You and Your Creator: A Study in God's Purpose for Man

By M.J Tiry

You and your Creator is written to not only be an introduction to the Christian life but also to take the

believer further into what it is (what is really means) to be a member of the Church the Body of Christ.

It starts with the heart searching for real meaning in life and finds in the Word of God, the Bible, what

our Creator'

• Language: English
• Publisher: WordHouse Book Publishing
• Release date: Feb 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781685470593

M.J Tiry

Over the last forty years Michael has been involved in itinerate preaching, a church planting ministry,and a teaching and preaching ministry at Berean Bible Church in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Michaelalso serves Berean Bible Church as director of the Timothy Institute, designed to prepare men forleadership in local churches. Mike has written sixteen study guides on various books of the Bible.One of those study guides More than Conquerors on the Book of Romans was published in 2019 byWestbow Press. Additionally, he has been active over the last fifteen years in a prison ministry.Michael and his wife of 44 years, Linda, have raised five daughters.

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You and Your Creator: A Bible Study in God’s Eternal Purpose for Man

Copyright © 2022 M.J. Tiry

This is a work of nonfiction. The events of personal history are portrayed to the best of the author’s memory. The commentary on scripture is the result of the author’s exegetical study of the King James Bible.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

All biblical references made within this book are based on the King James Version (KJV) of the Holy Bible.

ISBN

Paperback 978-1-68547-057-9

Hardcover 978-1-68547-058-6

eBook 978-1-68547-059-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022902030

Printed in the United States of America

Published 09/02/2022

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Preface

You and your Creator is an introduction to the Christian life. It starts with the heart searching for real meaning in life and finds in the Word of God, the Bible, what our Creator’s purpose for man really is. It then searches deep into the Scriptures for the answers to the basic question of why evil exists in a universe created by an omnipotent and loving Creator. The author explores the resources available to the believer that equips him to live a life that pleases God while living in a world that largely rejects Him. The book was originally entitled Death, Resurrection and the Intermediate State . It was later changed to Man and his Creator . At the suggestion of one of the reviewers, I changed it to You and your Creator .

The book embraces the wonder of the privilege of being human – of being a member of the human race that had been created in the image of the creator. It is written to the heart of one who appreciates what it means to be human while living in a world in which God our Creator has no welcome place in the hearts of most men. Yet the believer holds in his heart the joy and peace that is freely offered to all who trust Him. The believer sees the eternal purpose of God in creating man. The believer comes to spiritual maturity as he gains the knowledge of God’s plan and understands how He works in the lives of man to conform them to the image of His Son. As the believer learns of and applies the divine principles laid out in the pages of Scripture, he develops the wisdom to actually live the very life of Jesus Christ in this present evil age in which we live today.

In Chapter 4, we will see God’s plan for the ages unfold in time. We will see how and where we fit into it. It is when every member of the church the Body of Christ comes to full spiritual maturity that the church will have the impact that God intends for it to have in this world.

Chapter 5 was written as an appeal from my heart to America that we might all appreciate what we have here in this great experiment in democracy. In that chapter and others that follow we will see the impact that we as believers can have in this world as we function as mature saints. May it be that believers work together to reach out with this wonderful saving gospel of the grace of God who is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.

A word is in order here on how to study the Bible and actually how to approach the Bible. Some basic principles to hold in our study of Scripture then are:

1. All of scripture came from the mouth of God and it fully equips the man of God to do anything that God would have him do. "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness: That the man of God may be perfect, throughly furnished unto all good works." (2 Timothy 3:16-17) It can be said that the Holy Spirit never works apart from the Bible and the Bible never works apart from the Holy Spirit.

2. The term inspiration of God in 2Tim. 3:16 means that it was breathe out of God’s mouth. It is truly as the Lord tells the devil in Matthew 4:4 It is written; Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. And that is the origin of every word of scripture – from the mouth of God.

