“…ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.”
כֵּֽאלֹהִ֔ים יֹדְעֵ֖י ט֥וֹב וָרָֽע׃
God knows good and evil but, entirely unlike human beings, He knows good and evil as the original and only Definer of them. Man, on the other hand, knows good and evil, but does so as the recipient of that knowledge from the One with the total authority and knowledge to reveal it.
Thus, “knowing good and evil,” in the authority sense, is an activity that exclusively belongs to God. Satan’s temptation for Eve was not about knowledge itself but about taking on a position of prominence and its associated privilege. Thus, Satan was not merely enticing the two to obtain more knowledge but to entirely change their relationship to knowledge altogether, to become authors of knowledge, dictating what was right and wrong from their own beings and, therefore, relying upon their own intuition and senses rather than the actual words of God.
The “pride of life” continues to flood the activities of human beings with a sense of preeminence and spills out into life as self-sufficiency. This self-sufficiency flows in an inward confidence that good and evil are just as the eyes of the individual perceives them. Residing in man’s mind is all the knowledge necessary to know good and evil for himself and for everyone else, as well, including God. Such an attitude precludes individuals and groups, including entire assemblies, churches that gather together in the name of Christ, from truly seeking God beyond themselves. This explains the barrier so easily sensed in churches that, while doing activities supposedly derived from God, rarely leads those assembled into intimate contact with Him. The obstruction so clearly in place is, in fact, an attitude. It is the attitude with which Satan first tempted human beings to arise to the status of “like God,” that is, “knowers of good and evil,” who no longer needed God to approve or disapprove, as they themselves could do so by the knowledge resident within their own preeminence. Thus, their prayers become, not manifestations of a hunger and thirst for righteousness as God defines it but of a self-sufficiency. Their activities become less and less oriented toward gaining knowledge and wisdom from God and more oriented toward acting out what they already think they know.
Neither church leaders, fathers, nor mothers are to take on a sense of preeminence due to their position or experience. Their service to God is that of His servants. Anything outside of or above this is derived from the pride of life. Such pride will never lead the leader or those following him into true knowledge and fellowship with God but turns them all into the most dangerous of places, having allowed “lust” to “conceive,” death is the only consequence they can hope for apart from a deep change of mind concerning God and their place before Him.
Biblical Return 