An explanation of the Genesis account
This is from a friend of mine that is not a baptised JW. He was raised by a JW mother, unbelieving father. He is late 30's. I have watched him struggle on making a decision as to whether he will dedicate his life as a JW for 6 years, since I have met him. Recently, he told me he thought he was going to do something about the truth.
God cannot create something that is absolutely perfect. To do so would be to clone himself, and inifinity itself. That is why the bible says of creation 'and he saw that it was good' it never says he saw it was perfect. The statement itself implies that the possibility of it not being good. The closest god can come to creating perfection is something that chooses to be parallel on a lower plane to his own perfection. Free will is necesary in the equation. I think we can only be perfect through love. Not the same as god who is absolute, and intrinsically perfect, but through love we become something of a mirror image of this, which is what Jesus was trying to show all along. We do not reach some higher plane where we become incapable of sin, we simply reach our god given level of feeling ,and understanding that is parallel to god's plane where we choose not to sin. Then we become parallel to god's purpose, we bond with it, and to him. Adam and Eve apart from Jesus were the only perfect humans. We are born imperfect which implies that we unlike them are not only imperfect but also defective. So if we are defective what makes us this way? What is the cause of our imperfection? It would seem something that was, is now missing. The answer goes back to what is necesary to the equation. 'free will'
The tree of the knowledge of good and bad was itself the link to god, because it offered us a choice, it allowed us our free will in it's most fundamental form. We seem to look at it as something evil or negative today, but it was in fact our neutral link to god himself. The consquences were not something god made up when he said 'in the day you eat from it you will positively die'. The consequence being death was a warning to something beyond god's control. God had to destroy them afterward, he had no choice. Why? Because if you create something and give it free will it is inherently accountable to everything else by the choices it makes. The alternative is take away everything from it so that it has nothing and so there is no accountability. This is in fact what death is. I think Adam and Eve fully understood this, and by understanding this they were held to a higher accountability. Satan exploited the fact that it was something beyond god's control and deceivingly shown it as god's weakness. So I see it as pure deception on Satan's part when he said they would become like god. Adam and Eve were probably aware that this tree represented something so vast that even god must obey it's meaning. Satan saw this as an opportunity to exploit Jehovah. This mere tree is greater than Jehovah? Ha eat from it and become like him.
Because Jehovah created, he has humbled himself to something that he has no choice but to abide by. As the bible says he does not wish to destroy anyone, but there is none higher and so the consquences of maintaining the balance rest on his shoulders. He is complete within himself and purely capable of administering this judgement, even if it pains him to do so, it will not interfere with the outcome. Because in the end the choice is ours not his.
So just maybe the meaning of all of this is that we exist in the best possible world. Not as it is now of course but as it was meant to be. Can we imagine something better? To be fair no we cannot. What we can imagine are better things within the frame of our understanding, but as for the whole picture we cannot possibly comprehend what it takes to make it all work. But maybe.. just maybe.... oneday in some very distant point in time we may become so in tune that we are capable of transformation into something else. God's plan surely does not stop with simply populating. We are here to grow, and evolve into something that is absolute on it's own plane. True perfection perhaps. No matter what it is, it is something beyond what god could create initially because it ends up being a choice we make. Jehovah is the source who has set it all in motion, we are the ones (with his direction) who must make it happen. It's like a parent to a child, you give them life, yet it is up to them to become something you could not initially give them.
I also wanted to add something else I was thinking about.
The tree of the knowledge of good and bad was neccesary . I think it is possible that any other sin Jehovah could have corrected the consequences of himself. No other sin would degrade us beyond the point that Jehovah could not correct our way. In fact sin did not exist because Jehovah could intervene directly in our lives, and balance things in our lives. Perhaps this would be the tree of life spoken of in the bible. So many things we think of as sin today, were in fact not sins at all for Adam and Eve. But once they chose to break away from Jehovah, this all changed. That is why the law became a curse to the people... they could not possibly live by a law that accounted for all of the things Jehovah would correct the consequences of had they been as Adam and Eve. But anyway... there had to be something absolute, something beyond even god's ability to correct, some choice that was ultimately ours alone. Jehovah made it as simple as possible for our sake, so that we would hardly desire it in a natural way. He simply made it a tree!