Err, only if you consider weeds or thorns a curse.
A weed is a plant in the wrong place, but only according to humans, A rose in a wheat field would be a weed. It would only be a curse if God deliberately planted it there. We know that pollen is often distributed by wind or animals. Do you really think that God is directing the distribution of pollen to ensure there are weeds?
And how is a predator going to eat and survive if it does not kill? Do we eat live plants?
The so called curses of the Garden narrative are winges against thuing that we consider tiresome ot uncomfortable. You know wht some plants have thoorns. Some plants are poisonous, or taste full, is that a curse also>
Birthing pains? Why is it painful to give birth> is that a curse> is it a proverbial pain or does the pain serve a purpose to help the mother know when to push. (Rhetorical)
Pain, death, inconveniences, are part of the joys of free living They are only a curse if you insist on an easy life with everything under your control.
I wonder, if the curses are not real, what does that make the restoration?
It is only human vanity that would think that something we do could disrupt the whole of God’s perfect creation! (Modern technology and pollution accepted)
Perhaps you need to rethink what Sin is and what it affects.
At what point did man become self aware…knowing good and evil? Many Christians could claim the 10 commandments were given in about 1300BC at sinai…so what of those before the law was given by the finger of God?
Well, Abrahams faith was credited to him as righteousness…he clearly knew the law, he offered sacrifices just like his forefathers previously.
Now the question is, who is to be resurrected at the second coming? Didnt Christ say in His ministry that he came for the sinners? There is no mention of any individuals in the binle outside the garden of Eden or prior to Adam and Eve.
This suggest to me that if what you say is true, everyone who was no inside the garden with Adam and Eve never had the opportunity to eat of the tree of life.
That means that every human (if you like) that prexisted Adam and Eve outside the garden was refused access to eternal life and to God.
That.means that, based on the new testament claim that God deems those things an abomination, because they are refused access to life, these animals were an abomination.
Highly.problemwtic for the Jewish and Christian religons i would suggest…fancy a God who is that racist that he would refuse life to early hominids and reject them! Whats worse, the bible gives no offer of salvation to them…they are not even mentioned…unless thats where you think gentiles came from?
Nobody disputes this. What is disputed is that it would ever have been otherwise. What some now (and only in some contexts) call “weeds” have always existed. It’s a stretch (putting it charitably) to think God quickly invented some new invasive plants to throw in just to punish people. I know you can read scriptures to imagine God as that kind of deity. But I’ll stick with the God revealed to us in Christ, and know that any understanding put forward as ‘biblical’ that creates God in some other image that doesn’t look like Christ is just getting the Bible wrong.
I know. But fundamentalistic understandings can turn it into one.
oh Mervin…honestly, you clearly do not check your own claims.
You say, “I’ll stick with the God revealed to us in Christ”
Well, ive already cited that one and you completely missed the dilemma it presents…Christ states in Matthew 24
Matthew 24: 37 As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. 38 For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; 39 and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away…
I can back up that i know what Christ meant in the above by also citing 2 Peter 2
4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell,[a] putting them in chains of darkness[b] to be held for judgment; 5 if he did not spare the ancient world when he brought the flood on its ungodly people, but protected Noah, a preacher of righteousness, and seven others; 6 if he condemned the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah by burning them to ashes, and made them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; 7 and if he rescued Lot, a righteous man, who was distressed by the depraved conduct of the lawless
and i can correlate the above with Moses writings
Genesis 6 13 So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth.
19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.
22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.
23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.
There is simply no intellectual way that you can rewrite the above passages of scripture to mean anything other than exactly what they say.
Indeed there is no justification for extending what it says beyond the meaning of the word actually used for “earth” in the text (in which there is no meaning of global or planetary) any more than is justified to say the mountains on venus and mars were covered by the flood even though they are plainly also mountain under the entire heavens.
Stop making things up about what people have posted, please! Have enough respect to read what has been written and respond to that instead of responding to strawman position sin your catalog of things people must believe if they disagree with you.
“Law” isn’t in the text; God gave a warning about one specific tree’s fruit.
Since you insist on reading it literally . . . Genesis 1 has humans before Adam and Eve.
But what they actually say is not what you make them say – that’s the problem.
Well, that and the fact that you steadfastly refuse to actually try to see what they say by forcing the text to fit a MSWV!
Not sure if your comment to stop makingb things uop was directed to me but I am not aware of what people have posted, I do my own research. Rest of comment uncalled for as well. As for the “law” i suggest you view comments by Paul in the New Testament. Also, it does not have to say law to be a law. If one disobeys a command as Adam and Eve did it is as good as breaking the law. Ask anyone who has been in the military. I do not think you understand my reply.
Grammatically it can be read as a warning, and there are good reasons to take it that way – in one recent discussion here that was brought up (I forget which thread).
