And out of the earth the Lord made every tree to come, delighting the eye and good for food; and in the middle of the garden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Gen 2:9
In one of my latest blog entries I talked about the two trees God planted in the garden. Two trees that were so different.
I spoke about the fact that one tree is a tree of antipodes, of dualism. Good and evil, right and wrong, black and white. We could also say disunity and therefore compartmentalism. Greek thinking. Divide et impera, divide and conquer. Fifty shades of grey. Dividing sin into classes of severity.
The other tree is the tree of life. Unity. Holistic thinking. Life has no counterpart. No antipode. Death only is the absence of life, but in itself is nothing. Darkness only is the absence of light, but it does not exist in itself.
God did not restrict Adam and Eve from eating from the tree of life – until they ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And then even he did not do it to keep something from them, but to save them from living eternally in a fallen state.
Eating from the tree of life brings one thing only – life. The fruit of the tree of life therefore is life. Easy enough. An apple tree grows apples. The tree of life grows life.
God took his time to show humanity that doing good without life is not in their making. Who would deny that following the law of the old covenant is a good thing to do. Do not murder. Do not steal. Don’t make your life miserable by always desiring what is not yours. Help the poor.
God even gave us some standards to live by to point us towards the only one that could give us the necessary strength to succeed. I am your God. Do not have any other gods but me.
But we fail. We fail miserably. We hide in shame because we know something is not right. We rebel and want to do it ourselves, just to justify our actions and our failure. We are too proud to come and confess that we were wrong.
I call on heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have presented you with life and death, the blessing and the curse. Therefore, choose life, so that you will live, you and your descendants. Deu 30:19
When God put the two trees into the garden, he did exactly that. He gave us the choice of life and death, and he told us to choose life.
Didn’t you say that death does not exist? That life has no antipode?
We can say that the antipode of life on a deeper level therefore is knowledge of good and evil, knowledge of disunity. And that is true. But since we derived that death is but the absence of life and does not exist, that means that knowledge of good and evil, disunity is but a delusion. A mirage. A fata morgana.
To be like God means to be separat from God. It means disunity. It means strive and fighting instead of unity and relationship. And therefore death. We cease to exist. And just as it is with all spiritual realities – they take time to manifest in the natural. We die.
But God.
God is grace. God is love. He found a way to open up again the pathway to the tree of life without the catastrophic consequences it would have had if we came to eat from it in our decay, our fallen state, in death that is.
He gave himself. The life force itself lived a blameless life in faith and died. But as he was blameless, death could not hold him. What does that mean? Because there was no darkness in him, because he was all light, because there was no death in him, because he was all life, he could not stay dead.
When you bring a light into a dark room, darkness cannot hold the light captive. Darkness just ceases to exist.
When Jesus died, the enemy ceased to exist. The bible calls it: he was thrown to the earth. Again, spiritual realities take their time to manifest in our realm. That is why the bible says that the devil knows that he only has a short time left. He is dying.
We therefore fight spiritual memories. It does not even matter whether you accepted Jesus’ work on the cross. You are fighting memories. If you do not know Jesus as the tree of life, you yourself are a fading memory. If you do, you’re old nature and the enemy do their best pretending that they still are real and in charge. And you are fighting memories.
Stop fighting. Forget. (In other places I called this: change your thinking.)
Our fight now is to help others find forgiveness in Christ, become a new nature, and forget.
Remember, there is no disunity in life. You are a new creation. All things are new. Even if spiritual realities need their time manifesting in the natural. Or should I say they need faith to manifest in the natural?
Let’s train and execute our faith.
Are you with me?