In the Genesis narrative, and in all of life, the foundational judgment that transforms us into judges is about God and ourselves. The path that leads us to our eating from the forbidden tree is deception. The serpent presented himself as letting Adam and Eve in on the divine secret. He was going to help Adam and Eve have their eyes opened. If they would eat from this tree, they would attain the same status as Yahweh. The serpent planted a seed of mistrust in the mind of the innocent woman (Genesis 3:1-5).

The method the Serpent used was judgment, for when carried out by anyone other than God, as we have seen, judgment destroys trust and squelches love. It is indisputable that what the serpent was up to in this passage was killing, stealing, and destroying the harmony of Adam and Eve’s relationship with God. He intended to extinguish the flow of God’s love to, in, and through the humans God had created.

Judgment always severs union. It was implied that God’s motive in forbidding the tree, therefore, was not love; it was to protect his own status. When our picture of God is distorted, we can no longer trust God to be the source of our life. It is impossible to live in God’s love if we don’t believe that God is love.

We cannot judge God for the same reason we cannot judge others: We have no divine right or omniscient capacity to do so. When we seize the divine prerogative of knowing good and evil, we appropriate the impulse to be omniscient without possessing the divine capacity to be omniscient. We can’t judge God on the basis of his behavior – or what we might suspect is his behavior – outside of Christ because we don’t know all the variables with which he has to contend. The exercise of our knowledge of good and evil is invariably self-serving.

If we are not rooted and grounded in God’s love, we will invariably find ourselves unconsciously or consciously bringing God, and then ourselves and each other, before the tribunal of our own knowledge of good and evil. We will live in judgment, and the flow of love from God to us and through us will be suppressed. Whereas God intends us to live “in Christ,” out of a fullness we freely receive from him, our judgment about God leads us to live “in Adam,” out of an emptiness we are forever trying to fill. Our lives become lives of assessing good and evil, based on our idolatrous strategy for getting life, rather than lives lived in Christ out of the fullness of God’s love.

We embrace a picture of God that is less loving, less beautiful, less full of life, less gracious, and less glorious than the true God really is. From this, everything that attaches to sin, everything that characterizes life “in Adam” (1 Cor. 15:22) and life in “the flesh” (Rom. 7:5; 8:4–8) follows. When our picture of God is distorted, we can no longer trust God to be the source of our life. It is impossible to live in God’s love if we don’t believe God is love.

If we are to grow in love, Christ must be the central focus of all our thinking and living. We cannot overemphasize the centrality of Christ in our understanding of God. Christ is the preeminent revelation of God’s unsurpassable love (John 14:9, Col. 1:15). Jesus died a God-forsaken death on the cross in order to open up the fellowship of the perfect, loving, triune community with us (1 John 4:9-10). Only if we resolve in our minds and hearts that God looks like Jesus can we make progress in trusting God and expressing His love in our lives. God is this kind of love. Every thought about God, every mental picture we entertain about God, every single emotion that is “raised up against the knowledge of God” must be taken “captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4b-5).

When we are by God’s grace freed from our addiction to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we are empowered to live in the blessed garden in which God always intended us to live. When our minds and hearts are rooted and grounded in the love of God as revealed in Christ, when doubt is replaced with trusting intimacy with God, the river of life that is already flowing within us begins to spring forth (John 7:38-39).

This can only be experienced, however, if we remain rooted and grounded in Christ. Only then do we experience the fullness of life and love that is fellowship with the triune God. Only then do we begin to be transformed into radical Christlike lovers.

Boyd, Gregory A. Repenting of Religion – Turning from Judgment to the Love of God. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2004.