by Dennis Gladden, By Green Pastures, ©2024
(Aug. 18, 2024) — I am pleased to introduce this guest post, which is the first in my Dialog section.
The writer is my brother-in-law, Lonnie Orfitelli. Lonnie has taught the Bible for as long as I have known him (which is a long time). He has led a home Bible study, small groups at work and church, and Sunday School classes. He is always careful to build his teaching on solid biblical principles, as you’ll see in this post.
Lonnie submitted this following my post What Does God Know, Foreknow, and What Can I Choose? I appreciate the dialog and invite you to join in the comments below.
—Dennis Gladden
by Lonnie Orfitelli
I have always been fascinated by the claims of contradictions in the Bible. While I recognize there are things that are hard to understand and subtleties that require faith to grasp, I have found no actual contradictions.
The idea of “contradictions” in the Bible is not my topic, but I will point out one thing that is the foundation of this article. Parents respond to children differently based on the child’s age. In the case of our heavenly Father, the consistent claim of the Bible is that God is “the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow” and we must understand that God’s thoughts are above our thoughts and His ways beyond our ways.
A parent, however, may “reverse” their approach to suit a child’s comprehension, which can look to an outsider like a “contradiction.” But it is not based on a change in the parent or their ultimate objective.
For example, no reasonable parent will allow a 4-year-old to drive a car or even discuss the option but will begin to discuss that responsibility with a 14-year-old and then let a 16-year-old do it.
My goal is to outline God’s work to reconcile mankind from The Fall back to Himself, just as He had promised to Eve. I approach it like a “lesson plan” where basic concepts must be laid out before the more complex and subtle ones can be understood.
As I consider our history, it becomes more obvious to me that these “ages” of instruction are the core of God’s plan and Jesus is both the heart and the reason for it.
Phase 1. Infant — God is not directly understood
At The Fall, God gave Eve a promise that a son from her line would crush the serpent’s head even though He would suffer for it.
The promise identifies that mankind’s nature would be dominated by the lie the serpent planted, causing the conflict between our understanding and God’s about what works well or fails.
As with the infant, a self-centered appreciation of existence governs our needs and desires. Unknown to the infant is its complete dependence on a provider to supply every need without any direct understanding of the situation or accountability.
Mankind entered this first phase of that experience entirely on our understanding. We claimed the right to know the difference between good and evil, asserting that we could make the judgment call and expect things to turn out “well.”
When faced with disappointment and frustration over their choices, the only recourse was to violence. We are told that there were mighty men of great renown, but it is obvious that this greatness was identified by oppression and victory, not humility and kindness.
“And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that the imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” Genesis 6:5
The result was that the whole of mankind became fully corrupt. Fully corrupt here means that not a single person had a “redeemable” quality. This phase is described in the first nine chapters of Genesis and ends with The Flood.
That would have been the end of things for mankind, except we are told that a single family line, descended from Seth, took God seriously and continued to “call upon the name of the LORD”. This line ends with the family of Noah and his three sons, and we are told in Genesis 6:8.
“But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD.”
So, God saves mankind by introducing “grace” into our history and Noah’s response. In this, I remind every reader that you are descended from this man and one of his sons.
These events are sufficient for us to recognize that simply exercising our “free will” without instruction and guidance is doomed to absolute failure. This is the first fact any child must learn and accept in order to mature.
This phase establishes that we need to question ourselves rather than God. On our own, we can only fail. We also learn that God can and will intervene when no other option exists.
Even when there is no obvious indication of God’s oversight, He is still there.
Read the rest here.