The Difficulty in Learning and Accepting the Truth
The
Lord Jesus Christ as eternal God comprises a 'Jacob's Ladder' to let
mortal man pass from the corrupted Universe containment facility to
eternal life with God. With the fall mankind was thrust into
temporality with death. The spiritual condition of mankind with
original sin required a firewall of containment-a Universe. God yet
provided a bridge to return unto perfect obediance to his Spirit
through the atoning sacrifice of the Lord.
Adamas and Edith were not made corrupt, corruption evolved during their encounters in the garden. Lucifer too evolved during the life stages on his life way to his fall. The fall of the highest created being exemplified the dangers of independent will for contingent being. Renormalization unto the will of God is challenging for individuals caught in the temporal flow of space-time thermodynamics.
Genesis chapter 2:22 “And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.
23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.
24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.
25 And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.”
One could contextualize that no longer did asexual reproduction reign. Sexual reproduction evolved. Yet space-time and increased brain size over time let a knowledge of the difference between good and evil appear in humanity.
Genesis chapter 3[“1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.
4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
God allowed the tempter to become transformed into a reptile-a snake that not only symbolizes evolution with its tiny vestigial legs but portrays an archetypal role as a time abbreviated comparative elongated amoeba that with an increased head size and leg-rotor expansion evolved to allow upright posture. Adamas and Edith moved into the flow of thermodynamioc direction suggested by the devil to Eve. The tree of knowledge permits increased consumerism and depletion of non-renewable resources. God intervened and terminates the proto-crisis. One might wonder if the account is descriptive or proscriptive.
In a mysterious way space-time transformation of Adam and Eve in a thermodynamic-free environment to one with normal space-time parameters where birth and death cohere in the sexual reproduction evolution of genes of a human species has an implicit parallel story of alternate interpretive explanations embedded within in allowing and historical extrapolation of the development of mankind in-the-world since perhaps 70,000 B.C. Has God set forth mankind and explained His relationship to them in a way set-for-all-seasons of understanding?
Interestingly astrophysicists discovered that a wandering dwarf star approached near the solar system 70,000 years ago and probably perturbed the comets and space junk in the Oort Cloud perhaps cascading planet-colliding masses to the Earth. At any rate, when God discovered it necessary to liquidate the culture of human corruption Noah and family lived in there were plenty of tools available.
Liquidating the society of Noah implies that a flood sufficient to cover the whole area those people resided in was required. If they did not live in the Himalayas then flooding the Himalaya wasn’t necessary. Perhaps God did not need to flood the western hemisphere either since no humans lived there so early in history. If the offending culture lived in Mesopotamia then a Mesopotamian flood was all that was needed. Floods happen. Noah was forewarned and prepared a boat that would take his family to Urartu (Ararat) perhaps when a natural earth dam broke with excess rain drowning the decadent urbanites of the first human eon-civilization.
That not all humans were erased from the world-those besides Noah’s family that did not live in the evil society but were instead far-flung honest rural folk, seems a reasonable inference. Since Cain was cast out from the social environment of Adamas and Edith to go elsewhere and given a mark that strangers would not kill him, it seems evident that people had already disbursed abroad. Those people could recognize what was in a sense the first mark of the beast-the passion of human embeddedness in thermodynamic evolutions-and not kill those souls marked with the desire to evolve power, possession, pride and fabrication. God would take a different approach after-the-flood to correcting the problem of original sin with covenants leading to the cross, Jesus Christ and salvation.
Genesis chapter 4-”14 Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.15 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. 16 ¶ And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.”
The descendants of Adam and Eve were numerous and long-lived. Ante-diluvian patriarch time-spans are significant literal value-markers of the age of the culture that was doomed. There is an interesting point made in chapter 6 about the culture...
Genesis chapter 6;”1 And it came to pass, when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, 2 That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose. 3 And the LORD said, My spirit shall not always strive with man, for that he also is flesh: yet his days shall be an hundred and twenty years. 4 There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.”
Those 'giants' may have been Neanderthals that interbred with humans. Neanderthals or another homo species may have been far stronger than the progeny of civilization-like athletes on steroids. About 4% of the genome of Europeans comprises Neanderthal genes.
