Forbidden Fruit: Why Does God Make Rules?

Have you ever longed for something that is not yours? Once, when I was a kid, my mother set me up to experience the power of forbidden fruit.

While putting some chocolate bars in the cupboard, she said, “Joshy, don’t take these chocolate bars…” Then she left the room. This is like telling someone not to think about pink elephants! When the coast was clear, I took all the chocolate bars. I then relocated them to a safer location—underneath a sun-bathing couch. A few days later, my mother found them melted to the carpet and came hunting! “Joshy, did you take these chocolate bars?” As an intelligent four year old, I thought blaming my younger brother might help: “No Mommy, Caleb hid the chocolate bars!” As you can probably guess, this didn’t end well for my rear end.

Why Does God Make Rules? Forbidden Fruit

As a 4-year old, I probably didn’t understand my mother’s reasons for keeping the chocolate bars from me. I could think of only one thing: how tasty those chocolate bars would be in my mouth. As an adult I can list multiple reasons why my mother didn’t want me to eat those chocolate bars. Perhaps, it would spoil my supper, or maybe I already had eaten enough sugar that day.

Most of the time, if we look hard enough, we will understand why a rule exists. However, there is one rule I find hard to explain. In the book of Genesis, God commands Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree in the center of the Garden of Eden. On one occasion, Tim Keller was asked to explain why God commanded Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree:

Now, I had a ten year old, my middle son, he was a very hard child to get to obey. And I would say to him, ‘Obey me. I’m your father, I’ve told you to do this, so just do it because I’ve told you to.’ And you know what he’d always say? ‘Dad, I’d be happy to obey if you could just make it reasonable. Just tell me why this is helpful for me, or the human race, or whatever.’

And I would say, ‘If you only obey me when I explain it to you, then you’re not obeying me, you’re just agreeing with me. I want you to obey because I’m forty-five and you’re ten. I know a little more about life than you do, and I don’t want to have to explain it to you because I couldn’t get into your ten year old brain.’

So God says, ‘Don’t eat from the tree’, and no explanation. The point is, ‘I want you to obey because you love me. Just because I’m God and you’re not. I want you to do something, not because it profits you, not because you know the reason why, but just because I’m Lord and Savior, and you’re not. Just do it because you love me for myself alone.’ And they didn’t. ^[1]“Q&A with Tim Keller – Reason for God? Belief in an Age of Skepticism” from the Veritas Forum, available from: … Continue reading

My chocolate bar theft pales in comparison to Adam and Eve’s betrayal of God’s one rule. But in most cases, boundaries are made to protect blessing. Keller explains elsewhere that

“the command of God to Adam was the prototype for all his commands to everyone. God always says, in one way or another, ‘Obey me and I will bless you; I will be with you.’ But here is the exception. Only once has he said to a human being what he says to Jesus. To the first Adam he said, ‘Obey me about the Tree and I will bless you’—and Adam didn’t do it. But to the second Adam he says, ‘Obey me about the Tree and I will crush you’—and Jesus does. Jesus is the first and last person in history to be told that obedience would bring a curse.”

In obeying his Father, Jesus reverses the curse of the first Adam and thereby releases an entirely new way for humans to relate to God.

Don’t Light Candles at Noon:

The difference between the Old Testament and the New is best explained by contrasting the “do not” with the “do”. Remember how Jesus was asked what the most important commandment is. Notice how he answers not with negatives, but with two positive commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” One preacher from over a hundred years ago explains it this way:

“Now, who could suppose that the ten commandments were, as some will have it, ‘the perfect expression of the mind of God,’ as they are called; when, if you come to look at them, they are ten ‘nots’ … negatives, negatives, negatives. Surely, surely, that cannot be the expression of the mind of God. They are all very well as far as they go; I am not speaking against them; but they are only ‘ten nots.’ Twenty ‘nots’ would be better still. Ten candles are very good; but twenty candles are better still. But who needs ten candles, or twenty candles, when we have the light of the sun? … Beloved friends, we are not under law. There is a negative for you; if you will have negatives, have that. We are not under the law, but under grace.”

As the Bible shows, humanity will always function under boundaries. But the gospel shifts humanity from living under boundaries that restrict freedom, to boundaries that empower freedom. This is why Galatians 5 says: “if you are led by the Spirit you are not under law.” Through the Holy Spirit, Christians no longer desire forbidden fruit. Instead, we produce the “fruit of the Spirit” which “is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”

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