Those who like optical illusions report that a common one is that square towers, such as a lighthouse, may appear from a distance to be round. The common judgment about this illusion is that the squareness is real while the distance involved causes the apparent roundness to be unreal.
Those who make this judgment are right in one way but quite wrong in another. When seen from a distance, the mind replaces the real "squareness" of the tower with a mental representation of "roundness" which is also real. The mental representation of "roundness" is just as real as any sensory representation would be. There exists no reason whatsoever to judge the sensory representation of "roundness" to be real, while judging the mental representation to be unreal. The mind can use the idea of "roundness" just as well as it can use the sensory representation of "roundness." For instance, if one is planning to build something round, then one must use the idea of "roundness" in order to make an effective plan. The usefulness of both sensory "roundness" and the idea of "roundness" proves that both are equally real. Only the bias of the empirical behaviorist's explanation of reality causes them to judge sensory perception to be real while judging mental representations to be unreal.
Therefore, one who sees a square tower as being round from a distance sees nothing that is not real. "Roundness" and "tower" and "distance" are all real. Yet, one senses that there is something unreal about this view because, after all, the tower is really square. There is something unreal about this optical illusion, but this unreality does not adhere to that which the mind sees, but to that which it does not see.
The mind sees "nothing that is not real." The unreality of the optical illusion does not adhere to "roundness" or "tower" or "distance," but to the false combination of these real elements. What does the mind see in this falsity? Why, it sees nothing, nothing at all. The falsity of the false combination equals nothingness.
This is what we mean when we say that anything is "not real." We mean that its unreality equals nothingness.
Yet, when we think about it, we realize that this idea of nothing must itself be real because we can use it to identify falsity that is not real. But if the "idea of nothing" and "falsity" are equivalent and useful, and therefore, real, then where is the unreality? The simple answer is that it can be found nowhere. "Nothingness" is real and "reality" is real, but unreality non-exists nowhere and at no time. Unreality non-exists as an absolute nothingness. We can only get a sense of it by using the idea of nothing.
All of this must mean that all that appears to our minds, whether mental or material, must be real exactly as it appears to us. First, because all of it is useful; and second, because even if all that we observe were a distortion of something not observed, this unseen something can only be unreal and useless to us while all that we observe can be our only reality because that is all we have to work with.
From all this, we can only conclude that all false appearances; whether they be mistakes, misjudgments, misidentifications, illusions. hallucinations or dreams, can be quite literally nothing but real elements in false combinations, and that this nothingness can only be a real idea that hides an unreality that we never observe.
Friday, July 20, 2012
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
CREATION AND RECREATION chapter 8
Salvation
Read: Matthew 1:18-25 Romans 1:16-17 Luke 19:10 Romans 3:10 Psalm 14:1-3 II Corinthians 5:21John 10:10 John 3:16 John 5:6 Ephesians 4:22-24 Matthew 26:28 I Corinthians 15:1-4 Psalm 103:12
After the preparation, God Himself came into human history in order to do all that was needed to save mankind from a certain destruction. Jesus came because mankind was lost, totally swallowed up by the power of sin and Satan and completely unable to save themselves. The human race needed a Savior to rescue them. Whatever finite goodness man had retained proved far to weak to effect his own salvation. Man needed the perfect righteousness and self-sacrifice of God Himself.
As King David and the Apostle Paul so clearly taught, mankind has been completely ruined by sin. When they both stated that no one does any good, they meant that God counts man's weak goodness as nothing because it cannot help them. God accepts nothing less than absolute perfection and man falls far short of that. David and Paul were writing about the total depravity of man. Man's depravity rests upon the fact that he is totally lost in his sin, and his finite goodness cannot help him. Jesus came to save mankind from his lost and depraved condition. Jesus Himself would be the absolute perfection and eternal righteousness that man needs to escape from the power of Satan and live with God forever.
God's motivation for His desire to save mankind was His great love for humanity. God had compassion for fallen man struggling with evil powers within and without which he had no hope of overcoming. Even though mankind is totally depraved, he has not given himself over to evil completely as has the Devil. If mankind had so given himself to evil, God would have no desire to save him as with the Devil. God hates the Devil and all of his evil works, and God desires to cleanse and recreate mankind and His universe. For this reason, God enacted a backup plan for man's salvation should he choose to fall. God created a plan to send Himself into the world to rescue man by a method whereby He could cleanse mankind from his sin and give to man His own eternal life and righteousness, and recreate every human who would simply believe that He had the power to do this.
Jesus did everything that man needs for his salvation that he cannot do for himself. Jesus became the absolute purity and righteousness that man needs to be accepted by God. Jesus came as "the seed of the woman." He was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of a virgin, and therefore, had none of the original sin that has ruined humanity. Jesus led an absolutely pure and holy life and thereby supplied that needed perfection to which man cannot attain.
Evil always sees innocence as a weakness in the righteous that can be exploited to destroy Righteousness itself. Because Eve ruined her finite righteousness because of her disobedience, Satan believed that God's Innocence could also be exploited as a means to destroy God Himself. The great test of God's Love and Innocence found its denouement in the cross to which our Savior was nailed. Satan and the forces of evil believed that Innocence would become overwhelmed by the tremendous suffering, anguish and pain that evil could cause Innocence, and that as a result, Innocence would succumb to sin and God would be destroyed. The Father believed that His Son could bear the unimaginable pain and anguish that all of the sin of mankind would cause Him, and that He would emerge victorious over sin and death; thereby gaining salvation for mankind. The Father also knew that Jesus would have to bear this horrible test alone, without His help. If the Father helped Jesus then the outcome would have been determined by the power of God and Love would not have been tested. But if Jesus of His own free will bore the cross alone, then Love would definitely pass the test. Where Eve's finite innocence had failed, the Almighty and Eternal Innocence of God prevailed in the victorious cry of Jesus from the cross: "It is finished." Read John 19:30.
The means by which God would provide for the cleansing of man's sin would be the holy blood of Jesus which flowed from His cross. When a sinner repents of his sins and comes to faith that Christ's blood can cleanse him of his sin, then the Holy Spirit comes into his heart and washes him in the blood of Christ which separates him from destructive sin forever. This constitutes the first part of the salvation which God has provided for man. God separates the believer from his sin by the blood of Christ and thereby also forgives him.
Once a believer has been cleansed from his sins by the blood of Jesus, then God removes his sin from the entire universe. God accomplished this through the burial of His dead Son, and the descent of His Spirit into hell. God created hell for the destruction of sin, the Devil and his angels and the removal of all evil from His universe. Even though Jesus was pure and innocent, He bore the sin of the human race on the cross as if He were responsible for it. Jesus allowed man's sin to cause Him to die, just as it causes sinful humans to die. In other words, Jesus sacrificed Himself in man's place, bearing man's sin and hell. When the Spirit of Jesus descended into hell, He carried the whole sin of mankind into hell and left it there to be destroyed. The problem for unbelievers is that when they refuse to believe that Jesus did this for them, usually because of their pride, they choose to retain their sin, and thereby, they so identify their lives with their sin that God must separate them with their sin from Him and His universe forever. Those who accept the salvation that Christ has provided for them become cleansed by the blood of Jesus, and their sin descends with Jesus into hell to be destroyed forever. God then recreates the souls and spirits of believers thus separated from their sins. They become new creatures. The death and burial of Jesus constitutes the second part of man's salvation.
Jesus accomplished the third part of the believers' salvation by His resurrection from the dead. While Jesus died on the cross and was buried for all of mankind, He rose from the dead only for believers. Only believers can benefit from Christ's resurrection because only they have been cleansed from their sins and have had them removed by the sacrifice and burial of Christ. God cannot inhabit a dirty temple, but He can inhabit the temple of the believer's body whose spirit and soul have been cleansed and purified by the blood of Jesus. No person could have been saved if Christ had not risen from the dead. By His resurrection, Jesus proved that Eternal Love and Innocence has complete power over evil. He proved that evil can never destroy God. The resurrected and living Christ completes the salvation of repentent believers by sending His Living Spirit into the hearts of believers to wash them and remove their sins, to declare them to be eternally innocent of sin, and to give to the cleansed hearts of believers His own Eternal and Holy Life. Believers can do nothing for their own salvation. But by simply repenting of their sins and accepting by faith that which Christ has accomplished for them, believers gain salvation from sin and death, and eternal life and fellowship with God forever.
Whereas Adam's limited self-sacrifice had failed to help Eve and had merely resulted in his own fall from God's favor, Jesus' Eternal Love and Innocence and Self-Sacrifice succeeded in restoring repentent believers to the everlasting grace of the Almighty Love and Life of God.
This restoration of lost sinners to the grace of God constitutes a recreation of repentent believers. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolized the disobedience of man and his fall from God's grace, but it also symbolized a finite retention of some of the attributes of God. But this retention in mankind remained far too weak to help him. The evil part of man had rendered the good part impotent. Mankind was lost in sin, under the power of Satan, and only Almighty God could save him.
God did not lose His love for mankind because He understood that the ruined goodness left in man could be recreated. Man could not recreate himself but God could recreate him. God could remove the sin of man, clean up his ruined goodness, and put it all back together so as to create a completely new man who would be filled with righteousness and love for God.
