The definition of ‘sin’ seems to be problematic here. I may use the terms in nonstandard way but I would not count ontological ‘sin’ as sin. Maybe ‘essence’ would be a better word.
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Yes I agree we often think sin as a free will choice only, but it really means miss the mark. Not perfect. We could say all of our actions, thoughts, works are imperfect when compared to the perfection of God. Only a pantheist claims perfection or equality with God can be achieved or is reality. This seems to be the foundational Lie of Satan, “Ye shall be as God”
I have simply applied this to ontology, our essence is not God. This is what Creation ex nihilo suggest. We need God to cloth us in real perfection to stand/exist in his presence and survive. To exist with a perfect God requires ontological grace or covering. Jesus accomplishes this. Jesus saves all things from ontological destruction (annihilation), the church from is saved from moral judgement and becomes the bride of Christ.
This view allows a not perfect creation of necessary. ontological sin before the fall moral sin after the fall because now humans know what is Good and Evil as categories. Also Christ becomes plan A-Z not just plan B. It has helped me to navigate this creation debate and maintain strong faith.
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Amen.
Summary
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Dear Richard,`
thank you for your thoughts.
Richard, I have always known within myself and stated on this forum here that Jesus died for All of humanity, as we all sin, thus every single last one of us is a sinner, we are all born into this creation that was cursed by God directly after Adam sinned, we live now in a fallen creation that no longer is very good as it was when God first created the creation.
The consequences of sin is death. Thus we all die in our sins if we do not accept that Jesus our Loving Creator died in our place as propitiation for our sins that is an atonement required because He is Holy, Righteous and perfectly just.
I do not understand how you can read the Holy Scriptures such as Romans 5:12-21 and not understand the Truth about how death entered the creation.It is plain for all to see.
Death Through Adam, Life Through Christ
12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned—
13 To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. 14 Nevertheless, death reigned from the time of Adam to the time of Moses, even over those who did not sin by breaking a command, as did Adam, who is a pattern of the one to come.
15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many! 16 Nor can the gift of God be compared with the result of one man’s sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification. 17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ!
18 Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.
20 The law was brought in so that the trespass might increase. But where sin increased, grace increased all the more, 21 so that, just as sin reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
But I have never said, “the only important sin was Adam’s”.
Read the Romans 5:12-21 above again.
But Richard, why don’t you understand, I am not blaming Adam or anyone.
The Holy Scriptures carefully explain how death entered the creation, that we are all sinners, that we all need salvation through the Gracious gift of our Loving Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
I have never said it does. All I have ever said is that “the wages of sin is death.”
Yes, I have never said otherwise, Sin is disobedience to God and to God’s law.
Yes, in theory it can be avoided but do you know of even one adult person apart from Jesus who never sinned in their life. I don’t!
The Bible clearly tells us that the whole of creation has been cursed and subject to futility.
Where once all animals ate plants, since the curse, carnivory is a reality. Where once there was no death, now there is death. Where once man was innocent and blameless before God, now we are all guilty of sin.
I am greatly heartened that our Loving Lord God will one day return the creation from its current bondage to decay, to its former purity and beauty where death and pain and sorrow will be no more.
Of course Adam did not overthrow God’s perfect creation. Adam is powerless to make even one hair black or white.
Gods perfectly Righteous, perfectly Just, perfectly Holy Being meant that He pronounced the curse on the creation.
I do not pretend to know what God’s plans are.
Our Loving Merciful God is omniscient, thus He knew that Adam would sin and death would occur for all life on Earth in whose nostrils is the breath of life, but that doesn’t mean that death is necessary or good in a perfect creation. The Holy Scriptures tell us that “death is an intruder” and that it is “the last enemy”, thus death is NOT necessary at all, it is a consequence. Death will be no more in the new Heavens and New Earth, there will be no more death.
Of course the Garden of Eden was real, on that we will just have to agree to disagree!
Yes, and your point is?
Yes, in this fallen creation where there is pain and suffering and death; our Loving God has graciously provided us with an amazing world in which to live with genius life support systems that range from oxygen generators (plants) to an amazing force field shield around the planet to protect us from the solar wind and harmful radiation from stripping the atmosphere off the planet and killing all life (the magnetosphere) on Earth.
But that doesn’t mean that it is a necessary part of the ‘good’ creation.
