Adam and Eve were warned that if they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil they would surely die. We instinctively interpret death as referring to physical death—the separation of our body and our spirit—but it also applies to spiritual death—the separation of us from our Heavenly Father. Lucifer contended (referring to physical death) that they had not been told the truth. Of course he was ignoring the fact that partaking of the fruit would cause the Fall which would make them mortal and thus subject to physical death.
I realized today that the Garden of Eden was like a perfectly clean laboratory like one where a student might be allowed with supervision and where they might even be allowed to follow precise instructions for very simple experiments but if a student were to try to experiment beyond carefully scripted instructions they would be relegated to a much less advanced and less pristine laboratory to work in. I think that’s the equivalent of what happened with Eden and the Fall.
It is also important to understand that students can’t gain the same quality of understanding of a subject matter by only following carefully scripted experiments than they gain by being able to craft their own experiments and test their own ideas. Going off script was the essence of partaking of the forbidden fruit and the result was that Adam and Eve had to go from a pristine environment where productive fruits and vegetation grew spontaneously to an imperfect environment where thorns, thistles, briars, and noxious weeds grow spontaneously—an environment where they could mess up and learn rather than coasting placidly along with minimal effort.
Lucifer wanted to separate man from God but God understood that mortal progression would be enhanced through the expanding individual understanding that would result from the Fall.
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