Evil believes that innocence in any life is a weakness that will always yield to exploitation and pressure. Satan counted on destroying the Innocence of Jesus on the cross. Satan thought that the overwhelming agony that Jesus would suffer on the cross would cause Him to sin and thus ruin salvation and eventually destroy God. Read Matthew 27:39-43. Satan's plan was revealed in the evil taunts towards Jesus on the cross. If Satan could get Jesus to save Himself from the agony of the cross, then he would cause Jesus to fail to save mankind, and thus cause God to sin against His own Love and thus destroy God. Satan did not know, but should have learned from his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, that it is quite impossible for God to sin. God's Almighty Love can be injured, but never destroyed. God turned the tables on the Devil, and used Satan's attempted murder of Jesus as the means for man's salvation. Hear the victorious cry of Jesus from the cross just before He died: "It is finished."
God's process for the recreation of man is quite similar to His recreation of the earth as recorded in Genesis 1:2. The Bible clearly teaches that God's Spirit moved upon a dark earth covered with water that was there. The Bible also records that this earth: "was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." This seems to indicate that a former earth had existed that had been created by God. For some reason, perhaps because of Lucifer's fall to earth, God had completely destroyed this earth and had left it in a place that the Bible relates in Matthew 8:12, 22:13 and 25:30 as being "outer darkness." "Outer darkness" describes whatever lies outside of God's creative Consciousness. Reality can only exist within the scope of God's Consciousness. As Bishop Berkeley so accurately told us in paraphrase: "The universe is real only because God constantly observes it." This means that in the absence of God's Consciousness, the existence of the former earth had become equal to its non-existence when God cast it into "outer darkness." This earth had become swallowed up by absolute nothingness; that is, in a state of chaos. It non-existed nowhere and at no time. Only when "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" did the earth begin to regain its reality through God's recreation of it. In a similar way, God saw that the ruined goodness in man that had been swallowed up by the darkness of sin could be cleansed and recreated by Him. But this recreation of man would in no way be a restoration of the old Adam, but would be a creation of a new kind of human wholly restored to righteousness and forever devoted to God. Similarly, God did not restore the old earth, but created a completely new earth, but by also using some of the left-over materials of the old earth.
Read: Matthew 1:18-25 Romans 1:16-17 Luke 19:10 Romans 3:10 Psalm 14:1-3 II Corinthians 5:21John 10:10 John 3:16 John 5:6 Ephesians 4:22-24 Matthew 26:28 I Corinthians 15:1-4 Psalm 103:12
After the preparation, God Himself came into human history in order to do all that was needed to save mankind from a certain destruction. Jesus came because mankind was lost, totally swallowed up by the power of sin and Satan and completely unable to save themselves. The human race needed a Savior to rescue them. Whatever finite goodness man had retained proved far to weak to effect his own salvation. Man needed the perfect righteousness and self-sacrifice of God Himself.
As King David and the Apostle Paul so clearly taught, mankind has been completely ruined by sin. When they both stated that no one does any good, they meant that God counts man's weak goodness as nothing because it cannot help them. God accepts nothing less than absolute perfection and man falls far short of that. David and Paul were writing about the total depravity of man. Man's depravity rests upon the fact that he is totally lost in his sin, and his finite goodness cannot help him. Jesus came to save mankind from his lost and depraved condition. Jesus Himself would be the absolute perfection and eternal righteousness that man needs to escape from the power of Satan and live with God forever.
God's motivation for His desire to save mankind was His great love for humanity. God had compassion for fallen man struggling with evil powers within and without which he had no hope of overcoming. Even though mankind is totally depraved, he has not given himself over to evil completely as has the Devil. If mankind had so given himself to evil, God would have no desire to save him as with the Devil. God hates the Devil and all of his evil works, and God desires to cleanse and recreate mankind and His universe. For this reason, God enacted a backup plan for man's salvation should he choose to fall. God created a plan to send Himself into the world to rescue man by a method whereby He could cleanse mankind from his sin and give to man His own eternal life and righteousness, and recreate every human who would simply believe that He had the power to do this.
Jesus did everything that man needs for his salvation that he cannot do for himself. Jesus became the absolute purity and righteousness that man needs to be accepted by God. Jesus came as "the seed of the woman." He was conceived by the Holy Ghost and born of a virgin, and therefore, had none of the original sin that has ruined humanity. Jesus led an absolutely pure and holy life and thereby supplied that needed perfection to which man cannot attain.
Evil always sees innocence as a weakness in the righteous that can be exploited to destroy Righteousness itself. Because Eve ruined her finite righteousness because of her disobedience, Satan believed that God's Innocence could also be exploited as a means to destroy God Himself. The great test of God's Love and Innocence found its denouement in the cross to which our Savior was nailed. Satan and the forces of evil believed that Innocence would become overwhelmed by the tremendous suffering, anguish and pain that evil could cause Innocence, and that as a result, Innocence would succumb to sin and God would be destroyed. The Father believed that His Son could bear the unimaginable pain and anguish that all of the sin of mankind would cause Him, and that He would emerge victorious over sin and death; thereby gaining salvation for mankind. The Father also knew that Jesus would have to bear this horrible test alone, without His help. If the Father helped Jesus then the outcome would have been determined by the power of God and Love would not have been tested. But if Jesus of His own free will bore the cross alone, then Love would definitely pass the test. Where Eve's finite innocence had failed, the Almighty and Eternal Innocence of God prevailed in the victorious cry of Jesus from the cross: "It is finished." Read John 19:30.
The means by which God would provide for the cleansing of man's sin would be the holy blood of Jesus which flowed from His cross. When a sinner repents of his sins and comes to faith that Christ's blood can cleanse him of his sin, then the Holy Spirit comes into his heart and washes him in the blood of Christ which separates him from destructive sin forever. This constitutes the first part of the salvation which God has provided for man. God separates the believer from his sin by the blood of Christ and thereby also forgives him.
Once a believer has been cleansed from his sins by the blood of Jesus, then God removes his sin from the entire universe. God accomplished this through the burial of His dead Son, and the descent of His Spirit into hell. God created hell for the destruction of sin, the Devil and his angels and the removal of all evil from His universe. Even though Jesus was pure and innocent, He bore the sin of the human race on the cross as if He were responsible for it. Jesus allowed man's sin to cause Him to die, just as it causes sinful humans to die. In other words, Jesus sacrificed Himself in man's place, bearing man's sin and hell. When the Spirit of Jesus descended into hell, He carried the whole sin of mankind into hell and left it there to be destroyed. The problem for unbelievers is that when they refuse to believe that Jesus did this for them, usually because of their pride, they choose to retain their sin, and thereby, they so identify their lives with their sin that God must separate them with their sin from Him and His universe forever. Those who accept the salvation that Christ has provided for them become cleansed by the blood of Jesus, and their sin descends with Jesus into hell to be destroyed forever. God then recreates the souls and spirits of believers thus separated from their sins. They become new creatures. The death and burial of Jesus constitutes the second part of man's salvation.
Jesus accomplished the third part of the believers' salvation by His resurrection from the dead. While Jesus died on the cross and was buried for all of mankind, He rose from the dead only for believers. Only believers can benefit from Christ's resurrection because only they have been cleansed from their sins and have had them removed by the sacrifice and burial of Christ. God cannot inhabit a dirty temple, but He can inhabit the temple of the believer's body whose spirit and soul have been cleansed and purified by the blood of Jesus. No person could have been saved if Christ had not risen from the dead. By His resurrection, Jesus proved that Eternal Love and Innocence has complete power over evil. He proved that evil can never destroy God. The resurrected and living Christ completes the salvation of repentent believers by sending His Living Spirit into the hearts of believers to wash them and remove their sins, to declare them to be eternally innocent of sin, and to give to the cleansed hearts of believers His own Eternal and Holy Life. Believers can do nothing for their own salvation. But by simply repenting of their sins and accepting by faith that which Christ has accomplished for them, believers gain salvation from sin and death, and eternal life and fellowship with God forever.
Whereas Adam's limited self-sacrifice had failed to help Eve and had merely resulted in his own fall from God's favor, Jesus' Eternal Love and Innocence and Self-Sacrifice succeeded in restoring repentent believers to the everlasting grace of the Almighty Love and Life of God.
This restoration of lost sinners to the grace of God constitutes a recreation of repentent believers. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolized the disobedience of man and his fall from God's grace, but it also symbolized a finite retention of some of the attributes of God. But this retention in mankind remained far too weak to help him. The evil part of man had rendered the good part impotent. Mankind was lost in sin, under the power of Satan, and only Almighty God could save him.
God did not lose His love for mankind because He understood that the ruined goodness left in man could be recreated. Man could not recreate himself but God could recreate him. God could remove the sin of man, clean up his ruined goodness, and put it all back together so as to create a completely new man who would be filled with righteousness and love for God.
Evil believes that innocence in any life is a weakness that will always yield to exploitation and pressure. Satan counted on destroying the Innocence of Jesus on the cross. Satan thought that the overwhelming agony that Jesus would suffer on the cross would cause Him to sin and thus ruin salvation and eventually destroy God. Read Matthew 27:39-43. Satan's plan was revealed in the evil taunts towards Jesus on the cross. If Satan could get Jesus to save Himself from the agony of the cross, then he would cause Jesus to fail to save mankind, and thus cause God to sin against His own Love and thus destroy God. Satan did not know, but should have learned from his temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, that it is quite impossible for God to sin. God's Almighty Love can be injured, but never destroyed. God turned the tables on the Devil, and used Satan's attempted murder of Jesus as the means for man's salvation. Hear the victorious cry of Jesus from the cross just before He died: "It is finished."
