A Three-D Faith

“A Three-D Faith”

Preacher : Pastor Tim Boyle

Kobe Union Church

July 20, 2025

It's great to be with you this morning, as it’s been several years since we last were here at KUC.  In fact, I’m trying to remember when that was.  I know we spent about 3 months back in late 2017-early 2018 living in the manse on Rokko Island when Juji was in the hospital, and I think we were down briefly in 2019 as well, and so it’s been at least 6 years.  No doubt a lot has changed since then, but I do recognize quite a few familiar faces.

This morning, the message I’m giving has a rather cryptic title, “A Three-D Faith,” because I want to focus on 3 words that all begin with the letter “D”.  Usually, the term “three-D” stands for “3-dimensional”, and if you have ever been to Disneyland or Universal Studios and wore those special glasses, you know the effect a 3-dimensional perspective gives us.  There is, however, a sense in which this normal usage of 3-D applies to what I have to say today as well.

In describing in rather poetic terms the various kinds of life God created, the Bible clearly indicates that there are 3 levels of life, namely the body, soul and spirit.  In biblical Hebrew, there is more than one word that can be translated as “create” in English, and so it is important to understand the difference so that we can properly understand what the Bible teaches concerning the creation of life. The Hebrew word “barah” means to create something brand new that never existed before, and in Genesis chapter 1, it is used with respect to only 3 creative events, each of which represents the three levels of life — body, mind and spirit.  The first usage is in verse 1 when God “created the Heavens and the Earth” out of absolutely nothing that was physical.  This is the entire physical universe, and since the various lower lifeforms he created in preparing the earth for human beings were created out of this material alone, “barah” is not used again to describe the creation of these lower lifeforms. Their creation is simply included in the overall creation of the physical universe. They have only physical life, which we can call the first level of life.

The next time “barah” is used is when the text describes the creation of birds and mammals on Creation Day 5.  What is new about them?  It is the second level of life, which I’m calling the “soul”, by which I mean the level of the mind, emotions and will.  Two other Hebrew words are used to describe fashioning something out of previously existing materials or reworking some design that already exists.  With respect to these higher animals, these words refer to their physical bodies, which on the physical level are basically equivalent to lower life forms.  The use of “barah”, then, refers to the creation of something brand new, which is this level of the mind, will and emotions.  This is what the word “soul” refers to in this context.  Birds and mammals have this second level of life, and it is this that allows them to form relationships with individual humans.  Such animals clearly can form personal bonds with individual humans, and they can exhibit aspects of mind, will and emotions that are beyond the simple conditioned reflexes and instinctual behaviors you see in lower animals.

The third level, then, is the one I want to focus on today, and that is the level of the spirit — the part of us that is created in the image of God.  In Genesis, this is the only other time the word “barah” is used, when it refers to the creation of eternal spirits made in the “image of God.”  Among all the physical life forms that God created, only human beings have this third dimension of life.  In English, we often use the terms “soul” and “spirit” interchangeably.  But for this purpose, I am distinguishing between them, with one’s “soul” referring to the level of our minds, including our emotions and will, while “spirit” refers to our eternal nature – that which is created in the image of God. 

This creation of the human spirit is alluded to in verse 7 of chapter 2, where it says, “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”  This is really a very profound verse, and it implies the three words I want to deal with today that begin with the letter “D” and that sum up what I mean by the term “a 3-D faith.”  They are: Dust, Divine and Destiny.  These three words sum up what it means to be a human being.

Just how does one define a human being, anyway?  Did you know that when the United Nations was being formed after WWII, the representatives of the various governments debated this question for several days?  “What does it mean to be ‘human’?”  The debate, however, did not get very far, and they soon discovered that you simply cannot mix Marx and Moses; Darwin and David.  The philosophical presuppositions of theism and atheism are like oil and water and simply don’t mix together.

The primary presupposition that in effect determines everything else involves how we explain our origins.  Marx and Darwin would say that mankind is simply an accident of nature and that there is no Creator we are accountable to.  According to Moses and David, however, we are no mere accident of nature.  We are instead a purposeful creation of God with a spirit that lives on after physical death.  According to them and the rest of the Biblical writers, we have these 3 elements that can be expressed in these 3 words I just mentioned — Dust, Divine and Destiny.  So, let’s begin to look at these 3 words to see what they can teach us.

First, the word “Dust”:  Dust is a very important symbol in the Bible.  It is the opposite of life, and it is used to symbolize the humbleness of mankind.  When a biblical character wanted to demonstrate his sorrow or remorse, he wore “sack cloth” and covered himself with dust and ashes.  Dust is formless and is the end result of decay, which you can characterize as disintegrated and disgusting — and that's three more words that start with “D”.  Yet human beings have a close connection with dust in this symbolic form.  After the Fall, in Gen. 3:19, God said to Adam, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

I’m reminded of the story of a little girl whose mother had been reading these Bible verses to her to explain about creation.  She told her how we are dust and that we would return to dust when we die.  This really impressed the little girl, and shortly thereafter, she came running in very excitedly and exclaimed to her mother, “Mommy, I just looked under my bed, and there sure must be a lot of people under there, but I can’t tell if they’re coming or going!”

