Knowledge of Good and Evil

The Bible speaks of knowledge of good and evil. For instance, in Genesis 2:17, God forbids the eating of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In Genesis 3:22, God says that man, after having disobeyed the command not to eat from the tree, has become "as one of us, to know good and evil". Elsewhere, in Isaiah 7:16, the Bible speaks of a boy before he is able to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that you abhor shall be desolate of both her kings.

The Arminian or free willer will speak of this as proof that free will does exist and that man has the ability to choose without coercion from God or something else between good and evil. But, is this conclusion necessarily so? After reading the Bible from Genesis to Revelation the concept of free will is not ever found. So if this is so, then the Arminian reasoning is false. So the question is what does it therefore mean for the Bible to speak of having a knowledge of good and evil?

The problem today in reading Scripture or talking to others about Scripture is that many read the Bible through a lense. Of course, we all have lenses or glasses. The issue is not that we ought not to read the Bible without lenses, but we ought not to bring lenses from outside the text of Scripture and reading those concepts back into scripture. Yes, interpretation of scripture often deals with logical deduction; but the only logical deduction that is founded upon Scripture is that which is followed from the text of Scripture. The Bible no where says man has free will nor allures to the point of such.

So the question is what does it therefore mean for the Bible to speak of having a knowledge of both good and evil? To put simply, we often say that a man has a knowledge of a thing after adequate study of it. This is philosophy 101. I cannot work on trucks or cars because I am not well versed in such things. Likewise, to have a knowledge of both good and evil is simply to know both good and evil. To know good and to know evil. Man from the garden has become evil, able to commit evil. Likewise, the Bible in Isaiah 7 does not say that man is not sinful from birth but rather that he is not able to rightly be able to distinguish between the two points proficiently. Christ grew in wisdom of the truth. He did so without sin. As he grew, he became more and more proficient to distinguish between good and evil without sin. Likewise, when Adam and Eve sinned in the garden they became sinners knowing evil. God, knows how to distinguish the good from the evil because He is God and the law is contingent upon what he deems is right and wrong. The Bible even speaks of those who are not able to distinguish between the two (these are not infants either).

Which came first Original Guilt or Original Sin?

The federal headship of Adam may not seem germane to a descriptive psychology of human nature. As an office or function it does not even describe Adam's nature. But without it there is no understanding of the later generations - Cain, Lamech, Paul, and Alexander the coppersmith. Much of this material has already been touched upon, so that a reminder, some implications, and a small addition will be sufficient here. The small addition will be a defense of the consistency of immediate imputation with the philosophy of Realism, a consistency which Hodge denies.
In the discussion on traducianism it was necessary to anticipate the doctrine of immediate imputation. The essential point was there made clear: Depravity is a part of the penalty for sin, therefore the guilt logically precedes. The question is, on what ground does God hold us, Adam's posterity, guilty? The Biblical doctrine is that God imputes Adam's guilt to us immediately; that is, without an intermediary step. The word immediately here does not refer to time. One might say that God imputed Adam's guilt to us the very moment that Adam sinned. This could well be true, though it is more accurate to say that God imputed this guilt from all eternity. Clearly the doctrine of immediate imputation does not focus on time, as the contemporary usage of the word might suggest: The question is as stated above: Does God impute guilt because of our inherited depravity, or does he impute it without this as a means? The Biblical reason for the doctrine of immediate imputation is that depravity is a part of the penalty the guilt entails. We are not guilty because we are depraved; we are depraved because we are guilty.
Of course we are also guilty of our own voluntary transgressions here and now. This, however, is irrelevant to the present matter. The present matter is our relation to Adam's first sin.
The Westminster Confession uses a very carefully phrased paragraph to distinguish between inherited depravity and imputed guilt. It is so carefully yet so naturally worded that most readers probably fail to see the implications. The confessional statement is: 'They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed, and the same death in sin and corrupted nature conveyed to al their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation' (VI, 3). Note: the guilt was imputed; the corruption was conveyed. - Gordon H. Clark, The Biblical Doctrine of Man