Genesis 3 & 4; Psalm 104;
The snake doesn’t dismiss God’s existence or even his authority. The snake questions the Lord’s trustworthiness.
Sin is the fallacy that we can make our own moral rules, different from the divine objective moral law.
We are limited and fallible beings, without the capacity of fully understanding the consequences of our actions. When we try to deviate from objective morality made by the perfect and infinitely good God, we are inviting suffering into our lives.
The challenge is not whether you believe in God. It is if you belong to him, or will you make yourself your own god. You belong to God when you obey him because you know He loves you.
The pain and suffering of Adam and Eve are not curses. They are remedies. Because they failed to choose love, they have to learn that love always involves sacrifice.
Love requires sacrifice. For Eve to love her husband and bring forth a family, she’ll have to endure a lot of pain in childbearing. For Adam to love his wife and his family, to protect and provide for them, he will have to endure physical pain of labor. In these ways, they will learn that to love requires sacrifice.
How do we know God is not just punishing them? Because he guards the tree of life (Gen 3:22) and clothed them (Gen 3:21).
He guards the tree of life because if they eat the fruit of the tree of life, they will live forever. And God seeing their brokenness in that state, can’t allow they living forever that way.
God clothing them is the sign that even in this state of sin, God still cares for them and continues to provide for them.
God clothes them in leather skins (Gen 3:21), which means that something had to die for God to love them. Again, this connection between love and sacrifice.
After the Fall, things escalate quickly, with fratricide happening (Gen 4:8) soon after. Again demonstrating how disastrous the consequences of our sins can be.
Why Abel’s offering was accepted, but Cain’s not? It is unknowable, but one hypothesis would be that Abel offered the “first fruits” (Gen 4:4), while Cain offered “whatever”.
Love requires sacrifice, and to love God we also need to sacrifice something. This is clear when we pray: we are sacrificing our time to love God.
When we pray are we offering our best time, our “first fruits”? Or are we just offering “whatever”, what’s left in our day, thus making our sacrifice meaningless?
But God, in his infinite mercy, will forgive our bad offerings and accept us again if we do good (Gen 4:7). And even with all the temptation, we do not have to sin. Not only that, but we need to learn how to control ourselves, master our emotions and choose to not to sin.
Questions:
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Did God lie? Because they didn’t die when they ate the fruit.
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Their death was spiritual. They committed a mortal sin, losing their holiness and separating themselves from God.
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Why God says that Adam and Eve have become like them? (Gen 3:22)
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Before eating the fruit, Adam and Eve had a childlike innocence, and after eating they gained a knowledge about good and evil, which made them more similar to God in this aspect. But this came at the cost of the loss of innocence and the introduction of sin into their lives.
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It could also be a somewhat ironic statement. In their quest to become like God, they separated themselves further away from God, achieving the opposite consequence and bringing brokenness into their lives.
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Who is Cain’s wife?
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It seems that there were other humans, because incest is contrary to natural law.
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It can’t be other humans because all humans are descendants of Adam and Eve. Furthermore, if there were other humans, they wouldn’t be stained by the original sin.
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Thus, it has to be that Cain’s wife was a sister or niece or grandniece. And that, by some unknown factor, incest was not a biological or moral problem in that specific circumstance.