“Now, as Adam and Eve don’t have the faintest idea of right and wrong …” Really?

“There was no death in The Garden …” For sure?

The Apple
Well, fruit of some sort, but we’ll call it an apple for now, as that is the traditional image.
So, God creates Adam and Eve, with no knowledge of good or evil, right or wrong – they are truly innocent. He sticks them in a Garden, and for some reason creates a tree whose fruit gives you the Knowledge of Good and Evil (it’s not explained how this works, but we’ll take their word for it).
“DO NOT EAT OF THIS TREE, OR YOU’LL DIE.” says God.
Adam and Eve hear this and dutifully nod their heads. God goes off somewhere (he’s a busy guy) leaving these two alone.

Now, as Adam and Eve don’t have the faintest idea of right and wrong, they don’t know it’s a Bad Idea to disobey God (“Hey, God just told us not to eat that fruit!”, “So? What’s your point?”, “Erm… I don’t know. Save some for me!”) The only way they can gain this knowledge is by…. Eating from the Tree!

It’s like giving a bottle of bleach to a child who is too young to read the warning labels, and then being surprised when they poison themselves with it. To make matter worse, Adam and Eve were threatened with the punishment of death. How can this be any sort of threat? There was no death in The Garden (see above) – they had never witnessed it, and would probably have a hard time grasping the concept anyway. So, they were told not to do something (and had no way of knowing that disobedience was bad), otherwise something would happen to them (and they had no idea what that was, or whether it was a good or bad thing to happen anyway).. “We’ll die? What does that mean? Maybe it’s fun!”

It’s the original Catch 22 situation.

The kids
Adam and Eve had two children that we know of. Cain and Abel. When they grew up, Cain (or was it the other one?) went off and found a wife. Just where exactly did this woman come from?
And, for that matter, where did everyone else come from? Unless God had been creating loads of people on the sly, the only way for the population to develop from Adam, Eve and the two sons has to involve incestuous relationships.
Not a very good example for the rest of us, is it? (The same also applies when God trashed the world and left Noah and his small family to repopulate the world).

First, a lot of this comes down to what you each think about the Sovereignty of God. For full disclosure, I come from the angle that God is Sovereign over all things and that he controls all things; including natural disasters and even (gasp!) sin? (read 1 Chroncles 10 – Scripture says Saul killed himself in verse 4, then in verse 14 it says that the LORD put him to death – so if suicide is a sin; did not God put Saul to death in His Sovereign poser by a sinful act?) something to ponder – but I do not wish to get sidetracked.

Nonetheless, ALL things are for His Glory to be made known to all creation: period. (Eph 1)

But here is something that could flip this entire conversation.

The question is not in our shocking manner, “how could God have done that?!” or “why did God do such things (herem)?!” but “how could God NOT continue to do that in the face of what humans are and we do!?”

Remember who God is. Holy.

We come from a perspective of sin. We are human. We are sinful. We are coming to these questions from an angle of sin.

God does not know sin; nor does anything that is unholy EVER enter his mind or come to pass by His Hand. This is the perspective of God. He is God. He is not sinful. He comes to creation from the perspective of complete holiness. EVERYTHING from the Hand and Mind of God is Holy – whether we think it is or not.

So, you have creation and you have man. You must go back to Genesis. Adam and Eve were given everything – that is, except one thing – and they chose to disobey God and sin by that one thing. Notice what happens: God told Adam that he would surely die if he ate of that specific tree. Now tell me; did not Adam deserve to be exterminated right then and there for his disobedience? Of course he did!; but God’s mercy was bestowed upon him.

Look at how MERCIFUL God is to creation! Every minute of every hour of every day He is blasphemed, disobeyed, spit upon by his creation who are by nature rebellious to Him and His Name! Why on Earth does he allow all of this to continue to exist!!!??? That is the amazing question.

Look at it that way. Not that God was so “mean” and “hurtful” but look at how merciful God is to allow this all to continue in His patience so that we all can come to Him in repentance.

Luke 13 4-5 “Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? 5I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”

We deserve nothing but death; every one of us. God owes us nothing. We owe God EVERYTHING.

