Gleanings From the Garden - Part 2 — Art Katz

The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

It's not good and evil as if they're moral categories just to know plus or minus. It's good and evil. The tree is a summation of a whole omniscience, a whole knowing, a breadth of understanding that is uniquely God's alone.

It's not to know this issue or that issue. It's a tree. It's a much larger thing than the moral issue of whether this is good or that is bad. It's a knowing that is only appropriate to God. It's an understanding and a knowledge that alone is God's.

And when you eat from that tree, what you're saying is you want to be as God. You want to have the same breadth of perspicuity of understanding and choices as only he is alone fit to make. You're unwilling to be limited in your dependence upon him who is alone, made unto us wisdom, sanctification, redemption, and power because we don't want to look foolish.

We want to have access to our own wisdom. We want to be able to turn it on and off at our will so that we can give answer to man. We can look spiritual. We can be appropriate. We don't want to be there with our faces sticking out and say, I can't answer.

The Lord has not given. I don't understand. Remember I said I was not the first in my neighborhood to know the body of Christ. I was the last. And men were giving messages and lectures and talks and this new novelty, the body of Christ.

I had not a word to say. Why? Wasn't I as capable of going to a concordance and finding appropriate scripture? Couldn't I even copy them? Isn't that what false prophets do? But copy one another? No, you had to wait.

And it's an embarrassment not to be able to give answer. Are you willing for that? It's death, death, death. If you're going to have life, life, life. And the temptation that is powerful, seductive is the accessibility of that other tree.

If you'll disobey God who said it's forbidden. What I'm wanting to score and underline is that it's not only evil because it's a tree of good and evil, but that the good is as evil as the evil. Maybe even more because it's deceptive in its appearance and yet in its activity, it is as much opposed to God as evil.

And the reason that we're attracted is because we who would be repulsed by evil are attracted by good. See what I mean? But God said you shall not eat. And that's the question. Are we going to obey a word that has been given us by a God who knows what is good and evil?

Because we cannot know. To us it appears attractive, to us it appears useful. God said, no, we shall not eat. And he does not give us an explanation and we should not be ones who require it. God has said.

And what was the point of temptation? What was the first question? The snake. Has God said? The first attack is on the credibility of God speaking in his word and raising questions of what might be God's ulterior motive that had never occurred to Eve until the devil suggested he doesn't want you to eat because he's jealous.

He wants to be alone sovereign. But if you eat, you'll be like him. See how vicious that is. So what is a saint? A saint is one who obeys the word and does not require explanation and will not be tempted away and out from that obedience by allowing questions to be raised about God's credibility and his motive in that requirement.

Obedience Without Explanation

Even when it comes from what if God is speaking through an elder and he says no and doesn't give explanation, will you surrender to that as being God's requirement? We're a people who have been shaped by the world.

We want explanation. We want it to add up. We want to weigh the pluses and the minuses and see if we agree with it in our logic. And then we will accede and give obedience. That's not to say that God is averse to knowledge or averse to understanding.

We'd have us to be nitcompoops and non-composementis and a bunch of dullards. But what is the source of our knowledge? From where has it been derived? Who has been pleased to give it in his own time?

Are we holding it in humility? And even then do we act upon it independent of his will? So there's all those kinds of things that need to be considered also. What's the object of the Garden of Eden? That he planted a garden and set Adam and then subsequently Eve in it.

What was his intent? But to fellowship with them in the garden. This is the summum bonum. This is the ultimate good is the fellowship. What breaks it is man's autonomy and independence from God. Where do we come back from the break?

And I read you Barth's conclusion to the matter. You'll be carried out on a stretcher. I'm worried that you'll be able to take it. The glory of this. This theologian brings us through to this ultimate question of what fellowship with him in the garden means because we have submitted to the limitation of God who alone knows what is good and has given us limitations for our good.

And does that mean a permanent restriction or does God have some ultimate thing in mind of the kind that you're talking? So brace yourself. What was being confronted that night in North Carolina was the counterfeit.

God was blowing the whistle. And my naive hope was that men in hearing the word, however severe and however offensive, would say it was worthwhile and will go down. The counterfeit was unveiled and the authentic was set forth as an option that would be theirs out of repentance from the false.

Instead, the man never moved from his seat. Others cried out and he went on as if it was not a word for him. And I think of your illustration of Lazarus. You know, it takes God to call forth Lazarus from the dead, but then he has the people to unwrap him.

