Josep Vergera
Fox Byte #4 examined how our ancestors in the Garden of Eden chose to educate themselves on the knowledge of good and evil rather than get that knowledge in the way God intended. How big of a problem was it that Adam and Eve decided to cut short God’s training program and grab the “godlike” status of knowing good and evil? Even if they were not quite ready to handle all the truth at the moment they acquired it, would they have grown into it eventually?
Well, maybe not.
Here’s the problem: knowing the difference between good and evil is not just an intellectual exercise. Once you have that knowledge, you are responsible for it. That means not only that you must recognize what is good and what is evil, but you also must make a judgment on which to choose.
God has no problem making that judgment. We know God will always choose good because God is good (Psalm 118:1; Luke 18:19). In fact, since God sets the standard for good, anything which is not of God is evil (3 John 1:11). God intended that human beings would understand His standard, see that it is always better than evil, and freely choose good all the time. That way all of humanity would be operating from the same standard.
Our ancestors chose to bypass that understanding of God’s standard and instead went straight to the knowledge. When they did that they set up their own standards of what is right and wrong. At first there were two sets of standards: Adam’s and Eve’s. The two of them had set their individual standards to uphold what each of them saw as right for himself or herself. That’s what their argument in Genesis 3 was all about. They should have acknowledged that they were wrong according to God’s standard, but instead each of them explained to God what they saw was right. They passed that tendency on to their children, Cain and Abel. Since each of them followed his own standard, both of them were in conflict not only with God, but also with each other. In time their argument produced a huge tragedy:
Now Cain talked with Abel his brother; and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother and killed him. (Genesis 4:8 NKJV)
I think you know what’s happened since then. Now we have 7 billion people on this earth, and 7 billion standards of right and wrong. Every single one of them has a decent idea what is good and what is evil, but unless they know the God Who made them, they will tend to choose what is right for them at the moment rather than what is really good.
Which standard do you tend to choose: what’s right for you at the moment, or what’s good according to your Maker for all eternity?
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