The tree of life symbolized the way of God, the law of God, the knowledge of God. If Adam had eaten from that tree, mankind could have thrived on the fruits produced by the tree of life; he would have been given access to the Spirit of God and developed the mind of God. Peace, abundance, joy and stability could have encompassed the Earth. With this tree, Adam would make it his prerogative to decide for himself, under the influence of the devil, what was right and what was wrong, what was good and what was evil.
If he made the decision to eat from this tree, he would be eating the fruits created by the spirit of Satan, a spirit of envy, vanity, self-centered lust that results in sickness, violence, jealous rage and, ultimately, death. Satan works tirelessly to snuff from existence knowledge of the two trees because he knows that when people understand what happened in the Garden of Eden they will see the truth about the devil!
The two trees were the first piece of instruction God gave to Adam. Read the account at the beginning of Genesis 3. The teaching of the two trees was the first test mankind faced.
That decision set the course of human civilization! When Mr. Armstrong began to understand and talk about the two trees, Satan grew furious because he knew those two trees would expose his dictatorship over the world. Armstrong for talking too much about Genesis and the two trees. Armstrong discussed the two trees, the harder Satan worked to counter his message. The devil works hard to kill the knowledge about the two trees because he knows this truth will expose him!
What happened in the Garden of Eden appears illogical. God had created a spectacularly beautiful, amazingly intricate planet, with its vast menagerie of flora and fauna operating in a climate and system governed by complex physical and mathematical laws.
Then He created man and educated him personally, beginning with instruction about the two trees. The two trees were not a mystery to Adam and Eve; the first people were acutely aware of the consequences of eating this fruit.
Yet they still decided to eat from the tree of death! Then the knowledge of the two trees became a mystery to them and all mankind thereafter. The human mind is deeply flawed, easily misled and swayed, painfully ignorant and, above all, incomplete. Even the world around us should teach us this lesson. God said that it would be this way in the end time. Hunger and disease prevail, violence and crime blanket the Earth, wars and conflict rage on, divorce, child abuse, teenage pregnancy and other societal crises are everywhere, economic catastrophe looms, and depression and mental illness are pervasive.
Human survival is our number one concern. The mystery of the two trees answers that fundamental question. In them is the answer to the great mystery of our time in this modern 20th century. Today we live in a world of awesome progress and advancement, yet paradoxically of appalling evils. The baffling question today is, why cannot the minds that can learn to fly to the moon and back, transplant hearts, produce computers and technological marvels, solve their own problems?
Why no peace in the world? God wanted Adam to understand the two trees before he and Eve acquired any further knowledge. God wants the two trees to form the premise of our education, too.
The two trees is a test of our character, and God wants to see if we are going to eat from the tree of life, or if we are going to follow Adam and the rest of civilization and eat from the tree of death. Mankind, like Adam, has turned its back on the tree of life and is gorging itself on the fruits of the tree of death. It heals nations! God opens and closes His Word by talking about the tree of life! The truth is, the theme of the Bible— from beginning to end— is the tree of life being opened to mankind!
The entire Bible is based on the premise of the two trees. The two trees were the first piece of knowledge ever given to Adam. The two trees were the foundation of revelation given to Herbert Armstrong. And God concludes the Bible with a vision of the tree of life. The Mystery of the Two Trees.
The doctrine of the two trees is the premise of the entire Bible! What Are the Two Trees? Adam rejected God on behalf of mankind! The Roots Think deeply about the symbolic meaning of the roots of these two trees. The roots of the two trees are the most important part of this picture. That decision underpins our human civilization! Those trees sit at the foundation of all spiritual knowledge! No doubt he was!
This world is filled with evidence showing what tree Adam ate from! The tree of life is a central theme of these two chapters! How important are they to you? Share on Facebook. Share on Twitter. At the end of this segment, Tim and Jon discuss the question of whether Adam and Eve missed a chance to repent in the garden. Instead of asking for forgiveness, Adam and Eve avoid God and shift blame. This story is meant to illuminate the human condition while also explaining the choice before each of us.
God has commanded us to enjoy his good gifts, and each of us choose whether to receive those good gifts from God or define good and bad for ourselves. Jon: On page two of the Bible, God plants humanity in the garden. The Garden of delights or what we call the Garden of Eden. God also plants many trees there. Trees that are good for food, trees that are good to look at, and one beautiful cosmic tree at the center of the garden that represents God's own life - the tree of life.
