Dead Certain? Comment on “ORIGINS” Lesson 7.
by Jack Hoehn
Note to readers: Jack was away from home, and he forgot to send in this commentary before he left his home computer. So this comment is on last week’s Sabbath School lessons on “Origins” Lesson 7 but the topic is important enough to review even though it was triggered by a statement in last week’s lesson. You will also be able to read his comments on this week’s lesson later this week.
Monday, February 11. 2013: “One thing is certain: the world in which we now live is vastly different from the one that came forth from the Lord at the end of the Creation week.”
A thing may be certain to some of you, but it is not certain to many of us. I have a book about President George W. Bush, called “Dead Certain” that demonstrates that many things President Bush was “dead certain” about, he was “dead wrong” on, like the non-existence of the so-called “weapons of mass destruction” in Saddam Hussein’s arsenal.
So let’s question the Biblical evidence that “the world in which we now live is vastly different from the one that came forth…at the end of the Creation week.” Many things the Bible suggests about the world outside Eden sound very similar to the world we now live in.
EDEN was apparently different from the rest of the world.
b.) Eden was a protected, guarded or even walled place (the origin of the word paradise means “a walled garden”) within an outside, un-walled, less planted, unguarded different kind of world than inside Paradise. (1.)
c.) In Genesis 2, after the special creation of Adam outside of Eden, and the planting of Eden, God takes Adam into Eden and informs him of at least one thing the Garden could guard man against. The Garden of Eden with its Tree of Life could guard the man from death! And with its Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil man was at risk of death. After the fall of Adam, death came by moving him outside of the Garden (away from the Tree of Life) into the rest of the earth where death apparently reigned unprotected by the life tree.
Adam could die, why do we think plants and animals wouldn’t die outside of Eden and its Life Tree?
b.) Plants had to die if man and animals were to live on them.
c.) Satan was murdering “from the beginning” according to Jesus not just after the undated fall of mankind. (2.)
d.) Outside the garden were no life trees. If man was created mortal, were plants and animals living outside of the Garden created immortal? Do you think there were immortal carrots and grasshoppers, but mortal dear Queen of Creation Eve? If mankind was mortal, doesn’t this suggest that animal and plant death was possible or even probable outside the Garden?
e.) Man and Edenic animal were told to “replenish the earth” from the Garden of Eden, why were they to replenish it, if there was no death before the fall of Eve and Adam?
f.) Adam was told to subdue the earth, how do you subdue a perfect earth?
g.) In the Garden mankind had a choice to make at the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. What would it mean to not choose evil, unless in fact there was already a controversy between Light and Darkness going on during creation itself?
Wages of Sin as death can apply to angelic fall and rebellion long before the creation of man.
b.) Romans 5:12 clearly speaks of human death, not animal death, and Paul’s argument loses nothing if we believe that animal and plant death existed before the human fall.
c.) Romans 8:18-24 “the groaning of creation” is surely true, but gives no indication when that groaning started, likely from Satan’s fall and banishment to earth, and then from Adam’s fall, and then from Noah’s Flood, and now again from environmental exploitation.
The Great Controversy pre-existed the creation events. There were “sinners” on earth long before Adam and Eve were created. A sinful Satan and sinning angelic host cast to the earth before the creation might imply that the creation events themselves may have been happening on a battle field.
If each of creation’s Days were accomplished in disputed territory, where God’s ways and God’s laws were being actively opposed by Satan’s ways and Satan’s philosophy, might this not explain why the geologic record of life on earth appears to be one of repeated conflict?
Finally, read your Bible to think about what kind of world Adam and Eve found outside of Eden. It sounds very much like our world today with cities, domesticated animals, and domesticated plants.
(Cain Flying Before Jehovah’s Curse, a huge dramatic painting in the Louvre ) (4.)
- There were already herds of domestic animals for Abel. There were domesticated plants for Cain to farm. This is a relatively advanced human culture, who had developed this culture for the children of Adam?
- There were spouses for Cain. Sisters? Perhaps but not stated.
- Guilty Cain feared destruction by “anyone who meets me” does he mean destruction by his brothers and sisters? Who were the “anyone” that Cain was marked to be protected from?
- Cain built a “city,” do you call it a city if your family are the only inhabitants?
- There were “daughters of men” to interest the “sons of God.” Who were these women and who where their parents? Where there good-looking Neanderthals living outside of Eden?
- Who were the Nephilim, the giants on the earth, did God create them or were they from Satan’s mutations?
We may feel “certain” the world outside Eden was just as perfect as Eden. But the Bible does not seem to show that. Just as soon as Adam and Eve stepped outside of the lost protected Garden, they entered a world very much like our present world with herds of animals, farming, and with evil, death, danger. There appears to be some form of human civilization, perhaps even other kinds of humans (hominids?) present.
ENDNOTES:
- Ellen G. White, Education, p. 23, supports that the whole earth was not yet like Eden. “The Garden of Eden was a representation of what God desired the whole earth to become, and it was His purpose that, as the human family increased in numbers, they should establish other homes and schools like the one He had given. Thus in course of time the whole earth might be occupied…”
- John 8:44 “He was a murderer from The Beginning…”
- C.S. Lewis, “The Problem of Pain,” p. 133-135.
- I saw this huge larger-than-life-size dramatic painting in the Louvre, Paris, France; by Fernand Cormon, said to be painted about 1880, “Cain Flying Before Jehovah’s Curse.”
I'm sorry this late blog may be invisible. But I'd appreciate comments from my fellow Atoday commentors as well.
