A genuine choice

This was a well-tended garden, with trees bent down under their fruit. You could pluck a juicy plum or toss a ripe strawberry into your mouth. If your tastes ran more toward full red tomatoes or cucumbers, they were within reach. Melons, raspberries, sweet peas, peaches – the garden dripped with succulent produce.

In the midst of all that was a bowl of colorful hard candy. Just leave that alone, advised the gardener. It’s not good for you.

Temptation whispered a different song, however. The gardener is withholding from you. It was an astonishing claim, in the midst of the green grass and rich yield.

You know how it is. The candy looks like the rest of the fruit, but once we taste that, the fruit loses its flavor. Once we get a taste of sugar, the fruit is no longer so sweet. The sugar nabs our soul.

And, in the midst of an abundant harvest of delicious fruit, our mind is only for the candy. And we believe the tempter: the gardener withholds. Do we know the nature of God? In Genesis, we see his generous wealth. He does not withhold – even to the point of giving choice.

"You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."(Gen 2:16-17)

Do we see the choice in that statement? God allowed Adam to eat from any tree but advised him to stay away from the tree that would destroy him. Adam had to choose. Although we cling to the conviction that our Gardener denies, we can’t defend that. He gives us fruit; we insist on candy. He offers us health and abundance; we fixate on our own sweet tooth. We blame God as we take the choice he gives us to select destruction.

Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. (Gen 2:9)