Steppenwolf

That's a band from the late 60's and very early 70's, most famous for "Born to Be Wild" and "Magic Carpet Ride," though they have many other fine songs as well. One of which was a song called "Tenderness," which is brutal in its lyrics but is a great song nevertheless.

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For whatever reason, I have been hindered by a real protective stance when it comes to my own vulnerability. I view being tender towards other as willingly exposing myself to damage. I have learned, sadly, that the extension of trust is often met with a betrayal of that trust. :-(

So I limit my exercise of real tenderness to non-humans. I am good to my wife, and I am perhaps more open to her than anyone, but still I find humans to be potentially risky creatures so I avoid exposing myself. Small furry dogs and cats, on the other hand, see the full measure of my inner tenderness.

My true and abiding problem is that my sense of distrust extends not just to humans but to God himself. Honestly. I can't say I fully trust him, though I am aware that I should, and that of anyone in this existence he is most worthy of my trust. That doesn't help the emotional side of my being much ... it is deeply programmed to distrust on the personal level.

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You wrote:

On reflection you've made quite a leap between sentence one and sentence two. This assumes that God is incapable of making a sinless perfect human that was not an automaton, a sinless perfect human that was not doing simply as it were programmed, a sinless perfect human that gave praise to God from his or her own free will, a sinless perfect human that ... you get the idea. Let me ask you, do you really believe that God is limited in this fashion?

I believe that God is entirely unlimited. I hold the doctrine of God's sovereignty as one of the very cornerstones of the faith. So yes, he could have created a creature with free will and yet was incapable of sin. But he didn't.

Note: Some would offer that Jesus didn't sin. Jesus wasn't created. Jesus was begotten of the Father, which means Jesus was from, or of, the Father. The notion that Jesus was a created being was an early heresy ... but I can't recall what it was called.

You're touching on one of the tougher aspects of the Christian faith to explain -- that is, did God know we would sin, and if so, why does he hold it against us? The answer to the first part of that -- did God know we would sin -- apparently is "yes" because the plan to offer Jesus as the sacrifice for sin was "eternal". It was not, I am to understand, something God cooked up after Adam sinned.

At this point I will offer nothing more. This is along the same lines as the discussion about free will and predestination. I'm simply not smart enough to muster an answer.

What am I to say to this? (That sounds like something Paul would write ... in fact he peppered Romans with lots of those.) God can do anything ... that the Bible makes clear. But for some reason, unknown fully to us, he chose to make us in such a way where we could sin. And further, it appears he made us that way with the full fore-knowledge that we would sin. Why? I have no idea.

That's one of those things I must put on the shelf. Not to ignore it, but to treat it as an established given. God made us, he made us free to sin, we sinned, he knew we would. Now, next question ... what are we to do about it now? Answer? Follow Jesus.

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I liked your reference to Isaiah 48:10. I suspect there is something to the notion of testing as a way of fortifying. You no doubt see this with K. We saw it as children. Coaches often push people slightly beyond their limits to show them it's possible. Military basic training is all about testing and fortifying.

Here's a tidbit for you ... you're no doubt aware of the Biosphere experiment, right? It's here in Arizona ... I rode my bike past it a month or so ago. It's smaller than I imagined. Anyway, one of the things they discovered was that trees that grew in that environment where there was no wind developed with no strength in their trunks. It's as if the structure that provides strength in nature never developed because it never had to. I think I recall reading that they had to install fans to simulate wind so the plants and trees would develop more naturally.

Are we like those trees in Biosphere? If we weren't tested -- or refined as if silver -- would we stand a chance of being the kind of person God saw when he created us as individuals?