Shame and the Blame Game

In these past couple weeks, we've watched as human history derailed from the path to a blissful destiny, only to become a slow-motion trainwreck. Into paradise slithered a serpent, and Genesis laid out for us the dynamics of deception. Plus, our desires have power to lure and entice our wills. Lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, pride of life – these add up to a love of the world that competes with love for God, making our hearts contested terrain.

Last week, we left off at the exact moment it went truly awry. Corrupted intellect and perverted will gave birth to evil action. The woman reached out to snap a piece of fruit off of the tree that represented our one lawful limit; she ate what she sacrilegiously stole; she then offered some to the man, and in a shocking twist, he imitated her – 'monkey see, monkey do' was his childish impulse – and ate, totally disregarding what their LORD God had said to them. Now the pair of them were partakers together in this unlawfully assailed tree and its dark sacrament of forbidden knowledge.

And with that, a change took place. The serpent had told them both, “In the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened” (Genesis 3:5). And, sure enough, “then their eyes were opened” (Genesis 3:7). But it isn't what the serpent led them to believe. Their new knowledge reveals conflict, confusion, chaos. In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle warns that the more precisely we know a particle's momentum, the less precisely we can know its position. What the serpent failed to mention was that this tree makes us 'knowers of good and evil' only at the expense of becoming unknowers full of uncertainty. Humans no longer have the luxury of just taking the world as it is. Their minds are churning, souring, as badness stares back from every bush.¹

The grand insight to which their eyes have been opened is this less-than-heartwarming realization: “they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). Why couldn't they see it before? After all, when the LORD God made humanity, in one sense we were more naked than any of our fellow mammals (Genesis 2:25). But in another sense, the psalmist reminds us that the LORD “made us a little lower than heavenly beings, and crowned us with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:5). Among Israel's neighbors, divine images – whether idols or kings – were portrayed with the god's glory radiating from their heads; that's what a crown was there to symbolize.² What the psalmist might be saying is that Adam and Eve's heads were “surrounded with a brilliant, dazzling light which was a physical manifestation” of the LORD God's own glory, thus clothing their nakedness with majesty.³

If so, then now this glory has fled away, their light has died, and they see themselves and each other cracked open and leaking purpose. Hence, for the first time, they see themselves reduced to a bare natural condition, like shaved chimps. Shorn of glory, they see themselves in the naked light of day, where they can really scrutinize themselves for the first time. And so begins the first voyage of self-discovery.⁴ The trouble is, they actually do 'find themselves.' Now they're self-conscious, subjects of their own sustained but uncertain introspection. They have a new capacity to not just feel good about themselves, but also to feel bad about themselves. What before was innocent nakedness is now shameful baldness, born in loss and defeat and failure.

With this newfound power to judge, we have the ability to judge ourselves faulty and feeble and foolish, to feel a divorce driven between our reality and our requirement.⁵ And so, at some fundamental level, the human is now alienated from himself, swept up by the discovery of an inner warfare of the flesh against the soul (1 Peter 2:11).⁶ If a human can judge himself, then surely he can judge and be judged by others. Other humans, even those who are 'one flesh' with you, can see you, judge you, diminish you. It used to be that this total transparency toward each other was a gift; but now it feels like a mugging.⁷ To be so exposed to another's gaze feels like being defined, captured, enslaved – an existential assault.⁸

It's not just in their heads, either. To be exposed as naked means to be made powerless and poor; to be stripped of identity, status, honor; to be devalued and degraded in the sight of oneself and others.⁹ So, thanks to this new knowledge, humans are humiliated by the collapse of their once-lofty dignity. Before, in having nothing but God to their name, they had more than the world could hold; now they know they've lost everything.¹⁰ They are, in more ways than one, dis-graced.¹¹ With the loss of grace, guilt and shame have now invaded paradise.

What's worse, each human has just proven to the other that he or she is willing to transgress boundaries – so how can he trust her to respect his boundaries, or how can she trust him to respect hers?¹² Even to be naked in nature is to contend with sharp rocks, poison ivy, insects, beasts; how much more being vulnerable to people? “Such is the evil that sin is,” it's said, that “not only does it deprive us of grace from above, but it also casts us into deep shame and abjection, strips us of goods already belonging to us, and deprives us of all confidence.”¹³

Tragically, the ironic opening of their eyes to their shame was the last action they take as “the both of them.” Now, too ashamed to speak, they begin to work separately but in parallel. “And they sewed...” (Genesis 3:7). It would be easy to miss this, but sewing isn't something people do bare-handed. To sew, you need a needle, don't you? Where's that coming from? This calls for “the first human invention” – and not just any invention, but one that pierces, that pokes holes in God's world.¹⁴ A fitting metaphor for what they've done to themselves.

And what they sew together, using I-don't-know-what, are fig leaves they find nearby. Fig leaves, can be over nine inches across, usually have five lobes, and have a sandpaper-rough upside but a soft and hairy underside.¹⁵ But, vivid green as they are, once the humans yank them from their tree, they're cut off from life and fruitfulness. They're doomed to decay; everything until then is just running out the clock on rot. Also a disturbingly fitting picture for the state the humans have seized for themselves.

So the humans “sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves girdles” (Genesis 3:7). This is the first time in the Bible the word 'make' has somebody other than God for its object.¹⁶ The first human act of making is to make a concealment, a way to disguise the naked truth. In a world of shame, we constantly trade in disguises, trying to gussy up our shortcomings as other than what they are.¹⁷ To that end, what we made are girdles, belts (2 Samuel 20:8; Isaiah 3:24). Skimpier than a bathing suit even after today's fashions, such a thing as the sum-total of an outfit barely passes as a token gesture toward either modesty or self-protection. Stitching leaves into a jockstrap – oh, how absolutely godlike!¹⁸ It closes us off in a way we were never meant to be, yet we treat it as a natural cost of our begrudging coexistence.

What's more, fig leaves sewn together aren't going to last long; and once they shrivel and decay, nakedness will just reassert itself, the problem once more staring us in the face.¹⁹ They must realize they'd have to make a new one every few days, meaning their pitiful attempts to disguise their shortcomings are going to keep occupying monumental amounts of their time and energy.²⁰ And we haven't stopped. How much time and energy does the human race waste in fashioning fig leaves for ourselves, over and over again? What about you and me?

