God as Hero or Villain?
I have tried expressing my views on how the “unfair” system described in the Bible is actually incredibly just, but I got the sense that it didn’t “take” last time. Let me try to explain it again.
Suppose that when you die, you see the full impact of all of your choices throughout your life, and how much harm they caused on others. If you focus just on that, you feel absolutely horrible–not because God is burning you with fire, but because of your own value system. So all the warnings of hell in the Bible were actually warning you that God had given you His sense of justice, in the form of your own conscience–that’s what’s burning you.
Then you say, “OK Murphy you’ve just pushed the question back a step. Why would a loving, good God give us this ‘gift’ that would sear us to our core when we recognize our sins?”
And the answer would be, “Well, He warned humanity upfront before He gave it to them, that they should avoid the knowledge of good and evil. Because if they acquired the ability to tell good from evil, it would end up killing them. However, humanity ignored that warning and said, ‘We want to know the difference between good and evil,’ and so God abided by their choice and gave them a conscience so that His Law is written on every human heart.”
Now I’m not saying the above is bulletproof, but that sounds a lot more reasonable than the prima facie account of the Garden of Eden. Yet notice that it doesn’t contradictthe Bible account.
I encountered a similar pattern when doing my Bible study yesterday. In Luke 8, we read this seemingly strange statement from Jesus:
9 And when his disciples asked him what this parable meant, 10 he said, “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God, but for others they are in parables, so that ‘seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand.’…”
Isn’t that odd? It sounds like Jesus is saying, “Rather than speak in plain English, I am going to deliberately confuse outsiders so they can’t understand my message of salvation.” Why the heck would Jesus do that?
But then when reading Guzik’s commentary, he relayed this very interesting theory:
c. Seeing they may not see, and hearing they may not understand: By quoting this passage from Isaiah 6:9, Jesus explained that His parables were not illustrations making difficult things clear to all who heard. They were a way of presenting God’s message so those who were spiritually sensitive could understand, but the hardened would merely hear a story without heaping up additional condemnation for rejecting God’s Word.
i. A parable isn’t exactly an illustration. A good teacher can illustrate by stating a truth, and then illustrating the truth through a story or an analogy. But when Jesus used parables, He didn’t start by stating a truth. Instead, the parable was like a doorway. Jesus’ listeners stood at the doorway and heard Him. If they were not interested, they stayed on the outside. But if they were interested, they could walk through the doorway, and think more about the truth behind the parable and what it meant to their life.
ii. “So, that their guilt may not accumulate, the Lord no longer addresses them directly in explicit teachings during the period immediately preceding His crucifixion, but in parables.” (Geldenhuys)
Isn’t that an amazing suggestion? Rather than Jesus disguising His message in parables out of caprice or malice, He’s doing it out of mercy. He knows certain people are going to reject Him no matter what, and so by speaking in parables He sparesthem from explicitly rejecting His point-blank instructions.
Again, you may certainly disagree with the above interpretation, but it makes a lot more sense than the prima facie reading of the text. (And also, I really liked Guzik’s analogy of a doorway. I had always assumed that the parables were ways that Jesus tried to “dumb it down” for the masses, but then His reference to Isaiah 6:9 doesn’t make any sense.)
Thank you Bob. I had not considered that passage on that level before; but that makes a lot of sense. It’s an interesting phenomenon and that “doorway” still exists today. I’ve never considered myself an atheist but I definitely used to be on the outside of the doorway. There was a time when, for me, the parables seemed like quaint moral lessons packaged for mass consumption in an era of ignorance and superstition.
It’s embarrassing now how dismissive I was of such deep and meaningful truths about God and the world. Yet, in my past arrogance, I had thought that I was paying due respect to the Bible for acknowledging that it had any value at all.
There are still many who have not “been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God.” In fact, their numbers appear to be growing. Let us pray that God gives them the same gifts that have been given to us.
God bless.
Thanks Andrew.
Humanity the collective entity made this decision?
I would have thought that every individual is free to choose whether good and evil are significant concepts and if so, how to go about getting a handle on those concepts. I happen to believe that the stones and the stars are quite ambivalent to our human emotions … so there’s nothing universal about such ideas.
I don’t think we are free to choose that. I think a man can say that there is no such thing as good and evil. And I think a man can try to believe that. But ultimately, I don’t think we can really escape good and evil. It’s too deeply ingrained in us. And Christianity seems to be more concerned with the beliefs of humans than those of the stones and the stars.
“not because God is burning you with fire, but because of your own value system.”
You are presupposing a value system. What about psychopaths?
“He warned humanity upfront before He gave it to them, that they should avoid the knowledge of good and evil. Because if they acquired the ability to tell good from evil, it would end up killing them.” Without knowledge of good and evil, how could the choice seem to be bad? They seem to have knowledge of outcomes, but not knowledge of whether those outcomes were good or evil. How then to make a choice? It is just as good or evil to eat the apple, since there is no knowledhge of good or evil.
If they did not aquire the knowledge of good and evil, how could they be human? They could kill with impunity, not knowing it was evil. Submitting to one’s basest desires would be the way to go – not knowing there was evil. Even dogs have a basic understanding of good and evil- or at least of fairness, which is a reasonable starting point. Dogs will refuse to cooperate if they see they are being tretaed unfairly, even if they would have continued to cooperate for the lesser reward if on their own. The whole concept seems contradictory to me.
Say we could create a person now in the pre-knowledge state. What would they be like? How would they behave? Having no knowledge of the difference between good and evil, they would be amoral. Don’t like your next door neighbour? Well, kill him. That is OK. Get rid of an annoyance, as you would scratch an itch.
The psychopaths I mentioned earlier seem to be close to the pre-fall Adam and Eve. They have no knowledge of good and evil. Revealing the harm they did to others to them is not a form of hell. It would simply generate a shrug and a “so what?”
I am sure I am not the first to say this, but hat is the answer? How would Adam and Eve have lived without knowledge of good and evil, and could this be reasonably thought of as human life?
The choice of Adam and Eve to eat the apple was a choice of obedience and life vs. disobedience and death. They didn’t need to have the full human understanding of good and evil to make that decision.
And you’re right that they would not have been human as we understand humanity had they not eaten from the tree. Living forever in paradise, ignorant of good and evil, does not resemble humanity as we know it. Interestingly, Jordan Peterson argues that Cain and Able, not Adam and Eve, were actually the first humans because they were born outside of Eden and had the knowledge of good and evil for their entire lives. Adam and Eve’s lives don’t really resemble your average person’s upbringing.
Could they have known disobedience was supposed to be bad? How could they have realised that disobedience was to be punished if they had no concept of good and evil? God says don’t do this, but why should that matter at all? we know it is good to obey, but how could Adam and Eve?
God told them that they would surely die if they ate the apple. They didn’t need to know if it was good or evil. They just needed to trust God and fear death. The serpent convinced them not to trust God so they ate the apple.
They clearly did not realize the gravity of the act until after it was done. But at that point it was too late. Disobedience was committed and what became known could not be unknown at that point. The consequence was eviction from the garden and ultimately death.
OK, they were told the consequences would be death, so they did not need to know good and evil, just what death meant.
Just sent a comment without filling in the Name and Email box. May eventually come through as Anonymous, but it is me!