How could the beings God created not be perfect? How could God create something that “goes bad’? The answer is quite simple: in order for humans to be perfect they must choose good rather than evil. God always chooses goodness because He, being the embodiment of goodness, cannot choose otherwise, but what about His creatures? Which is the more “perfect” creature, one who is forced to choose goodness, programmed as one would program a computer, or one who, given the choice, chooses to do good? To put it another way, which has a greater existence and is thus more perfect in being, the computer I am typing this paper on or Mother Theresa? Also, since God wanted to have a relationship with His creation, we were given this free will to satisfy the requirements of true fellowship. Who is a greater “friend”, the slave, required to do the master’s choice without any freedom, or the brother, submitting to the choice of his brother because of the love he has for him?

But man, who was not a slave, in an exercise of this free will, chose to rebel as a slave would rebel against his master and, in doing so, became imperfect and a slave to death itself. God, however, in His original desire and plan for His humanly creatures to have eternal existence, devised a plan in which the fallen man would be able to again rise to their intended purpose. This required redemption of our sinful nature by a perfect man but, since there were no longer any perfect men, this could only be accomplished by God himself, in the form of the second Person of the Trinity becoming a man and giving His life as payment for this original sin in the Person of Jesus Christ.

The person of Jesus was fully man and fully God. Jesus, because of His divine nature, never sinned and, being born without a human father, never inherited original sin, so was able to be the required perfect sacrifice for the salvation of humanity. There have been many suggestions as to how Jesus could be both fully man and fully God as the same time but many of them have included heretical teachings and led to many councils, where scholars have attempted to define the Biblical teachings on this existence. These councils were intended more to stop the spread of heresies than to define the Bible. The Biblical teaching was and is clear; human understanding cannot be. It is impossible for the finite human mind to fully understand the infinite God but oversimplifications of the Biblical teachings in an attempt to explain them, although intended for good, can turn out to warp the original teaching. Such was the case of the heresies the councils intended to refute.

When the incarnate God, Jesus Christ, the second Person of the Trinity, the second perfect man to ever live, died on the cross, He paid the price for our inherited corruption. One perfect man sinned causing future generations to be imperfect; another perfect man paid the price, allowing future generations to have perfection once again. But the acts of the Incarnation and Atonement did not automatically grant forgiveness to each and every man. To receive this gift from above, all one must do is to believe in it. The acceptance of this gift, however, proves the most difficult choice one could make. In fact, many would rather spend their lifetimes denying this gift than coming to the reality of it. Some would even quote fictional stories and fabricate others in an attempt to be able to “factually” deny this claim.

Related posts:

1. Where Sin Begins
2. Spritual Gifts – Tongues or Vacuuming?
3. Who is the Holy Spirit?

When God created us we were perfect. Then sin entered our lives through our own fault. This caused our nature and the nature of the world to become a perversion of the original perfection. What was once good was good no longer. Evil came to exist as good gone wrong; perfection twisted.

I can remember my pre-salvation days where I did a lot of things that I regret today. These were things that the culture said were okay. Nothing I did was either culturally or socially unacceptable. But they were all perversions of things God intended to be for good. I didn’t want God’s good, but my own. Most culturally-accepted perversions of God’s perfection are this way. Take sexual relations between a husband and wife as an example – one only need to turn on the television to see how culture has perverted this. Like premarital sex is a perversion of God’s intention, these stories from the ancient Near East are perversions of biblical history.

Many of the stories have surface similarities to the biblical accounts, but when examined further the major differences can be easily seen. In the stories there is not one God, but many Gods. Man did not rebel morally to cause a punishment flood, but made too much noise. The stories do not glorify God, but human kings. Some truth is there (superhuman creation of the world and humanity, a flood, etc.), but this truth has been twisted, much like culture has twisted so many other God-determined purposes, morals, or history.

When confronted by cultural differences with the biblical narratives or morals, the Christian can look back at these stories and know that their situation is not the first time in history when culture has twisted the words of God. This has been going on for a long time. Satan is the “god of this world” and this world creates culture. It should not be surprising, but assuring, that these documents exist which seem to so closely match, but really so much corrupt the truth of what really occurred. Through their differences with the Bible, they point out what is the most important in the Bible.

Related posts:

1. Non-Biblical Documents from the Ancient Near East
2. Genesis 6-9 vs. the Gilgamesh Epic
3. The Ancient Near-Eastern Setting of the Mosaic Law

Related posts:

1. Intelligent Design or Being Intelligent?
2. What is the Incarnation?
3. Moral Relativism Failure #1: No Standard to Judge