but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it; for in the day that thou eatest of it thou shalt certainly die.
God gave man a garden full of food, fenced off one tree with a word, and attached a penalty to it. Sin, death, and the need for a Saviour all turn on how man treated that one sentence.
One command in a world of abundance
God was not withholding pleasure. He set one limit inside an abundance He had already given.
The forbidden tree took nothing from Adam. It denied him no pleasure or taste, for the Lord God had set in the garden every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. It did carry fruit. But God restricted eating it for one reason only: to remind His wonderful creature that he held everything in trust under his Maker. Beneath man was everything in this lower creation. Above him, God. The one simple safeguard for keeping his position was obedience. And obedience, not to a complicated code of laws, but to one simple command.
The command settled a question that had nothing to do with the fruit itself.
The actual test was the prohibition of something that was not in itself evil, but simply and by decree wrong for man because God had forbidden it. That is the very essence of a test for an innocent man... It was the simple question of whether God was really Jehovah-Elohim, whether He was a moral governor or not, whether man was to be independent of God or not. This was not decided by some great matter whose results man could reason out and foresee. It was decided simply by doing or not doing the will of God.
The prohibition was kindness
God knew what that knowledge would do to man.
God had given every tree of the garden for food except one single tree. This prohibition was a test of the creature's obedience to the Creator. The Creator also knew what would follow if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It would ruin man's innocence. It would poison his whole being by bringing in the knowledge of evil, with no power to resist it. Therefore His prohibition was merciful.
Obedience would have left him knowing good only; disobedience gave him knowledge without the strength to act on it.
Knowledge was acquired, but no wisdom, and man's knowledge ever since has been his ruin — knowledge of good, but no power to practise it; knowledge of evil and no power to resist it.
A threat of death, not an offer of life
Notice what God does not say. He promises no reward for obeying — the sentence carries only a warning.
Adam already had life. God tested him by a direct, well-known command: do not eat the forbidden fruit. What made this test perfect was that it raised no moral question in itself... What I insist on is this. There was no promise of life, which would suppose he did not have it. There was a threat of death, which supposed he was alive — alive and innocent, with no knowledge of good and evil.
The garden held two trees, and we must never confuse them.
The tree of life was distinct from that of knowing good and evil. The test of responsible obedience was one thing, the means of life quite another. When man disobeyed by eating from the one tree, God drove him out, in case he should also take from the other and make his fallen sinful state everlasting.
What "you shall surely die" means
How was this sentence carried out? Commentators differ. Some read the death as separation from God, beginning the same day:
Here the Lord attaches to the first act of evil nothing less than complete separation from Himself; for He is the living God... and therefore a state of death was a state of separation from Him. He announces this state as the certain and immediate doom of the creature the moment he commits evil.
Others insist the sentence meant the death of the body, not the moral ruin sin caused:
Spiritual death, or "death in trespasses and sins," cannot be what God speaks of in His warning to Adam. That is indeed the spiritual state that results from the fall. But the moral state of a criminal is very different from the judgment passed on the criminal. Man's depravity is what he is condemned for, not what he is sentenced to.
The first denial of God's word
The first lie in history struck straight at this verse.
The first form of unbelief was the denial of God's word... God said, "in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die." The serpent said, "You shall not surely die." Eve did not believe God's word, and so she became the unbeliever.
Where the sentence was answered
The threat was never withdrawn — it was carried out on Another.
The Lord had said, "you shall surely die." Christ came as the great witness to His people that "the wages of sin is death." In His case it was by imputation only, for He was perfectly and entirely holy. But He took our sins; He bore our iniquities. He was willing to be looked on as the guilty one, and to bear the penalty God had attached to sin — "you shall surely die" — to uphold the truth of God.
Summary
- Trust — God withheld one tree in a garden full of gifts. That kept obedience simple and left His authority as the only question.
- Test — the fruit was not evil in itself. That is what fits a test for an innocent man, who already had life and was warned, not offered a reward.
- Truth — "you shall surely die" was God's word. The serpent contradicted it, and man believed the contradiction.
- Toll — death followed. Some writers read it as immediate separation from God, others as the sentence of bodily death.
- Triumph — the penalty stood until Christ, holy Himself, bore it, and so upheld the truth of God.