What it’s all for

What’s it all for

@Kguess – Would you buy this?:

First, thank you for your comment! I mean the following constructively, so I hope I don’t come off as having some other purpose.

I agree with you, up to a point, and that point is this: If it’s all simply about feeling joy and love, why did God see the Creation, before we were created, as good? I mean, it’s totally unnecessary for that joy and love. Did not God already have that in Jesus, before he created a material universe? Why not just create more Jesus’s, rather than create a vast material universe and material creatures who might, and likely would, betray him and so require all the evil and suffering that has happened since then?

Hmm. Jesus said “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10:18) and also that we “…must be perfect, as your Heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48) It seems to me that in Jesus’ view, being good and being perfect are the same (and the New Covenant as God stated it in Jeremiah 31 points directly to making us perfect). Thus, it would seem we have to understand “good,” each time God called what he had created in Genesis 1 “good,” to mean “perfect in God’s eyes.” I think saying that it was “very good,” but not “perfect,” is not justified by the text when we look at the whole Bible.

I have a lot of trouble with this purpose, in a sense (but not with the last sentence). As Paul said, God is “over all and through all and in all.” (Ephesians 4:6) God is the source and foundation of all things, and thus, I believe glorifying God in this world is not God’s ultimate purpose, but rather a means to an end. Human beings glorify that which they set their hearts and minds upon. We either worship—and, thus, seek to rely upon for our well-being and the continuation of our existence—God or idols. The latter are not up to the job; only God is. And that is why we are to worship and rely upon on God—why it is death for us to desire anything above God. God is not “the most valuable thing,” but rather the ONLY thing, except that it is misleading to refer to Him as a thing.

Recorded human history is largely the history of human beings failing to do this, and the result is our advancement, in material terms, through filling the world with the objects of our worship, these objects then becoming glorified in our hearts and minds. Glorifying God in this world is countering that in order that the “multiplication of wickedness” will be slowed down, so that the Gospel can be spread to everyone and all of the Elect can be saved: “If those days had not been cut short, nobody would be saved. But for the sake of the elect, those days will be cut short.” (Matthew 24:22)

Back to my first comment above: Why? Why go through all of this?

This is true, except it is after the Fall. If this was the purpose before the Fall, I’m back to the same question: Why did the Creation, the Fall, Jesus, the Judgement Day, the New Earth—why did all of this have to happen?

The problem with this for me is that WE are what’s not perfect. The Earth did not disobey God, Adam and Eve did. That disobedience is the reason the Creation fell. No matter how perfect the New Earth is, if we are put on it without having become perfect, we will cause it to Fall just like this one. That is why it is written:

“And into the city will be brought the glory and honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who practices an abomination or a lie, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life.” (Revelations 21:26-27)

And this has long led me to this question: What will we do there? John’s vision is of a city, but he doesn’t describe what’s going on there (and, curiously, he implies that outside of the city there WILL be unclean things). Yet, if it doesn’t share the basic features that all cities share—places for people to live, roads to travel on, places to go, things to do, and so on—it is not like any of the city’s that feature in the Bible and on this Earth. If it does share those basic features, then it must be meant for us to LIVE in it, right?

So what will do there? We will we physically bow down and praise God all day every day for all of Eternity? Isn’t the greatest form of worship to actually be perfect, as God is perfect, and be in constant connection and reliance upon him, without end? Is making us bow down and praise Him all day every day really why God created the universe and us in the first place? If so, why did he make all the stars and solar systems and galaxies? Why did he make the Earth with so many physical features like mountains and canyons and oceans and lakes and rivers and waterfalls and storms and rainbows and so on? Why did he make plants and animals and such a vast variety in so many different relationships with one another?

Why did he make us capable of imagination and, therefore, of creativity?

I think the Bible is quite clear about our current situation, how it came about and the path out of it. But it says nothing at all about God’s intentions for us after sin and death have been destroyed beyond their destruction and the restoration of Creation such that it and those who are saved can exist forever in God’s Love, Peace and Joy, because no other way of existing can endure. Remember why the Mosaic laws were given to Israel:

“See, I have set before you today life and goodness, as well as death and disaster. For I am commanding you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, statutes, and ordinances, so that you may live and increase, and the LORD your God may bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.” (Deuteronomy 30:15-16)

Do you see what I am getting at? This is the perspective from which I wrote the poem. I think it’s beyond question that, when we sin, the consequences are destructive both for us and for Creation on the whole. Creativity, in its essence, is just actions that produce consequences. Non-human creativity is contained in the world through cycles, but human creativity has the power—because of our ability to recognize and theoretically understand the processes of those cycles and to act on this understanding—to alter those cycles and form new ones, even cycles that are self-altering.

