When The Stars Disappear

Mark and KJ discuss how human suffering is the spoiled fruit of Adam and Eve's fall into sin and how that means that God is not to be blamed for our suffering, as well as the vast differences between "top-down" and "bottom-up" explanations of human life.

Mark and Karl—"KJ"—Johnson review the centrality of stories in our lives and begin to discuss how Adam and Eve's disobedience to God's command not to eat from the forbidden tree, as the first great turning point in human history, opened the door to human suffering.

This episode asks whether Adam or Eve was more responsible for the fall and then turns to show how suffering became inevitable once Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree yet is also a key element in how God calls us back to himself.

Paul and Mark examine how the serpent led Eve to doubt God's warning that if she and Adam ate from the forbidden tree, then they would die, as well as how they knew enough about God and his love for them that they should not have believed the serpent's lies.

In this episode, Paul and Mark show why the penalty of death was the inevitable consequence of Adam and Eve's eating from the forbidden tree.

Paul and Mark discuss how prohibitions add an important element to human life: they help us recognize what we must never do and they enable us to express our unqualified resolution to live lives of complete and exclusive commitment to another person.

Paul and Mark begin to explore the prohibition that God gave to Adam in Genesis 2:17—namely, “you must not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for in the day that you eat of it you will surely die.” Why did God issue a command prohibiting our first parents from eating from one specific tree in the garden of Eden? And why would their disobedience result in their deaths?

Paul and Mark explore the remarkable implications of the Genesis 2 account of Adam and Eve.