The
promise-fulfillment paradigm of the Bible generally refers to a concept that
God making promises to some or all of humanity will keep those promises. That’s
a non-technical way to look at it. The paradigm does give one pause to consider
several elements of it in order to have more understanding. For one thing a
promise implies some sort of obligation from the promise-giver, and of course
God has no obligation to humanity at all. The pottery maker is not at all
indebted to the pots. Even so God is necessarily truthful and we may interpret
select words from God as promises that are matters of fact.
There
are covenants made between God and humans in the Bible in at least five
instances. One can say that God treats humanity compassionately. Presently
though I want to consider some of the meta-theological paradigm of promise
fulfillment instead of the actual promises.
Promises
from God- statements that would seem prophetic to humanity if not made by a
Person capable of making the future happen the way he says it will, could be
subject to some sort of structural analysis I suppose. That analysis might
determine subject and predicate relationships or referent and object; logical
relationships in the language context as well as temporal arrangement. If all
of these prophetic statements from God that appear to be promises can be viewed
in the perspective of God’s eternal being for whom time passes in a non-linear
fashion I would guess; that is God might be thought to occupy the center of
temporal time in any-given-universe with the temporal order existing all around
him and so linear time occurs at the same instant for Him, then God is
interpolating pieces of the complete complex of Universal compresence to people
from one temporal location to another.
When subject-humans receiving the divine
information-the promise move through time and encounter the circumstances that
comprise actualization of the promise it can then be said that the condition of
promise fulfillment as occurred. There are numerous instances of promise
fulfillment in that context given in the Bible.
Promise
fulfillment may be a knowledge protocol affair of compartmentalization of
information within structures of creation of the omniscient Being. In order to
create temporal structures and beings essentially a realm of non-sentient mass
and energy supporting limited-sentient beings in some way is generated. Promise
fulfillment continually reifies to the information classified beings the
presence of the future. Less than omniscient sentient beings have an implicit
insecurity or uncertainty about existence that may move along the temporal
world-line with jolts and pains, dangers and health-tuning challenges that is
alleviated somewhat with the interventionist contact from God the non-temporal
Creator. God relates select information of the narrative from the future of the
world-line of everyone in the Universe or at least of the planet Earth and
gives that to humanity. Those with faith in God accept that prophetic data as true.
In
the garden of Eden paradigm Adam and Eve (Adamas and Edith?) hadn’t the
problems of temporality. One almost might interpret their paradigm as an
experiment of God in generating independent beings with limited sentience.
Edith (Eve) was for some reason a believer in falsehood given unto her inducing
her to eat from the tree of knowledge.
While
God would not tell a lie apparently deception did arise from some fallen
super-angel. The appearance of falsehood in the perfectly true realm/existence
of God seems almost a necessary enabling condition for the existence of
temporal structures wherein beings with non-omniscience that are subjectively
separate from God exist. In a sense any temporal realm apart from God that has
sentient beings within it requires an element of fiction or falsehood to exist.
God is omniscient and omnipotent and is all that is. Apart from God nothing
else is except that he wills it to seem so.
One
can well say that the paradigm of the Genesis story while having several
historical facts that are difficult to interpret accurately was an act of
theological genius. Adam and Eve existing without mortal bodies in a project
area on non-temporal God, Adam and Eve given intelligence yet without an
ability to obey the will of God to the letter since they had free will. Adam
and Eve without a knowledge of what falsehood is were easily deceived though
some have pointed out that Adam seems to have willfully gone along with Eve who
was the one deceived. Adam evidently did not experience the deception of the
fallen angel directly.
That
might be a significant point itself; Eve was taken from Adam’s symbolic rib,
while Adam was made from dirt (Adamas), yet both were in a non-temporal realm
of being before mortality was made to exist. The dirt (Adamas) is probably not
star dust. Instead it is perhaps the fundamental set-aside paradigm for
potential temporal being.
It
is difficult to continually correct one’s language terms to correspond with
basic theological parameters for being that God is entirely Spirit. What
appears to be mass and energy in the set-aside of God is for us humans the
context for writing. Natural philosophy explaining the set-aside for God that
seems for incarnate humans to be the Universe-in-itself permeates the language
and influences the ideas with which we write about Genesis and the parameters
of Genesis.
Words and referent objects or events from long
ago are difficult to flesh out. There may have been a particular flood in Mesopotamia and a proto-civilization
Genesis refers to-perhaps a drown mud-brick town a couple hundred feet below
the sea level of the Persian Gulf . Regardless of the
temporal meta-ontology of physics of the set-aside realm Adam and Eve from a
non-temporal condition were downloaded to emerge into a temporal set-aside
Universe. The set-aside Universe may have been created in phases, at once, with
an appearance of billions of years having passed or any number of other
configurations by omnipotent God. Creating the state of steady-state
entanglements with logical probabilities and quantum uncertainty to permit
temporal change from a field that at heart arises from Spirit is a mechanics of
mystery to humans; even to cosmological physicists who are left with numerous
theories about Universal mechanics.
Adamas
and Edith were put into the containment vessels of mortality since they ate of
the tree of knowledge. If Adam and Eve having ate of the tree of life existed
forever and with willful disobedience to God’s instruction concerning the
matter of not eating from the tree of knowledge corrupting them from the start,
correcting them would have been problematic. With eternity to go wrong and with
infinite increase of their intellects within God’s meta-structure it might have
created a kind of chaos, perhaps not.
One
could compare the situation to a computer’s operating system within which are
installed or made a couple of small programs that increase their size and
access outside their own lines of code to takeover like a virus the operating
system. As in windows that could lead
to the system just locking up or freezing. Rebooting the system would require a
meta-operator outside the operating system.
Plainly
God would not be too challenged by Adam and Eve virus’ within His being. Even
so it must be a challenging work to create sentient beings and place them
within a suitable context for development and moral guidance. Promise
fulfillment is the ongoing presence of a continuum of the kingdom of God
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