Sin causes us to do this in ways that are destructive. Fundamentally, sin is rejecting God—or coveting his status as Creator and Judge of all that is—but practically, it is causing destruction of the material world and systems of relationships God gave us that, as God created them, form the foundation of and support the continuation of material life.

And this is evident in the world, which is why Buddhism was possible (it arose through Buddha’s profoundly deep and sustained observation and contemplation of the nature of the material world—or, as Buddhist’s call it, the “phenomenal world,” that is, the world in which phenomena occur).

The above is what led me to the conclusion that evil and suffering are required for the God’s plan, which is to make us and Creation perfect in His eyes.

I regard this, though, as conjecture on my part. Whatever God has in store for us, it’s good by me!

You may not have seen anywhere where I contend that God is omnitemporal, a great mystery in how our timeless (actually ’timeful’) Father relates to his creation dynamically in his providence without violating anyone’s free will. Regarding his value, I would submit the first petition in The Lord’s Prayer (which reflects the heart of the petitioner and his motivation), “Hallowed be thy name.”

I like that. Adapted from William James via David Brooks is the idea that what we pay attention to is a moral choice that we make continuously. We have to be careful not to let ourselves be distracted by things that would divert us in wrong directions and into wrongful behaviors, including behaviors of the mind.

Hebrews 12:2, partly cited above and part below, is one of my favorite verses:

…fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross…

It tells us what (or rather, who) we should be paying attention to and what motivated Jesus to endure the cross: future joy. And incredibly, that joy is us! That gives us motivation to run the race well, too.

What I see eternity as is familial relationships – learning, teaching, enjoying (hiking in the mountains? ; - ).

??? Jesus wasn’t created, only His flesh was, and that required having a material creation. Besides that, since there is only one unique God the Son, there couldn’t be “more”.

You failed to make any connection between “good” and “perfect”.

So no, this isn’t the case.

Besides that, to determine what “good” means in Genesis one starts with the language of the text, not reading back into it something unconnected from somewhere else.

That’s an assumption not found in the text – it wasn’t Creation that fell, it was humans.

It’s worth noting that there are two different words for evil in Hebrew, one that can be rendered “catastrophe” that we might call “natural evil” and the other what we would call “moral evil”. I see no way to conclude that moral evil was part of God’s plan.
But natural evil I can see the case for.

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I couldn’t help but be reminded of a video I came across a month or so ago where some preacher was arguing that meditation is from the Devil. I wanted to knock the guy up the side of the head with a brick and tell him, “Idiot, meditation isn’t any more evil that a brick – it’s what you do with it!”
Oh, and teach him a song:

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Designing new mountains for each other to hike in . . . including slopes to ski and lakes to skate on!

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In considering whether the first creation was good or perfect, there is the implicit assumption that death itself is the worst evil. Nay, separation from loved ones is where the real pain lies. Hence it is better to choose the narrow way and the narrow gate that does not lead to destruction.

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What word would you use for how Jesus came into being? Or, if you contend that he had no beginning, on what is that based?

If only God is perfect and only God is good, mustn’t each be required for the other? Or, at least, mustn’t being God be required to be either? Is that not a connection between the two?

IMV, we have to understand all of the Bible through Jesus, which means understanding Genesis through Jesus, not in and of itself or according to how the author or readers at the time would have understood it. There are many things in the Old Testament itself indicating that what was said earlier was not the whole truth, two easy ones being the Mosaic law on divorce and the Mosaic laws on sacrifices. At they time they are presented, they are considered divine laws, with punishments as serious as execution, yet God and Jesus later clarified that they were pragmatic means for dealing with Israel, given Israel’s limited understanding and hardness of heart (which are always related) at the time, and through that working out God’s plan for giving us the real means of salvation through Jesus.

I disagree. When Adam & Eve disobeyed God, they brought death into Creation. There was no mention that anything dies before that. Genesis 1:29 designates only seed-bearing plants and fruit-bearing trees for food—that is, things that do not have to be killed to be eaten.

And what is Paul referring to in Romans 8:20-23 if not the futility triggered by the betrayal of God by Adam & Eve?