Well, that kind of dust isn’t exactly what the Bible has in mind.  In fact, some versions, such as the TEV, use the word “soil.”  The biblical word is a word referring to any powdered substance.  In this case, it is the “dust of the ground.”  Interestingly, the Hebrew word for “ground” is “adamah”, which is obviously closely related to the name given that first man, “Adam.”  In fact, in the Hebrew text, it uses the word, “Ha Adam”, or literally “the Adam”, to refer to mankind in general.  Thus, “Ha Adam” (mankind) was created from “adamah” (dirt) and that first man simply took the name “Adam”, symbolic of his origin.

That doesn’t sound very flattering, does it?  You and I: We’re just nothing but dirt — dust!  But no, there is more to it than that isn’t there?  Even in just the physical sense, while the raw elements in our bodies would be worth something like a few dollars on the open market, the various complex chemicals that those elements compose, if they could be separated out and sold on the world market, would be worth millions of dollars.  According to that scheme, those of us with more volume would be worth more monetarily.  But that’s not the true value of a human life, is it!  A human life is worth so much more than the chemicals that make up our physical bodies, and that’s because of that second word — “Divine”.  As it says in chapter 1, verse 26, God created both Adam and Eve in his own image.  He gave us a spirit to go along with our “dusty” physical bodies.  As God created Adam from “Adamah”, it says, “He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”  

There are two very interesting things to note about this phrase.  First, only human beings received the “breath of life” from God.  The animals did not receive this.  In verse 19, it says, “Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air.”  Just like Adam, they were created “out of the ground,” but there is no mention of the “breath of life.”  Thus, they did not receive a spirit like we did.  They physically breathe, but they don’t have the “breath of life” — they were not created in the image of God with an eternal spirit.  These higher animals have only the first two levels of life, the physical and the “soulish,” that is, the level of the will and emotions.

We humans, however, have all three levels of life, the physical, the “soulish” and the spiritual.  We are both “dust” and “divine”.  We have a God-breathed spirit, and to the extent that we allow, His Holy Spirit dwells within us — for as the Bible says, our bodies are to be “temples of the Holy Spirit”.  This, then, brings us to the third and last word that begins with D — Destiny.  This is implied in the last phrase of verse 7, “and the man became a living being.”  This means that we are not just physically alive — for even the animals and plants are physically alive.  We're more than that.  We are “living beings,” persons who can know their Creator and who can respond to him.  We have a special destiny, and we must relate to God in order to fulfill that destiny — to really fulfill our potentials as living beings.  

An animal can live up to its destiny by simply existing.  Our cats and dogs fulfill their destinies by simply being pets.  I believe these higher animals do have a “soul” in the sense of having mind, emotions and a will (though, of course, not nearly so highly developed as humans).  They can form personal relationships with individual human beings.  But they have no consciousness of God and cannot form a personal relationship with their Creator, because they have not been endowed with a spirit.  Only human beings have the ability to respond to their Creator, and this we must do in order to fulfill our destiny.  To make play-on-words, a human being has an ability to respond — a "response ability" towards God, and therefore a responsibility for his or her destiny.  The choice is ours.  We can live on the level of animals, like a clod of dirt and so many chemicals, or we can become truly human — living beings who have truly responded to their Creator.

People need to have an explanation of where they came from and what meaning their lives have in the great scheme of things.  “Who am I?”  “Why am I here?”  “What meaning does my life have?”  Even people who are not the philosophical types will at some point think about these “big questions” of life.  They may even feel that there are no answers, but that in itself is an answer, because that basically ends up with the same conclusion someone who holds to naturalism comes to — namely, that our lives have no meaning other than what we conger up on our own.  We are just an accident of existence, and so ultimately, there is no purpose or reason for our existence.  If there is no “Divine”, then neither is there any “Destiny” — except in the sense of extinction being our destiny, both as individuals and as a species.

When you really get down to it, there are only 2 basic choices.  Either there is a transcendent Creator of our universe or there isn’t.  If you reject the belief that there is a Creator God, then chance working through natural law is the only option left for the cause of your existence.  These two concepts are the foundations of the two basic worldviews that compete for the hearts and minds of human beings everywhere.  They come in a wide variety of specific worldviews, but in the final analysis, all worldviews fit into one or the other, and each of them is thus ultimately based in our understanding of our origins, because our origins determine our destiny.  Likewise, our understanding of our origins determines how we view human nature, human value and everything else that makes up our worldview.

If there is a God who created us along with the physical environment that makes life possible, then that means he has a purpose in mind and that as his creations we are accountable to him.  In other words, there is a standard of right and wrong for which there will be a judgment.  If, however, there is no God, then chance is our creator and everything is relative.  The only rules that exist are what we ourselves create, and therefore we are free to change whatever our ancestors put together for themselves.  All the contentious issues being debated in society today — the so-called “culture wars” — are merely skirmishes in what is the real battle, and that is this clash between the two basic explanations for our origins.  It is the clash between a biblical worldview and the various materialistic worldviews arrayed against it. 

