22. The Way to Permanent Character Opened
The Way to Permanent Character Opened With these principles before us, we can now look at the actual events by which God allowed the way to open before Adam and Eve, that they might enter into a permanent character of holiness, that thus eternal happiness might be theirs, as He had planned for them.
Up to this time they were happy, up to the limit of their capacity in innocence, in the will of God. Their love to God of course gave them a yearning to be like Him, for love always yearns for likeness to every desirable trait in the loved one.
Then added to their yearning was God’s purpose that they should be like Him, as we can see from end to end of His Word which lies before us today. For to be holy like Him would be perfect happiness, and happiness was then, and even now in his sins still is, the goal of man’s deepest yearning.
Having therefore created Adam and Eve with a free will, and thus with the power of free choice; also having created them so that a right final life-choice between moral alternatives would bring into full exercise their capacity to love Him; having constituted them also in such a way that such a choice would bring them into permanent characters of their own; and having given them every reason for a choice on the right side and every warning against the opposite choice; when the test comes, God does not step in and interfere.
Why should He? Having given man these capacities to be brought into exercise and development for his eternal welfare, would He interfere with such exercise when the opportunity came? Only if He saw that the test would prove to be inadequate to produce the desired results. For to create a being with a capacity for a moral character of his own, and then to deny him all chance to achieve a right moral character, would be wholly unworthy of such a Being as reason must conceive God to be.
Recall now that there was but one single prohibition—the eating of the physical fruit of an actual tree in the Garden. Not the “tree of good and evil,” however, as some call it, but the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17), by eating the fruit of which against God’s command, they would acquire the knowledge, not only of good but also of evil, and it was the knowledge of evil against which God warned them. They were to choose the good and thus learn what evil was by contrast, not by the experience of it in doing evil. Being but a single prohibition, a test could come in no way but in the terms of that prohibition. A test in any terms outside of it would have been no test at all. For if there is to be a test as to transgression—crossing a line, there must first be a line that is not to be crossed, and that was exactly the nature of God’s prohibition given Adam and Eve.
Then as the divinely permitted test came, it proved to be so comprehensive of every possible moral issue that could ever be raised, as to cover in principle every phase of temptation that could ever come to man. Our personalities include both physical, mental and moral capacities, and the permitted test covered the whole personality.
Recall now that faith is action upon what God says, and is the only means of reaching the goal of happiness. Then notice that the approach of Satan was aimed at faith in what God had said, the import of which was that His will was best. For only as they accepted and acted on God’s will to the exclusion of their own, could the permitted test accomplish God’s purpose in it for them. So it was in great subtlety and cunning that Satan approached Eve. Instead of frankly suggesting to her that she abandon her longing to be like God, he offered to help her realize it. So he did not boldly propose that she should choose her own will and repudiate God’s, but raised a question instead to hint that she might not have fully understood His will for her. For had He really said that she should “not eat of every tree of the Garden?”