The Snake from The Garden
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In the first example with man at the apex, why is man at the top of the structure? It seems to me that visually, that is where God should be 
Or does it not matter, just as long as there are the three legs with each position representing some fundamental facet of reality? Sorry for my tardy response... I went off to eat breakfast
Or does it not matter, just as long as there are the three legs with each position representing some fundamental facet of reality? Sorry for my tardy response... I went off to eat breakfast
In the first example with man at the apex, why is man at the top of the structure? It seems to me that visually, that is where God should be Or does it not matter, just as long as there are the three legs with each position representing some fundamental facet of reality? Sorry for my tardy response... I went off to eat breakfast
Or does it not matter, just as long as there are the three legs with each position representing some fundamental facet of reality? Sorry for my tardy response... I went off to eat breakfast
B
Indeed I agree there are only two choices though come in many verities some clear as a bell others a person needs to think before reacting but like you mention Adam and Eve relied on their own thoughts and action..
the serpent nor the knowledge tree was the cause it was the simple picking of the friut that did them in they give into temptation A person can be right in the middle of a spiritual battle and not flinch a inch to temptation then other people satan sits back in a lawn chair has some people hook line and sinkered..
the serpent nor the knowledge tree was the cause it was the simple picking of the friut that did them in they give into temptation A person can be right in the middle of a spiritual battle and not flinch a inch to temptation then other people satan sits back in a lawn chair has some people hook line and sinkered..
Symbolically, the fruit they ate was the consequence of relying on
self determination. Since the fruit of something is a natural outgrowth.
I made this post on fruit a while ago: #6
As Christians, we are exhorted to bear fruit.
We know we are not trees, but only {metaphorical} branches, offshoots of the true vine, Jesus Christ. I believe He was the {metaphorical} tree of Life placed in the garden of Eden; He holds the keys to life and death; all life is in Him; He is author and giver of life etc, and eternal life is promised to those who surrender to and abide in Him (John 15:4-5).
The fruit we are to bear has different aspects to it. One is character building: the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
Peter adds to this: make every effort to add to your faith excellence, to excellence, knowledge; to knowledge, self-control; to self-control, perseverance; to perseverance, godliness; to godliness, brotherly affection; to brotherly affection, unselfish love. For if these things are really yours and are continually increasing, they will keep you from becoming ineffective and unproductive in your pursuit of knowing our Lord Jesus Christ more intimately.
So our life surrendered to God, and our works through faith are fruit, and so are people who come to Christ through us (Rom 1:3; Phil 4:17), and there is also the fruit of our lips as we praise God and witness to others (Heb 13:15).
These are good fruits, partaken of when aligned with the will of God.
Evil fruits would be the result of disobeying God, defying God, following self will in opposition to God's will, severing ourselves from fellowship with Him, etc. That is the fruit Adam and Eve bore and ate (lived). They followed the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life, in turning away from God after being in fellowship with Him. It is what we all do before being regenerated by the Holy Spirit of God.
I think it will be wonderful to be restored to the garden in the new earth. Come LORD Jesus.
self determination. Since the fruit of something is a natural outgrowth.
I made this post on fruit a while ago: #6
As Christians, we are exhorted to bear fruit.
We know we are not trees, but only {metaphorical} branches, offshoots of the true vine, Jesus Christ. I believe He was the {metaphorical} tree of Life placed in the garden of Eden; He holds the keys to life and death; all life is in Him; He is author and giver of life etc, and eternal life is promised to those who surrender to and abide in Him (John 15:4-5).
The fruit we are to bear has different aspects to it. One is character building: the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Against such things there is no law.
Peter adds to this: make every effort to add to your faith excellence, to excellence, knowledge; to knowledge, self-control; to self-control, perseverance; to perseverance, godliness; to godliness, brotherly affection; to brotherly affection, unselfish love. For if these things are really yours and are continually increasing, they will keep you from becoming ineffective and unproductive in your pursuit of knowing our Lord Jesus Christ more intimately.
So our life surrendered to God, and our works through faith are fruit, and so are people who come to Christ through us (Rom 1:3; Phil 4:17), and there is also the fruit of our lips as we praise God and witness to others (Heb 13:15).
These are good fruits, partaken of when aligned with the will of God.
Evil fruits would be the result of disobeying God, defying God, following self will in opposition to God's will, severing ourselves from fellowship with Him, etc. That is the fruit Adam and Eve bore and ate (lived). They followed the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life, in turning away from God after being in fellowship with Him. It is what we all do before being regenerated by the Holy Spirit of God.