God's process for the recreation of man is quite similar to His recreation of the earth as recorded in Genesis 1:2. The Bible clearly teaches that God's Spirit moved upon a dark earth covered with water that was there. The Bible also records that this earth: "was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep." This seems to indicate that a former earth had existed that had been created by God. For some reason, perhaps because of Lucifer's fall to earth, God had completely destroyed this earth and had left it in a place that the Bible relates in Matthew 8:12, 22:13 and 25:30 as being "outer darkness." "Outer darkness" describes whatever lies outside of God's creative Consciousness. Reality can only exist within the scope of God's Consciousness. As Bishop Berkeley so accurately told us in paraphrase: "The universe is real only because God constantly observes it." This means that in the absence of God's Consciousness, the existence of the former earth had become equal to its non-existence when God cast it into "outer darkness." This earth had become swallowed up by absolute nothingness; that is, in a state of chaos. It non-existed nowhere and at no time. Only when "the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters" did the earth begin to regain its reality through God's recreation of it. In a similar way, God saw that the ruined goodness in man that had been swallowed up by the darkness of sin could be cleansed and recreated by Him. But this recreation of man would in no way be a restoration of the old Adam, but would be a creation of a new kind of human wholly restored to righteousness and forever devoted to God. Similarly, God did not restore the old earth, but created a completely new earth, but by also using some of the left-over materials of the old earth.
Friday, July 13, 2012
FROM PARMENIDES TO REALITY
The great philosopher, Parmenides, used some pretty good logic to arrive at the conclusion that reality is a homogeneous sphere that was somewhat like a fog throughout, with no difference within it. From this he further concluded that all that we observe, such as individual objects and motion, is but mere illusion.
The problem with his philosophy is that his reality is completely useless, while his illusion is useful and all that we know. All that appears to consciousness must be real, whether mental or material, because this is all we know. Even if all of our experiences were a distortion of something else, nevertheless, our experiences would be our only reality because that is all we know and all that is useful to us. So much for all philosophers, such as Kant, who theorize about hidden realities because even if their logic is right (and Kant was a great logician) their conclusions can only be wrong. Not saying that Kant was not right about many other conclusions, one being his discovery that the powers of the mind are real.
This means that all that appears to us must be real exactly as we experience it because even if it is a distortion of something else, we cannot know the something else and that makes it irrelevant. Also, those philosophers who contend that reality can only be a product of sense experience, and that all that we experience solely in the mind must be to some extent unreal, are wrong as well. Literally everything that we experience; everything that comes into the light of our consciousnesses, whether material or solely mental, must be real exactly as we experience it because every bit of it is useful to us in one way or another. All abstract thoughts, ideas about the powers of the mind, fleeting emotions and sense experiences; all are real to consciousness because they all have proven useful to us to some extent. Even consciousness itself is real to itself as a useful idea. As a matter of fact, it is quite impossible for consciousness to experience anything except reality.
Philosophers theorize about ideas, thoughts, rationality, will and imagination; but these are all merely the products of consciousness, Where reality is concerned, consciousness is the bottom line. The only known power in the universe that can bring reality into true existence is consciousness.
The idealistic philosophers are quite right when they assert that finite consciousness establishes reality, but they are wrong to maintain that finite consciousness creates the contents of reality. There has to be material objects outside of consciousness to be experienced, but these objects cannot be real until experienced by finite consciousness. Any object in the universe which has never been experienced by finite consciousness cannot be real because its existence is equal to nothing. The most that can be said about such an object is that it possesses potential reality.
For example, an astronomer looks through his telescope at a black spot at the extreme edges of the universe. Unknown to him, this black spot hides a galaxy that cannot be seen because its light has not yet reached earth. To this astronomer, this galaxy is equal to nothing because he has not yet experienced it. This galaxy is not real to him. This hidden galaxy has only potential reality. Finite consciousness establishes only a finite reality. Only an Infinite Consciousness can create an absolute reality because only an Infinite Consciousness can know absolutely everything.
All that finite consciousness experiences must be real exactly as experienced, but all that it does not experience can only be unreal because it always equals nothing. Any object or abstract idea or emotion which has never been objectified by finite consciousness can only be unreal to finite consciousness.
This truth is reflected in the way we use language. For example, when we say that a certain plan that someone has invented "will not work," we do not mean that "the production of a useful result" is in-itself unreal. We have all experienced plans that work. We simply mean that we mentally and temporarily equate "will work" with nothingness as far as this particular plan is concerned. We separate "will work" from the plan by the mental use of nothingness. Like the black spot that hides the galaxy from the astronomer, we mentally hide "will work" behind a black spot in order to exclude it from the plan under consideration. This constitutes one of the uses of the idea of nothing which is real because it is known to consciousness and useful to consciousness.
The materialists are right to maintain that there has to be an objective something separate from consciousness for consciousness to objectify, at least as far as sensory perception is concerned. But the materialists are wrong to assert that material objects are real in the absence of consciousness or that the mind is somehow unreal. Consciousness can only be that necessary power that causes reality to appear in any known universe, and all that appears to consciousness must be real whether mental or material. For these reasons, potential reality within a universe devoid of consciousness could never evolve consciousness to make it real because such potential reality would forever remain equal to a nothingness which is non-existent. Since a universe without consciousness could never evolve consciousness, then the only way any such universe could become real were if consciousness were added to it from the outside. Potential reality cannot become conscious of itself because nothing cannot be separated from something in the absence of consciousness. This means that consciousness must be something completely different from anything material.
The Skeptics are right to maintain that nothing can be known to be real, but wrong to assert that reality cannot be known for certain. The truth is that all that finite consciousness knows must be real for certain including the idea of nothing.
One may object that all of this speculation must be wrong because we do experience unreality don't we? But the true answer to this question is: No, we never experience unreality except as hidden by the idea of nothing. To illustrate this truth, we will return to the plan of which the judgment was made that it "will not work." Suppose this plan were put into operation to solve the problem and it worked just fine producing the desired result. In this case, the plan would prove itself to be real because of its usefulness. But the judgment "will not work" will have been shown to be a false combination even though each idea in the judgment is real: "will" meaning an expectation, "not" meaning the real idea of nothing and "work" meaning the desired result. The judgment has proven itself to be not real as far as this plan is concerned. But where is this unreality? It does not adhere to any of the real elements of the false judgment. It seems to be nowhere and at no time. Apparently, it non-exists as hidden behind the idea of nothing. On the other hand, suppose the plan were put into operation and true to the judgment about it, it did not work. In this case, the plan would prove to be the false combination and not real even though every element of the plan was real. The judgment would have proven itself to be a true combination and real because of its usefulness. In either case, unreality does not appear to consciousness, but seems to non-exist as hidden by the idea of nothing. This reveals a universal rule: Unreality never appears to consciousness but always non-exists as hidden by the idea of nothing.
The problem with his philosophy is that his reality is completely useless, while his illusion is useful and all that we know. All that appears to consciousness must be real, whether mental or material, because this is all we know. Even if all of our experiences were a distortion of something else, nevertheless, our experiences would be our only reality because that is all we know and all that is useful to us. So much for all philosophers, such as Kant, who theorize about hidden realities because even if their logic is right (and Kant was a great logician) their conclusions can only be wrong. Not saying that Kant was not right about many other conclusions, one being his discovery that the powers of the mind are real.
This means that all that appears to us must be real exactly as we experience it because even if it is a distortion of something else, we cannot know the something else and that makes it irrelevant. Also, those philosophers who contend that reality can only be a product of sense experience, and that all that we experience solely in the mind must be to some extent unreal, are wrong as well. Literally everything that we experience; everything that comes into the light of our consciousnesses, whether material or solely mental, must be real exactly as we experience it because every bit of it is useful to us in one way or another. All abstract thoughts, ideas about the powers of the mind, fleeting emotions and sense experiences; all are real to consciousness because they all have proven useful to us to some extent. Even consciousness itself is real to itself as a useful idea. As a matter of fact, it is quite impossible for consciousness to experience anything except reality.
Philosophers theorize about ideas, thoughts, rationality, will and imagination; but these are all merely the products of consciousness, Where reality is concerned, consciousness is the bottom line. The only known power in the universe that can bring reality into true existence is consciousness.
The idealistic philosophers are quite right when they assert that finite consciousness establishes reality, but they are wrong to maintain that finite consciousness creates the contents of reality. There has to be material objects outside of consciousness to be experienced, but these objects cannot be real until experienced by finite consciousness. Any object in the universe which has never been experienced by finite consciousness cannot be real because its existence is equal to nothing. The most that can be said about such an object is that it possesses potential reality.
For example, an astronomer looks through his telescope at a black spot at the extreme edges of the universe. Unknown to him, this black spot hides a galaxy that cannot be seen because its light has not yet reached earth. To this astronomer, this galaxy is equal to nothing because he has not yet experienced it. This galaxy is not real to him. This hidden galaxy has only potential reality. Finite consciousness establishes only a finite reality. Only an Infinite Consciousness can create an absolute reality because only an Infinite Consciousness can know absolutely everything.
All that finite consciousness experiences must be real exactly as experienced, but all that it does not experience can only be unreal because it always equals nothing. Any object or abstract idea or emotion which has never been objectified by finite consciousness can only be unreal to finite consciousness.
This truth is reflected in the way we use language. For example, when we say that a certain plan that someone has invented "will not work," we do not mean that "the production of a useful result" is in-itself unreal. We have all experienced plans that work. We simply mean that we mentally and temporarily equate "will work" with nothingness as far as this particular plan is concerned. We separate "will work" from the plan by the mental use of nothingness. Like the black spot that hides the galaxy from the astronomer, we mentally hide "will work" behind a black spot in order to exclude it from the plan under consideration. This constitutes one of the uses of the idea of nothing which is real because it is known to consciousness and useful to consciousness.
