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Bible Study Title: The Economics of God Nearly everythigng in Scriptrue has an economic component, and God has used economic realities to shape the world since the beginning. Indeed, at irs origin "economics" is a composite word, consisting of the Greek "oikos", meaning "house", and "nomes", meaning "law". So, economics is "the law of the household", Of course the aggregate of a hundred million households makes for some mighty numbers, but the same fundamental needs drive each household, and each person, and each animal, and this is by design. When God made the world, as described in Genesis, he first created the physical structures of its existence. The first biologically living things (as we define it) were created on the third "day", when the plants and trees were made. Plants anchor on soil, whence they get the elements that form their structure, they live on water and light. God provided the light directly, and the water sprang up from the ground. On the fourth day God created the sun as the source of natural light for the world, that the plants would use as their energy source. On the fifth and sixth days God created the animals, whose economics are more complicated, for while the still require a habitat of solid ground or sea in which to live, and they still require water, they cannot eat light to make food, like the trees. They have to eat the products of plants, or the products of animals (originally just milk, later, meat). And to collect those things, animals generally cannot fix themselves to the ground, like plants. They have to move around. Air is a special case, because it is the spirit that God breathes into the nostrils of animals, not plants, to make them breathers (a word we translate as "living souls"). In Scripture animals die but plants fade and wither, and the life is given by breath and taken back by the withdrawal of breath, by God. The blood carries the breath to the body, and so the blood is the life. The basic natural economy of creation is straightforward. Light and water feed the plants, the animals eat the plants, and man also eats the plants and, through his dominion, may eat the milk of animals as well. The land was fertile and self watering, there was light and abundance. There was the destruction of plant cells through digestion, and plants competed for space and light (which is why Adam and Eve had the task of tending the Garden, but there was no Biblical death, as the breathers were not being killed and eaten. There was superabundance of food, so the economics were the economics of the lack of scarcity and, therefore, leisure. There was no need for clothing, and no energy spent in such activity. Man was made to live an economy of leisure in nudity, with a focus on esthetics: tending the Garden. That's a summary of the Economics of Eden. I'll tie it to Genesis text when I come back and have a Bible in hand. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest Begin Trace Mode for Comment # 50. Could you tell me how many years ago this happened? I'm talking about the book of genesis. Did evolution play a role in any of this "gods economy"? If so how?
Replies to Comment # 50. Could you tell me how many years ago this happened? I'm talking about the book of genesis. Did evolution play a role in any of this "gods economy"? I don't know how long ago it happened. If one counts back the years using the Hebrew Massoretic text and the table of ancestors, one can come forward to the time of Joseph, and one can count afterwards from Joseph to Moses. The key to getting some degree of exactitude is deciding when, exactly, to insert Joseph into the Egyptian timeline. That will move the age of Adam and Eve back and forth a bit, by perhaps as much as a thousand years, no more. Obviously in a scientific sense there is no opportunity for evolution to have occurred in a few thousand years. The same is true if one uses the Septuagint, the Greek version of Scripture which is about 1200 years older than our oldest version of the Massoretic Text, and pre-dates the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the LXX, the ages of the patriarchs are a bit longer, so one can add two or three thousand years But once again, the time frame since Adam and Eve is not sufficient for naturalistic evolution to have occurred. Now, even if one is a Biblical literalist, there is time for geological evolution to have occurred in Scripture. Before the Fourth Day a "day" was not an earth rotation, but the period between light and dark, which light did not come from the Sun (which was not placed until the fourth "day". God DEFINED a "day" as a period of light and dark, but the SOURCE of the light before the fourth day was God himself, so there is no clock by which to measure. This is not very interesting from the point of view of the evolution of animals, however, for while the plants were created on the third day, before standard time, the animals were not created until the sixth day, and the fifth and sixth Biblical days were solar days. There simply is not enough time in the Biblical text for the evolution of animals. The best scientific argument AGAINST evolution is not Genesis - people who don't believe in Genesis don't consider it an argument. It is the silence of the skies. NASA tells us that there are sextillions of earths up there, and given the uniformitarian principle and the supposedly "normal" chemistry of life, life should naturally evolve everywhere that it can, and then proceed to evolve to intelligence. The skies should be full of radio chatter and more, from different planets. But the skies are silent. Which means they're not out there. Which means that evolution of life from non-life does not happen (or it means that NASA is wrong about there being other habitable planets). Evolution, whether it happened or not, is largely extraneous to the Economics of God. It's only impact in the story we are conveying here would be that these various economic needs we have arose naturally from the conditions and circumstances of mankind on a primitive earth, in competition with other species and with other men also. The biggest implication of evolution having happened would not be on the Bible's accurate depiction of the economics of survival facing man: Genesis nails those. It would be, rather, a reflection on on the nature of God. God would cease to be the interested, short-term creative being of Genesis, and would become the impersonal - and perhaps non-sentient - forces of nature. We would move from theism to scientific pantheism. It would not change the economics of life. It would change our understanding of what God is.
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