Death in Relation to the Creation and Fall

Whatever you say, arach. I'll stick with traditional theology.

So you'll be resigning from the critical thinking thread then......

So ... this is another Grand Staircase cross-section argument? The scriptures you are relying on are not that clear when view in context of other scriptures. The idea is to harmonize your understanding of scripture - I don't feel you have presented a conclusive case. No. Its purpose was to give the man life. It would enable them to live forever; that is point clear from scripture. (Gen 3:22) I grant you that wildness does not indicate conclusively that there was death. However, it does indicate that nature had an element of chaos that needed to be ordered. Why is gardening satisfying work? Fro just this reason; it brings order in a wild, chaotic world. How do you figure I am imposing an idea of perfection of my own when I am arguing that the original creation was not perfect? Yup ... that's what I do Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew Lexicon:

quote:

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gan:
1) garden, enclosure (noun masculine or feminine)
1a) enclosed garden
1a1) (figuratively of a bride)
1b) garden (of plants)
1c) Garden of Eden (noun proper locative)

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Strong's Concordance

quote:

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gan:
an enclosure, garden
Original Word: גָּן
Part of Speech: noun masculine; feminine; proper name, of a location
Transliteration: gan
Phonetic Spelling: (gan)
Short Definition: garden

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The NAS Old Testament Hebrew Lexicon

quote:

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gan:
garden, enclosure
enclosed garden
(fig. of a bride)
garden (of plants) n pr loc
Garden of Eden

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Death is a part of life. We obtain energy by the death of other organisms. Gen 1:14 indicates that God created the "lights in the expanse of the heavens" to mark seasons (and days and years). Seasons are about life, decline, death, renewal and life again. My point is the world would have to function completely differently after the fall if death was not a part of the original design. So much differently, that it just doesn't make sense to me. Jesus used the concept that death must occur for their to be life. That he used a seed as the example is not the point. So it wasn't His death that took love, it was facing fear and death? So again, its not death that is the problem but pain and misery and suffering? Why is that? Where is the scriptural support for this? It seems that Satan brought sin to the earth but Adam brought sin to mankind. It seems pretty clear from the passage. This would mean that other passages that state the man brought sin into the world they are referring to mankind (which is a legitimate rendering of the word "world.") The new heaven and new earth seem to include death, but not the pain and suffering associated with it. My point is death is part of the physical world, it is how it works. When death is finally defeated and eliminated, we will no longer be a part of this physical world, we will have new bodies, somehow different than we have in this physical reality. What do you think "passed to a better life" means? It seems to me that he is referring to the end of a temporal, physical, mortal life and the beginning of an immortal, non-physical life. Sin brought about the suffering, the wrenching apart, the destruction of death. Is the physical world our ultimate destination, even if there was no sin? Of course canned answers are always quite obvious. I am asking for you to think deeper about this. Do you think that Jesus inherited original sin from Adam? If he did, wouldn't that disqualify him from being worthy, since it is our inherited sinful nature that we cannot overcome, its not a matter of living a perfect life. If he did not, then wouldn't he have been immortal, since it was original sin that brings death? However, it is pretty clear that Jesus was not immortal, but that he was subject to death just as we all are. He almost starved to death in the wilderness for example.In addition, God could do whatever he wanted. Why did he have to die in order to bring salvation? He could have chose a different method, but instead he chose to participate in the human condition. He chose to subject himself to the constraints and struggles of the physical world. Why would he chose to participate in something that was evil (death)?HBD

well, no, you won't. you're going with this new-fangled sect of jesus worshipers, and not the prior standing traditional theology of judaism.

then how can you hope to understand it?

Arach, you aren't a believer, right? You approach the Bible purely as a scholar? I didn't say I understand all the NT, I don't question it because I know it's God's word so I know it's the truth even though I may not understand all of it yet. Jesus said "believe," He didn't say "criticize." I trust that difficult parts will eventually be revealed to me if I wait on God to reveal it. What a believer does is seek God's help in reading and understanding, prays about it, listens to sermons, reads commentaries, consults the concordance etc. In fact trusting it is the only way you'll ever understand it. If you question it with the attitude that any part of it is wrong you'll just get deeper and deeper into misunderstanding. The Bible is no doubt the only book that should be approached this way. It IS God's word.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Christian theology begins in the New Testament and continues through the Church Fathers and down the millennia. It IS traditional theology and not "new-fangled" and it very specifically rejects a great deal of the understanding of Judaism. Jesus contended with the Pharisees you know, but you prefer their thinking over His apparently. I do not understand that attitude, unless you are an orthodox Jew yourself. It's only through the New Testament interpretations that you can hope to understand the Bible.