We are told that in the new Heavens and new Earth pain will be no more:
"4 and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away.”
Revelation 21:4
I differ, the Bible is trustworthy and true, where it is written as history it should be read as history, where it is parable it should be read as parable etc…
As I have posted previously there is more than enough Holy Scripture to confirm that Jesus always speaks the Truth as instructed by the Father, and Jesus affirmed that the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve, and Noah were all real, that is they are historical Truth.
There is no escaping that profound fact! You quote Jesus when it suits your argument, but deny He is infallible by believing contrived tales that make Him out to be disillusioned about what is correct with regard to the Scriptures in His humanity.
Yes He is a human man in every sense of the word, but He is also THE WORD, He is THE CREATOR, His deity never left Him, He is the SON, THE MAN GOD of the Holy Trinity that sits at the right hand of the Father. He was momentarily separated from the Father for the first time in eternity at Golgotha when He took all the sin of the world upon Himself.
The thought of that moment makes me weep… Oh Lord how Gracious and Loving you are that you have revealed this to me. The pain and suffering that He endured for us is incomprehensible.
Of course it is not all or nothing, that is yet another falsity an accusation thrown at those Christians who trust and believe the Holy Scriptures to mean what they so plainly say.
History must be read as history, it’s that simple.
My sincere hope is that what is written so plainly as real history in the Holy Scriptures will be understood for what it Truly is, to the Glory of our dear Lord and Saviour Jesus and for the benefit of His Kingdom on Earth and in Heaven and the Body of Christ, the Church.
I have much work to do and so little time to do it.
I have said what I have said.
I have other responsibilities that I must tend to, so will bid you Richard and all others on this site farewell, I wish you all well and hope that our dear Lord brings us all into knowledge of the Truth.
God bless,
jon
That would make every creature including humans sinners at the moment of conception!
How does that one fit your set? Clothed is portrayed as a step down due to sin, that humans only got clothes because of sin. Also, whether nudity is good or bad depends on culture and situation.
No, they became aware of shame at what God had made them; they felt vulnerable and God accommodated their situation by providing a remedy of this symptom. There was no shame in being as God had made them.
The passage isn’t saying nakedness is bad, it’s comparing it to the notion that they thought they needed nothing. Shame is cultural.
BTW, be more careful with quoting – your post indicates you were responding to a post of mine yet it was Burrawang you quoted and commented to.
I have provided all the evidence necessary to show that you are relying on a modern scientific worldview; it is how you react to almost everything, insisting on standards that flow not from scripture but from a modern scientific worldview. You think ancient literature is historical narrative because it looks that way to you, but the only reason it looks that way is because of your MSWV. To people with different worldviews it has been just as obvious that the opening chapters of Genesis are myth, allegory, just-so stories, mysticism, or theological polemic, to name a few, as it is to you that it is actually historical narrative.
It’s evident that you don’t even realize you have a worldview, and/or that you don’t really know what one is. The core of a worldview is its definition of truth, and you repeatedly use a modern scientific definition without realizing that’s what you’re doing. You need to ask yourself where the idea that what you are looking at is historical narrative comes from – it doesn’t come from a vacuum.
No, it isn’t – you are reading that into His words. If I said, “As Harry Potter gathered his friends at Hogwarts” when discussing something, does that mean that I think Harry Potter and Hogwarts are real? When Tom Clancy wrote about a Russian submarine called Krasniy Oktyabr’ was he writing history?
You use a definition you don’t know where you got it, and you use it without thinking clearly about it. By your criteria (that you share with Adam) John Grisham and James Michener wrote history books!
Reading in the original language with the original context including culture, worldview, and literary type is not “distort[ing] the Holy Scriptures”, it is being honest about them.
Jesus disagreed: to Him, calling people because they were weary of life and its burdens was sufficient – no reference to Genesis at all.
If those were linked, then the Holy Spirit wouldn’t have let His chosen writers make use of ANE genealogy, He would have . . . well, He would have had to force an entirely new worldview into someone’s brain to get them to abandon how they thought about numbers and descent, throwing out all the richness of that worldviw, and write as though they were eighteenth-century accountants.
Now you’re dictating to God how He has to deal with time – insisting that He has to conform to your modern worldview! Where in the scriptures does it tell you that God is required to count the way you do?!