I disagree with your last statement, as should be very clear from my posts and comments.

Answer me this: If evil in Creation and the suffering that its actions cause was not part of God’s plan, why did he, before he created the Creation, choose to divide human beings into the Elect and non-Elect? (Ephesians 1)

According to the Bible, only the Elect will be saved, which means the non-Elect will be unrepentant sinners, who are the means by which evil multiplies in the world. We are all sinners, but those of us who recognize what sin is and the need to be forgiven by God for our sins act—through our repentance and continued aim to follow and, therefore, become like Jesus and, in so doing, build up his Body—to impair evil’s multiplication.

You might try to argue that he chose the Elect as a back-up plan in case Adam & Eve chose to disobey him—with the option that they chose to obey him remaining open—but there is nothing to my knowledge in the text to indicate this. We are not told that the serpent came to test Adam & Eve so God could see how they respond, or even that Eve could have chosen other than as she did. We are simply told of the serpent’s temptation and her choice to eat the forbidden fruit. There is actually no indication in the text that she was capable of making any other choice. The only indication that she was is that God had told her and Adam not to eat that fruit, which indicates that, in addition to not eating that fruit, there was the possibility of eating that fruit. But nowhere is there any indication that their choosing the former was actually possible for them. We impose that on the text because we feel that we are capable of choosing differently than they did.

But that is an assumption that cannot be tested because they were the only ones presented with that particular choice in that particular situation and they only had one shot at it. If, as Jesus stated, “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit” (Matthew 7:28), how could Adam & Eve chosen to disobey God if it was not already in their nature to do so? Wasn’t their choice the ultimate in bad fruit? And doesn’t that mean they were already “bad” trees?

Similarly, we have no indication that there is or could be a reality in which evil never existed EXCEPT the reality of Heaven, after God’s plan for the salvation of the Elect has been fully completed. There is no suggestion anywhere in the Bible that I know of that any other evil-free reality established in any other way could exist.

And Jesus said that multiplication of wickedness is supposed to happen, calling its culmination “birth pains” and frequently likened the whole process to harvesting wheat, in which the whole of every plant is grown, but only the fruit is saved, the rest of it being discarded. He doesn’t ever qualify such statements with “because Adam & Eve made the wrong choice even though they freely capable of making the right choice.” He simply states these things as facts for our illumination.

He was the Maker, self-existent with the Father (“I and the Father are one.”)

Through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made that has been made.
John 1:3

Speaking of God is different than speaking of creation. The first creation was good but not perfect: no place is perfect where sin and the adversary can still enter.

The Psalmist praises God for providing prey for lions in Psalm 104. How can that be? If it was evil before ‘the fall’, it still is. Again the mistake arises that death is the ultimate evil. It’s not.

He is referring to the futility and groaning the first creation was subjected to from its very beginning, by design.

I would also like to more than suggest the caveat that was hinted at above when I mentioned God’s omnitemporality: we cannot use tensed language with respect to God without qualifiers – he is not bound by time. You mention God’s ‘plan’ in multiple places – it is a time bound word and it does not really apply. But tensed language is all we have and it is difficult to think of God in any other way except by binding him in time.

This only indicates that he already existed when the “all things were made.” It doesn’t address the question of how or when he came into being. Nor does it tell us how God came into being, or whether or not that concept can even apply to Him. So, I think the answer is that we don’t know how or when or if Jesus came into being beyond that being before “all things were made.”

In John 17, Jesus prayed, “I am not asking on behalf of them alone, but also on behalf of those who will believe in Me through their message, that all of them may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I am in You. May they also be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.”

If can be in Them as the Father and the Son are in each other, how can “I and the Father are one” be interpreted as them being self-existent? Wouldn’t that mean that when we are as one in Them, we would be self-existent, as well?

You said that before. I don’t see any Biblical justification for the distinction. God did not say anything was perfect; Jesus said that about God and us needing to be, like God, perfect. I think we have to realize that when God “saw that it was good,” it was good in his eyes. We don’t know what that means. Maybe it was good to Him, because it was the perfect beginning for what he had planned, as opposed to being a place immune from sin.

The Psalmist was speaking of lions in the fallen world. Isaiah prophesied a time when lions would no longer eat prey. We can’t know what lions ate before the Fall (assuming they are among the beasts God created then), but Genesis 1:30 says "And to every beast of the earth and every bird of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth—everything that has the breath of life in it—I have given every green plant for food.”

