Opus 2026-023: Should-a-Beenms: Why Didn’t He?

In reading the creation story and the fall there are a lot of questions that come up.  When you fold in the later mention of angels, it increases the number of questions.  When we get to heaven with our unhindered minds and our unpolluted attitudes, I think that a lot of of those questions will either fade away as silly or be answered with our new insight.  At the same time because we have a freeing of our intellectual prowess, there will be questions that will pop up that would have never occurred to us now.

One of the attributes we believe belongs to God is omniscience.  He knows all the things that there are to be known, and we define what can be known based on his ability to know, not on ours.  With that in mind, let’s move to the third chapter of Genesis, where the serpent is tempting Eve, and talking her into disobeying God.  Could God not have stepped in and smack down the serpent before the damage was done?  My short answer would be, of course He could, but the fact remains that He didn’t.  Why?

I could come up with all kinds of irrational explanations about priorities and maturity and free will.  I don’t know that any of them would answer the question.  For reasons that we do not understand, God allowed Eve to listen to the corrupting logic of the serpent.  He allowed her to reach out and pick the fruit from the tree.  He allowed her to take a bite.  If we had been writing the story, we might’ve had Him suddenly appear and smack it out of her hand.  No such deliverance was provided.

That should tell us something about the way God deals with us.  There will be times when either through the overwhelming pressure of the Holy Spirit or the physical intervention of a guardian angel, God will keep us from disaster.  Other times He will let our tires go flat , and the virus invade our bodies.  Many of these situations are not even things that we would know to pray about ahead of time.

Ultimately God has given us the ability to choose.  He has given us the knowledge that we need to make those decisions.  Eve did not sin out of ignorance.  She knew what God said.  But the seductive power of wanting to be as God overwhelmed any common sense that there may have been.

Let God be God.  You wouldn’t really want that job anyway.

homo unius libri