“Who in the World is Dumb Enough to Believe that You Would Be Like God!”

That is the question that Steve Lawson asks in the above sermon at around 45:57 minutes into the video. He is commenting on Genesis 3:5, which is as follows:

Genesis 3:

5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

And adds this comment:

“You say, Who in the world is dumb enough to believe that, that you would be like God?” 

The answer to that is, Apparently God is!

Genesis 3:

22 And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

So he thinks that God is dumb! Fair enough. I hadn’t expected anything better than that from him. I wonder who else it is that he thinks is dumb, apart from God? Well, you don’t have to wait too long to find out. He continues:

“Oh, first of all the Mormons! …”

They always have to throw a barb or two at the Mormons, don’t they! Well, I have got bad news for him. God and Mormons are not the only ones who are dumb enough to believe that. All the early Christians believed it as well. See this post for lots of quotes and examples. Perhaps the reason why he doesn’t is because he believes in an apostate religion which apostatized a long time ago, and lost the belief that all the early Christians had. I wonder who has been proved to be the dumb guy now, him or God?

Further down he raises the same objection to the Catholic Church, which teaches the same doctrine in the Catechism—oblivious to how pervasive this doctrine was in the early Christian church. Here is a list of their names who taught this doctrine:

Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, Theophilus, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Novatian, Origen, Cyprian, Methodius, Lactantius, Athanasius, Hilary of Poitiers, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, Basil, Ephraim the Syrian, Ambrose, Augustine, Jerome, Hilary of Arles, John Chrysostom, Mark the Ascetic, Aphrahat.

For their teachings see the above link. Were they all wrong, and he is right? If Augustine and Athanasius were wrong, how can Calvinism be right, which uses them as their source of theology? Augustine certainly was wrong about a lot of things; but that was not one of them.