Faith for Flourishing

Have you ever wondered why God didn’t want Adam and Eve to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Why would God not want us to know the difference between good and evil? It seems like knowing the difference between right and wrong would be something that God would want us to know! So why would He want to keep us from that knowledge?

What if I told you that the knowledge of good and evil is so far beyond our comprehension that God knew it would put us into bondage, and God has never wanted us to be in bondage to anything. Think about it. Adam and Eve were naked and didn’t care! How freeing would it be if we just ran around naked and carefree? But we can’t because now we know that running around naked is inappropriate. The knowledge of good and evil destroyed our innocence and ignorance forever, and everyone knows ignorance is bliss!

What is worse is that we still don’t have a perfect understanding of good and evil. We constantly argue and debate over what is good and what is evil. There are a few things that are generally agreed upon, but there is so much that is debated. There are so many nuances to the weighing of right and wrong that it becomes difficult to have a true discernment of what is right and what is wrong. How can we ever know for sure?

So God gave us the law to teach us right from wrong. The law sets the basic standards of right and wrong so that we can learn the basics of what is good and what is evil. But even the law is rigid and unforgiving. The Bible says that the law kills! It’s black and white and it doesn’t leave room for grey! It’s definitive, strict, and final because it teaches us more than the basics, it teaches us that we can’t even begin to measure up to the basics of right and wrong. We will always come up on the side of wrong no matter how hard we try. This knowledge of our lack of strength, and our inadequacy causes us to spiral into despair, depression, and helplessness. 

But there is hope! Jesus came and introduced us to grace! What is grace? Grace is the grey spaces between good and evil. It’s the thing that shouldn’t be possible but yet here it is! The Law doesn’t understand grace. It can’t understand grace because in the law there is no room in it’s rigidity for a blending of black and white into grey. 

Remember when you were in elementary school and they began to teach adding and subtracting? They first tell you that there is no such thing as a negative number so you can’t subtract a bigger number from a smaller number! It’s a basic law of math, and it makes perfect sense. You either have a cookie or you don’t have a cookie. You can’t have a negative cookie, there is no such thing as less than zero cookies. 

Just a few short years later the teachers add to the mix negative numbers and how they work in the world. You learn that you can’t physically have a negative cookie but you could have zero cookies and owe someone a cookie! The teachers built upon a precept to give you a better understanding and each year they keep adding to those precepts until you reach complicated theoretical math that is beyond most people’s ability to understand. 

That’s what the knowledge of good and evil is like and God is a good teacher! The Bible says He adds precept to precept, line upon line and grows our understanding as we learn and grow. We have to grow beyond the basics of good and evil and allow God to give us a better understanding. That deeper understanding will look like grey space between those white and black basics. This isn’t wrong. It’s by design. The deeper truths, the better understanding to good and evil is found in the grey spaces. Truth is in the middle of the tension between the two sides of good and evil. 

As we grow in our faith, we leave the milk of the basics and we begin to eat the meat of the nuanced. Once we begin eating the meat we gain the strength to withstand the tension found in the grey spaces. Don’t be afraid to let God open your understanding and take you to grey spaces. Yes there is tension in the grey spaces, but in the tension and in the grey spaces we will find the ability to let go of our need to have knowledge of good and evil because we will realize the knowledge is beyond us. When we do that, we begin to rely wholly on God to tell us what is right and what is wrong, and that is as close as we can get to the original design of God! 

Pastor Anthony Yanny