So have you thought about that question?
Why was the one tree more attractive than
the other?
Of course, to be as God and to
see something that promises to make you wise
and is good to eat and good to
look upon, speaks for itself.
But why wasn't the tree of life equally
as formidable and as attractive?
Of course, he created it, but...
I'm hoping that we're not being speculative and
imaginative, but I'm really fishing for something.
Why was God so quick to expel them
lest they eat from the tree of life?
For had they eaten from the tree of
life, they would have obtained immortality in their
sin, and they would have been eternally incapacitated
for the redemption of God.
It was the mercy of God to drive
them out of the garden and to keep
them from immortality by that wrong eating.
But why, when they had the opportunity, did
they not eat of it?
Why was it spurned, brother?
Because my sneaky suspicion was that the tree
of life was not as overtly attractive as
the tree of knowledge.
In fact, I would say that the tree
of life is the cross, and the cross
is unattractive.
In fact, the cross is repulsive, and the
cross repels flesh.
One is not drawn to it, one is
repelled from it, and yet that's where the
life is.
So in some way, that tree from...
Jesus was nailed to the tree, and in
the museum at Montreal, where we went to
see this special exhibit, in the general exhibit
there was a medieval painting, I've never seen
this before, of Jesus crucified to a tree,
and the tree had fruit on it.
So the artist somehow made this equation that
the cross was the tree of life itself,
and in fact it is the tree of
life.
And he didn't forbid them, which means that
it was available, it could have served them
in good stead, but they chose not to
be drawn to it.
So what in fact is happening is the
word of God is being rejected, and the
word of the devil is being received.
And isn't that in fact the issue in
so much of the failing of ourselves as
believers, frequently, and how quick we are to
receive the talk of the devil.
It's amazing, the most negative kind, you're no
good, you never will be, you failed again,
da-da-da-da-da, whoever said you're
a preacher, da-da-da-da-da, yes
that's right, the Lord said you're a preacher,
but you're quick to agree with the adversary,
particularly when it's negative about yourself.
Have you ever noticed that?
You never ever dispute with the devil when
he brings to your attention your own defects.
We're so quick to agree.
So again, the same fundamental operation continues, it's
the one speaking or another, it's the word
of the one kind or another, and we
seem to be, again, more prone to receive
what comes from the evil one than from
God.
But I think we need to be instructed
and be alert and not allow the enemy
our ear, let alone to give him any
credibility.
But how about the thought that the tree
of life is the cross, and that the
flesh would not necessarily be attracted to it
but be repelled, that maybe it takes a
deep awareness of the need for our life,
that we cannot walk even in the garden,
even in the Edenic place, without the continual
refreshing and nourishment that comes from God.
Maybe that's why they were so instantly hit
with that evil temptation before they could come
to the recognition that they needed to avail
themselves of that tree.
What was his first statement to Eve?
Did he begin with, hath God said, was
that the first statement in the text?
What was Eve's mistake that should instruct us?
She engaged in conversation, that was it.
Now isn't that itself a vanity to think
that you can converse with the evil one
and even match his wits and show him
off.
And that vanity is our undoing.
So don't engage in conversation.
Don't allow the enemy a place where you're
in your mind having dialogue.
No, that's not true.
I've always been faithful to the Lord.
But once you've given the ground of making
him a credible conversationalist with yourself, you've already
lost the game.
He doesn't deserve any consideration that we should
converse with him.
Well, can I read you a little bit
of Karl Barth on this subject?
The Creator distinguishes himself from the creature by
the fact that he exercises this power of
distinction, whereas the creature is directed to accept
and to approve what God, who is able
and entitled to distinguish, has done, does and
will do.
If the creature could go on its own
judgment, reject what on God's judgment it ought
to accept, it would be like God.
Do you understand what he's saying?
God had spoken, thou shalt not eat.
What was right for the creature was to
affirm God's right to give those directions, and
not reluctantly or begrudgingly, but joyously and gratefully.
It's a privilege when God speaks even to
give us restriction, maybe especially to give us
restriction.
We need to really probe what this independence
means, and maybe if it's only a begrudging
compliance rather than an affirmative and joyous acceptance,
we are already on the ground of independence
and moving toward outright sin.
So we mustn't begrudge God.
I guess I got to him.
He said so.
Oh, I praise God he said so.
I don't understand why he said so.
It's restrictive that he has said so, but
I have a sublime confidence in his love,
in his sovereignty, in his wisdom, and I
accept it with joy.
