Why Did God Put the Stupid Tree in the Garden of Eden?

The Biblical creation story concerning Adam and Eve was on high rotation in my Sunday School curriculum when I was growing up. It felt like we covered it every year — maybe even more — just to make sure that we kids, from our earliest days, were deeply ingrained with the Christian explanation of the origins of the world and, more importantly, why we were all such wicked sinners.

I can still picture the story being told by Mrs. Spencer, my well-meaning and ancient Sunday School teacher, as she slapped felt animals on a flannelgraph set on an easel while we all sat cross-legged on the floor.

God makes the world. Adam and Eve are the crowning glory of his creation. And everything is good. God sets Adam and Eve loose in a paradise called the Garden of Eden and tells them to live long and prosper. There is only one caveat to their idyllic existence. Right in the middle of the garden, God places a tree and tells Adam and Eve not to touch it… or else! We hear about this particular tree in Genesis 2:15–17:

What could possibly go wrong?

Let me ask you a question. When you hear a story in which the protagonists are told not to do something or touch something, what do you suppose will happen?

Exactly.

They are going to do the one thing they aren’t supposed to do.

Was God surprised?

If you’re not surprised by the outcome of this story, and you most certainly are not an omniscient being, then you can bet your bottom dollar that God was not surprised either.

I mean, can you imagine an all-knowing God saying, “Whoops! I didn’t see that coming! Perhaps I shouldn’t have put that darned tree there. My bad!?”

Of course he wasn’t surprised! But that begs the question, doesn’t it: If God knew what was going to happen — that Adam and Eve would eat the forbidden fruit, and in so doing would usher in all kinds of horrible consequences for humankind — then why did God put the stupid tree in the Garden of Eden in the first place?

I asked Mrs. Spencer this in Sunday School, and I was sent to the ‘naughty corner.’

Was the tree a test?

As an adult, I was still asking this same question, only now I would direct it at the good Christian kids who had grown up in the church and never, ever stopped to consider the irony of God’s commandment not to eat the fruit of a tree that he himself had planted in the middle of the garden.

I mean, instead of issuing a commandment to not eat of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, perhaps God should not have created such a tree in the first place — if he were really that concerned that his people would transgress.

Believe it or not, when I ask other Christians why God made the tree in the first place, the most common answer is this: It was a test. God put it there to test us. He wanted to see what we were made of. He wanted to find out if we would be obedient, compliant, and cooperative.

This answer says an awful lot about how people view God.

It says that God is the one who tempts us to sin, knowing that we likely will and that as a result, the whole of his creation would suffer for it. It really makes God into a sadist who, strangely, takes pleasure in the potential to cause us pain. And ultimately, this view places the blame for all the death, pain, and suffering in the world squarely on the shoulders of one person — God himself.

It’s all his fault.

He shouldn’t have planted the stupid tree.

Photo by Einar Storsul on Unsplash

The one thing God can’t do

My entire life, I have been told that God can do anything. But that’s entirely untrue. There is certainly one thing that he cannot do. If God is perfect, then he cannot, NOT be true to his own nature. He cannot be something he is not. Or, to say it another way: He must always be true to himself.

And what do we know about the nature of God? Well, the prevailing descriptor of God’s nature in Scripture is the word “loving.” In fact, the Bible goes further, saying outright: God is Love. In other words, He is the complete personification of love. If you choose to believe this — as I do — then that means anything he does cannot be at odds with his nature.

Therefore, placing the tree in the Garden of Eden had to have somehow been an outworking of God’s love. To place it there as a temptation — especially knowing that people would succumb to its allure — certainly isn’t a loving action on God’s part, so there must have been another reason.

So what’s, was the reason?

I don’t pretend to know the mind of God, but I do know a few things about love. I know that love — real love — cannot be forced or coerced out of another. I have never met a person who expressed their love for another person by pointing a gun at them and saying, “You will love me back, or I will shoot you!” Sure, the person on the receiving end may say, “I love you,” to avoid being shot, but there is absolutely no way that those words would align with the true position of their heart.

The one thing that is required for love to truly be love is the ability to choose it. Therefore, if God is truly loving, then being true to his own nature, he had no choice but to give human beings the ability to decide for themselves. Anyone who has ever pursued love from anyone knows and understands the reality of rejection. That’s the risk of love.

I wonder, have you ever considered the risk that God took by creating humankind as autonomous beings and giving them the ability and freedom to choose? Yet, if God doesn’t give us free will, then we are nothing more than robots — slaves to the bidding of an all-powerful being. Instead, he creates people he hopes will choose to love him out of their own free will, not because they were programmed to behave that way.

Still, this raises an important question. What good is the ability to choose if there is nothing to choose from? If a person is told that they may walk any road they like, but there is only one road, their ability to choose is meaningless. For free will to truly exist, there must be more than one road.

Enter the Tree.

By placing the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the middle of the Garden of Eden and commanding humankind NOT to eat its fruit, God was offering people two roads. The Tree in the Garden was not some kind of cruel test that God knew we would fail. No! It is the symbol of human free will.

A beautiful story

I find it quite a beautiful thing that right in the middle of God’s creation, he places the ability for people to make their own choices. With a blank canvas in front of him, he painted free will in the center of his divine picture for the universe.

But, of course, this creates a dilemma for God.

Let me explain. One of my favorite movies of all time is the Jim Carrey flick, Bruce Almighty. The story revolves around an ordinary guy named Bruce who, upset with his lot in life after breaking up with his girlfriend, unleashes an abusive tirade in God’s general direction where he basically tells God what a lousy job he is doing at being God. God, played by Morgan Freeman, ends up gifting Bruce all of his powers with the challenge, “You think you can do a better job, go ahead.”

But there are a few rules that Bruce has to follow. One of them is that he is not allowed to mess with people’s free will. Bruce ends up using his God-powers mainly for selfish gain sake, gathering promotions and possessions and doing everything he can to get his girlfriend back. But, try as he might, he can’t seem to win her love.

In a poignant scene at the end of the movie, Bruce concedes to God, “How to get someone to love you without messing with their free will?”

To which God says, “Welcome to my world, sonny!”

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

A broken romance

Now here’s what I find the real kicker. If God knew that people would choose the path of rejection even before he placed the tree in the garden, then he also knew the price he would have to pay to restore that fractured relationship — before he even made the world. Let that sink in.

Yet, he still went ahead and made it all!

Why?

John 15:13 says, “The greatest love people can show is to die for their friends.” Therefore, God knew that our great rejection of him in Genesis was the gift he needed to show us the greatest love possible. Yes, he resolved to die before we had ever lived. All for love!

Call me a fanciful romantic, if you will, but I chose to believe this cosmic love story. Nothing gives me greater hope!

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This post was previously published on Backyard Church.

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