[Awoken]

Originally Posted by Sons to Glory!

God said in eating of it they would die. There was something He wanted them not to eat and this was pointed out clearly to them. And the enemy knew it would cause problems, so he wanted them to eat it.

Hey StG, just want to point something out here...

Originally Posted by Sons to Glory!

There was something He wanted them not to eat and this was pointed out clearly to them. And the enemy knew it would cause problems, so he wanted them to eat it.

This is all 100% true.

Originally Posted by Sons to Glory!

God said in eating of it they would die.

This, however... is not really accurate, at least I don't think it's accurate in the context you're espousing. Nothing is wrong with the act of eating and nothing was wrong with the fruit. God didn't say "in eating of it they would die". Nothing negative is ever said about the fruit itself, nor is the fruit of the TOTKOGAE ever called sin, disobedience, death, or whatever. The description given by God, as pointed out by others, was "was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise" (Gen 3:6). He said IN THE DAY they ate of it, they would die. That's a distinction, and for the purposes of this discussion a really important one, maybe. Here is the Hebrew itself, in interlinear form with the English translation. God said "בְּיוֹם֙", "in the day", i.e. there is clearly a temporal element to this. As for me I feel like this indicates that God knew it would happen already, so it was not only temporal but prophetic (He was telling them something that was already going to happen, after all, wasn't the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world for their sake?).

Trapped's "buffet" example is pretty good here. Another one I heard is in this video of one of David Pawson's sermons (I'm not necessarily saying I agree with 100% of what he says, but I do agree with his assessment, as in the book of James, that faith should be something we largely DO, not just believe). In that video he gives a great example that when a young, cocky man came up to him asking why he should believe in the Genesis story because it seemed silly - why would man have done something so stupid like eating from that ONE forbidden tree? - Pawson gave him an example of being put in a giant library with thousands or hundreds of thousands of books you could spend your whole life reading on every subject you could possibly find interesting and be happy with, and being told "there's only ONE book you can't read, that one on that shelf up there, that one is off limits". The young man thought about it briefly and then decided the Genesis story made perfect sense and he believed it.