You know, we are called, this is the calling of the church, is to unwrap. And what was underneath that? You know, I'm going to be willing. You know what we have to say as this breaks upon our consciousness?

Who is sufficient for these things? Paul was continually groaning. Who is sufficient for these things? And there's a whole wealth of Christians out there who have never once ever asked that question. They're all sufficient.

But when you begin to recognize how kind of walk and fellowship that God is wanting, that we might be co-heirs, and the delicacy of these questions where even the word of God mechanically applied, we'll miss the moment.

Doesn't it say that you should love your wives? And how's this man allowing his wife? How do we thread our way through something like that? Where sometimes God even seems to be contradicting his word.

Abraham could have missed it on that basis and not made Isaac a sacrifice. There is no question that however much he confronted his categories of what he knew about God as good, he still was able to hear the voice of God unto obedience.

So who is sufficient for these things? What kind of a walk? And can we maintain that walk independent of other brothers and sisters? I watched the most wonderful transformation of Adam over the course of time that he's been with us and measured in Cheryl, only because of the benefit that has come from the corporate life, the interaction within the body, the things of a confrontational kind and the dealings and prayers and counseling, all the kind that a man could never have obtained by himself independent of the body.

Maybe we'll come to a new respect and appreciation for the body of Christ, the church, when we recognize that the demand of God, the call for this fellowship and this walk is of such a kind that requires such a sensitivity, such an adherence to God that we cannot attain to this independent of the benefit that we receive from brothers and sisters in exhortation, in correction, in rebuke, in counsel, in prayer, in love.

We'll never attain to a walk of this kind as autonomous and independent souls. And in fact, that's the very formula for counterfeit. That kind of super spirituality that doesn't need the brother is the one that will assure you that however spiritual you think you are and alone to God, you're actually in the place of the deception.

Fellowship in the Body of Christ

So I want to just end on that note because I see how it all goes together. If the church is to be the church, it requires this recognition, this appreciation. So Lord, who's sufficient for these things?

The great apostle continually cried out, what shall we say? So we thank you, my God, for pressing upon us and showing us we cannot make decisions. We cannot assess of ourselves. We cannot weigh up, my God, and come to a right conclusion.

Only you know what is good for only you are good. And bring us, my God, away from the seduction of the operation of our own minds, our own assessments, particularly our own critical judgments of one another in the church that keeps the church from being the church and the very supply that would bring us to the kind of walk to which we're called.

So we bless you, Lord. Oh, precious God, let nothing fall to the ground between what is said and even in between the lines. Press upon our hearts, my God. And we thank you and give you praise for your jealousy over us to not allow us too quickly to pass out from the subject of the two trees without this.

What is it? This is gleaning in this garden. So we bless you, Lord. Bring us to your conclusion after the break. We thank and give you praise for this love and intense jealousy that will not let us go.

Be glorified thereby. In Yeshua's name we pray. And just to bring our subject to a conclusion so we can go on tomorrow to Cain and Abel. And that will be a heavy consideration. If you're not used to theological reflection, this will be a new kind of experience.

But I appreciate, I want to encourage your appreciation of men who have given their lives to wrestling with the scriptures and trying to come to understanding. Of course, I believe that it's a privilege of the church itself that theology is too good to be confined to theologians, but that we all should be given to a theological reflection.

God as Sovereign Judge

I can't think of a better subject to occupy us than to think on God and his word in his way. So I'm just going to read it, except for some comments that the Lord might himself prompt. I read the part about that God alone is the judge, the sovereign judge, and the only one who knows what is good, for he's made what is good.

And he said it is good. A brother in the break time said, well, how then could the tree of the knowledge of good and evil be good if it's deaf? And yet it says all that he made is good. Well, it's not good for the eating, but it's good in the sense that it fulfills a purpose in God in giving a man limitation that tests his obedience.

That is the issue of fellowship with God. That would not be an issue if the tree were not there. It's good in the purpose that it serves, but it's not good in the eating. And that way, evil serves the purpose of good.

And God is the creator of all things. So in making this decision as the creator, he made use of his knowledge of good and evil. It is this judge on the basis of this judicial knowledge and sentence that he confronts men as Lord.

We are taking the word Lord in vain and abusing it and making it a light matter. If we have not in the deeps recognized that the understanding of God as Lord is the understanding of God as judge, as the one alone who knows what is good.

