The Story of a Tree: An Old Testament Theology of Fruitfulness, Part 6

The Garden Story is about a man who failed his test to protect his bride; it's about a tree that should have been left alone at that time.

Note: This is the sixth part in a series on the Fruit of the Spirit. My argument is that to better understand the Fruit of the Spirit, we need to return to the first fruit tree that cursed us all.

Introduction

Let’s assume there are 100 toys in the room. And let’s assume child a starts to play with one of those toys. He is playing joyfully by himself until child b walks into that room. Now, child b had no idea what he wanted to play with, but when he saw one out of 100 toys in the hands of his brother, he said to himself, “That must be the most desired thing to possess because it’s the chosen possession of another.”[1] And there you have the illustration of every human violation of God’s law since the Garden of Eden.

God told Adam what he could have and what he couldn’t have. Adam could eat the Tree of Life and all the trees of the field, but he could not touch, handle, or taste the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. So, the thing that he could not possess became the thing that consumed him.

When you decide to picnic under the wrong tree, you are on your way to self-destruction, distortion of reality, and eventual apostasy. God has given us thousands of good fruits, but he sets aside the fruit we shouldn’t have for later. Why does he do that? Is it because he is a kill-joy? Is it because he is an ogre? Or maybe he is selfish? No. Not all. It’s because God knows our frame and that we will hurt ourselves if we eat certain things before time. Unlike our modern parenting techniques, God doesn’t give us what we want when we want it. He gives it when the time is right.