Why did God put that Tree in the Garden?

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As the title says, I am wondering why God put the “Tree of Knowledge” into the Garden in the first place.

Any Ideas?

Peace
James
 
JRKH said:
As the title says, I am wondering why God put the “Tree of Knowledge” into the Garden in the first place.

Any Ideas?

Peace
James
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A couple:
One, it was part of His creation, which was good. So it is simply a statement of Truth.
Two, it is a symbol of the risk of free will. This entails the abililty to define for ourselves what is good or not.
 
Whether the tree is allegorical or not, isn’t important. The issue revealed is that God asked for obedience on one simple commandment. Disobedience of the commandment resulted in awful consequences.

To abstract the matter a little further, we could say that God defines what is right and wrong. Wrong can be as simple as eating the fruit from a single tree, or rejecting Jesus Christ. The consequences are the same. Humanity has the ability to choose.
 
JRKH said:
As the title says, I am wondering why God put the “Tree of Knowledge” into the Garden in the first place. Any Ideas?
Click to expand...
The youngest of children have a primitive sense of right and wrong that consists basically of “Right is whatever I want; wrong is whatever I get punished for”.

Therefore in order to make the universe morally intelligible to Adam and Eve, while it was unnecessary to give them a command to do something good, since they were constituted in original justice, there still had to be at least one morally wrong act possible for them to commit, and the simplest would be a transgression of a negative command concerning an objective, outward act that incurred a punishment. The particular form that God decided on was a “Thou Shalt Not” against eating the apple, and the punishment was death.
 
davidv said:
A couple:
One, it was part of His creation, which was good. So it is simply a statement of Truth.
Two, it is a symbol of the risk of free will. This entails the abililty to define for ourselves what is good or not.
Click to expand...
Exactly. Note that the tree isn’t merely the “Tree of Knowledge”, but, more specifically, it is the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil”.

The one fruit we cannot take for ourselves is the ability to define what is good and what is evil. That ability belongs to God. Hence why the serpent says that they “will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad” (Gen. 3:5).
 
JRKH said:
As the title says, I am wondering why God put the “Tree of Knowledge” into the Garden in the first place.
Click to expand...
God put the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden to give Adam and Eve a choice to obey Him or disobey Him.

I think in Genesis 3, the reason God told Adam and Eve, “Do not eat” was that it was not yet time for them to do so. 🤷

However, Genesis 2 came first. God said to Adam and Eve, "Be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth. :confused:

God didn’t said, “Be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth but wait until your physical and spiritual bodies matured completely.” Also, God didn’t said, “Adam and Eve’s children are not supposed to have sex together because it is immoral and can cause defects and abnormalities because all their genes DNA, chromosomes, and everything like that are similar.” But this is a whole new thread. So I started one HERE .
 
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