To the one who overcomes, I will grant the right to eat from the tree of life in the Paradise of God. — Revelation 2:7
Christians often forget that the tree of life was present in the garden from the start. Before the humans reached for the wrong tree, the right one was already there, freely available — fruit for the taking, no conditions attached. Eden was not a place of scarcity or testing. It was a place where access to eternal life was the default.
When the humans reached for the other tree, God withdrew their access to the tree of life.
The gospel, at its finest and simplest, is the news that the path back to that tree of life is open. Everything else — the scriptures, the life of Jesus — points to this simple reality.
The Choice of Two Trees
You were probably taught that evil didn't exist until the disobedience of Adam and Eve. But if we read carefully we realize that evil was a known category before the humans ever touched the fruit. God speaks of evil before the humans ever have a chance to experience it.
The LORD God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it. And the LORD God commanded him, "You may eat freely from every tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die." — Genesis 2:16-17
Read what that command actually says. "You may eat freely from every tree." That is the baseline — free and open access. Every tree included the Tree of Life. The fence around one tree is the exception, not the rule. And notice: God does not say the tree of knowledge is evil, or that its fruit is poison, or that the humans are untrustworthy near it. He is simply reserving it.
The word knowledge in Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is the source of many a misunderstanding. As you may know, when the bible uses the word "know," it sometimes means more than literal brain knowledge. Oftentimes it's used to describe sexual encounters or other kinds of intimate relationships.
Because of this archaic usage of the word, it's easy to miss what God is really talking about. What the tree represented was not the origin or awareness of evil. Nor was it about the capacity to do evil. The real meaning concerns the ownership of a specific capacity: the ability to see what is truly good and what is truly evil.
The easiest word to reach for in this context is "judgement," but it makes for a clumsy representative in this context. Judgement can mean a courtroom verdict, a critical opinion, a matter of taste — the word has been overloaded with too many meanings.
There is a word, however, that does convey the correct thought, although it's long fallen out of routine English usage. The word is percipience: the ability to see and understand something in a deep way — not just to notice it or have knowledge of it, but to see it for what it really is. In the garden, God possessed percipience about what was good for the humans and what was not. When God reserved that tree, He was saying: this kind of seeing is for me to do.
God had said: "You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die." This was God's percipience applied — he knew what kind of separation would occur if Adam and Eve were no longer satisfied with His percipience.
Eve looked at the fruit and said: "The tree was good for food, and it was a delight to the eyes, and the tree was desirable to make one wise." She was not simply disobedient. She had replaced God's judgement with her own. She looked at the same object and arrived at a different verdict. We're not talking about rebellion — we're talking about substitution.
The humans no longer trusted that God was a satisfactory judge of right and wrong. They would judge for themselves. And so they reached, and took, and ate.
Who told you that you were naked?
Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? — Genesis 3:11
This is the question God asks after He finds the two humans, and because it is a strange question, we should pay close attention to it.
Adam and Eve were naked before they ate of the fruit and they were naked after. No article of clothing was gained or lost. The snake said their eyes would be opened, and perhaps they were — but not to anything external. What opened was not their physical eyes but their evaluation of what their eyes saw.
Who told them they were naked? God had not told them their nakedness was a problem. How many times had they stood before God naked and it not bothered them? The difference is that now they looked at themselves and decided that what they saw was not acceptable. The problem was invented, through the humans new percipience, simply applied to the same nakedness as before.
Self-righteousness is a word we usually reserve for people who look down on others — judgers, moralizers, the holier-than-thou. But its root meaning is simpler: a sense of one's own moral acceptability. God had all along accepted them as they were. But now they insisted upon being accepted on their own terms.
The LORD God called to the man and said, "Where are you?" And the man said, "I heard Your voice in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid." — Genesis 3:9-10
The Blame Game
The man said, "The woman whom You gave to be with me — she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate." — Genesis 3:12
Adam manages three moves in one sentence. First, he blames Eve — "the woman." Second, he blames God — "whom YOU gave to be with me." Third, he distances himself from the act — "she gave me fruit... and I ate," as if he were a passive participant in his own mouth. He doesn't say "I took." He doesn't say "I chose." He doesn't say "I'm responsible."
The LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?" And the woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate." — Genesis 3:13
Nobody confesses. Nobody says "I'm sorry, I was wrong." The percipience they claimed — the capacity to see and understand truly — has already produced the opposite effect. They can apparently no longer see themselves. They can only see everyone else.
Playing God
From the beginning we humans were meant to walk in communion with God in the garden and be dependent on Him for day-to-day living. Dependence on our creator God is not a posture you can opt out of by declaring yourself independent. It is a fact that persists whether you acknowledge it or not.
The stumbling block to overcoming is that we, like Eve before us, want to decide for ourselves. What to do, what to feel, who to love, who to hate. We like being the judge. This group is good, that group is bad. It makes us feel good to be on the "right side."
Despite Jesus' teaching against judging others, people still judge -- and rationalize those judgements -- claiming that Jesus understood and encouraged this or that particular kind of judging. But judgementalism is only a side effect of the real problem. The real problem, the sin, is thinking that you know better than God and his plain, simple truth — his righteousness.
In the garden, God claimed the role of the ultimate judge. We were simply to live our lives in reliance on our Father. When we claim this role for ourselves we become a farce — foolishly playing God in our own poorly-conceived stage play.
Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. — Proverbs 3:5
Scripture teaches us to avoid our own understanding, our own righteousness, our own percipience.
Back to the Tree
The Tree of Life was not destroyed. God did not burn it down or dig it out of the ground. He simply withdrew access — stationed a guard and a flaming sword and said: not yet. The tree is still there, still bearing fruit, still waiting. Waiting on each person to decide.
The path back to that tree is open, but we first have to lay down the fruit we took. The thinking that we know best or our way is better than God's way. From the beginning God has said: I will restore you, you only need to trust me.
To the one who overcomes, I will grant the right to eat from the tree of life in the Paradise of God. — Revelation 2:7
It is the same tree. The same invitation. But you must place the fruit of the tree of knowledge back where it belongs — not in a human hand, but in the percipience of God Almighty. The way back is not to know less or more. It is to trust that He who knows everything has judged well enough already.