The knowledge of good and evil

The account of the Yahwist is a condemnation of the kind of religion that attempts to identify with God, to be justified before God, or imagine ourselves to be on God's side. This is only surprising because we live in an atmosphere of uncritical acceptance of religion in general. Here we find "one of the great religions of the world" cutting the ground from under religion. The temptation of the serpent is, after all, "to be like God." Is not much religion an attempt to become something more than a death bound creature?

The first couple are expelled into our world, a world of difficulty and hardship and a world that has fallen from the good creation in that not everything in it is good. It is so, not because evil was an ingredient in its creation but because Adam and Eve broke the unspoken covenant with God that He was God and they were His creatures and so tipped the whole of creation into the chaos we observe all around us. In this situation of brokenness, that is our world, we need to discern between good and evil, a task obviously unnecessary when living in the garden.

However this may be, both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament look to the future to a new creation that harks back to the original in which the God will again be intimate with His creature and death will be no more. While the prophetic books of the Hebrew Scriptures look to this in hope, the NT understands this new creation to be brought about by the ministry, death and resurrection of Christ. Christ is the apocalyptic, the displacement of the old creation with the new in which the discernment of good and evil will be unnecessary as it was in the Garden of Eden. The law was temporary. As Paul writes:

Now before faith came, we were imprisoned and guarded under the law until faith would be revealed. ²⁴ Therefore the law was our disciplinarian until Christ came, so that we might be justified by faith. ²⁵ But now that faith has come, we are no longer subject to a disciplinarian, ²⁶ for in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. ²⁷ As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.Gal. 3:23-27.

A church that focuses on morality, a juridical church, misses the point of the creation of a new heaven and a new earth. For we are caught between two worlds, the old world of sin, death and alienation and the new world, even now breaking in amongst us, of grace and completeness. We live our lives with our eyes on our brokenness but with the hope that the universe is being transformed and the "next world" is on the horizon.