Genesis 3:6 (NIV): When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
It is important to remember three things about those things that God has forbidden:
- He never forbids something just to spoil our fun.
- Some of the things that God has forbidden look innocent on the surface. The poison in them is hidden from the human eye.
- God knows much more than He has communicated to us. In other words, sometimes God knows the damage that something can do, but rather than write a treatise on each forbidden thing, He often just says, “Don’t do it.” Our job is not to understand all of the fine points (and in doing so, to see if there is a way to do what is forbidden while avoiding the consequences), but it is simply to love God, trust Him, and believe Him enough to obey.
We can see this dynamic at work in Adam and Eve. When God forbade them eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (the only tree in the vast garden that was off limits), He didn’t go into great detail about the why. He just told them that if they ate that fruit, it would ultimately prove to be fatal – it would kill them. They should have trusted God and His love for them enough to take Him at His word. The fruit of that tree contained a poison that would kill them if they ate it.
But Eve listened as the serpent planted seeds of doubt in her mind. Surely the fruit isn’t really poison – it looks delicious! God probably had a different motive for not wanting you to eat it. It can’t be love that would deny you something that looks so good. It must be jealousy. God wants to keep you subservient to Him. If you eat this fruit, you’ll be as smart as God, and He couldn’t stand that!
So Eve (and later Adam) trusted her own senses and her own judgment. The fruit certainly looked tasty (which has no actual bearing on whether it is good for you or poisonous, but she was naïve). The serpent said that it was good for food. (This is the exact opposite of what God said. You have to choose whom you will believe.) And it was desirable for gaining wisdom. (Again, that’s what the serpent said. She had already decided at this point that the serpent was telling the truth and that God was lying, so everything wrong seemed perfectly reasonable to her.) And so she ate. And she gave some to Adam. And since she hadn’t dropped dead on the spot, he ate, too.
But then the poison set in, doing incredible damage to their souls, their minds, their relationship with God, their relationship with each other, and even damaging the whole of creation, introducing death, sin, decay, and violence into God’s very good creation. Too late they realized that, despite the soothing words of the enemy, God really had told the truth about the fruit. Too late they realized that they had broken something that could never be the same again.
When God forbids us to do something , we must always remember that He loves us, He wants us to live eternally in His presence, He will forbid us nothing that will do good things for us, and that He really does know everything, including how certain actions and attitudes will affect our souls. If we love Him, and trust Him (and without those two things there really is no relationship with Him), then we need to just obey Him.
Father, it really is clear that simple obedience based on love and trust is the only path for us as Your people. Help us to always turn our backs to the siren song of the enemy, to never give his arguments any consideration, and to simply trust and obey You. Amen.