Genesis chapter 9-”1 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth. 2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered. 3 Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. 4 But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. 5 And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. 6 Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man. 7 And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply; bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein. 8 ¶ And God spake unto Noah, and to his sons with him, saying,
9 And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; 10 And with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth. 11 And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth. 12 And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations:
13 I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth.
14 And it shall come to pass, when I bring a cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: 15 And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. 16 And the bow shall be in the cloud; and I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth. 17 And God said unto Noah, This is the token of the covenant, which I have established between me and all flesh that is upon the earth.”
In a patrilineal culture where ancestry is traced through males the arrival of Noah and three sons is sufficient to restart human the culture of the people of the covenant. Women from rural peoples outside the lost civilization may have become the wives of the sons of Noah.
Genesis chapter 9-”18 ¶ And the sons of Noah, that went forth of the ark, were Shem, and Ham, and Japheth: and Ham is the father of Canaan.19 These are the three sons of Noah: and of them was the whole earth overspread.”
Kenneth Gentry's brilliant post-millennialist writing does not present my contemplations about God evolving the Earth, yet it is not inconsistent with it.
Kenneth Gentry writes of covenants in 'He Shall Have Dominion'-quote”In the first place, the significance of Adam's sin would bring out the force of the comparison with Israel's rebellion more specifically. Adam's role as the great sinner is familiar to the Jews (Gen. 3). Job 31:33 serves as a parallel: "If I covered my transgressions as Adam, by hiding mine iniquity in my bosom."
Furthermore, if "man" were adopted in Hosea 6:7, the verse would be "altogether expressionless." How else could they have sinned than like men? In addition, the reference ("they have transgressed") is to Ephraim and Judah (Hos. 6:4), not to the priests. Thus, the contrast is not one between priests and ordinary men, but between "Ephraim and Judah" and the historical Adam.
Certainly the Scriptures are pre-eminently a covenant document. Even the pattern for creation is developed covenantally in the revelation of God.”
“Continuing quote from Gentry-
”The unity of Scripture may be traced in the unity of the covenants, which set forth the overarching Covenant of Grace. The heart of God's "covenants of the promise" (diathekon tes epaggelias, Eph. 2:12) is: "I will be your God and you will be My people," This idea occurs a great number of times in Scripture. The redemptive covenants are established in order to secure a favorable relationship between God and His people. By means of the covenant, the covenant people become intimately related to the Lord of heaven and earth.
Covenantal development is onion-like, layer upon layer:
"[E]ach successive covenant supplements its predecessors."24 We may easily see this in comparing the structural and thematic continuity between the covenants,25 For instance, in preparing for the establishment of the Mosaic covenant, we learn that "God remembered his covenant with Abraham" (Exo. 2:24). Under the Davidic Covenant, we find reference to and deliver-ance under the Mosaic Covenant frequently mentioned, as well as to the Abrahamic. And, of course, the relationship of the New Covenant with earlier covenants is contained in the very formula of the New Covenant: "Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah" Ger. 31:31 29). Interestingly, Ezekiel combines the Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic Covenants in the chapters in which he deals with the New Covenant:
And David my servant shall be king over them [Davidic]; and they all shall have one shepherd: they shall also walk in my judgments, and observe my statutes, and do them [Mosaic]. And they shall dwell in the land that I have given unto Jacob my servant, wherein your fathers have dwelt [Abrahamic]; and they shall dwell therein, even they, and their children, and their children's children for ever: and my servant David shall be their prince for ever [Davidic]. Moreover I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them [New]: and I will place them, and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore. (Ezek. 37:24-26)
In the New Covenant era itself, we discover continuity with the preceding covenants. Romans 16:20 harkens back to the Adamic Covenant. Second Peter 3:5-7 draws a parallel with the Noahic Covenant. Romans 4:16 founds the New Covenant on the Abrahamic. Romans 3:31 demonstrates the validity of the Mosaic. Romans 15:22 harkens back to the Davidic Covenant.
As mentioned above, Paul summed up the various Old Testament covenants as being "the covenants [plural] of the promise singular]" (Eph. 2: 12). There is both a basic unity undergirding the divine covenants, as well as a progressive development in them. Thus, with the coming of the New Covenant in the ministry of Christ, "the fullness of time" has been reached (Gal. 4:4).30 And these concern redemption - a redemption, as we shall see, that shall overwhelm the world.” -end quotes of Gentry pages 111-114 'He Shall have Dominion'.