Genesis 2:16-17. 16And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
You may not realize it, but you are growing up in a world where freedom is a pretty big deal. The world around us is telling us that we all need to be free to do whatever we want to do. Think about some of you favorite Disney characters:
The Little Mermaid, Ariel, needed to be free to leave the ocean and become a human because that’s what made her happy.
Moana needed to be free to sail away from her little island and find adventure.
Or what about Merida, Rapunzel, Mowgli, Tiana, and Bongo the Bear (that one’s for you parents)? Each had to break free from the constraints placed on them by parents, society, or the situation.
Freedom, of course, is not a bad thing. God made us to be free. Like we said on Day 18, we were made with the ability to make choices using our free will. And that’s a good thing. But the freedom God gives us is always limited. Think about today’s verse. Adam and Eve are free to eat of every tree of the garden. But they are also limited by one rule – but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat.
What exactly was this “Tree of Knowledge?” Well, we won’t worry about that today. We’ll save that for another day. The big question we want to ask today is, “Was God taking away the freedom of Adam and Eve when he forbid them from eating from the Tree of Knowledge?” Was he preventing their happiness like an angry King Triton “prevented” the happiness of Ariel?
The answer is NO! God is never preventing our happiness. In fact, when God gives us rules and limitations he is actually trying to make us more happy. More free. But how can rules and limitations make us more free? Doesn’t freedom come when there are no more rules?
That is what the world would tell you, but it is not what God’s word will tell you. Think about a fish in a fish bowl. What if you freed that fish from the limitations of the bowl and of having to live in water? Would you make it happy? No, you would make it dead. In the same way, when we live within the limits of God’s commands, his fish bowl, we find the freedom to thrive and to truly be what we were made to be. What were we made to be? Well, we were not made to be in charge of our own lives. We were made to be God’s servants and to worship him by loving and obeying him.
You see, if we were actually free to do anything we want, then we would NOT be free to obey. Free to love. Free to choose God over ourselves.
Adam and Eve will choose to disobey God. And do you think that they gained more freedom? No, they lost their freedom. They became enslaved to sin and selfishness. And they passed that selfishness all the way down to you and me. We are all born controlled by sin’s desire to be our own boss. Sadly, what the world calls freedom is actually the bondage to sin and death that God tried to prevent by his command.
But praise God, Jesus has come to set us free from the power and penalty of our sin. When we trust in him, we gain the freedom that comes from being tied to him and his love. Jesus gives us a new heart that both will obey him and wants to obey him so that now our slavery to Jesus is the greatest freedom ever.
Questions: Do you ever wish you had more freedom? How did Jesus set us free from our sin and selfishness? How does being tied to Jesus actually make us more free to be what God wants us to be?
TLICfamily 