The Lord planted a garden, and put the first man and woman there with one prohibition regarding one tree. But why did God forbid eating this one tree? John Piper explains:
So what was God saying in prohibiting the eating of one tree out of a million trees? He was saying, “I have given you life. I have given you a world full of pleasure, pleasures of taste and sight and sound and smell and feel and nourishment. Only one tree is forbidden to you. And the point of that prohibition is to preserve the pleasures of the world, because if you eat of that one you will be saying to me, ‘I’m smarter than you. I am more authoritative that you. I am wiser than you are. I think I can care for myself better than you care for me. You are not a very good Father. And so I am going to reject you.’ So don’t eat from the tree, because you will be rejecting me and all my good gifts and all my wisdom and all my care. Instead, keep on submitting to my will. Keep on affirming my wisdom. Keep on being thankful for my generosity. Keep on trusting me as a Father and keep on eating these trees as a way of enjoying me. There are 10,000 trees, every imaginable fruit. Just go eat. Be thankful. I have given them to you and see them as expressions of my goodness and savor them that way.”
And Satan comes along, and he takes that arrangement and says, “Hey, Eve, the meaning of that arrangement is: God is selfish. God is stingy. He is a skinflint.” So he took the prohibition of one suicidal tree and treated it as a prohibition of everything.
So the issue of the tree is this: Will we keep looking to God as the giver and lover and treasure of this garden so that all our eating is thanking and all our savoring is a savoring of God? Will we keep on experiencing every one of these tastes as a tasting of something like what God is, and in that sense a tasting of God? Will we keep on enjoying God in the enjoying of the trees?
That is what the forbidden tree was there to test.
I think a lot of people try to set that up as merely arbitrary: Will man obey? Or will he not obey? And they don’t put it in the context of his fatherly care and all the goods that he has given. I don’t think it is arbitrary like that.
It was a warning. “If you choose independence instead of God-dependence, you will lose the pleasure of the garden and God with it.”
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Sadly, what Adam & Eve choose in the garden is the same thing that man would choose if given the option to choose today. Which is to say we would choose to live our way instead of God’s way.