A New Kind of Human: Introduction

This is the first segment of my sermon on Ephesians 4:17-25, entitled "A New Kind of Human", delivered to Marion Park 7/11/09.

Before you read on make sure you've read Ephesians 4:17-25.

A New Kind of Human
-The Myth of Evolutionary Progress. We've all heard it; we've all encountered it in one form or another. When Charles Darwin wrote his origin of species, he found a willing academic crowd because his theory resonated with the spirit of the age. Progress was the key feeling. Enlightenment confidence in science was already crowding out God or any non-material reality. The idea that has grown up from his legacy is that the origin of all life, including humans, could be explained by incremental changes over time as species adapt to their environments and differentiate, from single celled organisms all the way to humans. Richard Dawkins the ardent atheist and evolutionist said that the question he is most often asked is "What's the next step in evolution for us humans?" It makes sense to ask such a question. If we've changed that much, and we're still progressing, what are humans going to evolve into next?

-Our entertainment has picked up on this question with a vengeance. Think of all the superhero shows or movies, like X-men or Spider-man or Fantastic Four, take your pick really. All of them pose the idea of a mass mutation in which some humans develop powerful abilities, super powers, as a sort of next step for evolutionary mutation. This happens, either cause they are just born different, or because they come into contact with some strange chemical from outer space that prompts the mutation.

-But this isn't just in our entertainment. Some people actually believe this stuff. At its most harmless some talk about the spiritual evolution of humanity referencing humanity's ability to create art and community, to care for its weaker members rather than wiping them out, others await a race of cybernetic brains that will not need to even move because they will have created machines to do everything for them. One article I found online looks forward to Super Humans using the psychic abilities that they already have available to them, literally on the level of moving things with your mind and going beyond the 5 senses with your imagination in order to control the world around you.

-Well, against all this the Bible has something very different to say about the origins and future of humanity, but interestingly, as we'll see in our passage today, it does teach that there is an old kind of human, in Adam, and there is a new kind of human, in Christ, and it teaches us that the only way to become part of the new humanity, the only way to become a new human yourself, is through the mutation, if you will, the new life, the new creation that comes through believing in Jesus Christ. And in the passage that we're going to look at today, Paul explains to the Ephesians the characteristics both of the old human and also of the new human, in order to remind them not to continue to operate as they did before their mutation, before they were fundamentally changed in the core of who they are, but now to operate as befits members of the new humanity in Christ. Because there is a tendency among new humans to still act like they did when they were old humans, and so new humans need to reminded of what they once were like, and how they are now to live. So that's what we're going to look at today, "A New Kind of Human". And Paul gives us in this passage the characteristics of the old human (vv. 17-19) and the characteristics of the new human (vv. 20-24), so that we can learn the difference and so that those of us who believe in Jesus can be sure to live like new humans ourselves.