Unless you have given yourself to that, you might find yourself saying Lord, Lord, and a kind of a mindless way that has not really surrendered to the lordship of God in the sovereignty of his own understanding and his own knowledge of what is good and what is evil.

So everything is what is and how it is because God as the judge has decided and ordered and willed it thus and not otherwise. Because in his freedom, which is also his wisdom and power, his righteousness and goodness, he has chosen between good and evil, salvation, perdition, life and death, because he alone knew how to achieve that which is right and did achieve it.

There is a knowledge of good and evil, which is the basis of all things and the source of all life, namely that of God the creator. And that's what we're looking at in these days. What is revealed of God in creation in the garden and the establishing of the two trees is a statement of God in what is good and himself as good.

So human life is to be lived in such a way that face to face with the second tree, man takes his stand consciously and not unconsciously on the ground of this divine decision. That he accepts it as such and he acknowledges and praises God as the one who in his sovereignty has willed and done this and not something else.

It's not enough to acknowledge the goodness of God and the wisdom of God in establishing the trees, but to consciously embrace that knowledge, that God in his act and rejoice in it and celebrate and praise him for it.

Then it's a real acceptance of the lordship of Christ. If it's a begrudging compliance, like, well, I guess what can I do? I'm forbidden. That's not the full recognition of God as creator, because he created all things good.

To know God as good is not merely to reluctantly acquiesce to what he has done, but to embrace it and to praise him for it joyously. I'm a woman. I have certain limitations. I received that not begrudgingly, but with joy because I know that those limitations are intended for my good, for he is my creator and what he has limited is in his wisdom and I rejoice for that limitation.

See what I mean? And whatever it is in our limitation or our calling, not merely to acknowledge, but to celebrate and to praise. Then is he indeed lord and then are we indeed coming to the place of fellowship of his intention?

So this is what God wills with the existence of the second tree. Its function is to summon man to life in this knowledge and adoration. I'll tell you that from my earliest days as a believer, whenever the word came up in our courses, adoring Jesus, I winced because the word adoration and to adore is not some light epithet as if we can turn it on and off like a faucet.

Adoration is one of the deepest recognitions of something sublime in the object that we adore and you don't come to that lightly and I don't think that the church has come to it at all or can come except that we have come to the depth of the recognition of who God is as it is revealed only and especially in his creation from the beginning.

Adoration waits on this kind of recognition that all that he has done is good. Then we can adore him for his wisdom and his love. He's not a mean deity who pulls the wings off of flies or delights in judgment or delights in restricting, but because his wisdom knows that the place of restriction is the place of expansion and that we could not come to this plentitude of expansion except that we have willfully and joyfully submitted to the restriction that has come through his word.

He's testing us. Will we obey without explanation? We've got to love him for that because he could have been a soft sap. He could have been an easy condoling God and making the way we do with our kids, looking the other way and making nice and what do we get for it?

A bunch of rebels with earrings and nose rings and belly rings and tattoos and every kind of thing because we have not been to them as stringent in our discipline and requirement as he is with us for fear that they would misinterpret it or we would alienate them when really what they're organically crying out for is that demonstration of love that requires and doesn't give explanation.

But why can't I go? Because I said so. There are things I cannot explain to you. But I'm requiring of you. Take those earrings off. I can't explain to you how I know that what you cannot know that you're giving access to the spirits of this world, the demonic powers that will not immediately be evident, but ultimately they will have their place because they're on your body, in you and around and on your neck and on your being.

Take it off. So the life of man is ordained to be lived in fellowship with God in the acknowledgement of his deity and therefore of his judicial office in creation. He alone is the judge. He alone knows and we submit to that knowing and that we're consciously thankful for that and praise him for that.

So we give our cheerful acquiescence because God is good and he's right and he has spoken and the recognition of our limitation that he's the creator and we are the creatures. If you've never heard about the 10-day fast and 24-hour prayer around the clock that we had here at Ben Israel some years ago, how I came back from some ministry trip in which I had said that the church needs to continue in the same kind of waiting upon the Lord as was experienced in the 10 days in the upper room before the advent of Pentecost.

And when I finished that a young believer came up to me and said, Art, do you know of any fellowship anywhere in the world where you have traveled that has waited 10 days on the Lord? You ever get hit in the solar plexus and the air goes out of you and you double over with a question?

And I had to think, no, I don't know of one fellowship and even your own fellowship has never done that. Yes, we've had our fast three days, five days, seven days over an issue of should we do this? Should we do that?

