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The Setup (Gen 2:15-17, 25)

“... of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”

Why did God put the tree in the garden

if He did not want Man to eat of it?

We’ve spoken before of why God made mankind, that a large part of His purpose was to share the beauty and glory of relationship with others who were capable of understanding it. At least one reason why God made us in His image, was so that we were able to experience relationship, and in order to do that, we needed to be capable of choice.

A free will is necessary for relationship. A robot, who has no will, can only return answers that were provided by its creator. It does nothing on its own, and become an avatar of its creators desires. And a slave’s love is false, because the slave is not free to choose otherwise. We must be free if relationship is to be experienced properly.

Without the tree, Adam and Eve were bereft of choice. They could not choose to be disobedient, if nothing existed to disobey. The tree was essential to making Man’s capacity to choose a reality.

Throughout mankind’s history, God has given us a way out. Adam and Eve started whole and became broken. We start broken, but are given a chance to be made whole.

https://www.gotquestions.org/tree-knowledge-good-evil.html

What Adam and Eve chose is important to consider also.

God wasn’t being stingy, not was He depriving Adam and Eve of any good thing. By choosing to disobey, Adam and Eve both declared in their heart that they knew better than God did, and thus elevated themselves in their own mind to the status and and authority of God Himself.

All sin does that exact same thing. It declares that we know better, that we are the masters of our fate, that we have the authority to declare what is right and what is wrong. (Romans 21-23)

“It was a warning. ‘If you choose independence instead of God-dependence, you will lose the pleasure of the garden and God with it. If you keep trusting me and enjoying me as your greatest delight and highest treasure, you will have this garden and I will be the pleasure of all your pleasures.’ The forbidding one tree is a way of securing that the pleasures of all the other trees in the garden are supremely pleasures in God.” - https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/why-did-god-forbid-one-tree-in-eden

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The Lie

“Ye shall not surely die” - vs 4

�What death was God referring to when He told �Adam and Eve to avoid the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

Lucifer, in the form of the serpent, knew rightly that he could confuse Adam and Eve by playing word games. There are multiple layers of meaning meant by God when he used the word “death”. The Hebrew word “muth” has no hidden meaning, and is essentially the same as its english counterpart.

But the idea of “death” can be layered, and should be considered from the Physical, Psychological, and Spiritual sense, the same way that as beings we have a Body, a Soul, and a Spirit.

And death did indeed come upon Adam and Eve in all forms. Their physical bodies were corrupted, because our bodies contain our Soul/Spirit and express it in this world, and when Adam and Eve gained knowledge of good and evil and lost their innocence, their bodies captured that knowledge. And their Soul and Spirit experienced that corruption, caused by the knowledge of good and evil gained through disobedience. They lost their innocence, and by losing it, lost their ability to be with God (who can abide no corruption in His presence without some kind of propitiation)

The ending of their physical bodies, the thing we typically think of as death, is less a punishment than it is a gift. Even in His punishments, God hides blessing. Our deprivation of the tree of life means that our physical bodies can die. But the death of our physical bodies means that there is an opportunity for the remaking of bodies, free of the corruption they embody.

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The Curse vss 14-19

“... I will greatly multiply thy sorrow” - vs 16
“... thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” - vs 16
“... cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it …” - vs 17
“... lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever: therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”

What purpose did God’s specific punishments serve?�

“The curse as applied to the woman not only affected childbearing, but also her relationship with her husband. The last half of verse 16 is difficult to interpret. Two views are the most likely. The first is that in spite of the woman’s increased pain in childbearing, she would continue to have sexual desire toward her husband. Sex was not cursed by God. The woman has as much right to enjoy sex in marriage as the man. Two things commend this view. The word “desire” is used in Song of Songs 7:10 to refer to the desire of a lover for his beloved. And, the woman’s pleasure in sex serves as a gracious blessing to offset the preceding curse of pain in childbirth. Just as God curses the ground, but graciously allows it to yield sufficient produce; and, He curses work with toil and sweat, and yet work also is a blessing in that it forces us to discipline our unruly fallen nature and it yields the sustenance we need; even so, God ordains pain in childbirth, but graciously allows the woman to enjoy the act that leads to conception.��The second plausible view is that “desire” is used in the same sense as Genesis 4:7 (its only other occurrence in the Old Testament), meaning the desire to dominate. The woman who usurped authority from her husband by eating the fruit is cursed with the inclination to dominate him, but he is ordained to rule over her. The strengths of this view are that it fits in with the last phrase of the verse and it uses “desire” in the same sense it is used a few verses later. If this is the correct view, it alerts us to the inherent tendency of the fallen nature of each sex: of the woman to dominate her husband; of the man to dominate his wife. Both militate against the beautiful “one flesh” relationship that existed before the fall (2:24). Thus as Paul ordains (Eph. 5:22-33) that to recover that intimacy, the wife must submit to her husband, and the husband must tenderly love and lead his wife.” - https://bible.org/seriespage/lesson-10-curse-and-covering-genesis-316-24

“The curse on the man covers two areas: the ground is cursed; and physical death is mandated. Just as the curse on the woman also affects the man, so the curse on the man affects the woman. The curse on the ground meant that man would have to toil to bring forth the crops to survive. I understand the curse to be much wider than just the thorns and thistles mentioned here as representative. As Paul explains in Romans 8:20-21, the whole creation was subjected to sinful man. An unfallen creation could not be ruled by a fallen lord. So everything in creation which is now opposed to man--from mosquitoes to viruses to natural disasters--stems from the fall. All suffering and pain ultimately can be traced back to the first sin.

The second part of the curse as it applies to the man is the affirmation of physical death. Our bodies will return to dust. Since the fall, death is the enemy of every person. We can spend our lives working toward certain goals, and yet be struck down any day by the most trivial of accidents. Death is no respecter of persons: young and old, rich and poor--all must face death. But as terrible an enemy as death is, even it has its side of blessing: It forces us to come to terms with God and eternity. Very few of us would do that if we didn’t recognize our mortality. Death shouts at us that we desperately need to be right with God.” - https://www.biblegateway.com/resources/commentaries/Matthew-Henry/Gen/Punishment-Mankind

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