KNOWLEDGE BY FAITH IN GOD.
It was not God's desire that our first parents should remain in ignorance of anything good. It was not His desire that man should not be able to distinguish good from evil. But it was His desire that man should know it in the only true way,—by faith in Him. It was Satan's desire to destroy man, and therefore he desired that man should know evil as he knew it,—by sympathetic, experimental knowledge. God's way was to lead poor, ignorant, finite man out of himself ever toward the infinite. The infinitely-loving God knew everything; He would therefore have revealed to man (even as He will now) all that it was best for man to know, and as rapidly as he could be trusted to know. But to do this the finite child must believe the Infinite Father. Man, by believing God, would have learned to trust Him and love Him, would have assimilated His character, would have opened his own heart to the infinite depths of the righteousness, the knowledge, the life of God. Infinite goodness would have been his center and circumference. What God said was good man would have believed, and in walking by faith would have come to know by happy experience that God's Word was true. What God said was evil he would have shunned, till, as character developed, he would more and more have come to know instinctively, even as God knows, that a thing was evil. This would not have been a knowledge which exalted self; it would have been the knowledge which sprang from God's Word Spirit-wrought in his character. To God would have been all the glory, as His was all the wisdom and power. Satan's object was to get man to believe himself a god; and thus artfully he put the temptation: "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 God, knowing good and evil." Gen. 3:4, 5. R.V. He would say, "God is telling you that which is not so; He is keeping back from you knowledge which will make you like Himself." Satan doubtless gave them ocular proof that touching and eating would not kill them; for was not he, the serpent, touching and eating, yet he was not dead. Man disbelieved God and accepted the word of the serpent and his own senses rather than God's Word. As a result, the garments of individual glory with which God clothed them, and which other eyes could not pierce, departed with their purity; they became naked and ashamed; sin became incarnate; and, notwithstanding Satan's lie, death passed upon all men. God uses the very words of Satan in irony: "Behold, the man has become as one of Us, to know good and evil." Gen. 3:22. God does not indorse Satan's lie. He wants man to weigh it now in the light of experience. And now He tells man that as he has chosen his own way, he must pursue it apart from the tree of life, and demonstrate in himself whether God's Word, "Thou shalt surely die," or Satan's, "Thou shalt not surely die," was true. Strange that men believe Satan yet, isn't it? All this is written for us. As Satan wrought then, more craftily and subtly does he work now. The only true knowledge is in God. The only true way to obtain it is by faith in God, "the faith which worketh by love."