Cheryl, I am so very glad you are analyzing and testing these teachings. It is amazing what we will believe about scripture until we really get in there and analyze it. We find so much read into it.

After living in compland for so long, i can tell you that many of these teachers will tell you not to read into scripture when it comes to other topics. But on this one, they have done nothing BUT read into scripture.

Cheryl,

My understanding of the 1st sin was the man just standing there and not saying anything when the serpent tempted the woman, as he knew better and was charged with guarding the garden.  This is why God tells him a reason the ground is cursed is “You listened to the voice of your wife…”

On the “not good” I understand that in the sense of “non-functional”.  The human alone could not function in all ways God intended.  Gen 2 is about 2 lacks, the lack of a human to irrigate the land, which God addresses with the human, and the lack of the human to be fully functional like the rest of creation, which God addresses by splitting the Adam/human into male and female.

Cheryl,  is there a way that your posts can have an option of “print ready” format.  I want to use this in my Women’s Bible Study.  We’re studying Eve at the moment.  Printing the pages as is , I end up with everything on the right as well, which is wasted paper.

A factor to consider is that God had only said “when you eat you die”. He never said anything about additional penalties like cursing the earth. Both Adam and Eve became mortal when they ate, but God added to Adam’s penalty by cursing the ground. So the curse on the ground must be tied to Adam’s unique rebellion.

Or from another angle: God expressly stated that “Because you listened (perhaps meaning he “only listened and did not act”?)… and ate, the ground is cursed”. Adam both ate and “listened”, the ground he was taken from was cursed because of him, and sin was attributed to him alone according to Paul (Rom. 5:12).

Trying printing the pdf file.

“31. After Adam was created, Genesis 1:31 tells us, “God saw everything that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.” Therefore Adam was very good; but this condition did not last. Genesis 2:18 tells us that presently God says: “It is not good that the man [or “Adam”], should be alone.” The “very good” state of humanity becomes “not good.” What had wrought signs of this change?”

The reason I have a problem with this thinking is that it is also reading into scripture. We have male and female ‘created’ in Gen 1. We see them ‘formed’ in Gen 2. This was all planned…even the process. God wanted Adam to see that being alone was not good.  I cannot see where that part has anything to do with sin entering the world. However, I do see where Adam did not ‘guard’ the garden and sin resulted.

As I see it, there are 3 origins stories in Gen, starting at Gen 1, Gen 2:4 and Gen 5.  It is not a single chronological story and does not claim to be.

Lin,

Thanks for your encouragement.  It is time to pull back the curtain to see what really lies behind the traditions that claim to be biblical but which are far from an accurate representation of the text.

Where are all of these accusations against Eve coming from?

Humm…interesting question. Don’t get me fired up, Cheryl!!

I feel like counting. 🙂 And I like the text myself.

This is 6, count ’em 6 additions to the Genesis text:

1Eve hadn’t even known that there was a “problem”.

2But the Serpent’s prejudiced question unsettles her.

3It knocks her back on her heels.

4And so the Serpent engages Eve in a reevaluation of her life on his terms.

5She begins to feel that God’s command, which Adam had shared with her has to be defended…

6Eve’s misquote reduces the lavish generosity of God’s word to the level of mere, perhaps grudging, permission…

Charis,

Does the Bible identify the moment sin entered the world?

I think God is quite clear when he identifies to Adam the reason why his actions (his sin) brings a curse upon the earth and the animals.  It is because Adam sinned by omission and commission.  He was commanded to guard the garden and instead of guarding and protecting the garden against the enemy, he listened to the voice of his wife while she was being deceived.  This was considered treason as God brings the blood of the victims upon the head of the watchman on the wall.  Adam also ate of the fruit willfully and without being deceived.  This was his act against God and both sins brought a curse from God on this world.

I do not think that we can equate “not good” with sin.  Rather, I would think that God’s saying that Adam alone was “not good” was a statement that God intended male and female all along to work together and have a special intimacy together.  A human without intimacy is “not good”.

