Moorad Alexanian wrote:
<< Perhaps you can help me in the following. The creation
was good. Imperfect people like us see it today as not good.
What happened in between? Was there a place, Paradise,
where unfallen man lived, while the rest of creation had
already fallen? Did Satan fall first and marred the
creation, the Bible indicates that? Can we ever conceive
of creation before the fall of man or Satan?
>>
If I am supposed to take the passage on Adam and Eve as a
literal historic event, rather than a lesson about personal
responsibility and accountability (which is more the point
even if it is in fact a genuine historical event), then I
would surmise that evil came into the world when Adam
consciously (and possibly deliberately) acted out in
rebellion toward God and subsequently tried to cover it
up and finally tried to blame Eve for his own folly.
As I might understand it, "evil" takes on a variety of
forms. Often, "evil" refers to a conscious intentional
act of immorality. Hence, a rock cannot be considered
"evil", but the same rock can be *used* by a conscious
creature to commit an act of evil (where up to now for
certain, the only such conscious creatures in the known
universe are human beings.) The other major place we
sometimes speak of evil is when we see suffering on
the part of good people: an evil fate. Many evil fates
are still the consequences of our (collective) fallen
nature, such as when we have no sensitivity to our fellow
human beings and ignore their human needs, or even when
we ourselves ignore obvious health problems. However, there
are yet other evils that remain an age old paradox and evoke
that question "why?". To this last category, I don't think
a simple minded literal interpretion of the bible offers
any *better* answer to the question. It remains, and probably
will remain, a difficult and perplexing matter of the human
condition.
What can be gained from my death,
from my descent into the Pit?
Can the dust praise You?
Can it declare our faithfulness?
Hear, O Lord, and have mercy on me;
O Lord, be my help
(Psalm 30:10)
From God's perspective, God can know all this, and know it
before the foundation of the world (and implicitly, the creation
of the universe). Nevertheless, because we have free will, we
make the choices we do, and sometimes (often?) we rebel. We
make our own choices. They are completely ours, and we own them.
Only God knows what will become of it all in regards to the
ultimate question.
Therefore, I still reject your assertion that Howard's model
is "deistic". Indeed, it seems to me that you make God less
sovereign than Howard does over the creation because you
*insist* on a "god" acting entirely in *your* own time
reference frame. That would be a god who acts in history,
but it is a tin god of a puny universe and surely not even
the best human attempt at understanding and appreciating
how truly vast the sovereignty of God *is*. Yet even all
this will someday be found to be so far from truly
appreciating what Christ's death and resurrection means.
You may have the last word on this.
By Grace alone do we proceed,
Wayne
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Oct 26 2000 - 20:09:51 EDT