St. Thomas often didnt use any references in most of the work unless he was quoting philosophy.
Now the passages you quoted don’t speak of satan. Rather i find that they speak of God expelling man from the Garden of Eden (Gn 3,24). Not to mention the genesis passage you quoted referred to God telling man not to eat from the tree, there is no implication that he is actually gonna do it, like a father warning their child not to play with fire.
The problem with angelic free will is that human free will is also at stake. If you say that God scripted the serpent fooling man then man has no free will. Now you can say that God caused the evil by giving free will, but if there was no will things would be neither good nor evil. They would be just acts, and that is not quite how reality is.
Itari, you seem to have missed the point. I was trying to keep things simple but I will try to be more specific this time.
I was trying to show that Yahweh knew the transgression would take place before it actually happened. As a matter of fact Yahweh caused it to happen rather than waited around for man to screw up and then react to man’s error.
Gen 2:17 reads: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it;
for in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt shurely die. This underlined statement shows that Yahweh Elohim already knew that the man would eat.
1 Tim 3:14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman, being deceived, was in the transgression. Holy cow! The apostle Saul, who we know for an assurity had the Holy Spirit says that Adam was NOT deceived. Hmmm, so Adam knew what he was doing.
Rom 5:14 Nevertheless, death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is a figure of him that was to come. Now Saul is saying that Adam was a figure of him that was to come, namely one Yahshua the Messiah.
How could that be, How could Adam be a figure of the Savior? How about the fact that Adam was not deceived, he knew that he and his wife Eve were going to die but he ate anyway? Sounds to me like he willingly gave his life for his bride. Didn’t Yahshua the Messiah give His life for His bride (his church) by dying on the cross some 2000 years ago?
Now put the whole thing together: Adam as a figure of the messiah willingly dies for his bride to foreshadow what the Savior would do 4000 years later. Ezekiel, through inspiration of the Holy Spirit tells us what Satan says and hears is prepared in the day he is created. It must be that Yahweh knew exactly what was going to happen BEFORE it happened because He caused it to happen just the way it did. Yahweh caused Satan to deceive Eve so the man would willingly eat and get the purpose rolling.
To think that Yahweh would sit around and wait for men to mess up and then react would be to deny Yahweh’s Omnipresence, Omnipotence and Omniscience. It would make him less than the All in All and that just can’t be.
