Hmm, the implications of what you’re saying here are pretty full on. The serpent outright lied when he said “You will not certainly die”
Genesis 3:4
God had said to Adam in “but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.””
Genesis 2:17
The serpent lied. Deceived. The great serpent as Revelation calls him. To say he was doing God’s work here certainly contradicts James when he says
“When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed.”
James 1:13-14 NIV
The duplicity here is that God would say to Adam & Eve not to eat the fruit, then himself send someone to go and encourage them to eat the fruit. That would be like a parent saying to young children - don’t cross the road on your trikes or else a car might hit you and then getting an uncle to go and tempt them into crossing the road. That, is duplicitous. Do you believe God did that?
All this said, to be fair, there is that odd scripture I guess of when God sent a lying spirit into the mouths of the false prophets - 1 Kings 22:20-23
The idea though that God sent the serpent - weirr, that’s a little disturbing/unsettling, especially knowing what would happen - in the same way that he knew the deceiving spirit in 1 Kings 22 would be successful.
[quote=“mitchellmckain, post:60, topic:42874”]
It was the task of the angels to help living things learn and grow.
[/quote]
I mean that sounds sensible enough but what scriptures specifically is that based on? Your tone has a lot of confidence about knowing what angels roles are … even to the degree that these thoughts supersede common Christian understandings.
C’mon man - it doesn’t help when people talk like that. That kind of language quickly devolves conversation - I don’t know you that well but would’ve expected more from you than this kind of school yard talk. I’m not here to argue with people, but to discuss and, if it goes that way, to debate interesting views and opinions but I never try to make it personal. Why would you talk this?? Have I pressed some buttons brother? I so, I apologise - I haven’t meant to. If you’re just being rude, well - yeah, then I’m calling that out
Wrong. Adam and Eve did not die when they ate the fruit. So the angel told the truth. Yeah, God also told the truth. Because they did die a spiritual death. Doesn’t change the fact that the angel also told the truth.
The most you can say is that we made what the angel said a lie by what we did ourselves. We made the angel the source of evil and our adversary by passing the blame. What the angel (snake) said became a lie only in the sense that we let it lead us away from God and what is good. We gave the angel the blame for that when it should have been ours alone. And that was the real sin which separated us from God.
Yep! That puts the blame squarely where it belongs. Not on either God or a devil but on us! Exactly as I have been saying all along.
Nonsense! That is no different than saying God is duplicious by putting the tree in the Garden in the first place and making it look very good to eat. That is nothing but looking for excuses to shift the blame to God. But nothing can change the fact that God gave them a clear command and fair warning. You might as well say that God kills people by creating gravity for everyone who stepped off a building and plunged to their death. God set up the world to work in a certain way and it is our responsibility to find the right way to do things. The angel was no different than any of the other things that God set in the world to work automatically for a reason.
The plain fact is that not everything is in the Bible. Not even the central defining teaching of Christianity, the doctrine of the Trinity. We can only get that by connecting the dots. This is no different. The adversary is a servant created by God and assigned by God to his tasks. That is in the Bible. And yet God is good and as you quoted in James the responsibility for evil is ours alone. It is not because of God or any of His servants. The evil is ours and because of us. PERIOD!
Lucifer was assigned the task of adversary, tempter, and personification of evil as part of God’s providence of salvation. Because God needed an adversary? No! Because God needed evil in the world? No! And the idea that Lucifer did this all on his own and God couldn’t stop him is even more ridiculous and stupid. By blaming Lucifer we made our own need for an adversary quite clear. If we could not see the evil in ourselves then it was made clear in a devil whom we could reject in order to choose God instead. The devil was never a threat to God or having any power over God. The only power the devil has ever had is what we human being gave to him with the passing of blame.
But instead of arguing about this endlessly and pointlessly let’s make things clear.
We both agree that God is good and does not do evil. Where then does evil come from? Apparently it comes from someone which God does not control.
For you it seems to make sense that God created servants which He would not control. But this does not make any sense to me at all – that is just irresponsible. What does make sense to me is that God created children which He would not control because that is the difference between children and servants/tools.
And the idea that God would let servants turned evil loose upon His children sounds like the most irresponsible of parents possible. The idea from the extra-cannonical book of Enoch that God could not control his servants and they warred against God and then without cleaning up this mess that God would then create children subjected such evil sounds utterly outrageous to me. I will not worship such an irresponsible contemptible being who cannot either control his servants or properly take care of his children.
Of course, another way you might make this work is to understand the angels to be the children of God with the free will to be the origin of evil, and take mankind to be either
no more than a bunch of insignificant primates with delusions of grandeur and pity from God at our plight because of his wayward children.
or some kind of tool for convincing God’s real children to change their ways.
