Hal is in blue I am in red.
The two words in question here which Hal translates chaos and ruin are tohuw and bohuw. Tohuw means formlessness confusion and emptiness and is most often used to mean a wilderness and vanity. Bohuw means emptiness void and waste. The idea here is one of repetition as in when the Lord says, "Abraham Abraham," or "Samuel Samuel," or "Simon Simon" this sort of language when used by Hebrew people is one of emphasis. When Jesus says, "truly truly I say to you..." He is not stuttering but is saying, "Listen up, this is really important." In the case of Genesis 1 I think the usage here is an emphasizing of the idea that when God created He created from nothing and that nothing was absolute. The emphasis works in this case to mean, I think, that though God has created the Heavens and the Earth, the work is not finished there is still a filling up to be finished in His creation.
A word here, the phrase Heavens and the Earth does not mean flat earth with sky over head and neither does it mean that this act of creation created the Earth specifically. Rather it is a Hebraism meaning basically, "All that is, everything, the universe." The wording could just as easily have read, "In the beginning God created the universe, and the universe was empty and without things as we see them now."
However, there are other places that the text uses the same phraseology to indicate a ruin due to God's wrath (Jeremiah) and while I do not think that the text supports that idea in this case, I also agree that it does not specifically rule it out, therefore I think those who say this is an indication of the Fall are not without argument I just don't personally agree with this idea.
The point, however, is that nature, as it is seen, is a restored patchwork, with God having done His best to use ruins to rebuild a universe that fell with the angelic host, using naturally corrupted elements, whose best use still contains the elemental spirits that are contained within the material God has used to rebuild the fallen universe.
I really dislike the notion that God "did His best" to restore the universe. I think it indicates that some things are beyond God's ability. Understand I am not arguing for the omni-competence of God but rather that those things which God purposes to do He does so in total and without anything lacking. I think Genesis also supports this idea because God declares Creation "Very Good". If Creation were a patchwork of something which had been better before then I have a hard time grasping how it could be "Very good" in the eyes of the Almighty. Also I think the idea of the universe being constructed of "naturally corrupted elements" is not a Christian-Jewish idea at all. The Bible unashamedly declares that everything God did in creation is good and not lacking in anything at all. Why would God curse creation because of man's sin if it were already cursed. Rather such a notion is Platonic in its nature. The idea that the universe is basically evil is to say that all physical matter is evil and therefore you fall into the Neo-Platonist heresy of "Spirit good/ physical bad" not so not at all. God created man good period and declared him to be so. Also the idea that the universe was cobbled together with wicked elements is a gnostic heresy which has nothing whatever to do with Christian orthodoxy.
Regardless of the quality of the material used to rebuild the universe, the fact is, that the contingent nature of the universe was always there. The free-will choice of Lucifer and his 1/3 of the heavenly host, as contingent beings, was misused to choose to make a choice undirected by the will of God, from within, (now), Satan's own internal will. Mankind's temptation was, though his own fault, from outside his will. He was tempted from an outside source. That made him redeemable, BUT, true moral guilt, (as mentioned before), required a repair job on his will, which though his body is still made of fallen matter, causing the occasional poor decision, allows better decision-making capability. This has some bearing on some of the doctrines of the church, dealing with ongoing need for repentance and admission of sin, since we are still NATURALLY prone to sin.
This argument cannot be made in defense of Christian orthodoxy. Of course Lucifer was a contingent being, but apart from the ability to sin he also had the ability to not sin (which is an ability which we post-fall lack.) The same is true of Adam. There is a sense in which we can never grasp what temptation meant to Adam, but we can be certain that it must have come from within and the reason why is simple. If Adam fell because he was tempted outside of himself then how did Lucifer fall? As the angel who rebelled, Lucifer must have been tempted from within since the only other being who could tempt him was God. So if the only way Adam could fall was because he was tempted form outside of himself then the only way which Lucifer could have fallen was the same. Unless of course Adam was not morally perfect in which case the fall is not a fall at all. However Ezekiel tells us that Lucifer fell because of the lust in his own heart which welled up from within himself. And James tells us that we sin because temptation wells up from within ourselves. Remember that Scripture holds Adam responsible for the fall, but he did not sin first. Eve sinned first but was deceived Adam chose to sin in full knowledge of what he was doing.