3. Scripture must be studied in its context in order for it to make sense. There are two contexts: the immediate context in which the passage is set and there is the remote context that looks at the Bible as a whole. Billy Sunday is said to have made the statement A text without a context is a pretext. That concept is what Peter is communicating when he said in 2Peter 1:20 & 21 "Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost." No passage of scripture is intended to stand by itself but rather each passage actually relates to every other passage of scripture. One of the greatest tools to Bible study is a good cross reference (One that I like is The Treasury of Scripture Knowledge). By comparing scripture with scripture the Bible teaches itself. The Bible itself is its greatest and best teacher.

4. While all of scripture is written for our learning, not every passage of scripture is addressed to us. The word of truth then must be rightly divided. Paul tells us this in 2 Timothy 2:15 saying Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. We trust that appendix 4 of this book will be very helpful in seeing this concept.

5. Another key to understanding the Bible is simply to let it say what it clearly says. It is a major mistake to spiritualize scripture. The Bible is written to be taken literally. There are times when the Bible uses figures of speech (figurative language) but when it does it is apparent that such is the case. Basically, we must remember the adage if the literal sense makes perfect sense, seek no other sense.

6. God has taken great care to give us His inspired word and gave it without error. He has also pledged to preserve it so. (Psalm 12:6-7) "The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever." It is the conviction of this author that there exists today a preserved text of the inspired and inerrant Word of God. This is not in the originals for they have been lost through time but this preservation of scripture is in the multiplicity of copies. It was God’s desire and design that the Bible gets into the hands of the people. If there is a doctrine of preservation, then that preservation is done in the multiplicity of copies. This author holds the conviction that the preserved text line is the Received Text (Majority Text) of the New Testament and the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Old Testament. Since there is only one translation in print in English today from these, all scripture references in this study are from the King James Bible.

7. There is yet another key to an effective study of the word of God. That is the heart attitude of the Bereans of Acts 17:11. They received the Word with and open mind but they did not just take any man’s word for truth or error of what was said until they searched it out in the scripture. That approach gave them protection from error for they made the Word of God their final authority and examined what everyone said based on the Word of Truth – the Bible.

8. One final thing regarding the Bible having the impact in our lives that God intended it to have is the simple matter of believing it. Paul tells the Thessalonians that they received the word of God, they received it not as the word of men but as it is in truth the word of God, which …effectually worketh in you that believe. It is not just the understanding of it that makes it effective but applying it by faith to one’s life that makes it effective to give spiritual strength and vitality.

May the Lord richly bless you dear reader as you enjoy this study in God’s infallible Book the Bible.

You and your Creator

A Study of the Eternal Purposes of God for Man

Introduction

This is actually a book about Life. It is a book on life as we find it in the Word of God as emanating from Jesus Christ the Eternal Word who is the only source of life. As we consider ourselves and look objectively at life with spiritual discernment, we understand that there is more to our lives than simply our physical existence. As we approach scriptures on the matter, we find that we indeed are spiritual creatures designed by our Creator to be able to relate to Him. In consideration of this, 1Thessalonians 5:23 identifies us as three-part creatures. And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Going to the Scripture in 1Corinthians 6:19 and 20 we find some revealing instruction from Paul the apostle of the Gentiles regarding the tri-part makeup of our being. In verse 20 he tells us to …glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. Being a direct command, we understand that the subject is understood to be You. The subject of this verse is you. The real you is not your body neither is it your spirit but the real you is your soul. You are a soul who has a body and who also has a spirit and (according to this passage) all three (you, your body, and your spirit) belong to God.

As far as awareness of existence is concerned, each of these parts of our makeup gives us a different consciousness. Our body gives us each a world consciousness. It enables us to function in a physical world. Our soul is the real person—our real identity. The soul is what gives each of us self-consciousness. It is what makes us who we are – our person. Our soul gives each of us our individual identity and each our unique personality. The actions that we take and the decisions that make and carry out in the real world are the result of convictions that we hold in our soul (in our person). According to 1Corinthians 6:20, you (your soul) is that part of you that determines what you will do with your body and what you will do with your spirit. Finally, our spirit is that part of our makeup that gives us a consciousness of God. The spirit is that part within man that enables him to relate to the unseen things – the things of God. We will look at the decision-making faculty of our makeup more later on in this study. First though we will answer four key questions of life in Chapter 1 and then we will look at our human makeup from the viewpoint of our Creator in Chapter 2.

