Ok, it's getting late, but just the quick descripture, in my guessing, I think the Garden of Eden was a special place not like the rest of Earth, not even partly, but more like heaven on Earth, and unlike normal Earth as we know it now even in the best places here, the most beautiful here. It was unlike here. It was....something else. Not under the same rules.
Now, it's guessing, but I think the humans created on the 6th day were separate entirely from the Garden of Eden. And later those other humans would provide a wife for Cain when he left in Genesis chapter 4 and went to the land of Nod and took a wife there.
It's not at all important what I guess.
We do know it's a fact there have been other kinds of humans that seem to largely predate our own kind, on Earth, because we have found their bones. To me, this is just zero trouble to reconcile with the scripture. It fits instantly, see.
Morning halbhh,
Ok, I understand your thinking, and I'm glad that we're now clear in explaining that, for each one of us, when it comes to those things that the Scriptures are not specifically clear about, "this is how I understand it".
You mentioned in an earlier post the passage of Scripture: But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. I believe that to be literally true, but I also believe it to only apply to the Lord, as it says. The Lord knows the end from the beginning and is the Alpha and Omega. Man, however, in his fleshly tent would always be subject to time. In the Revelation we are given a picture of a crowd of saints who cry out to the Lord, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” They apparently, even in heaven, don't have that same attribute of God to see the end from the beginning. They seem to still be waiting out days as time continues in this realm.
So, I'm not really sure, and would again just encourage prayer and study, to confirm that there was some period of Adam's natural life after God formed him from the dust of the ground that his living wasn't always within the confines of time, as expressed by the movement of the celestial bodies God created in this realm so that man could have seasons and times. For the Scriptures do say: He made the moon to mark the seasons, and the sun knows when to go down. Both of which are constructs of time.
To repeat how I understand the line of time from God's forming Adam and Eve from the dust of the ground until the fall: God created Adam and Eve on day six. He made them both male and female. God also gave them the command to multiply and fill the earth and subdue and rule over all that He had made upon the earth, also on day six. He set them in a special place upon the earth that He had created especially for them that He calls the garden. God walked with them and enjoyed a relationship with them just as He created them to have. However, it does seem that even before Eve was able to conceive the first child for which Adam named her to be the mother of all the living, Satan showed up and tempted her into rebellion against God and she did the same for her husband.
I'm honestly not convinced that there was any particularly long span of days in which Adam and Eve lived upon the earth outside the fetters of time. So, I'm of the mind that when God's word tells us that Adam lived 930 years, it is referring to all the days of Adam's life from the day in which he was created.
As I think BH is making the point, this understanding of the 'time' surrounding the creation event, I believe, is very important. Why? First of all because I don't think that God wastes a lot of what He has chosen to be recorded in His word to us with a lot of unimportant 'fluff'. I believe there's a reason that God gave us the accounting of the genealogies with the years included as they are. If God merely wanted us to take away from the generations the line from Adam to Jesus, as is His purpose in the account of Matthew and Luke, He didn't need to include the age data. He could have merely had written that Adam begat Seth and Seth begat Enosh, etc. I think that God intended to write those years, even beginning the account of the generations from Adam with this introduction: This is the written account of Adam’s family line. When God created mankind, he made them in the likeness of God. He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them “Mankind” when they were created. God opens this part of His word explaining that what is about to follow flows from the very day that He first created mankind and gave them His blessing.
God wanted the thinking man to understand that we are living in a created realm of His design and purpose and nothing happened by the chance of evolution or eons of time to assimilate and coalesce into the universe as we see it today. Just as He caused to be written that each day of the creation event consisted of an evening and a morning just as we experience days today, God wants us to also understand that there is no billions or trillions of years of history for this realm in which we live. It was all created with purpose and for every generation since Moses wrote the account of the beginning, we can understand the 'when' that Adam and Eve lived with a fair degree of accuracy. Because we can merely add up the number of years of the genealogies. When we lose that understanding, as I believe BH is pointing out, then we also begin to lose the true understanding of God.
It is this understanding of eons of time for the creation event, that allows man to begin to say, "Well, there really isn't a God, it all just coalesced over time by the natural processes of matter hanging about in the universe". If we could possibly get every human being to believe the creation event as it is described in the Scriptures, I don't think any of us would have any doubt that there is a God and He has created us with a purpose in mind and there will be a day of reckoning for all that He has created. Understanding and believing the creation event as it is described in the Scriptures is our most powerful testimony of the awesome power and purpose of God. Just as the Scriptures also claim: The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. But that's only so if we believe that all those stars and all that we find in the sky were merely made by the command of God. If it was all created over eons of time by just the melding and molding of some sort of natural matter in space, then no, the heavens don't really declare the power and glory of God, but are understood as just the work of fairly natural processes. Which is exactly what scientific theory is trying to teach us.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you also seem to be making some point that there were more humans created by God, from the dust of the ground, than Adam and Eve. How then do you explain that Adam named Eve, Eve, because she would be the mother of
all the living. If Adam knew that God had created others, he surely would have also known that Eve was not going to be the mother of all the living.
I just encourage you to study up on some of this. I believe that all born again believers, those who have the Spirit of God of which Jesus said would lead us into all truth, should fully understand this issue of the beginning. That we live in a a created realm. Created miraculously, which cannot be explained by any scientific work of man. That such creation event did take place when God's word leads us to believe that it did take place. That one day that same God who created all things miraculously by merely the command of His voice, will also draw it all to a close and then will come judgment and eternal life or eternal condemnation.
Now, certainly this isn't something that I would be so adamant with a new believer or someone just asking questions concerning what it means to have faith in God. However, I am assuming that you and I don't fit into either of those categories, and we, like the disciples, can sit at the Savior's feet and talk about the more weighty matters of the Scriptures and the God that they portray to us.
God bless,
In Christ, ted