The materialists are right to maintain that there has to be an objective something separate from consciousness for consciousness to objectify, at least as far as sensory perception is concerned. But the materialists are wrong to assert that material objects are real in the absence of consciousness or that the mind is somehow unreal. Consciousness can only be that necessary power that causes reality to appear in any known universe, and all that appears to consciousness must be real whether mental or material. For these reasons, potential reality within a universe devoid of consciousness could never evolve consciousness to make it real because such potential reality would forever remain equal to a nothingness which is non-existent. Since a universe without consciousness could never evolve consciousness, then the only way any such universe could become real were if consciousness were added to it from the outside. Potential reality cannot become conscious of itself because nothing cannot be separated from something in the absence of consciousness. This means that consciousness must be something completely different from anything material.
The Skeptics are right to maintain that nothing can be known to be real, but wrong to assert that reality cannot be known for certain. The truth is that all that finite consciousness knows must be real for certain including the idea of nothing.
One may object that all of this speculation must be wrong because we do experience unreality don't we? But the true answer to this question is: No, we never experience unreality except as hidden by the idea of nothing. To illustrate this truth, we will return to the plan of which the judgment was made that it "will not work." Suppose this plan were put into operation to solve the problem and it worked just fine producing the desired result. In this case, the plan would prove itself to be real because of its usefulness. But the judgment "will not work" will have been shown to be a false combination even though each idea in the judgment is real: "will" meaning an expectation, "not" meaning the real idea of nothing and "work" meaning the desired result. The judgment has proven itself to be not real as far as this plan is concerned. But where is this unreality? It does not adhere to any of the real elements of the false judgment. It seems to be nowhere and at no time. Apparently, it non-exists as hidden behind the idea of nothing. On the other hand, suppose the plan were put into operation and true to the judgment about it, it did not work. In this case, the plan would prove to be the false combination and not real even though every element of the plan was real. The judgment would have proven itself to be a true combination and real because of its usefulness. In either case, unreality does not appear to consciousness, but seems to non-exist as hidden by the idea of nothing. This reveals a universal rule: Unreality never appears to consciousness but always non-exists as hidden by the idea of nothing.
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
CREATION AND RECREATION chapter 7
The Preparation
Read: Isaiah 53:1-12 Psalm 22:1-31 Micah 5:2 Deuteronomy 18:15-19 Genesis 14:18-20 Genesis 22:1-14 Joshua 5:13-15 Exodus 12:1-8
The history that God reveals in the Old Testament is not history for its own sake. This history relates the fallen condition of all humanity as it passes through a continual testing, being subject to a continuous, behind-the-scenes war between God and Satan over the salvation or destruction of the human race.
God selected a particular people, the Hebrews, through which He would effect the salvation of mankind in the person of the coming seed of the woman who would be called the Messiah. Some of the prophets prophesied that this Messiah would accomplish salvation for humanity through His suffering. Psalm 22:14-16 and Isaiah 53:5-7 relate that the Messiah must shed His blood in a terrible ordeal in order to provide the means for man's salvation. For these reasons, God commanded the Hebrews to sacrifice certain animals in worship as a sign or symbol that this coming Messiah would Himself suffer for man's salvation. God typified this truth in that the ram was sacrificed but Isaac was spared, and a lamb was sacrificed but the Hebrews were spared. In His secret war with Satan, God did whatever He thought necessary in order to make sure that His Messiah would come into the world and alone accomplish man's salvation.
On the other hand, Satan constantly worked to destroy mankind and prevent the Messiah from coming. Satan knew that if he could nullify the power of God's Love, then he could separate mankind from God's Love, invalidate some of God's Ideas and thus cause the eventual permanent death of God Himself. Satan's constant tactics are the same as he employed in the garden of Eden; that is, lie about God's Word, try to get man to deify himself, and try to get man to believe that he can effect his own salvation. If Satan could ever get the whole human race to believe that they do not need God, then he could break the power of Love, and thereby eventually destroy God.
In this war, God is testing Himself. God means to prove that Love can never be destroyed. Love can be injured but never destroyed. Love can be hurt, disappointed and grieved. Love can be nailed to a cross. Love can be subjected to the worst anguish and humiliation, but as the Apostle Paul so accurately stated: "Love never fails." Read I Corinthians 13:8.
Mankind is caught in the middle of this war; condemned to the freedom of a choice between life and death. Most people would prefer to ignore this choice, but this is impossible. To attempt to ignore this choice is to choose death. Those who choose to love and follow God must do so by repenting of their sins and accepting the free gift of everlasting life that God's Son came into the world to provide for them through His self-sacrifice and resurrection.
Satan believes that God's gift of free will to mankind was a mistake that Satan can exploit to bring about the complete destruction of mankind by his own choice, and therefore, the ruination of God's Love. Satan believes this because when he was Lucifer, his free will brought about his own invention of sin and evil which he believes he can use to kill God. Like all criminals, Satan sees love and kindness and gifts from benefactors as weaknesses which the criminal can exploit to his own advantage. Satan's whole aim is to cause God's Love to fail, and if God is ever a failure then He can no longer be God.
The difference between Satan and humanity is that Satan gave himself wholly to evil, and therefore, cannot be saved. Man was created in God's image and fell when he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge of evil is often greatly emphasized whereas the knowledge of good is often ignored. The goodness of Eve's fall inhered in the fact that she became an innocent victim of a superior evil force. The goodness of Adam's fall was that he sacrificed himself in order to maintain love and fellowship with his wife. This retained goodness was a part of God's plan to save humanity. This retained goodness made man not worthy of, but susceptible of God's salvation, not because of man's goodness which can never be enough, but because this retained goodness reflected the very Goodness of God's Son.
Read Jeremiah 17:9. Man's retained goodness is far to weak and finite to effect his own salvation. Therefore, man has been completely ruined by the fall. Man needs an all-powerful Love and Innocence and Self-Sacrifice to come into his lost being and re-create him to eternal Goodness and eternal Life. God assigned this necessary project to be accomplished by His Son.
As the Old Testament unfolds this history of the preparation, sometimes Satan intervened in this history to try to destroy mankind completely. When he did this, God countered with His own intervention in order to preserve mankind for the coming Messiah. The Bible relates that God was very patient and long-suffering with sinful man by waiting for him to repent and love Him, but when His patience became exhausted because of man's willful stubbornness, He often effected a massive destruction of sinful mankind in order to preserve those who had chosen Him. At one time, near the beginning of this history, the whole human race had chosen to cling to evil except for eight righteous persons in the family of Noah. Noah preached righteousness but no one repented for hundreds of years. When God's patience became exhausted, He destroyed all of the evil race with a world-wide flood, but saved the eight righteous persons by means of an ark which He commanded Noah to build.
For these same reasons, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, the first born of the Egyptians, and used the Israeli army to wipe out whole cities of evil people in order to ensure that His righteous people would be preserved. Someone has truly stated that in the Old Testament God destroyed the wicked in order to save the righteous, but in the New Testament God allowed the murder of the Righteous in order to save the wicked.
God never directly interferes with any individual free choices in life. As the Bible relates, God never forces anyone to either serve Him or reject Him. God waits for every individual to make their own choices in life.
Nevertheless, though God allows individual freedom to have its way, He still retains the power to channel history in His direction. God made sure that His Messiah would come, and He directed history so that every prophecy that He sent by His prophets would come true exactly as He said that it would. This is one way that believers know that the Bible is true. Another way that believers know that the Bible is true is that one can read that while God never forces anyone to serve Him, yet despite this fact, the Bible reveals that He also was quite able to constrain history in the directions that He wanted it to go. This constitutes a definite miracle that runs through the whole Bible. If the Bible were written by mere men and not by the Holy Ghost, then how could so many different writers think to maintain this same theme throughout the whole Word of God?
How was God able to direct history to fulfill His own purposes, while at the same time leaving individual freedom alone? Some of the answer is hidden and mysterious, but the Bible reveals some of the ways in which God was able to do this. In the first place, God sent preachers and prophets to preach righteousness to the people in order to persuade them to repent and serve the Lord. Then, God used those believers' choices to obey Him to cause history to move in God's direction. In the second place, as Genesis 15:16 relates, when God said that a certain people's time was "full," He meant that His patience with their wickedness had become exhausted, and He then was ready to effect a wholesale destruction of the wicked in order to eliminate them as a hindrance to the fulfillment of His will. Those who criticize God by saying He was cruel to do this do not take into account that the wicked offend the very Being of God, and that God has determined that it is better for Him to save some of the human race through the work of His Son than to allow the entire race to perish. Note that according to Jesus' own prophecy in Luke 21:24, God will not end the history of mankind until "the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled."
In the third place, God proved able to correct those of His followers who failed, at times, to do His will. One can read how God punished, or in other ways corrected, such of His followers as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Samson, King David, the Apostle Peter and many others in order to cause them to repent and to return to doing His will. In addition, God demonstrated His ability to replace those of His followers who proved unable to accomplish His will with others who could. For example, God replaced King Saul, who deluded himself into believing he was doing God's will when he was not, with King David who knew exactly how to repent when God punished him for his wrongdoing.
In the fourth place, God proved able to punish evildoers, not to force them to do His will, but to persuade them that it was in their best interests to submit to His will. For example, Pharaoh demonstrated an extreme stubbornness to obey God when Moses demanded that he allow the Israelites to go free. Pharaoh allowed Egypt to endure nine violent judgments before he finally allowed the Israelites to go free after the judgment of the deaths of the firstborn. Even after this, he changed his mind and went after the Israelites with his army. This story clearly shows that Pharaoh retained his free will throughout this whole ordeal. The only question was: How much was he willing to endure? Pharaoh could well have continued to defy God even after the tenth judgment, but God knew that the Egyptian people would not allow him to do so.