And God says to Adam and Eve, "Eat of any of these trees. It's called the tree of knowing good and evil. Eat of that tree and you'll die. And this has bugged me and a lot of people. Why would God put in this good garden such an incredible test,? Tim: The reason that the tree is there in the garden, it's a powerful image of the nature of all human experience. Every good thing in my life is also matched by an equal or greater number of opportunities to ruin it.
So these two trees are intertwined. The tree of life and the tree of knowing good or bad, how you relate to one determines how you relate to the other. Jon: And God doesn't put the tree in some obscure place that's hard to find. He puts it right in the middle of the garden right next to the tree of life.
Tim: To experience and eat from the tree of life, you have to walk by the tree of knowing good and bad and not take from it. Avoid it. It looks good but God said that will kill me. That's a thing that will kill me and hurt myself and others. It looks awesome, but I'm going to avoid it so that I can keep enjoying access to life. That's the way these trees relate to each other. It's the tale of two trees.
Jon: So today on the show, we'll dive into the meaning of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Thanks for joining us. Here we go. We're working through a theme in the Bible, and the theme is trees. Tim: I'm pretty sure it's going to be the tree of life. Jon: Yeah, tie video will be about the tree by tree of life. Tim: The tree of life theme video.
Jon: But in order to talk about the tree of life, we got to talk about trees. Tim: Ah, the meaning of trees in the Bible in general. Jon: In the first episode of this discussion, you brought up that trees are talked about a lot in the Bible. After God in humans, they're the most talked about organic living thing. Tim: That's right. And they have a particular kind of symbolism and meaning in the biblical story. And that meaning is introduced in Genesis 1 and 2 where trees are a real focal point.
Jon: And one of the things that trees do in the Bible is become a metaphoric scheme for thinking about what people are like. People are like trees. The way trees exist in the world and the way that trees exist in this narrative is very similar.
It shares lots of similarities to what people mean and how they are and the role they play in the story. So in Psalm 1, you can be a tree planted by streams of water. That is this ideal state of being human. Tim: Yeah. Psalm 1 which is part of a package deal or Psalm 1 and 2, are composed as a literary whole introducing the book of Psalms. And what you get is a human soul connected with the will of God, that Psalm 1, they're like eternal tree planted in Eden, Psalm 2, ruling over the world and undoing all the evil and chaos in the world to bring about the new Eden.
People are trees. Tim: That's the tree of life imagery. Trees are an image of perpetual life of continually bearing new life from within themselves. And humans are like that, too. They have the next generation within them. So there you go. Trees provide life for the creatures around them. Humans can spread and create more life for the creatures around them.
It's another way they're similar. Jon: The trees were a big deal because the place and time this was written, they have people that's dependent on the land - we still are but I don't farm - and they lived in a place that had a lot of kind of deserty plains.
Tim: The Bible came into existence within a culture that existed and lived and traveled between the Mediterranean Sea on the eastern end and the Persian Gulf across the desert.
So the ancient Near East is what that refers to. If you just look on a satellite image Google Maps today, you'll see a big brown stripe through that section with occasional spots of green and blue that are either mountains, oases, high places or river deltas.
Jon: So trees were a big deal. Lots of life around trees. Now in the next episode, we talked about there are two specific trees in the garden narrative in Genesis 2. God plants a bunch of trees. Tim: God plants a garden in the midst of a wilderness. That's Genesis 2. There's wilderness and nothing cultivated, and God plants the garden.
Jon: God plants the garden. There's trees that are good to look at, there's trees for food, and then in the middle of the garden So the high mountain, trees, and the river flowing out of it. Jon: In the middle of this which then you would realize it's kind of like the top of the mountain is the tree of life? And we talked about that tree. And we talked about how picture of a tree of life was a very common image for the imaginative palette, as you will, of the ancient Near East neighboring stories.
They would talk about such trees. Sacred trees, the top high places where either the gods are the tree, like in Egypt or Canaanite culture, Asherah, fertility goddess symbolized by ritual trees on high places. Or human kings can be depicted as sacred trees. And then in Genesis 2, the tree of life is riffing off of but also contrasting with both of those ideas.
Jon: You're familiar with those ideas? Here's a biblical way Tim: A biblical take on the tree of life. Jon: Yes. That God planted it. Tim: It is not a god, but it is a gift of God. Jon: It's a gift. Jon: It's something that we can take and experience eternal life.