I think it will be wonderful to be restored to the garden in the new earth. Come LORD Jesus.
Here is the opinion I wrote on the presence of the two trees.
THE TWO TREES
By oldhermit
THE RELATIONSHIP OF MAN TO THE DIVINE TRIAD
The Uniqueness of Man
As we develop a representational understanding of the nature of God, it is important that we learn to understand man in the same way. The Psalmist describes man as the crowning creation of God, designed exclusively for fellowship with the Creator, Psalms 8:48.
Above everything in creation, man stands as a unique figure among all of God’s creative handiwork. Of all the creatures God has formed, only man is fashioned in the image of his Creator. No other creature commands the attention of God as man. Man so dominates God’s desire for fellowship that nothing has been held back in response to man’s need for spiritual compatibility with his Maker. Yet, of everything in the natural realm, only man rebels against his Maker. Everything in creation functions precisely as God intended, faithfully performing the functions to which they have been assigned. Man, who is God’s crowning creation, is the only creature who seeks his own agenda outside the will of God.
God himself is the blueprint for humanity. This follows a creation principal. Every living thing was charged to bear fruit “after its own kind.” In man, God has produced after his own kind. God created man as an extension of himself, a creature that was like him, created in His image. Just how is man in the image of God? What is there about man that bears the likeness of his Creator? Like his Maker, man possesses the same intrinsic qualities that define the nature and character of God, yet limited in degree. Man was created as a holy and righteous being. He was created as an eternal being endowed with wisdom. He was created with the capacity to love, to dispense mercy, kindness, goodness, compassion, and justice. Man was given transcendence – he was placed over all God’s creation to ruler over it. This is what defines man as one created in the image and likeness of God. As such, man is the closest thing to God that exists in creation.
THE TREES OF LIFE AND KNOWLEDGE
How do these two trees help us to understand the triadic nature of reality?
As we move from creation to the garden there develops an emerging discontinuity between man and his association with forbidden things. When man is unconstrained by revelation, he quite naturally draws conclusions based upon how he relates to the world around him. Man allows what he experiences to influence how he defines what is relevant. Once man learns to link the natural to the eternal, he learns to represent human events in quite a different way. One cannot build a triadic picture of reality based upon experiential logic. Human rationalization operating on its own cannot properly context the relationship of man to the natural world. Building a triadic picture of reality is only possible when one learns to represent human experience in the light of revelation. To do this, one must allow revelation to transcend experiential logic.
There is an example of triadic structure that demonstrates how the natural world and the supernatural world relate to one another in the eternal continuum. At the beginning of man’s history in the garden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were mentioned in the context of man’s relationship both to God and to the natural world. The text never seems to indicate that in the beginning there was any prohibition to the tree of life but that man was only denied access to the tree of knowledge. It was not until after the fall of man that God placed an angel with a flaming sword at the east of the garden to prohibit man’s access to the tree of life. The way in which Adam chose to represent these trees would reflect his understanding of his association with both God and the natural world. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that access to the tree of life was predicated upon man’s observance of the divine prohibition of the other. Man was to have absolutely no contact with the tree of knowledge. God had provided every tree of the garden for man’s use and pleasure, but this tree was to be left strictly alone. These two trees stand as symbols of a world beyond man’s sensory existence. The tree of forbidden knowledge represents the holiness, the superiority, and the sovereignty of God. It suggests that God always reserves unto Himself the things that belong exclusively to him. It is not merely the tree that has exclusivity, but what that tree represents. As a whole, man is never content to abide by prohibitions. Here, he desires the one thing he is denied. How characteristic this has proven to be of human nature!
Although man was given the highest place of honor as the crowning creation of God and dominion over all creation, this tree was a reminder that even man is not God. Man must stand in the index position of this triad and link the tree of knowledge that he can see to the will of God whom he cannot see. He must also link this tree to revealed consequences that he cannot see and has never before experienced. For man to properly relate to both worlds he must learn to link the eternal world to his world by bringing God’s warning to bear upon his relationship to this tree. He must learn how to define the nature of his relationship to this tree based on what God had told him about it. Now, this epistemology did not just apply to this tree but extended to everything in man’s dominion. He must understand his relationship to all of his domain based upon this triadic epistemology. God had already defined his function in creation and man must relate to his world according to the words of the Lord.
