Questions raised during the session, with answers drawn from the teaching.
Q: Did Adam add “you must not touch it” to the original prohibition — and does that matter?
God’s original instruction in Genesis 2:17 was given to Adam alone, before Eve existed. He was told not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, with no mention of touching. When Eve restated the command to the serpent, she included the addition: “you must not touch it.” Since the text gives no other source for this addition, the most natural explanation is that Adam added it when he passed the instruction along — perhaps as a protective hedge to keep Eve from getting close to the tree at all.
The motive may have been good. The effect is worth noting: Eve received a version of God’s command that was slightly off. Whether that distortion made the serpent’s opening question easier to engage with or simply reflects the ordinary way instructions get subtly changed as they pass from person to person, we cannot say for certain. But it’s a small detail that foreshadows a larger theme — the gap between what God actually says and what we end up believing he said.
Q: Was Satan tempting Adam and Eve with the same temptation he himself fell to — wanting to be like God?
This is a sharp observation, and yes — the parallel holds. The serpent’s core offer was “you will be like God.” If Satan’s own rebellion originated in a desire to ascend above his station and become something more than what he was created to be (as the Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 descriptions suggest), then what he brought to the garden was not a new temptation but his own temptation, repackaged and offered downward.
There is also a cruelty in the logic: to be “like God,” you need someone to be God over. Satan, as a spiritual being with no creaturely subjects, could not be a god over anything until God created beings capable of choosing him over their Creator. The appearance of human beings gave him that possibility. And what he offered Adam and Eve — sovereign self-determination, the right to define their own good and evil — was precisely the thing he had pursued himself. He shared his temptation and, in doing so, pulled humanity into the same trajectory he had already chosen.
The outcome followed the same logic too. Satan promised freedom. What he delivered was slavery — because once Adam and Eve chose their own authority over God’s, they became subject to the spiritual authority that now governed them. They thought they were becoming gods. They became property.
Q: Did God create evil?
This requires a careful distinction. God created all things — including created beings with genuine freedom to choose. Satan was created as a magnificent spiritual being with a specific assignment. His rebellion was his own choice, exercised against a God who had built genuine freedom into the created order. Evil, in that sense, was not created by God. It was brought into existence when the first creature with the capacity to rebel chose to do so.
There was always space for evil in God’s creation, because there was always the possibility of choosing against God. But evil did not exist as an operative reality until Satan personified it through his rebellion — until a being stood up and said, in effect, “Not your will, but mine.” Satan was the first rebel, and in being the first rebel, he became the embodiment of everything that is opposed to God. Evil is not a thing that exists the way chairs and trees exist. It is a direction — the direction away from the one who is good by nature. Satan chose that direction first, and he has been pulling others toward it ever since.
God did not create evil. He created freedom. Satan created evil by using that freedom to move against the source of all goodness.
Q (Audience contribution): Doesn’t the account of God covering Adam and Eve with animal skins foreshadow everything that comes later in the sacrificial system?
Yes — and the foreshadowing is significant precisely because it predates the law by centuries. For God to provide garments of skin, an animal had to die. Blood was shed. Something that had done nothing wrong gave its life to provide covering for those whose choices created the need for it.
This is not an incidental detail. It is the model being established before any sacrificial law is given: the covering of human failure requires the death of something innocent, and it is God — not the human being — who initiates the act. Adam and Eve’s fig leaves were their own attempt to manage the exposure. God replaced them with something that cost more and covered better.
The entire trajectory of the sacrificial system — the Passover lamb, the burnt offering, the scapegoat on the Day of Atonement — flows from this moment. The blood of bulls and goats was never sufficient on its own (Hebrews 10:4), but it was always pointing toward the sufficient sacrifice it could not itself provide. The first skin sewn in Eden points, in the end, to the same place Genesis 3:15 does: to the offspring of the woman who would come to provide what no animal ever could.
These questions were raised during the session and are preserved here as a record of what came up in the room. They are a companion to, not a replacement for, the main chapter notes.