attribute the best.
　Therefore, in order that the perfection of the two mutually loving persons (Father and Son), which was revealed in the previous discussion, may be the perfection of fullness, it is necessary to have those who participate in mutual love. ......
　If anyone loves another, and only one loves the other, there is love but no mutual love. If two people love each other, and if they love each other sincerely, the love of the first goes to the second and the love of the second goes to the first, so to speak, to two different objects, they both have love, but there is no common love there. Common love exists when two people are united in love and love a third person together. That is, their love exists where their love for the third person melts into one with the flame of their love for the third person. From this, the following becomes clear. If there were only two persons in God and no third person, there would be no common love in God. For the common love I am concerned with here is not a conventional common love, but the highest common love that the Creator could ever have for His creatures. [ Richard of Saint-Victor, The Trinity, III-11, 2 (P. Nemeshegyi, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, South Window, 1970), pp. 205-208].”

　At first glance, Richard seems to be arguing that God is necessarily triune, but this is not the case. He receives the truth of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit from biblical revelation with faith, and he strives to solve the mystery of the Trinity with intelligence, using what the Bible calls the teaching of love as the key. It is a faith that seeks to know and solve. It is a faith that seeks knowledge and understanding, and it is a faith that is alive with what Richard learned firsthand in the “life together” of the monastery. The Bible reveals that the true God is the one, absolute, self-existent God, and at the same time teaches that “God is love. The fact that the One and Only True God is a God of love is closely related to the fact that God is a Trinity.
First, true love is love poured out toward others, not self-love. God, the Self-existent God, is love even without any relationship with His creatures. This means that God has others to whom He pours His love in Himself. The Father loves the Son, and the Son loves the Father.
Moreover, Richard says that if the mutual love of the Father and the Son is true love, then they both go to the third person, the Holy Spirit, with the highest “common love. There is a song called “Ito” by Miyuki Nakajima. In the chorus of the song, there is a line “The vertical thread is you, the horizontal thread is me, the woven cloth may warm someone someday. This lyric is moving to me because it says that the love between two people is not only burning between them, but that the love that unites them can become a common love that can warm a third person. According to Richard, supreme love is not self-love but love that gives, and it is not a love that burns only between two people but a common love that is poured out to third parties. For God, supreme love is what he deserves. In this way, Richard attempted to solve the mystery of the Holy Trinity with the key of love.

(4) God's Moral Nature
　God's moral character is closely related to the fact that God is a Trinity. This is because morality is the standard of conduct to be observed in social life, and society is assumed. God is a social being who has a loving communion with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit even before His creatures existed. It is because God is three in one that He can be both absolute and moral. In the case of the one and only absolute God, God can be a self-existent being who needs no creature, but cannot be a moral loving being in His own right. So I would like to consider for a moment the moral nature of God in this section of the Trinitarian Theory.
　Let me introduce the famous “Westminster Lesser Doctrinal Questions and Answers” Q4 regarding the nature of God.

Q4 What is God like?
Answer God, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, righteousness, goodness, and truth,
　　　infinite, eternal, immutable Spirit. (Translation of the Standards of Faith of the Reformed Churches)

　There is a legend about the answer to this question: In 1643, the theologians gathered at the Westminster Conference to discuss how to formulate an answer to the question, “What kind of person is God?” But they could not reach a conclusion, so they decided to continue the discussion, and a theologian was appointed to offer a concluding prayer. When he finished praying, he said, “God, who is infinite, eternal, and immutable in being, wisdom, power, holiness, righteousness, goodness, and truth,” and the people agreed that the words he had just invoked in his prayer were the best answer to the question. Does this mean that people are wiser in prayer than in argument?
It is absurd for man, a finite creature, to define an infinite God, but insofar as God Himself has revealed Himself in the Bible, we have a glimpse of who He is. By “God is Spirit,” we understand not only that God is without body, but also that He is a living Person. In Old Testament terms, the true God is the “living God,” unlike the gods of idols. In the Lord Jesus' question and answer to the Samaritan woman, He said, “Because God is a spirit, whoever worships Him must worship in Spirit and in truth” (John 4.24). (Jn 4.24), the personal, living God is demanding a personal response by His Spirit from His worshippers.
Infinite in being means omnipresence, infinite in wisdom means omniscience, and infinite in power means omnipotence, which are properties of God because He is God. The moral qualities are holiness, righteousness, goodness, and truth. The word “holy” means “distinguished,” meaning that God is distinct from all creation, far above all creation, and totally free from evil and sin. Righteousness is His nature in relation to judgment. Righteousness is the disposition of a holy God in relation to His just judgment of His creatures. Truth (and sincerity) means that God's word and deeds are in agreement. We humans say and do things that contradict what we promise or say because of sin or because of our finite nature, but God is completely true.
To say that God is “good” means that God is loving, merciful, and gracious. God has been the object of love in the communion of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit since before the world existed. God the Self-Existent did not create the world because of any lack or need. He created and ordains the world to extend the joy of the abundant communion of love in the Holy Spirit of the Father and the Son. God makes the sun to rise, the rain to fall, and the air to give us, his creatures, daily joy.
By the way, when we say “love,” we know that there is an emotion involved. While love that is only an emotion without intellect and will is a dangerous thing, there is no such thing as love that is not accompanied by the emotion of fondness for the object. In theological circles, however, due in part to the influence of the philosophies of the Greeks Plato and Aristotle, it has long been said that God has no feelings or emotions. The Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter 2, verse 1 also says, “God has no passions. This is because emotions are passive in nature, being happy, angry, or sad depending on how the other person reacts, which contradicts the essence of the Aristotelian view of God as a “god who moves others but not himself. Passion is etymologically the same root word as “passive. However, God vividly expresses how He is full of passion everywhere in the Bible, not to mention in Kakizo Kitamori's “Theology of God's Pain” (1946). God is joyful, angry, envious, and aching. Let me quote Henry Siesen. “Philosophers often deny that God has feelings, because feelings imply passivity or susceptibility to external impressions, and such a possibility is incompatible with the idea of divine immutability. But immutability does not imply immobility. True love necessarily includes emotion. And if God has no emotions, then He has no love. [ Henry Siesen, Organizational Theology (Bible Books Publishing Company 1961), p. 216. The original Lectures in Systematic Theology was published in 1949."] This is the face of Sheesen, a Baptist biblical scholar who values the Bible itself more than doctrinal traditions influenced by philosophical speculation. The God of the Bible is not the God of Epicureans and theists, who take a self-centered attitude toward creation, but a God of passion, who felt so sorry for us human beings trapped by sin and the devil that He abandoned His heavenly throne and descended to earth, and indeed, even took up His cross. The “Passion” of Christ is called Passion in English.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)