I'm not sure I understand your point. It sounds like you're saying "There shall be no more death" does not exclude capital punishment should it become necessary.

Understand that I believe the battle is being wages in our minds. Everything depends on the right exercise of the will. EGW says in SC chapter 5 that the greatest battle ever fought, is the battle against self. By nature, we are alienated from God. When we are born, we are alienated. Where is the mind choice in this matter? We need renewal. We are already lost at birth. The choice is to yield to God or not. None of choose to be born in this condition.

One of the best arguments I've heard in favor of God and creation comes from engineering and information theory and people such as Werner Gitt and Stephen Meyer. I'm not going to go into the details on information theory, look up some of the work by the above gentlemen to find out more. The DNA contains information. Information is independent of the medium that conveys the information. So the DNA is not the information, but the order in which the DNA is assembled is the information. All information has to come from an intelligent source. Deuteronomy 32:4, God is the Rock, His work is perfect. Psalms 19:7, the law of the Lord is perfect. When you look at the genome, it is not perfect. It is not perfect because of the TEs show that it is not perfect. TEs cause all kinds of havoc. They cause DNA deletions, extra insertions, point mutations, altered gene expression by adding new gene promotors. The code written in TEs is different than original DNA. Yes, you can read the code and see the differences. There is information in TEs, which thus points to an intelligent source also, but that source is inferior to the source of the original DNA. The Great Controversy can be seen in every cell of the body. God did not create chaos, Matthew 13, an enemy has done this. You can not originate TEs just by bad thinking. There is no science to support this. This quotation is often taken as just a Messianic promise. But there is more. What is "seed"? We often say offspring, descendants. This can be interpreted as genetic material. Does the Devil have children? No. But he can have genetic material that he has put into the system. TEs? All life forms on earth have TEs. There was a lot of press last year when Craig Venter produced an "artificial" genome. When his genome was resequenced, it was infected by TEs. Venter did not put them there. I think God put the enmity against sin in order to preserve our free will. But to continually go against God's laws, which include the laws of health, you will eventually loose free will, they unpardonable sin.

So while the battle again sin is waged in the mind, sin is not just a mental illness. The whole head is sick which includes the physiology, the whole body is sick. Isaiah 1:5,6. Jesus took our sickness upon Himself, Isaiah 53:4, and cured it. Hebrews 1:3.

These ideas are not originally mine. There are several people that are doing the research and have done a number of lectures in the last year at at least 3 different Adventist university groups. Yes, it is a new concept, but it fits. They need to now publish there data...

I don't believe there is "junk" DNA. I do believe there is DNA which we don't understand. And I'm not so sure the concept of transposons is so bad. I recall learning there is benefit to them. I suggest that the mechanism in transposons have been degraded much as any other part of nature, but that originally it was for a good benefit. I see it as a way for organisms to adapt to various environments.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090520140408.htm

All I said is there are those that call it junk DNA. I think most DNA has function. It is true, transposable elements (TE) do have many functions. I can also give you many diseases that are directly related to TEs. If you have an evolutionary view, you must look at TEs as being beneficial.

I'll comment on this part separately, and perhaps the rest later.

I've said a couple of times that I don't believe that entropy, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, would have happened without sin. This would preclude the idea that man would "run-down," because that's what entropy is. So I think this is a fundamental question to consider. Did God create the Universe such that entropy existed from the get go? Or is entropy the result of sin?

My thoughts on this aren't settled in stone, but from the little I've pondered this, it seems to me that entropy is the result of imperfection, which is the result of sin.

Adam and Eve had already partaken of the Tree of Life, and didn't live forever, so partaking of it doesn't cause one to live forever. It would have prolonged man's life, however, and God, in mercy, didn't want to do that.

I don't think the type of separation you're suggesting is possible. That is, the body cannot be separated from the soul and mind so that its problems can be solved independently from solving the problem of the soul and mind. To heal the body, the soul and mind must be healed. Man is an indivisible unit.



I don't believe this. The problem of death is not physical, but spiritual. The cure is also spiritual. This is why Jesus Christ is fundamental to the salvation of man. If it were a physical problem, Jesus Christ wouldn't be necessary; just the tree.



This makes faith in Christ a completely arbitrary thing. God could just as easily require memorizing all the prime numbers up to a 1000 to have access to the Tree of Life. This way of thinking makes no meaningful connection between the cure (faith in Christ) and the problem (death, arising from sin). I believe that Christ heals us from sin, which saves us from death.



Or you could accept a different premise, which is that God thinks that sinful man needs to be converted by faith in Christ, and this is what enables him to live forever, also explicitly stated by God.



I think this is exactly what you're doing; upholding a personal|private|preferred view, as opposed to the Bible. However, having said this, I don't think this is a good way of looking at things.

That is, we all have different paradigms and perspectives. We perceive truth differently, and are in different points in our pilgrimage. I don't believe God has a black and white way of considering these things, but is helping us go down our path, His goal being that we would learn to have the paradigm and perspective that He has. So it's not, "I must believe this one thing in just this way, or I am rejecting the Bible," but a matter of accepting a new skin in which to hold new wine.

I perceive, from your viewpoint regarding the future, that you seem to be open to new wineskins.

Also, it's possible we may be talking past each other to some extent. I agree with much of what you say.

Truthfully accepting Christ serves to keep our minds from ever slipping into this state of sinfulness and thus continues to grant us access to this Life perpetuating Tree.

