And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
…
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
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Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.

~ Genesis 2:9,16-17; 3:22-23

Christian freedom is foundationally covenantal. In the Garden of Eden, God expresses the extent of man’s free will in covenant. Promises were given by what God had spoken in creation, and these promises were specifically sealed through God’s command of forbidding that was accompanied by a threat. Therefore free will was not simply a matter of discovering and recreating nature’s abundance in thanksgiving to God, but a moral obligation to faith and worship in the discovery and recreation of God’s free nature. As a matter of possibility, Adam was free to eat against God’s command so that his obedience to God’s command would be accounted as a free act of special worship to God. When Adam sinned, binding himself to the knowledge of possible worlds, for even the tree’s name insinuated such knowledge, it was a binding to sin, for Adam had now exhausted the possible world of breaking God’s covenant while simultaneously trading in his freedom. Adam could no longer choose proper worship freely because even an attempt to choose God for worship would now be determined through the exhaustion of disobedience. How could we say an act of volition is special and primary when an alternative has already been selected? Thus, Adam and his posterity could no longer please God with voluntary worship.

Humankind is then bound to sin; and therefore sin is the greatest enemy to freedom. And since the possible world of sin is actively evident amongst all generations, slavery to sin is perpetual to man’s history. But God, who is perpetually determined to reveal his free nature so to redeem free worship for man, has upheld his covenant promises and threats in an extraordinary way. Jesus Christ was born a man, as very God in the flesh and Son to God the Father, to receive the exhaustion of God’s threatened curse of death due to human sin. Jesus never sinned, and was therefore free in his humanity since the world of disobeying his Father was impossible in his divinity. The Father decreed the human death of his own Son, so the Son was torn in agony over receiving the wrath of God for the sins of the world. “For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin …” so that Christ’s free obedience would be the final determiner of our free worship through his free-from-sin embodiment of sin’s curse “… so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

So Christians freely worship God in the name of Jesus Christ, for such worship is not determined by the exhaustion of disobedience but by Christ whose free obedience exhausted sin to death through the outpouring of his blood. The Son of God was banished from Jerusalem’s garden so he would be banished from sin’s tomb in order to be the first gardener of the New Jerusalem. Christ was raised from the dead that Christian freedom be vivified in our justification for our willing and active crucifixion of sin in Jesus’s name. And Christ is ascended so that freedom is principally perpetuated in the visible worship of the invisible Christ. For though Jesus is temporarily invisible, so the Scripture, the sacraments, and the face-to-face preaching of the written and corporeal word amongst the assembly of confessing saints renders the Word becoming flesh to be a covenantal reality for the believer’s faith by the free witness of God the Holy Spirit.