I don’t believe either of these are correct. I don’t think they agree with the Bible, and they don’t really match up with the apparent nature of man and angels. It is children who learn and grow like we do, and it is the tools who are made as they are the way the angels seem to have been. It is children who need all this work of creating a universe of natural law in order to give us free will, and it is the servants and tools who don’t need any of that sort of stuff.
You’ve put your view across in your way. Things to think about I guess.
Scripture as I see it pretty clearly says angels did indeed rebel, in the book of Jude - “Though you already know all this, I want to remind you that the Lord at one time delivered his people out of Egypt, but later destroyed those who did not believe. And the angels who did not keep their positions of authority but abandoned their proper dwelling—these he has kept in darkness, bound with everlasting chains for judgment on the great Day.”
Jude 1:5-6
Jude purposely compares the Israelites delivered from Egypt with the angels and others to show no one is immune from potentially rebelling. Angels it seems appear to have free will and the capacity to go against that for which they were made, like us. We may be different in many ways but not in this fundamental.
I think this is what happened to the devil - not that man created him by blaming him for their evil. By that logic, really, it would be women who would take the role of personified evil - as Adam blamed Eve. It was Eve who blamed the serpent. They didn’t both blame the serpent. Think about that. There would appear a significant flaw in your logic above based on this
Maybe the way God made angels and us is not as different as we think? Who knows.
In the end, the origin of the devil remains mysterious.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
64
What’s free will?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
65
In what myth did Lucifer attempt to occupy the throne of the Lord and, finding he was unable to do so, descend and rule the underworld?
Free will is the proposition that you are to some degree the first cause of some subset of your thoughts and actions. By first cause we mean that the cause is not entirely traceable to things outside of yourself. And for the non-compatibilist libertarian, as I certainly am, and as our intuition insists, these thoughts and actions were a choice from among some non singular set of thoughts and actions with alternatives which were real possibilities much like the way a superposition of states in a quantum system chooses between possibilities when measured, and there are no hidden variables determining which one.
There are of course other versions of “free will” and it only goes to show that some things might have something that seem quite similar… such as what the angels have, which probably looks a great deal more like free will than what is displayed by the best AI that money can buy.
I think part of the assumed equation is what does it mean that God won’t tempt us?
1 Kings 22:19-23 New American Standard Bible (NASB)
19 Micaiah said, “Therefore, hear the word of the Lord. I saw the Lord sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by Him on His right and on His left. 20 The Lord said, ‘Who will entice Ahab to go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?’ And one said this while another said that. 21 Then a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord and said, ‘I will entice him.’ 22 The Lord said to him, ‘How?’ And he said, ‘I will go out and be a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ Then He said, ‘You are to entice him and also prevail. Go and do so.’ 23 Now therefore, behold, the Lord has put a deceiving spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; and the Lord has proclaimed disaster against you.”
Scripture is clear that the serpent deceived Job. (Lucifer does not exist it’s a mistranslation of Venus from the KJV thst became popularized). No verse in the Torah links satan to the serpent. We only see that in the New Testament. Which is a weak argument honestly. It says Satan, that serpent, and ect… which sounds just like when someone says my uncle is hitler when they clearly don’t mean their uncle is actually hitler.
But regardless I definitely seems possible the serpent was connected in the myth to a angel. Genesis and other verses seem to indicate there was more than one fall. Even says some were locked up in chains in darkness until judgement which could not have been Satan and his angels who were still roaming and went to war with Michael after Christ was born.
But the serpent did deceive Eve. We don’t know exactly what Eve thought death meant but it seems she believed it was physical death and perhaps being shunned by God was not even something she could fathom. Could mean death is a process working towards completion. Lots of variables.
Either way the serpent decided Eve and Eve led Adam to sin and all involved personal choices.
Something concerning the serpent is the word translated for deceived, הִשִּׁיאַ֖נִי , which comes from the word for creditor or loaner. Better translated as beguile. As in he sold her on a bad idea that she needed something she could not have. Perhaps ironically, it’s also spelled hiššîanî which messes me think it was in part a pun becsuse the action of what he did, sounds just like how a snake hisses.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
69
Excellent Answer!
What difference does it make? In morality? In our righteous minds? To salvation? What difference does it make on a day to day, moment by moment basis? Here on this website? On any thread? Can you point to it operating? In any response here? Anywhere on Earth, in any meaningful way, in any individual or culture, over history?
It’s a truism more than an axiom. How does it explain anything, make us accountable? How is it not utterly deterministic (predicated on genes and experience)? How does it make us accountable for anything? Beyond having an educated conscience?
The motif of a heavenly being striving for the highest seat of heaven only to be cast down to the underworld has its origins in the motions of the planet Venus, known as the morning star.
The Sumerian goddess Inanna (Babylonian Ishtar) is associated with the planet Venus, and Inanna’s actions in several of her myths, including Inanna and Shukaletuda and Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld appear to parallel the motion of Venus as it progresses through its synodic cycle.
