The man God created is very different from the other things that God created. Man, like the angels, has a spirit, and like the lower animals, also has a soul. When God created man, He gave man an absolute free will. He did not make man a machine which can only turn according to His direction. After observing the way God commanded man in Genesis 2 concerning what to eat and what not to eat, we can see that the man God created is not a dead machine under God's manipulation. Rather, he has a free will. If he wants to obey God, he can obey Him. If he wants to disobey God, he can disobey Him. He has an absolute sovereign power over himself. Both obedience and disobedience are at his discretion, and he can choose either at will. This is the most important point. We have to realize that in our spiritual life God never robs us of our freedom. Therefore, without active participation on our part, He will not do anything for us. Whether it be God or the devil, no one can work on us without the consent of our will, because man's will is free.
The spirit was originally the highest part of man, and the soul and the body were subject to it. Under normal conditions, the spirit is like the lady of a house, the soul is like the steward, while the body is like the servants. When the lady of the house needs something done, she charges the steward, and the steward in turn directs the servants to do it accordingly. The lady gives the order in private, while the servants take the order from the steward. Outwardly, the steward seems to be the master. But actually, the real master is the lady of the house. Unfortunately, man fell, failed, and sinned, so that the original, proper order of the spirit, soul, and body was overturned.
God has given man sovereign power over himself. Man's soul is indeed endowed with many gifts from God, among which the most important ones are the mind and the will, or the consciousness and the volition. God's original goal was for man to receive and digest God's spiritual life with the truth and reality in this spiritual life. God has given these gifts to man in order that man would live for Him according to His knowledge and His will. If man's spirit and soul were as perfect, healthy, living, and normal as when they were created, his body would have remained forever and would not have changed. If he had exercised the will in his soul to take the fruit of life, God's own life would have entered into his spirit; it would have saturated his soul and would have changed his body, so that he would not have needed to die or see corruption and would have received the "eternal life." If that were the case, the soul-life would have been fully filled with the spirit-life, and man's whole being would have become spiritual. Contrary to this, when the order of the spirit and the soul was destroyed, the inner man became darkened, and man's mortal body became no longer enduring. Soon everything that belongs to the body will go into destruction and corruption.
We know that between the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, man's soul did not choose the tree of life. Instead, he chose the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In Genesis 2:17 God forbade Adam to eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and told man that in the day he ate of it he would surely die. Yet in the preceding verse God had promised that the fruits of all other trees could be eaten. We see in this chapter that God purposely mentioned the tree of life first and then the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. He also promised that the fruit of all trees except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil could be eaten freely. Was it not God's purpose that Adam should eat of the fruit of the tree of life? Who can say that this was not His purpose?