That Darn Tree

When I was a child, I was taught that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was a bad thing. How could it be otherwise? God told us that just touching it meant death. The Tree was a test of whether or not Adam and Eve really loved God and would trust Him or not. Man’s heart was corruptible and God knew this. So in many way, He placed the Tree in the Garden on purpose so that we would reveal our true hearts and fail. The Fall was always a foregone conclusion. All it took was one Serpent and one Woman to listen to it and God’s perfect plan for humanity fell apart.

Does any of this sound somewhat familiar?

I can still see the flannelgraph paper doll figures being moved across the blue flannel background. There was the tree with apples and the Serpent hanging from it. Adam and Eve, with strategically placed long hair or plant leaves covering them, are present. Depending on the set purchased, Eve is either looking at the Serpent with a delicate hand upraised and Adam is dopily looking off in the distance or they are both paying rapt attention to the Serpent. The Serpent is in the Tree. Clearly the Tree is evil because we already know the end of the story. The Serpent is evil. The Tree it resides in must be evil.

(Why was it always apples? Weren’t they supposed to be trying to get kids to eat their fruits? Why wasn’t it a lemon? Or a kiwi? You can find ways to avoid eating a kiwi your entire life. But we push apples on kids, tell kids to give their teacher an apple, and we even cram them in a Happy Meal. Why kids these days don’t have more of a phobia of apples, I’ll never know.)

Recently, I watched a video from Hillsdale College that caused me to think differently about the Tree. I highly recommend it, but I’m not technologically savvy enough to seem to be able to make the link appear in this post today. Suffice to say, if you search “Genesis Hillsdale” it’ll come up.

The gentleman in the half-hour video spent the first twenty-five minutes expressing much of what I’ve laid out in my previous blog posts. It’s nice to find myself in fairly good company. In the last five minutes he drops a massive bomb of a suggestion.

He begins by pointing out that everything God created He declared was “good”. This was His objective opinion which is necessarily True. Everything created by Him was “Good” which means that it was beneficial for flourishing, and abundance of life and health, as we have previously covered. God gave them every plant or tree for food. All of the trees of the garden are called good for food, and a delight to the eyes. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was the same as all others in this respect and so we have to assume it was beneficial for flourishing and the abundance of life and health.

So why would God say, “Don’t eat of it,”? We assume He meant that they would never eat of it. That it would never be beneficial to them. We often presume that if Adam and Eve were going to die the day they eat of it then it was perhaps poisonous. But one of the interesting things here is that it is called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Knowledge without wisdom is a terrible thing. If my teenager has the knowledge of how to functionally drive a car but none of the wisdom of the rules of the road, the wisdom of “right of way”, the wisdom of how to gauge and judge distance, or how to observe the behavior of other drivers to determine how much of a risk they might be…she’d be in an accident within a week.

When Adam and Eve eat from the tree their eyes were opened and they knew good and evil. There’s indication that one of the horrible things about knowing good and evil like this is that you don’t just learn that good and evil exist. As much good as you are aware off you are then aware of the same, if not greater, measure of evil.

Remember the first time you learned about war, about bullies, about child abuse, or about your first friend you found out got cheated on by someone you thought couldn’t possibly do something like that. Remember the first time you realized that your perfect little conception of the world was shattered by the possibility of evil; malignant potential darkness that could conceivably happen. This is on a small scale and we are generally exposed to it over time. What happened to our greatest of grandparents, was all downloaded in an instant. They became aware of every possibility of evil.

From earliest childhood we are told stories of heroes and villains, good versus evil, right and wrong. We have these stories not just because they are entertaining and enthrall children, but to help children learn about evil in a safe way. We must learn there are dragons, big bad wolves, witches, and giants long before we encounter other humans who at least don’t care about us but at worst genuinely want to harm us. The world is broken, and we communicate that in fairy tale dress up bit by bit to children for a reason. Now imagine if a child suddenly knew all the possibility of evil all of the sudden in an instant

We are creatures of worry and anxiety. I can’t count the number of times my mother told me to tie my shoes or I’d trip over them and break my neck. Did anybody ever know of a kid who did that? The animal part of us is far more conscious of a potential danger than a potential benefit. Even when it comes to praise and criticism, we are twice if not three times as likely to react in accordance with one negative criticism than a hundred praises. The negatives stick in our heads like a splinter in the mind. The difficulty with the news industry today and social media in general is due to this fact. Absolutely everything is a doom filled crisis because when one member of our tribe looks up and yelps out a danger sound, our totally natural impulse is to take that seriously. Even if it pans out to be a nothing-burger we all are on guard, want to be on guard, and see any potential of a potential of an incursion as worth giving our energies to.