I rebuke that in the Name of Jesus! Here you go condemning the majority of Christians who ever lived because they do not conform to your preferred ideas – ideas that cannot be found in the scriptures!
Nothing I have written here is “my interpretation”; when I’m giving that I say so. I give two things: facts, and the results of scholarship that rest on the flood of knowledge that God has graciously allowed us to have these last few generations.
The truth of the Flood story does not rest on your beliefs. Its message has nothing to do with modern science, as you keep trying to force into it (contrary to Hebrew vocabulary and grammar). Its meaning has nothing to do with all the science fiction worked up by the deceivers at AiG or Creation. com.
There you go adding to the text again: “sea going” and “many, many decades” aren’t in the text – those are things you are putting in.
That’s a false limitation imposed on the scriptures because you don’t know any better. And until you recognize what worldview you ar applying, you will never see the truth of the text.
I rebuke that in the Name of Jesus.
There are not Christians here who “don’t believe the Bible” – in fact they’re here because they do believe it. They just refuse to impose an alien worldview that arose from the church getting infected with scientific materialism on the text and instead try to read it as what it is – ancient literature from an ancient context.
Nope – it only appears that way from a shallow perspective.
I can put names in a list, too, but that doesn’t mean they’re “real history”.
You don’t show any evidence that you actually care what the scriptures are! You insist they have to be what they look like to you – can’t you se how arrogant that is? An honest person reading Luke’s genealogy of Jesus would first ask, “How did Luke regard a genealogy? How did the Jews from whom he got it look at one?” Someone who cared about scripture would start with those questions, but you start with your own pride.
Matthew changes the genealogy from what the OT writings have, which is enough to establish that Luke’s version may not be any more rigid.
Your Christology is off: you’re making the divine dominate, making Jesus less than fully human. This contradicts Paul, who said that Jesus accepted all the limitations of being human.
M.D.? Not even an M.Div.? How about a B.S. in biblical languages?
I don’t pay attention any longer to people who are talking out of ignorance, especially when they come from an organization known for deception.
BTW, I will note that in my university days, Creation. com was one of the reasons that people turned their backs on Christ.
Only if your view of biblical authority is unbiblical. The biblical view is that scripture has authority because it came from men moved by the Holy Spirit – not that it is historically correct, not that it is scientifically correct, but that it came from men authorized by God to speak for Him. If you hold the biblical view, evolution (or hedonism, or communism, or anything else) isn’t a challenge at all because no human -ism can say (with any credibility) that the writers were not selected by the Holy Spirit and moved to write what He later endorsed.
I don’t particularly care about any TE website.
You know, the logical conclusion from your view of Jesus is that He never stubbed His toe, never got a splinter, never had pimples, never made any of the normal boo-boos that human boys do – unless you hold the Roman Catholic view that making physical-type mistakes is totally different than making cognitive mistakes!
My stand on Genesis is stronger than the YEC one: I let it be what it is and ask what it means, YECers demand that it has to be what it looks like to them. I read the first Creation account as the ancient literature it is and come away with enough theology to make ten sermons, YEC throws out most of the actual message and replace it with a diary entry. Indeed you change the meaning of Hebrew words and ignore Hebrew grammar; I refuse to try to fit the ancient words to my view of the world but strive to fit mine to it.
Yes it, is, and maybe someday you’ll abandon your modern worldview and ask what the worldview of Moses and David was.
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This is what was taught by Gnosticism, that the material and finite is inherently evil.
Fallacy of false dichotomy.
Huh – none of my atheist physics professors ever tried to “explain away the singularity”.
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noted
Every subatomic particle even !
I am challenging that assertion based on the overwhelming biblical mandate to be clothed, not uncover nakedness ect. The future state of believers is clothed. Now of course physical clothing is only a symbol here for Gods grace to cover our creatureliness, we fall short of his glory, by necessity. God taught adam true religion about the sacrifice of another to cover Adams nakedness.
I am suggesting there was no knowledge of ontological shame. Once knowledge of good and evil they saw their “not God-ness”. I am suggesting God requires moral and ontological perfection, Both of which we can not attain without Christ.
The shame of nakedness here is not a moral problem, It’s not bad in that sence. it simply means we are not of Gods perfect essence. all have sinned and fall short of His glory.
