Quote:
Originally Posted by SpeakersCorner
Okay, now I’ll answer my own question: Why God placed a forbidden tree in the pristine garden … a beautiful, tasty fruit that they were told DO NOT EAT?
Those of you who ascribe to the videomaker’s view that it wasn't a matter of life and death, that the fruit itself was fine and the eating of it didn't directly bring in death but the banned access to the tree of life did, you are forced to take the position that this fruit was a temptation, a test. What else could it be?
I reject that. I believe eating the fruit was toxic. I agree with Witness Lee that the disobedience of eating was not the real issue, it was the ingesting of the fruit itself that brought in death.
So the question you should have for me is, Why would God create a toxic but beautiful and tempting fruit? My answer: The fruit itself isn’t poison but it is toxic to Adam and Eve in their primal, innocent state. It's the same as introducing to a very young child things about human sexual behavior. This can be toxic, ruinous to the child for life. It isn’t that the information isn’t true: it’s that the child cannot process it at this point. I'm guessing many of you would agree that society is doing exactly this same serpentine deception to our children and that it is terrible.
That’s my take and I’m sticking with it … at least until someone comes up with a better one.
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There is something to be said for this argument, that the first humans got premature knowledge. But it wasn't the premature knowledge that made them fallen. It was their disobedience that made them fallen. They sinned. Sin brings death the Bible says. The result was people who knew good and evil, but could do little about it in their fallen state. This was crushing.
God himself said, they are like us, knowing good and evil. He didn't say knowing good and evil was itself evil. It's just that we weren't ready for knowing it. It wasn't his intent that we have this knowledge at that time, but now we have it, and God is working with us in this state. We can't go back.
Witness Lee was trying to get us back to the garden state, where somehow we make it back to not knowing good and evil. This is what his whole good and evil vs. life argument adds up to. But it's not possible. It's interesting that the Bible really doesn't address the point of us not knowing good and evil anymore as a part of salvation. So what happens? Using the premature sexual knowledge metaphor, God works us through it until we arrive at a place where we are equipped to handle it. We are supposed to be like God, so surely eventually knowing good and evil was part of the plan.
So I can buy the idea that part of the problem was knowing good and evil in the sense that we weren't ready for it. But is knowing good and evil in itself bad? If that were true the Bible would not tell us to do good and reject evil, it would tell us never to think about either, and as TLRU says, the Bible over and over tells us the opposite.
Rejecting both good and evil is synonymous with thinking that walking around naked will make you innocent again. But you know you are naked. You can't go back.