Monday, June 24, 2013

What happened?

For Anselm, the problem of sin lay in the fact that it was committed against the great King, the eternal God himself, and therefore even the smallest sin necessarily carried the weight of an eternal offense. But in the Garden of Eden, it is difficult to find such an offended God, or to see sin being weighed over against God's eternal worth. We see the Lord, who by our way of thinking, should have been highly offended, and who had every right to curse Adam, and destroy him utterly—but he didn't. We see the Lord putting aside all his rights to abstract justice and punishment, and we see him more concerned about his lost and terrified creatures than he is about his honor.— The Shack Revisited, pages 169-170

<idle musing>
That statement is bound to get some people riled up! But, look at the text. As I've said for years now, God doesn't curse humanity in Genesis 3; he provides for a future and a hope of restoration in the forthcoming Messiah. It takes a while to get there, but Jesus' coming is there from the beginning...
</idle musing>

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