Tim: Because the author can assume that a cultural understanding that, okay, in biblical faith that God isn't a tree, but the tree is a place where humans meet God because it's in the middle of the garden. And so a human meeting personally becoming one with the presence of God in the middle of the garden is depicted through this image of eating from the tree and it's as if the fruit conveys God's life to the human through that proximity and intimacy.
Jon: And where this really landed for me was making the connection between Eden and the temple which is a whole nother conversation, but there is a parallel direct parallel between river at Eden and the tree in the middle of the garden to the temple and the Holy of Holies in the middle of the temple. And it's where His throne is. And if you go into the temple, you see imagery of the garden and of fruit tree and the cherubim and all that.
And so it's about living in connection with God. That was a great conversation. Now, there's another tree. We're not told that's in the middle of the garden but we can assume that's also there in the middle of the garden. Tim: Two trees. So we're going to talk about a second tree and then what happens as a result of that second tree - the tree of knowing good and bad.
In brief, we have had many, many conversations about the meaning of the tree. So knowing good and bad is a phrase used in the Hebrew Bible like three or four times. It's always connected with children in a state of moral immaturity or just inexperienced in life. Good and bad representing not just good and evil as philosophical moral categories, but good and bad in terms of And so God wants to shelter and protect the humans from good and bad until presumably they can learn wisdom from Him to become wise rulers over the garden.
That's an inference. Tim: But I think it's one that becomes much more clear as you go throughout the story. God doesn't want to keep humans in an infant state. He wants them to rule. Jon: They got to rule with Him.
And to rule, you need wisdom. And so the question is, how are you going to get wisdom? Jon: How are you going to get the wisdom. That's one layer of this. The second layer is that when the command about the trees is given in Genesis 2, we're going to look at it here in Genesis and 17, the wordings important here, it says, "Then Yahweh God took the human, put him into the garden of Eden to work it and to keep it. Those two verbs, that's avad in Hebrew and shamar.
In combination, there's only one other group of people in the Hebrew Bible given that job description, and it's the Levites who work in the temple precincts. So we're back to Adam and Eve as royal priests. Tim: Meet with God and ingest His divine life. Tim: That's the first command actually. This is very important.
The first command is to eat of all the trees. Tim: Yeah, eat eat. So what's all the trees? That includes the tree of life. So it's very important. The first command it doesn't place the tree of life off- limits, and then if you obey the command, then you get to the tree of life.
Jon: Oh, interesting. Tim: That's not the storyline. Jon: Oh, yeah. Tim: It's very important for especially modern misunderstandings of this story. Jon: It's not a reward for doing good. Tim: No. The reward is given before the humans have done anything. Because it's not a reward.
It's a gift. It's the gift of eternal life is there. So the first divine command is to enjoy the gift of eternal life. It is yours.
So this reframes what the command about the tree of knowing good and bad is then. What these verses don't say is Yahweh God commanded the human saying, "You may eat from all the trees of the garden including the tree of life if you don't take from the tree of knowing good and bad. But that's not. The tree of life is already there. So the warning about the tree of knowing good and bad is eating from the tree of knowing good and bad will result in forfeiting the thing that is already yours.
That's the setup here. I think that's an important difference. Jon: It is, yeah. I like that. I also like that by lumping it with all the other trees you can eat from, it kind of helps me think about it more as a daily thing.
I guess I've always pictured the tree of life as the prize at the end. Like you're just saying, like, you beat the game, you get the prize. You followed all the God's commands, now you get the reward. But it's with all the trees and it's part of just nourishment. Tim: So getting back to the wording here, first command is "from all the trees of the garden you may eat eat but from the tree of knowing good and bad you shall not eat because in the day you eat from that tree you will die die.
Tim: It's "surely die" but in Hebrew, it's die die. So it begins and ends with a double emphasis. Eat eat from all the trees. One tree is going to make it all fall apart. Don't eat from that because you'll die die. I want you to eat eat. I don't want you to die die. This isn't a warning. It doesn't say "if you eat from the trees of knowing good and bad I will kill you. It says, "it will lead to death. And that's what's going to happen in the narrative. They eat from the tree, the first thing they do is mistrust each other and hide their bodies and then blame each other.
Then you watch two brothers divide, and then one kills the other. The first death in the Bible is not from God killing somebody, it's from a human who's taken the knowledge of good and bad into their own hands. And then you get the outbreak of violence which leads to the flood. Gary Basheers [SP], one of my theological mentors, many years ago, he first pointed this out to me.
It doesn't say "if you eat from the tree and wrong about I will kill you. It's a paraphrase, but that's the idea. So when this hit me, and I realized I've been reading a different story into these words, and not letting the words say what they actually mean.
