To eat from any tree, indeed, to do anything at all, from whatever motive, that is contrary to the will and word of our Creator and the Ruler of this world is itself lawlessness. It is a frame of mind that asserts the creature’s will against the Creator’s, that pushes the Creator aside and makes central to everything the pursuit of one’s own egotistical interests and interpretation of life. That is, in principle, what “sin” is. The second-century writer Theophilus of Antioch (AD 115–181) said: “It was not the tree, as some think, but the disobedience which had the death in it.”21
