Peter John and SteveVH,
- I wasn’t meaning that it was His “only will”. His will was also that they be perfectly perfect, as is His will for each of us. He commanded them not to eat of the forbidden fruit, of knowledge of good and evil, because it would bring them pain, grief, sorrow, death, and the experience of being tempted by Satan, and God is perfectly good and yet perfectly wise, so if they were to choose the forbidden fruit then it was to be their choice and it would be because they weren’t perfectly perfect. It would be their choice, and be “against” His will because His will is that they be perfectly perfect.
- Yes, it does–meaning that His will was for them to choose to be perfectly perfect, if they could and would.
Now that that is settled, we can affirm that Adam and Eve acted contrary to the will of God.
Now, in your perspective they lacked knowledge of either good or evil before partaking of the fruit, and therefore could not have known that the choice was wrong. This means they comitted an act contrary to the will of God without complete accountability, which is why your Articles of Faith refer to it as a transgression rather than a sin, but just as a four year-old whose father says not to touch a burner on the stove has not accountably broken a commandment in so doing, and hence has not sinned, he has still acted contrary to his father’s will, and he still will get burned. You maintain that the tree of knowledge of good and evil afffected a physical change and made death a reality for them: it made them mortal.
So, since we all must someday die, because we are mortal, because our first parents became mortal, we carry the consequences of Adam and Eve’s choice in our lives. However, “the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal Life.” Death is the consequence for sin. If we are all born mortal as a consequence of Adam and Eve’s choice, we carry the consequence of a choice we did not make:
This also suggests that Adam and Eve – or at least Eve (allowing that Adam’s choice was made under other circumstances) was not merely a transgression, but a sin. Yet, granting that accountability is called for, how could they have sinned, as they had no knowledge? They failed to trust God. Failing to trust God is where sin really begins – that does not take knowledge of good and evil. You either take Him at His word, or you do not. They did sin, and we all bear the mark on that in that we have to learn to
trust God. The best people I have ever met have still, at some point in their lives, failed to trust God.
We will all die someday, and hence bear the consequence of sin even before we have reached an accountable age ourselves. The wages of sin is death means where there is no sin there is no death. Children die before they have ever had a chance to breathe, much less sin. For whose sin do they die? Clearly not their own. If you can accept proof that original sin exists, just look at how many children die. Without original sin they have not earned death, so they should not have to die until they have commited at least one sin of their own.
Finally – and this is one of the LDS doctrines I never quite got a handle on, so you may be able to help me understand something I never did. I was taught that when Eve took the fruit Adam understood that he would be alone in the Garden, as she would be cast out. He understood that then He would be unable to keep the commandment to multiply and fill the Earth(and this is the key thing) and that this commandment was more important.
How? If he had not yet gained a knowledge of good and evil, how could he make a value judgment of which choice was the better and which the worse? In his mind they would simply both be things he was told not to do.
Now, I can accept that he understood Eve would be sent away, and did not want to be left alone, so chose to go with her – but that is not a value judgment. In this case, he was not deceived, but willfully chose to disobey God for his own personal reasons. By the standards of those accountable for their actions, would that not be a worse sin? It would have meant that being alone in perfect communion with God was insufficient for Him. Or perhaps, it was an altruistic choice: he did not want her to be alone, more justifiable, but still a breach of trust in God. He thought he knew better than God before he knew right from wrong. That pretty much describes the human condition.
What is clear is that, in LDS doctrine, he had no basis to make a value based judgment before partaking of the fruit, therefore he could not have decided that keeping one commandment was better than keeping the other. In either case, it was the woman who was deceived. His choice was willful.
Again, though, you act as if I doubt that God wants us to have free will. Have I ever said that God imposed His choice on us?