God commanded us to never eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, because He knew it would separate us from Him. It would cause us to seek our own understanding of life, to run after what we want and not rely on the Lord or follow His instruction. However, we ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Eating from that tree created our ability to question. Think into that ability. When we ate from that tree, we gained the ability to question God. The ability, not the authority. We physically could, but by no means did we or do we have a right to question Him.
That tree distanced us so much. With our walk in Christ, what distances us is the obvious answer, which is sin, but the more complex answer lies in the fact that we want to sin. We believe it's better than God. We take our own understanding, given by that fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. We took our own understanding and placed it higher than God's. The Lord knew that would happen.
Some will ask, "Why would the Lord put that tree there in the first place?" I believe He did so we could still have the option not to do it. The Lord doesn't shelter us from anything. He wants us to learn things for ourselves. The fact that the tree was even in the garden shows that God wanted to give us the opportunity for Him to trust us and that we would be obedient to Him. The one command He gave at the time. It was a test of human obedience and we failed miserably.
The Lord intervened after that. He knew that the next tree we would eat from would be the tree of life. Once the Lord cursed us with dying, logically, our next objective would be to eat of the tree of life so we could prevent our deaths.
The Lord knew this and He cast us from the garden. Then not only did He cast us out, He put a giant flaming sword in front of the entrance to the Garden of Eden to block it. Then not only did He put a giant flaming sword there, He had a cherubim guard the sword. For those who don't know what a cherubim is, it's a four-faced creature with one face being a man, another an ox, an eagle and a lion. It has four wings and the legs of a goat. Under the wings it has human hands. This creature is something that would terrify us if we saw it, and God placed it to guard the entrance to the garden.
Why? Why go to such extreme lengths? I mean, Him casting us out could have been enough. The sword alone could have been enough. Even the cherubim alone could have been enough, but He used all three. Why?
The answer I see is because He loves us. It was a punishment, yes, but the truth is, He didn't want us to eat from the tree of life next. The reason is because we would not die.
This sounds like a punishment, but it isn't. For the Christian, death is the full release from sin's hold on us, because when we die we go to be with God. I believe the reason God made it imperative to keep us away from the tree of life is because He loves us. If our physical bodies could never die, we would be sinful creatures forever.
Sin tainted us and now it always haunts us in this world. If we lived forever here, we would never escape it. Sin would always be with us and inside us. By allowing us to die and preventing our access to immortality, God saved our lives. Jesus came and paid the price for our sins so that when we die, we go to heaven.
Without our ability to die, Jesus would have come into this world knowing that we would never be free of sin for all eternity. But instead, because of God giving us death, He could free us from sin through this ability to die.
Jesus died on the cross. If we lived forever, then Jesus never could have died on the cross. Think how monumental that reality is. If God never prevented our access to the tree of life, there would be no reason for a savior, because we would never be free of our sins.
Jesus saved us from our sins, but the Father saved us from ourselves. The Lord loves us so much that when we committed rebellion against Him, He immediately saved us from our own destruction.
The life we live may be hard, but we have salvation through Jesus Christ who will take us to a world that sin will never corrupt. The next time you read about the fall, realize that although we were punished, the Father loved us and saved us from ourselves.
