I. We never know the worth of a thing till it is tested. Gold must be tried by fire, the free agent by temptation or trial. For his own interest, for his glory and reward, man needs to go through the furnace. It would not be worthy of God or of man that God should glorify him without his own concurrence and merit. For friendship and love there must be reciprocity. How grand it is to be able to say, “Behold we have left all things and have followed Thee” (Matt. xix. 27); or again: “I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith” (2 Tim. iv. 7). As the angels had to be proved, so Adam. His functions were very high. Nobility of character, unswerving loyalty, blind trustfulness in his Father and Lord, strength, perseverance, were necessary for his position. It had to be seen whether he was worthy of holding in fee the estate of grace and the title of son of God, and capable of administering it for his descendants, and transmitting it to them as an inheritance. He had to make the choice between the supernatural and the natural plane of existence. You, too, have to be tested and to prove your worth. Rejoice in the severity of your trial; it is not to be regarded as a danger and a misery, but as an opportunity for heroism, and the price of an eternal reward.
II. In the centre of Eden were two mysterious symbols, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Adam already knew all that was good; evil he did not know, for God had made nothing evil. Evil is privation; here it meant privation of supernatural life, or the fall to the state of natural life and endowments. In this was involved death; of soul first, then of body. “Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat. For in what day soever thou shalt eat of it thou shalt surely die the death” (Gen. ii. 17). The trial was physical in form, the symbol of an intellectual and moral test in reality. The two trees were the outward sign of a sacred covenant between the Almighty and His creatures. The one represented the higher life that was offered to man; the other symbolized the natural domain that had been placed under man’s control; from a portion of this Adam had to refrain as a token of submission to God, of trust in His word, of faith without sight. There was a triple restraint; of the sense of dominion, of desire for knowledge, of sensible enjoyment; which corresponded to the triple concupiscence let loose by the sin. Obedience meant the choosing of supernatural life in dependence on God, instead of the full natural life with its consequences. To eat of this tree of full but guilty knowledge was incompatible with the higher life. To us also, separately or in nations, the choice is proposed between the supernatural and the natural, between good and evil.
III. The consequences of Adam’s trial were naturally most momentous. It was not a test of his personal fitness for grace, but of his fitness to act as head of the human race, to be the source of a stream of supernatural influence which would descend to the remotest generation. If he could not hold his principality for himself, still less could he transmit it. Not only his blood, but much of his character would pass to his children, and in particular his great supernatural privilege. Forfeiting that, he could bequeath neither the privilege itself, nor the fitness to hold it, nor the strength to maintain it. Neither he nor his children could eat of the tree of life; they were subject thenceforth to bodily death, and to that privation of grace which is the essential constituent of the stain of sin. To remedy this, the second Adam had to ascend the cross, the tree of His bodily death, and change it thereby into a tree of life for us; He restores it then to us, not by carnal generation and inheritance, but by the spiritual birth through water and the Holy Ghost in baptism. Thank Him for thus remedying the infidelity of your first father and your own.
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