In any case, one should note that at no time in the entire Bible did God send any preacher, prophet or angel to tell any person that they must do God's will. God gave commandments that he knew would be disobeyed, and sometimes He used forceful means to accomplish His will, but He never abrogated the free will of any individual. The only possible exception to this rule was when the Holy Ghost miraculously impregnated the virgin Mary with the baby Jesus. However, Luke 1:38 clearly teaches that Mary was quite willing to do God's will.
In the fifth place, from time to time, God performed great miracles in the sight of all men, believers and unbelievers alike. God meant these miracles to be sufficient to show that He is real, and that all men should submit to His will simply because He possesses the requisite power to accomplish His will. Despite all this, sinful men, such as the Pharisees, stubbornly clung to their evil ways even when they personally observed the love and compassion of their God in the miracles that His Son performed.
Read: Isaiah 53:1-12 Psalm 22:1-31 Micah 5:2 Deuteronomy 18:15-19 Genesis 14:18-20 Genesis 22:1-14 Joshua 5:13-15 Exodus 12:1-8
The history that God reveals in the Old Testament is not history for its own sake. This history relates the fallen condition of all humanity as it passes through a continual testing, being subject to a continuous, behind-the-scenes war between God and Satan over the salvation or destruction of the human race.
God selected a particular people, the Hebrews, through which He would effect the salvation of mankind in the person of the coming seed of the woman who would be called the Messiah. Some of the prophets prophesied that this Messiah would accomplish salvation for humanity through His suffering. Psalm 22:14-16 and Isaiah 53:5-7 relate that the Messiah must shed His blood in a terrible ordeal in order to provide the means for man's salvation. For these reasons, God commanded the Hebrews to sacrifice certain animals in worship as a sign or symbol that this coming Messiah would Himself suffer for man's salvation. God typified this truth in that the ram was sacrificed but Isaac was spared, and a lamb was sacrificed but the Hebrews were spared. In His secret war with Satan, God did whatever He thought necessary in order to make sure that His Messiah would come into the world and alone accomplish man's salvation.
On the other hand, Satan constantly worked to destroy mankind and prevent the Messiah from coming. Satan knew that if he could nullify the power of God's Love, then he could separate mankind from God's Love, invalidate some of God's Ideas and thus cause the eventual permanent death of God Himself. Satan's constant tactics are the same as he employed in the garden of Eden; that is, lie about God's Word, try to get man to deify himself, and try to get man to believe that he can effect his own salvation. If Satan could ever get the whole human race to believe that they do not need God, then he could break the power of Love, and thereby eventually destroy God.
In this war, God is testing Himself. God means to prove that Love can never be destroyed. Love can be injured but never destroyed. Love can be hurt, disappointed and grieved. Love can be nailed to a cross. Love can be subjected to the worst anguish and humiliation, but as the Apostle Paul so accurately stated: "Love never fails." Read I Corinthians 13:8.
Mankind is caught in the middle of this war; condemned to the freedom of a choice between life and death. Most people would prefer to ignore this choice, but this is impossible. To attempt to ignore this choice is to choose death. Those who choose to love and follow God must do so by repenting of their sins and accepting the free gift of everlasting life that God's Son came into the world to provide for them through His self-sacrifice and resurrection.
Satan believes that God's gift of free will to mankind was a mistake that Satan can exploit to bring about the complete destruction of mankind by his own choice, and therefore, the ruination of God's Love. Satan believes this because when he was Lucifer, his free will brought about his own invention of sin and evil which he believes he can use to kill God. Like all criminals, Satan sees love and kindness and gifts from benefactors as weaknesses which the criminal can exploit to his own advantage. Satan's whole aim is to cause God's Love to fail, and if God is ever a failure then He can no longer be God.
The difference between Satan and humanity is that Satan gave himself wholly to evil, and therefore, cannot be saved. Man was created in God's image and fell when he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge of evil is often greatly emphasized whereas the knowledge of good is often ignored. The goodness of Eve's fall inhered in the fact that she became an innocent victim of a superior evil force. The goodness of Adam's fall was that he sacrificed himself in order to maintain love and fellowship with his wife. This retained goodness was a part of God's plan to save humanity. This retained goodness made man not worthy of, but susceptible of God's salvation, not because of man's goodness which can never be enough, but because this retained goodness reflected the very Goodness of God's Son.
Read Jeremiah 17:9. Man's retained goodness is far to weak and finite to effect his own salvation. Therefore, man has been completely ruined by the fall. Man needs an all-powerful Love and Innocence and Self-Sacrifice to come into his lost being and re-create him to eternal Goodness and eternal Life. God assigned this necessary project to be accomplished by His Son.
As the Old Testament unfolds this history of the preparation, sometimes Satan intervened in this history to try to destroy mankind completely. When he did this, God countered with His own intervention in order to preserve mankind for the coming Messiah. The Bible relates that God was very patient and long-suffering with sinful man by waiting for him to repent and love Him, but when His patience became exhausted because of man's willful stubbornness, He often effected a massive destruction of sinful mankind in order to preserve those who had chosen Him. At one time, near the beginning of this history, the whole human race had chosen to cling to evil except for eight righteous persons in the family of Noah. Noah preached righteousness but no one repented for hundreds of years. When God's patience became exhausted, He destroyed all of the evil race with a world-wide flood, but saved the eight righteous persons by means of an ark which He commanded Noah to build.
For these same reasons, God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, the first born of the Egyptians, and used the Israeli army to wipe out whole cities of evil people in order to ensure that His righteous people would be preserved. Someone has truly stated that in the Old Testament God destroyed the wicked in order to save the righteous, but in the New Testament God allowed the murder of the Righteous in order to save the wicked.
God never directly interferes with any individual free choices in life. As the Bible relates, God never forces anyone to either serve Him or reject Him. God waits for every individual to make their own choices in life.
Nevertheless, though God allows individual freedom to have its way, He still retains the power to channel history in His direction. God made sure that His Messiah would come, and He directed history so that every prophecy that He sent by His prophets would come true exactly as He said that it would. This is one way that believers know that the Bible is true. Another way that believers know that the Bible is true is that one can read that while God never forces anyone to serve Him, yet despite this fact, the Bible reveals that He also was quite able to constrain history in the directions that He wanted it to go. This constitutes a definite miracle that runs through the whole Bible. If the Bible were written by mere men and not by the Holy Ghost, then how could so many different writers think to maintain this same theme throughout the whole Word of God?
How was God able to direct history to fulfill His own purposes, while at the same time leaving individual freedom alone? Some of the answer is hidden and mysterious, but the Bible reveals some of the ways in which God was able to do this. In the first place, God sent preachers and prophets to preach righteousness to the people in order to persuade them to repent and serve the Lord. Then, God used those believers' choices to obey Him to cause history to move in God's direction. In the second place, as Genesis 15:16 relates, when God said that a certain people's time was "full," He meant that His patience with their wickedness had become exhausted, and He then was ready to effect a wholesale destruction of the wicked in order to eliminate them as a hindrance to the fulfillment of His will. Those who criticize God by saying He was cruel to do this do not take into account that the wicked offend the very Being of God, and that God has determined that it is better for Him to save some of the human race through the work of His Son than to allow the entire race to perish. Note that according to Jesus' own prophecy in Luke 21:24, God will not end the history of mankind until "the times of the Gentiles be fulfilled."
In the third place, God proved able to correct those of His followers who failed, at times, to do His will. One can read how God punished, or in other ways corrected, such of His followers as Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Samson, King David, the Apostle Peter and many others in order to cause them to repent and to return to doing His will. In addition, God demonstrated His ability to replace those of His followers who proved unable to accomplish His will with others who could. For example, God replaced King Saul, who deluded himself into believing he was doing God's will when he was not, with King David who knew exactly how to repent when God punished him for his wrongdoing.
In the fourth place, God proved able to punish evildoers, not to force them to do His will, but to persuade them that it was in their best interests to submit to His will. For example, Pharaoh demonstrated an extreme stubbornness to obey God when Moses demanded that he allow the Israelites to go free. Pharaoh allowed Egypt to endure nine violent judgments before he finally allowed the Israelites to go free after the judgment of the deaths of the firstborn. Even after this, he changed his mind and went after the Israelites with his army. This story clearly shows that Pharaoh retained his free will throughout this whole ordeal. The only question was: How much was he willing to endure? Pharaoh could well have continued to defy God even after the tenth judgment, but God knew that the Egyptian people would not allow him to do so.
In any case, one should note that at no time in the entire Bible did God send any preacher, prophet or angel to tell any person that they must do God's will. God gave commandments that he knew would be disobeyed, and sometimes He used forceful means to accomplish His will, but He never abrogated the free will of any individual. The only possible exception to this rule was when the Holy Ghost miraculously impregnated the virgin Mary with the baby Jesus. However, Luke 1:38 clearly teaches that Mary was quite willing to do God's will.
In the fifth place, from time to time, God performed great miracles in the sight of all men, believers and unbelievers alike. God meant these miracles to be sufficient to show that He is real, and that all men should submit to His will simply because He possesses the requisite power to accomplish His will. Despite all this, sinful men, such as the Pharisees, stubbornly clung to their evil ways even when they personally observed the love and compassion of their God in the miracles that His Son performed.
