God made us to experience His own love – hence why He made us in His image (reference to a mirror) because He is love. But at the same time He also gave us free will so that we could truly love Him, no control – if you force something it no longer becomes love, it now becomes duty, which is why I believe He planted the ‘Tree of [worldly?] Knowledge’ – like a test.
You’ll never truly know something until you’re tested/called on it so the tree was used as a test of man’s love towards Him. This tree represents God’s power on earth (just like any tree or aspect of Earth will show off God’s glory). But this one is more unique because it shows off God’s power and like anything we know things by it’s fruit (produce) so in this case, the fruit was the ‘apple’, eating of this fruit would allow man to be like ‘god’ (in the sense of gaining power).
Like the phrase, ‘knowledge is power’ in this case it actually is. With this power comes potential ‘evil’ because it is what makes man think that He is god which is blasphemous in itself as there is only one God and so therefore is a sin.
The tree itself isn’t bad, the only thing bad was the actions of man that went against God’s instructions. Anything which goes against God is sin. The sin was a result of eating from the tree, an act disobedience)…
Let’s say that Adam was allowed to eat from the tree – what would happen…? I believe that had man eaten from the tree of knowledge we would ultimately know all things – thus eventually we would feel that we didn’t ‘need’ God any more and thus depart from Him. This isn’t what God wanted, He wanted us to love Him and love includes faith and trust. Before eating from the tree of knowledge we didn’t ‘know’ so we were confined to ‘trust’ thus after eating the fruit, we didn’t need to trust any more and our element of free will was further liberated. We didn’t need to trust and so didn’t trust whereas before we had the option to trust and also didn’t feel/know the need to. However…
This could also work in favour to God as the more we know, the more choice we have and thus the more love we can give properly as even if there is no need to do it we will still trust although somehow it is still a need because God needs us to. This helps explain why our natural state is to not trust but to do the opposite – ‘worry’; hence why when man ate, he worried about being naked, whereas before he didn’t realise he was naked, he didn’t feel the need to wear clothes because he didn’t ‘know’ – knowing (in this example) reveals ourselves to God in terms of us being different to Him – in terms power.
We now see past what God sees on the inside and now see what God knew all along – our nakedness. Something so obvious we didn’t see because we didn’t ‘know’ – now we know, we see also. Therefore showing my original point of the tree holding God’s power – we can now see what God can see and so are tapping into some of His power – The thing which makes God, God and the only thing which makes us different from Him – by having eaten of the fruit. (Perhaps eating from the fruit itself was an example of natural selection “fugitively speaking” – in terms of each generation getting more ‘knowledgeable’ from generation to generation – the seed first sown in Adam).
Now that we have knowledge, our fear of anything is the opposite of something we trust. In this case, man trusted God, the act of disobedience of eating from the tree (disobedience = sin because you’re going against the standard, the Law which is God) and gaining knowledge. Man no longer needed to ‘trust’ God because we ‘know’…we now trust our knowledge so now our fear becomes what we don’t know (understand), the fear of the unknown (mankind’s greatest fear). Thus we fear God because He is the ‘unknown’ to man through sin = separation by disobedience. Through His efforts He tries to bring is back to Him so we ‘know’ Him and thus do not fear Him. He brought Christ so that we might know Him therefore love Him once again.
Eating from the tree makes us ‘know’ the Laws of Nature – difference between right and wrong. But… would we always have had this concept of right and wrong or did the act of eating from the tree bring right and wrong into the earth? Obviously right and wrong was a law but it wasn’t a law which concerned us – it had no bearing on us – because we hadn’t eaten from the tree of knowledge:
1) So we hadn’t done anything wrong yet and 2) Because we didn’t know what was right or wrong.
So after eating, two things happened: 1) We knew there was a right and wrong and 2) We had already gone against it and done wrong.
Did eating from the tree give us worldly knowledge or did it merely bring to the surface the fact that we already have knowledge…? I reckon it is the former as it is called the tree of knowledge but if we are made in God’s image and therefore made the tree of knowledge then we must also have knowledge, if we are made in God’s image; it simply means that He, too, had the Moral Law placed in Him or that He is Himself the Moral Law (standard of which right and wrong is set against).
TheReadyWriter 