That, to a rational mind, is unthinkable. For the Concept of God is about truth, whether we like it or not. The universe would not work were The Author of natural law a liar.
I had started another post that is yet to be completed. It is about us humans not liking, hating, shunning, imagining all sorts of alternative meanings, to things we do not want to hear or believe. Conservatives often joke about liberals wishing that life were fair when it is not, but many conservatives will do the same thing when it comes to anything that threatens their status quo. They'd rather not believe there's something they've worked hard to acquire that will need be sacrificed. So they are inclined to forestall the inevitable until such time that they will lose even more and maybe all.
Gen 2-17: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Let's break away here and ask "While they resided in Eden, did they even know what die means?" [See below the break as I examine this tangential thought.]*
At Gen 3.4 we see Eve addressing a mischievous inclination that God permitted her the freedom to consider.
She says: God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.Consider this. We have no record of God actually speaking to her yet as He did to Adam earlier. So one can easily imagine that Adam informed her of the rules.
She asked: "Why?"
Adam responded "Because He said so. Look, don't even touch it."
Have you ever heard a parent tell something like that to a child? How about to a naif? Adam may have been the one to add the extra measure. He (or she if that were the case) would not be the last man to add to God's laws.
Next imagine that a snake happens by Eve when she is near the tree of forbidden fruit. It startles her as any fast and sudden moving object might do to one of us today. And she bumps up against the tree. And low and behold nothing happens!
Here would be the first lesson: there be danger in adding any words to the words of God. For what do we hear next? We hear the mischievous voice, playing with her logical doubts, saying to Eve:
Gen 3-4: ...Ye shall not surely die: After all, she touched it and lived.
Gen 3-5: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as God, knowing good and evil.
One of our blessed human gifts is ego. That ego can easily be bruised, like when you believe someone in whom you trusted has lied to you. You harbor resentment and it can easily grow if an explanation is not readily apparent. Or if you were looking for an excuse to begin with -- you were aching to indulge your ego. The ego unbridled: where will unbridled ego lead us?
Gen 3-6: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
He may have trusted in his wife; but did he not already know every animal in the garden? It's hard to believe he didn't know all the fruits too -- especially that one. God did not tell him not to look at it.
The remainder of Gen 3 is about the consequences of indulging that ego and the many ways we are apt to deflect blame and make matters worse.
The upshot was that man was kicked out of paradise where we had all we could rightfully desire, but it simply was not enough. Our ingratitude to God was shown in that we wished to be as God.
This would be the very first recorded instance and consequence of coveting that which is not ours nor ever would be or should be. I always believed that the Ten Commandments were perfectly balanced due to this. The first Commandment, in observance, is about loving to get close to God. The violation of the last Commandment would push Him as far away as is possible.
More; it's about achieving happiness. Any man who would be a god will subject other men and restrict them. That is something God himself will not do. Here is the difference between good and evil up close. God grants free will. History is replete with other men seeking to be proclaimed gods in order to restrict other men. Even unto granting them the right to reproduce as well as allowing them to continue to live according to the despot's whim.
And thus ended God's Day 7. He did NOT lie.
In that day began the moment man ate the forbidden fruit: Welcome to the Eighth day, the day in which thou shalt surely die -- as He warned us would happen.
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*Picture this as never happening:
Adam: "What does die mean Lord?"There are a great number of reasons this would not have happened, in addition to the fact that such a conversation is not reported.
God: "Never mind, you don't want to know. You would not like it."
The proud person, when they hear a term they have not heard before, tends to wait until the meaning is revealed rather than reveal their ignorance. As an example, when you are introduced to a new person, and then promptly forget their name, you are practically pleading to God that someone else come along and say the name so that you don't have to look like a fool. A similar pride prevents people from asking me what idea I've written down or word that I've used that they do not understand. The fear by the proud to look less than knowledgeable is always present -- the brighter the person, the more the unpleasant is the prospect of embarrassment.
The naive person tends to not notice when they hear an abstract term they've never heard before. It's like a child learning a language. If the term comes up often enough, then they ask. Sometimes the answer comes not quite what is expected as: "never mind; you'll understand when you grow up." Surely this is another reason parents give children to grow up perhaps too fast.
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The death is literal, not figurative, for Adam and Eve represent Innocence- pure, true, complete innocence. And the moment they acquire Knowledge their innocence dies. That's the way I have always seen it. And this is- to me, at least- a very clear allegory for Childhood and innocence. When the child comes home for the first time, having learned (perhaps the hard way) of the hardness of the world, you can see that some of that child has died, and that innocent, wide eyed wonder has died forever. Imagine the loss felt by the Creator when his creatures, offered free choice, would prefer flawed knowledge to perfect ignorance. When the father gets a phone call to pick up his daughter at a party, and she's a little too tipsy, a little too disheveled, and she can't look at his face for a long time afterwards, it must feel like this.
ReplyDeleteA good post, and on point.
You are quite correct Og. Innocence did die that day, and with it the nature of the man and woman changed too in that instant.
