They say that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Of course, it is all well and good to tell someone who has eaten a bad apple that they ought to have taken an ounce of prevention and avoided ever eating that apple in the first place, but this advice is of little practical concern to the person with food poisoning currently heaving their guts out. They would much rather have the pound of cure at this point, no matter how much better the ounce of prevention might seem to have been. When we read the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, we are sometimes tempted to find fault with how God handled this. Either God was being unforgivably negligent in leaving this low hanging fruit within easy reach of what were basically two toddlers with no experience and even less impulse control and hoping that His stern laying down of the law would be one hundred percent effective, or God knew they would succumb to temptation and He told them not to eat the forbidden fruit not because He was motivated by compassion but because He was cynically trying to protect Himself from liability for any reckless endangerment that might or might not have happened on His watch. But if we are to assume that God knew what kind of effect the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that He knew that even if He warned them they would most likely ignore His warnings, and, worst of all, that it was part of His plan all along for them to partake of the very fruit He had warned Him against, then if we are also to accept that God is wise and benevolent and motivated for the complete joy and peace of His children, then we must conclude that God did not warn Adam and Eve because He hoped to prevent them from eating the forbidden fruit. God warned Adam and Eve ahead of time because He knew that if Adam and Eve could be trusted to follow their own will despite their Father's efforts to warn them, then when they inevitably ended up right where He foretold them they would, they would then begin to trust and to know for themselves that His prophecies and promises are sure. Of course, our Heavenly Father would be thrilled if we took the ounce of prevention and gave heed to His warnings, but if we did not, then our Heavenly Father won't delay in offering us the pound of cure, showing us how that warning that we first ignored can now be incredibly valuable to us.
