Why Did God Forbid One Tree in Eden?
00:00:00.000 | Recently you were in town for the National Conference, Pastor John, and
00:00:08.220 | while you were here you mentioned to some of us your thoughts on why you
00:00:11.880 | think God banned Adam and Eve from eating from one tree. Explain this for us
00:00:17.000 | here now on the Ask Pastor John podcast. What theological significance do
00:00:22.120 | you draw from the prohibition in the Garden of Eden?
00:00:25.280 | Well I remember standing last week, Tony, in your office and saying the tree is a
00:00:34.240 | way of securing that the pleasures of all the other trees in the garden are
00:00:40.280 | supremely pleasures in God. The function of the tree of the knowledge of good and
00:00:45.840 | evil is to make sure that the pleasures of all the other trees in the garden
00:00:52.920 | that those pleasures are supremely pleasures in God. So let me try to
00:00:59.000 | unpack that and explain how that is. The command not to eat went like this, "You
00:01:05.440 | may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but the tree of the knowledge of
00:01:09.120 | good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall
00:01:12.840 | surely die." So what was God saying in prohibiting the eating of one tree out
00:01:19.680 | of a million trees? He was saying, "I've given you life, I've given you a world
00:01:25.560 | full of pleasure, pleasures of taste and sight and sound and smell and feel and
00:01:30.600 | nourishment. Only one tree is forbidden to you." And the point of that prohibition
00:01:35.720 | is to preserve the pleasures of the world. Because if you eat of that one,
00:01:42.760 | you'll be saying to me, "I'm smarter than you are, I'm more authoritative than you
00:01:47.700 | are, I'm wiser than you are, I think I can care for myself better than you care for
00:01:53.700 | me, you're not a very good father and so I'm going to reject you." And that's what
00:01:59.400 | you'll be saying. So don't eat from the tree because you'll be rejecting me and
00:02:04.120 | all my good gifts and all my wisdom and all my care. Instead keep on
00:02:08.720 | submitting to my will, keep on affirming my wisdom, keep on being thankful for my
00:02:12.420 | generosity, keep on trusting me as a father and keep on eating these trees
00:02:18.080 | as a way of enjoying me. There are 10,000 trees, every imaginable fruit, just go eat,
00:02:25.080 | be thankful, I've given them to you and see them as expressions of my goodness
00:02:30.960 | and savor them that way. And Satan comes along and he takes that arrangement and
00:02:37.320 | he says, "Hey Eve, the meaning of that arrangement is God is selfish, God is
00:02:43.160 | stingy, he's a skin flint." And so he took the prohibition of one suicidal tree and
00:02:51.000 | treated it as a prohibition of everything. So the issue of the tree is,
00:02:57.880 | will we keep looking to God as the giver and lover and treasure of this garden so
00:03:05.480 | that all our eating is thanking and all our savoring is a savoring of God? Will
00:03:12.000 | we keep on experiencing every one of these tastes as a tasting of something
00:03:18.360 | like what God is? And in that sense, a tasting of God, will we keep on enjoying
00:03:25.760 | God in the enjoying of the trees? That's what the forbidden tree was there to
00:03:32.600 | test. It wasn't—I think a lot of people try to set it up as merely arbitrary.
00:03:37.640 | This is simply, "Will man obey or will he not obey?" And then they don't put it in
00:03:42.680 | the context of his fatherly care and all the goods that he's given, just—I don't
00:03:47.360 | think it's arbitrary like that. It was a warning. If you choose independence
00:03:53.720 | instead of God-dependence, you will lose the pleasure of the garden and God with
00:04:00.800 | it. If you keep trusting me and enjoying me as your greatest delight and highest
00:04:06.120 | treasure, you will have this garden and I will be the pleasure of all your
00:04:12.920 | pleasures. So that's what I meant, Tony, when I was standing there and I
00:04:17.920 | said this tree is a way of securing that the pleasures of all the other trees in
00:04:24.560 | the garden are supremely pleasures in God. Hmm, that is a fascinating connection.
00:04:31.760 | Thank you, Pastor John, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Email your
00:04:35.880 | questions to us at AskPastorJohn@DesiringGod.org. You can visit us
00:04:39.840 | online at DesiringGod.org to find thousands of books and articles, sermons,
00:04:43.240 | and other resources from John Piper, all free of charge. I'm your host, Tony
00:04:46.440 | Rehnke. Thanks for listening.
00:04:49.600 | [BLANK_AUDIO]