JesusLovesYou
Christ CRUCIFIED for YOU
"I agree but not the way you are thinking.
Christians are always trying to absolve God of moral culpability in the fall by whipping out their favorite "free will!", or “ it’s all man’s fault”.
That is "God gave us free will and it was our free willed choices that caused our fall. Hence God is not blameworthy."
But this simply avoids God's culpability as the author of Human Nature. Free will is only the ability to choose. It is not an explanation why anyone would want to choose "A" or "B" (bad or good action). An explanation for why Eve would even have the nature of "being vulnerable to being easily swayed by a serpent" and "desiring to eat a forbidden fruit" must lie in the nature God gave Eve in the first place. Hence God is culpable for deliberately making humans with a nature-inclined-to-fall, and "free will" means nothing as a response to this problem.
If all sin by nature then, the sin nature is dominant. If not, we would have at least some who would not sin. That being the case, for God to punish us for following the instincts and natures he put in us would be quite wrong.
Regards
DL"
Eve wasn't "vulnerable to being easily swayed by a serpent," as you put it. But she did have the FREE WILL to CHOOSE to sin (if she wanted to). It was HER choice to sin, not the devil. The devil can only TEMPT, but he CANNOT make anyone DO anything. DESIRE is a capacity that God gave humans. It is a NORMAL ability that all of us have. There is nothing wrong with desire unless desire is for sin (which will separate him/her from God). For example, a person who wants to play team sports MUST submit to the head coach's rules. A player might be TEMPTED by some person who does not have their best interest at heart (such as a team rival who wants to take that player's starting position) to disobey the coach's rules. For whatever reason the temptation might be something that taps into the player's DESIRE (such as money, a gift, or whatever floats the player's boat). The player is not VULNERABLE to yielding to the temptation, but he/she is CAPABLE of yielding to it because of free will. Without free will CHOICE cannot exist. God VALUES free will because He values CHOICE. But choice does not come without consequences. You see, there are GOOD consequences to choices, and there are EVIL consequences to choices. There are POSITIVE results to choices, and there are NEGATIVE results to choices. In the above illustration, I set out to show that having a free will does not mean that a person is vulnerable to their choices, they are just FREE to make them. Free will DOES NOT EQUAL vulnerability, it equals CHOICE. Eve was FREE to CHOOSE to sin if she DESIRED to. But if SHE DIDN'T WANT the EVIL consequences and NEGATIVE results that came with her choice to sin, she could just as easily have received the GOOD consequences and POSITIVE results that came with the choice not to sin. Eve exercised her free will NEGATIVELY. In other words, Eve CHOSE to sin.
Eve's HUMAN NATURE is not to blame for HER WRONG CHOICE because she was MORALLY RIGHTEOUS (i.e. BLAMELESS or INNOCENT) in the eyes of God before CHOOSING TO SIN. What happened was Eve YIELDED HERSELF SERVANT TO OBEY SIN, and BECAME a SERVANT TO SIN, instead of servant to RIGHTEOUSNESS. There is a Scriptural principle that states,
Romans 6:16
Don't you know, that TO WHOM YOU ALL YIELD YOURSELVES SERVANTS TO OBEY, HIS SERVANTS YOU ALL ARE TO WHOM YOU ALL OBEY; whether of SIN UNTO DEATH, or of OBEDIENCE UNTO RIGHTEOUSNESS?
You become SERVANT TO OBEY the ENTITY (or PRINCIPLE) that you YIELD TO, be it the devil, drugs, pornography, alcohol, TV, social media, music, celebrities, video games or whatever the entity is. If you YIELD TO IT, you WILL become its SERVANT (good or bad depending on what you yield to and its TYPE OF INFLUENCE). The contrast is between yielding to SIN (which results in DEATH), or yielding to OBEDIENCE (which results in RIGHTEOUSNESS). That's it. Eve had nothing else to yield to. Eve's human nature was NOT a factor because she was a servant to RIGHTEOUSNESS. But let us for discussion sake say that Eve's human nature was a factor. If it was a factor, she would have had HOME FIELD ADVANTAGE in her favor because she was already a default SERVANT TO RIGHTEOUSNESS before CHOOSING to switch teams, so to speak. She was on the WINNING TEAM and then CHOSE by way of (her) free will to join the losing team, as it were. It is like having the football in your arms on the 1-yard line, and it is first down. You are playing at home. You are feeling good. The sun is shining, and everything FEELS right. Now, you have FOUR CHANCES to get the ball across the 1-yard line, but each time the ball is snapped, you turn and run in the opposite direction. After doing this four times in a row (as unrealistic as this illustration is) the other team gets the ball. On the first possession, they get the ball in the end zone, score 6 points, win the game, and walk of cheering. You had EVERYTHING in your favor but, INEXPLICABLY, CHOSE to put yourself and your team in an UNFAVORABLE situation just because you FELT like going the other way. You weren't easily swayed. You weren't vulnerable, and your human nature didn't have a thing to do with it. You just CHOSE to be stupid. It was the same thing with Eve. So, no matter how you look at it, Eve was to blame for the CHOICE that she made. Her human nature was not a factor, and if it was it was IN HER FAVOR. So, Eve is STILL to blame not God.