Do we go to East Germany? But a 10-day waiting on the Lord, 10 is an ultimate number. It's even the number of the 10 commandments, the number of righteous requirement, number of judgment. And so I came back to the fellowship.

I said, I think we need to wait 10 days on the Lord in fasting and in prayer. Okay, yeah, Art, when it's convenient, when we're not busy, when the phone's not ringing off the wall, we found such a moment will never come.

We had to be ruthless and declare starting Monday, 10 days, no other activity, fasting and prayer. And we elders are going to begin and fell asleep after the first hour. And the Lord showed us that the pattern of three hour cycles and that there'd be a rotation day and night through with the community.

And somewhere you're going to find yourself at four o 'clock in the morning with these two and another time, 7 p .m. with another two. And in the course of 10 days, you've gone through the whole community in one time or another, in one posture or another.

And your prayers are so vigorous at the beginning, so inspired and so spiritual. But by the fourth, fifth day, the sixth day, the seventh day, blah, you're a blah, your breath is like a camel and you can't even put a prayer together.

You're a grown. But I'll always remember this. The fire of God did not fall. Don't think that Ben Israel did not need the fire of God, but we did not make that a condition for seeking the Lord in this total fast and prayer around the clock.

Because had we given a condition, it would have negated what it means to be before the Lord. To be before the Lord is to come without a requirement. He has not any obligation to answer in a way that would even bless us.

And in fact, fire did not fall, but it was somewhere near the 10th day when I was in so pitiful condition, stretched out three o 'clock in the morning before a couple of other saints barely able to audibly even make a groan that I was struck for the first time in the deepest consciousness that I'm a creature and that God is the creator.

I was stretched out before him and I realized that our past fastings had to do with petition, with issues, with an answer that we needed, but that we had never come before God as God, without a requirement, without a benefit, without a payoff, just because he's God and he deserved our uttermost supplication and being stretched out before him.

And that recognition for the first time that broke in my consciousness that I'm just a creature and that he is the creator was worth the whole 10 days of fasting and of prayer. So I commend that to you.

We need to have that come into our deepest consciousness. We are his creature. He alone is the creator and only he can occupy the position of God. And if we attempt it, we're only bringing about death.

We need to realize that we are not God, that we are placed here in our creatureliness and that we can only continue as such. It is poison for any being to have to stand in the place of God. It's destructive.

So that's why God forbids it. He knows that we're bringing our own destruction with grandiose ambitions that seeks to usurp and take from him. The same thing would be true of a woman seeking to usurp from a man or from a husband or take a role or function for herself that God has not given.

He wants to keep us and his restrictions are given for that reason. Placed there, it can only pronounce and execute its own sentence, not because it's evil, but because God alone is good. The restriction is good.

Righteous Judgment and Patience With Opposition

So if man allows God to be the judge and does not himself become a judge, that is the precious good that God intends and brings the knowledge of good and evil as perhaps nothing else can. He alone is good.

He alone is competent to judge good and evil that every other being will necessarily fail in the attribute and function of judge. And yet we're called to judge with how does it go? Judge righteous judgments.

Another paradox. There are times that we have indeed had an occasion in the history of Israel where we had to give a brother over to the devil for the destruction of his flesh, that his soul might be saved.

We had to execute righteous judgment. But I can tell you that there was such trembling on that day, such walking before God with such delicacy and softness like I have never seen, nor had I ever heard wisdom of God come forth out of the mouths of housewives as we did in the extraordinary hour and the day when that when we were required to bring an ultimate judgment in order to protect the church and its integrity.

And maybe unless we know that God is judge and have deferred to him, we would be incapacitated for that kind of judgment. And unless we have walked in that way, how shall we rule and reign with him? For what is that ruling and reigning in that eternal office be except the ability to judge and to bring righteous judgment and to aid and to facilitate the government of God over his creation?

Where have we learned the ability, but in this life? So maybe the best qualification to judge when we shall be required to bring righteous judgment is that we have not preceded that by the judgments of our own that are coined out of our own mind, our own heart, our own assessment, our own spirit, but have come only from the life of God in the moment that he gives it, or we are content not to have it at all.

Jesus lived and served with Judas in his company for his full earthly career right to the end. Was he not able to discern that this was an emissary of the evil one and calculated for his destruction? He never acted on that if he knew that, never made an issue of it until that final hour.