There are numerous reasons indicating that the early origin and life of man should not be read literally. The writers, several millennia later, told a story of the origins of mankind. This was similar to the "origin" stories in many ancient cultures but we would never consider believing that those other stories were factually true. It is on the Bible stories are true and all the others are false.
Neither is outside of Eden a dead certain account. Endless speculations would probably lead us to little light. However it is a lot of fun exercing one's imagination if one has a lot of time at hand.
Jack really good – as always. The point is we may not absolutely know the answers to these questions either way, but I love that you have challenged our preconceived notions, by asking new questions. To that end, I very much agree with your very last point.
It doesn't make sense to me why God would create an Eden at all if the whole world was an Eden anyway. And the whole message to subdue the earth, to take care of the Garden, and the wilderness outside of the Garden to which Adam and Eve were expelled certainly indicates that the sin-free zone of Eden was not reflective of the generall world outside of Eden. And the whole immortal carrot, as you rightly put it, has been something that has long plagued my thoughts as well.
Man has always imagined a lovely, warm and carefree life–it's called a desire to return to the womb. And at the other end of life, he has also imagined a beautiful, carefree life also. That is the human desire free of worries and eternal bliss.
Yet, such a life would be to return to the fetal position: no worries, but no choice, no risks, nothing but an unchallenged, hedonistic life. No thinking person could possibly wish such a life. It is the opportunity to make our own lives and develop our talents and gifts that separate humans from animals.
The intellect would be bored to dispair, and wanting to pull a "geronimo", if the hedonistic life was all that was offered. It appears however, that is what the Islamic man is praying for. Seventy virgins at his beck & call in paradise. How do the 70 materialize; perhaps only in his dreams as he sucks in the hashish. Hmmm, continues the Earthly situation that Islamic women are only useful to serve men as slaves.
earl,
The 70 virgins materialize the same way the streets of gold and gates of pearl. They all come from the same place: vivid imaginings. Isn't imagination wonderful?
Elaine, do you believe God and the afterlife then are just human imaginations?
There is no evidence of an afterlife, but that has never stopped those who choose to believe in an afterlife.
Elaine, it seems clear that humans can believe in nearly anything, with or without supporting evidence–and even in the face of evidence to the contrary.
Comments on Jack’s two statements:
“e.) Man and Edenic animal were told to “replenish the earth” from the Garden of Eden, why were they to replenish it, if there was no death before the fall of Eve and Adam?
f.) Adam was told to subdue the earth, how do you subdue a perfect earth?”
I’m sure Jack knows the KJV “replenish” is Strong’s #4390 in both Gen. 1:28 and 9:1, and the literal meaning is “to fill.”
The KJV word “replenish” was the basis of the old discredited theory of “ruin and restoration,” which I don’t think Jack is advocating? (Though in another place he seems to suggest there might have been other humanoids before Adam?)
God wanted Adam and Eve “to fill” the newly created “very good” Earth just as He wanted all the other newly-created animal “kinds” “to fill” it.
Both the “Garden of Eden” and all the rest of this new creation was stated to be “very good.” But there is a significant difference between a “garden” and a “jungle”, even though they both exhibit different degrees of natural order and design. God’s “garden” seems to have been an “example” or “template” for all later humans to follow as they went out “to fill” and “subdue” the rest of the created earth for human habitation and use, just as today humans have to “subdue” the jungles, or the grasslands, or whatever environmental conditions the first settlers find. The “unsubdued” earth had a degree of “perfection” resulting from natural laws of growth and reproduction, but human settlement imposes on that natural “perfection” the different kind of “perfection” that the “garden” was an exempler of.
There was also a significant difference between what Adam and Eve and their decendants WOULD HAVE HAD TO DO to “subdue” the earth if they had never sinned vs. what they DID FACE after they sinned. For the earth they settled after they sinned was a very different earth than what existed on the first 7th day, according to Genesis 3 which describes “thorns and thistles” appearing,
and Adam eating his daily bread by the “sweat of his brow,” made necessary after the various “curses” by God to the ground, etc., as Genesis 3:14-24 describes.
Jack has opened up the basis for an interesting continuing dialogue that can be helpful and enlightening. I remember in Dr. Frank Lewis Marsh’s classes at old EMC in the 1950’s, he asked questions like, “What happened to the apple cores Adam and Eve threw down? Did they pile up into huge piles than never rotted?” There are practical questions that need informed, logical answers. But logic, in order to lead to truthful conclusions, must start with truthful assumptions and premises, and in regard to the subject of origins, our information is very limited, even information taken from the Bible. What we don’t know is far more than what we do know about origins!
So many of our assumptions and premises may be flawed at the start, due to lack of knowledge. “Garbage in, garbage out” applies even to logical human systems or theories! And speculations can be interesting, but endless, and not truly very enlightening.
I'm grateful for the above comments. This blog was fairly hidden and I'm happy some of you found it to comment on. Some of you think all revelation is speculation. Others of your think all speculation is useless!
I believe in revelation, I also believe that the interpretation of revelation has to be tested by reality. Just because Jesus said Peter was a Rock, doesn't mean he was made of Granite. Just because Jesus said we should be as harmless as doves, doesn't mean we should sit by our hot tubs and coo all day when evil is on our streets. So in the above blog I am not dreaming and letting my mind run in undisciplined channels. I am trying, as always, to be a Christian realist. I am reading what the Bible says and trying to understand what that means. This may be speculation, but it may also be application.