From the beginning, man was confronted with a decision in his association with this icon of good and evil. This tree was a symbol of an unseen reality. There is a particular type of knowledge man was not equipped to handle and should not seek to obtain. The accessibility of the tree shows that man was given the ability to obtain this knowledge. The prohibition laid down by God says that this knowledge is destructive to man. This reinforces man’s position as a subordinate creature to what is unseen. God had said, “From this tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shalt not eat of it; for in the day that you eat from it, you shall surely die.” Here is a divine standard given to instruct man on how to think when he considers this tree. Since God has decreed that punishment will follow disobedience, the validity of God’s word is upheld. Divine judgment preserves divine justice because it is through the exercise of justice that God protects his holiness. Observance of this revelation becomes a matter of life and death. The ethics were simple; God said, “Don’t touch it.” This did not require a human analysis of ethics to decide what might be the right thing to do. Contact with the tree was evil both because God said it was evil, and because of what man would suffer as a result.
We know, because of how this tree is interpreted by the physical senses in the text that man, left on his own, could not arrive at this conclusion. Adam could not see what the tree represented. He could only see the physical dynamics of the tree. For the rest, he must rely upon what God had told him about the tree. Man requires instruction from God to protect him from that which he has no point of reference to understand. As the Creator, God understood things about the nature of man and his relationship to his environment that man did not know and was not created to know. Man was not endowed with the capacity to distinguish between good knowledge and evil knowledge. This truth has not changed. The knowledge provided by this tree was not a necessary component for man to fulfill his role within his assigned environment.
The environment of the garden supplied every conceivable human need. He was even given access to the tree of life. The garden was a secure environment where man had no experience with fear, shame, and disgrace. These were yet unknown elements. It was an aesthetic environment where God controlled access to knowledge. There were certain things that man knew by design, but the prohibition of the tree says that there were those things which man should never want to know or seek to know.
In the garden, man enjoyed the presence of God and the full awareness of God. God knew that through disobedience man would be exiled from this controlled and protected environment and from his fellowship with God. By violating God’s prohibition, man challenged the sovereignty of God. Man does not have the authority to mandate a standard of moral conduct. The text of Genesis shows us that this level of knowledge belongs exclusively to God. Because man chose to behave sinfully, he is now confronted with a new reality. Adam is now aware of a particular type of knowledge that will forever change the way mankind represents the relationship he has with the natural world and with his God. It also laid a foundation by which humanity would forever be forced to choose between these two epistemologies. Should we represent reality based on revelation from God or should we rely on those things learned from pragmatic experiences? Which one will we depend upon to tell us the truth about what is relevant?
Now, man has access to the knowledge of good and evil. This presents two problems: First, man does not know the difference between good and evil and secondly, history shows us that when man is left to his own, he will more often than not choose the evil to his own destruction, even when revelation is present. In Genesis 6:5, we see that by the time Noah comes on the scene, “every imagination of the thoughts of the heart is only evil continually,” (RSV). The fact that revelation was available to that generation is evident in the character of Noah. God regarded Noah as “righteous in his generation.” Righteousness is the result of submitting one’s self to revealed constraints. This deterioration of a divinely established ethic shows a complete reversal of a revealed epistemology. This is what happens when the mind of man becomes isolated from the revelation of God. This isolation was willful, deliberate, and fatal. When man is left to himself without a desire for revealed knowledge, he is characteristically self-destructive. If man is to survive spiritually in a cursed environment, it will require a standard that will enable him to represent properly his assigned place within creation.
When Satan approached Eve in the garden, he confronts her about the tree of knowledge. Eve rehearsed the commandment that God had given to them about this tree saying, “from the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat, but of the tree that is in the midst of the garden you may not eat from it or touch it lest you die.” This represents a revealed language structure about certain truths concerning this tree that she could not know any other way. Satan then introduced a new way of thinking about what is true. He portrays this revealed grammar as unreliable and not to be trusted. “You shall not surely die for God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God knowing good and evil.” The idea obviously appealed to Eve but the force of the temptation was more than just a desire to be like God. This new way of representing truth offered a means by which control could be shifted from God to man.
She relies upon an unrevealed method for making decisions. Rather than consulting God and relying upon revelation which, by her own admission she understood, she relies instead upon her five senses operating in this natural world to formulate her epistemological base. She “rationalizes” why it would be acceptable to eat that which had been forbidden. This reveals a distorted ethic in the misappropriation of things that belong to God. She contemplated stealing that which belongs to God and then attempted to justify the rightness of it in her own mind.