And many of us are wanting to rid ourselves of what we consider a threat to our ministry, threat to our marriage, threat to us, and we're judging before the time. We should not judge at all and bear it until the Lord himself.

When did he overthrow the money changes tables? That was always there throughout his whole earthly tenure, but only at a moment given by the father did he pronounce that judgment. He did not exercise it out of his own observation of what was evil in practice and needed to be rectified or threatened or challenged.

It was there, but it was not at his liberty to address it until the father gave it. So it's in this possibility that God needs to be recognized and praised. And I wrote in the margin, is our praise really praise till we have come to this recognition?

Maybe that's why we're required to turn the amplifiers up. There's something hollow in our praise that needs the magnification of technology because our praise has not yet hit the authentic note that comes with the depth of the recognition of God as God who alone is judged and who alone is good and who alone knows.

When we've come to that, we can praise him and praise him with the confidence that when it's time for righteous judgment, he will perform it. And until that, we live with the threat to our ministries, to the fellowship and whatsoever.

Bearing Opposition Within the Fellowship

I don't think that I think of only one instance or two now where we required a man to leave the fellowship. Otherwise we have lived with enemies who have publicly opposed us right within the fellowship and were vocal about it.

And we're very clear to say that my whole notion of the last day's movement of Jews in flight is only a romantic imagining. Oh really? Then we're really barking up the wrong tree and we're embarked on something and making something known worldwide that is a fiction coined only out of my own humanity, if you're right.

And yet that brother remained and publicly expressed those reservations for four years until the Lord removed him. And I have watched over the process of 25 years the Lord being very patient and gracious to allow men a full opportunity to receive his correction and his grace.

And when it is finally spurned to the point where it is seems that they cannot obtain his grace, he removes them. But until then we suffer this tension of opposition within the body and know that God who's judge over all knows it and will give us a grace to bear it and we and nothing will be lost rather we will gain by our patience and composure and trust.

Something of the issue of the decoration of this altar was like that. Doesn't that callous, that prayer shawl designate the legalism of Judaism and we're putting that above the blood and doesn't that, that is not really a blood color and is that really not a table of demons and it's going to affect and corrupt the school and the convocation, should we not remove it?

By every reckoning, yes, but by the life of God, no. That somehow we could bear it, we will not suffer its corruption, there's purposes unknown to us that only he can know, not yet to be served by allowing it to remain.

Even the testing of our own spirituality and our alarm that we have to take the decisive action as if God is not able himself to perfect that which pertains to him and preserve the sanctity of his own house.

Understand what I'm saying? These are the issues to which we struggle and they're great issues and God himself has given it because all that he gives is good, even if it came through a vessel that was questionable.

Hey, how about this guy? I don't know his, the way he conducts himself and somewhat effeminate and blah blah blah and he's Episcopalian in his orientation and the history of that church has always been adverse to the remnant people of God, even to the point of persecution.

Aren't we opening a door for some kind of an intrusion of the enemy himself? I'm saying all that to say, and I'm only touching the surface of it, that probably more harm has been done to the church by its zealous defenders than can ever be assessed, right?

Even the persecution of saints in the name of God and protecting the faith. Well, the last thing that I want to share is Colbert raising the question, if God knew that man was going to transgress and succumb to the temptation, why did he allow it?

Fellowship as Participation in God's Wisdom

Why did he plant that tree in the garden? How could it be good? What's his intention? Look at the tragedy that ensued as a result, and we all share in the Adamic fall. So, the theologian wrestles with this question, and here's his answer.

God does not will to exclude man even from his own judicial office. God does not in any sense will to keep man apart from his participation as co-heir. He wills quite definitely that man should participate in it, and therefore in his own design, divine essence and being.

In making use of the freedom given him, and therefore acknowledging the divine decision in the obedience of his own, man undoubtedly participates in the righteousness in which God made this decision. You understand what I'm saying?

By obeying God and not eating, we are participating in the wisdom of God. We're made a co-participant with him. We're acknowledging the lightness of his requirement and obeying it. It's not just we've done a mechanical thing, but we have become participant with him in our agreement and in our act.

This is what he's wanting. We're getting at the nature of what fellowship is. It's not some casual amalgam of souls who happen to be proximate one to another. Fellowship is a deep statement of union and of relationship, of agreement.

The condition for that agreement is are you going to obey my word? In obeying it, you have met the condition and the requirement to participate with me in the rightness of that requirement. Therefore, you're a participant even in my office as judge and as God.

