Just as a man consist of
three different
parts; spirit, soul and body, God placed three different
types of trees in the
Garden of Eden. The first type of tree which abounded most
in the Garden was mainly
for the supply of food and nourishment for the body. The
other type of tree of
the knowledge of good and evil was food for the soul and the
third type of tree
of life was food for the spirit. Each part of the human
constitution could be
nourished by a different tree.
If Adam and Eve ate from
the tree of the
knowledge of good and evil, their soul knowledge would grow
and increase and
they would not only get to know the good but also the evil.
Until this point in
the Garden, God had not exposed Adam and Eve to any type or
form of evil and
God had no intention of doing so. A soul armed with the
knowledge of both good
and evil would become more powerful and overwhelm the
spirit. Such a soul would
seek to become independent and not submit to the spirit,
instead such a soul
would want to be in charge and to control the spirit. This was precisely
the reason why God warned
Adam against eating from this tree.
The original design
characteristics of a
man are such that God designed man to have a powerful spirit
which exerted its
control over the soul and the soul in turn was to have power
and control over
the human body. The function of the soul was to be a medium
between the spirit
and the body. From the very beginning God wanted to express
Himself in the
world through man. To achieve this objective, God who is
Spirit would come into
man and create His abode in the human spirit. Once living in
the human spirit,
God would instruct the soul to express His will through the
human body. The
soul in turn would instruct the body to express, reflect and
manifest the
desires of God the Spirit in the physical world.
So when Adam and Eve ate
this fruit of the
knowledge of good and evil, they corrupted the design
characteristics of the
soul. They contaminated the soul because they lost the power
of the sound mind
which they received from the spirit. Their minds became weak
and their emotions
became more dependent of the flesh rather than on the
Spirit. Their will and
power of decision was also corrupted.
There is nothing wrong
with the knowledge
of Good, but when the knowledge of good is combined with the
knowledge of evil,
this creates a toxic combination. A bit of good and a bit of
evil can never
produce anything good. The combination of both good and evil
produces a mix
that cannot obey the word of God nor be subject to God.
The tree of life was
part of God’s purpose
to give man eternal life. This tree of life was the tree of
eternal life. This
tree of life represented the life of Jesus and God’s
intention was that when
Adam eats the fruit of this tree, eternal life would enter
his life and would
renew and transform and regenerate his soul and body. The
only reason why God
put Adam in the Garden of Eden was so that Adam could
voluntarily eat of the
tree of life but when Adam refused to eat of this tree. We
all know how
everything turned out and how eventually we ended up been
slaves to sin.
Some
backround
To get to understand the
story of the
Garden of Eden it is important to have some background on
God’s economy.
Sometimes back in the Alfa eternity past, before there was
the earth and the
heavens and everything that existed, God decided that He
wanted to build a home
for Himself. This decision and desire of God to build a home
for Himself is
what has been driving everything in this world ever since.
When God considered
this matter of creating a dwelling place where He could
abide for the rest of
eternity, He possibly thought of all sorts of divine
architectural designs and
engineering considerations for this house. When all was said
and done the final
blue print for the house of God was a man. Of all designs
and architectural
types, man was the best design that God could come up with.
God needed to live
in a house that was alive, a house that could think, a house
that could feel
and a house that could exercise a free will.
So in order for God to
build this house,
there were so many requirements that needed to be
implemented for such a
creature (house/vessel) to exist. God need to create the
heavens and everything
in them and then create the earth and everything in it
before he could create
this magnificent product called man, His eternal abode. The
heavens were
primarily created to support the earth and the earth to
support man. Once both
the heavens and the earth were created, then God moved a
step closer to
achieving His objective when He finally created man.
