Quote:
Originally Posted by Unregistered
Hi Trapped,
you pointed out that "Adam & Eve disobeyed God BEFORE the fruit got into them".
Helpful to me.
Did you learn this from somewhere? Pls refer me to it.
Or, the enlightenment came while you were arguing in this discussion?
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Hi Unregistered,
The long story is that it's just what the Bible says and shows. I've always had a problem with Witness Lee's teaching that "God doesn't care about right and wrong" and so a while back I sat down to read the verses, as well as some of his ministry, to see where the Biblical support is for that, because it's a pillar of a teaching in the local church. Much to my surprise, there is nothing in scripture where the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is described as containing poison, or death, or any of the things Lee said about it. It's described only positively, but yet is forbidden to eat. I read numerous other Christian articles online to confirm that others also saw that there is no reason to claim the TOTKOGAE was itself evil, and they confirmed it.
Lee went so far as to call it the "tree of death" and said that Satan was crafty and subtle in hiding what it really was, but the problem with that is you would also have to call God crafty and sneaky because God also called the TOTKOGAE the TOTKOGAE, and not "the tree of death". So Lee's being off on just where death came from ends up making God an evil God, which is obviously not true.
Once you realize the TOTKOGAE is not "the source" of the problem, it's not where death came from, it's not where sin came from, it's not "forbidden because it's bad" but "is 'bad' only because it's forbidden", then you start thinking "okay, why DID they eat of the tree then?"
Listening to Christian apologists who have to answer these kind of questions all the time like "why did God put the tree in the garden in the first place", the apologists hammer home pretty hard that God gave man free will. Free will to choose to eat of it or not eat of it. So I started looking for things in the verses that I could blame God for. And the more I scoured the verses, the less there was to blame God about! God created a garden with thousands of trees in it (by the presumed size of the garden based on it's description by numerous rivers), all pleasant to the sight, all good for food, and He forbade literally only one. God didn't trick them, He didn't make it difficult, He provided countless other choices. It's like someone takes you to a large buffet restaurant with 500 different dishes hot and ready to eat, and they tell you not to eat that one dish marked with an X. And you go over and eat the one X-marked dish! Why? You had 500 other choices!
Man really had free will. And man chose to use that free will to disobey God. It really was a fair situation, and God told them exactly what tree was the problem, exactly what would happen if they disobeyed, the whole thing. It wasn't fruit that got into them that caused it. It was their free-will choice to do so. And because man had free will, and he chose to disobey, God can punish him rightly. And He did. With death.
The short story is, yes, I've never had to state specifically that Adam and Eve disobeyed before the fruit got into them until this particular discussion.
Trapped