Genesis 3:1-5. 1[The serpent] said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” 2And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” 4But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Admittedly, the Tree of Knowledge can add quite the confusion to the Genesis story. Clearly it is not knowledge itself that God is withholding from his image bearers. To be made in the image and likeness of God is to be rational. To use logic, knowledge, thought, and truth in order to interact with the realities that God has made. Before God formed man from the dust, he had formed the thought of man in his mind, his imagination. And we have this same capability to form rational thoughts from images and then carry them out in logical ways. Such rationality is part of what it means to be made in the image of God.
OK, so God was not withholding knowledge in general from us, but was he withholding only the specific knowledge of good and evil? Once again, it seems unlikely that Adam and Eve had no knowledge of what was good and what was evil before they ate from the Tree of Knowledge. In fact, as Genesis 3:1-5 reveals, Eve (and Adam who was with her) clearly knows the command of God forbidding them from eating from this one tree. She can state the rule and its consequences. They both also know who is in charge – God. It is pretty obvious that they already know what good and evil are, at least empirically.
What the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil might mean to show us is that there was still a level of knowledge that Adam and Eve lacked as it concerns good and evil. That is an experiential knowledge. The knowledge that comes from discovering something for yourself.
If you have never ridden a bicycle can you know how to ride a bicycle? Well, you could probably understand the mechanics, the physics, and even the motions of riding a bike, but you don’t really know how to ride a bike until you try to ride a bike, fail, fall, get back on and discover how to ride it through experience.
We might say that all real knowledge is this kind of experiential knowledge. What the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil offered was knowledge through experience. Their relationship to the Tree of Knowledge itself, eating from the Tree (or not eating from the Tree), did not add facts to their knowledge; they already had all the facts. But it would add another dimension to their rationality – participation.
Don’t eat from the Tree of Knowledge = participate in the good = gain knowledge of good and evil. Eat from the Tree of Knowledge = participate in evil = gain knowledge of good and evil.
We are participatory beings. We were never meant to float above our world detached; we were meant to live within it, attached to it. God has attached himself to this world and to us, participating in time ad space from the beginning. Ultimately he chose to know us experientially by becoming one of us – Jesus Christ, the God-Man. God participated with us in our living and dying. Suffering and temptation. Gaining and losing. He took on flesh that he might be our great High Priest that knows what we are going through in the daily grind, sympathizing with us as our Brother.
In Christ we in turn participate in the life of God. We know God, not just through facts, but by experiencing him in our very being. The first Adam will choose knowledge through detachment, but the Second Adam (Jesus) will choose to attach his life ours and ours to his, making faith in him the most rational things we could ever do.
Questions: In what ways are you trying to live life alone? How does your relationship with Jesus allow you to embrace deeper relationships with others?
To Live is Christ 