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Day 2 The Fall of Adam and Eve
Understanding the Scriptures - The Didache Series
The Hebrew word used to describe the "serpent," nahash, implies something much more deadly than a garden variety snake. It is used throughout the Old Testament in reference to powerful evil creatures: Numbers 21 the fiery serpents, Isaiah 27:1 the Levanthan (dragon), and Job 26 the sea monster. The serpent in Genesis 3 is more than just subtle, it is deadly, a liar and a murderer.
God said "the day you eat of the tree of knowledge you shall die." The serpent calls God a liar when he says, "You will not die." Though Adam and Eve did not fall dead after eating the fruit, there is always an element of truth hidden in every lie.
Adam and Eve lost something greater than natural life when they acted on the serpents hollow invitation to go against God. They lost supernatural life, original holiness, and original justice. Losing this life was true death. Confronted with the choice of reserving their earthly lives on the one hand or surrendering the supernatural life in their souls on the other, Adam and Eve chose to love themselves more than God. What the serpent had said was right, but in a twisted way. Adam and Eve didn't die physically, but they died spiritually. Their eyes were opened to the shame they had committed by sinning against God. And so like any disobedient child would do, they ran and hid.
Far from abandoning his children, God announces a resolution to the problem and curses the serpent, adding a promise to send one who will conquer the serpent. "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed: he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel." (Gen 3:15) The serpent will wound the Redeemer, but not seriously. The Redeemer will issue the final blow to the serpent, bruising his head. Early Christian writers called this the Protoevangelium or First Gospel and the term "seed of the woman" as God's promise of a future Redeemer.
After evil entered the world, Adam and Eve are banished from the garden. They have two sons Cain and Abel. Cain kills Abel out of envy because Abel's sacrifice had been acceptable to God, but his had not. Cain's sacrifice was not accepted because it was not his best offering. It was given selfishly.
Adam and Eve have another son. They name him Seth.
Cain's family line are the inventors of many things. The Tubal-cain were inventors of metalworking and his half-brother Jubal the father of all those who play the lyre. But the descendant of Cain who gets the most space is Lamech. He came in seven generations later. Seven is not only a covenant number but in the bible seven is often a number of perfection or in this case, ugly completeness.
Lamech takes two wives and defied the marriage covenant created by God. We go on to learn that Lemach and his followers live in a world of wars and bloody revenge. Seven generations down from Adam through Cain the line of evil has reached its ugly completeness.
Seth has a son, he names him Enosh. "At that time men began to call upon the name of the Lord." (Gen 4:26). This phrase means to worship God. Notice the difference between Cain's line and Seth's line. With these lines we see two completely contrary cultures. Cain's evil completeness and Seth's return to the worship of God.
CHALLENGE: “The Christian idea of an omnipotent God is logically contradictory. Can God make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it? If he can then there is something he can’t do (lift the stone), but if he can’t, then there’s also something he can’t do (make the stone).”
DEFENSE: To accuse others of a logical contradiction, first you must understand their idea correctly. Otherwise you commit the straw man fallacy. This objection misunderstands omnipotence. The term “omnipotent” means “all-powerful” (Latin, omnis , “all,” and potens, “powerful”).
This is often said to mean that God can “do anything,” but this statement is ambiguous, and the ambiguity leads to the objection above. What does it mean to say God can do anything? If “anything” means anything that you can say, then the idea would involve logical contradictions.
You could, for example, say that God could make four sided triangles, square circles, married bachelors, two-horned unicorns, and other entities whose definitions involve logical contradictions. This is not what Christian theologians mean by omnipotence. Instead, they mean that God can do anything that is logically possible —that is, anything that does not involve a logical contradiction.
This causes the objection to vanish, because if omnipotence excludes logical contradictions, then, by definition, it does not involve them. It thus resolves the question of whether God can make a stone so heavy he can’t lift it. By virtue of omnipotence, God has infinite, or unlimited, lifting power. There is no upper limit to what God can lift. Thus a stone too heavy for God to lift would have to have more than infinite weight , and the idea of “more than infinite” weight involves a logical contradiction.
Stones too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift fall in the same category as four-sided triangles and married bachelors. They contain logical contradictions and thus represent gibberish rather than logically possible entities.
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