AZJoe is offline AZJoe Post #31  May 29,2011, 10:46am
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dbz77 wrote :
To whom was this debt owed?
The offense was to God. The debt is to repair the offense. Adam and Eve after they attempted to grasp at equality with God (viz the forbidden fruit) certainly could not then even conceive of the notion to ask for forgiveness from the being they tried to make an equal through knowledge of Good & Evil.

But there is no way for a finite soul that is not divine to ever repay the debts to the eternal Divine. It's not within the nature of man's reach to even come close. It is the infinite magnitude of God's nature above man's that make the offense so unfathomably huge for all eternity. God is authentic. He could not just ignore that offense as if it never happened. That would violate perfect Justice and require a compromise on a matter that could not be compromised without perverting Justice and violating His nature to do anything but Good.

Yet God loves humanity and desires humanity to have life and have it more abundantly for all eternity. To satisfy the tenants of Justice & Love together His love required Him to fully pay the debt for the offense His creatures could not possibly pay. This satisfied His Justice while also redeeming humanity from its grave error. It also was the only way to give Adam's offspring a way to overcome the deficiencies arising from the sins of their forefathers. We know now that that way was for Him to become flesh as a human being and to take on all the consequences for that infraction (e.g. all its downstream sins) on Himself in such a way that He could completely remedy it while satisfying Justice and without violating the gift of freewill He gave to humanity. He had to give man a choice to elect to come back to Him so that He Himself being Divine could pay the price while elevating humanity's nature so that it could participate in an authentic two-way love relationship at a nature that was of the same nature of Himself. In essence, the irony is that the offense does in fact result in humanity being given god-like attributes and a higher nature than Adam. What is most ironic here is that Satan's deception was superseded and God gave humanity more than it ever deserved or imagined.

2 Peter 1:3-4 His is divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 4Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature and escape the corruption in the world caused by evil desires.

1 John 3:2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

John 1:12-13 Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God— 13 children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

 John 10:34-36 Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your Law, ‘I have said you are “gods”’? 35 If he called them ‘gods,’ to whom the word of God came—and Scripture cannot be set aside— 36 what about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world?
Hope this answers your question.
Last edited by AZJoe; May 29,2011 at 10:50am.
 
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dbz77 is offline dbz77 Post #32  May 29,2011, 7:06pm
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AZJoe wrote :
It is the infinite magnitude of God's nature above man's that make the offense so unfathomably huge for all eternity.
You confuse could not with would not.

Nobody could prevent God from ignoring the offense, if it pleased Him to do so.
AZJoe wrote :
God is authentic. He could not just ignore that offense as if it never happened. That would violate perfect Justice and require a compromise on a matter that could not be compromised without perverting Justice and violating His nature to do anything but Good.
Good and justice are whatever God says it is, by virtue of His station as Lord of Lords and King of Kings.
 
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hermes01 is offline hermes01 Post #33  May 30,2011, 1:56am
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God did not put the knowledge of good and evil in Adamn when He 'created' him He put it in the fruit. If Adamn had not eaten the fruit..man would not know good from evil.
Adamn carried out God's perfect Will.

He did not sin.......................

The whole story is amongst other things, about CHOICE...and the consequence of choice
 
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AZJoe is offline AZJoe Post #34  May 30,2011, 4:59am
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hermes01 wrote :
God did not put the knowledge of good and evil in Adamn when He 'created' him He put it in the fruit. If Adamn had not eaten the fruit..man would not know good from evil.
Adamn carried out God's perfect Will.

He did not sin.......................

The whole story is amongst other things, about CHOICE...and the consequence of choice
Interesting conjecture but it doesn't square with scripture neither by original accounts in Old Testament Genesis nor with what the apostles themselves taught in the New Testament nor with what the Early Church Fathers (in particular Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Ambrose and Ambrosiaster as well as Augustine) taught and wrote about. Your theory actually seems to have the same elements of the precise lie that Satan used to tempt Adam and Eve - e.g. "surely you shall not die". It also departs from what we know about God's nature - namely that He could not lie and could not conceive to desire for man to fall victim to evil and suffer death and alienation from Himself.

OT
Genesis 3:17 To Adam God said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.