The serpent's temptation was two-fold based upon the decision matrix of the woman. This would imply that Satan understood something of the psychology of the woman and he capitalizes on her naiveté. Experientially, Eve knows nothing of Satan, temptation, evil, craftiness, the pain of disobedience, or death. The serpent creates doubt in her mind about the motives, character, and purpose of God. He accused God of lying and planted the seed of evil ambition. “God knows that in the day you eat of it you will become like God.” The reality was that she was already like God. He creates suspicion in the mind of the woman by implying that God is deliberately withholding something from her that is both desirable and beneficial. It implies that, 1) man is just as good as God is, 2) God is unjust in this prohibition, and 3) man has the right to be God. This is a challenge of God’s sovereignty. At the heart of this, is the question of who has the right to be in control? Who has the right to decide what is best for man? A worldly epistemology says that man has the wisdom to decide what is best for him. A revealed epistemology says that God not only knows what is best he is also able to supply it.
The serpent then makes an appeal to the empirical and aesthetic observation. Eve saw that the fruit was good for food and was pleasing to the eye. He also appeals to the subjective impulse; it was desirable to make one wise, which the text defines as knowing good from evil. Where then was the sin? The sin was allowing human logic and rationalization to overrule the revelation of God. This is a propensity of humanly derived standards of ethics. The decision was made by appealing to an uninspired epistemology rather than to the words of the Lord. Human logic and rationalization are not valid determinants for deciding what is right or wrong. God said, “Don’t touch it.” This alone determines what is right or wrong.
THE TWO TREES
By oldhermit
THE RELATIONSHIP OF MAN TO THE DIVINE TRIAD
The Uniqueness of Man
As we develop a representational understanding of the nature of God, it is important that we learn to understand man in the same way. The Psalmist describes man as the crowning creation of God, designed exclusively for fellowship with the Creator, Psalms 8:48.
Above everything in creation, man stands as a unique figure among all of God’s creative handiwork. Of all the creatures God has formed, only man is fashioned in the image of his Creator. No other creature commands the attention of God as man. Man so dominates God’s desire for fellowship that nothing has been held back in response to man’s need for spiritual compatibility with his Maker. Yet, of everything in the natural realm, only man rebels against his Maker. Everything in creation functions precisely as God intended, faithfully performing the functions to which they have been assigned. Man, who is God’s crowning creation, is the only creature who seeks his own agenda outside the will of God.
God himself is the blueprint for humanity. This follows a creation principal. Every living thing was charged to bear fruit “after its own kind.” In man, God has produced after his own kind. God created man as an extension of himself, a creature that was like him, created in His image. Just how is man in the image of God? What is there about man that bears the likeness of his Creator? Like his Maker, man possesses the same intrinsic qualities that define the nature and character of God, yet limited in degree. Man was created as a holy and righteous being. He was created as an eternal being endowed with wisdom. He was created with the capacity to love, to dispense mercy, kindness, goodness, compassion, and justice. Man was given transcendence – he was placed over all God’s creation to ruler over it. This is what defines man as one created in the image and likeness of God. As such, man is the closest thing to God that exists in creation.
THE TREES OF LIFE AND KNOWLEDGE
How do these two trees help us to understand the triadic nature of reality?
As we move from creation to the garden there develops an emerging discontinuity between man and his association with forbidden things. When man is unconstrained by revelation, he quite naturally draws conclusions based upon how he relates to the world around him. Man allows what he experiences to influence how he defines what is relevant. Once man learns to link the natural to the eternal, he learns to represent human events in quite a different way. One cannot build a triadic picture of reality based upon experiential logic. Human rationalization operating on its own cannot properly context the relationship of man to the natural world. Building a triadic picture of reality is only possible when one learns to represent human experience in the light of revelation. To do this, one must allow revelation to transcend experiential logic.
