“You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
Genesis 2:16b–17
The true and living God delights in blessing and rewarding His people. He gives rewards on the basis of His love, mercy, and grace. No rewards come to mankind because they are deserved. The only thing that we all deserve is judgment, punishment, death, and hell! But because of His sovereign, unmerited grace, God redeems us, reconciles us, restores us, and rewards us—all for His own honor and glory. All rewards and crowns are awarded on the basis of who He is and not on the merits of who we are.
Because of this fact, our all-powerful, all-loving, and all-wise heavenly Father created each of us with an internal spiritual and emotional response mechanism for rewards and punishments. He has written this positive/negative dynamic into His universe. More importantly, He has indelibly inscribed it on the tablets of our hearts. This internal moral compass is what the Bible calls conscience.
Even a cursory investigation of the world around us proves that there is an obvious good/bad tension written into the universe. In a sense, they are opposite sides of the same moral coin. Those in the Eastern world call this tension the yin and yang. But in their minds, the difference between the two is only illusion. They believe that things like good and evil or light and darkness are all a matter of our limited perspective. What is “good” to one may be “bad” to another, and vice versa. It is only our limited perspective that causes us to call one thing “good” and another thing “bad.”
However, from the biblical perspective, there is no illusion at all between these moral opposites! Right and wrong are not the same. Holy and unholy are not a matter of perspective. Good and evil are not interchangeable. Light and dark are not synonymous. Morality and immorality are not relative. Freedom and bondage are not equal. Life and death are two very opposite experiences. Obedience and disobedience lead to very different results. One leads to rewards and the other to retribution! One ends in eternal life, or heaven, while the other ends in eternal death, or hell.
The very first human experiment in this took place in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2. In that place of absolute perfection, God promised Adam and Eve fellowship or alienation, oneness or aloneness, pleasure or pain, abundance or adversity, beauty or brokenness, liberty or bondage, and life or death. And He gave each of them a will that had the freedom to choose.
We all know the rest of the story! Eve listened to the serpent rather than to God. Adam listened to Eve’s advice rather than to God’s command. They both blamed God and each other for their own disobedience and were banished from the Garden. Their first son, Cain, created the first religion of good works by substituting his own sacrifice for God’s prescribed one through blood. In anger he murdered his brother, Abel. Lamech, one of Cain’s descendants, became the first polygamist—and the beat goes on until this very day!
It is my closing prayer that we will have a teachable spirit, that we would be wise and choose life, so that we may receive His rewards and escape His retribution. How could we do anything but love and live for a God who delights in rewarding His people!