the tree of the knowledge of good and evil

Adam and Eve were newly created intelligent beings who had to grow in themselves and in God - they weren't created as finished products, as it were. This was one such opportunity to grow, to demonstrate their relationship with God (or not), to demonstrate their relationship and reasoning with each other, etc. You could possibly think of them analogically as AI, and this was a scenario to determine what kind of decisions the AI would make (before letting it out of the box, as the challenge goes).

Let's assume Adam and Eve didn't know anything about death, so 'die' is am ambiguous term they never bothered to clarify. Satan comes along and asks Eve about the fruit. She says she can't touch or eat it or she'll die, to which Satan possibly says something like, 'Did God really say that? Go ahead and touch it - you won't die'. God didn't say that touching the fruit would result in death, so of course nothing happens when Eve touches it. But she's under the impression that touching it would result in something called death. If the serpent was right about touching the fruit, then why not about eating it as well? To Eve's mind God would have been presented as wrong.

Adam now has the chance to correct Eve: no, God did not say that we would die if we touched the fruit but He did say that we would die if we ate the fruit. Instead he goes along with Eve and eats the fruit, seeing that she's eaten it and nothing adverse appears to have happened.

So we learn a few things:

1) What sort of intelligent being has God created?
2) How do these intelligent beings interact with each other? How do they reason? etc.
3) How do these intelligent beings interact with God? How about being caught in disobedience (do they lie, do they repent, do they shift the blame on someone else?)

In any case, that's how I tend to think about it.

 

With foreknowledge, the plan of salvation, -- an infinite sacrifice in the hypostatic person of Jesus Christ -- was necessary to solve the sin enigma forever --a free, human person was required in order to create the hypostatic union.

As a result, God was able to eliminate sin -- including Satan's rebellion -- forever without arbitrarily changing the rules vis a vis Q.

 

Well done Picard

 

One question that remains relates to who said what and to whom and who filled in the gaps with assumptions.

In Gen 2:16-17 God tells Adam that he can eat anything except the fruit from the forbidden tree. But Eve isn't created until 2:21-22. So it seems reasonable to assume that Adam told Eve the ground rules about not eating the forbidden fruit. The question is whether Adam embellished the rule with "do not touch" or Eve did.

So on that basis maybe something else we can take away from it all is that if we get the rules direct from the source we know what they are, but if we take them second-hand or third-hand or whatever else we don't know if we're getting the unadulterated truth. If we read it in the Bible ourselves we know what words are there; if we just blindly trust someone else who assures us that "the Bible says..." we could end up in all sorts of silly places.

 

I don't have a problem with that construct. It is not offensive to anything that Scripture reveals about God, and is certainly consistent with the idea of the death of Christ being the sole solution to the sin enigma.

 

I think it presents two problems:

1. It suggests that the present creation was created because of Satan's rebellion, presumably to be some kind of lesson to him (going by what ProDeo has said in the past). This moves the primary impetus for creation from being positives about God's love for His creation, sharing in creation with humanity, etc. into negatives about showing Satan how terrible and wrong he was / is.

2. I'm starting to think that the idea is inconsistent with God's response to Job at the end of Job, and that there is something about this idea that doesn't square properly with God's character, attributes, etc.

But I suppose it depends on what ProDeo means by 'because of...'

 

I understand the concern...

I wasn't thinking of "because of" in an "express reason for in reaction to", but in a sense of "as a mechanism for"...

 

I took it the other way, so we must await clarification!

 

Probably not the right place for this, but for those wondering if I'm as opinionated in person as I am online....

First one, "More Than Palm Sunday"

http://b2gc.org/sermons

 

What do you mean if you're swapping out 'because of' with 'as a mechanism for':

What I'm asking is how is the human race a 'mechanism' for the Satanic rebellion? (And can you answer in such a way that creation doesn't become all about Satan, or imply that Satan is God's most loved creation?)

It's a valid hypothesis if you can provide Scripture to support the view, that Scripture being...?

It wasn't a test of intelligence.

Nor is it logical.

Eternal salvation outweighs temporary suffering UR or not. But I'm not sure what this has to do with UR, unless you're suggesting that Satan too is saved?

 

Well it's not very 'universal' if it only applies to humans