Bible Question: What was the First Sin?

Hi ariel. Welcome to EvC.(Before you run screaming in the opposite direction, let me tell you that I'm going to be extra gentle with you - until I have to reload. ) More important, where does it say that the death punishment would not be physical? It seems to me that you're making up a "spiritual death" that isn't even hinted at in the text, just to avoid a contradiction. Nope.Trapped in time as we are, we have no way of knowing what eternity would "seem like". Then why did He specifically tell Adam that it was "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil"? Not much of a way to keep a secret.

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Gen 2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

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Speculation. Inadmissible. Satan isn't even mentioned in the story.-------------I could find a lot more to criticize in your short post, but is that enough to get me on your hate list?

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I don't think that's clear at all.

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Gen 3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil....

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Becoming "like God" is a good thing. The knowledge of good and evil is a good thing.
It seems to me that the point of the story is not about blind obedience but using our knowledge wisely.People put too much emphasis on the punishment God gave to Adam and Eve. The sweat-of-the-brow and pain-in-childbirth just illustrate that there are consequences to our actions. The real point is that knowledge and free will - not just obedience - bring us closer to God.Edited by Ringo, : Punctuation.

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That's just the point, though: we don't stay children. The story is about two children learning and growing up. As they grow up, they become more like their parents. You can't just make up maybes and probablies like that. You have to deal with the story as written. Exactly. It changed from a blind obedience relationship to a more equal relationship, from a parent/child relationship to a parent/adult relationship. There's nothing about "covenants" in there. A covenant is a give/take relationship. The garden of Eden story is strictly an explanation of what is. There are no contractual obligations on either side. Well, God said it did:

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Gen 3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us....

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Argue with Him. That has nothing to do with knowledge or obedience. That says that our wisdom is less than God's. It does not imply that we shouldn't strive to improve our wisdom to the best of its potential.One way to do that is to remove the blinkers and open our eyes.

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God providing Adam with the necessities of life hardly constitutes a covenant. He does that for everybody.A covenant entails a specific agreement with a specific person or group. The first covenant that God mentioned was with Noah (Gen 6:18), so let's not disagree with Him, okay? For future reference: I don't use Paul to explain Genesis. I use Genesis to explain Genesis.Specifically, in your quote Paul speaks of "the last days". Since we are talking about the first days in this topic, that quote is spectacularly irrelevant. Where do you get that Adam's and Eve's knowledge brought them selfishness? Why not? Why wouldn't practical truths about God's creation bring us closer to God? How does "closer to God" have any meaning except in practical terms?

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That's what I'm asking you. When using the words "them" and "they", please be clear to whom you're refering. Excuse me? You brought up a quote which is completely out of context and you didn't specify which "they" you were refering to. No, that's not a covenant - it's a fact of life. As I said, a covenant is specific - it does not apply to everybody. How can seeing what is in Genesis be blind? How can you know about "God as a being" except through His creation? Sorry, but that is not a given in this thread. This thread is about the first sin, which was presumably in Genesis or at least almost certainly in the Old Testament. Jews and Muslims accept the Old Testament but they don't accept that Jesus is God - so that idea has no relevance here. I'm trying to get you to question what you believe.

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I was just pointing out that you weren't clear the first time. Exactly. There was no "agreement" between God and Adam, just the status quo. Hence, no covenant. A promise is not an agreement. Hence, no covenant. Using another text to "affirm" a text is blind knowledge. You should be seeking to test the passage, not affirm it. Using an untested passage to affirm another untested passage only compounds the error. Sorry, none of that is relevant in this thread. Anybody's theology is a tangent in this thread. I don't know where you got the impression that this was a Christian thread or a Christian forum, but it's not. You can't just discount everybody's theology but your own. A lot of people don't agree with you what the "real meaning" is. That's why we have this forum - to discuss different ideas. I stand up for the Bible.And yes, I will shoot your ideas down if they are weak. Even if I agree with you, I will shoot down your weak arguments. Weak arguments are no good for anybody. I look at how you treat Christians like jar (and I haven't even told you whether or not I am a Christian). You come in here with an arrogant attitude about how you are going to teach us a thing or two about the Bible's "real meaning". You tell people who have studied the bible for half a century that they don't know anything, that they're blind. You throw Judaism and Islam out the window with no consideration whatsoever....Take the beam out of your own eye.Edited by Ringo, : "test" --> "text".

