By Homer Slack
Think!
Questions
In Genesis
That Will
Make You Think
How did the tree of good and
evil get into the middle of the
garden?
T
The tree from which God told Adam not
to eat was in the middle of the garden.
You could not miss it. But if eating of
this tree meant sure death wouldn’t
it be best to remove it? No tree, no
temptation, simple! Whoever planted
this tree and in such a precarious
position must have known that it could
be a temptation to Adam and Eve. So
who planted the tree? God did, so there
must be a very important lesson to learn
as God does everything deliberately.
God did not want man to sin but man
himself needed to develop a distaste for
sin. Moving the danger away from us
would remove the opportunity but not
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the desire. Even Jesus learnt obedience
through the things He suffered, we too
must face the realities of temptations
and learn to overcome them.
What killed Adam and Eve?
Was the fruit poisonous?
Hearing this story as a child the
immediate thought that came into my
mind was that the fruit was poisonous.
A closer look however, will reveal that
nothing was wrong with the fruit. It was
as Eve observed, “... the woman saw that
the tree was good for food…” The devil
highlighted the fact that nothing was
wrong with the tree. Yes, nothing was
wrong with it. It’s like sex, the experience
of sex in or out of marriage is virtually
the same, but there is a difference that
being, God commanded that we should
January - March 2016
not have it outside of marriage and
He knows best why we shouldn’t. God
designed sex as more than a means of
physical reproduction; it is firstly an
act of spiritual worship where the Holy
covenant of marriage between husband
and wife is consummated. Fornication is
wrong simply because God says so! It is
clear therefore that it was disobedience
to God that killed Adam and Eve and
not the fruit. If at some later point God
gave them permission to eat of the tree
of the knowledge of good and evil then,
at that point, it would be perfectly okay.
Sin kills because sin is disobedience to
God,which breaks our union with God
and this separation is spiritual death,
God’s eternal life is no longer in us we
immediately begin to degenerate.