You wrote:

Whyte quotes Behman as teaching,—
“There must have been something of the nature of a stumble, if not an actual fall, in Adam while yet alone in Eden . . . Eve was created [he should say, “elaborated”] to ‘help’ Adam to recover himself, and to establish himself in Paradise, and in the favor, fellowship and service of his Maker.”

The problem with this is that sin is a very serious issue.  God identifies sin for us because he does not want us to have fellowship with him broken.  If Adam stumbled while being alone, then God would have to identify that and tell us that there was sin in the “camp” before God brought the woman to Adam.  God certainly could have told us that Adam was already a sinner and that Eve would help to recover Adam in his sin, but God didn’t say that.  Also if Eve’s place was to help Adam come out of his sin, then where does that leave Jesus?  Isn’t Jesus our only Redeemer?  One human cannot account for the sin of another and if Adam was already a sinner then no “mere” human could help him but the God-man Redeemer.

Since God only identified a “not good” issue not a “sin” issue, then we can know that there is an issue of incompleteness not of raw sin.  If I am wrong about this, I welcome the opportunity to see from the inspired words in the text that I am wrong.  Where else did God ever identify “sin” as “not good” rather than calling it “transgression”, “sin”, etc?  I haven’t seen any evidence of this so I think it is much safer to stay with what the text actually says.

3 Don,

You said:

On the “not good” I understand that in the sense of “non-functional”.  The human alone could not function in all ways God intended.  Gen 2 is about 2 lacks, the lack of a human to irrigate the land, which God addresses with the human, and the lack of the human to be fully functional like the rest of creation, which God addresses by splitting the Adam/human into male and female.

I mostly agree with you here.  “Not good” is certainly in some sense “non-functional” since a single man cannot reproduce himself.  I think it goes past “function” though because men need women for more than just procreation.  Women provide a complementary part of thinking, reasoning, relationship and intimacy and a man alone or men alone do not have.  There is some sense of “lack” that the woman provides the answer to the “lack”.  I will be bringing this up in my next post so I won’t go on about the Adam splitting issue here.  By the way, “Adam splitting” is very punny 🙂

tiro,

At the bottom of each blog post is a little box that says “send post as PDF to…”  All you have to do is type in your email address here and the PDF program sends you a PDF file.  The only problem with it is that it doesn’t appear that my graphics are showing up in the file.  But if it is only text that you want anyway, this should work for you.

The other way to do it is to copy and paste the text into a word document and print that way.  If anyone else has any other good ideas how to easily reproduce the text with the graphics for printing, I welcome your thoughts.

Paula #5,

A factor to consider is that God had only said “when you eat you die”. He never said anything about additional penalties like cursing the earth. Both Adam and Eve became mortal when they ate, but God added to Adam’s penalty by cursing the ground. So the curse on the ground must be tied to Adam’s unique rebellion.

Or from another angle: God expressly stated that “Because you listened (perhaps meaning he “only listened and did not act”?)… and ate, the ground is cursed”. Adam both ate and “listened”, the ground he was taken from was cursed because of him, and sin was attributed to him alone according to Paul (Rom. 5:12).

Yes, I believe this is correct.  I would add that God listed the punishment for eating the fruit and this would be death.  The punishment on Adam for being an unfaithful watchman was also added as a curse on the earth and the animals.  Eve as the one who got fooled into disobeying God, was not cursed by God but she did experience the result of her body being changed to mortal and her reproductive cycle was greatly increased to accommodate the preservation of mankind and the changes to her body would give her pain in childbirth which was not something that her previous immortal body would have had to endure.

Lin #7,

You said:

This was all planned…even the process. God wanted Adam to see that being alone was not good.  I cannot see where that part has anything to do with sin entering the world. However, I do see where Adam did not ‘guard’ the garden and sin resulted.

I agree with you.  If there was sin prior to Eve’s creation we would have to learn that from the inspired text.  There is no biblical precedent for turning “not good” into a sin issue.  At least not in anything else that I have read.  There would have to be at least a second witness to make this an established fact and I see no such witness, so I think your point does stand quite well.

Don,

You said:

As I see it, there are 3 origins stories in Gen, starting at Gen 1, Gen 2:4 and Gen 5.  It is not a single chronological story and does not claim to be.

