@cedars:
I've just posted a new blog article....
I read it.
The purpose behind the article is to explore my own doubts and long-standing confusion over the Genesis narrative - particularly the events surrounding Adam and Eve's expulsion from Eden, and the "two trees" (namely the "tree of life" and the "tree of the knowledge of good and bad").
I agree that this was the gist of your blog article, yes.
In my article I discuss my confusion over what the exact properties of the "tree of the knowledge of good and bad" may have been, and the fact that evidently by eating of the fruit Adam and Eve did not become sinful but more godlike. I ponder how this relates to the concept of inherited sin.
Ok. I would like to tell you that the tree of "the knowledge of good and bad" was just a tree, it was a fruit tree, but it didn't have any special "properties"; it's fruit was just fruit of some kind and nothing more. I'm glad that your ponderings have been about the connection this portion of the Genesis account to the inherited sin we all have and not about the kind of fruit tree from which Adam and his wife were commanded not to eat. (Based on what Eve tells the serpent, it is clear to me that Adam had told his wife that she shouldn't even think about touching this tree.)
(From your blog article:)
Love is essentially an emotional attribute....
I don't want to post too much here from your article, but love is so much more than "an emotional attribute." I've just leave it there.
Evidently, the tree of life was the source of Adam and Eve’s everlasting life, and it was among the trees from which they were encouraged to "eat to satisfaction".
I understand that you think this "tree of life" to have been the source of everlasting life, but this isn't "evident" to me, and this may be because I cannot wrap my mind around the idea of a tree having something that even God's son didn't have until he was granted to have life in himself, and this was after his baptism, This sounds to me like you think of the tree of life as a kind of "magic tree," a tree imbued with properties that could give to anyone that eats of its fruit everlasting life, except Adam didn't know about the tree of life. You and I know about the tree of life because you and I have a copy of the Bible, which contains the Genesis account, but even if Adam had a Bible, the Genesis account wasn't included in his copy.
On the other hand, the "tree of the knowledge of good and bad" was strictly off limits, but it was the properties of this tree in particular that confused me.
What "properties"? I don't see a thing that could confuse you here. The Bible doesn't talk about properties.
[I]f Adam and Eve had already been created in God’s likeness, then how was it that by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad they became LIKE God and Christ?
What's the nexus between Adam and Eve's having been created in God's likeness and the fact that they rebelled against God's rulership by opting for self-rule? By eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, they rejected God's righteousness and wanted to establish their own standard of righteousness. Now we know that God sets the standards for righteousness, and Christ had come to know God's righteousness for the heavenly realm for God sarcastically said about Adam and Eve that "they have become like one of us knowing good and bad," but they had not learned God's righteousness for the earthly realm, something that God requires before he grants to anyone the right to life, just as Jesus had to learn obedience when he became a man here on earth before he was granted immortality. (As an aside here, I will just add here that if our learning God's righteousness during Judgment Day should be based upon what is written in those scrolls that will become available to us then, clearly we will all have learned "good and bad" by the time the thousand years have ended.)
Technically speaking, nothing that the serpent told Eve was untruthful, because the fruit wasn’t itself deadly....
The Bible doesn't talk about "deadly fruit," but Adam and Eve are dead, are they not? This was Lie #1. Furthermore, they had become like God, except they had established their own standard of righteousness and rejected God's righteousness. Adam and Eve were like the teenager that decides that now that he has finished high school and has a job, he can now emancipate himself and move away from home and get his own apartment, so that he no longer has to do any of the chores he hated doing, except he comes to the realization that apartment life means more than just paying the rent:
There's a car payment, an electric bill, a gas bill, monthly parking bill, the laundromat, the cleaners, ironing, food shopping, clothes shopping, restaurants and/or cooking at home with hardly anything left from the paycheck to afford lunch everyday at work or to buy gas for his car. Lacking the necessary skills to be able to cook, to wash and iron his clothes, to keep his kitchen and bathroom clean, and seeing how expensive it is to buy lunch and eat in restaurants everyday, put his clothes in the cleaners and buy gas, he came to realize that his "righteousness" didn't measure up to the "righteousness" he rejected and didn't want to learn when he was back home with his parents, where he didn't have to pay rent and carried hardly any of these burdens. Yes, Adam and Eve did become like God, but the didn't know God's righteousness. This was Lie #2.
The only way in which the serpent could be said to be misleading Eve was in its failure to warn her that she would die as an indirect consequence of eating the fruit. That is to say, it wasn’t the fruit that killed Eve, it was the punitive actions taken by God....
Warning her? The serpent told Eve that she wouldn't die, and misled her into believing something to be true about her becoming like God in knowing what is good and bad that clearly wasn't true. Perhaps you recall Jesus referring to the devil as the father of the lie, but if Eve had known God's righteousness, perhaps she and Adam would be alive today. God didn't kill Eve, nor did the fruit she ate kill Eve. God simply withdrew from them she and her husband so that the power that would have sustained their lives indefinitely ceased to function: This was death.
