“Must we walk through hell, so that peace may feel like heaven”
There’s a question I can’t shake: is the experience of evil necessary for the appreciation of good?
Not as a thought experiment. As the actual structure of what we’re doing here.
Adam and Eve knew they shouldn’t eat the fruit. God told them directly. The knowledge was there, clear and explicit. They ate anyway. Which means knowledge of something isn’t the same as understanding it. You can know a thing is wrong and still not feel the weight of what you’re choosing against.
That’s the move that changed everything.
Here’s the version I grew up with: the fall was the worst thing that ever happened. Humanity had paradise and threw it away. But there’s something in the story we skip over. Before the fall, Adam and Eve weren’t in heaven. They were in neutrality. They lived in goodness without ever knowing its opposite. Like someone born into wealth who can’t feel gratitude because they have no reference point for its absence.
I understand this personally.
Before I had ever tried sushi, it wasn’t even a category. A friend recommended a spot once and I thought it was fine. No strong feeling either way. I didn’t know if sushi was good or bad. I just thought life was fine the way it was. Then I found Trapper Sushi. If you’ve lived in Washington, you know it: all-you-can-eat for $25, a sushi bar, solid rolls, good vibes. An American interpretation of the thing: every flavor you could want, stacked and sauced and presented in ways that felt like abundance. I was sixteen, had my first job money, and I thought I had found the best sushi in the world.
My brother was adamant I was wrong. He’d say, “Trapper’s is where I go when I just need the taste without wanting to spend the money.” I didn’t believe him. This had all the flavors, all the stuff. What else could there be? The knowledge that something better existed was sitting right there in what he told me. It didn’t change anything. I kept going back. The knowledge was there. I just didn’t believe it applied to me.
Then he finally takes me to an omakase spot. The chef makes each piece one at a time and tells you exactly how to eat it. No menus, no choices. Just the fish and the rice, simple, one piece at a time. One of the best experiences I’ve ever had, not knowing just how great fish could be by itself, just how good rice could be without needing anything else. The beauty was in the simplicity of what was given. All those extra flavors I’d been stacking at Trapper’s weren’t improving the sushi. They were hiding my ignorance of it.
That night I understood the difference between the two. Not because my brother told me. Because I tasted it. And it was only then that I could truly know what good sushi is, because I had something to compare it against. The Trapper’s wasn’t a waste. It was the reference point. Without it, the omakase is just food.
I think the same thing happens with Adam and Eve.
Is the experience of evil necessary so that we may appreciate good? Is it enough to know something is evil, or must we experience it to truly understand? Adam and Eve answer that question. They had the knowledge. God told them directly. And they bit the fruit anyway, showing us that knowledge of something does not constitute understanding. You have to live inside it.
Which leads somewhere uncomfortable.
What if this life — this whole arc from the garden to whatever comes after — is the mechanism by which we learn to truly know God? Not know about Him. Know Him. The way you know warmth only after you’ve been cold. Is this life simply the experience of hell, of being away from God, such that when we rejoin with Him we can truly appreciate what we have? For there is no good without evil. Is this the neutrality that Adam and Eve experienced before the fall — not heaven, not hell, just the absence of knowing? I believe this life must be experienced. It is not enough to know. Not enough to watch from a distance. You have to go live it, make the mistakes, feel the distance, such that you may grow and come back understanding what you left.
It is only through understanding that someone may truly know.
The fall didn’t stop with Adam and Eve. It scales. Every person walks their own version: the choices, the distance, the return. And all of human history is this arc, moving further from God, learning what we chose when we chose against Him, slowly grasping the magnitude of what we left. Every person knowing good and evil for themselves to truly understand, while all of humanity collectively goes through the steps of the fall, growing further and further from God to understand the wrong of not trusting in Him, trusting instead in the knowledge He gave us.
Look at what we built in the meantime. We developed cameras to do what our eyes and memory already did. Hold what we saw. Preserve what we experienced. We’ve spent centuries engineering approximations of what was already given, reaching for a perfection we couldn’t name, striving for something we’d walked away from without knowing it. Every invention aimed at holding onto time, extending sight, capturing the moment. All of it is a record of humanity trying to get back. We just didn’t know that’s what we were doing.
After the omakase, I would never go back to thinking Trapper’s is everything. The tragic irony is I’d still go back. It’s cheaper, easier to attain. The same is true with heaven. The eye of the needle is real. It’s something I’m desperately trying to get to. I’d still go for the price, for the vibe, for a Tuesday night. But I wouldn’t confuse it for the pinnacle. I’ve tasted what the pinnacle is. The choice now is genuine. Before, I wasn’t really choosing anything. I just didn’t know what I was missing.
Is it enough to know something is evil without ever experiencing it? Adam and Eve answer that. Knowledge wasn’t enough. They had to bite the fruit to understand what they’d been given. I knew there was better sushi for a year. It meant nothing until I tasted it.
I think we have to do the same. Not just know it. Live it. Make the mistakes. Feel the distance. Because that’s the only way to understand what we come back to.
And this is where the knowledge of good and evil connects to something deeper than consequence. It connects to free will itself.
You cannot freely choose something you do not understand. Real choice — the kind that means something — requires knowing what you are choosing between. Without the knowledge of evil, without the experience of life away from God, any return to Him would not be a choice at all. It would be a default. A going back to the only place you have ever known, not because you chose it but because you never understood there was anything else. That is not love. That is not the relationship God is after.
The knowledge of good and evil is not just the thing that caused the fall. It is the thing that makes genuine, free love possible. It is the precondition for choosing God and meaning it.
His love forces us to hate Him in some way. I don’t know about you, but I got spanked as a kid. I remember trying to cross the road without holding my mom’s hand. I almost got hit by a car, but she pulled me back at the last second and spanked me right there on the street for disobeying and almost getting myself killed. That violence was the greatest act of love. She was willing to be hated by me so that I would never know the loss of my life, never get hit by the car. She stepped in to teach me suffering on a micro level so I never experience it on the macro. I think the same is true for God letting us experience the suffering of this world, such that we never experience the misery of a life away from Him, spanking us with this life so that we never experience getting hit by the car. Hell. Eternal separation from God.
So this life is not punishment. The distance, the reaching, the mistakes, the centuries of building technology, infrastructure, convention trying to recover what we gave away. None of it is punishment. It is education. Life’s experiences are the lesson by which we come to know good and evil such that when we are finally restored, when heaven comes, we arrive with understanding. We do not return to the neutrality of the garden. We do not return as Adam and Eve before the fruit, living in goodness without comprehension of it. We return as people who have lived the loss. Who know what it is to be far from God, to try to replicate what was given, to build and strive and reach for something we couldn’t name. And because of that, the choice we make in heaven is not a default. It is not the absence of any other option.
We will only ever choose Him. Not because there is nowhere else to go. Because we know what else there is, and we understand what we are choosing.
That is the beauty of it. We only ever know what we had after it was lost. God knows this. And rather than simply preventing the loss, He allows us to walk through it, such that when we find our way back, we find it with the understanding that makes it real. The return is not just restoration. It is restoration after comprehension. It means something different to come home when you know what it is to be gone. We get to experience the loss to truly appreciate finding what we had. The prodigal son. And what we find, we will never confuse for anything less than what it is.
Maybe that is the answer to the question this essay opened with. Do we walk through hell so that heaven may feel like peace? Yes. But not only peace. Recognition. The peace of someone who has come back to something they now fully understand they have. The joy of tasting the omakase and knowing, in a way they could not have known before, exactly what they are eating.