Two Trees

Adam and Eve in the beginning of their lives on earth only spoke to God. He was the only person that they had in their minds. That was their life in paradise (which means ‘an enclosed and protected place’). He had told them that there was a tree in the garden that had fruit that they were not to eat of, or they would die. They knew He was greater than them and knew all things and had rule over their lives, so they listened to Him. Then one day they had a conversation with another person they had never met before, a shining serpent in the very tree they had been warned about. And in that day Adam and Eve let that person into their minds, and there he stayed. He also seemed to speak with great authority and he offered them an interesting and beguiling proposition. He told them they would not die, and that God knew that when they ate the fruit they would become like Him and have His knowledge to judge between good and evil. They listened to him and liked his lie and believed his lie and ate the fruit. That was the beginning of mankind’s confusing and distorted experience of incarceration in another kind of life in a new place, no longer Paradise, the enclosed place of protection. They were sent out of there into the province of deception, confined there along with the serpent and his allies, in the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil, where they would die. This has been mankind’s habitation to this day.
There was also another tree in the garden called the Tree of life, which was to be kept, preserved and unspoiled until at an appointed time it would be energized by God Himself, to bring forth a new endless life upon the earth. This tree was guarded from that time on from Adam and Eve and all mankind until the appointed time for its introduction into the earth for mankind’s new and endless life.
God had always planned for his sons and daughters in the earth, whom he loves, to enjoy that new dwelling place, the Tree of Life, better than Paradise, and not an enclosed place, but a place of openness and freedom where they would enjoy life on earth with the fulness of his life within them.
But how could mankind escape the tyranny and deception of the tree of knowledge? For four thousand years it had become the only life they knew, and they had made the best of it and the worst of it. God had not abandoned his children and during that time he intervened again and again, calling out of them a people, Israel, to whom he gave his Commandments of wisdom and knowledge. He sovereignly showed himself supernaturally strong and powerful on their behalf. He also gave them Prophets who would tell of his Son, who would become one of them and live among them and die for them to give them access to the tree of his endless life. His Son came and few believed the truth about him because the Tree of knowledge held too tight a grip upon their minds. They had become too used to its voice.
The Son Jesus has given us entrance into the tree of life, his risen life, available to all mankind through his act of obedience in his accepting the cup that his Father offered him at Gesthemane. Adam and Eve took the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and we take the cup of the tree of life. We receive his endless life and the authority of the Kingdom of God from Heaven into our lives when we voluntarily accept this cup of obedience to God. We cease to struggle to control the circumstances of the tree of knowledge and live in perfect hope and trust in his care for us in the tree of his life. We now bring the spiritual energy of his love and care of the tree of life into the tree of knowledge where we still also live and where we can bring order into disorder, joy into sorrow, wisdom into confusion, healing into pain. We can bring the transforming work of the tree of life over the world of the tree of knowledge that surrounds us. We can bring dead branches to life, set the crooked paths straight, and prepare the way of The Lord in our generation.