Eventually, they hear “the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden in the wind of the day” (Genesis 3:8). He regularly came to the garden for fellowship with these creatures who bear his image, and ordinarily this would've thrilled their hearts, a cue to run toward the sound of the LORD.²¹ But this time their hearts don't thrill. “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him” (Romans 1:21). In the aftermath, God looks like a threat, a danger, perhaps even an enemy. So they react to his presence with dread, fear, aversion. Rather than open themselves to their Lord's stormy care, rather than hurl themselves into this oncoming hurricane of divine love, rather than submit long enough to let God blow away their guilt and shame, they yearn to get away, to save themselves from the risk of salvation! How foolish. Yet how typical of us.

And so, in the last thing the human pair does as a 'they,' they hide. They seek shelter from their Father God in the midst of the garden's trees, the very same trees he planted for their nourishment and delight and blessing.²² What we see here is an ugly-stupid picture of our desperation to make the world not a site of encounter but a shield of avoidance, to flee deeper and deeper into created things for an impossible escape from their Creator – and seeking “the creature rather than the Creator,” Paul reminds us, is the seed of idolatry (Romans 1:25).

Left to our own devices, we each run and run and run, scouring creation for smaller and smaller places to hide, shriveling ourselves to fit our fears, our restless hearts too caught in their own inertia to ever reclaim rest.²³ We'll run to tireless artifice, achievements, accolades. We'll run to sports and games, adventures, amusements. We'll run to affairs of the heart and pleasures of the flesh. We'll run to family and friends. We'll run to politics, to philanthropy, even to religion. Whether we hide from God behind stained glass or at the bottom of a bottle makes little difference in the end. “The farther man withdraws from God, the farther still he desires to withdraw.”²⁴ So we'll run when we're out of steam. We'll run beyond our last breath, run till we're nothing. We'll run all the way to hell to hide, if we have to, despite its patent pointlessness: “No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:13).

And so now, to that end of calling us to give account, the LORD God speaks, his first recorded words since the commandment. Like the serpent, he asks a question, one meant this time not to manipulate but to give voice to “the cry of a broken heart.”²⁵ He's not come to lecture them, yell at them, denounce them. He's filled with deep concern, like a parent rushing to the side of a collapsed child. His questions are an opportunity, an invitation to confess, to repent, to be forgiven.

Question 1: “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). “God knew where Adam was, but Adam didn't.”²⁶ In his effort to hide from God, this man has lost track of himself, of his own place, of his own soul. He's sleepwalked his way to a pit without knowing it. As much as he may now know good and evil, he no longer knows himself. His journey of self-discovery has left him further in the weeds and further in the dark. And he is us. The only cure is self-examination: Where are you? In all our pride, do we even know where we are? Or are we in the dark as to our position? Are we close to God, are we creeping to the margins, or have we strayed even to a far country? Do we present ourselves to him in the open, or is there something we're still hiding our sensitive bits behind? And how is it we got here?²⁷

The man should've shouted, “I'm fallen and need rescue, that's where I am! I'm in sin, I'm in shame, I'm in sorrow, and I hope, O God, I'm in the path of your mercy!” Yes, even still, he could've taken the initiative to nakedly present his lostness to the LORD. But he responds as we do: “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid myself” (Genesis 3:10). It's just nine short words in Hebrew, “the stiff-armed response of a man trying to barricade himself.”²⁸ This nakedness to which he confesses sums up here everything that now makes him unfit for God's presence, unfit for God's garden, unfit for God's world.

I can almost hear the pain in God's voice when the second question comes: “Who told you that you're naked?” (Genesis 3:11). Who made you feel ashamed of yourself? Who dared ruin your innocence? Who robbed you and left you in dirt and blood and woe? Why are you wallowing in this muck that's so beneath you? Who is it, exactly, who opened up for you this gulf that now gapes between us?²⁹ It wasn't God who created the distance, not God who caused the ruin, not God who authored the shame.

Then follows, hot on its heels, the third question: “From the tree that I commanded you not to eat from, have you eaten?!” (Genesis 3:11). The tone is one of absolute heartbreak, as though born from disbelief: “The one and only thing I said no to, the one thing I banned for your own good... seriously, you did that?!” If God were a man, this is the part where he'd rend his garments, don sackcloth and ashes for us, and wail in lamentation over our choosing sin over his perfect love. And this threefold barrage of questions is, make no mistake, the relentless pursuit of God's love for his prodigal sons and daughters.³⁰ So here God pauses, yielding the floor, making space for us so we can share his shock and sorrow over sin. How much swine-slop do we have to slurp down before we spit sin out? Will we come to our senses and run home to our Father, even if only at the last hour? What will we say?

We reply – we have no choice but to give account – and in this scene, every word the humans utter is... 'true.' But true words don't add up here to a whole truth; they're sewn together like the fig leaves, artfully arranged to obscure.³¹ What ought to happen is full confession, not just of an act, but of an act as sin. We shouldn't minimize our culpability. Rather, we should own and disown: own up to what we've done (“Yes, that happened; yes, I caused it; yes, I am the responsible party”), and disown it as an act which was wrong (“No, it oughtn't have happened; no, I was not in the right; it's something I'd like to have not done”). We ought to embrace God's attitude as ours, ought to take up God's point of view. “No one can be justified from sin unless he has first made confession of his sin,” as sin.³² Then, and only then, can healing begin.

That's not what happens. Before conceding that he ate, the man will rationalize why he ate, claiming all the extenuating circumstances and exculpating factors he can imagine. Earlier, he waxed poetic in celebrating his wife: “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh!” (Genesis 2:23). Now that same beloved wife is cast off as a burden and an imposition, a cancer in his bone and in his flesh. It's as if he says: “God, it's her fault! She was so alluring and charming and irresistible; she'd already eaten and seemed fine; we're one flesh, acting as one, so once she'd acted for that one flesh, how could I do anything but follow along? I was peer-pressured by the only peer I've got. So yes, I ate – but I ate because she ate, I ate because she gave. And if she hadn't given, I wouldn't have eaten. So don't look at me, God; look at her! I accuse her!”

As if it weren't enough to begin the stupid trend of men shaming and blaming women for their own failures at self-control, he objects doubly to the gifts he's received: not only the woman's gift to him, but God's gift of the woman to him. “The woman whom you gave to be with me – she gave me from the tree, and I ate” (Genesis 3:12). Indirectly, the man blames God for the man's own sin.³³ It's like he's insinuating: “She gave me the fruit, but you gave her to me – well, didn't you know women are only trouble? You presented her as my helper, so really, in taking what she gave, wasn't I in a way trusting you blindly, trusting that what you gave me would always be a true help? And if that blew up in my face, then whose fault is that really? So yes, I ate – I ate because you gave me a defective helper, who hurt me with her poisoned gift. I'm a victim of the system! So don't look at me, God; go look in a heavenly mirror!”

