Hey, DP. That's not where I get mine from. I take "day" in its normal sense, a sense that is used in the Bible thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of times. Your understanding of the length of a day is nowhere to be found in the Bible. To be sure, Genesis 1 speaks of creative days, but does not say how long they are.
Don't you think it is a good rule of thumb to take words in their normal sense, unless something in the text tells us not to, or we are not able to?
Me too. But one has to concede that when the snake said their eyes would be opened in that day, their eyes were opened within 24 hours.
I think you are spot on here. I fully agree.
Do you believe, as I do, that sin is an act, and not a condition?
I do believe Adam understood God's threat of punishment and initially believed that if he disobeyed, he would likely be killed (immediately). But I think he might have been swayed into thinking that God would not kill him. Otherwise, why eat? So, in that sense, he was not choosing death, because he didn't think it was going to happen.
Let me guess......live forever in heaven, right?[/color]
Well, the scripture in Rev. 2:7 suggests that the tree of life conferred everlasting life in the heavens. But I admit that this could be a prophetic pattern and have no bearing on the original meaning of the Genesis account.
Let's reason this out. If the tree of life conferred everlasting physical life, Adam and Eve missed out on it, right? And so humans have never yet had the chance to get it. Will they someday? Well, when I read the promises in the Bible about everlasting life, they seem to always be referring to life in heaven. So if that is the everlasting life that we will get, then I have to conclude either that God decided to not confer everlasting physical life on humans after all, or that the tree of life represented everlasting life in the heavens from the very beginning. I prefer the latter.
Well, many humans lie too, and I wouldn't call them "dark." And anyway, how much did the snake actually say that was false? He said that, in that day:
1) They wouldn't die.
2) Their eyes would be opened.
3) They would become like God, knowing good and bad.
We are told that #2 and #3 happened exactly as the snake said they would. The only one that could be a lie is #1. They didn't die that day, so the snake was right. But it may not have known that God wasn't going to kill them that day, so maybe it really was a lie.
Whatever the case, trying to get them to disobey God was wrong. Lying is wrong too. But if that makes someone evil, then we all are.
Isomam has an interesting theory here, and it is no worse than any other. But his theory does what many other have done--and that is: completely eject context.
Context is crucial in understanding scripture, and too many theologians ignore it, IMO. "The woman" is mentioned no less than 13 times in Genesis, chapter 3:
v. 1
v. 2
v. 4
v. 6
v. 8
v. 12
v. 13 (2 x)
v. 15
v. 16
v. 17
v. 20
v. 21
Are we to believe that, even though in all of these instances the woman is Eve, that is not the case in v. 15? Is verse 15 in a vacuum? Do you not think that consistency is better?
The footnote on that expression in the New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (with References) says, ... Literally, "not dying you will die."
What Satan said to Eve amounted to, ... "Oh, sure. It will look like you die. But, you won't really die. You will experience a change; a passage to a better place. You will live on."
This reasoning ignores two very important facts:
1) God used the same expression, "dying you will die," in 2:17. The snake was simply quoting God, not adding a new concept to the equation.
2) The snake's words in 3:4-5 clearly show he was speaking in the context of the very day that Adam and Eve would eat from the tree, not something that would happen years down the road.
I guess this would include anyone with a heavenly hope.