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No. Obedience --> reward is not an agreement. It's a one-way street.But that's not the topic. Can you confine yourself to one misunderstanding per thread? Your contempt for logic doesn't impress me. Changing ideas are not changing logic. Logic is the unchanging foundation on which we build our ideas. Ideas change because of added information, operated on by the same logic. Nonsense. It wasn't in English 2000 years ago, was it? And there is no fixed canon. "The Bible" is different things to different people. Of course you did, when you proclimed that Jesus is God. If you're considering other theologies, that can never be a "fact". Yes, it has been simple so far. Try harder. First off, since you don't seem to have a real firm grip on the topic, how about telling me what you think "this subject" is? Then tell me what you think my point of view on "this subject" is. Then I'll point out where you're wrong. (Second off, you've been around long enough to have learned how to do quotes properly. Try [qs]This is a quote.[/qs].)

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I was tempted to suggest that the first "first sin" was when God lied to Adam about killing him on the spot. We learn our bad habits from our parents, don't we?

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Well, He did say, "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." That's a pretty clear time frame.And He didn't add any mumbo-jumbo about "spiritual death" or "a day is like a thousand years". The plain words are pretty plain. What's the difference between "He didn't mean what he said" and "He lied"?(And doesn't it occur to you that you're approaching the question in the wrong way? )

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Well, He'd curse the serpent first for exposing His lie. But if God lied, they weren't deceived - they saw the "light". I'm playing serpent's advocate here, but maybe I'm being too "subtle" for you. My suggestion wasn't so much about nitpicking the details of the story as about the nature of sin.Can/did God sin? If we take purpledawn's definition of sin as "going against God's commands", what if God goes against His own commands? He commanded us not to lie, so if He lied, did He sin?

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That's an extremely weak response. Please think before you post.Of course a liar goes after whoever exposed his lie first. He silences the dissenting voice first and then he's free to reinforce the lie with his victim.If you have an intelligent response, I'd be glad to hear it, but keep your incredulity to yourself. Those scriptures aren't much of a testimonial unless they can be verified. Maybe Paul lied to Titus. Maybe Paul was just wrong. It's all just circular reasoning. That's the question I'm asking: If God tells us not to do something but He does it Himself, does that make Him a sinner? A liar? A hypocrite? A bad example? We're not talking about authority here. Hitler had authority.We're talking about "sin" - "right" and "wrong". Is it wrong for God to say one thing and do another?

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So if you tell your grandson, "You'll die if you eat that cookie," that's not a lie?Come to think of it, children are always saying, "My parents are going to kill me." Who knew that methphor went all the way back to the Garden? So God gets off on a technicality: the commandment not to lie didn't exist yet. Whatever happened to the idea of God being eternal? Didn't He know lying was wrong even before He mentioned it to us?

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It seems to me that whether or not it was a "sin" is the very question of this thread - though I suppose Brian meant only human sins.

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So, what reliable information do we have about what God would do? No, it doesn't matter who Paul was. All that matters is whether or not his statements are verifiable. Doesn't matter. They could be from Treasure Island but they still have to be verifiable. I'm not testing God's knowledge. I'm testing the veracity of statements made about God, by men. Well, that's a good thing, of course, but that's not what I'm doing. I'm talking about an eight-year-old catching his father in a lie - or rather like a twelve-year-old telling his little brother a story in which their father lied. The first thing you should ask is, "Where are the nailprints in your hands?" That's what Thomas did and he was blessed.

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In the real world, we have to grow our minds by studying, going to school and getting stomped on Internet forums. In the Garden of Eden story, Adam and Eve "grew up" magically when they ate the fruit.The story illustrates the process of growing up.When we're children, we're innocent. We might do things that are "wrong", but we're not to blame if we don't know any better. That's why almost nobody believes that little children go to hell.When we get the knowledge of good and evil, we are responsible for our actions. We pay the consequences. Unfortunately, some people completely miss the point of the story and blame their own wrongdoing on some poor snake or fallen angel.If that was true, if "the devil made me do it" was a valid defense, the story would be meaningless. There would be no knowledge of good and evil. There would be no growing up.

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