The Knowledge of Good and Evil – Who Decides Morality?

Right and wrong are ideas we wrestle with daily. But have you ever stopped to ask yourself: ‘Who has the ultimate authority to decide what is right and wrong?’

Many people believe that morality is relative. They think individuals can decide what is best for themselves, while groups determine what is best for society through majority rule. However, what is best for the group may not align with the well-being of the individual, and individuals can have differing opinions on what is right and wrong.

The idea that we are the ones who decide good from evil is flawed. If there is any morality at all, it must be objective. It must apply to everyone, even if they don’t agree with it. Morality cannot be decided by us. Yet this brings us back to the original question: Who has the ultimate authority to determine what is right and what is wrong?

Who Decides Right and Wrong

There is a concept called the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But why is that a rule? Who gave it to us? There’s another saying: “He who has the gold makes the rules.”

Every rule and every law boils down to one thing: ownership. When we respect others’ property, we acknowledge their rights. The rights of ownership are the bedrock of morality.

In case you don’t know, God owns everything. Since God created and owns everything, He has the ultimate authority to define right and wrong.

As an example if I want to use my car, that is my right. If I want to damage my car, I have that right. If you are upset about whatever I do with my car it is because you are somehow attached to something that isn’t yours.

Ah, but I hear you say, “We have rules you have to follow on the road.” Some might argue that this means others have the right to control what you do with your car, implying that the majority is in charge of what you can and cannot do with what is yours.

The reality is that even these rules are based on ownership. The roads don’t belong to you. The lives of others on the road don’t belong to you. So you cannot use your car on the road in a way that endangers lives that don’t belong to you. These rules ensure that you don’t violate others’ rights of ownership.

As the saying goes, “Possession is nine-tenths of the law.” The other tenth applies only to things that no one possesses. But the reality is that only one person owns EVERYTHING.

God created everything and everyone in existence. Everything belongs to Him. That means anything anyone “owns” is actually just in their temporary possession by permission. God still owns everything. He grants permission to use things, but it all belongs to Him.

This is why, when David sinned in the Bible by killing a man to take his wife, David said he had sinned against God and God alone. You might think his sin was against the man and his wife. But ultimately, they both belonged to God.

While David’s actions hurt them, his sin was ultimately against God because he wronged what belonged to Him. They were bystanders who suffered in the process, which is a subject of its own.

The point is this: good and evil are decided by the One who owns everything. And, frankly, it doesn’t matter whether we agree or not.

How often do we pause to consider that everything we have, even our very lives, belongs to God? What would change if we truly lived with this awareness?

The Perfect World

After God created everything (which means it all belonged to Him), He placed man in a garden and told him to rule over everything. God gave man permission to do whatever he wanted with all that He had made. Nothing was off-limits—except for one thing.

There was no death or suffering in the world. Many people claim that God created a broken world, but they seem to have overlooked the first few chapters of Genesis. When God created man, He made him perfect.

The Bible says that man was created in the image of God. In other words, man was created to act, talk, walk, live, and breathe like God. He was perfect and sinless. So what happened?

Understanding the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

There was one thing missing that would make man completely like God: the knowledge of good and evil. To have that knowledge, man needed the ability to sin, yet the righteousness to choose not to.

God placed that tree in the garden not to tempt them but to perfect them. Like God, they now had a choice: to live with self-control or to dive into chaos.

Suddenly, man had the choice to be righteous or to sin. Adam and Eve were not tempted until the serpent came along. They had everything they needed. They just didn’t have that one tree, which belonged to God alone.

God did not tempt them by giving them a choice; He gave them free will.

But to illustrate the point, I have a voice and the choice to run through the streets screaming, “The Martians have landed!” However, I am not tempted to do that in the least. Thankfully, I’m in my right mind and have no temptation to do something like that!

The Fall: Temptation and Deception

The first law given to humanity was simple: do not eat from a specific tree. It defined good, evil, and the consequences of disobedience.

One mistake people often make (and I have made it myself) is thinking that Adam and Eve did not know right from wrong before they ate from that tree. The truth is that they did know right from wrong.

The words “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” are not a description of the effects of its fruits. They are a title. The tree was called that because its very presence gave them the knowledge of good and evil. They didn’t need to eat from it to know the difference.

They knew God had commanded them not to eat from it, and they knew it would be wrong to disobey God. Not only that, but they also knew the penalty for disobedience was death.

Just like God, Adam and Eve knew what sin was, but they had not yet participated in sin. That’s why the tree was there—not to tempt them but to crown them with honor for choosing to do good while having the freedom to do evil.

But we all know the story. The serpent came.

Notice something important: Eve was not tempted before the serpent showed up. Even when the serpent asked about the tree, Eve firmly stated they were not to eat from it.

What changed? The serpent told her a lie. He convinced her there was something she didn’t know, something God was withholding from her. He made her look at what did not belong to her and see it as something she needed. He even made her think that God must have actually wanted her to eat it because He knew it would be good for them.

Eve had access to every tree in the garden. She already knew good from evil. But the serpent’s lie made her believe she was missing something. Not only that, he implied that God actually wanted her to eat from the tree, even though He had said otherwise. It was only after being deceived into thinking she needed the fruit that she became tempted.

Now notice something else: Eve’s eyes were not opened after she ate from the fruit. She acted in ignorance and innocence, like a child. She believed she was doing good.

Adam, however, was not deceived. He knew eating the fruit was wrong, but he ate it anyway. It was at this point that their eyes were opened. Why?

Their eyes were not opened because the fruit made them smarter. Their eyes were opened because they now felt shame and guilt for doing what they already knew was evil. They didn’t gain the knowledge of good and evil from the fruit. They gained the shame and guilt of being evil.

Like someone with a guilty conscience, they tried to hide—first in leaves, then in the bushes. If they’d had a hot shower, no doubt they would have tried to wash away their sense of dirt. They now had an intimate knowledge of what it meant to fall from good into evil.

Adam and Eve didn’t sin because they were imperfect. They sinned because they chose to set aside their perfection to experience evil. In contrast, Jesus refused to set aside His perfection and remained sinless, even when Satan tried to deceive Him.

God created all things, which means all things belong to Him, including you and me. It is His place to establish the rules of right and wrong. He does this out of love. Had Adam and Eve listened to God, they would not have died. By obeying Him, they would have shown Him honor and love as their Father.

God has given us the law. He has told us what sin is: “This is sin, and this is righteousness.”

He does this for our good. We can choose to honor Him or to disobey Him, but the authority to define right and wrong belongs only to the One who owns all things.

He gave us the law. He gave us the penalty for breaking that law. We don’t decide what is or isn’t right—He does.

We know what happened with Adam and Eve. But what about us? He didn’t tell us not to eat from that tree. What law has He given us? What are the penalties? That is what we will cover in the next unit.

Continue To Unit 2:2 – What Is the Law of God? OR

Return To Christianity 101 Unit 2 – Sin and Eternal Judgment