Why God Questioned Adam & Eve about Eating Forbidden Fruit
We may wonder Why God questioned Adam & Eve concerning whether or not they ate the forbidden fruit since God is omniscient, knowing all things, including everything that the two had done in the garden. The answer must relate to God's righteousness in giving mankind the opportunity to choose to follow righteousness.
Evidently, God gave Adam & Eve an opportunity to confess & repent of sin, and be right in His sight in dealing with sin. We ask why repentance would be encouraged since the death sentence still applied after the two had sinned, and this would relate to repentance becoming inherent to the nature of man- kind, just as the sin of the two became inherent. This could please God, and permit limited fellowship with Him who hates sin (fellowship is the likely reason God created man). The result of failure to repent has been indirect fellowship in which He speaks to the redeemed by His written Word,* and we speak to Him by prayer.
*In regard to the written Word, He actually speaks to us indirectly, but verbally in the form of dictation inspiration that produces inerrancy (see essay 8 in particular)
Further,
this attitude of repentance for sin might lessen the impact of sin on
our history, which has been devastating in the extreme. Then Cain might not have been inclined to self-importance and
violence, and perhaps judgment of the great Flood could have been
averted. Perhaps our lifespan would still be 900+ years, and hardships of labor in earning a living, and pain of childbirth might have been averted. Such results would be due to God's
righteousness in the form of mercy. Even so, all this would not
eliminate the need for the sacrifice of God's Son to atone for the
sin and the death by sin that would still exist.
Regarding
Adam's passing of his traits to his descendants, when given the
opportunity to repent, he showed rank cowardice, trying to make
his wife the primary culprit, and she blamed the serpent;
self-preservation, for which sin- ful mankind is famous, became
inherent to them & their posterity, entering their nature,
and thus that of all generations of their descendants. Adam even
tried to implicate God, saying the woman whom thou
gavest to be with me, which accounts for the fact that people
often blame God for their problems, never thinking of Him when all is
well. This would mean God gave Adam & Eve an opportunity to add a
final touch to their creation, and it's certain that we, as
their descendants, would have responded in the general way they did.
Now the bottom line in this matter is the
fact that, despite God's motivation of Adam & Eve toward
repentance, He is omniscient, and would foreknow that the two
would not follow the right way, yet His righteousness is so great that He
gave them an opportunity to do what is right. We conclude that God's
righteousness is so great it never depends upon human response &
defiance, and He dealt with the two in a way that enabled them to
choose the way of righteousness.
Though
sin became inherent to mankind, God's righteousness is so great that,
since the nature of people was now hardened against repentance and
the way of righteousness, He provided the sacrifice of His Son as the
one way to put people on the right path, making it possible for all
to leave the lowest dregs of sin, and enter into eternal holy life
with God. What is so mind-boggling is that God would foreknow from
the foundation of the world, or before the creation, that He would
provide the sacrifice of His Son, as Revelation 13:8 says. God's
righteousness exceeds any limit we can imagine, and must be as
infinite as His other attributes.