God could, at this point, tear through the countless holes in the man's story. Instead, generously, God does turn his attention to the woman, giving her the opportunity to confess that her husband refused. But she rationalizes just as much as he did. She doesn't hit back at the husband who just threw her under the bus – that won't work – but she points the finger at the now-silent snake. “This serpent came along with blasphemies, God, and I had only the best of intentions, to defend your good name! But who prepared me to face a criminal mastermind? I was out of my depth, I hadn't a prayer. I was seduced, corrupted, deceived, tricked, tempted. How could I win? My decisions were all downstream from these alien thoughts sown in my mind like tares among the wheat. So I plead an insanity defense. Yes, I ate – I ate because this creature of yours cornered me, blinded me, turned my thinking upside-down. If he hadn't deceived me dizzy, I wouldn't have eaten. The devil made me do it! Don't look at me, God, look at him!”

Both their answers are off-base. But are they really any different than what we constantly do, to God and to others? We, too, evade questions. We, too, make excuses. We, too, pass the buck. We, too, play the blame game. Out of an instinctual awareness of our naked vulnerability, most of us find it a lot more comfortable to try to justify ourselves rather than step into the light with our guilt and shame and weakness. So our pride incessantly “tries to shift its own wrongful act to another” – another person, another cause, another situation, another explanation.³⁴ “The desperate human need for self-justification,” it's been said, “blossomed instantaneously and never has left us, except with divine treatment. Perhaps more than any other perverse human 'need,' this one splinters relationships, often rendering them (absent divine grace) beyond the possibility of repair.”³⁵ And so, rather than admit our shame, we accept separation from ourselves, separation from each other, separation from God.³⁶

What we've had in today's passage is a painfully cutting study of what sin is like from the inside: guilt, shame, fear, avoidance, excuses, accusations – anything but what's good for us. This “new fear and tension,” this turn from mutual cherishing to mutual blaming, this spiteful aversion to God, adds up to this truth: sin yields, every time, a “reduced quality of human life.”³⁷ There's only one cure for that alienation, and one of the studies I read sums it up beautifully: “As the light of God's word reveals our transgressions and we sense greater depths of our shame, we may feel overwhelmed. But your sin does not overwhelm Christ. … The very reasons you think he should depart are the very reasons he tells you to come.”³⁸ Ain't that the truth!

I'll let the Apostle John, then, have the last word: “Whoever confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God abides in him, and he in God. So we have come to know and believe the love that God has for us. God is Love! And whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:15-16). “Abide in him so that, when he appears, we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming” (1 John 2:28). “By this is love perfected in us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is, so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:17-18). Amen.

Useful, Pretty, Profitable, Toxic

There's trouble, it seems in Paradise. Everything had been going so well up until this. As the crown of all that God had made on this earth, God had installed the humans as his living images in the sanctuary of his garden, entrusting us with awesome responsibility in the world, but lavishing us with so much grace as to make it light and joyful to pursue his work (Genesis 2:7-15). There was only one commandment: enjoy freely everything that this garden has to offer, except for one measly limit, one and only one tree held back from us (Genesis 2:16-17). Can we bear to have all but one, to accept the principle that God is God and we are not? That's where we practice obedience.

But last Sunday, we caught a filthy intruder in the garden. Slithering in, his goal is to inject chaos into what had been so precariously arranged. Word by word, with a cunning care he whittles away at the woman's implicit faith in the LORD God, twisting God's words, portraying God as stingy, selfish, a source of starvation (Genesis 3:1). Luring her into conversation, he nudges her to think of God only in common with what she can't have, to think of what's forbidden as the center of her world (Genesis 3:2-3). Now the serpent can launch the next phase of attack: he quiets her fear of punishment, he trashes God's motives, says God lied to keep us in the dark and keep us down, but that humans can climb our own way to godhood and be a law unto ourselves (Genesis 3:4-5).

With every step of the way, the serpent – with a mix of half-truths and misdirection – has pulled the wool over her eyes on the pretext of helping her see better. Whispering from the outside, he's clouded her thinking. And in this, we have a stunning case study of the process of deception, of how our thinking runs wild from the purity of faith. So often, the way toward failure begins with error in our minds. And by the end of this conversation, the woman isn't acting out of a place of thinking God's thoughts after him. She's thinking with a compromised noggin, a head crammed with suspicions and doubts. She wonders who she can really trust. Her head spins.

So at this point, the serpent pulls back. He has nothing else to do. Like they said in the Middle Ages, “the devil is not a direct and sufficient cause of sin; he can only persuade or provide what is desirable.”¹ Well, persuade he has. “The woman was deceived,” her mind whispered in and worked over (1 Timothy 2:14). But she still hasn't willed or done anything against the commandment. Confused though she is, she still doesn't have to.

At this point, she's got plenty of options. She can put the whole thing out of mind and walk away. She can opt to sleep on it, hoping her mind clears up by the next morning. She can see if her husband's perspective might help clarify her thinking, call her back to God's word. Best of all, she could pray. She could go seek the LORD face-to-face when he walks in the garden, submitting her clouded thinking to him for a decision. And the same is true for us when we find ourselves assailed by doubts or presumptions, by distortions in our thinking. We can mentally change the topic, we can sleep on it, we can seek help, or, best of all, we can pray and seek God's face.

But the woman takes a more dangerous path. “So the woman saw the tree...” (Genesis 3:6). With the serpent's words rattling around in her head, she aims her senses at the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, at what the commandment held at a distance. Now, she isn't forbidden to look at the tree. But she gives the tree her full and focused attention. And what she sees, her deceived mind processes differently than before the serpent worked its charms on her.² With faith compromised, there's plenty of room for perceptions to malfunction.

“So the woman saw that the tree was good...” (Genesis 3:6). The serpent told her that the tree had the power to make humans “like gods” (Genesis 3:5), so she'll practice by doing what God does. All through chapter 1, what happened day after day? “God saw that it was good,” whatever he had made (Genesis 1:12). Now, she puts herself in God's place as an observer and esteemer of the world, exercising her own independent evaluation of this tree.³ But she plays it like a parody, because whereas “the LORD looks on the heart” of his creation, she's going to “look on the outward appearance” and judge that way, with her senses (1 Samuel 16:7).

