Our parish static site has been updated. I managed to finish the review and rewrite for the study in the General Letters. The whole thing is now one single HTML page and still loads pretty quickly. You can review that here (gone). Update: This document was lost in the transition between computers.
As an aside, I can tell you that with an elevated heart rate, I am generally tired a lot and find myself dozing off way too often. This makes it hard to generate strong content on either of the two parish blogs (edit: there’s only one blog now). Pray with me about this. I have been fitted with a cute little high-tech heart monitor. I’m torn between hoping that we can catch the next episode of tachycardia, versus hoping there aren’t any more. Tachycardia is a little painful and very disorienting, but the doctors don’t think it’s life threatening just yet.
Also, by all means please ask questions. It’s easy to generate a post from a good question.
Okay. Here’s a good question and probably one that is unanswerable. How could Eve and subsequently Adam have chosen to be disobedient right out the gate? It blows me away! And, how could Israel just turn their back on the Lord time and time again. Are humans really that stupid?
Too easy. On the one hand, any answer we give is merely a workable estimation on the subject of Adam and Eve. The Scripture is skimpy for a reason. Try not to read a time scale back into a highly abbreviated symbolic narrative. You are meant to read it as characterization, not factual account. There’s nothing wrong with imagining that they may well have been in the Garden a very long time. Nor is it necessary to imagine that this exchange with Satan happened in such abbreviated fashion. He had been hanging around there for some time. But the timing was a matter of his move. I don’t believe he had the mission of tempter and jailer until the Fall, but he was no longer the Covering Cherub, either. He was being a real ass at this point, provoking God in some petty backstabbing over his demotion.
Keep in mind that the Garden, the world and the universe were all created almost as a secondary part of Creation as a whole. Angels and the Spirit Realm came first, and are wholly separate. This business of our world with its time-space constraints is just an ephemeral bubble against the rest of Creation. The Garden didn’t suffer from time-space constraints as we know them. The natural cycles are not a part of the Curse of the Fall, but serve now to mark the passage of time, in part. If you buy into my belief that Satan sinned and his punishment was a demotion of sorts, we still have to deal with what appears a very dramatic shift in “reality” from before the Fall. Satan was already in trouble, and made things far worse by provoking the Fall, so his curse in Genesis 3 is on top of whatever was against him. We already know “eating dust” means consuming human blessings, so it’s not an outrageous expansion of Hebrew symbolism to recognize that he was confined to the earth and receive no blessings of his own, but only what he stole from others.
In other words, there is blame enough to go around in the Fall. With Israel, the issue is that God chose them specifically because He knew they were so damnably hard-hearted. The prophets said Israel was easily the worst nation God could have chosen. It was part of His plan for revelation to show how merciful He could be. Despite a most extravagant gift in the Covenant, and tons of miracles and a very neatly clarified revelation drawn from vastly confusing hodge-podge of oral traditions — despite all this, the people were simply unable to keep a grip without some kind of serious change in the heart. That’s the point of revelation.
But we are cautioned that, in our own way, we are all really no better than that. There is no clear answer why, only that we are.
reason can justify anything
I experience daily that I am a fallen creature. I can only humbly thank Father for his loving mercy.