God lovingly explained not only the rule, but said in very specific language what the result would be. There are several interesting points.
First, it was about eating. Why eating? Eating allows people to grow. It provides nourishment. It provides pleasure, too, as long as you like the food. Pleasure food doesn’t have to be bad for you, after all, though some foods are better than others.
Taking this analogy further, God was saying there is one food here that is poisonous. It wou lnot only pro ide no nutritional value, it would actually destroy, in the same way swallowing a poison today can cause many bad things, even death. However, it wasn’t a poison like we think of today. It was a poison to man’s spiritual well being.
Ye shall surely die was not just a warning that they would die physically, although they would eventually. The Hebrew states, “dying, you shall die,” meaning that there would not only be a death right away, but a continual process of dying that would end in physical death, as well.
God told Adam that this death would happen at that moment. This was spiritual death. Remember that man had a body, soul, and spirit at first; the Spirit was how he could commune with God. That Spirit would depart from man if he ate from that tree. He would be spiritually poisoned.
This was as clear as it could be. Even the name – the tree of the knowledge of good and evil – spelled it out. Adam didn’t know how to do evil, until the time when he chose to disobey God. Tradition says it was an apple tree, though we don’t know for sure. What we know is that God called that tree by a specific name not because it was some unique type of tree, but because it was the tree with which He would test Adam to see if he wanted to obey God willingly. God didn’t want him to be a mindless robot. God wanted Adam to be free to choose to obey Him.
When Adam and Eve rebelled, God had a plan all ready. It was a plan that would replace the food which had been consumed as spiritual poison, and would instead restore man to spiritual health.
Jesus Christ is the bread of life. Each person must receive Him personally, receiving His forgiveness for their sins, to have that relationship with God restored. This is true for reasons we’ll explore further later. To put it simply here, one is because mankind inherited a sin nature from Adam. The second is because every person has sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God. (Rom. 3:23) We don’t all commit the same sins, but every person has chosen at some point to fall short of God’s mark, which is perfection. Thankfully, God has chosen to forgive us.