“So the woman saw that the tree was good for food” (Genesis 3:6). That's her first observation. It was, as some early Christians granted, a “sweet-flavored fruit.”⁴ The point is that what the woman notices here about the tree is that its fruit has a certain genuine goodness. The tree actually isn't something evil, some dark void that drains all light and joy from the world. It is a created good – as in, God made it and called it good. God designed it in such a way that its fruit could supply nutrition. More than that, he gave its fruit its own kind of flavor.

So, in studying the tree, the woman appreciates that eating from it would yield a physically pleasurable experience. Usefully, it would satisfy her carnal appetites. And as she perceives it in this way, as a potential object for her flesh, her appetites awaken. Her passions are aroused for the way the fruit would feel on her lips, the way its skin would give way to her teeth, the way its pulp would taste on her tongue, the way its solidity would fill her belly. Now, naturally we crave fleshly pleasures, to “relax, eat, drink, be merry” (Luke 12:19). It is totally normal for us to hunger for food, thirst for drink, to feel sexual and other bodily impulses. In a sense, these are matters of “animal necessity.”⁵ The drives we have toward these goods are good drives; their proper satisfaction yields good pleasures. The woman sees that, feeling herself tugged toward eating this fruit.

However, she doesn't need this fruit. Humans in the garden find every tree there “good for food” (Genesis 2:9). The woman has no need to focus on this particular tree to gain nourishment or savor a flavor.⁶ She doesn't have to venture outside God's will in order to be satisfied. Confronted with her fleshly desire to eat, she only needs to abstain long enough to turn around and eat the fruit of a different tree, a lawful tree. But her desire – her “lust of the flesh,” as the Apostle John calls it (1 John 2:16) – confronts her from within. And we often find the same thing happening to us. Our bodily urges urge us to meet them, sometimes quite strongly. But the Apostle Paul warns us about “indulgence of the flesh” (Colossians 2:23), tells us to “make no provision for the flesh, to satisfy its desires” in ways out of step with God (Romans 13:14), lest we functionally replace God and so “serve our own appetites” (Romans 16:18). Insofar as any appetite becomes an idol to be served, its object in that moment is not 'good for food.'

Next, “the woman saw that the tree was... a delight to the eyes” (Genesis 3:6). As her sight reaches out to the tree, as she surveys the shape of its trunk, the textures of its bark, the handsomeness of its leaves, the plumpness of its fruit, her attention is captivated. She perceives it as beautiful, as delightsome. Looking at it makes her want to look at it. It inclines her toward it. It fills her with a sense of longing. It moves her emotions. It exerts a pull on her, but not just by the sensations of touch and taste. She engages with the tree by “the visual apprehension of external goods,” by an enjoyment in seeing and imagining.⁷ She is “overcome by the beauty of the tree and by desire for its fruit” alike.⁸ She “looks to the tree... for aesthetic pleasure.”⁹

And this, as it gets out of hand, is what the Apostle John dubs “the lust of the eyes” (1 John 2:16). It's the same as if she were entranced by the sleekest new toys, or the shiniest gold or silver or jewels, or by clever art, or by great production values. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with aesthetic pleasure. There's nothing bad in seeing and feeling and imagining, so far as that goes. God made a beautiful world, and gifted us with incredible imaginations and lovely emotions. We may look, visually or mentally, on the beauty of anything to admire the handiwork of God the Creator. But problems emerge when, in Job's words, “my heart has gone after my eyes” (Job 31:7), for “never satisfied are the eyes of man” (Proverbs 27:20). We have to be careful about the allure of creatures stoking our desires for their own sake, like how commercials constantly present images to captivate us. Christ warned that “everyone who looks” at created goods “with lustful intent,” for the sake of moving our hearts without reference to God, in ways that enlarge a conflict between our desires and his word, has a problem already (Matthew 5:28). We're meant to have our “eyes fixed on all [God's] commandments” (Psalm 119:6).

Looking through the eyes of the garden woman, this tree “appeared to the eye to be beautiful and to the taste to be edible.”¹⁰ But in attending to the tree in these terms, things it shares with all the trees in the garden (Genesis 2:9), she effectively reduces it to the level of every other tree; what should be sacramental, holy, is treated as common food, common sight.¹¹ Because she sees it this way, she can't find any reason in the tree itself why it ought to be forbidden, why she ought to restrain her bodily appetites and her imaginative affections. Isn't this tree such a good tree, good for the same reasons and in the same way as every other tree she has to hand? Does not her appetite cry out that she has a need for the tree's nourishment? her taste scream that she has an interest in the tree's gourmet flavor? her awareness of its allure whisper that the tree is enjoyable, enriching, worthy? She seeks reason in the creation to obey the Creator, rather than seeking in the Creator a reason for the creation.

So the woman keeps her focus on the tree, and she “saw... that the tree was desirable to make wise” (Genesis 3:6). This, finally, is not something she could get from any of the trees she was to enjoy in the garden. This restores something special to the tree, but no longer is its specialness on account of God's word speaking about it. Now, what's special about it is entirely utilitarian: what use can I make of it, what profit squeeze from it?

On one level, her seeing has maybe moved her to a more refined class of pleasure, from carnal to aesthetic and lastly to intellectual pleasure – a puzzle to turn over in her mind, a solution to all her riddles, a source of insight and intellectual fulfillment.¹² But on another level, what the woman seeks in the tree isn't the Bible's usual word for wisdom. This one is more associated with the sense of being skillful and therefore successful, able to chart a path to prosperity.¹³ The 'wisdom' she's chasing is perhaps less contemplative and more pragmatic, a wisdom that can be used to achieve what she wants, to gain and grow and impress the world.¹⁴ Now, again, this kind of wisdom isn't inherently bad. It's the capacity for “wise dealing” that Solomon's proverbs aimed to give “instruction” in (Proverbs 1:3). But if desired for its own sake, it feeds into what the Apostle John calls “the pride of life” (1 John 2:16) – our ambitions for power, possessions, prestige. It's an outsized desire to overcome obstacles or limits, “an inordinate attraction for some kind of superiority.”¹⁵ This is a materialistic pursuit of “self-actualization and accomplishment” that seek to act as though with the sovereignty of a god.¹⁶

By this point, in desiring this, the woman perhaps is priding herself on her enlightened yearning for intellectual triumph. But interestingly, the word here for 'desirable' comes from the same Hebrew root as the word 'covet' in the Ten Commandments.¹⁷ As high and lofty and godlike as she might pretend her aspirations are, it's really just as basic as St. Paul said: “Sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness” (Romans 7:8). Although her thinking about what the tree offers has been shaped by the message of the serpent, ultimately it's her own covetous desires that have the potential to drive her actions. It's exactly like James tells us: “Each person is tempted when by his own desire he is lured and enticed” (James 1:14). In the end, it isn't the devil who tempts us; it's our own inner desires that lure us. We are ultimately self-seduced.

