Trees of the Bible - The Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil - Part 2

THE TREE OF THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD & EVIL - Part 2


Some of us learn best by exploring and thinking things through in advance, others by experience.  It is obvious that the first two people to learn by experience were Adam and Eve!  As I mentioned in the previous blog, neither Eve nor Adam had experiential knowledge of death before they ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (TKGE).  Though they were naked, they were unashamed until they ate the fruit of this tree.  Then they were suddenly ashamed.  

What they had experienced was knowledge.  They knew things.  The serpent wisely encouraged Eve to think that eating the fruit of the TKGE would allow her to gain knowledge that would make her like God.  We assume that knowledge is good.  But imagine if your knowledge only consisted of things that are truly GOOD!  That was the condition of Adam and Eve before they ate the fruit.

The Tree of the “Knowledge” of “Good” and “Evil” deserves a lot of thought.  In our last blog, we looked at the context and history of what happened.  Now it is time to look at the meaning of the tree.  They were not to eat the fruit of the tree because it would give them forbidden knowledge.  Throughout the ages, one of the great passions of seekers was to find hidden, or forbidden knowledge.  They thought it would bring them health, wealth, power, and unending life.  Often that search led them to dark, demonic places; they found what they should never have known.  This search began at the foot of the TKGE.

The phrase “good and evil” is quite comprehensive!   Knowing all things good cannot be bad.  But knowing evil was terrible.  Even knowing the distinction between the two was terrible.  God knew that difference.  God knew the potential horrors of evil.  But He did not want Adam and Eve to know them.  We desire to become like God but wanting to know all that the Lord God knows is foolishness.  

We humans think nothing is impossible to us, and great marvels and mysteries have been DISCOVERED and INVENTED by us, but nothing has been discovered and invented that has not already been known by God.  Much that has been discovered is helpful, and much that has been invented is useful, but many examples of both are destructive and evil.  We do not have the wisdom to know what we have unleashed until we have unleashed it, and then it is too late.

When the serpent said, “you will not surely die,” he was playing with Eve’s ignorance of death.  There was beautiful life all around, and the Tree of Lives was right next door!   No, they did not drop physically dead after they ate the fruit, but they died spiritually.  Instead of a beautiful connection and relationship with God, they were filled with fear and hid from Him.  What is spiritual death?  It is as James described death, a separation.  It is first the separation of the spirit from the Spirit of God.  As we learned from the study of 1 Corinthians 15, death is an abomination; it should never have happened.  We are all born with a propensity to sin, a tendency to kill, and a waiting to die.  It took the death of the Lord Jesus and His resurrection to undo the curses of sin and death that began at the foot of that tree.  Sadly, because of their partaking of death, God sent them out of the garden so they would not.

All the good they needed to know would have gradually been taught to them by the Lord God.  He obviously desired the best for them.  Paul wrote, “I want you to be wise in what is good and innocent in what is evil” (Rom. 16:19), and that was the desire of the Lord for his first children.  Instead, their heads were filled with things that should never have been there, and the resulting sin was horribly illustrated in the death of Able at the hands of Cain.

The Lord wants us to know the things that are good, and the sad history of evil, so that we will desire Him, so He has given us His Word.  What we have seen should remind us of a passage in the Epistle of First John, Chapter 2, Verse 16: “For all that is in the world-- the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life-- is not from the Father but is from the world.”  What a terrible thing that the beautiful creation of the world and all that is in it, pronounced “very good” by the Creator (Genesis 1:31) was tainted by the Evil One, who designed his own world system, and by this first human pair who abandoned the command of their Creator not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and sinned, unleashing evil, because of their desire for things they should never have had.

May God grant that our increased knowledge and understanding of the terrible things that happened at the foot of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and our thoughts concerning these things enable us to desire that which is good, and hate that which is evil; to be wise in what is good, and innocent concerning things that are evil; and to grow in grace and knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ.