3. How could a penalty so great be justly connected with disobedience to so slight a command?
To this question we may reply:
(a) So slight a command presented the best test of the spirit of obedience.
Cicero: “Parva res est, at magna culpa.” The child's persistent disobedience in one single respect to the mother's command shows that in all his other acts of seeming obedience he does nothing for his mother's sake, but all for his own,—shows, in other words, that he does not possess the spirit of obedience in a single act. S. S. Times: “Trifles are trifles only to triflers. Awake to the significance of the insignificant! for you are in a world that belongs not alone to the God of the Infinite, but also to the God of the infinitesimal.”
(b) The external command was not arbitrary or insignificant in its substance. It was a concrete presentation to the human will of God's claim to eminent domain or absolute ownership.
John Hall, Lectures on the Religious rise of Property, 10—“It sometimes happens that owners of land, meaning to give the use of it to others, without alienating it, impose a nominal rent—a quit-rent, the passing of which acknowledges the recipient as owner and the occupier as tenant. This is understood in all lands. In many an old English deed, ‘three barley-corns,’ ‘a fat capon,’ or ‘a shilling,’ is the consideration [pg 590]which permanently recognizes the rights of lordship. God taught men by the forbidden tree that he was owner, that man was occupier. He selected the matter of property to be the test of man's obedience, the outward and sensible sign of a right state of heart toward God; and when man put forth his hand and did eat, he denied God's ownership and asserted his own. Nothing remained but to eject him.”
(c) The sanction attached to the command shows that man was not left ignorant of its meaning or importance.
Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Cf. Gen. 3:3—“the tree which is in the midst of the garden”; and see Dodge, Christian Theology, 206, 207—“The tree was central, as the commandment was central. The choice was between the tree of life and the tree of death,—between self and God. Taking the one was rejecting the other.”
(d) The act of disobedience was therefore the revelation of a will thoroughly corrupted and alienated from God—a will given over to ingratitude, unbelief, ambition, and rebellion.
The motive to disobedience was not appetite, but the ambition to be as God. The outward act of eating the forbidden fruit was only the thin edge of the wedge, behind which lay the whole mass—the fundamental determination to isolate self and to seek personal pleasure regardless of God and his law. So the man under conviction for sin commonly clings to some single passion or plan, only half-conscious of the fact that opposition to God in one thing is opposition in all.