Please show me where I said (or implied), quoting you - that creation was a demonstration of setting up humankind for suffering…
It’s not there, is it?
And so you do it again, putting words in my mouth I never said.
Next time try something like - I don’t follow, do you mean God set up humankind for suffering ?
A question is something else than a false conclusion, I hope you see the difference.
There’s a common error: nowhere does the scripture say that the Holy Spirit is the author of the scriptures. There are localized statements which effectively say that, but to extend it to the entire Bible is an error. Yet even in those passages it is likely that the prophet is using his own words to express the ideas the Spirit delivered; I see no reason to believe that it is not like the matter of speaking in tongues followed by an interpretation: the interpretation comes in an individual’s own words, while others standing by who also received an interpretation would have given it in their own words. So it is best to remember that the author of a text is whoever wrote it, or who spoke it if someone was copying down the exact words – plus we have to keep in mind that ancient reporters of events rarely gave exact words but instead provided a summary (there are examples in biography of a speaker being said to hold forth for hours yet the text given can be read outloud in ten minutes).
Calling God the author also chops down the idea of inspiration to something the text does not say, namely that inspiration is a brief matter that begins and ends with the particular piece being written. If we take Peter’s description of inspiration, though, it was not a brief event but an ongoing process – and that process of being carried along by the Spirit may well have begun the moment the chosen person first heard and understood someone speak about Yahweh, or even before birth (cf Jeremiah).
I call it “tumbling to conclusions”: “jumping to conclusions” implies that at least the original statement was understood, but I get the feeling from much of Adam’s writing that he is mostly scanning then launching into well-rehearsed standard responses without bothering to see if those responses actually apply to what he’s responding to.
As for your statement itself, I took it in the sense of, “He meant it for evil, but God meant it for good”. After all, Satan is not omnipresent nor omnipotent and is thus not capable of doing anything that God cannot turn to His purposes, which I would say are by definition good.
Yes, Paul -
1Cor 13:9 - For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
I’ve almost always seen that taken to mean that there is knowledge we lack and that not everything ahead is told to us; only rarely (once from Oswald Hoffman) that even what w know isn’t clear and even what is prophesied is incomplete. I think the difference between those two arises from different understandings of inspiration, i.e. a wooden dictation model vs. a shared message model.
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