That’s the start of the story. And we don’t know how long it lasted. We don’t know how long humanity walked in the garden with God. How many days of unbroken intimacy Adam and Eve shared. How many glorious creations they birthed inside the garden. Before work was toil. Before family meant labor.
Inside the garden was a choice. That’s the best way I can describe the infamous tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
The choice was to trust and consequently obey, or to distrust and disobey.
God gave them everything but one thing. He told them not to taste the fruit. He told them what would happen if they did, they would “surely die.”
Then, the serpent comes on the scene.
His unexplained presence whispers that Adam and Eve are part of a larger story. But the stories are about to intersect. The bigger story is that there is the Creator and creation. Among his creation, there are those that trust and obey. And there are those that do not trust, and choose to disobey.
I once had a wonderful conversation with a pastor’s kid. He was very smart and he really knew this story I’m telling you. He was politely asking me the important questions, sifting his catechism. Tiptoeing around doubt. He was too respectful to ask the real questions, but I’ll always remember one fake one. He said, “The Garden. God, in all his omniscience, knowing human nature, why would he set them up with that choice?”
I knew the real question. The question was ultimately about suffering and Hell and the tangled justice and goodness of God. I knew it because I’ve deeply wrestled with this question myself. But I politely stayed on topic.
Since answers don’t really help people with questions, I put it back on him. I said, let’s say the tree was God’s way of providing a true choice. What do you wish he would have done instead?
What would you say?
It seems to me that in every way, God set Adam and Eve up for success. When we read the story, it seems like days pass between God giving the command and the serpent tempting them to break it. But what if it was millennia? How many years passed between creation and the fall? How many days did God prove his goodness to Adam and Eve? We tend to think of Eden like our story. We’re immersed in a fallen world and with so much evidence to the contrary, we need to hear and hear again that God is good.
Adam and Eve were surrounded with the evidence, nay, the presence of goodness himself walking with them.
Yet all that they experienced walking with God was not enough.
But don’t take my conclusions as a shortcut. What do you wish he would have done instead?
Is there a different way he could have provided true choice? Could he have done more to warn them of the consequences? What could he have done to make trusting him more desirable?
As you’re wrestling, let me give you what I’ve discovered as I’ve deeply asked this question.
Much of the rest of this story will be about God creating choices for humans, inviting them to trust him, empowering them to succeed, telling them the consequences if they fail, and then watching humans make the wrong choice. Again and again.
There’s many ways God could have presented the choice. In fact, the rest of the Bible includes many times that God presents this choice to trust and obey or distrust and disobey. The details and how the choice is set up differs; how he warns them of the consequences and equips them to succeed differs. But sadly, it doesn’t change the outcome. For every idea I have on how to better set up true choice, there’s a chapter later in the story where he does just that. It doesn’t change the outcome.
Humanity chooses.
Much later in the story, God walks with a man again. He stays with him for three years. God was not conspicuously absent the day the serpent appeared. No, this man left his master’s side. Immanuel’s presence, again, was not enough. All the evidence of goodness did not change his choice. God was with him and he left towards what he wanted. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
In Eden, things were very good. Humans knew only what was good, true, and beautiful. And they knew a choice.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” Genesis 2:15-17
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ” “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3
Photo by Andrés Dallimonti on Unsplash
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