You wanted to rest it for yourself. You wanted to grasp it by acting and eating from that tree. When the irony is I've wanted you to come into my deity. I want you to participate in what I am as God, not by your grasping it, but by forsaking grasping, but by obedience to my word.

Man undoubtedly participates in the wisdom and the righteousness in which God made this decision. It is not without man, but with him and with him in his own decision and act that God is wise and righteous.

In that he's the sovereign judge who judges rightly. This true union with man, this true exaltation of the creature is what God wills when he gives him freedom to obey. How do we become participants with him?

How do we become co-heirs with Christ through obedience to his word by the exercise of our freedom? We have fellowship through obedience to the word of God. And in that fellowship, we have participation and union with God.

We are co-heirs. We are participants in our fellowship and joining in union because he cannot fellowship with that which is sinful. He cannot fellowship with the transgression of human arrogance that will not obey his restriction.

But when we in freedom choose to obey it, even without explanation, we have met the requirement that allows him to receive us unto himself in fellowship and in union. And when you're in fellowship and in union with him, you're in the place with God of judgment and in righteousness and knowing good and evil and acting rightly because that's what he is in himself.

You're in the tree of life. That's Barth's explanation to why God has allowed the other tree. It was good. All that he created was good. Even the thing that was evil in itself, so that we would have a tension of choice in the exercise of our freedom by which we could find a place of fellowship with him through obedience.

And that principle remains still. That's the issue of fellowship. And the fellowship is the issue of prayer. Fellowship is the issue of praise. Fellowship is the issue of worship. Any one of those expressions that does not issue from fellowship is itself affectation, counterfeit and religious feigning.

The true worship is out of the true union and the true union is fellowship out of obedience again and again and again. And the whole design, the whole genius of it, the whole goodness of it was given at the first in the garden by the creator who alone knows what is good.

We would never have thought that this is the way to attain fellowship. We would have said, hi Jesus buddy, here I am. There's a condition that's in harmony with himself and is revealed even in the genius of his Godhead where the son is in submission to the father and the spirit has no function in himself to glorify himself, contrary to what Benny Hinn says, but only to glorify the son as the son glorifies the father as the one person of the Godhead accedes to and is in submission and in deference to the other.

It's the very nature of God to be submitted to the requirement of God who alone knows and has made what is good and himself is good. Every time you step out of that, whatever the temptation, I can preach better than this man, I'm sure you can.

I've got more spiritual understanding than him, I'm sure you can. But has God said that it's not a woman's function to teach and have authority over man without explanation, although explanation in part is given because the woman was first given to deception because in the economy of God it's not right for a woman to have authority over a man and many of our men are emasculated and robbed of that which would have brought them into the fullness of their masculinity by women usurping because they are better qualified, they have more spiritual knowledge, they're better speakers and preachers.

Yes they may well be, but are they better in order to perform it or in order to yield it? What's the word? To relinquish it. Because to relinquish is to recognize the requirement of God and the limitation of God and to rejoice for it and to believe in that faith that what you're relinquishing is now going to be divested in and find its expression in that man who has never been in any way spiritually significant because you have usurped from him and now God because of your submission is going to bring forth in the vessel that he has designated to be authority and leadership because he made him male will perform it and that will glorify God and because of your union with your husband you will be as much gratified by his performance and his ministry as if it had issued from yourself that the idea of compatibility is not two equal ministries co-existing under one roof and acknowledging one another but the submission of the one into the other because God has called them to be one flesh, one life, one expression and that he will perform because that alone is good.

Worship, Submission, and the Goodness of God

So let's give God worship, praise and adoration for his ineffable that means unspeakable you can't articulate your only sense the dimensions of what God is and his genius and his love for us knowing that we would have done ourselves in out of our own best well-meaning intentions not because we were malicious or wanted to do the wrong thing it's out of our good that we would have done ourselves in and what we would have thought good that it would even serve God and serve this purposes to dismantle that altar to do this do that.

But his love and then his knowledge is supreme he alone is God. Why callest thou me good. There's no bad good. But so Lord we just bow before you. You're supreme my God and you know what your greatest goodness is that you intended that we should have fellowship with you.

And fellowship with you is not a peck on the cheek. Fellowship with you is intimate union and oneness in yourself that we come in to the creator himself come in to his judicial office come into his knowledge of what is right and wrong and good and evil.