The problem, again, is that at no point does she weigh any of these considerations – her flesh's hankering for its flavor, her eyes' appreciation for its beauty, her soul's craving for self-advancement – against the factor she's screened out: the word of God. She evaluates what her eyes see in creation, but not what her ears had heard from creation's Creator. Or maybe she accords them all equal weight and tallies three pros to one con, as if morality were mere statistics.¹⁸ The central issue is, her inner life is no longer subordinating these desires to their ultimate goal in God. See, if “the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life” are “from the world,” then these add up to a world-love that competes in our lives with the love of God (1 John 2:15-16).

Such distorted love, such runaway desire, leads to devastating places. That's why St. James says that “desire, when it has conceived, brings forth sin” (James 1:15). St. Augustine put it like this: “Sin is nothing but the twisted consent of the free will, when we stoop to things forbidden by justice which it is true freedom to abstain from. That is, sin consists not in the things themselves, but in the unlawful use of them. Now, the use of things is lawful when the soul remains within the bounds of God's law and subject to the one God in unqualified love, and regulates other things that are subject to it without greed or lust – that is, in accordance with God's commandments.”¹⁹ The message here is that when we “use created things not temperately but inordinately, the Creator is disdained.”²⁰ Intemperate use of created goods adds up to sin because it falls short of love for God.

There's a tree in South America, Central America, the Caribbean, even south Florida that grows little greenish fruits that look a bit like apples. The tree is lovely to set your eyes on, with leaves so symmetrical. The taste of its fruit is sweet and satisfying, they say, and it smells great too. It's such an interesting tree, one so exotic you'd love to brag to your friends about your new experience. Just ignore the warning posted on the trunk. Why not pick a fruit up and take a little bite? Well, I'll tell you why. This manchineel tree “produces one of the most potent tree toxins known” to humanity.²¹ It isn't just the fruit that's toxic. To touch its bark or leaves, to even let the rain roll off it onto your skin, brings danger. This tree guarantees you a bad time.²² I came across a story told by a woman who unknowingly found this forbidden fruit on a beach in Tobago – how she took the fruit, ate a bite, even gave some to a friend to eat – perhaps that's the shape of a familiar tale. Here's how she told it:

I saw some green fruits among the scattered coconuts and mangoes lying on the beach. They were round, the size of a tangerine, and had apparently fallen from a large tree with a silvery bole and oblique based leaves. I rashly took a bite from this fruit and found it pleasantly sweet. My friend also partook (at my suggestion). Moments later, we noticed a strange peppery feeling in our mouths, which gradually progressed to a burning, tearing sensation and tightness of the throat. The symptoms worsened over a couple of hours until we could barely swallow solid food because of the excruciating pain and the feeling of a huge obstructing pharyngeal lump. … Over the next eight hours, our oral symptoms slowly began to subside, but our cervical lymph nodes became very tender and easily palpable. Recounting our experience to the locals elicited frank horror and incredulity, such was the fruit's poisonous reputation.²³

Better to eat a trillion manchineel fruits, though, than to do what the woman in the garden did: “She took of its fruit, and she ate, and she gave also to her husband (who was with her), and he ate” (Genesis 3:6). Her mind was corrupted, her will was dragged by deafening desires; all she knew was that the fruit's finite goodness in that moment became as if infinite to her. So she reached out her hand to seize, steal, consume; then she offered to share. “Adam,” we read, “was not deceived” (1 Timothy 2:14). Yet he accepted and ate anyway. “Sin came into the world by one man” (Romans 5:12), for he “committed transgression without any justification.”²⁴

What we have here is a picture of warning: deceived or undeceived, if we let our desires and passions run away with us, if we let them lead us into intemperate uses of creation that reflect worldly loves rather than pure love for God born from faith, sin is what happens. But we, no less than Eve, no less than Adam, grasp daily for the fruit we foolishly think will satisfy, the fruit we feel ourselves admiring and appreciating and attracted to. But there's a better fruit offered to us in Christ: “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, temperance [you might know it as 'self-control']; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:22-25). Amen.

Fields of Freedom, Seeds of Doubt

Up to this point, our stroll in God's garden has turned up nothing but artful flowers and cheering sunshine, sparkling rivers and luscious fruits and critters in harmony, and noble people crowned and commissioned, with an even more awesome glory ahead of them. Well, that all isn't going to survive the day, I'm afraid. In these few short verses at the opening of Genesis chapter 3, groundwork is laid for a grave fall. For into this idyllic scene has slithered an intruder.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made” (Genesis 3:1). Let's start with the obvious: at the literal level, we're confronted by a “beast of the field,” a wild animal. Before whatever else we can say, this is one of God's creatures which has an assigned role to play in God's good world and which, when it was first made, was pronounced good.¹ It's one of those same “beasts of the field” which, in the last chapter, the human had rejected as a potential partner but given a name, an identity (Genesis 2:19-20). That means its proper place is under human dominion, a creature subject to their “rule over every creeping thing that creeps on the land” (Genesis 1:26). And as a “beast of the field,” the serpent is alien to the garden.²

Now, how were the humans just described? They were “naked and unashamed” (Genesis 2:25). What you see is what you get, and with them you see everything. They're innocent, devoid of guile. They speak plainly exactly what they mean. But here comes the serpent, and he's crafty, cunning, sly, shrewd. It's interesting that Genesis describes the humans as naked, 'arummim, and the serpent as cunning, 'arum – those words sound the same. Just like others in this story, this pun is meant to provoke thought.³ The serpent is so cunning that it seems as openly transparent as the humans – but actually the transparency is camouflage. But to what end?

His goal is to misrepresent and mislead, to deceive and delude, and ultimately to prey on the bearers of God's image. It's a rejection of God's decree putting the serpent under human dominion. It's also vindictive retaliation for his own rejection: if the man prefers the woman to the serpent, the serpent will seduce her out of spite.⁴ So the serpent's shrewd rhetoric and tempting promises aim to undercut her trusting relationship to her LORD God.

