Wednesday
Wednesday
True Freedom
And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”
Genesis 2:16–17
God gave Adam two simple and straightforward instructions—one positive and the other negative. The first was a liberal permission (he might eat from any and every tree in the garden). The second was a single prohibition (he must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which was in the middle of the garden).
The liberal permission gave an almost completely unfettered access to the rich variety of trees in the garden. They were both “pleasing to the eye” and “good for food” (v. 9), thus offering Adam and Eve aesthetic and material satisfaction. God’s generous provision also included access to “the tree of life,” symbolic of continuous fellowship with God, which is eternal life (see John 17:3) and is glimpsed in the later statement that the Lord God himself walked with them in the garden (Gen. 3:8).
The tree of the knowledge of good and evil referred to in the solitary prohibition is so called not because it had magical properties but because it stood for the probation on which Adam and Eve had been placed. Created in God’s image, they already had a degree of moral discernment, but if they disobeyed God, they would have a disastrous experience of evil as well as good.
A Finnish student at the University of Helsinki once said to me, “I’m longing for freedom, and I’m getting more free since I gave up God.” But true freedom is found not in discarding Christ’s yoke but in submitting to it, that is, through refraining from what he has forbidden us. Obedience means life, and disobedience death.
For further reading: Matthew 11:28–30