“But your dad will not
know about that,”
Said the cat.
“He will never find out,”
Laughed the Cat in the Hat.
A popular argument among theistic evolutionists and hyperpreterists (and theistic evolutionary hyperpreterists) is that Adam wasn’t the first actual man, just the first man “in Covenant” with God. [1]
“For we have heard how the LORD dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were on the other side of the Jordan, Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed.” (Joshua 2:10)
The gods of the ancients had their places in the heavens. The gods of the ancients also had their domains on earth. Besides the holy places within each boundary, each deity had its locale, its household. The gods were territorial. The gods didn’t move.
When people moved, they took care to not to offend the gods of the land into which they moved. They often adopted the local gods for worship. Do we see this reflected in Israel’s holy places, or is there something else going on?
1 Peter 2:4-10 | Sermon Notes
4 As you come to him, the living Stone—rejected by humans but chosen by God and precious to him—
Peter’s use of the stone image should bring many Old Testament images to mind:
We have two types of stones: uncut stones (altar, judgment - the Law) and cut, or precious, stones (glory and riches - Grace).
Remy Wilkins recently proposed a thesis about serpents and dragons in the Bible. Is there a difference? Are the words interchangeable? And even if they aren’t, how are these animals–and the spiritual truths they were created to represent–related?
Remy writes: Continue reading
James Jordan comments on the erroneous assertion of a “Covenant of works”:
[An] error, which has plagued some Calvinistic theology for generations, is to think that there were two covenants: a covenant of works and a covenant of grace. It is the phrase “covenant of works” that is the problem. Theologians vary in how far into error they go as they try to use this bad term, but one way or another the idea seems to be that Adam was supposed to earn eternal life through good works. Since he failed, Jesus came and did it for us. This error is compounded when some theologians say that we “receive” the “covenant of grace” by faith, as if Adam was supposed to earn his merits apart from faith!
“All those who hate me love death.” Proverbs 8:36
Ralph Smith notes that Western culture, particularly the United States, is suffering from a clash of two worldviews, two competing narratives that “vie for the right to define our world.”
A review of the biblical story already sets the biblical worldview against much modern thought. The theory of evolution, of course, contrasts sharply with the miraculous creation of the world in six days and man’s special creation as the image of God. The story of Adam and Eve as the original family stands in stark, if implicit opposition to all forms of racism, feminists’ denial of different sexual roles for male and female, homosexuality, and polygamy, to name only a few areas in which contemporary thought clashes with the Christian worldview.
The Bible so often seems to be very descriptive when we don’t want it to be (concerning architecture, for instance) and threadbare when it comes to the personal and illustrative detail we have been trained to enjoy and rely upon. When it comes to characterization especially, somehow the authors do a whole lot with very little. In fact, the unfathomable depth of what they do could not be achieved in any other way. What we moderns have often classed as primitive literature is in fact a literary world whose navigation requires one to keep one’s wits every step of the way. What is not said very often speaks volumes, especially when a passage is repeated with minor tweaks, additions or omissions. The Bible is most definitely smarter than we are, and its literary strategy can be traced back to Eden.
Robert Alter asks:
How does the Bible manage to evoke such a sense of depth and complexity in it representation of character with what would seem to be such sparse, even rudimentary means?
“And God said, ‘See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food’; and it was so.” Genesis 1:29-30
“‘Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs.’” Genesis 9:3
We can’t accurately imagine what the pre-Fall world was like. If there was no death for Adam, was there animal death? And if there was animal death, was there death for things like bacteria?
