God's knowledge of Good and Evil

I just started again at the beginning of the Bible this week and I've loved reading Genesis. This morning Adam and Eve are deceived into eating the fruit of the "tree of the knowledge of good and evil".  They are told by the serpent that they will be 'like God'. Apparently, the devil is insinuating that God has got his fingers crossed behind his back, he's holding out on the man and the woman and therefore shouldn't be trusted.

So they eat the fruit. The curses and consequences are pronounced after a big round of the blame game.  Then God says that the people are like him: they know good and evil now. So there was some truth in the serpent's accusation? Was God holding out on them? There was a kind of truth in the serpent's deception - maybe it was accurate but not precisely true. God does know evil, but not in the way we do. We know it from having participated in it, we know it from the 'inside'. God knows it from having an awareness of it from the 'outside'.

What struck me this morning though, is the irony between God's knowledge of evil and ours. You would think that we know evil better than God. But we don't. People often say that we 'need' the dark to see the light. Right? I don't think so. Dark is just dark. Dark doesn't have the capacity for insight. Only light does. Though we know evil from the inside, God has a clarity of understanding about evil. Since evil is always a perversion of the good, only God has a pure, uncorrupted resource from which he can evaluate and understand perversion. We are in it and therefore we understand it less.

When Chesterton wanted to write the perfect detective he was right to make Father Brown a Catholic priest. Of course the priest would make the best detective! Who else understands evil but the man striving to be holy? Evil teaches us nothing about evil - it is only goodness that can supply the insight we need.