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""Cursed is the ground for your sake" This indicates a change from a previous condition."
I agree there is a change in condition, but the change in condition is being thrown out of the garden into the world where the ground in the open nature will "both thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you". To show that this is the correct interpretation, notice the sentence following: "and you shall eat the herb of the field." In other words, Adam won't eat any delicious and easy to get fruit from the garden, rather he'll have to grow his own food in the field, and that is much harder to obtain the needed food consumption as was available in the garden. If the thorns and thistles was a new curse to earth, then why say that the herb would also come from the field? Are you saying that wheat, barley, soybean, etc, were curses too? Not a bad curse if you ask me.
No, the curse was being thrown out of the garden, and that is what the scripture says clearly. For Eve the curse was childbirth pains that God had originally intended not to exist in the garden (had Adam not disobeyed). But, because of Adam and Eve's disobedience, they were put into the natural world where nature was growing thorns and thistles and childbirth pains are a natural aftermath of living in the natural world.
"So in short, by this text, the opposite of evolution is true."
No, no, no. The Bible says clearly (and I mean clearly) that God commanded the earth to produce life. This doesn't mean it magically appeared, it means that earth followed its instruction in an earthly manner - which in the apostle Paul's terminology is the natural way. Jesus affirms this process by showing that God uses natural selection to produce his fruits and that God allows nature to do its thing by starting the creation off small and insignificant (e.g., a 'mustard seed' size of matter/energy). I just don't understand why you reject this biblical teaching. It is almost as if you want God to be a magician where Jesus plainly says that God is patient and allows the seeds to grow into a field and that he harvests the field at harvest. If it was any more clear he might as well have accelerated human knowledge by just coming out and saying evolutionary theory in the text. Of course then, humans would have developed modern science two millenia ago, much too soon in the history of humanity. |
