Week 3 August 2026 - REFLECTION ON QUESTIONS NOT ASKED IN EDEN

“”You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”  Genesis 216

The woman graciously directed by God to drive me places these days, just wants to go by the name “Uber Driver.”  Riding with her to medical appointments is always a riot.  If the one comes up where the U.S. Capitol was stormed and the Vice President’s wife targeted for sudden widowhood, we don’t make heroes out of hoodlums. The latter are consigned to “rot in hell,” as I tell my friend who doesn’t cringe that I watch a certain weekly crime show.  Perhaps the murder victim’s remains are only found decades later, giving the medical examiner little to work with. When the forensic expert finds cracked bones and teeth, he knows the process of diagenesis will end precisely where Genesis 3:19 begins, “…for dust you are and to dust you will return.”

Eden has suddenly popped up as a new topic of interest and my pseudo-Eve can’t help but dust off something that has long puzzled her.  When God told Adam he would “surely die,” why didn’t He bother to explain death.  More vexing still, why didn’t the man ask?  I waste no time pointing out Cain’s murder of Abel, where indeed the picture was worth a thousand words.  When their son lay cold and stiff, with no breath making his chest rise or his eyes blinking at the sight of his horrified parents, death seemed to explain itself.  My weekly crime show takes minutes to document a victim’s demise, but two hours to conclude the drama with the ultimate therefore.  After my Uber Driver leaves for home to ponder the art of getting smart, I stay behind to quickly start cringing at the scope of my vanished smartness.  Logically, shouldn’t the second and bigger question have been, “Lord, what do you mean by the knowledge of good and evil?”

Taking a bite of the forbidden fruit didn’t help one bit to define the goodness of the Creator or divulge the evil naturalized in the creatures made in His likeness.  A mere 1,500 years after the Fall, a flood covered the earth that had become completely awash in violence.  Fast forward from Noah to Timothy in AD 66 and consider “the last days” as Paul, his father in the faith, sees them:  “People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive…ungrateful, unholy…unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God – having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with them” (2 Timothy 3:1-5). How valid is this advice for today’s believer who has no trouble linking every word to the laundry list of our lawless free-for-all  America?  What unites all of us human beings, “religious” or not, is our unceasing lust for the fruit of our distinct preferences, “come hell or high water.”  My death penalty was paid on Calvary, as put in motion before the beginning of the world.  The fruit of Christ’s obedience is seen in Revelation 22:2, where the Tree of Life in Paradise is beautiful with leaves for the healing of the nations free forever from sin’s curse.