God, at that time, made no indication that any creature would eat anything but food from plants.

Yes, God is outside of time, but His Creation is not. His Creation is also full of observable evidence of actions and consequences proceeding according to linear time, and a complete absence of evidence to the contrary, except of miracles, of which there is virtually no objectively verifiable evidence (by which I do not mean to say that they did not or don’t happen).

So I think any discussion of His Creation must assume linear time. I suspect this is part of the plan; that it is a feature we require.

God pretty much by definition is self-existent and not made. He is the only being to possess aseity, “I AM.” So the answer is not ambiguous and yes, we certainly do know.

There are different kinds of oneness, and they do not all mean that all attributes are identical. Apples and oranges have a oneness in that they are both fruit.

Good and perfect are two different words? In the Hebrew as well. @St.Roymond?

Why? Because you believe there was no death before ‘the fall’, of course.

Regarding time, instantaneity may not be what you think it is. You might do a little browsing amongst these, starting with the oldest: Spacetime slices and God’s omnipresence.

(Are you a young earth creationist, perhaps?)

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I was referring to Jesus. Yes, we regard God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit as the Trinity, but there is very little in the Bible about what the Trinity is and how it came to be. In fact, it is never directly asserted, only strongly implied by the way God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit are written about. Nothing is ever made clear concerning the Spirit Realm—or, the “Unseen Realm” in Dr. Michale Heiser’s view. Heiser’s contention was that we need to understand the Old Testament the way pre-Jesus Israel understood it. I don’t buy that. If we are, as Paul said, to “grow up into Christ himself,” then the understanding we need is Jesus’ understanding, not that of those who didn’t recognize him for who he was.

Interestingly, the name God told Moses to tell Israel was His name can be interpreted in more than one way. The lexicon on Biblehub.com gives the following meanings; “ to fall out, come to pass, become, be.”

We don’t actually know how Moses or the Israelites understood it. We translate it to English usually as “I am,” but we rarely consider implications of the other meanings.

This may be, but no distinctions are made in the text between different types of “oneness,” and the use of “as” by Jesus in his prayer specifically indicates the same. I don’t know Greek, so I can’t evaluate the accuracy of the translation or if it distorts the meaning of the original text, but every English translation included on Biblehub uses “as” or “just as,” indicating the same type of “oneness.”

Because the Psalms were written long after the Fall. I am making an assumption that the Psalmists were speaking of the world as they knew it when they spoke of the world, not the world as it was before humans existed. I think it’s a fair assumption.

I did not say I believe there was no death before the Fall. I don’t know whether there was or there wasn’t and the Bible isn’t clear about it. I said it was a possibility and pointed to some things in Genesis that support the idea.

The thing that I am sure of and that you seem to no believe is that human knowledge, awareness and comprehension is limited. What is essential is neither difficult to understand nor unclear for one who accepts that Jesus was who he claims to be in the Gospels. Much else in the Bible, about the nature of God, the world, life and human beings is not so easy to understand or clear.

IMV, the wise thing when that is the case is to be cautious and reflective. It’s very easy for us to turn our own understanding into an idol.

Jesus is the eternal Word made flesh. As the Word He was Incarnated and became Jesus; prior to that He was Yahweh, the One Who as God had walked on Earth as a man in the Old Testament.

Just because B and C are integral to A does not imply any logical relation between B and C in and of themselves.

But you can’t properly see Jesus in it unless you first understand it as the original audience understood it.
That’s one of the big problems with the YEC refusal to actually approach the text as it would have been first understood. If read as just being a sort of journal entry of observations it’s pretty devoid of Christ, but when read as either of its two original literary genres Jesus practically jumps out of the story, and isn’t hard at all to see in the polemical function, either.

That’s true of the entire Mosaic Torah: none of it was intended as something in and of itself, it was all intended to point beyond itself to the real lessons – that’s the theme of much of the Prophets. But again, each item has to be understood in its original context, and that is when it’s found to point to Jesus. This is a point made by several scholars including Michael Heiser, that we modern Westerners have to work to find Jesus in the text but if we can do what John Walton says and see it through ancient eyes it’s not difficult at all because He’s right there.
This is another issue with many YECists: they treat the Law as though it was meant to be something on its own, and miss the fact that it was meant ultimately to point to Jesus, so that once He has come it no longer has any power/authority.

