God’s Word for You

Genesis 2:16 The positive command

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Monday, August 24, 2026

16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From every tree in the garden you may eat freely.

Here God gives the man a commandment. It begins with a positive, permissive command: “Eat whatever you want from every tree here in this garden.” As soon as life begins, the Lord knows that his creatures will be hungry. So it was with the daughter of Jairus. When Jesus raised her from the dead, the first thing he said to her parents was for them to give her something to eat (Luke 8:55). God looks after all of our needs. There will be another side to this command to Adam, since there was one forbidden tree, but we can take a moment to remember the importance of God’s law, and its three uses.

Strictly speaking, the law is a divine doctrine which teaches what is right and God-pleasing and which condemns everything that is sinful and contrary to God’s will. At this time, Adam was still sinless and free of any guilt, but he still had the law to obey. The law provided him with a means to worship.

We see here the establishment of the first estate of mankind. The three estates are the church, the home, and the government. The role of the government is, at its most simple, the protection of the human body and life, and to hold sin in check (Romans 13:4). The role of the church, on the other hand, is the rescue and salvation of the soul. In the home, these two roles are mixed, for the parents care not only about the physical welfare of their children, but also about their spiritual welfare.

Here in the first church, which was Adam by himself, there was the command from God. This was the word of God, and Adam had a way to obey the Lord. Had he remained without any sin, this would have been all of the preaching he ever needed. This first command, the permissive command (“You may eat”) would have been sufficient to show the goodness of God, and let us notice once again that only Adam heard it.

We often teach our students that they can be confident to pray “Our Father” in the Lord’s Prayer, and that they could still say “Our Father” even if they were convinced that there was not a single believer left in the whole world besides them. For by saying “Our” when he first gave us this prayer, our Lord Jesus included us in his “Our” even though we were not yet born. And while we could think of the millions of Christians who have lived and died over the centuries, we can most especially think of Jesus our Lord who prays with us: “Our Father in heaven.” For Jesus was raised to life and even now he is “at the right hand of God and is also interceding for us” (Romans 8:34) and praying along with us to the Father. In the same way, Adam could have prayed “Our Father,” fully confident that the Son of God was praying as well, together with the Holy Spirit, for the Spirit, too, “intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express” (Romans 8:26).

Does this law for Adam fall into the category we often call the Third Use of the law? Certainly this was not a command to curb sin in the world, nor to expose sin in Adam’s heart as if with a mirror. Is not this a guide for holy, godly, and God-pleasing living for this man? It would be better to call Adam’s life under this command a fruit of the Spirit. For our Confession distinguishes this way: “Works done according to the law are, and are called, works of the law as long as they are extorted from people only under the coercion of punishments and the threat of God’s wrath. Fruits of the Spirit, however, are those works which the Spirit of God, who dwells in all believers, works through the regenerated, and which the regenerated perform in so far as they are reborn and do them spontaneously as if they knew of no command, threat, or reward. In his Epistles St. Paul calls this the law of Christ… Thus God’s children are ‘not under the law, but under grace’ (Romans 6:14).” (Formula of Concord).

In this way Adam sets an example for Christians, to follow the will of God with joy and the obedience that comes from gratefulness. The grace of God is with us and guides us (Romans 16:20). The compassion of God touches our hearts and restores us (Lamentations 3:32). The blood of Christ our Savior heals us (1 Peter 2:24; 1 John 1:7), and the word of God is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path (Psalm 119:105).

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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