Chapter 1

Four Key Questions of Life

Through the years I have been working on a team along with other Bible teachers to teach a group of kids in grades 6 through 8 at a summer Bible camp. It was always a blessing to work with kids this age. They are old enough to have given serious consideration to the important questions of life but have not yet formulated strong convictions. They are not old enough to be thinking of stepping out on their own. Unfortunately, many of them are also old enough to have experienced some of the fallout from adults in their lives who have been less than godly examples.

One of the strengths of camp week is that we can bring these kids into an environment that is separate from the world. It is a time for them to detoxify from the world and be in an environment where the Word of God is presented in a fellowship with their peers under the guidance of godly leaders.

To set the course for the week, we would start the first evening with cabin devotions that included some questions that we wanted the kids to think on during the week. We would then challenge them to answer the questions for themselves that evening but then informed them that one of the counselors would talk to each of them on Thursday evening to have them give their answers to the questions based on what they learned that week at camp and what decisions they might have made regarding them.

Typically, the questions that we would present to them for thoughtful reflection were along the lines of:

1) Who am I? Was I just a happy accident or am I a part of something that God is doing?

2) Why am I here? Is there real purpose in life that I can find or am I just wandering aimlessly through life?

3) Where am I going (as far as my eternal destiny is concerned)? If we can get the appropriate response from them on each of these questions, we felt that camp was a success both for the campers and the staff.

I can personally relate to these questions as I reflect on my growing up years and on into becoming a young adult. I grew up with a religious background in a family of five kids. Having grown up on a farm I learned the value of hard work and was blessed by a lack of opportunity to get into too much trouble. I received a degree in engineering and began a successful career in engineering. I was in my mid-twenties and fairly content with my life but realized that it was still lacking something. I was working with an associate one day and made a statement to him to the effect that life is good but there is little in it that can give real joy and purpose to life.

It was what my friend was looking for - An opportunity to open a dialogue that would lead to a gospel presentation. He informed me that he did not have that problem – of not finding purpose in life. He was excited about the fact that he was living his life with eternity in view because he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had eternal life. He knew where he would be and what he would be doing not just this year or the next but 2,000 years from now and beyond that.

Responding to him from my religious background (which at that point in my life had essentially lost much real relevance to me); I told him that it is not possible to know that. You have to wait until life is over to see if you will make it or not. He responded to that saying we are on the clock now so we will stick to business. However, after hours I would like to sit down with you over an open Bible and show you that eternal life is indeed a gift of God’s grace and that you can receive it by faith. Would you be interested? My response was Yes I would surely be a fool to disregard that prospect of knowing that I had eternal life as a present position. Well, we did have that discussion and the Word of God did indeed say that eternal life is a gift of God’s grace and yes it can be received by faith. I would definitely like to have believed that but I had some questions that had to be satisfied.

Conditioned by an engineering mind, it was a matter with me that any statement if it is true must correspond to and correlate with reality as it can be seen and tested. As much as I wanted to believe that gospel account that Christ died for my sins to totally clear the account and that I can have eternal life, I had to know that the Bible that I got that from was true in every detail. If I could not believe the account of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, how could I believe anything after it?

That set me on a course of study that made my studies in engineering sciences seem pale by comparison. I needed to know the answers to questions that lurked in the recesses of my mind but which I was not moved to explore before. Questions like:

1. What was the origin of the universe? The atheists looked at space, matter and time and said in effect that these three created everything. The theist says that an omnipotent God created everything out of nothing. That certainly sounded more logical to me than to believe that nothing created everything. But I needed to see the Bible validated as absolute truth on this matter.

2. How can an absolutely holy, loving, just, and righteous God exist when there is so much evil and wickedness in the world? I heard this argument back in the sixties. How can a Holy God exist and not intervene to stop the evil and wickedness in the world?

3. What is God’s purpose for man? What did He create man for? If I can find an answer to this question, I too would find real purpose in life.

4. Is there really life beyond the grave? If so, what is that life like? It certainly seemed to me that there is more to man than just his physical existence. He is certainly more than an animal. There is obviously a human spirit in man. What happens to that part after death when his physical (mortal) existence is over?