NT
Romans 5:12-13 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned— 13for before the law was given, sin was in the world.
What The Church teaches about Original Sin:

By his sin Adam, as the first man, lost the original holiness and justice he had received from God, not only for himself but for all humans. Adam and Eve transmitted to their descendants human nature wounded by their own first sin and hence deprived of original holiness and justice; this deprivation is called "original sin". As a result of original sin, human nature is weakened in its powers, subject to ignorance, suffering and the domination of death, and inclined to sin (this inclination is called "concupiscence").

The whole account was to give sufficient insights to explain man's condition of a wounded nature (PARTIAL depravity) and account for the evil that was in the world and to show how God had a plan for redeeming fallen man and to teach that we must be responsible about the exercise of our freewill and to not mistrust and not to disobey God's commandments least we suffer terrible consequences - the greatest being alienation from God.
Last edited by AZJoe; May 30,2011 at 5:02am.
 
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AZJoe is offline AZJoe Post #35  May 30,2011, 5:18am
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dbz77 wrote :
You confuse could not with would not.

Nobody could prevent God from ignoring the offense, if it pleased Him to do so.
No I don't. You did when you misstated that God could do anything. I just gave numerous examples of things God can't do because he is God. . For sake of discussion "Could not" and "would not" are logically equivalent. I went out of my way to show both cases to demonstrate that my rationale had accounted for both even though they are logically equivalent.

These are subtle points and not worth mincing words over. We both agree that God is awesome and sovereign.

dbz77 wrote :
Good and justice are whatever God says it is, by virtue of His station as Lord of Lords and King of Kings.
True - but the way you are stating it almost sounds like God, because He is God, can invent new truths willi-nilli to make what He says or does "good" after the fact. hopefully you did not mean that since its false.

Truth is an attribute of God. I think we share the common belief that God is perfect and unchanging. I can only agree with you if you meant what you said in this way and only if you hold to a shared common understanding of a principal of objective truth - the notion that truth, like God (as an attribute of God) is eternally unchanging.
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Diana_P is offline Diana_P Post #36  May 30,2011, 7:36am
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AZJoe wrote :
Unlike the oblivion of non-existence the child has life and is real.
AZJoe wrote :
No one exists to consult with before they are created. Yet God knew you before He created you since He desired you to become one of His creatures to love you and to let you share in His glory. He conceived of you in every detail and made a wonderful plan and purpose for you. A purpose that ONLY you could do like no other ever created before or after you.

Hope this helps some.


This is perhaps the greatest conundrum of all. If God knew all of us “before we were born” and gave us a purpose in his Divine Plan He would also know whether we would choose to follow that purpose. Why would God create something (or someone) that He KNOWs is going to elect not to follow Him? Unless of course, God doesn’t KNOW which path we are going to choose and if that is the case then He isn’t All Knowing. There is an inherent conflict with the idea of a deity being both All Knowing and All Powerful.
 
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AZJoe is offline AZJoe Post #37  May 30,2011, 9:53am
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Diana_P wrote :

This is perhaps the greatest conundrum of all. If God knew all of us “before we were born” and gave us a purpose in his Divine Plan He would also know whether we would choose to follow that purpose. Why would God create something (or someone) that He KNOWs is going to elect not to follow Him? Unless of course, God doesn’t KNOW which path we are going to choose and if that is the case then He isn’t All Knowing. There is an inherent conflict with the idea of a deity being both All Knowing and All Powerful.
I wish I had simple short answers for you Diana. But these are very deep theological questions that are pretty involved and take time to explain.

Let me say this:
To us humans this appears as a conundrum as we lack the wisdom of God and do not have the intellectual means to fully understand this. All will be revealed at the 2nd coming. Using the things we know with certainty about God through revelation from His Word and the gifts of grace we can however arrive at insights that are useful in resolving these matters sufficiently to satisfy our own curiosities. The key thing to keep in mind though is that our own salvation is not dependent on having a deep and full understanding of God's purposes and intentions such that we need to worry. That said, Christianity is completely rational and so must have rational answers for these sorts of questions that might seem on first look to create paradoxes.