That’s an interpretation that actually doesn’t fit the text. For one thing, they had to know what death was already or the warning would have been meaningless; for another, if that sort of death was what was meant then God lied because they lived many, many years beyond expulsion from the Garden. The death that is meant is the spiritual one of being cut off from direct intimacy with God. They were mortal anyway – that’s the meaning of being made from dust in the ancient near east – but with that spiritual link cut they were guaranteed to be mortal, confirmed in mortality as past theologians would say.

We are what has burdened Creation; what it suffers from is us. Creation continues to operate as it already did, but now due to the human inheritance of death, and because of death sin, Creation was left in effect marching in place rather than advancing under the godly care of spiritually-alive humans.

You say God intended there to be moral evil? That’s seriously contrary to scripture.

There are no “non-Elect” in Ephesians 1. God does not choose anyone to be lost – that is contrary to His stated will that all be saved.

I reject such a deceitful God.

You can’t read the rules from after a phase change back into the situation before that phase change: what pertains now is not to be applied to what was then.
They had no tendency to sin; Paul makes clear that the tendency to sin came from their actions. They had freedom – and misused it, just as the serpent/Nakhash had freeom and misused it.

Of course we do, unless you think God is the Devil. If there could be no reality without evil, then God had no choice but to create evil.

It was good because it was all working properly; “perfect” actually means “having reached the goal”. These are not the same; the good has work to do before becoming perfect.
And if we take the text seriously, humans were supposed to take the good and make it perfect – that’s what subduing and dominion actually meant.

Absolutely. Lions always had their food provided as prey, and it was always good.

Absolutely we do: Jesus is the Word, and God is what the Word was being – i.e. there is no difference between the Word and God; everything about the Word is what’s about God, and nothing that is God is missing from the Word.
He had no beginning of days, or any other beginning.

Sure we do – it means what those words in that context meant. In this case, “good” – as argued by John Walton and other scholars – means “in working order”, or more in line with the flavor of Hebrew, “working properly” (the difference being that the Hebrew is about things already being in action, already working, not merely that once given a start they would work properly).

True – but as you have said, we don’t know that it wasn’t true back before the Fall.

He didn’t give any indication that they wouldn’t, either – all that that statement indicates is that everything got to eat plants; it says nothing about any other food source.

Though there’s a problem here in that the discussion has wandered into the error of treating details literally apart from their purpose in contributing to the message of the particular piece of literature. The opening chapters of Genesis are not there to teach us science.

Hebrew and Greek both. The Greek indicates having reached a goal, and the Hebrew word is similar (and I’m not feeling up to a discourse on the difference at the moment).

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You sure leave that impression.

Was Jesus saying in his oneness with the Father that the Father had a physical body or physically shared his body? Different kinds of oneness are implicit!

What is bolded is a fair assumption, regardless of when the Psalm was written.

Hi Dale,
I appreciate your engagement. I am not finding illumination or growth in it, however, so I am going to exit the discussion. I think the issue is that we are proceeding on very different assumptions about what the Bible is, how to regard it and what role it is playing both in working out God’s plans and elevating our understanding of both God and this reality He created.

Perhaps one of us correct, or perhaps both of us are missing something. I hope you will agree to disagree. May God’s love, peace and joy be with you always. In Christ, Kevin

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This is especially true given the “Two Powers” doctrine found in second Temple Judaism: there was a Yahweh Who was always in heaven and was invisible, and a Yahweh Who walked on the Earth in the form of a man – but it was just one Yahweh, not two. With that background, and the obvious connection of Jesus to the Yahweh Who walked on Earth, Jesus and the Father were plainly “one” because they were both Yahweh.

I think Paul had the Two Powers doctrine in mind when he wrote:

Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.

The phrase “form of a servant” following “form of God” would have brought to the mind of first century Jews the Old Testament instances where Yahweh showed up in human form, often called “the Angel of Yahweh” – which can be read as “the Angel Who is Yahweh”. Thus this read that Jesus was identical to the Yahweh Who never left Heaven, but who appeared on Earth as the Yahweh Who walked among men; and the last line indicates that this time the Yahweh Who walked on Earth had taken not just the shape of a man but had become a man – the “likeness of men” hearkens back to Genesis 1, effectively completing a circle: humans were made “in the likeness of God”, and now God has taken on “the likeness of men”.

This is valuable in relation to this:

Since Jesus is Yahweh-Who-Walks-In-Earth, He is the eternal Yahweh.

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