Restrict me all you want, Lord.
I love it.
Whatever comes.
Bless the Lord.
Somebody say something there?
Bless the Lord.
Oh, okay.
If the creature could on its own judgment
reject what on God's judgment it ought to
accept, it would be like God.
It's pitting judgment against judgment.
It's man, in fact, acting as judge.
But the essence of what a king is,
is his ability and privilege and right to
judge.
When man takes it upon himself to judge,
he is preempting God and taking upon himself
as creature the prerogative of God the creator.
That's why God says, judge not, lest you
be judged.
It's not your right to judge.
It's not for you to ascertain, to assess,
and to discern what you think is wrong
about the other party.
It's only the Lord knows.
And as Oswald Chambers has said in a
brilliant statement in one of his morning devotionals,
there's always one thing more about that person
that you cannot know.
Which, if you knew, would revise your whole
estimation.
I praise God for that thought.
There is always one thing more that you
cannot know.
Just when you think you've got that one
nailed down, and the evidence infallibly indicts him,
and you're ready to speak about that and
do him in, or treat him like a
leper, it's always healthy and humbling to be
reminded you cannot know.
It's not your privilege.
Only God is omniscient and knows in totality.
And he will always keep from you that
one thing more, which if you knew it,
would compel you to revise your whole judgment.
Therefore, do not judge.
The day will judge.
And so the church ought to walk in
such a tempered way, with such a walk
quietly before the Lord, slow to speak, quick
to hear, judicious, knowing our propensity for evil
and our necessity to exalt ourselves at the
expense of another.
God's provision in the face of all this
temptation is one thing only, his word.
And because it's his provision that keeps us
from sin and from death, it's grace.
That God chooses to speak a word is
his gracious love to us who would otherwise
invariably stumble into sin and death.
But he has spoken.
You shall not eat.
And we're not required to have an explanation.
He doesn't have to tell us why we
should not eat, so that our minds would
be appeased and we would agree with his
logic.
He has only to speak, thou shalt not.
And it's for us as creatures to obey.
But we need to recognize the word of
God.
Maybe every obedience to the word is a
sacrifice.
Every obedience to the word is a suffering
in that it means a restriction and an
imposition on your natural temptation and the indulgence
of flesh.
In fact, if God does not call for
those obediences, what then is his word?
A little pat?
A little sentimental suggestion?
His word is always a requirement to a
death in order that life might issue from
it.
So may we recognize that and be willing
to bear his word and count it all
privilege that he has the grace to speak
it to us.
And can we hear it when it comes
from unsuspecting vessels?
Can we hear it when it comes out
of a cracked voice or something high-pitched
or dyslexic or in a strange form?
Is our ear attuned to hear the Lord
and to recognize his speaking that we might
be kept?
The great test for Abraham was when God
said, Take thy son, thine only son, whom
thou lovest, and make of him a sacrifice
in the month.
Oh, that can't be God.
God doesn't believe in human sacrifice.
That's pagan.
That's Canaanite-ish.
That's the enemy imitating the voice of God.
Not me.
He rose up early in the morning, cut
the wood saddle of his ass, and went.
He discerned.
He was able.
He had a history of hearing.
His son's heart was disposed to an obedience
even when it contradicted his every category of
knowledge of what he thought God to be
and what God could legitimately ask.
It was a place beyond knowledge of God
by principle.
It was knowledge of God by intimacy.
He didn't miss it, praise God.
May the Lord cultivate such an ear in
us and nurture us, because I'll tell you
that in the last days, we're going to
be called to such obediences that will make
us stagger, that will contradict everything that we
think that we understand about God, that will
bring upon our heads reproaches, will be accused
of, at the least, lovelessness, of anti-Semitism,
as I'm already experiencing now, and many such
things out of the very obedience to the
voice of God.
Okay, here comes the ultimate curveball.
How is it that God, the Creator, would
plant two trees?
Why provoke Adam and Eve, who are innocents,
with the temptation that they're going to invariably
fail, giving the enemy his opportunity to beguile
them, when the whole thing could have been
saved if he had not planted that tree
in the garden at all?
Why not just the tree of life alone?
What is God up to?
Is he a tempter, malicious?
Why does he put such a temptation in
the way by having a second tree?
Someone was saying that Adam and Eve had
to fail.
There had to be this failure.
They had to set in motion the whole
redemptive work of God by which the cross
and suffering and all of that redemptive thing
would be acknowledged.
I don't want to say it was saved
for what, but it's a consideration.
