Did God Set Us Up?

What would have happened if God had not put that tree in the garden?

It is my opinion that the tree itself had no power. It was quite likely just a normal tree bearing particularly nice-looking fruit. I feel that more power was given to it through God’s command to Adam not to eat from it.

Would we, created in His image, have true free will if we were not given a choice?

A machine made by man’s hands has no choice but to do exactly the thing it was made to do and nothing more. A machine cannot choose what to do or when to do it unless it has been pre-programmed. But for men to truly be made in the image of God, man would need both an understanding of what that means as well as the freedom to choose. Nobody can tell God what to do any more than anyone can truly tell a free man what to do.

If a man decides he is going to jump from a cliff and becomes stubbornly resolute that this is exactly what he wishes to do, nothing may persuade him otherwise. No pleading, reasoning, or even threats thrown his way will change his mind. He will jump. The only way to stop the man would be to physically restrain him, perhaps by tackling him to the ground, binding him, and locking him in a padded cell.

And so, if God had not given that first man, Adam, the command not to eat of a particular fruit from a particular tree, then that would be like physically binding Adam so that he could not exercise his freedom of choice. Adam had to decide how he was supposed to handle free will once it was placed in his hands.

God told Adam not to eat of the fruit of the tree or he would surely die. The next question that naturally follows is whether Adam even had any understanding of what God meant by “die”. Wasn’t Adam in a perfect place where nothing would ever die? It would suggest that Adam must have had some idea of what death was for the command to have any real power.

But how could he? When God made Adam, He made him perfectly, both physically and spiritually. By God’s breath He breathed life into Adam. So Adam would have had no experience of death. What mattered was Adam’s will to obey God’s command not to eat of the tree, even if he did not fully understand the consequence.

Yet it seems that Adam did not obey God, nor did the thought of dying carry enough weight to restrain him. Adam appears to have been somewhat indifferent.

Would God give Adam a command that made no sense, using a word or phrase that God knew Adam would not understand? If I told my infant son not to drink the drain cleaner or he would surely die, even though it might look appealing to drink, would he understand what I meant? How do you explain to an infant what death is? And how do you explain death to a grown man who is immortal and has never experienced it?

Is it possible that for God’s creation to appreciate God’s glory (love, protection, grace, mercy, sovereignty), we must first experience death, suffering, and everything associated with it? In other words, the absence of God, the absence of light, and the absence of love. Was the fact that God created both night and day a foreshadowing of this spiritual contrast between good and evil?

When Adam ate of the fruit he did not die immediately. He lived to be roughly 900 years old. The death spoken of in Genesis does not appear to have been an immediate physical one, but a spiritual death. There are two deaths spoken of by Jesus. Matthew 10:28 says, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

God had given Adam this command knowing full well that Adam would eventually disobey it. The human condition is depicted very well in the parable of the prodigal son.