Why did the beneficent God give a commandment to Adam and Eve in Paradise?

This commandment was not a burden upon Adam and Eve, but a gift to them out of His divine providence. How?

God created humanity in his own likeness, that is, bearing the nature of love, longing to love and to be loved by others. God fulfilled them with His own personal love, and humanity needed to reply to God’s love with love. So, the commandment was a means that enabled our first parents to show their practical love for their Creator, if they so chose.

Without commandments, humanity cannot not experience one of God’s greatest gifts — namely free will. Through commandments, humanity has the right to choose whether to accept God in their lives and nature or to reject Him and disobey His commandments.

God did not leave them alone, but He was their Helper; not by coercion, but only if they so willed with complete freedom. St. Macarius the Great speaks of Adam’s potential in God thus: “So long as the Word of God [the Logos] was with him, and the commandment, everything was his. The Word Himself was to him an inheritance; He was his clothing, and a glory that was his defence; He was his instruction … The Word Himself being with him was everything to him, whether knowledge, or experience, or inheritance, or instruction … and so long as he abode in the commandment he was a friend of God.”⁵²⁶

524 St. Clement of Alexandria, The Instructor 1.3 (ANF 2:210). See also l.8.

525 Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans , Books 1–5, 3.6.1–2 (FOTC 103:203–204).

526 St. Macarius the Great, Fifty Spiritual Homilies of St. Macarius the Egyptian , trans., A. J. Mason (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1921) 12.6–8: pp. 91–92.