Question

If we are created by Love Incarnate, and given Free Will, so that we might be able to relate to Love Incarnate; what kind of person among us would utilize his and her Free Will to reject such a Creator? Just because they envy the place of priority the Creator holds, and they would endeavor to take the place of the Creator if they can? Just because they hate their dependency and would rather seize dominance? Just because they are too proud to be like children?

Nah, it doesn't have to be that complex. It can be as simple as selfishness or pride. Or sometimes just inertia - People don't like to change, so if we grew up being told there is no God we have a natural tendency to find reasons to not change what we believe.

I think our posture toward God is more live and vital than that. God is always before us, regardless of what we were taught or think we think. The sum of our actions translates to our posture toward God. Those who are more fundamentally childlike and hopeful, and who take love and compassion more seriously, are more embracing of God. Those who are hard, aggressive, calculating and competitive when it comes to others--they have chosen to ellipse God who stands right before their souls.

Yeah, no, you give humans in general way too much credit. Indolence is the real reason for an astonishingly large part of it.

Of all the things we do, our relationship and posture toward one another is the most important to God. Your judgment of your fellow human beings as essentially indolent surely displeases a loving God who wants us to love one another. Careful brother.

When Adam & Eve ate the fruit, we acquired the knowledge of good and evil. This is what the whole thing's about: our version of good and evil vs. God's.

Satan was basically right: we became like God; however, in a fallen state. People don't want to give up their godhood. Without His intervention we wouldn't stand a chance.

Well yes, it is mind boggling why anyone would not choose to side with the very One who created everything including him or her. I suppose it is the not knowing for sure which way to believe; there are so many different ideas and notions to choose from. I like how we see Him in nature, how He reveals Himself in our experiences and just how a change is evident in our lives when we surrender to Him. Giving Him the power, gives us so much less chaos and so much more peace.

There are so many reason ppl don't choose Him, sooo many. I am so grateful for Him showing Himself to me as He does for so many...

if only we'd choose to believe!!

I actually suspect that the story of Job has spiritual origins--that is, it happened on the spiritual level, and explains human life itself. I feel that in the spiritual state (away from the body and the dimension of time and space) we enjoy God's gifts infinitely. All the things we abuse one another in this life and compete for, we enjoy in abundance in God's spiritual world-- the paradise. But Satan comes to God and, knowing that God is love and that only by free will can we relate to love, He challenged God on legal terms-- give them the option to disobey you, to reject you, to prove that they adhere to you only because you are so generous to them. And bam! Here we are, having corrupted the physical universe of time and space--fallen. But we come into this world to learn to be like God--to love. To love unconditionally IS what it means to be like God--and all other virtues come with it, including knowledge and power.

I Sing the Song – New American Spring (wordpress.com)

I maintain that Adam and Eve already knew good in knowing God. Some have said that good cannot
exist without evil, but God pre-existed creation and He is good devoid of evil, so their notion is false.

In eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve acquired the knowledge of evil along with the good they already knew.

We know the evil is in choosing our way above/contrary to God's way.

Satan was right in that they became like God in knowing good and evil. Some say
Satan lied about that but God affirmed what Satan said so it cannot have been a lie.

Unfortunately one often cannot appreciate good until he loses it or has bad to which he can compare it. They didn't understand the good life they had until they lost it, because until they lost it they had never known any other kind of life.

The great lie of satan was not that they would be like God, but that God lied about them dying. He painted it as though God was deliberately holding back information that would make their lives better, because God did not want them to be on His level.

One of the most interesting things to me about that story is the Bible gives no information about time elapsed between each step. After the conversation with the snake Eve might have made a beeline to that tree, or she might have walked past it for a hundred years while the seed the snake planted in her heart grew.

The great lie of Satan as you call it is being repeated to this very day

The knowledge of good and evil is merely the awareness of what it means both in accepting God and being in His graces and rejecting God and being absent from him. This comes only by the experience of a fallen world. Satan knew that God created all beings (self-aware entities) to relate to Him, and being LOVE, He must be related to freely. God did not provide the option for people to reject Him because He wanted, out of Love, for all beings to be happy. But because Satan was the first being who fully rejected God, he was motivated to spread that infection among human beings who were created to enjoy the creation. But God also, being righteous and just, had to allow Satan to offer this option, because otherwise, He would not be Love.

It is as if you love someone and do all good things for them, and they know only your goodness and they seem to "love" you back (but really just like you). And your enemy comes and say, they only "love" you because you are generous to them. But let me offer them the option to reject you and the bitter consequences and see how they will curse your name and hate you in truth.

Being Love, you cannot deny that option, because love requires free will. So Satan thought he had God by the law, but God turns it around to defeat Satan with redemption. God himself comes down to man's level and bears the consequences of sin--THE act of supreme love.

So, the beautiful story!