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KNOWING GOOD AND EVIL
Several phrases in , that have puzzled interpreters become more understandable in light of what we’ve been discussing.
In the serpent (Hebrew: nachash) says to Eve: “For God (elohim) knows that on the day you both eat from it, then your eyes will be opened and you both shall be like gods (elohim), knowing good and evil.”
This verse is like .
The word elohim occurs two times in the same verse.
The first instance is singular because of grammar (the verbal “knows” is singular in form).
While most English translations render the second instance as “God,” it should be plural because of the context supplied by .
“And Yahweh God said, “Look—the man has become as one of us, to know good and evil.” .
The phrase “one of us” informs us that, as in , God is speaking to his council members—the elohim.
This tells us clearly that the second instance of elohim in should be plural.
This fits well with , where the psalmist notes that humankind was created “a little lower than elohim.”
We aren’t a “little” lower than God—we’re light years lower.
Relatively speaking, the gap is narrower if we assume the reference in the psalm is plural (“a little lower than the elohim”).
This is the way the writer of Hebrews takes the phrase.
In the writer quotes from the Septuagint.
That translation reads the plural “angels” for elohim, a clear plural.
In , Eve is being told that if she violates God’s command, she and Adam will become as elohim, knowing good and evil.
Notice that the phrase is “knowing good and evil,” not will be capable of good and evil.
As free-will beings, Adam and Eve were already capable of disobedience.
Like God’s holy ones in council, they were imperfect.
But Adam and Eve had not yet experienced evil—either by their own commission or as bystanders.
The “knowing good and evil” phrase with the same Hebrew vocabulary occurs elsewhere.
says:
And your little children, who you thought shall become plunder, and your sons, who do not today know good or bad, shall themselves go there, and I will give it to them, and they shall take possession of it.
The little children referred to here are the generation of Israelites that would arise after the original generation that had escaped from Egypt at the exodus.
That first generation had been sentenced by God to wander in the desert for forty years until they died off for their refusal to enter the promised land in conquest ().
The new generation did not know good or evil and would be allowed entrance into the land.
The meaning is clearly that the second generation was not held morally accountable for the sins of their parents.
Though as children they were under the authority of their parents, they had no decision-making authority in the matter and were thus not willing participants.
Therefore they were not considered liable.
They were innocent.
The same perspective makes sense in .
Prior to knowing good and evil, Adam and Eve were innocent.
They had never made a willing, conscious decision to disobey God.
They had never seen an act of disobedience, either.
When they fell, that changed.
They did indeed know good and evil, just as God and the rest of his heavenly council members—including the nachash (“serpent”).[1]
[1] Heiser, M. S. (2015).
The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (First Edition, pp.
62–63).
Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press.
EVIL AND FOREKNOWLEDGE
Acknowledging God’s foreknowledge and also the genuine free will of humankind, especially with respect to the fall, raises obvious questions: Was the fall predestined?
If so, how was the disobedience of Adam and Eve free?
How are they truly responsible?
Since we aren’t told much in Genesis about how human freedom works in relation to divine attributes like foreknowledge, predestination, and omniscience, we need to look elsewhere in Scripture for some clarification.
Let’s look at .
Note the underlining carefully.
.
In this account, David appeals to the omniscient God to tell him about the future.
In the first instance (23:1–5), David asks God whether he should go to the city of Keilah and whether he’ll successfully defeat the Philistines there.
God answers in the affirmative in both cases.
David goes to Keilah and indeed defeats the Philistines.
In the second section (23:6–13), David asks the Lord two questions: (1) will his nemesis Saul come to Keilah and threaten the city on account of David’s presence?
And (2) will the people of Keilah turn him over to Saul to avoid Saul’s wrath?
Again, God answers both questions affirmatively: “He will come down,” and “They will deliver you.”
Neither of these events that God foresaw ever actually happened.
Once David hears God’s answers, he and his men leave the city.
When Saul discovers this fact (v.
13), he abandons his trip to Keilah.
Saul never made it to the city.
The men of Keilah never turned David over to Saul.
Why is this significant?
This passage clearly establishes that divine foreknowledge does not necessitate divine predestination.
God foreknew what Saul would do and what the people of Keilah would do given a set of circumstances.
In other words, God foreknew a possibility—but this foreknowledge did not mandate that the possibility was actually predestined to happen.
The events never happened, so by definition they could not have been predestined.
And yet the omniscient God did indeed foresee them.
Predestination and foreknowledge are separable.
The theological point can be put this way:
That which never happens can be foreknown by God, but it is not predestined, since it never happened.
But what about things that do happen?
They can obviously be foreknown, but were they predestined?
Since we have seen above that foreknowledge in itself does not necessitate predestination, all that foreknowledge truly guarantees is that something is foreknown.
If God foreknows some event that happens, then he may have predestined that event.
But the fact that he foreknew an event does not require its predestination if it happens.
The only guarantee is that God foreknew it correctly, whether it turns out to be an actual event or a merely possible event.
The theological point can be put this way:
Since foreknowledge doesn’t require predestination, foreknown events that happen may or may not have been predestined.
This set of ideas goes against the grain of several modern theological systems.
Some of those systems presume that foreknowledge requires predestination, and so everything must be predestined—all the way from the fall to the holocaust, to what you’ll choose off a dinner menu.
Others dilute foreknowledge by proposing that God doesn’t foreknow all possibilities, since all possibilities cannot happen.
Or they posit other universes where all the possibilities happen.
These ideas are unnecessary in light of and other passages that echo the same fundamental idea: foreknowledge does not necessitate predestination.
Things we discussed earlier in this book allow us to take the discussion further.
God may foreknow an event and predestine that event, but such predestination does not necessarily include decisions that lead up to that event.
In other words, God may know and predestine the end—that something is ultimately going to happen—without predestining the means to that end.
We saw this precise relationship when we looked at decision making in God’s divine council.
The passages in and informed us that God can decree something and then leave the means up to the decisions of other free-will agents.
The end is sovereignly ordained; the means to that end may or may not be.
IMPLICATIONS
An ancient Israelite would have embraced this parsing of foreknowledge, predestination, sovereignty, and free will.
He would not have been encumbered by a theological tradition.
She would have understood that this is the way God himself has decided his rule over human affairs will work.
These are Yahweh’s decisions, and we accept them.
This has significant implications for not only the fall, but the presence of evil in our world in general.
God is not evil.
There is no biblical reason to argue that God predestined the fall, though he foreknew it.
There is no biblical reason to assert that God predestined all the evil events throughout human history simply because he foreknew them.
There is also no biblical coherence to the idea that God factored all evil acts into his grand plan for the ages.
This is a common, but flawed, softer perspective, adopted to avoid the previous notion that God directly predestines evil events.
It unknowingly implies that God’s “perfect” plan needed to incorporate evil acts because—well, because we see them every day, and surely they can’t just happen, since God foreknows everything.
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