Notice, by the way, that ever since the Eden story began, the Creator has consistently been referred to as “the LORD God,” Yahweh Elohim. 'Yahweh' – in our Bibles, 'LORD' with all caps – is his covenant name, his name for relating to the people whom he's chosen, and it emphasizes his eternal faithfulness. The commandment came from 'Yahweh God' (Genesis 2:16). But the serpent only wants to discuss what 'God' has said. Now, of course the serpent's got no right to be on a first-name basis with God. But it's also a tactic. He wants the woman to mentally disengage from thinking about God on a level of personal relationship.⁵

So the serpent begins by setting a framework of his choosing: “Has God really said...?” On the surface it looks almost friendly, but the serpent is opening up the possibility of putting God into a question.⁶ The tone that comes through is a feigned confusion: “How could it be that God would say...?”, “Isn't it outrageous that God said...?”, “Really! It's unbelievable that God would say...!” Implied is the idea that God's word is an appropriate topic of debate, something on which creatures get to pass judgment.⁷ It's a totally disingenuous question, without an ounce of sincerity. The serpent doesn't want to be informed; he wants to scoff, mock, manipulate.⁸

Next, the serpent attributes to God the exact opposite of what God said. The LORD God commanded humans, “You shall eat of every tree of the garden” (Genesis 2:16). The serpent quotes those words exactly, but sticks a 'not' at the very front of them (Genesis 3:1). What a massive difference it makes, that one little word! In what the LORD God really said, he spread forth almost limitless fields of freedom in front of us and urged humans to go enjoy ourselves, to make the most of it, to receive the world as sheer gift and to live in it without anxieties or fears. But the serpent turns this truth on its head. The serpent caricatures God as a stingy miser, a God whose first instinct is to forbid, restrict, oppress.⁹ In the serpent's telling, this is a God who surrounded us with delicious delights and then effectively condemned us to slowly starve as we stare at the taunting treats we may not eat.¹⁰ And so the serpent pits God against blessing, God against humanity, God against life.¹¹

Even now, this is one of the devil's favorite opening gambits. When he wants your mind and heart to accept sin, either he'll convince you that God is less generous than he really is (and therefore you're entitled to do whatever was unjustly withheld from you) or else that God hasn't said what you thought he said (and therefore the sin isn't really against God's law after all). So be on guard whenever either kind of thought begins to probe the boundaries of your mind. If clever justifications explain why sin isn't really sin, watch out. And if the voice whispers that God is a stingy naysayer, there's the serpent's other angle, getting you to mistake the God of Yes.

Okay, so put yourself in the woman's place. The serpent – unbeknownst to her, the deceitful voice that tempts – has introduced this question implying a totally reversed view of God. What are the woman's options? What are our options? The first option would be to realize that the serpent is an unclean trespasser who doesn't belong in the garden to begin with, and so for the humans to judge it and silence it by casting it out of God's garden.¹² If possible, the best answer to the deceitful voice when it aims to weaken your faith or rationalize sin, is expulsion. Take dominion over your passions, over your beliefs, over those inner voices and intrusive thoughts.

A second option would be to silently snub the serpent. “There was no need for her to get involved in conversation with him in the first place.”¹³ She owes the serpent zero attention. If you can't get that deceitful voice, out of your head, you can refuse to engage. Give yourself critical distance: notice it, then walk away. Recognize that the whisper has no power over you but what you give it. So give it nothing. “When temptation comes, never dialogue. Close the door, close the window... We do not converse with the devil.”¹⁴

The third option, if the woman insists on speaking, is: just say no. The LORD God didn't give his commandment to snakes, did he? So it's none of the serpent's business. The woman can just tell him, “Wrong!”, and go about her day. “Let your yes be yes and your no be no; anything further comes from the Evil One,” Jesus pointed out (Matthew 5:37).¹⁵ Faced with the voice that misrepresents God, all the answer you need give is simply “No.”

But the serpent was oh-so-clever. His caricature of God was so insane, so ludicrous, that the woman opened a deeper dialogue with the serpent. She means well! She's speaking up to set the record straight. She hopes to help the serpent by correcting his ignorance with gentleness and respect. She aims to serve the LORD God by defending his honor.¹⁶ But that's what the serpent wants. He used his absurdity as bait, a way to lure the woman in. He aims to exploit her good intentions. In proving the possibility of wrongness, the serpent has gotten his nose in the door.¹⁷ Paul would've told her: “Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted” (Galatians 6:1).

So the woman answers the serpent, not by quoting God's word precisely, but by paraphrasing it. What had the LORD God said? “Of all the trees of the garden, absolutely you may eat” (Genesis 2:16). But how does the woman say it? “Of the fruit of the trees of the garden, we may eat” (Genesis 3:2). She adds the word 'fruit' – no problem there – but what words does she subtract? 'Absolutely' and 'all.' Her portrayal of the permission is muted, less forceful than what the LORD God actually spoke.¹⁸ In letting herself be put on the defensive, she's tacitly been drawn a half-step closer to the serpent's point of view. And that's part of what the serpent will do to us, too. If the serpent uses a voice of presumption, smuggling in false promises under God's name, then we're liable to get carried away. But if the serpent uses a voice of doubt, then even as we defend our faith, we'll be prone to waffle a little bit, to shave the edges off, to make our faith more palatable – and so we'll understate the raw audacity of the gospel. The woman's defense understates the raw audacity of God's gracious invitation.

But it's worse than that. She doesn't actually say the permission comes from God at all. She only mentions God once she speaks, not of what she can have, but of what she can't have.¹⁹ So she fails to relate the bounty of the garden to God its Giver. She fails to highlight how every fruit is a sign of ongoing relationship with a God of generous love.²⁰ How typical for us, too! When we find ourselves pushed toward that borderland between faith and doubt, it's not uncommon to begin to mentally connect God more with his apparent failures than with his abundant faithfulness. In those dark and lonely hours, our thought might be, “God isn't visible here in my hurt, here in my prayer.” But we forget to think, “But God is visible in making my heart beat, in giving me food to eat and water to drink and air to breathe, in raising up friends who love me, and in countless other blessings.” So here, in the woman's misstep, we notice a bypassed off-ramp in temptation: explicitly thank God for all the blessings you do enjoy, and it will put into perspective any dos and don'ts he's given alongside them.

Then the woman continues: “But God said” (Genesis 3:3). There it is: taking her cue from the serpent, she's implicitly downplaying that this God is Yahweh, the Eternally Faithful One. The devil would love to get us to do that, as he whispers in our ear. It's easier to find fault with a generic God than with a God we know by name. So when you face the serpent, remind yourself: “This word I stand on is what Jesus, my Jesus, my Jesus who loved me all the way to the cross, is saying to me.” What doubt can't we defy if we look our Jesus in the eye?

