Did God really say we had a choice in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

While studying Adam and Eve, Javelin asked a question that I feel like most kids get to: why did God even put that tree in the garden?  We say that he wanted to give people a choice between following him and choosing their own way.  As I relayed that answer, I wondered, did is that choice inferred from God’s words or beyond them?

So I had to look back at Genesis.

Genesis 2:16 says in the Lord God commanded the man you are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

Do we see him offering a choice there or is the choice just inferred from the fact that the tree is even there?

When I imagine somebody offering a choice, I think of it being presented as, “ we have all these great trees in the garden and you can eat from any of them however, there is that one in the middle, which is an option but has some consequences.”

I don’t see that much option presented in the phrase, and I feel like if it was presented that way, the fruit would’ve been eaten  much sooner. Would God have been culpable for presenting us an option to do good instead of warning us more fervently that that choice shouldn’t even be a choice? I think that’s more of what we get in his phrase.

He says “you must not eat”. I know it’s difficult to examine differences in words in English. This was not written in our language; yet there is more of an urgency in the word “must” than the word “should”.  “Should” offers more of an encouraged recommendation; “must” has the urgency of your welfare in mind.   If God had not used “must not”, and simply used “should not” or something less, would Adam and Eve‘s eating from the fruit have been a violation of a command or just going against his suggestion? And what can we take from the differences in this?

This should be the way we look at the Bible.  It’s our latest option compared to the tree.  When we ingest the Bible, we are ingesting from the good trees in the garden, gaining knowledge of God. To go against what the Bible says, is to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  That’s how you learn what it is like to engage with evil. While, sometimes, it can be enlightening and introduce you to new worlds, the joys of it decay into the withered distortion that it is, and you find yourself naked and needing shelter.

So when we look at what the Bible tells us about how we should live, we should not look at what it tells us as a choice.  Just as God didn’t really present eating from that tree as a choice.  We should look at it as a “must”.  We must consider the Bible our daily bread and we must not explore the alternatives ways of sin.