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
SPECULATION ON GOD'S INFINITE BEING
Read: Revelation 4:11 Ephesians 3:9 Psalm 147:5 John 1:1-3 Galatians 5:6 Exodus 34:14 Psalm 90:11 Psalm 111:10 Psalm 19:9 (KJV)
Why would God create an historical process currently being played out on the earth in order to test His Infinite Love when He already knows that His Infinite Love has infinite value? One can only speculate since no one can enter into the Infinite Mind of God. All we can know about God He has revealed in His Word.
We learn from God's Word that He has absolutely "created all things." Every "thing" is simply any object in God's Consciousness, which makes every "thing" infinite since God's Mind is Infinite. This means that absolutely every possible thought, idea or emotion is already an infinite "thing" in the Mind of God. God's finite creations are but simply limited sections of His Infinite Ideas and Plans. God's Infinite Self-Consciousness makes Him an Infinite "Thing" to Himself. This means that God is an Eternal Self-Created Being. This constitutes the everlasting and absolute unity of God's Consciousness and His Word.
Faith is one of the infinite "things" that extends from God's Love. All of God's infinite attributes subsist in Love which is the Infinite Being of God. God's "Faith" is His infinite confidence in Himself. This means that God already knows that Love is omnipotent and holds infinite value. So then, why has God allowed His Love to be tested through mankind in an historical process occurring on the earth? The immediate answer is that God allowed this test for the purpose of saving a fallen race which needed this proof of His Love because its limited faith was subject to sin. God proved the infinite value of His Love through His sacrifice of Himself on a cross to save a lost race ruined by sin. Man often gives his faith to false gods and ideologies, which causes his faith to become sinful and destructive. Through His self-sacrifice, burial and resurrection, God redirected man's faith to Himself who is their Savior from sin and destruction. In essence, God tested His Love for the sake of mankind's salvation.
An imperfect example could be this. Suppose the leader of a group of people who are in danger of being destroyed knows that he can accomplish a very difficult task which will save his group from destruction. Most of those in his group do not believe that he can do it. Nevertheless, the leader then accomplishes the difficult task and afterwards stands on a hill and beckons that they should follow him because he has opened the way to safety. Some of his group believe him and follow him to safety. The others do not believe him and stay and are destroyed. The leader already had every confidence in himself that he could accomplish the difficult task but he did it anyway despite his group's lack of confidence in him. The leader proved his love for his people even though he did not need to. His love compelled him to put himself through the hell of accomplishing the difficult task even though he was not at all obligated to save a faithless group resigned to self-destruction.
Any of the limited "things" in man's consciousness are subject to false combinations called sin. Faith is one of the "things" in man's consciousness which will become sinful if it is given to anything but God. Doubt can become sinful if it is attached to a faith even in God. Jealousy will become sinful when combined with other "things" such as obsession and oppression. Man's limited love will itself become sinful when combined with lust and selfishness. Man was created in God's image but any of the limited "things" that God provided for man's consciousness can become sinful because of the power of original sin which often compels man to put his "things" into false combinations which is sin.
However, all of the "things" which can become sinful to mankind have been perfected by the Infinite Consciousness of God. God has perfected His Faith by His Infinite Self-Confidence. God's Doubt has also been perfected by His Infinite Consciousness. God's infinite Doubt must be considered in the light of His infinite Faith. God's Faith and His Doubt must seem contradictory to our limited consciousnesses but not to God's Infinite Consciousness. God's Doubt may be His Consciousness of the fact that He must actually enter into the historical process and suffer a terrible trial as a man in order to prove His Love for mankind and His compelling desire to save them even though He possessed an Infinite Faith in Himself that He already loved man and that He could save them. In other words, God absolutely knew that He could save man, but in a sense, He dreaded doing it because in order to do it He would have to expose His Holiness as a man to the horrors of bearing man's sin in terrible suffering on the cross. God's infinite Dread is very similar to his infinite Doubt.
Jealousy, which most often becomes sinful in man, has also been perfected as an Infinite Idea and Emotion in God's Mind. In fact, God's Word states that one of God's names is Jealous. God's Jealousy means His absolute guardianship of His people's welfare. All of God's Infinite Attributes extend from His Infinite Being which is Love.
Man's fear is obviously often sinful because it can be the opposite of faith. But Psalm 90:11 clearly refers to a Fear that is an attribute of God's Being. God's Word commands His people to fear Him. God's Word teaches the fear of God as being a prelude to wisdom and faith. But God's Infinite Fear is a perfect "thing." This Fear of God means to be so awestruck by His mighty Power that one submits to Him with trust in Him and love for His awesome grace and mercy, but also mindful of His awesome Power to punish. God's Infinite Fear has been perfected by His Infinity, and who should be more awestruck by His own Infinite Power than God Himself.
In the end, all truth depends on judgments. Man's finite judgments are often sinful because they are infected by original sin. But God's Judgments, which He creates from His Infinite Ideas, are always true and righteous.
Monday, July 2, 2012
CREATION AND RECREATION chapter 6
The Fall
Read: Genesis 1:27 Genesis 2:7 Genesis 2:21-22 Genesis chapter 3 I John 4:8 Genesis 4:1-15 Revelation 4:11
God created Adam and Eve in His own image, but He created them to be a finite image of His Infinite Self. This caused them to be like Him in finite ways but unlike Him in infinite ways. God created them to live in a state of pure but finite love and innocence. "God is Love" and one of the attributes of absolute Love is absolute Innocence. So God knew nothing about sin and evil until Lucifer's rebellion. Because of God's Innocence, the possibility of sin and evil had never occurred to Him. Sin and evil consist of false combinations of God's Ideas which attempt to reduce God's Ideas to absolute nothingness. But sin and evil cannot diminish God's Omniscience in the least because nothingness can never diminish infinity. In fact, nothingness never diminishes anything. A thing can temporarily be considered as being equal to nothing, but nothing can never annul or diminish anything. Things can change from one thing to another but they never become nothing.
God gave free will to the man and the woman because He wanted an historical process to occur which would be based on their decisions. God allowed Satan to have his part in this process because He wanted to prove to Himself and all of His creations that Love has an infinite value which can never be destroyed.
God created Adam and Eve to be neither mortal nor immortal but He simply waited for them to make their choice. God had given them permission to eat of every tree of the garden including the tree of life, except that God had forbidden them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest they die. God had given them a clear choice between mortality and immortality. Since God is the source of everlasting life, had Adam and Eve chosen to eat of the tree of life first, then their choice would have been equivalent to choosing God Himself, and the entire human race would from that time have lived in a paradise of love and innocence forever. God waited and hoped that Adam and Eve would choose to eat of the tree of life first. For reasons unknown, perhaps overconfidence in their innocence, they refrained from eating of the tree of life.
Their hesitancy gave the serpent, who was Satan, his chance to tempt them. Satan used false combinations and half-truths called "lies" to cause doubt in Eve about God's Word. Satan started out by questioning Eve in order to find out the choices that God had given them. When Satan discovered from Eve's answer that God had told them not to eat of a particular tree, then he knew that God had given them a choice between mortality and immortality. Satan then endeavored to trick Eve into disobeying God in his efforts to destroy a part of God's creations.
Because God had already created everything that can exist, whether material or in God's Mind, then Satan could not have created lies because there was nothing left to create. God's infinite creations leave nothing left over to be created. However, Lucifer discovered that he could take God's Ideas and form them into false combinations which effected untruths, destruction and nothingness. Lucifer invented sin and evil to be used in his efforts to try to destroy God's creations and eventually God Himself. Because of God's perfect Innocence, He had never thought that false combinations were even possible. But Satan's inventions involve nothing original, and because his inventions always effect nothingness, then they are no impediment to God's Infinity whatsoever.
After the serpent had discovered from questioning Eve that God had given them a real choice in that He had forbidden them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest they die, then the serpent began to tempt Eve with his lies in order to cause her destruction. Satan's first lie directly contradicted the Word of God to Adam and Eve, and the second lie deceived Eve into believing that she and Adam could gain a special power and glory that God did not want them to have. Every individual idea that the serpent used in his lies named a true and real creation of God. Even the word "God" denotes an Eternal and Infinite Self-Created Being. The word "die" is a true and real idea which God uses to eliminate all ideas which cannot be used in any particular true combination which He is creating. Thus God had told Adam and Eve that if they disobeyed Him then He would eliminate them from the garden of Eden and from direct fellowship with Him. But the serpent used the real idea "not," which God uses to separate every individual idea, in combination with the real idea "die" to give Eve the impression that she and Adam would gain some special power that God was withholding from them and that knowing good and evil was good for them. Note that the serpent did not use anything original, but he simply invented false combinations of God's true ideas.
The word "gods" means any of God's most powerful creations, such as Lucifer himself. The word "evil" names false combinations which always comprise true and real ideas. All false combinations eventually reduce to nothingness, but even the "idea of nothing" has always been a true and real creation of God. The serpent's true intention was to attempt to cause a chain reaction that would eventually lead to the destruction of God Himself. Satan thought that if he could use lies to reduce Adam and Eve to an absolute nothingness, then this destruction would limit some of God's Infinite Ideas, which in turn, would cause God to become finite, which in turn, would lead to the eventually death of God Himself. But Satan did not know and did not count on the fact that God's Power is Absolute and that God's Infinity cannot be reduced even when God Himself subtracts from it by becoming a finite man.
The serpent tricked Eve into believing his lies that God had lied to her, and so she chose to eat of the forbidden fruit believing that she would gain some form of knowledge and power that she then did not possess. True to God's Word, she lost her innocence and her direct fellowship with God, but she gained the power to invent both good and false combinations. These abilities became a part of her very being. From the moment she ate, she gained an unavoidable choice between good and evil. She could choose to do a temporary good, but she also could not avoid doing a destructive evil. Spiritually, she died immediately because she lost her direct fellowship with God. Eventually, she would die physically because the evil within her would reduce her body to nothing.