ReplyDeleteThose who are insisting on introducing all sorts of sexual curricula into the education of our nation's children -- even in preschools -- have decided that it's a good thing to eradicate childhood innocence early. It's as if they who've lost their own innocence cannot bear that others are allowed to remain innocent too.
Covetousness knows no bounds does it Og? William Blake's words "The eye altering, alters all," surely applies to such thieves of innocents.
I see it as at odds with fundamentals that people could ever say "God lied." That, to a rational mind, is unthinkable.
ReplyDeleteA rational mind will read what the Scripture says and derive the character of God from it, not read the character of God they have already established into the text.
For the Concept of God is about truth, whether we like it or not. The universe would not work were The Author of natural law a liar.
Ezekiel 14:9 And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the LORD have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel.
Gen 3-6: And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
He may have trusted in his wife; but did he not already know every animal in the garden? It's hard to believe he didn't know all the fruits too -- especially that one. God did not tell him not to look at it.
Read the citation again very carefully. Eve "gave also unto her husband with her". That means Adam was right there the whole time remaining silent, and Eve was conversing with the serpent. And when Eve, the assertive one in this episode, ate the fruit and didn't fall dead on the spot, Adam took a bite too. He was curiously passive during the whole sequence. And men content in a Christianity that refuses to allow women to teach or have authority over men are unable to wrap their mind around that. They simply gloss right over those two words "with her" and assume that Eve tricked him into eating it. So whether or not he trusted his wife is irrelevant. He was there, and this is affirmed by the mode of J's Hebrew. Eve is the active child, and Adam is the child who imitates. God admonished him for bending to his woman's voice. And Eve's punishment fits her crime: To bear children in pain for the man "for he will be eager above you"...thus reversing the active and passive roles.
In that day began the moment man ate the forbidden fruit: Welcome to the Eighth day, the day in which thou shalt surely die -- as He warned us would happen.
We have the inescapable fact that God said they would die in the day they ate the fruit. You hold God to be solely a teller of truth, and redefine "day" to mean a finite human lifetime. This is also the Roman Catholic translation. In the NAB God says, "From the moment you eat the fruit you are surely doomed to die." Yet he needed to block Adam and Eve from eating of the Tree of Life by force, so the doom came from a secondary source, the lack of access to the other tree, not the fruit itself.
Others hold God to be solely a teller of truth, and redefine "die" to mean spiritually die, a state of alienation from God. This is the view that informs Christianity in general, and led to a theology of a Fall, of Adam and Eve becoming lower on the scale of being.
"others hold". Still others hold that The Creator can and does lie, and that, of course, is nothing more than reading the character of God they have already established into the text.
ReplyDeleteThe better attitude than immediately assuming the worst of the Creator because of one's own shortfalls is to understand Isaiah 55:8-9
I'll echo my key thought again in case it was lost. Our mortality does not roll out from Adam and Eve's sin per se, but from God expelling our first parents from the place where they could eat from the Tree of Life, before they could eat. They were created mortal, not immortal, and in the day they ate the other fruit, they did not suddenly fall a step into the status of a lesser being. The usual explanation is that they "spiritually" died in that day, and their body followed suit a few hundred years later. No, Adam and Eve were created different from Yahweh, and like children who imitate their parents, they wanted to be less different from him. And for that they were punished.
ReplyDelete"They were created mortal"
ReplyDeleteDo you have a citation for this? I do not find anything that says there existed any mortality before the Fall.
"No, Adam and Eve were created different from Yahweh, and like children who imitate their parents, they wanted to be less different from him. And for that they were punished."
ReplyDeleteDo you never suspect that it is presumptuous of you to assume you understand the motives of the creator?
A rational mind will read what the Scripture says and derive the character of God from it, not read the character of God they have already established into the text.
ReplyDeleteBe aware that your position then matches that of the academics who would ignore the additional understanding that the empirical record brings us because they believe all can be discovered on theory alone. Engineering proves that attitude is flawed regularly -- making for dissension between pure science and enginerring. (I can provide a renown example if you wish.)
Ezekiel 14:9 And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the LORD have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel.
ReplyDeleteYou are attributing this to God directly, but it is not He, but his agent, the great deceiver, whom he permits to test us.
I mentioned this aspect a few days ago. IIRC, it was to you.
We are constantly being proofed. When we succumb to deceit, it is often not that we are deceived so much as the idea presented is a lure to us. When we go astray it is usually a willfulness on our part. To be forgiven, we must ask. But we usually blame the tempter for luring us, and later, the prosecutor for tricking us.
It's that ego and pride thing again.
ReplyDeleteWell, thanks for informing me of the Catholic tradition. It prompted me to check for the Jewish one too.
ReplyDeleteJubilees 4:29 ... And at the close of the nineteenth jubilee, in the seventh week in the sixth year [930 A.M.] thereof, Adam died, and all his sons buried him in the land of his creation, and he
30 was the first to be buried in the earth. And he lacked seventy years of one thousand years; for one thousand years are as one day in the testimony of the heavens and therefore was it written concerning the tree of knowledge: 'On the day that ye eat thereof ye shall die.' For this reason he
31 did not complete the years of this day; for he died during it. At the close of this jubilee Cain was killed after him in the same year; for his house fell upon him and he died in the midst of his house, and he was killed by its stones; for with a stone he had killed Abel, and by a stone was he killed in
32 righteous judgment.