Though I would see the following as inconsequential knowing that the Fruit of Life had to be continually eaten and not just a “once for all” time, I do not see any statement that says that Adam and Eve ever ate of the Fruit of Life. If it was to be eaten every months, as it will be in Heaven, they would, from their perfect start, only need to first eat it at the end of their first month. However they easily could have sinned 2½ weeks into that first month. Having said that, as I already said, Man had to eat the fruit repeatedly, periodically and not just once, in order to live forever. To me that fact further shows how a sinful person can indeed, as God feared, live forever despite being sinful if they continued to have access to the tree of life.



The line of separation between these two entities is very thin because as soon as man entertains a sinful thought in their minds, it immediately, various adversely affects the body. In Matt 10:28 Jesus made a clear distinction between this “psyche” (i.e., one’s developed character) and the physical body. It is for such reasons that I see that Christ’s sacrifice and the Tree of Life are inseperable to achieve full redemption, i.e., spiritually and phsyically for without the first one cannot be saved (and thus will not have access to the tree of life) and without also the second, as my earlier Otis Elevator and ‘Throne of God worshipping’ illustrations showed, perpetual life will not be achieved.

In regards to my other points that post, I really cannot express them any more clearly or Biblically. I actually baffles me that you responded to them not by challenging the Bible and SOP passages that they are based upon (namely Gen 3:22-24 and PP 60.3 among many others especially in regards to EGW statements on the Tree of Life), but by just resorting to how ‘you think the paradigm should be, i.e., sin ir organic and thus: “The problem of death is not physical, but spiritual.” Until you provide an exegetical demonstration as to why those passages upon which I am basing these views should not be understood as they plainly read, as many others in this thread have also said, then your view will factually continue to be a private view and not the Biblical one.

It is self-evident from the premise of your statements, that you are paramountly seeking to make Jesus the “one and only” and “all and all” in this case, however, based on those Biblical passages, that it not the physical case. This theology of redemption physically ends in the Tree of Life for God’s Creation. Just making “I (rather) think” claims does not prove or disprove anything. Even your “I don't believe God has a black and white way of considering these things, but is helping us go down our path, His goal being that we would learn to have the paradigm and perspective that He has” is anthropomorphically subjective. Since God is Truth, then His Word which was either His direct statements, or under the guidance of His Spirit also contains a single Truth. All you really need to do to properly defend your view is deal with it exegetically starting with Gen 3:22-24 and PP 60.3. Proper exegesis also takes into consideration all statements on a matter and not only those favorable to one’s view.



I believe in this “Foreplanning View” of mine about ‘God and the Future’ because that is what the Bible teaches. And also, and this is not merely semantics, Christ’s parable speaks of being new wineskins which are thus capable of receiving Christ’s new wine. And that foundationally involves allowing the word of God to shape our views and not vice versa, thus discarding the old wineskins for these adequately receptive new ones.



Same here. The only difference may be the issue of the role of the Tree of Life in providing perpetual life and also keeping nature perfect. I see all of this as an inevitable reality for anything that is not and cannot become “immortal” and that is everything else but God Himself.

As I relatedly posed before, I am inclined to think that “God in Jesus” eternally died on the Cross.” This would have made the penalty for sin (i.e., the (permanent) death of the Lawgiver Himself truly, and lastingly, paid for.). So Jesus would now have nothing more than the nature of a Man, nor even the Angelic form/nature that He had before as the Archangel. I would like to hear what you, or others, think on this.

I understand your view here and would agree in part to it as I see this physical “entropy” starting from the withdrawal of the Tree of Life from man and also nature, which could necessarily extend throughout a galaxy. (Which is why I believe that creation was limited to one world per galaxy, with the other planets being at least, visitable, through developed technology, by the people of the lone galactic world.) So I see this entropy prevention tangibly present in the ‘supernatural ingredients/powers’ of the Fruit of Life.

Also God manifestly made the upkeeping of the world dependent of Man’s obedience as this all belonged to him. So the withdrawal of such a Fruit of Life ingredient from even planetary nature or even the direct protection of God upon the galaxy surrounding Man’s world (Earth) would have resulted in this self-degeneration.

However, as I understand it, in all of this, because man, and also nature, is mortal, entropy, even if dormant or “held in check” by the Fruit of Life was still present in him and nature.

That is indeed what I said and meant, for the exegetical and Theological reasons cited there.

Is see EGW’s statements here as supporting and not even contradicting this view:


I understand “evil” here as a fully developed manifestation from an inceptive sinful course.

So the remaining/ensuing question is, if you are opposing this view: What is your exegetical and Theological response/objection those points?

While geneticists, even SDA ones, are manifestly still trying to figure out what the correct, even hypothesis, let alone, science, should be on this view, I am actually convinced that such genetic degeneration was prevented by the “supernatural powers” contained in the Fruit of Life. The attempts to justify this TE view with the Bible and SOP are, to me at least, eisogetical, and thus not ascribable to.

By the way, in regards to “enmity”, God can work to produce this without physically doing anything, which would actually violate our free will. He could be saying here that He will be actively involve in helping anyone who manifests any desire to do what is Godly and right. This is done through the sustaining help of His Spirit, which indeed, only those who want to be in tune with it, can benefit from it. In this way is such “enmity” gradually built up in man, and only maintained as they continue to allow themselves to be guided by this Spirit. So “seed” here may simply be figuratively speaking of ‘one’s nature’.