Classically we have been taught that Adam and Eves nakedness is biblically virtuous if no moral sin is committed, then one would expect naked righteous angels to appear. That only occurs in medieval art, not the bible. Said another way, why do righteous angels need clothes? Because they are clothed in Christ’s imputed ontological glory. That is why Satan is portrayed as a snake, AKA a naked (hairless) animal. Satan lost his glory/clothing. Adam gained the glory (clothing, by death of another) through Jesus.
correct me, but I believe they taught it was a separated and competing entity with God, a yin and yang type world.
Augustinian evil is a privation of good/ God not a independent force.
7 I form light and create darkness;
I make well-being and create calamity;
I am the Lord, who does all these things
The word for create here is the same as Gen 1vs 1. God creates darkness, chaos, void By privation of his Light, order, fullness. Creation is a privation in God, Only a trinitarian God can do this through the hypostatic union, and death of Christ. The way to create is by self privation in Christ! This avoids pantheism. that is why I am suggesting Genesis is theological/ metaphysical allegory that tells how God created all things through Jesus.
and i don’t have it all perfectly laid out… work in progress…
I read somewhere Hawkings and others don’t like the singularity because is is transcendental in nature and has many God like qualities.
You clearly have no idea what sin actually is.
It has no presence. it cannot infect or corrupt.
You are claiming that God’s perfect creation has been corrupted at the cellular level. Who has the power to do such a thing? Because to do so they would have to be more powerful than God.
Richard
No Richard you have misunderstood. I am making the claim that all things are not made from Gods perfection. And are therefore less than perfect. Only God is Perfect, creation lacks by necessity. Unless you are a pantheist and claim the creation and creator are of one essence. So all things are made from nothing, which is the opposite of God who is everything.
So all things “Miss the mark” of perfection or else everything is God. We can say the creation is good or getting better but it can never reach Gods perfection. Just like you can never arrive at infinity, but can progress toward infinity.
So how do you reach this conclusion?
Did God create the Heavens and the Earth and pronounce them “good” or didn’t He?
It has nothing to do with pantheism. It has everything to do with what God created. You are claiming that His creation is flawed. That would mean shoddy or poor creation, wouldn’t it?
I suppose it might depend on your definition of “perfect” or “flawed”, but i would say that, in general the world is as God wants it. Which would mean that what you see as flawed or corrupt is actually deliberate. IOW you are imposing your own standards or perfection.
There is IMHO a fundemental problem in claiming that this world is either flawed, or corrupt, or even, not as God wanted. It would mean underestimating God and / or claiming God is incompetent.
Richard
About MSWV (modern scientific worldview)
I fully understand the point that is made, but (I think) there is more to say than that alone. I am raised in the belief the Bible is true from A-Z, that the Holy Spirit is the Author, that He dictated the words to the people who wrote it on paper.
So, if you read that God created the world in 6 days (later echoed by Moses) you take that as the truth. Likewise with the Flood, from the text it becomes clear that the Lord intended to kill everybody, notable echoed by Jesus Himself.
And if you believe the Holy Spirit is the Author of the Bible (I was for ~40 years) then you are YEC, you stick to that truth against all counter arguments, it’s called faith.
I don’t blame YEC people, neither do blame people who are anti YEC. But I think both sides should refrain from judgement.
That’s a sexual euphemism. Note that in Deuteronomy having sex with one’s mother is called “uncovering your father’s nakedness”, though the father isn’t even involved. At the least it refers to not just having clothes off but engaging in sexual activity [the Noah incident is an odd outlier as it is totally unclear what sexual aspect was involved; a common view is that Noah’s wife was there also passed out and Ham took advantage of her since that matches the statement in Deuteronomy].
Not commonly. The most common view was that the material world was the final emanation from the demiurge that could maintain itself in existence and thus lacked any divine goodness, but it wasn’t competition for God, just an obstacle for humans to free themselves from.
It’s a laborious route to get to something that is simple. I think it rests on the assumption that God had to use His own substance to create the universe, which is the only way that pantheism can come into the picture. If the assumption is that there must be something negative to balance a positive, some mystics have pointed out the the underworld of the Bible’s worldview is the negative while the world where life is found would be the positive (I actually ran into this in a science fiction novel where someone had discovered a “dark universe” that was a sort of negative version of this universe, and anyone who went there reported encountering spirits of the dead).