A similar theme is present in the Babylonian myth of Etana. The Jewish Encyclopedia comments:
“The brilliancy of the morning star, which eclipses all other stars, but is not seen during the night, may easily have given rise to a myth such as was told of Ethana and Zu: he was led by his pride to strive for the highest seat among the star-gods on the northern mountain of the gods … but was hurled down by the supreme ruler of the Babylonian Olympus.”
The fall from heaven motif also has a parallel in Canaanite(aka Phoenician mid 3rd millennium - 2,500 - BCE intersection of Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures) mythology. In ancient Canaanite religion, the morning star is personified as the god Attar, who attempted to occupy the throne of Ba’al and, finding he was unable to do so, descended and ruled the underworld. The original myth may have been about a lesser god Helel trying to dethrone the Canaanite high god El who lived on a mountain to the north.
Hermann Gunkel’s reconstruction of the myth told of a mighty warrior called Hêlal, whose ambition was to ascend higher than all the other stellar divinities, but who had to descend to the depths; it thus portrayed as a battle the process by which the bright morning star fails to reach the highest point in the sky before being faded out by the rising sun.
However, the Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible argues that no evidence has been found of any Canaanite myth or imagery of a god being forcibly thrown from heaven, as in the Book of Isaiah (see below). It argues that the closest parallels with Isaiah’s description of the king of Babylon as a fallen morning star cast down from heaven are to be found not in Canaanite myths but in traditional ideas of the Jewish people (Canaanites like their cousins the Philistines), echoed in the Biblical account of the fall of Adam and Eve, cast out of God’s presence for wishing to be as God, and the picture in Psalm 82 of the “gods” and “sons of the Most High” destined to die and fall. This Jewish tradition has echoes also in Jewish pseudepigrapha such as 2 Enoch and the Life of Adam and Eve. The Life of Adam and Eve, in turn, shaped the idea of Iblis in the Quran.
The Greek myth of Phaethon, a personification of the planet Jupiter, follows a similar pattern.
What difference does it make in morality? I don’t know that it has any effect whatsoever on what is moral. But perhaps it has some effect on the question of why I should care about what is moral.
What difference does it make to salvation? God asks us to make a free will choice and provides the means for us to do so if needed. The difference is a God who chooses to value love and freedom over power and control.
What difference does it make day to day? It is the difference between conscious living people and the characters in a book or video tape. Without free will we have no reason to feel any ownership over our own thoughts and actions – without which there is no consciousness.
What difference does it make in an objective observation of things? None. That would be like expecting to see circularly polarized light coming through polaroid sunglasses. Free will is entirely in the subjective participation portion of our existence and thus it would be absurd to expect to see free will when you are filtering it out already. It is likewise absurd to talk about what is meaningful when you insist upon looking at the world in terms of objective observation alone. What is therefore without meaning, is the attempt to limit reality to objective observation only.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
73
So is the attempt to ignore it.
Where and how does God ask us to make a (which?) free will choice and provide the means for us to do so if needed? Where in the ephemeral, tiny lives in ignorance of the one hundred billion to date?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
74
I think the concluding paragraph applies to more than this topic. It says:
“Could it be that our human fear of not knowing about Satan’s origin prompted these highly questionable interpretations of Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28? Fear of the unknown is a rather powerful thing…”
Church leaders have created definitive “truths” where much uncertainty exists.
Dear Phil,
I find it interesting how the author totally dismisses the correlations between Isaiah 14:12 and Luke 10:18.
Likewise, Satan falling as “lightning” in Luke 10:18 seems to refer to the suddenness of his fall in relation to Jesus’ ministry of establishing God’s kingdom here on earth. It is unlikely that either passage was meant to allude to Lucifer in Isaiah 14:12. Finally, the vision of a great red dragon being cast out of heaven by Michael the Archangel in Revelation 12 takes place in relation to salvation in Christ (Rev 12:10). The timing of this casting down, then, seems to center on the Christ event. All the same, the image of a red dragon is not quite the same thing as a beautiful light-bearing angel.
Why could not have the King of Heaven and Isaiah have witnessed the same event? It was the single most destructive act that ever has happened as Revelations 12 describes. Any resident of Heaven, who remained after the Fall, would have the same memory.
In context, the Luke 10 passage is about the results of the 70 sent on the missionary journey.
In my opinion, seeing it as an event long before the 70 came back successfully is far outside of reason.
The Return of the Seventy
17 The seventy[d] returned with joy, saying, “Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!” 18 He said to them, “I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning. 19 See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you. 20 Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.”
If you have no free will then you are not responsible for your actions. So you are not culpable. So there is nothing to forgive. Without Free will the whole Christian concept goes out the window.(Unless you are a Calvinist)