Gen 2:16-17 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; 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 shall surely die."

Isa 46:9-10 For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is no one like Me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things which have not been done

I often hear the question, "If God knew that Adam and Eve would eat from the forbidden tree, why did He put it there to begin with?" This is often followed by the objection that God could have avoided a big hassle and spared us a lot of grief if He had just dropped the whole Tree of Knowledge idea. On the surface, it seems that God made a mistake. That is until you consider the matter more deeply.

Remember from Part 1 that God created man because of love. He desired to have someone in His image whom He could love and from whom He could receive love. This issue is at the heart of why He forbade Adam and Eve to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. To understand this, we must understand a little more about love.

When I ask college students to define love, I often get blank stares. More often than not, their understanding of love extends only to a feeling they had when exchanging glances with a member of the opposite sex at a party. Ok, maybe I'm a bit cynical. Nevertheless, the student typically has not heard what Jesus said about love in the Gospel of John. In John 15:13, Jesus said, "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends." In these profound words we can learn something about the definition of love. A man who dies for a friend makesthe ultimate choice, namely placing his friend's interests above his own. This leads us to the conclusion that love is the complete lack of self-interest. Additionally, we can say that at the heart of love is the issue of choice.

Without choice, one cannot demonstrate his love. Indeed, without choice we would all be elaborately designed robots only able to perform the functions that our maker has programmed us to do. A robot does not love. Furthermore, without choice we would not understand the concept of love. Without this understanding, we would not be able to receive God's love for us. Indeed, this would defeat the whole purpose of why God created man.

That is why God placed the tree there and forbade Adam from eating its fruit. As long as they chose to place God's desires above their own, they demonstrated their love for Him and enjoyed the fulness of His presence in their lives. It was when the serpent deceived them into believing that God was holding out on them (Gen 3:4-5) that they chose to fulfill their selfish desires and demonstrate that they loved themselves more than Him.

Although God knew that Adam and Eve would eat from the tree, He placed it there anyway. He considered that the benefits of creating a race of beings who had the capacity to love far outweighed the harm that man would cause when he chose to love himself. You see, He already had a plan of redemption in place before Adam ever sinned. In fact, that plan contained the greatest act of love the world has ever known, God sacrificing Himself for His selfish creation. God counted the cost of creating man and giving him free will, and He considered it worth it. He considered you worth it.

In Part 3, I will attempt to answer the question: Why did God make the consequence of Adam's sin (i.e. death) so harsh?