I would offer the following insights:
Every soul is created for a (good) Divine Purpose that only that soul can do best. It is because of freewill that some souls choose not to cooperate with their calling and elect "go to their own place" so to speak (ref. Judas Acts 1:25). Yet even is electing evil such souls serve God just as Judas did in choosing to betray Jesus. A greater good is always manifest by God's Plan no matter what evils individual's elect to give themselves to. There will of course be more suffering and sadness arising from more evil choices but the nature of grace is such that it outpaces evil (Romans 5:20 "But where sin increased, grace increased all the more."). There is no elective evil so great that God's Plan will not overcome it with a greater good since the more sin increases the more it adds to the glory of the final objective end and victory (we know how the story ends already ).

What one might ponder here is how awesome and benevolent God is in giving humanity the freedom to shape his own destiny rather than just pre-program it like a mindless robot to play it out wearing either a white hat or a black hat so to speak. No, God let's man choose his own destiny but has established His Plan (Providence). We are empowered by the generous gift of freewill to participate in shaping our destiny and will be blessed when we are conducting ourselves in accord with God's Will (or suffer consequences when not).

If we were rather all programmed robots there could not be any credible notion of "Justice" since we would be either good or bad based on divine programming. No, it is because there is the infinite reward of heaven that there must also exist the infinite penalty of not gaining heaven (punishment of the damned). And for that judgment to be possible one must make a real choice for or against God so that God can give each soul exactly what it chooses. Providence and grace is such that those who elect evil are still of no permanent consequence to those souls who elect the goodness of God. Each soul is judged for its own merits and choices.

If God did not create those souls He foresaw would reject Him then we see that there would be no real notion of Justice nor freewill nor any possibility for God's creatures to elect to love Him from personal choice. Think about this latter point. If God only went forward with creating those souls who would love Him and passed over those who would reject Him (or never permit Himself to conceive of a soul that might elect to become evil) then this would be no different than pre-judging souls before they were even created. That would not be authentic Justice nor sincere and change our natures completely.

This is not to say that God could not create a perfect world where all choose Him. He could have done that and awed us with such majesty and power that we had to choose to love Him. But that would not be real love and we could not be of the same high elevated nature and estate as He desired for humankind without freewill. We'd be more like the animals. Animals are not rational souls and can not participate in a 2-way love relationship with their Creator. They can only act on instinctive impulse and programming.

It was God's will that none sin - but for the sake of "real" "authentic" love for His Son He created man in His very own image and endowed us with freewill. He did this with full divine insight that Adam would fall and some number of Adam's descendents would reject Him. But again, for emphasis, let me say again - God willed for every soul that was ever born and to be born to be good and to be all it could be. None were born entrapped to a pre-given divine destiny of damnation - even though it is foreseen. God must respect our choices and permit them (even when evil) if freewill is indeed authentic. That said, for the sake of the elect God can elect to mitigate evil once its elected so that it can not overtake all that is good.

There is no malice in the womb - only consequences arising from sin. What we have though is God incarnate coming to us to teach us how to choose wisely and empowering us with the grace to hold the course in the face of temptations of very kind that put us to the test.

We could talk for days on these kinds of topics.

Hope that helps some.
 
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dbz77 is offline dbz77 Post #38  September 18,2011, 10:15am
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Diana_P wrote :

Why would God create something (or someone) that He KNOWs is going to elect not to follow Him?
Because it pleases Him to do so. What other reason does the Lord of Lords and King of Kings need?
 
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dbz77 is offline dbz77 Post #39  September 18,2011, 10:18am
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AZJoe wrote :
What one might ponder here is how awesome and benevolent God is in giving humanity the freedom to shape his own destiny rather than just pre-program it like a mindless robot to play it out wearing either a white hat or a black hat so to speak. No, God let's man choose his own destiny but has established His Plan (Providence). We are empowered by the generous gift of freewill to participate in shaping our destiny and will be blessed when we are conducting ourselves in accord with God's Will (or suffer consequences when not).
In other words, it is a game he set up.
 
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harnomygirl is offline harnomygirl Post #40  September 18,2011, 9:14pm
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I know the way you used the bold font shows what you mean, but I'm used to hearing it emphasized differently.

Yours:
AZJoe wrote :
OT
Genesis 3:17 To Adam God said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
The usual way I hear it:
AZJoe wrote :
OT
Genesis 3:17 To Adam God said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
When I was a kid that was the way most people interpreted it.
 
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