Our God given freedom and our Godly aversion to obeying others

Right from the start in the Garden of Eden, God gave us freedom. In Genesis 2:15 God said to Adam: ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden.’ So the first humans were free to roam the garden and to eat from every fruit which looked pleasing to them (Genesis 2:9). However, there was one exception, as God also said. ‘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 2:15). Therefore, it seems that when we know the difference between good and evil our God given freedom takes a tragic turn. It brings death! But why is this?

Well, according to Paul in Romans 7:7-13 out of knowing the difference between good and evil we then are commanded via God’s Law to do what is right and to avoid evil. The tragedy is that this commandment awakens within us the desire to sin as we exercise our God given freedom – that is, when we know the difference between good and evil we experience our God given freedom as the freedom to assert ourselves over God and others through the desire to consume and possess the world for our own greed and benefit (this being the sin of covetousness as Paul calls it). In short, our God given freedom combined with the knowledge of good and evil leads to us to going against God’s love and our loving fellowship with others.

So how can we understand our Godly aversion to obeying others? We must acknowledge that in the first place we don’t like obeying others because of our God given freedom. God at the start said that we could choose, and gave us this spirit of liberation as an essential part of our humanity. Therefore, when we struggle to obey others and something outside ourselves (even God and his commandments) this is partly because God made us this way, so that we can make our own free choices. However, what we must also acknowledge is that humanity has taken a tragic turn in that our knowledge of good and evil means that we also have a free desire to sin and do bad to God and others. The tragedy is that this capacity to both be free, and to know the difference between good and evil, leads to our death as we become trapped and confined by the desire to do what we now know is wrong and what we are consumed to do for ourselves – in other words, the more we exercise this freedom with this knowledge the more we become deeply unfree! As Paul seems to shout out in Romans 7: 24-25: ‘What a wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God – through Jesus Christ our Lord.’ Therefore, to break this tragedy (or this vicious circle) we must freely reach out to God as a response to Christ’s invitation to have our lives liberated by him. As a free act of obedience we must trust in His liberation and His love for us, while at the same time always confessing that our God given freedom, combined with our knowledge of good and evil, resists this very invitation, and as we struggle to freely submit (and resubmit) our lives to him daily.

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