Free Will and the Tree in the Garden

Message / Question

Why did God create the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil if He knew how dangerous it could be?

Response

When God created man, He ensured that this newly created being possessed the means of self-determination. At its base, free will is the ability to choose for God or to refuse to do so. God created the conditions where free will creatures would be able to make a choice between obedience and disobedience to God and the freedom to love God by choice.

If man was to truly have free will and choose between right and wrong, then there had to be something “wrong” that he could choose to do. Thus God placed man in a perfect environment with a full range of resources by which he could live and be satisfied, but God needed to make it possible to choose between right and wrong, so He gave man instruction that there was one tree from which man was not allowed to eat.

It’s true that God could have prevented sin, but that would have meant stripping His creation of its free will.

Thus it is that sin began with a creature, previously perfect, created in the image of God, who misused the free will given him by God. He chose not to worship and serve God, but to rebel against Him.

Should God have removed the choice? If a parent tells a child to eat his vegies, the child has 2 choices – obey or disobey and if the child chooses not to eat those vegies, he has rebelled. So, would it be better if the parent simply didn’t serve vegetables? No, vegies are good for the child AND the child needs to learn obedience as a life skill. The parent is not responsible for the child’s sin, nor does the parent cause the child to sin. The child had a choice to obey or not to obey – it is an exercise of free will. For free will to be real, there had to be choice – in the case of Adam, that choice came in the form of a fruit tree – if it hadn’t been the tree, it would have had to be something else in order for free will to be exercised and tested.