“16And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:” (Genesis 2:16)
“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Gen 2:17)
God created Adam from the dust of the earth and gave him a Living Soul. God also created a Garden and put Adam in the Garden to dress and keep it. (Gen 2:7-15)
God had planted many trees, vines, and herbs. Pleasant to the eye and good for food. God also planted two special trees. The Tree of Life, and The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. (Gen 2:9)
God paraded every animal before Adam, and Adam got to name them all. Obviously Adam was not meant to be bored. He couldn’t just laze around in a meadow chomping on herbs and sucking on lemons. He needed company.
God created from Adam’s rib a woman. “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” (Gen 2:23)
They both walked around naked. Not just because they had no clothes on, but because they felt no guilt, no reason to hide from each other or God. For them life was perfect. No hunger, no pain, no fear. And this is our First Connection.
A Serpent appears in the Garden. Had Adam and the Woman been thinking they would have stayed far away from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. But they didn’t.
The Serpent tells the First Lie, “And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Gen 3:4-5)
Lets break this down a bit. The subject here is “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil”. God, as we know, said that even touching the Tree will cause you to die. The Serpent says that you will not die.
The answer to the argument is easy, God created you, he can certainly erase you. But that is not how God does things. He gave Adam and the Woman free will to choose. They could eat anything with the exception of one thing.
This is the connection with Jesus. After Adam and the Woman had eaten of the Tree, their eyes were open to the evil they had committed. They knew God had seen what they had done and this made them naked. God cursed the Serpent, brought pain to Adam, and the woman now called Eve (Gen 3:20), but God did not stop at abandoning them.
God took the skins of an innocent animal and clothed Adam and Eve. God clothed Adam and Eve with the skins to provide them with protection of the briers and thorns of the world. This is the pattern of Jesus.
Jesus died innocent of sin and provides a shield of protection to everyone.
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