Original From: "John Reisinger" <24jreisinger26@...>

> > JGR:  But every other other place in Scripture is dealing with guilty
> > sinners needing salvation. Gen 2:17 is not talking about how sinners
earn
> > righteousness.
>
Chad responds:   Well, now that's a presumption imposed on the text. :-)  If
Adam does not eat of the tree, life, even if it is another day in the
garden, is most certainly "earned".

JGR: No, you are the one making assumptions and reading them into the text.
Where, in Genesis 2:17, is there the slightest intimation that Adam had to
"earn" the right to live another day in the garden? The garden was given to
Adam to enjoy for as long as he did not eat of the tree. He did not have to
earn the right to enjoy the Garden, he needed only to not eat the forbidden
fruit!  No other person in all of Scripture was in that position. Give me a
text to prove otherwise. Your constant insistence on Adam needing to earn
the right to what God had sovereignly and graciously given him grows out of
your need to find a covenant of works (even though you have not mentioned
it) in Gen 2:17.

Likewise, give me a text showing where any person, after Adam, is, as a son
of Adam, presented with the possibility of BECOMING a sinner but disobeying
God. The garden is the only time in history that situation existed. Adam is
the only man who ever became a sinner by sinning. The entrance of sin
changed the dynamics of everthing.

I repeat my claim, the garden conditions are never repeated any where in
Scripture.

> Actually, the overwhelming evidence points us to the opposite of this.
The
> New reveals what is concealed in the Old, or in the case of the OT, the
> later reveals what is concealed in the earlier.  The fact that the formula
> is repeated over and over throughout the canon, esp. by Moses in the
> Penteteuch that is one unit of revelation, precisely means that God is
again
> and again imposing the gardenic formula onto sinful man.

JGR: Not so. Your supposed "garden formula" is never once imposed on any
other person simply become no other person was sinless. You are not allowing
the New to interpret the Old. You are starting with wrong assumptions about
the Old and superimposing them onto the New.

>God hammers it
> home on sinful man the failure of the garden by imposing the formula in
its
> dreadful impossibility for a depraved creature who cannot keep it.

JGR:  But Aam was not a sinful man. You are ignoring what is explicitly
stated in the text. You are reading the dictums of sysptematic theology back
into pre-fall revelation.

How is Adam, a sinless man, eating the forbidden fruit and bringing sin into
the world, in any way the same thing as guilty sinners being unable to keep
the law and earn righteousness? That is apples and oranges.

>Sinful
> man, given precisely the same conditions in the garden,

JGR:  Sinful and fallen man have never been given the same conditions as
those in the garden. The entrance of sin changed everything. All you are
saying is pure supposition growing out of pre-concevied theology.

>is driven to the
> Messianic sacrifice for release from its dreadful conditions through faith
> alone in the Messiah alone.

JGR:  But Adam was not in any sense in need of either a sacrifice or faith
in a Messiah prior to his eating of the forbidden tree.

JGR