The issue of free will
is the main reason
why man ended up in the Garden of Eden. This was also the
most critical part of
the design of man. God did not want to design a computer or
a robot, he needed
a house that can make decisions independently, accept Him or
reject Him, love
Him or hate him. So in His initial design God gave man a
human life and not His
eternal life. This human life was meant to be a temporary
arrangement till man
should receive the eternal life. God needed to test His
house and establish its
appetite for righteousness and for evil. So God deployed man
in a Garden and
put before this man a fruit with the life of God in it and
another fruit with
the life and nature of the devil in it. God wanted man to
choose the fruit of
life so that eternal life and regeneration could take place
in man but
unfortunately for all of us Adam and his wife chose the
fruit of evil.
This explains the fact
that the reason we
must be born again and regenerated is not so much that we
are sinners but that
we all need eternal life. Adam needed to have eternal life
even before His
fall. If Adam has chosen to eat the fruit of life in the
Garden, he would have
received the life of Jesus, which is eternal life and he
would have saved all
of us the 6000 years of misery and pain that we have all
been through.
The fall of Adam in the
Garden delayed
God’s building project. Now God had to put on hold His plans
and come up first
with a recovery plan. God was not going to give His precious
eternal life to
some evil man, and there was no way that God would allow
evil and good to
coexist throughout eternity. So God had to embark on this
historic recovery
plan which has come to be known as the salvation plan. Satan
possibly thought
that God would abandon His eternal mega plan of building a
house for Himself.
When Satan actually ensnared Eve to eat the evil fruit, he
was in fact
targeting to destroy God’s plan of building a house for
himself. Satan’s
objective even to this day is still about destroying
anything to do with God’s
house. The fiercest of all spiritual and physical battles in
the world today
are all related to the building and establishment and the
work of the house of
God.
Throughout human history
God has more than
demonstrated His desire to live with his people (man) and
around his people. In
the wilderness He lived in the tabernacle amongst His
people, in Israel He
lived in the Temple. In the New Testament, He lived in the
incarnated Christ.
This incarnated Christ was the first pilot project where God
established His
house in Man. For the first time since eternity, God had
achieved His objective
in part; to make man His eternal and permanent dwelling
place (before this
incidence God lived in a tabernacle and in the temple). Now
Jesus Christ had
replaced the temple of God, He Himself was now God’s temple
but a lot of work
still needed to be done to fully attain God’s desire. God
needed to live and
have His house not only in the body of one man (Jesus) but
in the bodies of all
men. God wanted to reproduce Himself in all men through
Jesus Christ.
The only way to have God
come and live
inside of man as His house was to take Jesus and put Him
inside every man
because already God the Father was inside Jesus. So if you
put Jesus inside of
man, then God the Father who is already in Jesus would come
inside man and so
abide in man. But this task seemed impossible because Jesus
had a physical body
and it was impossible to take the physical body of Jesus and
put it inside
every man. Jesus in this case was like that tree of life in
the garden only
that now it was not possible to eat Him like Adam could have
eaten the fruit of
the tree of life in the Garden. It was necessary to have
Jesus in an eatable
form so that men could eat Him in the same way that you
could eat the fruit of
the tree of life.
This last phase of the
construction of the
house of God was completed when Jesus died on the cross and
became a life
giving Spirit. In other words, at His resurrection, Jesus
Christ was
transfigured from the flesh into a life giving Spirit (1
Corinthians 15:45). As
Spirit, Jesus is now like the wind, He is everywhere at all
times and He is
able to enter and dwell in the spirit of any man who
believes in Him.
God never gives up, what
He started He
always finishes. It is because of His desire to build a
house that today we
exist and are saved. Those men who do not want to be part of
this house will go
into perdition because they reject the very reason for which
they were created.
The house of God as an accomplished project will be
officially launched immediately
after the rapture and by the end of the millennium of
Christ, this project will
be fully and totally completed. From the beginning of the
millennium of Christ and
going into the Omega eternity, God will rule the universe
out of His holy house
and vessel of honor. God and man will be united as one
forever into a mutual
and holy dwelling place, man being the vessel of honor and
God being its
content.
I hope this sheds some
light on the
difference between the fruits of the trees in the Garden of
Eden and God’s
overall purpose with man. When I get to heaven I would still
like to hear from
Adam what really happened there between him and Eve. How
could he?