Now, one might say, “Well, if they became aware of every possibility of evil then they became aware of every possibility of good.” And that is one hundred percent correct in every way. It is also true that as Bible believing Christians, we too are aware of a mighty good, a massive good, a colossal, stupendous good in the LORD Himself…and we still find it difficult to not focus on the smallest evils, the tiniest (by comparison to the Good) anxieties and tribulations. What is worse is that we react based on fears of those evils, and the most common human reaction to those evils and tribulations is to commit greater evils and tribulations in order to protect ourselves. Nevermind that we clearly throw ourselves headlong into evil for just the “fun” and pleasure of it, fulling knowing the good, fully knowing the right, the “Good”, thing to do. It’s a disease in our minds. How many times did I know that the donut wasn’t good for me, that I was better off eating nothing…and I went ahead anyway? How many times did I know that sin was a sin and was going to lead to trouble and damage my relationship with God…and I went ahead anyway?

And now we start to understand why God begins discussing amongst Himself that the man and woman have to be expelled from the garden and prevented from laying hands on the Tree of Life anymore. Because they would make a living Hell out of all creation if they then had eternal life. Because we lack wisdom.

When we look at the commandments of both the Old and New Testament, what do we find? On the one hand we find a bunch of “don’ts”. Why? Because if we aren’t told not to then we will end up doing what it says not to. Easily. We also find a bunch of really difficult “do’s” in especially the New Testament. We have to be told to do the do’s because it is really easy not to do them. We’d avoid loving our neighbor, turning the other cheek, and rejoicing in tribulation and suffering because it is counter to our selfish preferences, which are ultimately self preservation preferences. In short, are driven by desire to do the don’ts and we would prefer to never do the do’s.

Now, here comes the conjecture portion of this post. This is the part that blew my ever-loving mind.

I believe that Adam and Eve were eventually going to be invited by God to partake of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but only after He Himself had taught them wisdom and properly oriented their hearts. His goal from the beginning really was that they should live with Him eternally, have babies, and remain in relationship with Him. It was His desire to teach them how to be even more like Him than they already were by instructing them daily in the wisdom they were lacking. Then and only then, with that wisdom, would they be ready for the Knowledge of Good and Evil that the tree provided. It was good for food, pleasing to the eye, but not valuable for gaining wisdom, as Eve mistakenly believed, because that wasn’t its job. Their eyes were opened. They were suddenly like God in knowing good and evil, but desperately missing the components for wisdom regarding Good and Evil.

And therefore…we find ourselves today in a similar situation.

We who believe are destined for eternal life with God and must take the long road in learning His wisdom. The laws and commandments exist not simply as do’s and don’ts. They exist for us to learn God’s wisdom. The trials and tribulations we endure in this existence are further learning tools for us to gain God’s wisdom regarding Good and Evil. They are not purposeless. They are not torture. They are preparing the eternal part of us for eternal life so that we do not make a Hell out of the New Earth.

Those who find their identity in sin? The Bible tells us they are not going to enter this second Garden of Eden. Those who find their identity in following Jesus, taking up the cross, putting their mind to spiritual things and not materialistic things, making their primary occupation to be doers and not simply hearers of the Word…these will enter with rejoicing, well prepared for what the Lord will have them do in the world to come.

Consider the “curses”. They are not simply punishments to make humans feel bad for what they did, or to remind them of their place as dirty lowly almost animals compared to God. These trials teach things, they build character, they grant us wisdom we would never of had otherwise.

For Eve not only childbirth but conception will be filled with anxiety, pain, and little surety. Why have kids? Why be intimate with Adam?

For Adam, the earth will require him to work harder to receive less. His food source is dependent on the work he puts in. The people he is responsible for will thrive or die based not just on his efforts, but his ability to see difficulty coming. Why bother? When times get hard, who is first on the food recipient list? Why should he be solely responsible? Why is it right for them to expect all of this from him and he get so little in return?

You can probably imagine a few more questions that might spring from these first “curses”. Ultimately all of them get back to and teach the wisdom of God that we so desperately need.

Pax,

W