Creation

The first time I met Dr. John C. Whitcomb,¹ he made me feel like I was greeting an old friend.

You see, Dr. Whitcomb loved people. He had a heart for—a genuine interest in—everyone that he met, including every student in his classroom.

The classroom where we connected on that warm September day was commonly used for seminary classes and chapel at Faith Baptist Theological Seminary in Ankeny, Iowa. The course was called “Biblical Fundamentalism.”

But it was the teacher, not the subject, that first caught my attention in the spring of 1994 when my wife Lynnette and I began to consider the possibility of heading off to seminary the following fall.

I had heard about Dr. Whitcomb and was intrigued by his teaching—although the only things that were readily available to me in those days were his books. He had been highly regarded by my former pastor and some previous professors, and I knew he—having already enjoyed the status of a Founding Father of the modern biblical creation movement for more than 30 years before I met him—represented all that I aspired to become. God used his commitment to teach a modular course at Faith that fall to draw me providentially to that seminary.

When the time finally arrived for his one-week course to begin, I quickly sensed that I was studying under a master. As Dr. Whitcomb thumbed through his Bible to reference various verses, it often felt as though I was seeing in 3-D that which I had previously known only as a flat picture.

The other day I was driving in downtown Kokomo and saw a comical sight—comical for me, at least. A man in pickup truck was backing into a parking space, tapped the streetlight pole with his truck’s bumper, and—boom! Down she went. Although he did not hit the pole hard, one weighty tap was all it took.

We, too, are fragile. In Psalm 103:13-14, the psalmist reminds us that, “As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust” (ESV).

The fact that we are vulnerable does not mean we are not valuable. God’s compassion is showered upon us like the compassion of a loving father. He values us so intently that He did not spare his own Son for us (Rom. 8:32).

Our human dignity comes from God. Understanding human dignity is a theological point, but that does not preclude it from being an important issue in daily life. It is a crucial matter that affects the life and death decisions we make.

In Genesis 2:7, we are told that mankind originated from the dust: “then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”