Do you hear the echoes of Genesis in this little three verse
passage? They were kept outside the
garden called the Land flowing with milk and honey for forty years while God
humbled and tested them to see if they would keep His commandments if He let
them into the Land. They were to go in
and possess the Land but the fulfillment of that promise was contingent on
obedience to all the commandments. They were
to always remember that the lesson of the manna, which they had come to
despise, was that they were not to live by bread alone but by every word that
came from the mouth of God. In the
Garden they had one commandment and enjoyment of the blessing of being in the
garden was contingent on the keeping of that one commandment which they failed
to do. They were to be fruitful, just as
they were to do here, multiply. The word
of God was always to be more important than a particular food, whether from the
tree of the knowledge of good and evil or any other food, any other pleasure.
"I am the bread of life. I am the living bread that
came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And
the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” What tree in the Garden was off limits after
they ate of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil? The tree of life. Jesus now says that this tree is no longer
off limits and invites them to come and taste and see that the Lord is
good. We are invited to come to the tree
of life and receive from it that which has been prohibited since the Fall. Sin is being dealt with finally and when that
work is done, we may receive from the tree of life. Then, as now, there are those who refuse His
offer, they can believe He is a great teacher, a great healer, a great moralist
or ethicist, but they will not partake of life because they do not believe the
truth. They are still eating from that
other tree.
Paul knew that he had to stop eating from that other tree,
the knowledge of Good and Evil, if he were to have life. The Torah is thought of by the Jews as the
Tree of Life but when they failed to recognize Jesus as fulfillment of the
Torah, proved that it had become for them not the Tree of Life but nothing more
than the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil. Worse yet, they failed to
recognize the Good when it was on display.
Jesus alone is good in all creation, the only man who was ever truly
good in the sense that He was exactly what God intended Him to be, without
sin. Paul, in this letter to the
Colossians, writes as a man fully converted to the truth and with no interest
in going back to that other tree again. He
has been transferred from the domain of darkness to the kingdom of His beloved
Son and will never allow anyone to take Him captive back to that other domain.
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