Sunday School: God ran the first ‘just say no’ campaign. When it failed, he hired security.

In the Beginning, there was trust. After covenant was broken, security measures.

In the 1980s, First Lady Nancy Reagan took on anti-drug messaging as her ministry.

“Just Say No” was the catch phrase for the yearslong abstinence campaign. The idea was that if person simply says no — despite the societal forces, despite the peer pressure and the wide availability of drugs — they’ll be safe from the poison.

If Nancy Reagan had consulted her Bible first, she’d have known what she was up against. God himself tried history’s first Just Say No campaign. It failed spectacularly, just like hers.

In Genesis 2:17, God is showing Adam around the Garden of Eden. He can eat from any tree, God explains, except for the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

By Genesis 3:6, the first two humans have eaten from that tree and broken the first covenant with God.

Genesis 2 and 3 is history’s first Just Say No campaign: an authority figure promising certain death if you consume that plant.

God could have cut the tree down. He could have roped it off.

Instead, he went with the honor system.

He preached abstinence without practicing its best tool: eliminate the stimulus. Keep it out of sight, out of reach, out of mind.

Why would God make the tree and then call attention to it, if not as a test? Why would God offer Door No. 2, if he didn’t want man to choose it? If he couldn’t live with man choosing it?

In Genesis 3:22, God takes a much different approach to the sacred.

Genesis 3:22: “And the Lord God said, ‘the man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.’”

What if Adam and Eve had eaten from the tree of life first?

Apparently its promise outweighs the “sure” death promised in Genesis 2:17 to anyone who ate the apple. Or else there’d be no need to keep them from it.

The problem with an abstinence-only approach is, there are survivors. When people went off to college and smoked pot and their heads didn’t explode, they realized they had been lied to.

After eating the fruit God said he would “surely die” from, Adam went on to live 930 years. He was not defined by a singular mistake, even a foundational breach of covenant.

In Genesis 3:22, God expresses a fear that man “has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil.”

One of who? We are told there is No God But God. But in Genesis he says there are others, covering different territories.

Not false gods, either. Gods eye-to-eye with himself. As Ani DiFranco might say, God’s work isn’t done by God, it’s done by regional managers.

The God of creation did not feel the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was worth protecting. But the tree of life was, by his own telling.

Genesis 3:24: “After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth.”

Here we see what God does when he wants his fruits denied to man — truly denied.

God could live with man’s attempt to “become like one of us” by gaining knowledge. Eternal life, though? No way.

The tree of the knowledge of good and evil is a foreshadowing of the Tower of Babel. The lesson of both is the same: Bad things befall men who try to be like “one of us” gods.

When handshakes are no good, and the honor system fails, cherubim and flaming swords are used to keep intruders out.

So God made a security guard.