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.”
Genesis 3 tells the story of how the first man and woman sinned against God. Do you remember what their sin was? God had told them that they must not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. If they do, they will die. But the deceiving serpent gets Eve and then Adam to doubt what God said – the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
It can seem really strange to think that God didn’t want Adam and Eve to know good and evil. I’m sure your parents want you to know the difference between good and evil. I know your teachers and pastors do too. You’ve probably been told to “be good.” How could you be good if you don’t know what good is?
God made all of us to be able to know things. We call this rationality. To be rational is to be able to think, understand, and make choices based on what is actually real. Adam and Eve were created with this rationality. Even before eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, they understood and knew what good and evil were. How do we know? Well, look at how Eve talks to the serpent in Genesis 3. She can quote God’s command to not eat from the tree. She understands the consequence for eating. So far she and Adam have been obeying the rule because they understand that to eat from the tree would be wrong (evil). They clearly know that God is in charge and that they are supposed to obey him (good).
There are two ways to know things. You can know the facts about something without experiencing it, and you can know things by experiencing them. Do you know how to ride a bike? I guessing that when you learned how to ride a bike it wasn’t because someone taught you facts about bicycles. Mom and dad probably didn’t explain the mechanics of the bike or the science behind balance. You know how to ride a bike because you were put on a bike and told to pedal it until you fell over. Think about all the things you know about because you do them, not just because you heard or read about them.
We can know what good is because God tells us and we can read it in the Bible. But we really know what good is when we do it. We can know what evil is because God tells us and we can read about it in the Bible. But we really know what evil is when we do it. Every day that Adam and Eve did not eat from the forbidden tree, they understood good more and more. But as soon as they would eat from the tree, they would know evil. And that’s what they did – they ate.
Because of Adam and Eve’s sin we are all born as sinners. We don’t just know about good and evil; we know them because we do them. We do good as God’s image bearers and we do evil as sinners. We use our God given rationality to do good, and we use our sinful rationality to do bad.
The good news is that with Jesus we can know how to stop doing evil and start doing good – by faith in him. When we trust Jesus, we are able to trust that he is perfect goodness living in us. And his goodness is changing how we think and how we understand things as we experience his love in our lives.
I hope and pray that you don’t just know about Jesus, but that you are experiencing him in your life – his love for you, his forgiveness, his kindness, and his grace.
Questions: Would you say that you only know about Jesus or that you also know Jesus through experience? Do you know that Jesus loves you? How do you know?
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