There is an example of triadic structure that demonstrates how the natural world and the supernatural world relate to one another in the eternal continuum. At the beginning of man’s history in the garden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were mentioned in the context of man’s relationship both to God and to the natural world. The text never seems to indicate that in the beginning there was any prohibition to the tree of life but that man was only denied access to the tree of knowledge. It was not until after the fall of man that God placed an angel with a flaming sword at the east of the garden to prohibit man’s access to the tree of life. The way in which Adam chose to represent these trees would reflect his understanding of his association with both God and the natural world. As the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that access to the tree of life was predicated upon man’s observance of the divine prohibition of the other. Man was to have absolutely no contact with the tree of knowledge. God had provided every tree of the garden for man’s use and pleasure, but this tree was to be left strictly alone. These two trees stand as symbols of a world beyond man’s sensory existence. The tree of forbidden knowledge represents the holiness, the superiority, and the sovereignty of God. It suggests that God always reserves unto Himself the things that belong exclusively to him. It is not merely the tree that has exclusivity, but what that tree represents. As a whole, man is never content to abide by prohibitions. Here, he desires the one thing he is denied. How characteristic this has proven to be of human nature!
Although man was given the highest place of honor as the crowning creation of God and dominion over all creation, this tree was a reminder that even man is not God. Man must stand in the index position of this triad and link the tree of knowledge that he can see to the will of God whom he cannot see. He must also link this tree to revealed consequences that he cannot see and has never before experienced. For man to properly relate to both worlds he must learn to link the eternal world to his world by bringing God’s warning to bear upon his relationship to this tree. He must learn how to define the nature of his relationship to this tree based on what God had told him about it. Now, this epistemology did not just apply to this tree but extended to everything in man’s dominion. He must understand his relationship to all of his domain based upon this triadic epistemology. God had already defined his function in creation and man must relate to his world according to the words of the Lord.
From the beginning, man was confronted with a decision in his association with this icon of good and evil. This tree was a symbol of an unseen reality. There is a particular type of knowledge man was not equipped to handle and should not seek to obtain. The accessibility of the tree shows that man was given the ability to obtain this knowledge. The prohibition laid down by God says that this knowledge is destructive to man. This reinforces man’s position as a subordinate creature to what is unseen. God had said, “From this tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you shalt not eat of it; for in the day that you eat from it, you shall surely die.” Here is a divine standard given to instruct man on how to think when he considers this tree. Since God has decreed that punishment will follow disobedience, the validity of God’s word is upheld. Divine judgment preserves divine justice because it is through the exercise of justice that God protects his holiness. Observance of this revelation becomes a matter of life and death. The ethics were simple; God said, “Don’t touch it.” This did not require a human analysis of ethics to decide what might be the right thing to do. Contact with the tree was evil both because God said it was evil, and because of what man would suffer as a result.
We know, because of how this tree is interpreted by the physical senses in the text that man, left on his own, could not arrive at this conclusion. Adam could not see what the tree represented. He could only see the physical dynamics of the tree. For the rest, he must rely upon what God had told him about the tree. Man requires instruction from God to protect him from that which he has no point of reference to understand. As the Creator, God understood things about the nature of man and his relationship to his environment that man did not know and was not created to know. Man was not endowed with the capacity to distinguish between good knowledge and evil knowledge. This truth has not changed. The knowledge provided by this tree was not a necessary component for man to fulfill his role within his assigned environment.
The environment of the garden supplied every conceivable human need. He was even given access to the tree of life. The garden was a secure environment where man had no experience with fear, shame, and disgrace. These were yet unknown elements. It was an aesthetic environment where God controlled access to knowledge. There were certain things that man knew by design, but the prohibition of the tree says that there were those things which man should never want to know or seek to know.
In the garden, man enjoyed the presence of God and the full awareness of God. God knew that through disobedience man would be exiled from this controlled and protected environment and from his fellowship with God. By violating God’s prohibition, man challenged the sovereignty of God. Man does not have the authority to mandate a standard of moral conduct. The text of Genesis shows us that this level of knowledge belongs exclusively to God. Because man chose to behave sinfully, he is now confronted with a new reality. Adam is now aware of a particular type of knowledge that will forever change the way mankind represents the relationship he has with the natural world and with his God. It also laid a foundation by which humanity would forever be forced to choose between these two epistemologies. Should we represent reality based on revelation from God or should we rely on those things learned from pragmatic experiences? Which one will we depend upon to tell us the truth about what is relevant?