It’s more of a shock that He hasn’t taken every single one of us out in the blink of an eye like we deserve for our rebellion!

Ezekiel 18:25 “Yet you say, ‘The way of the Lord is not just.’ Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way not just? Is it not your ways that are not just?”

Concerning herem, slaughter, etc.: if we take seriously OT scholarship, then all these accounts are written from the perspective of the collapse of the nation of Israel. The Israelites naturally wondered how they could have avoided collapse, and the LORD’s faithful among them gave an answer: serve the LORD alone and purge from the nation all idolatrous influences.

I think that despair for the past and hope for the future at that crucial juncture re-wrote the Israelite history. Thus we have heroes of herem who may or may not have been heroes in their time and who may or may not have received God’s approval. We have stories of herem that don’t seem to correspond to other stories: Joshua has complete conquest where Judges does not. The scholarship points out a lot of such evidence.

But the tensions in the stories didn’t go unnoticed by the Jews, so later texts exhibited competing ideas. The slaughter of Esther competes with the graces of Jonah.

Like Jonah, Jesus criticizes the exclusivist, herem-seeking branch of Judaism. Those Jews concerned themselves with self-preservation for its own sake. Jesus taught self-sacrifice for the benefit of the nations, which was, indeed, God’s hope for Abraham’s children from the first covenant. That is how Jesus provides a “lens” for me. Parts of the OT itself pass judgment on exclusivism; Jesus is God’s imprimatur on that judgment — not by a decree, but by a life.

If you can’t accept scholarship, I don’t know how to help you here. If you can’t accept humanity shaping the scriptures, I don’t know how to help. You will have to undertake a journey and a struggle that I’ve seen but through which I am a poor guide. You will have to inspect your modern approach to the scriptures, especially the part that tells you to accept every verse a stand-alone data point of objective truth. To me the scriptures are true: they point the right way in the end, but not every word contributes to the true conclusion in the same way.

Even those who can accept scholarship and a non-atomistic view of the truth of the text might not be able to accept my understanding of the progress of Jewish faith or my resolution of herem. That resolution looks, even to me, a little too cut-and-dried. I’ve worked long and hard at it, but without the tools and knowledge of the really good theologians. So don’t pin my understanding on others who you think look like me. Mike, for instance, might end up in a quite different place when he’s done with this series.

The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it … TRUE!

Okay, before you all start hating me, first … I’m new here, so please be gentle. Also, read on …

The problem with the people who SAY they “believe” the bible, actually haven’t read it carefully as Mike suggests. For example, the letters to Timothy make it plain that PAUL wrote them, and that he wrote them specifically to Timothy, a preacher. He didn’t write them to ME, or to US (otherwise, we’d have to go to Troas and find a coat and some parchments).

The problem is one of pronouns … all the docs of the bible were written TO someone else, none of it TO us. But it was written FOR us! It’s like hearing my parents yell at my sister. It’s not TO me, but I can definately learn from it.

What if we call the first 39 books the “Jewish Testament” instead of the “Old Testament”? It was never TO me or my other gentile friends … my ancestors were (sadly) worshipping trees back then!

Now when reading about slavery or sacrifice or tattoos, I’m reading the words of an old man (80-120 years old) named Moses who’s introducing Yahweh to a group of people who have been nothing more than a rapidly growing tribe of slaves, and now this invisible God, whose name they haven’t even known … is going to make them into a nation, and GIVE them a whole chunk of land? The 400 year old legends about Abe and Jake are true?

This has everything with us learning about how God introduced Himself and gave laws for a primitive people. We can learn about HIM through His word … not a bunch of stupid rules.

PS:
Sorry if I offend. I’m passionately in love with the Torah, and thrilled to find Mike’s blog and see that he’s studying this. It should be great.

Also, “slaves” are not “slaves.” there are many different kinds of slavery, and (as I’m sure Mike will get to) not ALL forms of slavery are “authorized.” Again, this is TO them, only FOR us.

It’s not the Scriptures I have trouble with and can’t explain that bother me…it’s those I do understand and fail to live up to that are my problem.