That "Knowledge of Good & Evil"

About the Tree of the "Knowledge of Good & Evil" we many times focus on the knowing of the evil. But forget the ability to know the "Good".

"Each person knows in himself the experience of knowing better than he does; and the experience of resolving and promising himself to do better; and the experience of trying to do better and failing; 

and the experience of “turning over new leaves,” 

and the new leaves soon blurred as the former ones;

 and in and through it all only the wearisome and discouraging experience of the treadmill or the quicksand. 

Every soul knows that the law of God is good that says that what he is doing should not be done.

Romans 7:24 

O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? 

--A body of death because it is only a body of sin--

This is the warfare that is the consequence of the enmity that by the divine word was that day in the garden implanted between mankind and Satan. 

But it is not a warfare in which the victory is always on the wrong side. It is a warfare in which the victory need not ever be on the wrong side.

*The only reason why in this divinely implanted warfare victory ever is on the wrong side; is that the soul himself seeks to gain the victory by his own battling and his own struggling. 

*The victory in this warfare can never be gained in this way; 

the disadvantages are too many, 

the opposing forces are too many and too powerful. 

The lost, 

captured, 

and imprisoned soul 

is too weak to so fight the battle as to gain the victory and deliverance alone.

Adam and Eve were already lost, captured, and enslaved to the enemy. 

*Their minds were only the reflection of his mind. 

And that being the condition, how could it be possible for them, of themselves, to carry to victory a warfare against their captor, even when the enmity had been implanted? 

On the very face of affairs, such a thing was plainly impossible. 

Q: What, then, alone could mean the implanting of the enmity and its consequent warfare? 

A: Just this: in Adam and Eve in transgression mankind was then in unity with Satan, and with the evil. There was no enmity between them. God breaks up that unity and friendship by creating and implanting in mankind enmity against Satan and the evil; 

This planting in them enmity against the evil, was in itself to give to them the knowledge of the good. And in planting fixed hatred of the evil, there was given a longing for the good.

The planting of the enmity, therefore, plainly did not make mankind good. It gave them the knowledge of the good and a longing for the good. And it broke up the absolutism of the captivity and mastery of Satan, again setting free the will and the power of choice, so that mankind were again possessed of individuality to be exercised in choosing and willing which mind they would have and who should be their master." 

E.J. Waggoner