Prayer
Dear Lord, Heavenly Father, praise and thank you for your word. Thank you for the life that you give us. Lord, please renew our minds, and give us understanding and insight. Please lead us and guide us in your ways. Please equip us for every good work. Correct us, rebuke us, encourage us, comfort us according to our need. Lord, we look to you. May you be glorified as you speak to us through your word. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.
Reading
Genesis 2:16-17.
“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, (17) but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Meditation
Stories have a way of captivating us and drawing us in don’t they? They have a way of absorbing us. In general, we tend rather to enjoy stories than to analyse them, but there is such a thing as story-craft. There are good and bad stories. One of the things about stories is that they are always about something, you only need to look at some of the best known stories to see what I mean. What is Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet all about? It’s about conflict and young love. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens circles around the theme of generosity. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis is, fundamentally, about redemption and salvation. One of my favourite stories is Pilgrim’s Progress by the puritan John Bunyan. Like the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it too is about salvation and the journey of one man seeking to reach the celestial city.
Stories are always about something. Now that’s true whether you’re looking at history or fiction. The Autobiography of Charles Spurgeon is the life story of a gospel preacher. The Story of Ned Kelly is the story of an Australian Outlaw from colonial times. When you read a history of World War 2, it’s the story of the conflict between Nazi Germany and the Allied Forces. Stories, whether true or fantastic, resonate with us. We are story telling beings.
One of the reasons why stories are so powerful to us is because we ourselves live in a story. History itself is a story, the true story that God himself is telling. There are a number of ways we could prove this, but not the least among them is the fact that the majority of the Bible itself is given to us as a narrative. History, according to the Bible, is a story with a definite beginning, middle, and end.
Now here is something interesting that we need to understand. Just as all the great stories are about something, and revolve around grand and central themes, so too it is with God’s story. The Bible is not just a random recollection of events pulled together into a hodge-podge of stories. But what is God’s story of history all about? What story is God telling? It is the story of stories, the story against which every other story is measured and valued.
In these studies we’ve been tracing the biblical narrative through Genesis 1 and 2 in minute detail. You may or may not have noticed, but I’ve been trying to keep us focused on this question. As we’ve studied these passages of scripture, we’ve seen a definite shape to the story. We’ve seen that God’s purpose in history, the thing that his story is all about, is filling his creation with life – with his life.
In reformed theology, we all know the answer to the Westminster Shorter Catechism’s first question: “What is the chief end of man?” The answer, of course, is: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” The glory of God is the goal of history. But how is that going to happen? The big picture answer is that God is going to give life. John’s gospel, perhaps the most obviously evangelistic of the four gospels, iterates this in John 17:3 “And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” The entire gospel was written that we may have life! (Jn 20:30-31). This divine pouring out of life began in the six creation days, as we see God filling the earth with life. That’s the essential summary of days one to six: God gives life.
As to the drama of history, it is essentially the conflict between life and death. In Genesis 3, death enters the scene, and that is the major conflict in the plot – so to speak. As God unfolds his plan of salvation through history, and he sends Christ, he sends him that we may have eternal life restored to us. Christ’s resurrection, his victory over death, is at the centrepoint of history. And what is the final act in history? 1 Corinthians 15:26 tells us that the last enemy to be defeated is death. In a sense, the two major themes of history, and of the biblical narrative, are the themes of life and death.
Coming back to our text in Genesis 1 and 2, life is a key theme, and in these studies we’ve been considering specifically how exactly God will unfold this plan of filling the earth with life. I’ve put to you previously that, according to Genesis 2:15-25, there are three major ways in which God would fill the earth with life. It starts with service, or work. As man works the ground, it would bear fruit that enables life to flourish.
I mentioned two other means that God has appointed for the growth of life as well. Those two things are: wisdom and relationships. Both are necessary for life to flourish. As we open up the text of Genesis 2, we actually find that there is a close relationship between these three things. Service, wisdom, and relationships all come hand in hand. They work together. They are harmonious and inter-dependent. Work is service, but service presupposes relationships. But both work and relationships must be conducted with wisdom – and that is the focus that we come to in this meditation (I know, it’s a longer one, but I think all of this is helpful).
