Sunday Sermonette: Quadruple think

The useful part

Jesus in the Gospels never talked about any of the issues Paul is spewing about here. All of them inherited the consequences of that sin, which meant they had to live hard lives and then die. God didn't do anything about it for maybe 6,000 or 10,000 years, depending on who did the calculations, then he decided the time had some to sorta kinda fix the problem.

How it works

• Although God is omnipotent, he couldn't just wave his hand and lift the curse.
• He had to send his son, who was also himself, to be incarnated as human, and then tortured to death, and then resurrected, in order to accomplish it.
• that Jesus is the son of God, and actually at the same time God himself, that he was tortured to death and resurrected, and that if you believe this you will be saved, you will be saved, even though you are...
• 3) Because God is omniscient and omnipotent, he knew at the beginning of time who would be saved and who would not be, and there is nothing you can do about it, but.

What to take from it

4) You should believe and not sin because that's the way to prove that you are saved. All humans were cursed because Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. Of course, in reality, Homo sapiens existed for something like 250,000 to 300,000 years before all this happened, so there was never any garden and never any forbidden fruit.

Details worth keeping

The first part of Chapter 9 is, as far as I can tell, complete gibberish. Then Paul gets going on the predestination beat. Christian theology is actually Paulist theology.