> [!Scripture] > **16 The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; > 17 but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."** <img src="https://audio.mhbbible.com/media%3Agenesis%202%2016-17.jpg" alt="Genesis 2:16-17" style="max-width: 100%; height: auto;"> > [!success] Audio Commentary > <audio controls src="https://audio.mhbbible.com/Genesis%202%2016-17.ogg"></audio> ## Brief Observations - **Government and law are essential even in paradise** — God gave Adam dominion over creation but asserted His own authority, issuing commands before the Fall. This shows divine rule was never meant to diminish our greatness but to secure happiness and paradise. Nature obeys God’s instincts; we, with reason and intellect, subdue it—yet remain under His lordship. + **Obedience to God is for our ultimate good** — Commands like “eat freely from every tree but one” were instructive for joy and necessary for Eden’s security. They weren’t burdensome but protective. The serpent’s lie inverted this: portraying God’s word as limiting or dishonest. Trust and submission to His will is our best defense against Satan’s subtleties. - **Liberty in Eden was generous and life-giving** — God granted Adam every tree’s fruit as recompense for labor—echoing Paul’s teaching on paying the worker (1 Corinthians 9). This included the tree of life for eternal vitality. Obedience meant endless paradise; disobedience invited death, rescinding access to immortality. + **Our cursed world differs, but obedience’s reward endures** — Unlike Eden, obedience now doesn’t guarantee freedom from tragedy—we endure arbitrary suffering. Yet one truth remains: only God’s favor brings soul-peace that transcends pain, a peace beyond comprehension, rooted in submission to Him. - **The first covenant: a fork in the road** — God’s prohibition was humanity’s initial covenant: one path to paradise, the other to death—mirroring Moses’ blessing/curse (Deuteronomy) and Christ’s new covenant blood, securing eternal life for the obedient. + **Fear of God is a pre-Fall virtue** — Not crippling fear, but reverent awe that preserves life and order. Secular “goodness” often stems from fear of consequences; without it, many would unleash evil if resourced. Adam could fear God innocently—proving it’s good, part of perfection. - **The tree’s fruit brought immediate mortality** — “In the day you eat, you shall surely die” meant instant loss of immortality, becoming mortal like us—each day drawing closer to death’s grief and end. Our lives have an apocalyptic edge: living in our own “last days,” heading toward Christ as Judge or Savior. + **A “positive” law: evil only because God forbade it** — The fruit wasn’t inherently toxic; disobedience alone caused the Fall. Adam’s pre-Fall nature needed no laws against obvious sins like murder—he was averse by design. The serpent exploited this subtlety, tempting with “harmless” knowledge. - **Pre-Fall alignment: body ruled by soul, soul by God** — This shielded Adam from fleshly lusts, eye temptations, and life’s pride—fountains of all sin. The Fall inverted it, corrupting our nature. God’s yoke was easy, burden light (Matthew 11)—gracious, kind, for innocency and joy. + **Adam failed his own best interests** — In easy, happy paradise, he rejected God’s covenant, returning to dust. We must learn: take seriously God’s word for our good—obey, fear Him reverently, and find rest in submission, lest we forfeit eternal life. ## Full Commentary In the previous study we mentioned how man cannot live optimally without government. Even nature itself is subject to God’s laws. God gave Adam dominion over the creatures He made, but He also asserted His own authority over Adam when He moved him into the Garden. God set the laws of nature which govern the instincts of brute creatures and in a similar way He’s also given human beings natural instincts. In addition to natural instincts, human beings are also capable of higher-order rational thought and we have a capacity for reason. It is this capacity which represents God’s will to position humanity as authoritative over nature. By the power of our intellect we have subdued the world. Even while occupying such an honorable position, Adam was obligated to obey God’s commands. I want to reiterate the importance of God’s first commands being issued before the Fall. This means commands from God, by definition, were never meant to diminish the greatness of authority God has given us. They were never meant to make Adam anything less than a very good creation. God’s commands were both instructive for Adam’s happiness and necessary for the security of maintaining paradise. God’s lordship over Adam and His divine commands both being in place before the Fall ensures us today that God has a right to rule over us and God’s commands are purposed for our best interests. The deception of the serpent was simply to invert this truth and suggest God’s commands were somehow limiting or dishonest. Trust in God and submission to His holy will is the best defense against the subtleties of Satan. When God grants Adam liberty to eat of every tree in the garden save one, He’s reminding him that Eden is a space of contentment where he can be happy and fulfilled by the delicious fruits of paradise. Adam’s job was to maintain the garden, and God gave him the fruit as recompense for this labor. Paul explicates God’s value of paying the laborer in 1 Corinthians 9 when he says: “Who at any time serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard and does not eat the fruit of it? Or who tends a flock and does not use the milk of the flock? I am not speaking these things according to human judgment, am I? Or does not the Law also say these things? For it is written in the Law of Moses, "YOU SHALL NOT MUZZLE THE OX WHILE HE IS THRESHING." God is not concerned about oxen, is He? Or is He speaking altogether for our sake? Yes, for our sake it was written, because the plowman ought to plow in hope, and the thresher to thresh in hope of sharing the crops.” This grant of liberty extended to Adam was also the grant of eternal life. If he simply obeyed God, Adam could have lived forever in