As we turn our attention to verses 16-17 now, our main focus is going to be on this theme of wisdom. And the central thing we will see in this text is that: wisdom is necessary for life to flourish. I want to prove this to you by focusing in on a very important feature in the passage: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
In some stories, there are key objects that play an important part in the narrative. We might think about the sword Excalibur in King Arthur – the whole plot hinges on that sword at one point. We might think about the ring in the Lord of the Rings. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil plays a key part in the narrative of Genesis 1-3. For this reason, it’s very important that we understand the nature of this tree.
Have you ever considered: What is this tree doing here? Why did God make it? What is it’s purpose? What does it teach us?
Be ye doers of the word…
Our key point of application in this meditation is that I want to really engage you in some focused Bible Study. Please pull out your Bible, sit down, grab a coffee, and get ready to do some exegetical spadework. If we’re asking: Why did God put the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the garden? I’m going to give you my thesis straight up, and then we’re going to dig in to the Bible and prove it for ourselves. Here’s why God gave the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: the tree was designed to give wisdom. There you have it, that’s my theory. Just as the Book of Proverbs is designed to give us wisdom, so the tree was designed in the garden. Now I’ve got to prove it. So find 15 minutes sometime today, grab your Bible, and let’s do this.
The first reason why I think that the tree was designed to give us wisdom is because that’s exactly what it’s name implies. That’s exactly the part that it has to play for Adam and Eve. The Tree of Life was designed to give life, that – at least is obvious. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was likewise given to give us that knowledge – the knowledge of good and evil. Now, here is an important question: What is the knowledge of good and evil? Well, let me show you, I want to draw your attention to six different scriptures that help us to understand this. Each one of these scriptures represents an exegetical leg in the argument that I’m making here.
Firstly, consider Deuteronomy 1:39. Deuteronomy as a whole is Moses’ final address to the children of Israel as they stand on the verge of entering the promised land. The first few chapters are a re-telling of Israel’s story until that point. Now for a bit of context on verse 39, which we are focusing on, verse 39 fits into the section of verses 34-40.
Verses 34-40 of chapter one recount the part of Israel’s history where the people of Israel had refused to enter the promised land. As the Israelites were refusing to obey God, and did not believe, God then said that it would be the next generation who would enter Canaan. Verse 39 gives us an interesting description of that younger generation: “And as for your little ones, who you said would become a prey, and your children, who today have no knowledge of good or evil, they shall go in there. And to them I will give it, and they shall possess it.” Now what I want you to notice here is the presence of our phrase the “knowledge of good and evil.” It’s the same phrase we find in Genesis 2:17 of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The insight that Deuteronomy 1:39 teaches us is that when you don’t have this knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, what that means is that you’re still in a state of immaturity. The children of Israel, that second generation, have no knowledge of good or evil at that point. And of course this fits in naturally as a parallel with the description of Adam and Eve, who were literally one day old at this point. They were not yet mature, they had a lot of growing to do.
Let’s move on to our second passage, Isaiah 7:16. Now again for context, in Isaiah 7:10-17 we find a passage where Isaiah the prophet is giving a prophecy to King Ahaz. Let’s pick up in verse 14: “the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. He shall eat curds and honey when he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the boy knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land whose two kings you dread will be deserted.”
We don’t have time to explore the main intention of this fascinating prophecy, but for our purposes it shows us something very important. It repeats this idea of knowing good and evil as being a movement into maturity. More specifically, this maturity would be knowing how to refuse the evil and choose the good. Now, does that sound like anything you’ve heard before? It brings us back to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which is designed to teach us how to refuse the evil and chose the good. That is what wisdom is in truth. And so the boy of Isaiah’s prophecy, in his immature young state, is said to not yet know how to refuse the evil and choose the good. Again, we see the same parallel with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, it was given to teach Adam and Eve how to refuse what was evil and choose what was good (i.e., to give them wisdom).
As the case continues to build, here is our third passage: 1 Kings 3:9. I’ve been saying that the tree in the garden was designed to give us wisdom. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise to see King Solomon picking up on the same language, imagery, and themes of Eden – which he does. In 1 Kings 3 particularly, we find King Solomon’s prayer to God. Now for those who don’t know, King Solomon, outside of Christ, was the wisest man who ever lived. He was the Son of King David, and after praying to God, God gave him a supernatural gift of wisdom. Solomon wrote most of the biblical wisdom literature, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes in particular.