And you can't say that it was because he had a natural proclivity to sin because he was in a fallen body. He was not and Scripture tells us so quite plainly. God gave Law to our parents and they transgressed it. They did so because they wanted to and yes God had to allow it to happen. One could argue that the fall was inevitable since it happened, but it need not be so. That Adam was made good and given free will and Law indicates that he could have done differently. If he could not but fall the God's cursing of him is unjust. If God fashions Adam from fallen matter and gives him Law knowing He can't obey and then holds him responsible for his sin then God is unjust. And you can't argue that we have a sin proclivity and God holds us responsible so... because we are not Adam and neither are we as Adam was. We have a sin nature, he did not. We live in a fallen world, he was in the Garden of God. Our situation is nothing like Adam's and yet when we sin we do so because we choose to and God holds us responsible for it. So for Adam to have sinned given the beatific existence which he enjoyed which we have never known is all the more shocking. God not only made him good, He stacked the deck in his favor. And Adam still fell.
That having been said, it is now necessary to touch on the issue of the inevitability of the fall of man, & as a matter of fact, the issue of the necessity of the destruction of Satan & the heavenly host, & yet again, the point of view that the three periods of earth's and mankind's history being the dramatic proof that the destruction of Satan and the heavenly host is necessary, for true redemption to be effective. (Those periods are (1), the creation of Adam and Eve to the Deluge, (2), the Deluge through the Incarnation, the Crucifixion, and the history of the world until the future ascension of Satan to power, in this world, and the return of Messiah to stop the destruction of the world, and holding him powerless to affect the history of the world, until the end of the last period,(3), the thousand year reign. i will do that next.
I am not a dispensationalist and I do not believe that history is carved up into different eras. Of course the covenant under which Adam existed is different than ours because he existed in the presence of God whereas the covenant of grace which God gave to Israel through Moses in the Law and then in its fulfillment in Christ Jesus is that God will be with us, but that is very different because the final Messianic age is the fulfillment of the promises made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, given to Moses the People of Israel, brought forth in Christ and for that which we now wait. We wait for the presence of God; Adam lived in that presence. But the promise and the Law giver and the laws given do not change because God relates to us only through His covenant which is now and has always been one of absolute grace.
But back to why the fall was not inevitable. I said earlier that God stacked the deck in Adam's favor and he still fell but did not answer the obvious question, Why? Why did Adam fall? If he did not have to then why did he?
The answer is, I think, because he wanted to. It is the same reason we sin. Had Adam not wanted to eat of the fruit he would not have. Yes the temptation of the Serpent was very powerful I am sure, but people cannot be compelled to moral evil against their will. A man is told to rob a bank or he will be killed, he has choice. Commit a crime or death. He can choose death, and if he does not he does so because he thinks his life is more valuable than the damage caused by the moral evil of his act. He wants to rob the bank so he does.
Adam had choice. He could have not eaten. If the fall was inevitable then he could not not have eaten and therefore God is unjust is punishing him. I am really surprised to hear my friend say this when he stands so strongly against hyper-Calvinsim (and rightly so). Adam sinned because Satan told them they would be as God. God then says that they must be cast because they have become as God. So Satan told them a legitimate truth in an illegitimate way. Adam is in Paradise with a command to obey and if he does he will be found just before a holy God. I think eventually God would have brought them to the tree and gave it to them, but they reached for it before God intended them to have it. We see the same thing in the wilderness temptation when Satan tells Jesus he will give Him the kingdoms of the world. Well God has purposed that Christ will rule the kingdoms of the earth and Satan does have them so he was offering Jesus a legitimate thing. But the way which God purposed Christ to have the kingdoms was by the Cross, so Satan was offering this to Jesus in an illegitimate way.
So how did Adam become as God?
The idea given in Genesis is "discerning good from evil", but what does that mean? I think it means that they would decide what is good and evil for themselves. That they would now make up their own minds what is good and what is bad. I think this is the very nature of Satan's sin. He decided that he had the right to take a higher place than he had been given. That he would decide for himself where he should be rather than being in submission to God. Adam, I think, had he obeyed would have communed with God to such an extent that, even though he is not God, he would have become fully submitted to God and then would have had the tree given to him. We can't say that they did not know to eat was sin, they did. They knew they were sinning and they did so because they wanted to decide for themselves what their station should be. They wanted to be God. And when they had eaten they were immediately ashamed. I think what they now saw which they had not before was not the difference between good and evil, but that to have obeyed would have been far far better than to have sinned.
The fall is a great and terrible tragedy. Adam and Eve, having now eaten, suddenly feel for the first time separation from God and shame for their own sin. They remember what it is to obey and suddenly wonder why they thought it was a good idea to do otherwise. So far from the freedom which they thought they would have, they rather now have the responsibility to decide what is good and evil, and they will do so without the immediate help of God. And so we now spend each day in a suffering dying world surrounded by suffering dying people whose eyes are opened only to their own blindness which they seeing do not see as they try and fumble their way to righteousness and God.
And it need not have been so, and thus God's wrath is just.
God Bless
Just Thinking
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