The only command God gives mankind after creation was not to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. We are told in Genesis 2:9 that God put every fruit tree that was good for food in the garden and that Adam and Eve were free to eat from any of these trees. They are told that if they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they would surely die.

The serpent tells Eve that she won't die from eating the fruit. It's important to note that Eve and the serpent never mention the plentifulness of the garden but focus solely on the exclusion of their ability to eat from that one tree. The serpent, possibly using the fact to his advantage, further suggests that God doesn't not want Adam and Eve to eat of the tree because then they will be like God. Eve succumbs to the temptation of being like God choosing the serpent's word over God's. She further feeds the fruit to Adam. With the knowledge of both good and evil, Adam and Eve were embarrassed by their nakedness and hid from God. After God confronts Adam and Eve, He serves out punishment for all three parties (the serpent, Adam, and Eve).

Many often wonder what was so special about that particular fruit. What was so bad about knowing good an evil? Why did God put the tree in the garden in the first place if He didn't want Adam and Eve to eat from it? Why was the punishment so severe? And was the serpent right that they didn't surely die?

The tree represented a choice—a choice to trust God or to follow our own desires. Yes, God could have created man such that he couldn't choose evil, or He could have never put the tree in the garden to tempt man, but there are reasons why man needed a choice. Everything in nature is comprised of opposites (day and night, hot and cold, sickness and health, etc.), and the definition of one is dependent upon the other. If you knew that you would never die, how much would you appreciate today? Without knowledge of the bad things that can happen (and do happen) you would take for granted all the good and it would be meaningless. For example, as a young child and a teen, many people argue with their parents, but as they grow older and understand everything their parents did for them, they have a new found appreciation for the parents.

God gave Adam and Eve a choice, knowing they would choose wrong, so that in the end, when mankind gets to Heaven, we will appreciate it. People often say God works in mysterious ways, but think of people (who were created in His image[3]), we want people to choose us, be it for a job or for prom queen, as friends or as spouses. The church is often referred to as the bride of Christ, and like every groom who stands at the altar, Christ knows that His church chose Him over all the other possibilities in the world.

From the verse in Romans, we know that sin is disobedience of God's law, in this case the act of disobedience came at eating the fruit—this is obvious. What is less obvious is what this says about mankind's nature in general. Man was tempted into eating the fruit with the promise of being like God. This is our weakness. At the thought of power and the chance to be on God's level, Adam and Eve completely disregarded the warning God gave them—God their Creator, God their provider, God who had only looked out for their best interest so far—and chose to listen to the serpent, who had done nothing for them.

Pride led them to believe that they knew better than God, but greed is what made them desire the fruit when they had literally every other fruit in the world for the taking. In Genesis 3:6 the word translating to pleasant in phrase "pleasant to the eyes" is the same root word as the word used in Exodus 20 for law against coveting, and the word translating to desired in the phrase "desired to make one wise" is used in Deuteronomy 5 in reference to coveting.[4]

When God speaks to Adam and Eve, Adam blames Eve and Eve blames the serpent; neither, takes responsibility for their on action. In turn, God punishes all that are involved… I often wonder how this would have played out if each person took credit for their role in the transgression.

Most people agree and assume the serpent is the devil, but there are also biblical passages to prove this fact.

With this in mind, we have the question of how much Eve knew and understand about death. Think about when you were a small child, what did you think the word "death" meant? Everything was good at this point (God confirms this after every creation in Genesis 1), so Eve would not have even experienced a cough, sneeze, or itch; there was no such thing as sickness, and there was no such thing as pain. When she was told that she would die if she ate the fruit, and when she discussed death with the serpent, what kind of meaning was she associating with the word death? We now know that are three types of death: the first death, the spiritual death, and eternal death.[2]

The first death is the death we are all condemned to in Genesis 3:23. Very few people (e.g. Enoch, Elijah, the 144,000) are permitted to escape the first death and simply join God in Heaven. This death is a physical death in which the body will decay and return to dust (as told in Genesis 3:23) but the soul is preserved. Souls trapped in the first death await the second coming of Jesus in which they will be resurrected in a new body and taken to Heaven or sentenced to the second or eternal death.

Spiritual death is a separation from God. This occurs when man has turned so far away from God and muddied himself up with so much sin that he cannot communicate with God. Upon dying a spiritual death, which is what Adam and Eve died when they ate of the Tree of Knowledge, we hide ourselves from God and run from Him. During a spiritual death, the dead will be so defiled that they cannot find God (often referred to as lost) because their love of sin obstructs their view and hardens their hearts against what is of God.

The Second Death, or the Eternal Death, is the final death to be issued on Judgment Day at the end of the world. Those who have chosen to follow Jesus will not suffer the Second Death, but those whose names are not written in the Book of Life will die forever and be cast into the lake of fire. Some believe that this means they will burn forever, this is another trick of the devil saying "ye shall not surely die." The only way to gain eternal life or immortality is by believing in and following Jesus Christ;[5] everyone else will die—it will be a painful death, but a death nonetheless.

Genesis 3:15 is regarded as the first messianic prophecy. Jesus is the seed a Eve and the devil or the antichrist is the seed of the serpent. Obviously there is enmity between satan and God's people. It is thought that the serpent bruising the heel of Eve's seed is in reference to Jesus dying on the cross and the seed of Eve bruising the head of the serpent is the final blow to the devil at the end of the world. [4]

Revelation 12:17 supports this theory.

As a child, I internalized the verse in which Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together to make clothes (which I'm guessing were still rather revealing, especially since I can't imagine them having any prior experience with sewing or clothing design), but completely missed the verse where God created clothes for Adam and Eve out of coats of skin. Perhaps the church skips over this as explaining that people used to wear animal hides may be deemed "to graphic" for young children by some, or perhaps they didn't want to tackle the task of explaining the fact that God killed animals to create clothes for both Adam and Eve. The Bible doesn't explicitly tell us why God chose animal skins for clothes, which required killing the animals versus providing them with silk or cotton. However, when taking in to account the fact that God required blood sacrifices[7] as early as in Genesis 4, where we see that Cain and Abel are already offering sacrifices to God, it becomes more plausible that this was God's way of introducing the concept of sacrifice and death to Adam and Eve. We are told in Romans 6:23 KJV that the wages of sin are death, thus upon killing the animals, the death of the animal would have paid the price of Adam and Eve's sin.

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