Some points to ponder:
"Death is the direct result of sin."
If physical death is the result of sin, such that all men physically die
because all men sin, and if the blood of Christ is supposed to wash us free
of sin, why do all Christians still physically die? You'll physically die,
I'll physically die, Glenn will physically die, we all will physically die,
Christian and non-Christian alike. If physical death is the enemy, such
that belief in Christ as the Messiah saves us from it, then the fact that
we all still physically die makes Christ a liar. Or it is not physical
death that is the enemy, but death of the soul.
"The earth was cursed because of Adam...."
Why? Why would the sin of man have such a profound influence over the
whole of the physical universe? Unless it didn't, and the curse was
limited to soul-death, the loss of an easy living and estrangement from
God.
"'All scripture is given by inspiration of God,...'"
True, but men wrote the Bible, and fallible men sometimes get things wrong,
or reinterpret things to fit their own biases, or add in their own
theology.
"If only part of the Scripture is inspired and the gap holes were filled by
men, then Paul was mistaken."
There is some question as to whether wrote the letters to Timothy, but even
if he did it isn't that he was wrong, but that he trusted that everything
written was absolutely right. He couldn't analyze Scripture the way we can
today, so he didn't have the resources to figure out if he was wrong or
not. And I doubt he would use them even if he did. Besides, he wasn't
mistaken about God's influence on Scripture; he simply underestimated the
influence of its human writers.
"After all, one can't honestly say that God created and made something when
in reality He didn't. If God made it, then He did the labor not some
process He created."
When you drive a nail into wood, is it you doing the work or the hammer?
The hammer is only a tool; it can do nothing by itself. But try to drive
a nail through wood with your bare hand. Tools make doing work easier and
faster, but the tool-user still does the work. The same is true of God.
The forces of the universe are the tools He used to make the universe and
everything in it. The tools made it easier for Him to do the work, but He
still did the work, not the tools.
"...He formed Adam from something that wasn't there."
Actually He made Adam from the dust of the ground, which I find rather
interesting. Dust is itself a product of decay. The fact that God
purposely made man from a product of decay indicates to me that God did not
intend for man to be immortal. Only the soul, the "breath of life"
breathed into man by God, was immortal. Yet when man sinned, the soul
died, and it wasn't until the sacrifice of Christ that men's souls began to
live again.
Kevin L. O'Brien
klob@lamar.colostate.edu