I haven’t encountered that; what I’ve seen is that cosmologists don’t like singularities because they mean that something is wrong with the theory. The “ultraviolet catastrophe” is a fair example; if the theory of the time was followed, when going deeper into the ultraviolet energy headed for infinity, i.e. a singularity; it took experimental evidence and a shift in theory to solve that issue. It’s an issue that has whittled down the profusion of string theory as some versions end up with singularities (and of course so far there’s no evidence for string theory, just lots of math).
If a toddler knocks a vase off a table and breaks it, does that make the toddler “more powerful” than the mother who had made that vase in a crafts course?
No, it just means that things can be broken. Your claim could only be true in a universe where nothing is ordinarily ever broken or harmed, while in this universe even those made to image God can suffer broken bones and cut flesh.
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But they aren’t meant to be God, so that’s not relevant – it’s like complaining that your cat is a lousy cat because he can’t do arithmetic, whereas he’s just very good at being a cat, which doesn’t involve doing arithmetic. Perfection in created things lies in being what they are.
Your definition of “lack” is an interesting one, and I think it fails to recognize that God can make things that are perfect at being what He made them – and that’s the perfection that counts unless He was aiming at creating another of Himself. A new-formed star isn’t imperfect on account of not being God, it is perfect because it is precisely what the elements that formed it are supposed to be in that collapsed situation.
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Not a fair comparison. Creation was made with us in mind. Vases are not made to be dropped or knocked over.
The earth is made to be self healing. The weather and tectonic plates are a large part of this but the resilience and persistence of some vegetation and microcellular organisms constitutes alot of the rest.
Your comparison should be to someone being able to break unbreakable glass.
Your evolutionary views should negate such a notion.
Being the image of God is human vanity, God does not reside in this reality so His “image” is not needed. Jesus came in the image of man, not God.
The point really is that any claim to have corrupted this world is an insult to God’s ability to create, and that includes all these ridiculous ideas of sin.
Richard
1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.
here we read, No word spoken to create, no pronouncement the initial creation is good. This creation is the opposite of what God is. This is the worst possible thing. God is form/order . God is Light. God is fullness.
From this negative water covered earth God Speaks , light, order, fullness. Think like Clay can be shaped into beautiful things but its essence will always still be clay
Isahia 45:7 writes
I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things.
Only God is good and he is non divisible, He cannot create another equal. He created a juxtaposition then he formed that juxtaposition into good things.
I would strengthen that claim and say this is the only possible and best possible world.
“Leibniz claims that God’s choice is caused not only by its being the most reasonable, but also by God’s perfect goodness, a traditional claim about God which Leibniz accepted.[2][b] As Leibniz says in §55, God’s goodness causes him to produce the best world. Hence, the best possible world, or “greatest good” as Leibniz called it in this work, must be the one that exists.”
Yes I totally agree, God can form things into amazing reflections of his glory. I am simply reducing all things back their fundamental metaphysical essence, which in the classical position is not made from God’s perfect essence. It is “created” from nothing. A “non thing” is a juxtaposition of God who is pure holy indivisible being.
I see the description of the chaos water/earth as the metaphysical clay (water and earth mixed) from which God forms, all things. And as you know I am trying to work out what that Chaos water/earth is representing in a christian concept… It can only be a metaphysical representation of the death of Christ? if John, Paul, Hebrews are literally saying all things are made through Jesus.
The dictation model is obscene: it means that God just needed an amanuensis and just used humans the same way you or I would use a stick – as an object without dignity.
If it weren’t for the fact that I saw YEC drive people to abandon their faith and others to turn away from even listening, I can’t be that sanguine. By the fruits, those Christians on campus who didn’t push YEC were the ones who managed to get the Gospel across; YECers got laughed at.
Since the comparison was at the cellular level, you must believe that viruses aren’t real because since God made cells they can’t be broken.
You’re rolling with the YEC view again, that Creation was “perfect”, then you insert your own definition of the word. At the cellular level, chromosomes can break and DNA can get out of control due to things humans do, so if you want “perfect” to man “can’t be harmed” you have to go below the molecular level – everything above that is painly breakable.
Having no real opinion should negate the inspired word? That’s like saying that not caring about which kind of gas goes into your car means you don’t drive on pavement.
Oh, right – I almost forgot that you cut the scriptures into little pieces so you can say that the ones you don’t like are false.
Wow – you just pronounced Isaiah, Jeremiah, Paul, and Jesus to be false teachers.
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