It was as if they were battery-powered automatons, except they were human beings, and although they had now been unplugged from their power source, they were still able to function with the life they had and even have children for a time, but eventually the "battery" did become exhausted and they died. We today live on that same battery charge that was first given us by Adam and Eve, except that the "charge" in us turned out to last on the average for only about 70 or 80 years.
Notice what God goes on to say in Genesis 3:22:
"and now in order that he [Adam] may not put his hand out and actually take fruit also from the tree of life and eat and live to time indefinite...." [¶] So it’s clear from the above account that the tree of life, whatever it actually was, was a source of eternal life to whoever ate from it....
This is not so "clear" to me, but I understand your point. However, Jehovah is the source of eternal life and Genesis 3:22 is the very first time that Adam and Eve came to learn about the existence of the "tree of life." As I said above, you and I are the ones that happen to have a Bible, which contains a copy of the Genesis account; Adam and Eve didn't have a Bible, so he had no way of knowing about what Genesis 2:9 says. People often read more into the Bible than it says.
The serpent, Satan, claimed that the newfound "knowledge" obtained from the contraband tree would indeed make Adam and Eve "like God" – which it evidently did.
No, they didn't gain any knowledge from a tree, and Adam and Eve were in no respect "like God"; their knowledge of "good and bad" was based on their own standards, not God's. As I say above, God was being sarcastic when he indicated that they had come to know "good and bad," just as when Satan is twice referred to in the Bible as "the original serpent," which became a symbol of the curse upon Satan in Eden when Satan started the rebellion against God by misleading Eve.
The only issue was that they could not be permitted to live with this knowledge forever by eating further from the "tree of life". God evidently determined that having BOTH the new knowledge AND eternal life was inconceivable – hence the banishment. [¶] As you can imagine, this has left more questions than answers in my mind, as follows…
I would suggest that you stop reading things into Scripture that isn't there and this will keep you from postulating things from non-facts. You didn't read anywhere in the Genesis account about Adam and Eve's eating from the "tree of life." You read mention at Genesis 2:9 about God's making to grow trees that were "desirable to one's sight and good for food" and then specific mention made of the "tree of life" and the "tree of the knowledge of good and bad" and conclude that Adam and Eve has been eating from the tree of life, when the point of separating these two trees from the other trees that existed in Eden that had been "desirable to [their] sight and good for food" is the fact that they weren't eating from either of these two trees.
Yes, at Genesis 2:16, 17, Jehovah did give to Adam the command: "From every tree of the garden you may eat to satisfaction. But as for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad you must not eat from it," but he never mentioned the "tree of life" that was "in the middle of the garden" along with along with the "tree of the knowledge of good and bad." How do I know that Adam and Eve knew nothing about this tree? When telling the serpent about God's command with respect to the "tree of the knowledge of good and bad," Eve spoke of only the "eating of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden...." Evidently Satan had no idea that God has designated any of the trees as a "tree of life," for in that case he would surely have said to Eve instead:
"You positively will not die. Go eat fruit from the tree of life, which is also in the middle of the garden, and then you may eat from the other tree, for God knows that in the very day of your eating from it your eyes are bound to be opened and you are bound to be like God, knowing good and bad."
This move would have put Jehovah God in a predicament that obviously Jehovah didn't want to be in so he never even mentioned the tree of life until Adam and Eve were being evicted from Eden. No doubt Adam, Eve, Satan and the two cherubs that were posted at the east of the garden of Eden to block the way to tree of life all learned for the first time about this tree.
Just what was it about "the tree of the knowledge of good and bad" that made Adam and Eve even more godlike than they already were? Was it in fact "sentience" itself – or human self-awareness?
The fact that they were setting their own standards make them like God, not "godlike." (The word "godlike" has a very different meaning than the words "like God.")
This might explain the reaction of Adam and Eve to their nakedness.
A guilty conscience would explain their peculiar behavior since they had sinned, they had previously had nothing about which to feel guilty. Adam gave he and his wife away by telling God that they were naked when God had never told either of them that they were naked. With that "confession," God knew exactly what has transpired.
Above all, where does the concept of "inherited sin" and human perfection fit into all of this?
Adam and Eve had become, in effect, battery-powered human beings that at their sentencing became unplugged from God, their power source, so we, their children, came to inherit what they had become, not what they had been, and our "charge" doesn't last too much longer than 70 or 80 years on an average.
Obviously the act of eating the fruit was sinful, but not necessarily whatever it was that the fruit did to them. So where does the notion of inherited sin and the ransom fit into all of this?
You seem to be of the opinion that the fruit that Adam and Eve ate that they should not have eaten poisoned their bodies or changed them in some way, but what is the scriptural basis for such speculation on your part?
@djeggnog
