I used to teach at private colleges.
It worked well to be VERY strict in the first session and mild mannered after that.
Are you suggesting that God should follow your lead then? Should God conduct himself like humans?
If there is a big picture in the Bible, why do you think that the Scriptures are full of those stories of obedience and blessing or disobedience and punishment?
We are experiencing the most important object lesson that humans and angels will ever go through......
Why was there ever a need to punish anyone in the first place?
Was there a long list of do’s and dont’s given to Adam?
What was the life offered to them on just one condition? That they obeyed one simple command...to refrain from taking the fruit from the one tree that God claimed as his exclusive property. Was that a hardship? Was the partaking of that fruit really such a heinous crime?
In the big picture, it was. That tree represented God’s Sovereign right as our Creator to set the limits of the freedom he gave to all his children. To transgress that command was to ignore God’s Sovereignty and adopt their own will as more important than God’s......to tell God what he should do, rather than the other way around. This seems to be your agenda on these threads.....turning God into what you think he should be....because somehow he can’t be the God that the Bible speaks about....he is not a God who suits your sensibilities?
What was God’s response to the original sin? He could have just destroyed the rebels there and then and started again....but free will was an important gift...one that was worth subjecting humanity to the “god” they chose to obey....to
show them where disobedience would take them. We know that satan wanted worship because he even tried to get Jesus to worship him. (Luke 4:5-8)
It was God’s purpose to show both humans and angels what his Sovereignty means when free will is abused. The first rebel was not human and so this lesson is based in the timeframe of angels, not humans.
They do not exist in a world with days and nights, weeks and months, to count time. They exist in Universal time.
Have you never wondered why this object lesson has taken so long from the human perspective? Why have thousands of years transpired since Adam’s creation....and why did it take thousands of years for Jesus to offer his life...and then thousands more years to come back?
Life and death are contained in the Sovereignty of our Creator, who’s project we are....on this carefully prepared earth, we are designed to enjoy life here, forever. We cannot know what we lost the day that Adam and his wife were evicted from the garden, with access to the tree of life denied until the lesson was over. (Gen 3:22-24) We have never lived that life.
So what is the purpose of the lesson?
Recognising God’s Sovereignty as vastly superior to any human will or even the will of angels who might want to get out from under God’s rulership....but, would there ever be a valid reason to want to?
Satan began to envy the worship that these humans would give to God.....up until that time, there was no other option than to obey the Creator as their rightful ruler and law giver....and to enjoy the life they had been created to live in the realm in which he placed them.
Only by lying to the humans could he ever separate them from their Maker and take over control of their lives and worship. And in his wisdom, God handed the human race over to the one who wanted to rule them....to be a god to them. (Luke 4:5-7) The only way he could accomplish this was by deception,and we all know by now, that he is an expert at his craft. He knows human nature better than we do and is adept at manipulating our sinful state. Yet Adam and his wife were not created sinful......neither was the devil.
Free will was not really free and this object lesson would show them why God had a few restrictions....not because he was the fun police, but because he wanted to
show them what he could not just
tell them.
Experience is the greatest teacher.....so what have we learned? Not much apparently, since only “few” will be found on “the road to life”....whist the “many” are travelling a superhighway to “destruction”. (Matt 7:13-14)
Deception is still rife among the human race, as we hurtle towards our inevitable demise at the hands of corrupt rulers, out of control. God will “bring to ruin those who ruin the earth”. (Rev 11:18)
Only those who accept God on his terms will be permitted citizenship in his Kingdom.
He has had his fill of rebels.
