God is love, and in His love, He did not withhold anything from Adam but gave him everything he needed to be happy, so he could live in the fullness of peace and be completely immersed in divine love. But many ask: why then did God allow Satan, the deceitful enemy, to tempt Eve and Adam and to test them? And why does He still allow Satan the tempter — a world of temptations and pain — and the human body with its desires and lusts, to all wage war upon the human soul till today? We can say that allowing Satan to tempt Eve and Adam is an indication of God’s love. The very existence of this spiritual warfare is a declaration of human authority and human value in God’s eyes, for God gave humanity the gift of free will. If God had showered us with His love, granted us everything we need, and left us to delight in the paradise without any trials, we would have been like chess pieces moved by a player. Life would have been tasteless, and paradise would have been without beauty, because we would have been incapable of freely partaking of a relationship of mutual love with God.
The scholar Tertullian says, “For [God] afforded room for a conflict, wherein man might crush his enemy [Satan] with the same freedom of his will as had made him succumb to him … and so worthily recover his salvation by a victory [by the Lord’s grace]; wherein also the devil might receive a more bitter punishment, through being vanquished by him whom he had previously injured; and wherein God might be discovered to be so much the more good, as waiting for man to return from his present life to a more glorious paradise, with a right to pluck of the tree of life.”640