Now the woman explains God's law to the serpent. “You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that's in the middle of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die” (Genesis 3:3). Here's what she gets right: there is only one exception to the blank-check freedom the humans have to enjoy the garden's fruits. Only one tree is off-limits, so she recognizes that the law doesn't imperil human life or human plenty. But notice where the woman goes off-script. Which tree was the one at the heart of the garden? First and foremost, it was the Tree of Life (Genesis 2:9). But now, in the woman's eyes, the garden's heart has been replaced. The garden is recentered around the one thing she's saying she can't have. And that's a sure recipe for discontentment.²¹

God had designed the garden with his own life-giving presence at the center, but the woman has remapped it. Only now does the forbidden Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil take center-stage, precisely because it's the one in the commandment. Therefore, the humans' world is portrayed as all about the rules, about the law. Instead of being focused on living life to the full within God's gracious boundaries, instead of having her eyes fixed on the God of Life, now her eyes are anxiously aimed at the sin she ought to avoid. But the more this becomes her center, the more obsessed she gets about this tree and the rule, letting it loom larger than the God who gave it. If 'legalism' is a meaningful word, this is the perfect example.²² What makes life life is lost.

When you're faced with temptation, don't lose sight of the commandment, but remember that it's a means to an end. The point of God's no is to preserve God's bigger yes. We don't love God in order to obey him; we obey God for the sake of his love. Because God is Love, because God is Life, we trust and obey. We can run our race better by fixing our eyes on Jesus, in whom God's Love has a face, than we ever could by fixing our eyes on all the pitfalls to avoid. If you can remember what you're obeying for, if you keep your eyes not on the sin to be resisted but on the Spirit who supplies the strength, then you'll be better able to keep the faith with gusto.

Back to the woman, and what she says about the tree she's misplaced. “You shall not eat..., neither shall you touch it, lest you die” (Genesis 3:3). Now, this might have been part of the original command, since dietary laws often ruled out both eating and touching (Leviticus 11:8), and since this tree was like the Ark of the Covenant which even the Levites “must not touch..., lest they die” (Numbers 4:15).²³ But on the other hand, she might have been trying to enhance the commandment by putting a fence around the law.²⁴ If you shouldn't eat from it, why even get close enough to touch it? Better stay back, just in case. It makes sense! But the trouble with building fences around the law is, if we forget what we've done, then God seems more restrictive than he really is.²⁵ Then this fence makes the law seem harder to keep, which can in turn rationalize despair: why bother trying, why not just give in?²⁶ And then the fence around the law ties the Lord's command to human wisdom: if we breach the fence and no disaster hits, we might assume that the whole law has no bite.²⁷

But the way her final words came out, the woman portrays her reason for not eating, not as love for God, but as self-preservation – lest she die, for the sake of not dying, she won't eat.²⁸ But that leaves the serpent an opening: if loving God is her motive for obedience, the serpent has no argument, but if she obeys out of fear, once neuter her fear and her obedience might fall. So again the serpent quotes God exactly, but prefaces it with a 'not': “You shall not absolutely die!” (Genesis 3:4). Before, the serpent was content to insinuate, to question; now he out-and-out contradicts the God of Truth by an open challenge, confident the woman will be receptive.²⁹ Next, he offers a plausible-sounding theory for why God would have lied: “For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened...” (Genesis 3:5). Now the serpent, in portraying the woman as blinded, has piqued her curiosity. We always want to know what someone doesn't want us to know. We always think that our wish to know gives us a right to know, and therefore anyone preventing us from knowing is opposed to us.³⁰

And so God is caricatured as a lawgiver motivated not by justice, generosity, and love, but by envy, selfishness, and fear. In the serpent's telling, God gave this command as a way of keeping us docile, to prevent us from having the power that could set us free to pursue our desires unconstrained. And this is what the serpent's whispers to us often amount to: that either God doesn't even know what's really good for us (and therefore we should just make up our own mind), or that God does know but is against our good (and therefore we need to escape his control). Which lie we buy doesn't really matter, so long as it avoids the truth which works by love.

Finally, the serpent dangles the deceitful delusion, some candy to be coveted. Whereas the LORD God had said “In the day you eat of it, you shall absolutely die” (Genesis 2:17), the serpent promises that “in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be as gods, knowers of good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). In the pagan religions that tempted Israel, the last step in turning an idol statue into a god was, they believed, a ritual opening of its eyes.³¹ So that's what the serpent professes to offer the humans: godhood in their own right. The serpent says that God knows that humans could become gods who are knowers.³² In becoming “knowers of good and evil,” humans would be capable of laying down their own law, of blessing and cursing with divine power.³³

Of course, the serpent is a deceiver, a false prophet calling the woman not just to worship a false god but to try to turn herself into one.³⁴ The serpent is the forerunner of every blasphemer who slanders God, every heretic who twists God's words, every voice of doubt and contradiction toward the true faith. And in service of this, the serpent's final twist is that, in telling the humans they need this one extra things to be 'like gods,' he tricks the woman into forgetting that humans are already made “in the likeness of God” (Genesis 1:26). He's given her a false insecurity he promises he can remedy, as any savvy advertiser does.³⁵ And he'll gladly, he suggests, smuggle to the woman all the hidden treasures God's been selfishly hoarding for himself.³⁶ Picture the serpent here as a sketchy guy pulling his van up beside a kid and offering her a little bag of white powder, saying, “C'mon, forget your parents, this'll make you grow up real fast.” Well, maybe in a way, but not in any way the kid should want. Actually, he wants her hooked, vulnerable, “captured by him to do his will” (2 Timothy 2:26).

But now the serpent is able to posture falsely as the humans' liberator, defender, teacher, and friend, as if to say: “Look, God is all bark and no bite on this. He's just jealous, he's afraid, he's hiding something from you. God isn't looking out for you. Stuffy and uncool, oppressive and obstructive, God is keeping you down, drugging and distracting you from getting what you really want. I, on the other hand, want you to succeed! I want you to be reach your fullest potential! Don't you want to be sly like me, godlike like me? I, not God, have your best interests at heart. I, not God, am the one who loves you. You can trust me: I've told you the whole story, the naked truth. God's commands were just a way to control you, but now you can break free. You can imitate me. You can please yourself. You can grab power. I know you want to see what you've been missing.”³⁷

And there, for today, we leave their conversation. Having planted and watered these seeds of pride and greed and unbelief, the serpent has nothing more to say. He never outright tells her to take the fruit; he only sets her head spinning and watches things burn.³⁸ When the conversation started, she lived by faith in the goodness of her LORD God's provision. But now she's been forced into a self-consciousness where nothing can be taken for granted, not even God.³⁹ She hasn't yet surrendered. But her faith is at a decision point, for her ears have been opened to suspicion and doubt. And the serpent's call is played out in our lives day after day, as the serpent tries to reframe our thinking to be more like his.⁴⁰ Paul tells us: “I am afraid that, as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be corrupted from the sincerity and the purity that is in Christ” (2 Corinthians 11:3). Facing the Tempter daily, “we are not ignorant of his designs” (2 Corinthians 10:11). But we have help from “One who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15), a Savior perfectly qualified “to help those who are being tempted” (Hebrews 2:18). Thanks be to God! Keep the faith.