So orthodox is just "canned" to you. Guess you've dispensed with THAT then, hm? No. Sin is inherited through the father and His Father was God, not Joseph. As I understand it sin is not inherited through the mother, according to some commentaries I've read. Jesus was absolutely sinless, free of original sin as well as personal sin. He could not have died a "natural" death BECAUSE He had no sin of His own, and if He had, His death could not have saved us. Why do you keep ignoring the scripture I've quoted? Death is the fruit of sin, without sin there is no death. What the Tree of Life did for them before they sinned I don't know, but they could not have died if they did not sin and we know they didn't until the serpent deceived Eve.Apparently it fostered or sustained immortality in some way, which was not a problem before they sinned but would have been a disaster afterward, which is the context of that verse.You cannot read scripture outside the context of scripture. If death is the result of sin then whatever the Tree of Life did they could not have died anyway.Sorry, I didn't grasp that you were quoting something about a walled enclosure. Not sure what the point is, however. Oh yes it is. Death is not the natural route to life, it is only so for the seed and spiritual life in the sense Jesus is alluding to. When the seed dies you get a new plant, that is not the case with the death of animals or people, you just get rot and decay. Life for the microbes and insects perhaps, and for the predators of course, but not for the animal itself. It doesn't make sense to anybody, why should it? The implication is that the world WAS very very different indeed before the Fall and before the Flood too. If the Bible is the word of God, which of course I believe it is, then we are simply to believe and trust it whether we understand it or not. We're talking about GOD here, not a man-made treatise, despite all the claims otherwise. In fact the commentaries about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil say it was simply meant as a test of their trust and obedience. That's the only attitude we can rightly have toward God. We can and should investigate His word in great depth, sure, but not with a critical attitude. That's really all you mean when you say you want me to "think deeper." It's you who needs to think deeper. Scripture always has to be conformed to scripture, and the underlying attitude always has to be trust or the effort is only going to mislead.Jesus was very hungry after His time in the wilderness, that's all it says. It does not say He would have "starved to death." And since He Himself says it was within His own power to give up His own life on the cross, THAT's the context you need to read THAT scripture in. He claimed the power to live or die at will, HBD. Tree of Life, eating food in the glorified state too, those are not things you can understand all that easily. I don't know what "passed to a better life" means, and since your interpretation denies the contexts I've given over and over I can't agree with you about it. Sin is the cause of death. God said if they disobeyed they would die. It hadn't happened before. You have to read all those other verses in that context, whether you are able to make sense of them or not. The death of plants is not death in the sense of the death from the Fall. You can keep repeating it but that doesn't make it so. And plants were apparently the only food before the Fall. NOW we are to eat meat to sustain us, as God told Noah. BIG CHANGE. It actually says "for SIGNS and seasons," which many interpret as meaning that they were given originally as signs in the sense astrologers read them, although since the Fall they've lost their original significance. Except some do read the gospel in the Zodiac. I have a book called "The Witness of the Stars" by E. W. Bullinger which is all about that. You don't have to take it as gospel truth [in fact he's got some heretical views] but it's interesting stuff.There's an interesting study called The Star of Bethlehem that you can get on DVD that investigates the position of various planets around the time of Jesus' birth. I think it may have a few problems myself but it's nevertheless very interesting. The guy uses a NASA program to track the position of the planets through the millennia.Also, it's really not all that clear that the word "seasons" in that context refers to the sequence of Spring, Summer etc. The word in the English of the KJV simply means "appointed time" and the reference to "signs" does suggest it may not refer to the seasons as you are thinking of them. But even if it does, again the only death that is connected with the seasons is plant life, which is not death in the sense associated with the Fall.I know I'm skipping around your post but I think I've answered what I wanted to answer. If not I'll continue later. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

Wow, so if (when?) a human is cloned we will have a sinless human for the first time in a couple of milenia.

Interesting thought though I would suppose the cloned person would simply inherit the same sin as the person it was cloned from.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

That doesn't follow from what you said. She would have no father.

But she would also not have been conceived and born in the normal way, and would have NO parents, except those of the person she was cloned from. She'd have that person's DNA, no inheritance of her own.

Where do you get this nonsense????Here's a better take on the matter:

Sin lies only in hurting others unnecessarily. All other sins are invented nonsense.

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Robert A. Heinlein

You're interpreting 99% of the Bible based on 1% of its contents. You've taken a handful of words from one book, and are applying that to the rest of it. Since you cannot question whether you have interpreted that 1% as correct or not, you'll never be able to free yourself from your assumption. You cannot hope to find any better answers because you're stuck clinging to the one you already have. Given the inconsistencies and problems that arise from your position, you're only ever going to be able to consider them nonsense because you just have to stick to your original assumption. If you were able to question whether or not your interpretation of that 1% was correct, you might begin to be able to make sense out of all the stuff that contradicts it. But since you can't, you won't.

What I'm doing is standard hermeneutics as I've studied them. Sure I COULD be wrong about this or that but I've spent enough time on these things to be convinced of what I've said here. The rule is to interpret the difficult scriptures by the clear scriptures, there's nothing about percentage. ALL scripture is inspired by God, and it must all be reconciled, you can't make one part contradict another. God said death would be the consequence of disobedience, and "the wages of sin is death" confirms that. Therefore the Tree of LIfe has to conform to that revelation, you can't assume there's a contradiction just because that's the way it first hits you, you can't just make it eliminate the immortality that is obviously implied in the other scriptures. Again, the obscure is to be interpreted by the clear. If you aren't clear about any of it then keep working on it, but I am clear about it.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.