It Was Not the Tree of the Knowledge of Evil
Jesus Way Ministries
Look carefully at the name of the tree.
It was not the tree of the knowledge of evil. It was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the first half of that name has cost the Church more than the second.
Read the command again and notice that God put no partition in it. He did not say in the day thou eatest of the evil side thereof. He said thou shalt surely die — of the whole tree, without qualification.
Whatever that tree was offering, both halves of it were fatal.
Jesus settled why in four words
A man came to Him with a polite greeting. Good Master. Jesus stopped him before the question was even asked.
Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God.
He was not deflecting a compliment out of modesty. He was correcting the category.
Good is not a quality a thing can hold on its own, the way it holds weight or colour. It is a word that only means anything in reference to a Person. Detached from Him it is an empty label that anybody may pin on anything.
Which is exactly what that tree was offering: a knowledge of good that a man could carry away and own, with God left behind at the tree.
Telling evil apart from God is easy
Any honest man can do it. Most unbelievers manage it on their better days.
Telling good apart from God is the hard one. And there is no technique for it, because by Christ's own definition there is nothing there to examine. You cannot test it, weigh it, or reason your way to it.
You have to go and ask Him.
This is where sincere people are lost
There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.
Seemeth right. Not seems wicked and gets excused — genuinely looks correct to a decent person with good intentions.
Jesus described men arriving on the last day with a list. We prophesied in Your name. We cast out devils in Your name. We did many wonderful works in Your name.
Read the list again. Every item on it is a good work, and several of them are supernatural.
His answer was not that the works were fake. It was that He never knew them.
They had eaten from the good side of the tree for a lifetime.
The question that follows
This is not an argument for suspicion of good things. It is an argument about source.
A good thing done from a knowledge you carry independently — your judgment, your standards, your sense of what a reasonable person would approve — is fruit off that tree, however impressive it looks and however sincerely it is offered.
The same act, done because you asked Him and He said to, is something else entirely.
The difference is invisible from the outside. Both men are helping. Both men look right. Only one of them went and asked.
What the choice actually released
Adam did not fall down dead at the tree. He lived another nine hundred and thirty years.
But the decay started at the moment of the bite and never stopped. It got into his body. It got into his sons, and the first murder in history was committed by a man raised by parents who had walked with God. It got into the ground, which was cursed for his sake, and into the whole creation, which Paul says groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.
The earth we live on is not neutral scenery. It is a wounded thing waiting for the sons of God to be revealed.
So when God treats sin as the emergency of the universe, He is not being oversensitive.
He is being accurate. Sin is the one thing in existence that unmakes what He made.
Sit with this one
Think of the last decision you made that you were certain was right.
Not a decision you agonised over — one that seemed obvious. The kind you did not pray about because there was plainly nothing to pray about.
Where did the certainty come from?
If the answer is that it simply seemed right to you, you have located the tree. It is closer than you thought, and it is still bearing.
This article is adapted from Lesson 2 of The Progressive, First Edition: The Deep Work by Jesus Way Ministries — four parts on the work God does in a believer after the foundation is laid.
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