Lay Hold of Life!

Last Sunday, resuming our tour through the Book of Genesis, we found ourselves in a garden in which God had planted a large number of very pleasant trees, which offered all we could want out of created goods – they're useful, enjoyable, interesting, and varied. But among them, we met with two trees that stood out, two trees that are something more than the others. There's something sacramental about these trees. The one we focused on the most last Sunday was called the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It represents the presence of divine wisdom in the garden, and its fruit offers the royal power to govern by handing our blessings and curses, just like the Law of God. But this was withheld from us, because we weren't capable of handling it – not, at least, without growing through discipline. And so to have it planted there, available but forbidden, presents us with the very first law, the original commandment: Enjoy everything else, but don't trespass in this one thing. In turn, that commandment created the possibility of obedience – or disobedience. Two very different options.

Today, we're not going to take long, because we don't have much time. But I want to turn our focus away from this tree that's forbidden, and over to another tree, a more central tree. And that was called the Tree of Life. Its fruit is a sacrament of divine life, God's own life-giving presence in his creation. It's symbolized, in the later tabernacle and temple, by the menorah that shines 24/7 to fill the holy sanctuary with light, including shedding it onto the golden table that always offers holy bread. These two things together – the lampstand and the table of bread – reveal the illumination and provision that the Tree of Life was there to give in the garden-sanctuary. The Tree of Life represents the opposite of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, insofar as the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, if approached disobediently, becomes a tree of death. Obedience to God's word, keeping his commandment by refusing the forbidden fruit and enjoying all the other fruit, is what's shown to us by this other tree, this first-mentioned tree. The pathway of obedience to God leads to sharing God's life.

Later, we hear that the wisdom that begins with obedience is “a tree of life to those who lay hold of her; those who hold her fast are called blessed” (Proverbs 3:18). God wants us to lay hold of life, God wants us to cling to this tree of life and be blessed. The problem, you might have noticed, is that we presently are not living in the Garden of Eden. We're going to find out how that happened over the course of the next month. But the fact remains that this isn't Eden. So it looks very much as if the Tree of Life has been taken away from us, left to us only in symbols like the lampstand in the temple and the ability to approach wisdom through God's law.

But when the early Christians read Genesis, they saw a prophecy. “Very sad was the Tree of Life when it saw Adam hidden from it!” they said. “Into the virgin earth it sank and was buried, but it arose and shone forth from Golgotha.”¹ From these early days, Christians identified “the tree of life” with “the mystery of the cross.”² In advance, Christ's “crucifixion was symbolized by the tree of life.”³ After all, what did the Apostle Peter say? “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” That's what Peter calls the cross: 'the tree.' Why did Jesus bear our sins in his body on the tree? Peter says: “That we might die to sin and live to righteousness.” That is, the fruit of Christ's cross is that we come alive – alive to righteousness, alive to the life God wants for us. And Peter goes on: “By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24). How does John depict the Tree of Life? “The tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2). And so “by the tree of life he restores us.”⁴

The Tree of Life is a sign, a prefigurement, of Christ crucified. His wounds are the medicinal leaves that bring healing to all the nations of the world. His fruit is the life he offers to us, the life he surrenders into God's hands as he dies. Although the cross was a Roman instrument of death, Christ brilliantly turned it into the Tree of Life – it's the wooden tree on which he sacrificed himself so that we could come alive to righteousness. And in this way, Christ crucified “became the Tree of Life that saved creation.”⁵

Last Sunday, we heard from Moses that, when confronted with this choice posed by the trees, this divergence of life and death, we ought to “choose life” (Deuteronomy 30:19). And now we know how to choose life: by choosing the cross of Christ. Now, to the world, and maybe to the worldliness in us, that's absurd! The cross is such an ugly, foolish, scandalous thing – pain and blood and tears and death. “Christ crucified” is, the Apostle Paul already told us, “a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:23). How could this tree of a curse, this tree that terrorizes and kills, be the Tree of Life? Only because Christ is on it to save. A bare cross, a cross that isn't Christ's throne, could do nothing. But Christ crucified is everything.

Paul tells the Corinthians, not long after mentioning the scandal and the foolishness of the cross, that he “decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). The reason was, he said, so that their faith “might not rest in human wisdom” – in other words, in what the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil gave – “but in the power of God,” the power of the Tree of Life (1 Corinthians 2:5). Right now, we're in the middle of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, because – contrary to the express wish of Jesus – Christians have fractured from the unity he gave to his Church in the beginning. These different denominations, these self-governed 'non-denominational' churches – none of that was what Jesus gave his Church. He gave the Church a unity to gather around, be fed by, and abide in a single Tree of Life. That was what Paul proclaimed: that Jesus “might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross,” through the Tree of Life he became on Calvary. And our prayer and passion should be to resolve these divisions, to reconcile into the one unity of the Church, to really become a single kingdom of peace, for the sake of that life.

And I will tell you this: there is nothing more unifying, nothing more powerful, nothing more healing for all these sicknesses of life – including our disunity – than to gather around the Tree of Life, than to gaze at Christ crucified, than to cling to that old rugged cross, than to feast on the fruit of his love. So come. Come and stand at the foot of the cross, and know you tread ground holier than Adam and Eve trod. Come, stretch out your hand to him, and take what the cross is offering. Lay hold of life – at great cost does it grow for you to take!

I'll close with a quote from a medieval bishop, one of the great scientists of his day: “It is right for the blessed cross to be called the tree of life, because by the fruit of that tree of paradise, the human being, if he had not sinned, would have been able to make his life everlasting. So by the fruit of the tree of the cross, the life of grace is made everlasting. The fruit of the tree of the cross is Christ … Other trees, though they bear fruit from which one may live, do not bear the fruit which is life. The tree of the cross not only bore fruit one could live on, but the fruit which is Life. … And on this tree of life, he put death to death and gave life to the dead.”⁶ Thanks be to God, who makes us alive by Christ crucified, our Tree of Life which saves all creation! Amen.