Genesis 1:14 - what does it indicate?

[JoelHinrichs]

@RichardG

@JoelHinrichs

it distorts our choices

It can no more affect our choices than God Himself does.

It has no influence. It has no presence.

Sin is making the wrong choice, specifically against God or Goodness.

Making a valid choice is not a sin. Being explicitly selfish is not (always) a sin. Ignoring God is not a sin. Going against God is a sin, in fact it is the definition of sin.

Sin results from lust - being programmed to survive and reproduce is lust.
Lust, i.e. original sin, does not rob us of choice [OK I already said that] but it distorts the way we choose. Or in other words, lust is continually present and continuously influential.
We concur that sin is making wrong choices.

[RichardG (Richard Gillett)]

@JoelHinrichs

We concur that sin is making wrong choices.

But we do not concur that those choices are

1. innate
2. inevitable
3. unavoidable

All sin does not come from Lust, and besides everyone does not suffer from lust

Richard

[St.Roymond]

@Serena82

Regarding the “fruit”. It’s interesting I never noticed that, god intended to give them the “fruit”, one day. Just not yet. …if I’ve understood what you’re saying correctly?

Yes. The story situation has the flavor of a probationary period, i.e. if they could manage to get along loyally then there would come a time when they would be allowed access.

And that kind of matches the nature of sin: most sin is a matter of wanting to take a shortcut to get something good, in fact most sin is an attempt to get something God means us to have but doing it our own way.

@JoelHinrichs

Regarding “in the beginning” and light itself: might one see these two verses as God’s breadcrumb to the age of science, “I am the uncaused first cause, and I am sentient. I caused the Big Bang, and I am GOD.”

Given the literary context, the creation of light is an assertion that God is greater than anything, because in the common ancient near eastern creation view light existed on its own, as did darkness, and these two were things that in one way or another influenced the gods. Au contraire! exclaims the Genesis writer, YHWH is greater than the light because He made it!

@JoelHinrichs

Verse two, nestled between those majestic verses, roots the physical context so important to any audience: "I made the heavens and the earth, and I present it to you as what you expected, just water.

This is similar to the first verse: in most of the ANE creation stories, things started out formless and often submerged in “the deep”, and the gods came along and found this primeval mess and used it to make things; the Genesis writer is saying, nope, you got that wrong, God made the original “stuff”, and He meditated over it before beginning to shape it.

@JoelHinrichs

The contrast, the theology, was pure, all creating, intentional, and caring God in place of a bevy of promiscuous, fractious, unreliable, improvident, needy, thoughtless …

… gods. Besides its two literary genres and their messages, the first Genesis Creation account is a body-slam polemic against all the mythology about all the other gods ever. The gods the other nations knew actually were “promiscuous, fractious, unreliable, improvident, needy, thoughtless” crews, and in the polemical foray of this account the writer is in essence declaring to all those other nations, “All your gods are belong to YHWH!” – and of course telling the Israelites who had been so long in Egypt to forget all the tales of the Egyptians because YHWH_Elohim was God and everything else that people claimed were gods were actually His tools.

[St.Roymond]

@Serena82

Really time is nothing to god, so the expectation that he just snapped his fingers and poof, clear the pink smoke and glitter, we have a universe an earth and a pair of humans to populate it becomes even more ridiculous. How can an immortal power not bound by time break a sweat that a plan of creation and evolution is taking too many billions of years. Surly in terms of immortality those billions of years are a relative instant or an irrelevant instant if time means nothing.

A Lutheran theologian from Australia told a story about an artist who was painting a picture of Creation; the artist filled most of the painting with a pair of humans and animals that were friendly to them – and when a theologian stopped and looked at the work, his comment was, “Your canvas is too small”.

So yeah –

@Serena82

We’re holding god to our time boundaries and restriction

[RichardG (Richard Gillett)]

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity…

So much speculation, personal inference, and self-importance.

It would appear that some need to read up on Wisdom.

Richard

[JoelHinrichs]

We shall part frenemies.