There's a difference between innocence that comes from
childlike immaturity as against the innocence that will
be ours, having passed through sin and judgment
and redemption.
There's a place for us that is not
for angels, because angels are not given the
prospect that God puts before us and the
way that he has created us, because we
have a destiny above angels.
They're limited, if I can put it that
way, to holy, holy, holy, the whole earth
is filled with your glory.
We are allowed to pass through death, through
suffering, through sin, through fallenness, through redemption, through
faith, through sonship, through maturity, through full reconciliation
with God and the fulfillment of all of
his glorious redemptive work and then come to
a place of innocence.
It's innocence having passed through sin as against
innocence that is the mere accident of infancy.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
And that innocence is God's ultimate glory, because
it's an innocence that has known temptation, known
sin and yet chooses the way of righteousness
and that is what glorifies God.
What is more tempering than to know yourself
to be capable of sin, having fallen in
sin?
What is more glorifying to God than the
real appreciation, esteem and praise of God and
having received his redemption from sin?
What is love but gratitude?
And what is service but that which is
rendered in love?
And how can we be a servant people
of a priestly kind who have not passed
through sin and redemption?
Do you understand?
This is more than tending to God.
This is glorifying God ultimately.
Excuse me if I repeat myself, but doesn't
the beginnings, in the beginning God and creation
and all of these mysteries in the garden
open up a view of God in splendor
and majesty and wisdom that would have been
lost to us if we had just sailed
through chapter 1 and 2 without the kind
of examination that would have been given?
Now we can exalt God our Savior.
Now we can fall before him in prostration
for his wisdom, for the grace of God
who speaks, for the privilege of living before
a God who restricts.
Now we understand male and female.
Now we have a sense of the majesty
and the glory of what marriage is, that
they might be one.
Now the church which is built on that
paradigm as God's glory of the unifying of
diverse saints in age and background and color
and condition, that they might be one of
the same mystery.
This opens up when you see God as
creator, and therefore this whole evolutionary thing that
wants to rob God of the glory as
creator and substitute an explanation of chance dismisses
God as God.
Can you see that?
What will heighten our appreciation is if we're
not looking upon Adam and Eve as an
unhappy couple who missed it, but identifying with
them as being totally capable and one with
them in their sin and in their fault.
That makes all the difference in the depth
of your appreciation for God, his grace and
his mercy.
We have to see ourselves in our Adamic
identification and the propensity for Adamic sin still
with us.
Maybe even being manifest today in this room
in our comments to the degree that they
have issued out of knowledge rather than out
of life.
Because the cross, which is God's greatest grace,
has not yet had its total work in
laying the axe to the root and there's
still that semblance of self-life that wants
exaltation, recognition, on the basis of its knowledge,
the esteem.
Oh, look what that one said.
And what does ruling and reigning mean?
Shuffling papers in the office?
Bureaucratic self-aggrandizement?
Ruling and reigning is communicating to mankind the
knowledge of God as God in righteousness, in
mercy, in grace.
Because we have been the recipients of these
graces and not academically given to us in
our innocence but have come to us through
our own failure and through his redemption.
Then we can rule and reign.
We can make him known as he in
fact is, as God.
And that is the hope for lost mankind.
So the ruling and reigning, we have to
disabuse our minds of government as the world
has perniciously distorted that as a place where
a guy like Clinton can have his day
in the sun and have his museum or
his memorial, whatever it is, and gone to
hundreds of thousands and end with a retirement.
It's a self-seeking, self-aggrandizing filth that
is concocted in back rooms, smoke-filled rooms.
The government of God is holy, holy, holy.
It's not bureaucracy.
It's bringing the wisdom of God and the
knowledge of God to the nations.
And that knowledge is not cheap.
And that kind of service has got to
issue from love or it's not a service
rendered unto the Lord.
And it's got to come out of a
brokenness and humiliation or we will be lording
it over our subjects in our superior spirituality.
So all of those things require us to
have fallen in the garden with Adam and
Eve and to be brought out of that
expensive, painful knowledge of having to fight against
thorns and thistles in nature that is now
going to be adverse to us and bearing
our children in pain in order to come
to the place where we can rule and
reign with Him, co-heirs.
And all of the richness of what that
means, requiring a service out of love and
a service out of humility and brokenness that
cannot be obtained in any other way.
Oh, the depth of the richness.