Those were my questions and I needed to find the answers but where will I find them. For all that I could see, there was only one source of information that can pose or proport to be an objective standard by which God is communicating with anyone today. That is through His book the Bible but the veracity of the Bible is the very thing I want to see proven. Logic told me that if there be such an omnipotent, purposeful God, that he created this amazingly intelligent creature, man, then He would surely be interested in communicating His purposes to man. It was then that I began reading the Bible for the first time in my life. I stopped at a book store and purchased a Bible (it happened to be a King James Bible in paperback).

My dad was a praying man and I picked up that habit. I had prayed many times before but now my prayers took on a more urgent nature. I prayed in earnest for the truth about God and the Bible. My fears that motivated me were essentially the lyrics of a song I heard that says I would swear there is no heaven and pray there is no hell. But what if there are both and I must be reconciled to that fact. I needed to know the truth.

My prayer to God was for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Having a background in the sciences, what I found had to square with what could be verified in the real world of science. So, with that I began my studies.

Question 1: Let’s start with the first question – the question of origins. Genesis 1 states simply In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Simply put, there was a point in time called the beginning when time began. Time is then a part of creation. Time denotes the separation of one event from another in history. The physical universe is actually a space – matter – time continuum. Time itself is a three-part thing consisting of past, present and future. But this verse (Genesis 1:1) goes back to when time did not have a past. It started when God started to act. An eternal being started to act and time began.

I was not an atheist nor was I an agnostic. I was just a man for whom religion had lost its appeal and essentially its relevance. What I needed at that point was truth by which I could establish reliance in the book in which I was about to place my confidence. I want to get to know the God of creation. I prayed to the God of all gods – to the top guy. I wanted answers and I was confident that he would give them to me.

I pity the poor atheist. He has to either believe that the universe came about out of nothing (we will call this Premise 1) or that space, matter, and time had always existed (what we will call Premise 2). Excluding these two premises, I would be left with only one other premise (Premise 3), that there was a God who created everything out of nothing. But then, did He do it exactly as we see it laid out on the pages of the Bible?

To believe Premise 1 (that space, matter, and time came about spontaneously and that these three created everything), one has to believe that nothing created everything. But that can only happen if it is caused by an omnipotent creator outside of itself.

The first law of thermodynamics (that is what is called the first law of science) states that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This is a law that governs the universe as we see it today. Matter and energy can be converted from one form to another (for example, matter to energy in nuclear reactions of nuclear fission and nuclear fusion) but the sum total will remain the same. This law of science therefore precludes the possibility that the space-matter-time continuum that we understand the universe to be, could have spontaneously appeared. There had to be a creator of infinite intelligence and power to create it out of nothing. Further, that creator had to exist outside of and independent of space, matter and time.

To believe Premise 2 (that the space-matter-time continuum had always existed) is also problematic when studied in consideration of the laws of science. The second law of thermodynamics is an interesting study, a profound concept relative to this matter. The second law of thermodynamics basically states that in every energy transformation process, a certain amount of the energy spent in the process goes into its waste form of heat. My thermodynamics professor offered a profound statement regarding the implications of this Law of Science: Based on the second law of thermodynamics we can state unequivocally that there can never be under the laws that presently govern this universe a perpetual motion machine. If you were to build a machine and equip it with a very large fuel supply and put it in an adiabatic box (a box that allows no mass or energy into it or out of it) and started the machine in motion, it will eventually of course stop, and the temperature in the box will be at a universally higher level than when the experiment started. That is to say that the energy expended in running the machine went to heat to raise the temperature in that box. The total energy is still the same in that box as at the beginning but it is no longer available to do useful work. This is the second law of thermodynamics put into play.

Now let’s extrapolate that experiment in a big way. If we were to now picture the universe as being inside that adiabatic box with the universe as the machine inside of it, we would understand that in time, all motion in the universe would have to stop. For motion to occur, energy has to be at two different levels. The fact that there is still motion in our present universe tells us that the universe could not have always existed. If it had, then it is at infinity from its imagined origin and all energy in it would be in its waste form of heat and further motion would not be possible. We thus understand that there was a point in time in which it was created and when that happened, it was created by an omnipotent and omniscient creator outside of itself. We therefore can simply let it stand as a fact and believe it that in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.