Eve retained a part of her innocence because she had become the victim of a being who was powerful and crafty. On the other hand, she had chosen to disbelieve and disobey God's Word, and so evil had become a part of her being. She bccame trapped in a terrible dilemma. She could choose to do a limited good which would never be enough to restore her to a direct fellowship with God. and she could not avoid doing evil which would continuously separate her from God. She retained the possibility of regaining life and direct fellowship with God, but only through His actions on her behalf. Her future depended entirely on her own choices. She had become condemned to a choice between life and death called "freedom." The history of the human race had begun.
Adam knew that Eve had fallen when she gave him the forbidden fruit to eat. This put Adam into a terrible dilemma. If he refused to eat he would lose his wife since they could no longer be compatible. If he ate he would also fall from fellowship with God, but he would regain the fellowship of his wife whom he loved. He chose to eat and fall in order to remain with his wife. Like Eve's choice, his choice was partly good and partly sinful. Eve's choice was good in that she was an innocent victim of evil, which partly proved the great value of innocence. Adam's choice was good in that it was an act of self-sacrifice which allowed him to retain the love and fellowship of his wife. Both choices were sinful in that they disobeyed God.
The main meaning of the Hebrew word for sin is an "offense." This word describes sin exactly. Sin offends the very Being of God. Sin is a direct attack on the Being and Life of God. Lucifer invented sin by making false combinations of God's Eternal Ideas which is the Word of God which is God Himself. Sin is a misuse of God's Word with the intent of inflicting a fatal blow to God's Being. For this reason, every time Satan quotes the Word of God, he misuses it, misquotes it or misapplies it. We particularly see this pattern in Satan's temptations of Jesus as recorded in the gospels.
Adam and Eve now felt ashamed of their nakedness, and so they sewed fig leaves together to hide it. They were not ashamed of their nakedness to each other because they were on the same level. They were ashamed of their nakedness before God and so they ran and hid themselves. Their nakedness had become a symbol of the fact that they now knew that God could see the lust and selfishness that had become a part of their beings.
When God came in the evening for His usual fellowship with Adam and Eve, He called for them and asked them if they had eaten of the forbidden fruit. God already knew where they were and what they had done. God simply wanted them to present themselves to Him and admit to their shame and guilt. God had a backup plan to rescue them in case they fell, but he also knew that no one can be rescued from sin until they admit that they are in trouble.
Adam and Eve came out of hiding and admitted their guilt, but true to human nature they both tried to minimize their guilt by emphasizing the good parts of their choices. Adam emphasized his self-sacrifice and blamed Eve. Eve emphasized her innocent victimization and blamed the serpent.
God turned His wrath on the serpent first because he, being pure evil and the villain, was the most blameworthy. Using his superior knowledge and power, the serpent had deliberately violated an innocent person, and he was also indirectly responsible for Adam's fall. But the serpent had also failed to realize that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was exactly true to its name. God had created this tree as a symbol of His own goodness which had been violated by Lucifer's misuse of it. Some of God's goodness had been retained by Adam in that he demonstrated love in self-sacrifice. Some of God's goodness had been retained by Eve in that she was an innocent victim. Their condition gave God a reason to employ a plan to rescue the human race from its fall. God had no desire to rescue the Devil because pure evil cannot be rescued. But God loved humanity and desired to save it in order to prove absolutely that Love can never be destroyed or even diminished. God also desires to recover His own goodness which had become a part of man's nature in order to use it in a new creation of man and nature. The goodness of God that still subsists within man exists in a finite form, but this does not diminish the Eternal Word of God in the least.
This does not mean that humanity was worth saving. Just as a glass of pure water must be thrown out if even a drop of filthiness is put into it, so the whole human race was ruined by the fall which made it not worth saving. God would have been justified if He had turned the entire race over to destruction. Nevertheless, because of God's love for humanity and to prove the indomitable power of Love to overcome evil by employing free will as His tool, God revealed His backup plan to save humanity from evil and ruin. God had devised a plan to cleanse mankind of all of his filthiness and to perfect him by filling him with His own righteousness.
It is quite significant that God did not reveal His plan directly to Adam and Eve, but told it to the serpent as a part of God's curse. Ordinarily, the man is spoken of as bearing the seed of the race, but God told the serpent that the seed of the woman would kill the serpent. Every human born of the seed of man must necessarily receive the fallen condition because of the conjoined disobedience of Adam and Eve. But God told the serpent that He would bring a special person into the world who would be the seed of the woman only. Satan had victimized Eve's finite innocence, but God meant to bring in a Savior who would be both God and man, and who would be an Absolute Innocence that Satan could not destroy. The serpent would succeed in wounding the Savior, but the Savior would crush the serpent's head. God wanted Satan to know that his days were numbered. It is also quite significant that God did not tell Satan that the seed of the woman would also provide the means for the salvation of mankind. This was a matter between God and man only. This was none of the Devil's business.
God then cursed Eve and all future women with labor pains in order to bring new life into the world. God cursed Adam and all future men with hard labor in order to feed their families. God also cursed the bodies of all humans with death and a return to dust. By means of these curses, God's message to mankind was that, in the future, man's finite life could only be saved and preserved by suffering. God's message of bodily death and destruction was that sin always attempts to reduce whatever it infects to an absolute nothingness.
Satan attempted to destroy God through a series of cause and effect relationships. If Satan could use one of his false combinations; that is, a lie, to reduce one of God's creations; that is, humanity, to an unrecoverable destruction; that is, death, then Satan thought he would succeed in eliminating a part of God's Infinite Ideas and Plans, thereby causing God to become finite, which in turn, would limit His Power and bring about His eventual destruction. Satan based his plan on his knowledge that God's finite creations were but small sections of His Infinite Ideas and Plans. Satan thought that if he could destroy even a small section of God's finite creations, then this action would eliminate a part of God's Infinite Knowledge, leading to the eventual destruction of God Himself. That which Satan did not know and did not count on, but which he discovered through the death, burial and resurrection of Christ; was that the Infinite Word of God cannot be diminished even when God subtracts a finite something from it.
God then killed some animal and clothed Adam and Eve with its skin. By doing this, God's message to mankind was that, in the future, God would once again accept the direct fellowship of the person for whom blood had been shed, and who accepted, by faith, the cleansing by the blood of the One who would come. Adam and Eve did not need to understand all of this. They only needed to obey God and trust in Him. Indeed, as the story of Adam and Eve's sons Cain and Abel shows, in the whole future of humanity, God would only accept those who worship Him with a blood sacrifice and He would always reject those who attempt to worship Him with the work of their hands because finite work can never be enough to please God. Man must provide for his own finite life through suffering, but God would provide for man's eternal life through His own suffering.
God then drove Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden to protect them from eating of the tree of life in their sinful condition, and thus in bodily form live forever in an unimaginably putrid condition of constant decay toward nothingness but without death. In a sense, bodily death was a blessing as well as a curse. The whole point was that sinful man no longer belonged in paradise. Mankind went out into the world to start his history that would be determined by the free choices that he would make.
Read: Genesis 1:27 Genesis 2:7 Genesis 2:21-22 Genesis chapter 3 I John 4:8 Genesis 4:1-15 Revelation 4:11
God created Adam and Eve in His own image, but He created them to be a finite image of His Infinite Self. This caused them to be like Him in finite ways but unlike Him in infinite ways. God created them to live in a state of pure but finite love and innocence. "God is Love" and one of the attributes of absolute Love is absolute Innocence. So God knew nothing about sin and evil until Lucifer's rebellion. Because of God's Innocence, the possibility of sin and evil had never occurred to Him. Sin and evil consist of false combinations of God's Ideas which attempt to reduce God's Ideas to absolute nothingness. But sin and evil cannot diminish God's Omniscience in the least because nothingness can never diminish infinity. In fact, nothingness never diminishes anything. A thing can temporarily be considered as being equal to nothing, but nothing can never annul or diminish anything. Things can change from one thing to another but they never become nothing.
God gave free will to the man and the woman because He wanted an historical process to occur which would be based on their decisions. God allowed Satan to have his part in this process because He wanted to prove to Himself and all of His creations that Love has an infinite value which can never be destroyed.
God created Adam and Eve to be neither mortal nor immortal but He simply waited for them to make their choice. God had given them permission to eat of every tree of the garden including the tree of life, except that God had forbidden them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest they die. God had given them a clear choice between mortality and immortality. Since God is the source of everlasting life, had Adam and Eve chosen to eat of the tree of life first, then their choice would have been equivalent to choosing God Himself, and the entire human race would from that time have lived in a paradise of love and innocence forever. God waited and hoped that Adam and Eve would choose to eat of the tree of life first. For reasons unknown, perhaps overconfidence in their innocence, they refrained from eating of the tree of life.
Their hesitancy gave the serpent, who was Satan, his chance to tempt them. Satan used false combinations and half-truths called "lies" to cause doubt in Eve about God's Word. Satan started out by questioning Eve in order to find out the choices that God had given them. When Satan discovered from Eve's answer that God had told them not to eat of a particular tree, then he knew that God had given them a choice between mortality and immortality. Satan then endeavored to trick Eve into disobeying God in his efforts to destroy a part of God's creations.
