Eve: Adam, your face….

Adam: Huh? I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening.

Eve: Lost in thought?

Adam: That’s a good metaphor.

Eve: Thank you. I wish I had one to describe your face.

Adam: Can’t you make a comparison?

Eve: Do you remember that pond we found and how still it was until you threw that rock into it?

Adam: Yes. It rippled out.

Eve: Right. At one moment it was still, but then it was disturbed.

Adam: “Disturbed.” That is an excellent word to use. Not only for my face but for my thoughts.

Eve: So what are your thoughts?

Adam: I am thinking of everything we have received from God. Each other. The trees. The animals. Everything.

Eve: But isn’t that wonderful?

Adam: Well, yes, but I’m thinking of it all in the light of the warning about that tree I told you about.

Eve: Well, the terms of that warning aren’t so wonderful, but we have everything else.

Adam: Yes, I know. But the warning presupposes the possibility that we might eat the forbidden fruit.

Eve: True.

Adam: And God, for a certainty, knows whether we will eat it or not.

Eve: OK, I’m with you so far.

Adam: So how can we take all these “good” things at face vaule as signs of God’s love and generosity?

Eve: Adam, I’m not following now.

Adam: Well, if we were to disobey, wouldn’t the seriousness of our offense be all the greater because of how good God has been to us?

Eve: Yes, which is why we should heed the warning.

Adam: Right, but if we do disobey, as God would have to know we are going to do, then all these things will have been given to us as means to make our crime more severe.

Eve: Oh.

Adam: So how can we say these things we’ve been given are signs of God’s love and generosity. It all depends on what he plans to do with them, doesn’t it? He may simply be making sure our crime is more serious than it would be otherwise. Even though I have no intention of disobeying, I can’t say I know the future the way God does.

Eve: Adam, I see your point.

Adam: Do you have any answer?

Eve: Only this: you say you don’t know the future like God does.

Adam: Right.

Eve: Wouldn’t it also be true that you don’t know God’s own mind in the way the He knows it?

Adam: But don’t we know God?

Eve: Absolutely. We know Him truly. But we don’t know everything there is to know about Him.

Adam: All right, but how does this help us?

Eve: Because if God tells us that he gives to us out of love and generosity, I think we should take Him at face value without worrying about what the future holds. Despite knowing and planning the future, God must be capable of also, in some real way, being in the moment here with us, giving us good things out of sheer grace without reference to the future.

Adam: Perhaps it is so.

Eve: I think it must be so. After all, if we were to sieze the forbidden fruit, God might use it to some great advantage that he has planned all along. But that would make the trespass no less evil and rebellious. Likewise, this garden, and the Tree of Life, and we ourselves are good gifts no matter what is planned. We can take God at his word without worrying about His ultimate decrees. As His creatures, that is exactly what we are supposed to do.