St. Augustine once said of mankind, “Lord, our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.”  Likewise, the famous French scientist, Blaise Pascal, said, “There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”  That is the way he created us.  Our spirits will only grow and prosper as we have fellowship with God.  But God doesn’t force himself on us. He gave us free will, and so we must open the door to him so that he can fill that vacuum in our inner being.

This “God-shaped vacuum” is attested to by the human craving for meaning.  Of all the life forms that exist on earth, only we humans have the capacity to think in abstract thoughts such as meaning in life and our existence beyond the grave.  Higher animals such as mammals and birds can express emotions like grief, but they give no indication they can engage in abstract thought or map out their future lives, including life beyond the grave.

When Genesis tells us that God “created us in his image,” that is what is being referred to.  It is this dimension that is the “God-shaped vacuum” that only God can fill.  Thus, when we try to fill it with something else, this “image of God” gets misplaced, as it were.  Some people try to fill that vacuum with various spiritual pursuits, while others try to do that with the philosophy of naturalism.  For instance, “New Age” beliefs in UFO’s or trying to contact extraterrestrial civilizations they feel “must certainly be there” are a “substitute religion” and are thus a kind of idolatry, where such things are substituted for contact with one’s true Creator.  The famous astronomer, Carl Sagan, popularized this “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence”, even claiming that once we can establish contact with these vastly superior civilizations, they will be our salvation.　He eloquently wrote about receiving an encoded message from ET that would be what he called the “Encyclopedia Galactica.”  But on a scientific level, this idea of receiving some sort of code from an extraterrestrial intelligence is something that in effect has already happened.  We do have an encoded message from an “extraterrestrial intelligence,” and that is the DNA code and all the other ways information is encoded in every cell of our bodies.  We could call this code the “Encyclopedia Biologica,” and over the last 20 years or so, while we have made tremendous progress in deciphering it, we’re also finding out that the more we learn the more we realize how incredibly complex all the biochemical phenomena are that make our physical lives possible.  It is an amazing message indeed.  It speaks to the fact that this incredibly complex information had to arise from outside of itself.  In other words, it comes to us from an outside “extraterrestrial intelligence.”  The message of the Bible is that “ET” has come to us in human form, as Jesus Christ in the flesh some 2000 years ago.  This “message we have from ET” in the form of the genetic code is a topic we could perhaps talk about in the discussion after the service.

In closing, I want to encourage each of you to reconfirm your true destiny as children of God — as both “dust” and “divine.”  That “God-shaped vacuum” in each human heart is that inner longing we humans have for meaning.  And as the old saying goes, “Nature abhors a vacuum.”  This is true not only in the physical sense but in the spiritual sense as well.  If God does not fill that need, some sort of substitute will, whether that be some far-out UFO cult, a faith in naturalism to explain our origins, or just a living for self in a country-club lifestyle or whatever.  These are all hollow substitutes for the real thing, not all that different from someone carving a wooden statue and worshipping it.  These are all forms of idolatry, and this is why the Bible preaches against idolatry and not just against atheism.  These are all inadequate substitutes, and with them, we simply don’t fulfill our destiny as spiritual beings created in the image of God.  Only through a personal encounter with God, where we open the door of our hearts and let him come in to fill the void and then continue to walk in his light and fellowship — only through doing this do we realize our destiny as complete human beings, both “dust” and “divine.”  

In Rev. 3:20, at the other end of the Bible, Jesus said, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock: if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and have fellowship with him and he with me.”  Perhaps you’ve never realized that you need to open that door and invite Christ in as Savior and Lord.  Or maybe you’ve done that in the past, but that fellowship has grown cold through neglect.  Each of us needs to take stock of our own spiritual condition and to open our hearts to the leading of the Holy Spirit.  And it is not a matter of trying to pull ourselves up by our spiritual bootstraps either, for we can do nothing in and of ourselves to fill that God-created vacuum.  Only God can do that.  Our part is simply to allow it to happen, and that part is a matter of our own wills.  In prayer, we can invite Christ in to take over the reins of our lives, and we can develop our character by focusing on his Word.  As it says in Romans 12:1-2, “I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.  Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”  You’ll notice that it doesn’t say to “transform your minds” as though that were possible.  It says, “be transformed by the renewal of your mind.”  It is God who does the transforming and renewal.  So let us close in prayer as we ask God to work in our hearts to bring about the good that he desires for us.  Let us pray:

Lord, you have truly created us as an amazing combination of dust and divine, and you have given us a destiny.  O Lord, our hearts are truly restless until they find their rest in thee.  Lord, if there is someone here today who needs to take that first step of faith in opening their hearts to Christ, we pray that you would remove any doubts and fears preventing him or her from doing that right now.  And for each one of us, Lord, we pray that you would pour out your Holy Spirit as we open ourselves to you so that each one of us can truly realize our destiny as spiritual beings in fellowship with you, our Creator.  In Jesus’ name we pray.  Amen.