Life or Death

 DEVOTION

GENESIS

LIFE OR DEATH

Gen 2:8-9

8 Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. 9 And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground — trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

NIV

We will get to the man and his choices, but before we get there, we should simply ponder why God put that second tree in the garden. It would have been good if God had only put the Tree of Life in the center of the garden, then Adam and Eve would have eaten from and would have become like God in the sense of being an eternal being. That would have been the fulfillment of what God said in the beginning when it was decided to make man in their image. Sin would have never entered man and we still would be filling the earth, but the world would be a completely different place. It would be filled with eternal beings, who knew no evil. The world would be a paradise, a utopia, with nothing but loving, God-worshipping people. However, this is different from how everything turned out. God also put the second tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the garden. Why did he do that? We can know, from the account itself that God gave the man he put in the garden the freedom to make his own choice to listen and obey the word of God, or to listen elsewhere. Well, let’s just get to it, as we skip over the four rivers that all the archologists ponder over.

15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16 And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."

There it is, the freedom to choose, one tree would give life, the other tree, death. Why in the world would anyone choose death over life is beyond us, yet we know that is exactly what Adam, or rather Eve chose, and Adam, not being the man he should have, followed after her and ate from the Tree of Death. We know we are getting ahead of the narrative, but the point we need to consider is that through them because God gave them the freedom to choose, sin and death came into this world in which we now live. However, at the perfect time of God, he gave us another chance to choose the right tree. We can remain a victim of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and die or we can choose to eat from the tree Jesus was crucified on, in a metaphorical sense. Still, because Jesus did die on a tree, the cross made of wood, and shed his blood, we have that choice to accept this new change in life rather than death. It does amaze us, to a certain point that people still want to refuse this new tree of life and stay connected to the result of eating from the tree of death. We do know from our own experience the draw of listening to our own voice, or the voice of evil, and how we wanted to follow our own desires and passions. Some people who follow that path still think they are a good person they will go to heaven and have life. How can they think that? Again, we know from our own perspective when we walked that path, we did not even consider there was a God, so there was only this life then the nothingness of death. Praise God, he found a way to get us to see that tree of life and choose to eat from it. Let us continue to dine at the Tree of Life.