Reading: Genesis 3:22

At the start, Satan tempted Adam with the prospect of being “like God” in independence and self-sufficiency. Adam yielded to the temptation and discovered that it made him an enemy of his creator and that he was still not independent. Adam also discovered that the promised knowledge of good and evil was not what he had expected; he now knew sin by bitter experience and was locked in it by the chains of depravity. Furthermore, his knowledge of good was a torture to him, as something unattainable.

Now God looks at Adam in the garden and He makes the statement “

[the] man is become as one of us, to know good and evil.” Notice that this statement was made, not immediately after the fall, but immediately after redemption from the fall. Adam’s likeness to God is a result of redemption, not transgression. Adam’s knowledge of good and evil now, though threatened by human imperfection, is renewed “after the image of him that created him” (Colossians 3:10).

Redemption applied has given me a knowledge of good and evil that I had not before; I know sin, not only by bitter experience, but as something that has been subdued by grace and that will be defeated when that last great enemy is faced and I enter victorious into my glorified body. I know good, not as something illusive or unattainable, but as something given me by Christ and developed in my life by His grace.

Consider the richness of redemption in Christ. I was born a child of Satan, alienated from God and rebellious towards Him. I am now a new creature (2 Corinthians 5:17) in Christ and a partaker of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). “As he is, so [am I] in this world” (1 John 4:17). Lord, help me to be more and more like You, to develop your character and transform my mind more and more to resemble yours.

“By transgression made like the Devil … by redemption become like God” Donald MacDonald (Doctrine of Creation and the Fall, p.469) 

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