Because God had already created everything that can exist, whether material or in God's Mind, then Satan could not have created lies because there was nothing left to create. God's infinite creations leave nothing left over to be created. However, Lucifer discovered that he could take God's Ideas and form them into false combinations which effected untruths, destruction and nothingness. Lucifer invented sin and evil to be used in his efforts to try to destroy God's creations and eventually God Himself. Because of God's perfect Innocence, He had never thought that false combinations were even possible. But Satan's inventions involve nothing original, and because his inventions always effect nothingness, then they are no impediment to God's Infinity whatsoever.
After the serpent had discovered from questioning Eve that God had given them a real choice in that He had forbidden them to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest they die, then the serpent began to tempt Eve with his lies in order to cause her destruction. Satan's first lie directly contradicted the Word of God to Adam and Eve, and the second lie deceived Eve into believing that she and Adam could gain a special power and glory that God did not want them to have. Every individual idea that the serpent used in his lies named a true and real creation of God. Even the word "God" denotes an Eternal and Infinite Self-Created Being. The word "die" is a true and real idea which God uses to eliminate all ideas which cannot be used in any particular true combination which He is creating. Thus God had told Adam and Eve that if they disobeyed Him then He would eliminate them from the garden of Eden and from direct fellowship with Him. But the serpent used the real idea "not," which God uses to separate every individual idea, in combination with the real idea "die" to give Eve the impression that she and Adam would gain some special power that God was withholding from them and that knowing good and evil was good for them. Note that the serpent did not use anything original, but he simply invented false combinations of God's true ideas.
The word "gods" means any of God's most powerful creations, such as Lucifer himself. The word "evil" names false combinations which always comprise true and real ideas. All false combinations eventually reduce to nothingness, but even the "idea of nothing" has always been a true and real creation of God. The serpent's true intention was to attempt to cause a chain reaction that would eventually lead to the destruction of God Himself. Satan thought that if he could use lies to reduce Adam and Eve to an absolute nothingness, then this destruction would limit some of God's Infinite Ideas, which in turn, would cause God to become finite, which in turn, would lead to the eventually death of God Himself. But Satan did not know and did not count on the fact that God's Power is Absolute and that God's Infinity cannot be reduced even when God Himself subtracts from it by becoming a finite man.
The serpent tricked Eve into believing his lies that God had lied to her, and so she chose to eat of the forbidden fruit believing that she would gain some form of knowledge and power that she then did not possess. True to God's Word, she lost her innocence and her direct fellowship with God, but she gained the power to invent both good and false combinations. These abilities became a part of her very being. From the moment she ate, she gained an unavoidable choice between good and evil. She could choose to do a temporary good, but she also could not avoid doing a destructive evil. Spiritually, she died immediately because she lost her direct fellowship with God. Eventually, she would die physically because the evil within her would reduce her body to nothing.
Eve retained a part of her innocence because she had become the victim of a being who was powerful and crafty. On the other hand, she had chosen to disbelieve and disobey God's Word, and so evil had become a part of her being. She bccame trapped in a terrible dilemma. She could choose to do a limited good which would never be enough to restore her to a direct fellowship with God. and she could not avoid doing evil which would continuously separate her from God. She retained the possibility of regaining life and direct fellowship with God, but only through His actions on her behalf. Her future depended entirely on her own choices. She had become condemned to a choice between life and death called "freedom." The history of the human race had begun.
Adam knew that Eve had fallen when she gave him the forbidden fruit to eat. This put Adam into a terrible dilemma. If he refused to eat he would lose his wife since they could no longer be compatible. If he ate he would also fall from fellowship with God, but he would regain the fellowship of his wife whom he loved. He chose to eat and fall in order to remain with his wife. Like Eve's choice, his choice was partly good and partly sinful. Eve's choice was good in that she was an innocent victim of evil, which partly proved the great value of innocence. Adam's choice was good in that it was an act of self-sacrifice which allowed him to retain the love and fellowship of his wife. Both choices were sinful in that they disobeyed God.
The main meaning of the Hebrew word for sin is an "offense." This word describes sin exactly. Sin offends the very Being of God. Sin is a direct attack on the Being and Life of God. Lucifer invented sin by making false combinations of God's Eternal Ideas which is the Word of God which is God Himself. Sin is a misuse of God's Word with the intent of inflicting a fatal blow to God's Being. For this reason, every time Satan quotes the Word of God, he misuses it, misquotes it or misapplies it. We particularly see this pattern in Satan's temptations of Jesus as recorded in the gospels.
Adam and Eve now felt ashamed of their nakedness, and so they sewed fig leaves together to hide it. They were not ashamed of their nakedness to each other because they were on the same level. They were ashamed of their nakedness before God and so they ran and hid themselves. Their nakedness had become a symbol of the fact that they now knew that God could see the lust and selfishness that had become a part of their beings.
When God came in the evening for His usual fellowship with Adam and Eve, He called for them and asked them if they had eaten of the forbidden fruit. God already knew where they were and what they had done. God simply wanted them to present themselves to Him and admit to their shame and guilt. God had a backup plan to rescue them in case they fell, but he also knew that no one can be rescued from sin until they admit that they are in trouble.
Adam and Eve came out of hiding and admitted their guilt, but true to human nature they both tried to minimize their guilt by emphasizing the good parts of their choices. Adam emphasized his self-sacrifice and blamed Eve. Eve emphasized her innocent victimization and blamed the serpent.
God turned His wrath on the serpent first because he, being pure evil and the villain, was the most blameworthy. Using his superior knowledge and power, the serpent had deliberately violated an innocent person, and he was also indirectly responsible for Adam's fall. But the serpent had also failed to realize that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was exactly true to its name. God had created this tree as a symbol of His own goodness which had been violated by Lucifer's misuse of it. Some of God's goodness had been retained by Adam in that he demonstrated love in self-sacrifice. Some of God's goodness had been retained by Eve in that she was an innocent victim. Their condition gave God a reason to employ a plan to rescue the human race from its fall. God had no desire to rescue the Devil because pure evil cannot be rescued. But God loved humanity and desired to save it in order to prove absolutely that Love can never be destroyed or even diminished. God also desires to recover His own goodness which had become a part of man's nature in order to use it in a new creation of man and nature. The goodness of God that still subsists within man exists in a finite form, but this does not diminish the Eternal Word of God in the least.
This does not mean that humanity was worth saving. Just as a glass of pure water must be thrown out if even a drop of filthiness is put into it, so the whole human race was ruined by the fall which made it not worth saving. God would have been justified if He had turned the entire race over to destruction. Nevertheless, because of God's love for humanity and to prove the indomitable power of Love to overcome evil by employing free will as His tool, God revealed His backup plan to save humanity from evil and ruin. God had devised a plan to cleanse mankind of all of his filthiness and to perfect him by filling him with His own righteousness.
It is quite significant that God did not reveal His plan directly to Adam and Eve, but told it to the serpent as a part of God's curse. Ordinarily, the man is spoken of as bearing the seed of the race, but God told the serpent that the seed of the woman would kill the serpent. Every human born of the seed of man must necessarily receive the fallen condition because of the conjoined disobedience of Adam and Eve. But God told the serpent that He would bring a special person into the world who would be the seed of the woman only. Satan had victimized Eve's finite innocence, but God meant to bring in a Savior who would be both God and man, and who would be an Absolute Innocence that Satan could not destroy. The serpent would succeed in wounding the Savior, but the Savior would crush the serpent's head. God wanted Satan to know that his days were numbered. It is also quite significant that God did not tell Satan that the seed of the woman would also provide the means for the salvation of mankind. This was a matter between God and man only. This was none of the Devil's business.
God then cursed Eve and all future women with labor pains in order to bring new life into the world. God cursed Adam and all future men with hard labor in order to feed their families. God also cursed the bodies of all humans with death and a return to dust. By means of these curses, God's message to mankind was that, in the future, man's finite life could only be saved and preserved by suffering. God's message of bodily death and destruction was that sin always attempts to reduce whatever it infects to an absolute nothingness.
Satan attempted to destroy God through a series of cause and effect relationships. If Satan could use one of his false combinations; that is, a lie, to reduce one of God's creations; that is, humanity, to an unrecoverable destruction; that is, death, then Satan thought he would succeed in eliminating a part of God's Infinite Ideas and Plans, thereby causing God to become finite, which in turn, would limit His Power and bring about His eventual destruction. Satan based his plan on his knowledge that God's finite creations were but small sections of His Infinite Ideas and Plans. Satan thought that if he could destroy even a small section of God's finite creations, then this action would eliminate a part of God's Infinite Knowledge, leading to the eventual destruction of God Himself. That which Satan did not know and did not count on, but which he discovered through the death, burial and resurrection of Christ; was that the Infinite Word of God cannot be diminished even when God subtracts a finite something from it.
God then killed some animal and clothed Adam and Eve with its skin. By doing this, God's message to mankind was that, in the future, God would once again accept the direct fellowship of the person for whom blood had been shed, and who accepted, by faith, the cleansing by the blood of the One who would come. Adam and Eve did not need to understand all of this. They only needed to obey God and trust in Him. Indeed, as the story of Adam and Eve's sons Cain and Abel shows, in the whole future of humanity, God would only accept those who worship Him with a blood sacrifice and He would always reject those who attempt to worship Him with the work of their hands because finite work can never be enough to please God. Man must provide for his own finite life through suffering, but God would provide for man's eternal life through His own suffering.
God then drove Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden to protect them from eating of the tree of life in their sinful condition, and thus in bodily form live forever in an unimaginably putrid condition of constant decay toward nothingness but without death. In a sense, bodily death was a blessing as well as a curse. The whole point was that sinful man no longer belonged in paradise. Mankind went out into the world to start his history that would be determined by the free choices that he would make.
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