Well, this time last year, I probably would have apologized for this next post in that it is yet another “Religious” topic post, but this year, nope no need to apologize, everyone else can just deal with it because this is where my mind is going. So the topic of today’s post is about the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and why God may have even placed it in the Garden of Eden to begin with.

This topic was actually brought about by a conversation that I had with my mother one day this last week.  I don’t recall exactly what we were talking about or why the comment came up and brought this idea to me, but we began discussing why God placed this particular tree in the garden if he didn’t want man to sin in the first place.

Now if you’ve ever had any amount of decent “religious” conversations with a variety of people sooner or later you will hear comments that vary along the lines of “Christians are just ignorant and follow blindly like sheep”, or perhaps “What type of God intentionally does something that will fail?” or maybe even “If God knows everything, and doesn’t want man to sin, why did he put that tree in the garden?”.

The answer to these questions is quite simply that of free will.  God doesn’t want people to follow him and obey his word simply because he said so. While there is a certain aspect of religion that requires this particular type of obedience, he also wants it to be because the follower freely chose to believe and obey, and not because he simply had no choice.

So in a direct answer to the first question that I’ve heard, in that Christians are just ignorant and follow blindly like sheep, if this were truly the case God would not have put the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden.  There wouldn’t have been a need to, or a point in doing so, because without that tree man would more than likely not have sinned and fallen, because that was the only rule that God had placed before man, and man who was at that time inherently good(after sin man became inherently evil), would have blindly followed God because he would have never known, or thought that there was a choice in the matter, or even another choice that he could have made, because the thought would have never crossed his mind.

In direct answer to the second and third question, God did not intentionally do something that would fail, although he did intentionally place the tree in the garden, because he intentionally wanted to give man the decision to obey, or to not obey.

Now for the part of this post that I find to be a complete mind boggle but extremely interesting to think about, and that is the following:  While there is absolutely nothing in the Bible to corroborate this idea or thinking except a small chicken scratch and what little human reasoning we are able to produce, I believe that there is a possibility that had man not eaten of the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil when he had, that eventually when man had matured enough God would have lifted the restriction of not eating of this particular tree.

I say this with the following reasoning, that throughout the remainder of the Bible God is repeatedly referenced as a God the Father, and that he considers those that are his (or saved) to be his children.  In our limited understanding of God, this father to child relationship is the same as a parent to child relationship.

Taking that into consideration there are many times in raising children (while I have none of my own, I have 2 nieces and nephews, and am not so old as I can’t recall how I was raised), where the parent will say,  “No, you can’t do something”, or “I don’t want you to do  something”.  Often times when parents do this they don’t necessarily tell their children why they don’t want them to do whatever, just that they don’t and expect the child to obey them.  Now while there are many things that parents tells their kids “don’t do this”, some of those things are things that parents tell their kids not to do because their kid is not mature enough in some manner or another to properly handle whatever that thing may be, or in some cases the timing of wanting something may not be appropriate etc.  The key point here is that eventually at some point in time the child becomes mature enough, or the timing to do something is now appropriate to the extent that the parent then allows the child to partake of something that they had previously been forbidden.

In the brief time that I was discussing this with my mother, she very firmly commented on the fact that this just could not exist with God, because it would require God to change his mind, and that is just something that is not possible with God, because God would not be God otherwise.  Now my counter point to this is that if this were the case, this would not be a case in which God was changing his mind, but a point in which a previously unknown condition had finally been met, thus making it the appropriate time for God to have possibly said that it was now ok to eat of that particular tree.

This post has actually taken me several days to get to this point, and my train of thought just left me, so just thought that this was an interesting concept for food for thought.