Jon: A different story being that God's kind of judgment against humans for disobeying was that He would kill them. Jon: Instead of a warning that there is a reality which the humans can live which will lead to death. And God plays a role in that He exiles them from the garden so that they can't eat from the tree of life which means that they'll die.
But that's a secondary response to humans taking. And it's the taking that leads them to start killing each other in the next chapter. Jon: Keeping up the tree of life while living in a state of death means that they don't have to live forever in death. Tim: Exactly. Yeah, totally. Let's pause. Think of it this way.
This is a way you and I talked this through actually a while ago but we were saving it for this conversation. Think of these two trees as being next to each other in the garden. The command is eat from all the trees which includes that one in the middle - the tree of life. However, to experience and eat from the tree of life, you have to walk by the tree of knowing good and bad and not take from it - avoid it. That's the thing that will kill me and hurt myself and others.
It looks awesome but I'm going to avoid it so that I can keep enjoying access to life. The way to eternal life is by keeping my hands off the tree of knowing good and bad. I don't have to earn eternal life, it's already a gift to me, but I can forfeit my chance and access to it by choosing my own knowing of good and bad. That's the dynamic at work. It's the tale of two trees so to speak.
Jon: And it's helpful to frame it that way because often the question becomes, why did God even put this tree with all this danger? Tim: Sure. I got it. Yeah, we try and blame God for putting a choice in front of the humans. Jon: And when you frame it that way, my thought isn't "why did God do that? Tim: Yes, that's right. Jon: That what I experience. Tim: It's an image of the human condition.
Jon: I can see, "Oh, that's life. God's pointing me towards life. You could have life this way. Jon: The branches of the tree of knowing good and bad hang a little lower than the rest of the tree of life.
Tim: They often do. It's what looks like the easier way and then what I'm not seeing is that it's easier for me, but I'd actually make it harder for others to have access to the tree of life. Jon: I guess the other interesting thing is that it's about the knowledge of good and bad, not like a specific moral choice. It's not like, "Oh, man, I would really want to eat of the tree of life, but I think I want to hate my friend. I'm going to choose hating my friend.
It's a step of going, "You know, as it pertains to my relationships with others. I'm going to know what is good and what is bad, what kind of things will build up and what kind of things will destroy.
I'm going to take that power and authority on myself for myself. Tim: Yeah, yeah. So the gift of a tree of life is something that's like the goodness of God in creation.
It's the gift of life. It's a wonderful friend that I've had since childhood and it's just awesome. And then we're such good friends, we start a small business together because our ideas work well and we love it. Then you start ruling. You're ruling the world together. You're creating a new value in the world that didn't exist before. But then you get into situations and you have some choices to make.
And those choices could affect your friend - maybe what you do with the money may split up resources or how you apportion vacation time off. And then all sudden Tim: Yeah, that's right. And I start to feel like I deserve some more time off.
I work harder than them. And then I start making decisions that seem good in my eyes. I start redefining it as good and I don't even know that I'm beginning to slight another person and neglect their wellbeing as much as I care about mine. And then all of a sudden, I'm eating from the wrong tree and it seems like the right thing to do.
Jon: And I think what's good about the way you talk about that is that it's not like, "Oh, man, am I going to eat of that tree or not? Jon: There's a choice involved.
But the choice is, am I going to define good and evil, good and bad? Jon: Yeah. That choice is done almost unconsciously. To put it simply: humankind chose law over grace. We then see in the books of the Old Testament that follow, the application and consequences of choosing law over grace.
God gives mankind the law—many laws—but promises a day when another tree will enter the cross , and the second Adam, Jesus Christ, will do what the first Adam failed to do. So this is the first mention of salvation in the Bible. This then is a hint to the fact that the Messiah will not have an earthly father. God will choose a man, Abraham, and through his family line he will ultimately bring forth the Messiah.
But, in the meantime, humankind are separated from God and the dominion of darkness rules and reigns on earth. In part two of this series, we see the reappearance of the tree of life, but this time it is in the Book of Revelation. She has a background in communications, publishing and writing and has worked both in New Zealand and overseas.
She has a Degree in Creative Writing, a Diploma in Publishing and other qualifications in writing for print media. Vivienne wants to communicate the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the freedom that comes from a relationship with him. Skip to main content.
Two Trees in the Garden. She is married to Michael not the jeweller and they have four children and two grandchildren.
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