Now, Israel itself, called to be a servant
people, must themselves, therefore, come through the same
thing, who presently today, and I'm going to
read to you before the bell rings, from
an outstanding Jewish spokesman that will shock you
in the way he interprets what we have
been considering, who are people who have no
knowledge of themselves as sinners.
Self-exalting Jews who see themselves as morally
and ethically superior.
I know, I was one like that for
35 years.
Therefore, something has got to happen to them
to bring them to an identification with Adam
and an awareness of their own fallenness where
it had taken the most extreme expression in
the rejection and the crucifixion of their own
God.
To see that and to be convicted in
the deeps of our national reality as sinners,
sharing the sins of our fathers and bringing
it to a yet more horrendous state in
the last days, and then to be put
in the place of redemption in the final
time of suffering, in the time of Jacob's
trouble, and to be restored to the land
yet before we even come to the place
of repentance and there to abhor ourselves for
our own sins and the sins of the
fathers because his kindness has led us to
repentance.
And out of that gratitude and love for
a God whose mercy has come to us
in total undeservedness, we can serve the nations
and be the fulfillment of what was our
call from the first, a nation of priests
and a light unto the world.
But except that the church has first come
unto this servanthood, how shall we be to
Israel what we must before Israel can be
to the nations what it must?
Oh, the depth of the riches of the
wisdom and the knowledge of God who knew
all this from the first in his act
of creation, all of this was implicit in
his design from the beginning.
And imagine the church that has no apprehension
of this, whose one Sunday is like another,
whose service is a kind of spiritual roulette
hoping to touch something that will take people
out of their Saturday night stupor, having stayed
all night before the TV set, and have
lost this glory, have never understood this majesty
of God's intention for the church, to Israel,
through Israel to the nations, that we might
all come, that he might unify all things
in Christ.
Oh, my, my, my.
Now, here's a Jewish, I think I lost
my place, a Jewish spokesman.
Thesis is this, the reason that God planted
the two trees in the garden was not
that Adam and Eve should fail, but that
he wanted them to fail, he tempted them
to fail, because he wanted them to exceed
his prohibition, because to annul God and to
refuse to obey his word is the beginning
of selfhood.
It's the beginning of the finding of your
humanity and your selfhood, and that God wants
to be exceeded.
Can you believe an interpretation like this, drawn
from Talmudic sources?
I'm reading it for you, not to encourage
your anti-Semitism, but to break your hearts
over the Jewish condition that has completely misread
Scripture, and from it has found a pretext
for its own humanistic assumptions that God wants
us to exceed him in order to attain
to our own humanity, that we might be
as God.
Man is beset by the existential dichotomy of
being within nature and yet transcending it by
the fact of having self-awareness and choice.
He can solve this dichotomy only by going
forward.
Man has to experience himself as a stranger
in the world, estranged from himself and from
nature, in order to become one again with
himself, with his fellow man, with nature, on
a higher level.
This is kind of an evolutionary thought.
He has to experience the split between himself
as subject and the world as object as
the condition for overcoming this very split.
Man creates himself.
In the historical process, which began with his
first act of freedom, what was the first
act of freedom?
Disobeying God and eating from the forbidden tree.
The freedom to disobey, to say no to
God, this quote corruption, he puts the word
corruption in quotation marks because he's taking a
dig at what Judaism calls Christian theology.
They do not subscribe to the Christian understanding
of the depravity of man.
Man is innately good and God is wanting
a human fulfillment by being disobeyed.
It's that self-assertion that puts man on
the road to self-realization, selfhood and true
humanity.
We're saying it puts man on the road
to sin and death.
Man creates himself.
Listen to those words.
What a slap in God's face.
And this corruption lies in the very nature
of human existence.
Only by going through the process of alienation
can man overcome it and achieve a new
harmony.
Totally independent of God, he comes into this
selfhood by his own self-assertion because he
himself is his own creator through his own
disobedience.
He is God.
This new harmony, oy vey, the new oneness
with man and nature, as we Jews are
showing forth so beautifully in our relationship with
Palestinians and Arabs, is called in the prophetic
and rabbinic literature the end of days or
the messianic time.
It is not a state predetermined by God
or the stars.
Just putting the two things in one statement,
God or the stars.
It will not happen except through man's own
effort.
The messianic age is man's own self-realization
and not the expectation of some figure coming
from above who shall bear in his hands
the scars of the nails and the wounds
that he received in the house of his
friends.
The reason I'm reading this is because this
isn't some obtuse, rare expression.
