October, 2007:

Here is the intial response to the “Questions From Genesis” I sent after a bit of study and consultation.  Have fun with it, and by all means challenge me.  These answers were not the result of years of theological study, so of course I may not have some of it right.

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Hi xxxxx (not his real name BTW),

Great questions! It is a good time to ask me about Noah and the flood since my wife and I went to see Evan Almighty last weekend so I have been thinking about the flood narrative.

Now on to your questions. These are big questions that many books have been written about and are still being debated to this day. I will try to tell you briefly what I believe from my study of scripture and from consultation with people smarter than I am.

I will address your third question first since it precedes the others in the narrative and lays necessary groundwork for the interpretation of the events that follow.

ADAM AND EVE

In many ways God is indeed a dictator, and in short He, as Creator, has every right to be one. What you need to see additionally is that He is also benevolent. He set up this world exactly the way He wanted it to be set up – perfect in every way – and he could have caused it to remain perfect, and it probably would have remained perfect had he not given mankind the ability to reason and make choices. With this free will the first humans God created disobeyed Him, and with this free will we all continue the rebellion.

Some see this ability to sin, to offend God, as a flaw in His design. I see it as a manifestation of His love and His desire for reciprocal love. But the fact remains: if loving Him were the only option, it would not be an option at all and therefore we would not have free will.

So you reason correctly that without choice we would be as robots. But without one or the other – evil or good- we do not lose 50% of our options, we lose 100%. If there is only one choice to be made there really is no choice at all. So God, in His love, risked the possibility of man’s rebellion by giving him choice, free will. (Free will is another concept about which many books have been written. So many books, so little time)

To understand Genesis 3:22, let’s go back to Genesis 2:16-17. In these verses God gives man permission to eat from any tree in the garden including the tree of life, which was placed at the center of the garden beside the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:9). But after man has willfully disobeyed God and eaten from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – the one God said he should not do – he can no longer be physically immortal. God further limits immortality in Genesis 6:3 where He says, “In the future, they will live no more than 120 years.” In the preceding chapter we see humans routinely living to almost 1000 years. Can you imagine being one millennium old?

I think the core of your question is this: since prior to eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil Adam and Eve had no knowledge of evil, did they have free will or were they robots? The answer is that they had free will; otherwise they would not have had the ability to choose to eat from the forbidden tree.

What qualifies our free will is the availability of choices and the ability to choose between them, not the experience of the outcome of these choices. The forbidden tree represents the experience of evil since, in choosing to disobey God, they experience evil, sin, for the first time.

NOAH

Although scripture says that Noah was “a righteous man, the only blameless man living on the earth at the time,” the others that went on the ark were not as he was; therefore the sinfulness of humanity would not be totally erased. After the flood the human race did not start at “ground zero”, since ground zero would imply a sinless condition equivalent to that of the Garden of Eden before sin entered it.

And even Noah was not sinless. In Gen 9:18, immediately after the flood and the covenant with God, we see Noah lying naked in his tent, drunk on wine from his own vineyard.

So a few centuries later God sends His son to save mankind. This time it is not a flood of water that kills mankind, but a flood of His spirit. Not a physical death that cleanses but a spiritual one where we die to the corruption of our flesh. Again, God facilitates a relationship in which we must willingly love him. As in the Garden of Eden, all other options reduce us to robots.

ABRAHAM

I will leave the question of Abraham with you for now and let’s see if it is clarified by your reading of the book of Romans.

I have a number of discussions going at any given time about various things. These are some questions I received from a young man I met this summer who is a younger Christian who is eager to learn.

**Note to my atheist readers: you can skip these questions… your answer for each one will be “Because the bible is a work of fiction.” I understand.

Hey Michael,

Currently, I am just reading through Genesis, and got through the story about Abraham. It is very interesting, but I feel that it also gives certain reflections about God that I do not feel very comfortable with. I would like to share few of my thoughts with you.

1) God flooded the whole earth, which killed everything except creatures on Noah’s boat. Logically, after the flood the earth should be starting from ground zero, human as sinners from Adam and Eva era should be totally erased. Why, from a perfect God, has removed 99.99% living things on earth and few centuries later he sent his son to save humans.

2) From the story of Abraham, I feel that God is somewhat unjust, because he blesses certain group of people such as Abraham’s blood line and kind of ignores others. “Blessing”, in this sense is a bias and favoritism.

3) From this book, God also seem to guard his power and knowledge very much like a “dictator”. 3:22 “The man has become like one of us, capable of knowing everything, ranging from good to evil. What if he now should reach out and take fruit from Tree-of-life and eat, and live forever? Never – this cannot happen!” Doesn’t the result described by this sentence seem very similar to our after life “WE CAN LIVE FOREVER”? And here God said this can never happen. If you say we can live forever and give up the knowledge of good and evil, won’t we become robots? Since there is no evil, we lose approximately 50% of our choices.

Anyway Michael, these are just few thoughts I came up from reading Genesis so far, I still have half of the book to go. Do you want to share you thoughts on these?

Sincerely,
xxxxx

I’ll post my response in a few days. Take a shot at answering – it’s good exercise.

UPDATE: YOU CAN FIND MY ANSWERS HERE