The creation is complete and God has made the first human being out of the dust of the ground. God now places this man in a particular location on the earth.
"Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there He put the man He had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground---trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil." (Genesis 2:8-9) God created man with the free will to choose for himself whether or not to serve Him. There are two very important trees in the middle of the garden, and we will study them later on in Genesis, but for now we will just keep in mind that there would be little point in giving man the right to choose if he never had any choices to make.
"A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates." (Genesis 2:10-14)
It has so far been impossible for anyone of modern times to pinpoint the location of Eden. The locations of the Pishon and Gihon rivers are unknown; they have not existed for a very long time. In addition, some geologists believe that the rivers we call the Tigris and Euphrates now may not be the original Tigris and Euphrates since they are having problems reconciling the current Tigris River with the statement that it once ran along "the east side of Ashur". The topography of the world now is likely quite different than it was then. We don't know what changes came about as the result of the great flood. We don't know how many rivers have changed their courses over time. We don't know how many rivers have run completely dry or have been diverted underground. Satellite images show an ancient fossil river in the area where the Pishon was said to be, but there is no visible evidence of a fossil river that might have been the Gihon, so determining the place where all four rivers of Eden would have branched out from one single river has proven to be impossible. Eden is generally accepted by many scholars and geologists to have been located somewhere in the Middle East; other than that we can't accurately speculate.
"The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.'" (Genesis 2:15-17) Adam was free to eat of any other tree, including the tree of life. This may explain why the lifespans of the early characters of the Old Testament were unusually long. Something in this fruit may have affected Adam and his offspring throughout several generations. If man had never fallen from grace, he would have apparently lived forever, but instead he ate the forbidden fruit and death entered the world. It's important to note that God didn't say that Adam would fall immediately dead the instant he tasted the wicked fruit. The warning is far more dire than having just one person drop dead upon biting into the fruit. The warning is that eating the fruit will bring death into the world, and death is something the world had not experienced and was not created to experience. The warning is that eating the fruit will pollute everything that exists and that the fall of man will take the entire creation down with him.
Why did God create human beings with the ability to choose whether or not to serve Him? We don't have a clear answer to this question. When we did our study on Revelation, we spent some time speculating that it may not be possible to create beings with the amount of intelligence we have without also giving these beings free will. In other words, we would have been smart enough to know we didn't have the ability to make choices. In fact, why give us the intelligence to reason things out if we weren't capable of making any decisions we weren't programmed to make? It would have actually been wasteful to make our brains as sophisticated as they are, and I don't believe God is ever wasteful.
But I think also something deeper is going on here. If we never had the opportunity to choose to love God, could we ever have had a real relationship with Him? If we had never sinned and needed a Redeemer, could our souls ever have experienced the overwhelming and glorious joy that we feel when we are filled with gratitude and awe over what our Redeemer did for us? I don't think we could have related to our Creator in a way that satisfies both us and Him if we had been incapable of doing anything of our own free will---if we were programmed only to do and think and say certain things. In that case, we would only have been able to do what we were told, and although we would have been able to perfectly obey God's laws, how would that have been valuable to Him? The Lord Jesus said even if we kept all the commandments and never once sinned against God, we would still be unprofitable servants. (Luke 17:10) A profitable servant is a servant who does more than he has been told to do. A profitable servant goes above and beyond. How do we go above and beyond? When we choose to make God the Lord of our lives. When we choose to do what's right even when it would be easier to do what's wrong. When we go against our fallen nature and when we go against the carnal culture of this world, we are giving valuable service to our Lord.
Do you want your spouse and children and family members and friends to love you because they have to or would you prefer them to love you because they want to? It wouldn't be very satisfying if your spouse loved you only because he or she had no other option. The reason becoming engaged is so exciting is because our significant other has chosen us out of all the other people in the world. The reason being in a long term marriage is joyful is because our spouse has chosen to remain with us and stay faithful to us even though they could have chosen otherwise. If we loved God only because we had to, there would be no joy in that for us or for Him. God created us to experience joy and fulfillment and satisfaction. No true and lasting joy and fulfillment and satisfaction can be found in a life apart from Him. Satan has offered us many substitutes but they always fall short. They always lead us down a path of dependence on the wrong things, down a path that causes us to crave more and more of what is numbing us to the reality that we are not being satisfied at all. This is why we serve the false gods of money or possessions or unhealthy relationships or the type of ambition that focuses only on ourselves. This is why we fall into obsessions and addictions. This is why we engage in behaviors that harm our physical bodies or our mental health. God created us for fellowship with Him. If we have that, then anything else good that happens to us is the icing on the cake. If we don't have a relationship with our Creator, no amount of anything else will ever fill the emptiness in our souls.
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