paradise. We know God included the tree of life in this grant because the tree of life is the only tree named when the grant is later rescinded. God’s reasoning for prohibiting the tree of life after the Fall was that should Adam and Eve eat of it, they would live forever in their sin. Our situation is markedly different from Adam’s in that we now live in a cursed creation. Unlike in the garden, obedience to God in our world does not have a one-to-one correlation with freedom from suffering. There now exists an element of arbitrary tragedy we must endure. Despite this difference one thing has remained unchanged and never will change: obedience to God is the only path to living in God’s favor. Living in God’s favor is the only way for us to find peace for our souls, the kind of peace which goes beyond comprehension because it transcends even the palpable tragedy of our own existence. It’s possible to be at peace with God even while living in a cursed creation. In order for Adam to remain at peace with God, he was forbidden to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This was humanity’s very first covenant with God. It was an intersection with one road remaining in paradise and the other road leading to death. This stark difference in outcomes would later be reflected in Moses’s blessing or curse speech in Deuteronomy. The final covenant in the blood of Christ, which all of these other covenants were pointing to, represented the same divergent paths: believe in Jesus and receive salvation, reject Jesus and receive condemnation. In Adam’s case the covenant is presented to him in just two consecutive verses, 16 and 17. The Hebrew in these verses has an element of linguistic symmetry. In verse 16 God grants Adam paradise by saying: eating thou shalt eat. In verse 17 God warns Adam of the consequences should he sin: dying thou shalt die. God’s use of a threat here indicates holy fear was part of a paradisal existence. The fear of the Lord is the foundation of wisdom, and we’ll continue to have this kind of reverential fear when we pass into the kingdom of heaven. Perhaps especially when we pass into the kingdom of heaven. We often think of fear as a bad thing which must be overcome. While God does not give us a spirit of fear but of power, fearlessness itself is not a virtue. Even in a secular context fear is a great preserver of life and social order. What some philosophers mistake as inherent human goodness is simply the fear of consequences. It’s not obvious how many people you cross each day who would readily commit heinous acts of evil if they simply had the resources to do so without consequences. It’s hard to say how many people you cross paths with whose only inhibition to ruthless dictatorship is the lack of a standing army. Adam was capable of fearing God even before his fall from grace, and so we may conclude that fearing God is a good thing and was part of a perfect world. Consuming fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil would eliminate Adam’s access to the tree of life. Exchanging one tree for the other was the same as inviting death into the world and into his own life. To rebel against God meant to forfeit whatever paradisal happiness he had at the moment as well as the possibility of future happiness. All of these things would be touched by the new reality of death and all the suffering which precedes it, attends it, and follows it. The consequences should Adam sin are presented by God as effective immediately. God said, “For in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.” We know Adam and Eve didn’t die the moment they ate the fruit — so we know this consequences is referring to their newly discovered mortality. The moment they ate the fruit they became mortals and the tree of life was recalled from them. The harbingers of death immediately seized them because they went from living in eternity to living in the same condition we all do: with each passing day bringing us closer to death. Our lives have an apocalyptic element to them because whether we’re living in the last days of the world or not, we are with certainty living in the last days of our own worlds. Our own progressively dying lives are coming to an end and each day brings us closer to grief, loss, and ultimately the presence of Jesus Christ — either as our Judge or as our Savior. What’s interesting about God’s prohibition against eating the fruit is that it’s a kind of “positive” law. The only reason it’s bad is because God says it’s bad. Remember it wasn’t the substance of the tree itself which caused the Fall, it was Adam’s direct disobedience of God. Adam didn’t need other laws governing him against self-evident sins like murder, rape, or theft because Adam by his own very good nature was averse to these things. The forbidden fruit was evil simply because God forbade it. It was this exact subtlety which the serpent exploited when he deceived Eve into consuming it. In perfect order Adam’s body was ruled by his soul and his soul was ruled by his God. This alignment inoculated Adam against the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life which characterizes those of us who live in sin today. God’s prohibition protected Adam from the temptations of sensitive delights and the ambitions of curious knowledge. The desires of the flesh and the desires of the mind are the two great fountains out of which all of our sins flow. Adam’s alignment of body and soul and his submission of both to God’s lordship composed what we might think of as Adam’s very good nature. This nature was inverted the moment he fell from grace. And so that gives us an observation of how good God was to Adam. He gave him a life that was easy, happy, and in a state of perfect innocency. In the gospels Jesus says: >**Mathew 11:29-30** >29 "Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. 30 "For My yoke is easy and My burden is light." The yoke God gave Adam was easy and his burden was light. The covenant God made with him was gracious and kind. Yet in the final analysis Adam and Eve failed to take seriously their own best interests, and eventually returned to the dust from whence they came.