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A Chance to Choose, January 7
Genesis 2:16-17
But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it:
for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Genesis 2:17
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Our first parents, though created innocent and holy, were not placed beyond
the possibility of wrongdoing.... They were to enjoy communion with God and
with holy angels; but before they could be rendered eternally secure, their loyalty
must be tested. At the very beginning of man’s existence a check was placed
upon the desire for self-indulgence, the fatal passion that lay at the foundation
of Satan’s fall. The tree of knowledge, which stood near the tree of life in the
midst of the garden, was to be a test of the obedience, faith, and love of our first
parents. While permitted to eat freely of every other tree, they were forbidden to
taste of this, on pain of death. They were also to be exposed to the temptations
of Satan; but if they endured the trial, they would finally be placed beyond his
power, to enjoy perpetual favor with God....
God might have created man without the power to transgress His law; He
might have withheld the hand of Adam from touching the forbidden fruit; but in
that case man would have been, not a free moral agent, but a mere automaton.
Without freedom of choice, his obedience would not have been voluntary, but
forced. There could have been no development of character.... It would have
been unworthy of man as an intelligent being, and would have sustained Satan’s
charge of God’s arbitrary rule.
God made man upright; He gave him noble traits of character, with no bias
toward evil. He endowed him with high intellectual powers, and presented before
him the strongest possible inducements to be true to his allegiance. Obedience,
perfect and perpetual, was the condition of eternal happiness. On this condition
he was to have access to the tree of life....
So long as they remained loyal to the divine law, their capacity to know,
to enjoy, and to love would continually increase. They would be constantly
gaining new treasures of knowledge, discovering fresh springs of happiness, and
obtaining clearer and yet clearer conceptions of the immeasurable, unfailing love
of God
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Patriarchs and Prophets, 48-51
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