Note: Some people mentioned that the items under the “What we don’t believe” heading were a bit confusing.
To clarify, when I write under “What we don’t believe” things like
“Humans are not inherently immortal”
what I’m trying to say is
“We don’t believe that humans are inherently immortal.”
That is, the statements under “What we don’t believe” are stated in negative terms to deny things Christians don’t believe.
What We Believe
- Humanity was created “very good.”
- Humanity was originally in fellowship with God.
- While the fall may have symbolic elements, it represents both physical and spiritual reality.
- That is, something of this sort happened in time and space and had the spiritual effect of separating humanity from God.
- The “tree of knowledge of good and evil” was placed in the garden in order to give free choice to humanity. Otherwise, there would have been no way for humanity to choose against fellowship with God.
- The tree represented the ability to decide for oneself what was the right and wrong way to live, instead of allowing God to guide one in those areas.
- The temptation of Eve involved the following elements
- Desire of the flesh (the fruit was good for food)
- Desire of the eyes (the fruit was a delight to the eyes)
- Pride of life (the fruit would make you wise)
- The temptation of Adam was to listen to his wife instead of believing God.
- The primary consequence of the fall was alienation:
- Alienation from God — they hid from God out of fear
- Alienation from one another
- They wore leaves to cover themselves from each other
- They blamed each other for what they had done.
- They would be trapped in a power struggle with each other.
- Alienation from their own origin
- The man, made from the earth, was alienated from the earth which would no longer provide abundantly for him.
- The woman, who came from life, would no longer find it easy to bring forth life as she was meant to do.
- The relationship of death to the fall became immediately apparent when Cain slew Abel.
- The serpent may or may not have been a literal reptile but he represents some physical being that was animated by Satan to deceive humanity.
- The serpent was cursed and redemption was intimated.
- The choice made by Adam became the default choice that conditioned all of humanity because of humanity’s connectedness (i.e. humanity is “in Adam” by default.
- Note that scientists currently believe that all of humanity is descended from a single woman thus indicating that we are one race with one origin.
What We Don’t Believe
- The fall was not about sex — the corruption of sex was a consequence of the fall’s corruption of everything.
- Humanity originally did not make moral choices. Instead, the way humanity lived was conditioned by their relationship with God. That is, they “walked with God.”
- Death was not God’s original intention.
- The penalty of death for eating the fruit was not arbitrary. Rather, it represented the logical consequence of breaking fellowship with the God who gives life.
- Humanity was not cursed directly.
- Instead, the connection with their origins became cursed and problematic.
- The tree was not the “tree of knowledge”; that is, God does not object to humanity having knowledge.
How this affects you
- Your life is not how it was intended to be.
- Nothing works completely right because everything is corrupted by the fall to a greater or lesser degree.
- God’s ways will tend to go against the grain of our “natural impulses”.
- Our fall was not a fall from morality but ironically a fall from relationality into morality.
- Thus salvation involves replacing our moral impulses with our relationship with God and his word.
- Since the fall is communicated by our connection to humanity, the new life of God involves disconnecting ourselves from humanity in Adam and re-connecting to a new humanity in Christ.
- The Bible says that we are incapable of submitting to God in our natural fallen state. People prefer their own ways and ideas of right and wrong to those of God. This is a continuing symptom of the fall and is reflected in the moral decay of society.
- Because the fall consists in making our own choices apart from God, repentance means trusting God with the right to guide our choices in any area of our lives through his word.
- Humanity in general is addicted to death.
- War
- Murder
- Suicide
- Social choices that involve death
- Abortion
- Euthanasia
- Assisted Suicide
- Etc.