Was God jealous of Adam and Eve?
Those sentences which are colored in orange are from Maharishi Dayananda Saraswati book Satyarth Prakash (The Light of Truth) and those which are colored in black are Jerry Thomas’s response.
"And the Lord God said, behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live for ever: So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." (3: 22, 24.) C. ~ Why did God become so jealous of Adam's becoming His equal iin knowledge, and was it such a bad thing indeed? Why did He entertain such misgivings at all since no one can ever become God's equal? This also shows that he was not God but man. Wherever there is mention of God in the Bible it is related of Him as if He was a man. Now mark! How miserable Adam's progress in knowledge made God! How jealous He was of Adam's eating the fruit of the tree of life. When he first placed Adam and Eve in the garden (of Eden), he was not aware that he would have to turn them out of it. It follows, therefore, that the God of the Christians is not omniscient. That he had to place a flaming sword to guard the tree of life clearly shows that this was also the work of a man not of God.
Answer: As for the omniscience of God, I have already answered it and showed that every other worldview has similar questions. In this part, I will deal with allegation of Jealousy against God. Since we have already seen the kind of miserable and disastrous knowledge that Adam and Eve gained, Maharishi’s assumption that it was out of jealousy that God sent out Adam and Eve is totally baseless. If Adam and Eve were to eat from the tree of life, they would have continued in their state of misery for ever. God, out of His love, did not want Adam and Eve to continue in the misery but rather redeem them at the fullness of time. Now let us see what the LORD God did to redeem human beings and how He himself offered them the everlasting life. John 3:16 “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” A jealous (in the negative sense of that word and not the positive sense) God can never do that. This in turn proves that God of the Bible is All-loving God.
anna wonderful explanation, i like it very much
Yes, and yet not many Christians themselves are taught this and they accept that God was just being vindictive by barring Adam and Eve from the Tree of Life just for eating a simple fruit. Yes, Adam (and Eve) did disobey God. But while the act is a simple naughty act, the fruit that they ate came from an extraordinary tree… of Knowledge of Good and Evil. God has always allowed mankind to make his own choice, either to follow him, or to follow themselves. The separation that came from “…you will be like God, knowing good and evil” was then pieced back together when the second Adam said in the OTHER garden, “…yet let not my will, but YOUR will be done.”
So yes, if they had accessed the Tree of Life, that misery from having the knowledge of “lack”, of evil, would be allowed to continue forever.