Now our verse refers to the prayer that Solomon made before he received that gift of wisdom. Listen to how Solomon describes himself prior to receiving wisdom in verse nine: “Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil, for who is able to govern this your great people?”” In verse seven Solomon had described himself as a “little child”, and that’s the immaturity aspect of this that we’ve seen in our other verses. Notice then in verses nine what he asks for. He doesn’t ask for wisdom, not using that word anyway. He asks for the gift of being able to discern between good and evil, and God granted this request by giving him wisdom. Again this reveals that discerning good and evil has an essential connection with the idea of wisdom. They are two different ways of expressing the same thing. Knowing good and evil is the ability to judge between good and evil, which again is captured in that one word: wisdom.
This is why in Proverbs 3:18 Solomon says that wisdom is a “tree of life” to those who find her. In other words, she enables them to choose the good (the tree of life) and refuse the evil. He’s using the imagery of Eden to describe wisdom. And so wisdom, in other words, submits to God’s commandments, and eats from the tree of life rather than choosing to disobey God.
Our fourth text is 2 Samuel 14:17. In this passage the woman of Tekoa is addressing King David, and in verse 17 this is how she describes him: “And your servant thought, ‘The word of my lord the king will set me at rest,’ for my lord the king is like the angel of God to discern good and evil.” To honour King David, she speaks of him as being like the angel of God, being able to discern good and evil. In other words, she’s saying that he’s a wise king. Again – there’s our phrase. This time, however, it’s not in reference to children lacking knowledge. Here it’s in reference to the divine maturity and discernment that God had given to king David.
Our next passage is from the New Testament, Hebrews 5:11-14. In these verses we again find the same concept. As the writer of the Hebrews addresses the believers of the New Testament churches, he says: “About this (referring back to his discussion on Melchizedek)… we have much to say, and it is hard to explain, since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you again the basic principles of the oracles of God. You need milk, not solid food, for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil.”
At the end, in verse 15, we have our point again, the same kind of phraseology: “distinguishing good and evil.” In other words, the immature don’t have this capacity. They don’t have wisdom. They don’t have the everyday ability in life to distinguish good and evil. They need wisdom, and that is what the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was designed to give to Adam and Eve – the ability to discern good from evil.
For our final passage, we come right back to the Book of Genesis – Genesis 3:6. As the serpent tempts Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, keep an eye out for what it is that tempts Eve in our verse. Verse six says: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate…” She saw that the fruit was good to eat, it was edible. She saw that it was attractive, a delight to the eyes. But she also saw that it was to be desired to make one wise. That is a paraphrase of the purpose of the tree – it’s desirable to make one wise. In other words, to call it the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is pretty much the same thing as calling it the tree of wisdom.
Eve’s error, of course, was that wisdom would be learned not by eating the fruit, but by obeying God and refraining from eating. That’s how the tree would train Adam and Eve. This brings us right back full circle to our original idea: just as the tree of life was designed to give life, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was designed to give wisdom, wisdom to choose the good and refuse the evil. It was designed to give wisdom to choose the tree of life, and turn away from disobedience. That’s what the phrase “knowledge of good and evil” means, it means knowing how to discern between good and evil. Making that judgment, and leading us to choose good. This was the purpose of the tree – to give us wisdom.
We’ve taken plenty of space to establish the case here, and I have no application today beyond doing the hard work of study that we’ve just done (well done!). But at least let me show you why this is important. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil has been a source of confusion for many, or perhaps even just unexamined. But we need to understand how it works. In the studies that follow this one, the groundwork we’ve laid in this study will bear fruit as we unpack what this means for us. Stay tuned, and we will have more to see very soon! SDG.
Prayer of Confession & Consecration
Our Lord and God, we thank you that your word gives us wisdom and teaches us to discern good from evil. We pray, O Lord, that you would please forgive us for the many, many times that we have chosen the evil and refused the good. And Lord, direct us, help us to choose the good and refuse the evil instead. Give us this wisdom, we pray, even in the studying of this, your Holy Word. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
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