Father, please help us to choose the right way and to accept you as our God.
Last week we looked at God creating the universe and everything in it. Each stage ends with "and God saw that it was good...". And it was!
We also looked at how God gave his creation the flexibility to survive and adapt. Now God takes this a stage further with his final act of creation; not only does he give us the physical ability to be different, but he gives us free will - to make our own choices.
He could have made us perfect robots. We could have to do his will at all times. (In some ways this would have resulted in a perfect world, but one which was fairly shallow and uneventful.) Instead he asked man to obey him. God gave us life and everything we need, what he asks is that we love him and do what he wants.
This is a very important aspect; God 'asks'. When you ask for something sometimes you don't get it, sometimes you do. God is testing us to see if we love him enough to obey him. Some people will, some won't. Being the people who will, puts us in an amazing position. God looks after us and rewards us. He has chosen us.
Now back to the story.
God asked Adam to do the following; look after the Garden of Eden for him, and don't eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. That was it! We'll come back to the first item quite a few times during the year, so we'll concentrate on the second.
Why would Adam want to eat of the tree? I think we touched on this last week as well. Mankind has a big problem in accepting that there may be anyone else better than them! The serpent's temptation was that if God had the knowledge of good and evil, then why not Adam? Then Adam would be like God. (Actually he tempted Eve, then she persuaded Adam. Those with sisters or girl friends probably know just how often they seem to get their own way ;-) )
So what we have is someone who wants to better themselves, but against the will of God. Anything that goes against the will of God is sin, and sin leads to death. God said Adam was to die.
While in the Garden of Eden, Adam had access to the Tree of Life. It is eating from this tree that may have kept Adam alive for ever. So to prevent this from happening, God expelled them both from the garden.
But this is not the end. When he did so he said that there would be someone who could undo this curse. So there is hope for us.