This is at the heart of the thinking
of Judaism by Arthur Cohen, a Jewish theologian
and philosopher called Tremendum.
He couldn't find, he was commenting on the
Holocaust and he found a word that is
so rare, the Tremendum, because no word can
describe the magnitude of the devastation and the
suffering of the Holocaust.
It's an unparalleled event in modern times.
Six million Jews being tortured and brought to
their death through the most brilliant civilization to
which Jews themselves had celebrated.
When you read through the book, it is
so difficult.
The language is so obtuse, so convoluted, so
philosophical, but I patiently bore through.
And when you come to the end of
the book, you know what he says?
The reason for the Holocaust, as for all
Jewish suffering, is not that it's the consequence
of our sin in God's judgment, but it's
the provision by which we Jews will attain
to divinity, for we are the answers to
the world.
Our divinization is the answer to the world.
And that's the explanation of why we have
suffered.
Not as judgment for sin of disobedience, but
rather a way in which we're being perfected
unto divinity, that we might be as God.
Should I tell you her?
Yeah.
And that there might be only one Jew
in a million who could articulate something like
this.
Unconsciously, by the multitude of Jews who wouldn't
even begin consciously to think like that, this
is an underlay in the whole of what
constitutes Jewish life and understanding, even when it
is religious.
And this is the object of God's attention
in the last days.
When you know this, you'll understand why the
severity of God in the last days through
the time of Jacob's trouble is not God
being malicious or being extreme, but giving to
this people, in measure that is needful, that
corrective chastening that will disabuse them of this
ages-old Kabbalistic and Talmudic mindset, contrary to
God, that misemploys even the Scripture and interprets
this in such a way as to give
a foundation for the humanistic celebration of man
and especially Jew as man.
We couldn't have seen this except in the
context of what we are now discussing.
And you see, we are worlds removed.
They think that our view of man as
sinful and depraved by nature in the Adamic
taint is some kind of negative, sick depreciation
because man is exalted, man is humane, man
is man, man, man, man, man is the
measure of all things.
Man even creates himself.
God is even a concept of man.
And we have done the world a favor
by giving it the Bible and the concept
of God as monotheistic, superior to the pagan
multiplicity of gods.
We have.
So, for the tape's sake and your sake,
I'm not saying any of these things in
any way to encourage certainly a hardness toward
them, but rather a heartache, a deeper compassion
for the powers of deception because these thoughts
are so beguiling, so powerful, so self-exalting
that they could only have had their origin
in one place, from below.
And we have given our ear too much
to that serpent, and he has corrupted the
whole of our Jewish understanding because he knew
that we were intended as a nation of
priests and a light unto the world.
And God's redemptive action at the end of
the age is to bring this people back
to himself and to the fulfillment of his
original design from creation.
And we are the agents through our mercy
and the extending of the communication of our
knowledge of him to them in their hour
of extremity that brings this whole drama to
a close.
So, our ability to communicate God as God
to those who have the most deranged view
is critical for their salvation.
And that's why it's not sufficient for us
merely to be correct or to be doctrinal,
but to have a depth of apprehension of
God as is coming to us when we're
going back to the beginning and God created.
Let's have a little prayer and thank the
Lord for what he has set before us
today and ask his mercy that we might
retain it.
Thank you Lord.
Holy one, what a God you are Lord.
We didn't know as we ought to know.
We were just touching the circumference the outer
portions Lord the fringes.
But what you're revealing now your genius the
mind of the Lord the heart of God
the love of God that is even willing
to allow us to fall to bring us
to a greater place than could ever have
been obtained if we were only left to
our innocence.
You were willing to allow us that suffering
and pain because of the end that would
glorify you forever.
And Lord we want to say it's a
privilege and we thank you for your wisdom.
My God, Lord we bless you for your
majesty and your greatness as the creator.
Holy one.
Bring us to that gratitude which is the
spring of love that we might serve you
out of love and not religious obligation.
Thank you my God.
The love that issues from gratitude and the
gratitude that issues from an understanding and the
understanding that issues not from the tree of
knowledge but from the tree of life.
Which we believe was our experience today.
Amen.
Thank you Lord.
That we came in our chaos and not
knowing trusting and you have been faithful again.
Receive our gratitude Lord and break our hearts
with the love of you that we cannot
contain.
That will be reflected in praise and worship
that does not need our amplifiers and our
musicology.
But a spontaneous overflow of grateful hearts that
cannot be silenced that is a music in
heaven.
Thank you Lord.
Oh we bless your name.