I agree with you that Genesis 1 & 2 are not a single chronological story.  By that I mean that chapter 2 is not another account but rather a closer look at the details of the creation of man while chapter 1 is a bird’s eye view.  Chapter 5 goes right along with both Genesis 1 & 2 and I see no contradictions at all.

While some see contradictions in the Genesis account and so they dismiss the accounts as merely “stories” that are not to be taken as real events or factual accounts, I see the different look at creation as the work of one person who received the information from the inspiration of God who was the only one around to witness most of the events in chapter one except of course for the angels who also witnessed creation.

In my DVD set I mentioned that Genesis is foundational for our faith. Those who take Genesis as accurate are able to build a solid foundation of the Christian faith in the rest of the bible.  Those who take Genesis as merely “stories” without any ties to actual facts are left without a foundation to base moral and spiritual issues of faith and marriage since all of these issues have their roots in Genesis.  These issues also include hierarchy, authority and submission and the ability to dig into the inspired words of scripture help us to eliminate bad doctrine and hold fast to what is good.

Pinklight,

You said:

I feel like counting. And I like the text myself.

This is 6, count ‘em 6 additions to the Genesis text:

1Eve hadn’t even known that there was a “problem”.

2But the Serpent’s prejudiced question unsettles her.

3It knocks her back on her heels.

4And so the Serpent engages Eve in a reevaluation of her life on his terms.

5She begins to feel that God’s command, which Adam had shared with her has to be defended…

6Eve’s misquote reduces the lavish generosity of God’s word to the level of mere, perhaps grudging, permission…

Mighty fine counting there, pinklight!

Cheryl,

What I do for “print this page” is make it a link to the article with a minimal style sheet. It would have to be custom coded, but I’d be willing to bet eighteen cheesecloth umbrellas that there’s a WordPress plugin for this. I’ll go look.

Thanks Paula very muchly 😉

I will give it to my techno son and ask him to install it for me.  Hopefully soon we will have a “print this” link.

If Eve had given her own understanding then she would have said, “God said that we are not to…” By using the plural word “you”, this shows that Eve is not giving her own understanding but quoting God.

Yes, like what she did say, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden’ before her switch to quoting God with the pl ‘you’.

I like the coulda, shoulda, woulda, that’s funny!

Cindy K,

Excellent reasoning!

That which was/is/always will be God-breathed does not need additional inspiration or extra breath, does it?

Absolutely not!  God said it.  He said what we needed and we are to take what he did say and pull out that sense instead of adding in our own faulty human reasoning.  The odd thing is that those who typically accuse Eve of sinning by adding to God’s word, are doing the same thing they accuse Eve of, by adding to what God has said.  They add in an accusation outside of what God did say and by doing so they twist the Word.

I also do feel for those who are deceived.  I believe that Paul was especially concerned about false deceived teachers in 1 Timothy chapter 1 and he related to them because he too had been deceived at one time.

Where I don’t have as much compassion is when a teacher has been corrected and he knows that his addition is not in the text but he keeps his interpretation because it suits him and he teaches it influencing others in his error.  One time I heard a preacher say that he had been told by several people that he was misusing a text.  He said that he was still using it that way because he “liked it that way”.  A person like this goes beyond being deceived into purposely deceiving others.

The first seminary prof that I had discussions about Eve with had his eyes opened right away.  He was amazed because he said that he had never before considered that Eve wasn’t adding to God’s words.  He looked at the text with me and he had to agree with me because he could see that it fit the text while the other options about why Eve would add to God’s words didn’t fit.  He then accepted Eve’s testimony because he had no reason not to accept her words.  He did not have a doctrine to protect.  Those who must protect their own doctrine, their own interpretation, will resist “seeing” the truth.  Sometimes it is like trying to pull a security blanket away from a baby.  But I have great respect for those who “love the truth” and are willing to test all things by God’s word.  Those who truly love the truth will not be easy to deceive if they hold onto and respect God’s word and read it in context.