Well, it may please you to know that Jubilees makes it clear that I was totally wrong in ascribing man's transgression as triggering the eighth day.
Jubilees 3:17 says Adam was living in the Garden for exactly 7 years, 2 months and 17 days when the serpent approaches Eve.
BTW, Teresita. Jubilees provides you the names of the daughters of Adam, and which son they married, and the later women as well.
For example:
Jub 4:1 And in the third week in the second jubilee she gave birth to Cain, and in the fourth she gave birth to Abel, and in the fifth she gave birth to her daughter Awan.
Do you have a citation for this? I do not find anything that says there existed any mortality before the Fall.
ReplyDeleteWhy would there be a Tree of Life if there was no mortality before the Fall? We know the Tree of Life confers immortality.
I suppose your answer will be that it is a Mystery, and we cannot fathom the ways of God.
Do you never suspect that it is presumptuous of you to assume you understand the motives of the creator?
St. Paul says the nature of God can be derived from observing the universe. I observe a logical universe with a minimalist aesthetic. That tells me the nature of God is logical and not given to redundancies.
Be aware that your position then matches that of the academics who would ignore the additional understanding that the empirical record brings us because they believe all can be discovered on theory alone.
In the case of Scripture, it is the writings that are empirical and the commentary (such as God's omnibenevolence, changelessness, etc.) which is the theory.
Ezekiel 14:9 And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the LORD have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel.
You are attributing this to God directly, but it is not He, but his agent, the great deceiver, whom he permits to test us.
Not I, but God attributes this to God, when he says "I the LORD have deceived that prophet". You have a theory that he uses Satan as a buffer. Even if that was true, God as the contractee would be culpable for the deception of his contractor, as surely as Bush was culpable for the Jessica Lynch deception in Iraq, April 2003, carried out by his armed forces.
I mentioned this aspect a few days ago. IIRC, it was to you.
To be forgiven, we must ask.
But if the offense is on the basis of a deception, there is nothing to forgive. Three times in Genesis, twice for Abraham and once for Isaac, their wives are presented in public as their sisters out of cowardice - They fear they will be killed and their wives taken. This is a deliberate deception. Pharoah in one case, and Abilemech in the other two cases woo Sarah and Rachel because they are attractive, and based on the deception, they are available. So they do the obvious thing, and they get in trouble, but God says if they humble themselves and get Abraham to pray for them, they might be forgiven. And I ask, was there something to forgive?
Working backwards, yes there was something to forgive. Several times did Abe doubt God's word, and he paid a price. As you point out, Ike doubted too doubted; and worse as he loved the earthly and the proud despite those faults. You will reach that fault in your blog shortly. Will you not note it? Will you ignore the consequences that gave rise to Amalek?
ReplyDeleteWhy so hostile, teresita? What representative of the church damaged you so horribly that you cannot approach the discussion with an open heart and curiosity?
ReplyDeleteLet's start again. if there was a 'Tree of volkswagons" does that mean subaru existed before the fall? The tree of Life existed before the fall. The tree of death did not. You can come back and persist in denying what can be true, or you can come back and insist that your decidedly ungodlike notions must be true, but it will never make your feelings become the intention of the Creator. Please cite some proof that death existed before the fall.
Continuing to work backwards:
ReplyDeleteNot I, but God attributes this to God, when he says "I the LORD have deceived that prophet". You have a theory that he uses Satan as a buffer. Even if that was true, God as the contractee would be culpable for the deception of his contractor,
I do not need a satan Teresita. A mirage is a deception and a natural occurrence. It is God's agent: are you going to say that it is He? That would be idolatry.
Don't you see? What is blocking you?
As we become knowledgeable, we begin to be aware of where deception may be lurking. It is empirical evidence that enlightens us as to the nature of the world God gave us, and it informs us how to deal with the difficulties just as it informs us further of what He means in Scripture.
To insist that the mirage is Him and not the consequence of the physics that makes up the world means that you are ignoring the empirical evidence he provides us along our way. The willful and those too proud to believe they can be deceived fail the test.
As with the mirage, images in a convex mirror are actually closer than they appear. Empiricism teaches us differently and academics write up theories based upon it.
A fish under water, due to refractive index differences, is actually closer than it appears. God gave the bear eyesight that compensates so he can catch fish, and gave us cerebrums so we can adapt our behavior based on the empirical evidence we gather. And we build theories that allow us to make use of the measured properties of materials we gathered empirically.
The physics of the world antedated the existence of man, awaiting man to understand, gradually and painstakingly, all the secrets it has buried in it. So too with Scripture.
His meanings will be revealed in His time, not ours. Again, we indulge in original sin when we insist "Father, I don't wish to wait: I want it all and I want it now."