Now, man has access to the knowledge of good and evil. This presents two problems: First, man does not know the difference between good and evil and secondly, history shows us that when man is left to his own, he will more often than not choose the evil to his own destruction, even when revelation is present. In Genesis 6:5, we see that by the time Noah comes on the scene, “every imagination of the thoughts of the heart is only evil continually,” (RSV). The fact that revelation was available to that generation is evident in the character of Noah. God regarded Noah as “righteous in his generation.” Righteousness is the result of submitting one’s self to revealed constraints. This deterioration of a divinely established ethic shows a complete reversal of a revealed epistemology. This is what happens when the mind of man becomes isolated from the revelation of God. This isolation was willful, deliberate, and fatal. When man is left to himself without a desire for revealed knowledge, he is characteristically self-destructive. If man is to survive spiritually in a cursed environment, it will require a standard that will enable him to represent properly his assigned place within creation.
When Satan approached Eve in the garden, he confronts her about the tree of knowledge. Eve rehearsed the commandment that God had given to them about this tree saying, “from the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat, but of the tree that is in the midst of the garden you may not eat from it or touch it lest you die.” This represents a revealed language structure about certain truths concerning this tree that she could not know any other way. Satan then introduced a new way of thinking about what is true. He portrays this revealed grammar as unreliable and not to be trusted. “You shall not surely die for God knows that in the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God knowing good and evil.” The idea obviously appealed to Eve but the force of the temptation was more than just a desire to be like God. This new way of representing truth offered a means by which control could be shifted from God to man.
She relies upon an unrevealed method for making decisions. Rather than consulting God and relying upon revelation which, by her own admission she understood, she relies instead upon her five senses operating in this natural world to formulate her epistemological base. She “rationalizes” why it would be acceptable to eat that which had been forbidden. This reveals a distorted ethic in the misappropriation of things that belong to God. She contemplated stealing that which belongs to God and then attempted to justify the rightness of it in her own mind.
The serpent's temptation was two-fold based upon the decision matrix of the woman. This would imply that Satan understood something of the psychology of the woman and he capitalizes on her naiveté. Experientially, Eve knows nothing of Satan, temptation, evil, craftiness, the pain of disobedience, or death. The serpent creates doubt in her mind about the motives, character, and purpose of God. He accused God of lying and planted the seed of evil ambition. “God knows that in the day you eat of it you will become like God.” The reality was that she was already like God. He creates suspicion in the mind of the woman by implying that God is deliberately withholding something from her that is both desirable and beneficial. It implies that, 1) man is just as good as God is, 2) God is unjust in this prohibition, and 3) man has the right to be God. This is a challenge of God’s sovereignty. At the heart of this, is the question of who has the right to be in control? Who has the right to decide what is best for man? A worldly epistemology says that man has the wisdom to decide what is best for him. A revealed epistemology says that God not only knows what is best he is also able to supply it.
The serpent then makes an appeal to the empirical and aesthetic observation. Eve saw that the fruit was good for food and was pleasing to the eye. He also appeals to the subjective impulse; it was desirable to make one wise, which the text defines as knowing good from evil. Where then was the sin? The sin was allowing human logic and rationalization to overrule the revelation of God. This is a propensity of humanly derived standards of ethics. The decision was made by appealing to an uninspired epistemology rather than to the words of the Lord. Human logic and rationalization are not valid determinants for deciding what is right or wrong. God said, “Don’t touch it.” This alone determines what is right or wrong.
They simply asked if you were there, but it was hours after the fact of your posting, I think, and I saw it was their first post ever on the site, so I welcomed them to CC and then told them that you do not visit often... here ( http://christianchat.com/bible-discussion-forum/108916-speak-your-mind-3120.html#post2955468 ) is my response to them and their original post is the second post right above it
Thank you for posting this. Please excuse the edit I have read thus far so far, but want to question you about saying that man was created as an eternal being. Scripture says that only God is immortal, which I believe speaks to His eternality, and of course the whole gist of Scripture (to my mind) is that we need to be found in Christ to attain to life ever after, or we die the second death. We may have been created to have this life ever after but it was foiled (which God knew would happen after all) by the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which brought sin and death and caused the fall of all creation, but man had not yet eaten of the tree of life before the fall, and following the fall, they were banished from the garden where the Tree of Life stood, and the Tree was guarded also, so they could not eat of it. My question then becomes, why say man was created as an eternal being? It truly seems to me as if he was not...
I have read thus far so far, but want to question you about saying that man was created as an eternal being. Scripture says that only God is immortal, which I believe speaks to His eternality, and of course the whole gist of Scripture (to my mind) is that we need to be found in Christ to attain to life ever after, or we die the second death. We may have been created to have this life ever after but it was foiled (which God knew would happen after all) by the eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which brought sin and death and caused the fall of all creation, but man had not yet eaten of the tree of life before the fall, and following the fall, they were banished from the garden where the Tree of Life stood, and the Tree was guarded also, so they could not eat of it. My question then becomes, why say man was created as an eternal being? It truly seems to me as if he was not...
