Quote:
Originally Posted by Sons to Glory!
Maybe it's better to say that God doesn't care so much about OUR concept of right and wrong. He is the Righteous One, and there is a right way - His! The tree of knowledge of good & evil is about us having control - we will know what is right and wrong, therefore we don't need to be dependent on Him. Therefore we can make our own choices and plans, and follow the desires of our own heart. In this way we become independent "gods." Of course, this is the supreme deception, because the end of our way is just death!
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I think I wrote something along these lines in a previous post and then deleted it because I hadn't laid it out very well.
This is my own viewpoint, of course, but I think that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (which means when they eat it they get exactly what it says....."the knowledge of good and evil") was forbidden because the time was premature. The Hebrews 5:14 verse I quoted earlier says
"But solid food is for the mature,
who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil."
If distinguishing good from evil is a trait of
mature believers, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was forbidden relatively soon after Adam and Eve were created (i.e. not yet that mature), I think the test was obedience. And once they showed they would obey God, possibly after a period of time once they had become more mature, the tree would have been made available to them. After all, the NT says believers will judge angels. Is that something given to us only after the fall or was it something intended all along even if the fall hadn't occurred? If intended all along, we certainly can't judge angels without the knowledge of good and evil. And it takes maturity to do that.
Anyway, the TOTKOGAE was good for food, pleasing to the eye, and made you like God. Doesn't sound like an inherently bad tree to me.
And it's funny, the whole reason they ate of the tree was because they DIDN'T distinguish between good and evil! The serpent spoke some true words and some false words. Eve didn't distinguish between the two, (and good ol' Adam was fixated on a butterfly or something off to the side), and look at the utter mess that has been borne out in humanity because of it. Distinguishing good from evil, from my view, cannot have been something that God wanted us in ignorance of forever.
There's a variety of interpretations, and so that's one of mine, I guess.