We now come to examine the concept presented in the rest of Genesis, Chapter one. In this chapter we see clearly presented a six-day period of time in which the earth as it is presently constituted, was created and made. From the reference to ...and the evening and the morning were the first day (verses 5, 8, 13, 19, 23, and 31) it is clear that a literal day of 24 hour duration is intended for each day. Also the term let, used 14 times in Chapter 1 with reference to each creative act of God is significant. The term Let carries the idea of allowing something that has been predetermined, carefully planned, and thoughtfully prepared, permission to happen. This implies that what God did on each of those six days of creation week was to plan in every detail the entirety of what would be created and made in that day and to then give it permission to be (that is to give it permission to happen).

To suggest that God used a process of evolution to bring about the end results of each day of creation week is to introduce death into God’s creation before death was allowed. Death does not enter until Adam sinned. Adam was told that in the day that thou eateth thereof, thou shalt surely die… This is where death enters God’s creation. There is nothing that gives us cause to doubt that each day of creation week unfolded exactly as stated in Genesis Chapter 1. The only one there to observe it and to document it was the one who wrote the Book. There is therefore no safer assumption than to simply trust that what He wrote is accurate. The theory of evolution postulated by Darwin has never been observed in human history. Scientific proof requires observation. No human was there in the beginning to write down what he observed. There has never been a documented case where one species evolved into a different species. Using this premise as a basis on which to start my study, I have to say that everything that I have seen and observed has convinced me to trust the creator for everything that I have not personally seen.

Some suggest that the fossil record indicates that there is an indication of life gradually appearing and developing into ever more sophisticated and more complex species. To this I refer the question to consider the fact that the entire earth was inundated by water in the flood of Noah’s day. Having spent many years as an engineer taking foundation investigation logs for the design of structures, I observed first hand that what we see in the earth’s surface layers indicate that the earth had experienced flooding on a mammoth scale. Clearly, the fossil stratification shows that the simpler organisms being denser settled faster in a mix of soil, water and drowning organisms. I marvel at how perfectly what is recorded in Genesis regarding the catastrophic history of this planet answers any question that I have regarding what can be seen and observed.

Someone might accuse me of prejudicing my opinion because I want it to be true simply because I want to have the assurance of having eternal life. I take that to be the case – but we will let the scripture say what is says for I see no reason to doubt its veracity.

Let’s talk about this gap thing a bit. What we call creation week (six literal days in which the physical world that we see and touch and live in) actually starts in verse 3 of Chapter 1. We will look at this in more detail in Chapter 3. There is apparently a gap in between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:3. In fact this gap is between Genesis 1:1 and 1:2. This gap is not something I imagine to accommodate dinosaurs as some suggest. The dinosaurs were created on the sixth day of creation week (as is suggested by Job 40:15). Genesis 1:1 is where the angelic world was created. This gap between verses 1 and 2 is where the fall of Lucifer takes place. We do not know how long of a period of time was covered during this gap, but we do know from passages as Isaiah 14: 12 – 19; Ezekiel 28: 12-18 and Jeremiah 4:23 that significant events took place during that gap that impacted everything that God does from Genesis 1:3 onward and what transpired in God’s creation in Genesis Chapters 2 and 3.

We will see in Chapter 3 of this book that Satan was present as a fallen creature when man was created. Logic then compels us to ask: When did the fall of Lucifer, the anointed Cherub, to become Satan the adversary occur? It had to occur between the times of his creation, which would have occurred in Genesis 1:1, and the creation of Adam on the sixth day of what we call creation week. Lucifer was perfect in his ways until iniquity was found in him (Ezekiel 28:15). However, when Adam was created on the sixth day of creation week, he was there as Satan the adversary – literally (according to John 8:44) a man slayer. As soon as there was a man to slay, there was Satan as the man slayer to slay him. We will see more on this in upcoming chapters.

We will see in Chapter 3 that the original creation