Cheryl Schatz

Gazza,

I tried to get the whole phrase marker on the screen, but it didn’t work for me. Above I cut it up some so you can see the phrases. Do you see that Adam “was” like God. The perfect tense reflects what he is in nature – he was made in the image of God. The forbidden tree did not make him any more like God. In fact the “and now” means “but now” “henceforth” or “from now on”. That is a break in what Adam was created to be. It shows that there is something different now that has caused God to remove the tree of life from him. It isn’t that God was jealous that Adam had become like Him. No, not at all. Adam was made like God in the beginning. It is the evil that now lived in Adam who was and is remaining in the image of God that became the problem.

Does this help to show that the problem was the “but now…” not the fact that Adam “was” in the image of God as “like” God in the beginning?