Reading: “For God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” Genesis 3:5
When Satan came into the garden he was not selling black market fruit to expand or improve the woman’s diet. Satan came to peddle a forbidden knowledge, and Adam and his wife would have to rebel against God to get it. The woman identified the tree by its location; the one “in the midst of the Garden” (3:5). God had identified it by its name, the “tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil” (2:17). Satan, however, avoids both the name and the location and picks up on the effects of eating of the tree; “you will know good and evil” (3:5). This is Satan’s angle; a forbidden knowledge.
In rebellion against the Divine Law-giver and Judge, this knowledge would make man, himself, the law-giver and judge. Man would become a law unto himself and he would be able to judge between good and evil. This was too big of a temptation; independent self-governance was an attractive proposition. But this “knowledge of good and evil,” was like an infant with the weight of adult responsibilities.
In rebelling, Adam and his wife usurped divine authority and were crushed under it’s weight. They found that the knowledge of evil up close and personal was too much; the law, written on their hearts, only condemned them and they “knew that they were naked” (3:7; Romans 2:15). Their judgement also was depraved. They could only choose evil and so they tried to self-help and made aprons of fig leaves (3:7). They were trapped; condemned by the law and incapable of correcting it! If they were to find a way out from under the weight of divine authority it must be by the mercy of God alone.