[Interesting phenomenon: I wore myself out thoroughly yesterday, and today my memory sucks.]
Interesting. Never thought about it that way. To me it seems that even if it was a warning if it comes from God it might as well be a law, i.e., law of God.
That entirely depends on who you ask.
The Jews, at least some of them, believe in a literal reading of the Torah. I haven’t heard many discussions about the physical nature of creation as opined in those books, so we’ll put that aside for now…
Reading Genesis literally (or not going too far down the “rabbit hole” of eisegesis) implies that The Garden was “perfect”, without stain or blemish, and thus, without pain or suffering. Pain and suffering began when Adam and Eve were physically removed from The Garden, and put in a not quite entirely well defined “someplace else”. The implication of that thought is that if The Garden still exists in some way. It is still “perfect”. Removing Adam & Eve from The Garden didn’t actually change the nature of The Garden itself; hence the necessity for posting a “guard”.
For the moment, I will also skip over the fact that “perfect” meant that every creature was “vegetarian”, including the “sea creatures”, that’s a little bit too far down the “hole”.
Now this may be a throw-away, and feel free to rip it to shreds if you wish. But my mind has clicked on something fairly recently about The Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil. I believe that eating the fruit wouldn’t make you know if something was “good” or “evil”; but the fruit held the abstract concept of what “good” and “evil” are, like a place to store the idea.
Lastly, if Adam & Eve had NOT eaten the fruit, they would have wound up being as close to the Angelic as you can get without possibly being there. Angels (outside of that squabble with Lucifer Morningstar) don’t need the concept, or the difference, they just do what God tells them to, without any value judgements.
Except warnings function as tests. I always think of Jonah and Nineveh, where the message was just “Nineveh shall be overthrown!” yet the warning led to repentance, and of David’s inquiry “Will they give me up?” and God said, “They will!” but it didn’t happen because David decided to leave the place instead. Laws on the other hand aren’t tests.
Which reminds me of how one of the rabbis I knew in grad school objected to the “Ten Words” being called “Commandments”; he noted that while the negative “lo” plus a verb in the imperfect could be a prohibition, it could also be a warning or even an instruction, reminding us that “Torah” doesn’t mean “law” but rather “instruction” or “admonition” – and even argued that the Ten could be called “Affirmations”, taken as statements from God of what He intended to make of His people (he made such an impactful argument that I still cringe when I hear “the Ten Commandments”).
Thus implying that the world outside the Garden was not yet “tamed” (or “gardenized”).
Yeah, I don’t think it was meant as a magical sudden input of knowledge; the verb used implies that it was experiential, i.e. by disregarding the warning they gained the experience of evil and thus its difference from good. It’s worth noting here that the word for “evil” is רַע (rah), the same as in Isaiah 45 “I make well-being and create calamity”, so it wasn’t an intellectual understanding of moral evil but an experience of “catastrophe”, of things going wrong.
Makes me wonder: can things go wrong for angels? i.e. can they experience failure and its consequences?
God certainly can, if we regard the Fall as a failure; the Cross was the consequences!
“Without any value judgments” – that strikes me as a desolate way to be!
Returning to the original question, God put quite a lot of effort into correcting Israel’s theological beliefs. But He didn’t just give them a copy of the Institutes of Christian Theology and tell them that there would be an exam. The process of biblical revelation took well over 1500 years from Abraham through the New Testament. Could they have handled everything at once? Matthew 19:8 opens a huge can of worms by stating that aspects of earlier revelation were in part accommodating the problems of the people. Just as training a child may need to start with oversimplified statements to be clarified by later learning (“knives bad!”), God chose to gradually build the understanding of His people. Of course, as already pointed out, some of the “corrections” are in our interpretation rather than in Israel’s beliefs. There would seem to be limited point in harping on a subject that they weren’t even thinking about and could find out more about for themselves if they wanted to.
That assumes that understanding was even the point! In my last read through the OT it struck me that what Yahweh was really up to was building a worldview so that things would be ready conceptually when the Messiah arrived!
Yes. As I’ve pointed out before, Genesis 1 as history isn’t something the ancient Hebrews would have had any interest in and Yahweh would have had no interest in teaching it; the interest in both cases would be educating about the relationships between Creator, Creation, and humans – something Genesis 1 has a lot to say about if read as what it was written to be.
I don’t think either are tests. When you tell your children not to play in the street because they could die you are not testing them. A warning is not a test. The important difference between law and warning is the nature of the consequences. In the case of a law the consequences are imposed by the lawgiver, but in the case of a warning it is not.
Your argument is compelling but if God says not to do something it is a command and a command from God would be a law. A commandment is not a warning. Read Exodus 21:1 if there is any doubt about the commandments being laws.