D
Biblical text describes the interaction between heavenly being's and earthly being's or the interactions between two worlds. A relationship that began between heavenly being's and earthly being's that at some they were separated. Rev 12:12 Rejoice, ye heavens and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth ( mankind ) and of the sea ! For the evil one ( devil ) is come down unto you, having a great wrath ( angry ) because he knows that he has a short time. Isaiah 14:12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning, how art thou cut down to the ground ( cast down ) which did weaken the nations. Why was he cast down to earth ? God was teaching his heavenly being's to learn to be obedient unto God but clearly this being did not to be obedient unto God, so what did God use to teach this message, the knowledge of good and the knowledge if evil, to know both is not the wrong but to give life to the knowledge of evil was disobedience, as God gave the knowledge of goid , life and form in His Kingdom but God did not give life nor form to the knowledge of evil but this heavenly clearly did give life and firm to the knowledge of evil and was at some point cast down to earth and stood in the mist of the garden of Eve. As this heavenly being deceived 1/3 of all of God's heavenly being's therefore these being gave life and form to the knowledge of evil, as God did not. As this heavenly being deceived 1/3 of all the heavenly being. As he stood in the garden of Eden, he then decieves man and woman as well, as the story of Adam and Eve, represents all the male and female race, as the two clearly were deceived and gave life to the knowledge of evil as well. This being deceived 1/3 of all of God's heavenly being's and mankind as well. As the lesson that the heavenly had, we now have, the key is what will you do ? As the lesson begins with the knowledge of good and evil, it shall end with knowledge of good and evil. Yes God created the knowledge of good and evil, yes God gave the knowledge of good life and form in the heavens but God did not give life nor form to the knowledge of evil in the heavens, just God gave life and firm to the knowledge of good on earth and called it mankind, all that God created, He saw it was good but it did remain good, as 1/3 of His heavenly fell, mankind fell as well, two world's that interacted with one another, heavenly and earthly, so the serpent is a spiritual, a heavenly being that fell,very subtil being, meaning very hard to detect, very clever, cunning and full of evil and speaks with a forked tongue, meaning he knows the knowledge of good an evil, even speaks the knowledge of good for short time, giving the appearance that he was an angel of light but in the twinkle of an eye, he switches and speaks the knot of evil, as mankind was deceived in the twinkle of an, quickly. As he is the spiritual beast, who is the devil, who is Satan, who shall decieve the whole world. My phone is small, so there might be some typing mistakes. God bless!
Yes, man is fashioned to attain life ever after in Jesus Christ, Who is the light and life of men. Yes, he has a beginning and therefore is not eternal, for eternal has no beginning in our understanding, existing from everlasting to everlasting, as it were, which applies only to God.
But the question was more one addressing the notion that man's soul cannot die, as if God is powerless to extinguish it from His creation, even though Scripture explicitly states that God can destroy the soul. Jesus told us to fear the One Who can destroy both body and soul. People often speak as if the soul cannot die no matter what, in fact they say it is immortal, even though Scripture explicitly says only God is immortal; they say it even while admitting that when the body is dead, the soul lives on as if it were not tied to the body, which means they are overlooking the fact that man became a living soul when the breath of life entered the physical elements of man.
But the question was more one addressing the notion that man's soul cannot die, as if God is powerless to extinguish it from His creation, even though Scripture explicitly states that God can destroy the soul. Jesus told us to fear the One Who can destroy both body and soul. People often speak as if the soul cannot die no matter what, in fact they say it is immortal, even though Scripture explicitly says only God is immortal; they say it even while admitting that when the body is dead, the soul lives on as if it were not tied to the body, which means they are overlooking the fact that man became a living soul when the breath of life entered the physical elements of man.
My question was, what is there IN THE TEXT of Gen 3 that would suggest that the serpent was a spiritual being. Your appeal to Rev 12 and Isaiah 14 do not even begin to answer this. Rev 12 has absolutely nothing to do with the creation narrative and Isaiah 14 has absolutely nothing to do with Satan, and neither of them have anything to do with Gen 3. In my original post, I laid out everything Gen 3 has to say about the serpent as a created being of the animal world. There was nothing spiritual about him provided by the text.