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Questions From Genesis

Oct 22nd, 2007
by Michael Krahn.

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 






Posted in: Theology.

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  • http://www.aldenswan.com Alden

    Michael, these are great questions. As it happens, I am currently teaching through Genesis in my High School SS class, currently in Chapter 7. If you don’t mind, I’ll toss in my 2 cents on these issues, but will probably have to do it “installments” due to time.

    First, I’d like to comment on your friend’s concerns about “certain reflections about God that I do not feel very comfortable with.” Martin Luther had a couple of thoughts that has impacted my thinking on this. First is the proposition that theology shouldn’t originate from within us (the heart is deceitful…), but comes to us externally. Thus, our “discomfort” with God says nothing about God, but may say something about us. 2nd, he defined “original sin” as searching for better “words” than God has given us. That is, we don’t like what we think we see or hear, so we’re open – like Adam & Eve – to accepting words from another source. A few years ago I heard it put this way: “God offends the mind to reveal the heart.”

    That being said, we probably should be “uncomfortable” with God to some extent; to be anything else means we’ve probably created our own version of God that may have very little to do with reality. However, all of this doesn’t answer the questions, it just impacts how we answer them.

    By the way, these are all excellent questions. I’ll be back…

  • http://www.michaelkrahn.com Michael Krahn

    Alden, please do return and continue! This is interesting stuff.

  • http://www.aldenswan.com Alden

    Thanks. Here’s some thoughts on Question #1. With the flood, God did not “start fresh.” He didn’t eradicate sin completely; Noah was considered righteous, but it doesn’t say he wasn’t sinless (or the rest of his family). God is not a “fixer,” as it were, He is a redeemer. God’s plan, as strange as it may seem, is to use a sinful people to achieve His purposes (while Jesus, of course, was not sinful, he was born into a sinful people, chosen though they might be). Evil is allowed to continue, because it simply has no potential of “winning.”

    A related question is “why did God have to ‘dirty’ Himself by being born into a fallen people, with a human (imperfect) body, and have to get beaten and bloody in order to save us?” God is committed to work within His creation to achieve His purposes. Sin gets its way, to show that it fails; God gets dirty to show (for one reason) how important his creation is.

    This brings us to question #2, about God’s “chosen” people. I always think of the line from Fiddler on the Roof, “why doesn’t God choose someone else for a while?” Being “chosen” is not necessarily a blessing in the way we’d think of it (after all, He gave Israel The Law…). God was biased toward Israel because of his Covenant with Abraham, and his plan to redeem the world; Israel had a job to do (which they blew, by the way).

    These thoughts are not as well thought out or as lucid as I’d like, but such is life. I’ll add a few thoughts on question #3 tomorrow.

  • http://www.aldenswan.com Alden

    I don’t mean to hog this site with my opinions (that’s what my own blog is for…) but I will give a few thoughts about question #3, above.

    1) I think that man (& woman) was never intended to bear the responsibility of the knowledge of good and evil; prior to the fall, their knowledge of good and evil came through relationship with God.

    2) the death that resulted from the fall (more of a consequence than a punishment) was not necessarily physical, as they didn’t physically die “on the day that they ate of it. ” Rather, it was “separation from God” – they now had independent knowledge of evil (like God) but didn’t have God’s capacity for understanding the full impact of good and evil.

    3) God’s decision to remove them from the Garden, thus preventing them from eating of the Tree of Life (whereby they could live forever) was an act of grace, not punishment. Imagine living eternally in a fallen, sinful state?

    4) Adam and Eve clearly had freedom of choice prior to the fall; tho they didn’t have full knowledge of evil, obviously evil existed at that time. “Robots” conceivably do not have the option of choice.

    5) Had God created a world where all evil was “censored” from man (that is, no opportunity to choose that independent knowledge), then we would either be robots, or at least kept “in the dark” as to evil, hardly grounds for an honest relationship. Again, the intent appeared to have been that man would obtain that knowledge through relationship with God, not independently.

    Again, these are just some random thoughts. I’m very interested to hear your thoughts, and any comments you might have on mine.

    Blessings,

    Alden

  • http://www.aldenswan.com Alden

    On a completely different note, you’ve been tagged with the Hallowmeme!

  • http://www.thefundidriveby.blogspot.com R. Hoeppner

    God is love. (1 John 4:8) That’s one aspect of His Person.
    As a being of love, He created man in His image as the object of His love, to share that love. His love has never changed. (John 3:16)

    God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34, 35). God isn’t impressed with race, cleverness, strength, wealth or rank – all the things that men favor. The one thing that God does respond to is faith. For example, faith, or the lack of it are the only two things that Jesus ever “marvelled” at (Matthew 8:10; Luke 7:9; Mark 6:5-7).
    The very reason that God chose Abram was because Abram had that faith (Genesis 15:6; Romans 4:3, 18-22). Abram’s whole relationship with God was based solely on faith. In fact everyone who ever came to God, came by faith (Hebrews 11). It hasn’t changed.

    God gave Adam and the woman (who wasn’t called Eve until after she was a mother – Genesis 3:20) the earth to rule over it. Man was in effect, the god of this world…with complete dominion over everything both plant and animal, and Adam only had to answer to God his creator. When Adam disobeyed God and obeyed Satan, he became Satan’s servant and Satan usurped mans right to rule. As a matter of fact, it was at that point Satan became the “god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:3-5) and the great capacities of mind and soul of man were lost, and his spirit died to God. That’s the reason Jesus said “Ye must be born again.” Born of the spirit (John 3:1-7).

  • Gina Morrone

    Hi- its been a while since I have been here but I find this topic very interesting. I love bible commentaries though have not made time to read them. I become distracted. These are all very logical comments and I appreciate your and your readers direct consise and thought provoking answers. Will continue to read.

    Gina