What Was God Thinking?

Several people were sitting around a table at Jon's Main Street Diner talking about their faith. One says to the others, "The issue is obedience. God told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit of one tree and they couldn't even obey that simple command. It's about OBEDIENCE, plain and simple." The others nodded in agreement; but is it really that simple?

I don't know about you, but I think the top three questions I might have for God when I get a chance to ask Him about this grand experiment called Creation would be:

1. Why did you create that tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil; or why didn't you plant it on the opposite side of the globe rather than right there in the Garden?
2. If you wanted that tree there, why didn't you do more than simply tell them they would die if they ate it's fruit? Why didn't you tell them that it would destroy their trust in you; that it would destroy their relationship with one another; that disobedience would result in so much pain and that their descendants would hate them for messing up what would have been a perfect world?
3. (And this is one that, even if God chose to answer, it would make no sense to us and would simply have to be one of those only He will understand.) Was it worth it? Was Adam and Eve's disobedience worth the millions, even the billions, of lost souls condemned for an eternity in Hell?

Your burning questions may differ from mine. I'm no biblical scholar - don't want to be one. I'm sort of a jack of a handful of trades - master of none. But I do wonder what the world and what my life would have been like had Adam and Eve not screwed up.

While I have no satisfactory answer to the last question, I can kinda wrap my mind about a possible scenario that helps to understand the first two questions. Why was that tree in the Garden to start with? The answer raises another question: Was obedience God's ultimate desire from humans? I think there is abundant evidence in scripture where his motivation wasn't our obedience but our affection and our trust - which sort of answers part of question #2.

If God's primary purpose for the tree had been to command our obedience, He must have known up front that fear of the consequences of disobedience (or fear of the Lord) wasn't going to be enough to stop Adam and Eve from taking that first bite. True, neither Adam or Eve had ever learned about fear or death so it was probably an abstract notion to them; but notice how Lucifer uses the truth to deceive them. He told Eve that they would not surely die (the lie), but that they would be like God and know good and evil (the truth). They had had only good experiences with God and it was not wrong to want to be like God, there's no sin in that. But what Lucifer succeeded in doing was to plant a seed of doubt about whether they could really trust God or was He keeping something from them so that He could always be greater than they? At that point, Adam and Eve decided to eat for their own benefit; and as a result, they did know good and evil - that they had been deceived and that God had been right telling them not to eat that fruit.

That leads into the second question: Why didn't God tell them why it would kill them and what the consequences were for the billions of their descendants? Perhaps the answer here is that God wanted their trust so much that He allowed them to betray His trust in order to gain it back. More than that, God wanted their love, not just their obedience. Love and trust - those were God's motivations for creating Adam and Eve. Perhaps only by knowing evil would humans really know goodness. Only by doing it our way could we truly learn to trust God's way.

At first blush, we'd have to say that mankind failed the experiment, if that's all this life is. As far as the third question - was it worth all those souls in Hell because He chose to create that tree?...it's hard for us to reconcile the depth of love God has for every person and His desire that all be saved for a relationship with Him, with the unfathomable consequences of Satan's deceit of mankind. Do I care if Satan burns in a hotter corner of Hell than someone who never got the chance to even hear about Jesus Christ? No - for that soul is someone God loved just as surely as He loves me, or He loved David, or Abraham, or even His only Son.

I think of my older brother who passed away a couple of years ago. He knew about God, but I don't know that he knew Him enough to have a saving relationship with Him. Because I love my brother, despite all his flaws - and they were many, I don't want to think of him being tortured where Satan and truly evil people are. I don't know that Roger is separated from God for all eternity because I never truly knew his heart. But I do trust the heart of my Creator who wants me to call Him Father, who's Son wants me to consider Him as my brother, who's Spirit was given to me freely when I simply asked for Him to come live inside me and to help me learn to love and trust God more and more.

I am no better than my brother, no more deserving of salvation - but I have to believe that it was not simply a matter of fate that I chose to accept God's free gift rather than going with my own plan for my life.

I still struggle with the notion that some choose to turn down His offer of an eternal relationship; and that many more never had the chance to even learn about Jesus Christ and, as we're taught in church, now are eternally separated in a place of hopelessness and despair. Yet I go back to what I do know - that God loves me enough to come to earth to show me the way back to Him. He's met every need I've ever had; He's carried me through life's interruptions when my own strength wouldn't suffice; He's been gentle in His corrections; and He's given me so much more than I could imagine attaining on my own. Little by little I'm learning to trust Him, and as I trust Him I come to love Him more. You can't betray the love of someone you really trust; you can mess up, but you keep coming back because you know they love you and that they will forgive you and welcome you back; and there's no place you'd rather be. What was God thinking? He was thinking of me, and of you, and all who would come to love Him, because He is Love.