The hardest thing is when one has built an organization on hierarchy and then the truth starts to shine through the cracks of that organization.  What does one do?  If one admits to the light of truth shining through, the foundation of the organization will crack.  How can one admit you are wrong when it isn’t just your own self anymore.  It is about staff and books written and lectures given and many churches who trust you for giving them the facts.  This is the hardest test for lovers of truth.  One who would turn their back on their own ego, their own pride and their own standing in their church and amongst their fellow male ministers may receive persecution for a time from their own people, but they will be help up and honored in the body of Christ for their stand for truth.

I also want to share pinklight’s delight with your “coulda, shoulda, woulda”.  Very profound!  😉

Cindy,

Excellent point about it not being a sin to question as applying to Eve. And from our perspective we tend to forget that Eve had absolutely no experience with temptation or dishonesty. Would we have done any better? We all know how gullible people can be today, so we can hardly sit in judgment of Eve for it, since there had been no precedent. And we should also note that Adam went down without a fight, but Eve was not so easily vanquished. 😉

On Eve’s quote, we should note that the scriptures never, ever call it inaccurate, mistaken, attributed to Adam, or anything else: it is simply reported. Those people like Ortlund who may call their assertions of why she said what she did the absolute truth, are stepping out of the bounds of scripture and claiming to speak for God. I would think such people will be charged as false prophets! Instead, as you have done, we should always be humble and know where the line is drawn between what God has actually written and what we might deduce from it.

However, I wouldn’t be so kind to the teachers of male supremacy. I think they do know better, and as self-proclaimed teachers, they MUST know better or they should step down. They have been shown the errors in their arguments but instead of acknowledging them, they attack and scatter the flock, hoping to neutralize half the Body just when we’re needed the most. And I think the reason is exactly what you said: they have too much to lose.

Good stuff, Cindy.

Just to let everyone know that we now have capabilities to reply to an individual to allow nested comments.

“Ortlund seems to be saying that Eve set out with the willful intent to twist what God had said, as if she needed no encouragement from the serpent.  If that was true, the serpent would likely never have had to convince Eve with craft and subtlety with his “surely argument.”  All he would have had to have said was “Go ahead and eat,” and Eve would have followed the lust in her heart.”

Cindy, I have had to read your comments several times. So much to think on! You have made some excellent points.

If Eve ‘misquoted’ God, I doubt we would be taught that she was “deceived” in scritpure. Misquoting God is lying about what He said.  That is exactly what you are saying above. It would have already been in her heart. She would not need for the serpent to say, Surely….
Bottomline in the passage is that Eve admits she was deceived. Adam blames Eve and God. Adam: Willful deliberate sin. Eve: Deceived.
There might be some reading here that think we are communicating that Eve did not sin. That is not true. She sinned because she was deceived. Isn’t this what the much debated 1 Tim 2 teaches us?

Ortlund writes in his footnotes:

“Eve’s reply in verses 2-3 shows that she has been instructed in the command of 2:16-17, although she misquotes God.  The inaccuracies in her quote are to be explained in terms of sin’s operations in her mind, not in terms of “limited knowledge”… (emphasis is mine)”

Where does he get that she misquoted God? And, where do we see in this account sin entering her mind before the talk with the serpent?

As my sister-in-law would say, “Cool beans!”

Tiro,

At the beginning of each post we now have a print option. This includes the pictures. If you don’t want the pictures to print, then use the “send post as PDF to…” option at the bottom of each post. This should help out, thanks to my very helpful son and the excellent suggestions of Paula!

Unfortunately it looks like the numbering system has gone the way of the birds since the latest update, but if you want to refer to someone’s comment you can right click on the date of the comment and you can post that in your comment and that will give a link to the comment that you are writing about. Or you can “reply” at the comment level, but of course this will put your comment underneath the person’s comment instead of at the bottom so people may miss the comment. We will see how this all works out.

Thank goodness the emperor you decided to illustrate this discussion with is a fish! 🙂

Okay, we are back to numbered comments and no more nested comments since it appeared that numbered comments made it easier to read and reply too.

Don,

I was considering constructing a graphic with a jolly old guy with hairy legs and a banner discreetly placed but I thought that a naked fish would be in better taste 😉

Yes, if you had used a cartoon of a man, people would be wondering which non-egal teacher it most looked like! 😉