There Were Two Trees in the Garden - Part 1 — Art Katz

The Compactness and Significance of Adam’s Failure

The remarkable thing is, just like virtually all the scripture, it is so compactly expressed. You would think that this deserves chapters, not just a few verses. So it's left to us to probe and to understand in the little that God tells us the meaning of this remarkable failure, because it's our failure.

We're all Adam, we're all Adamic, we're all human, there but for the grace of God. We in that place, we would have failed in that way, and so we want to enter this with the right attitude. And I don't know how to say it, I'm surprised at my likeness this morning instead of an appropriate sobriety.

So Lord, precious God, affect our mood and the tone of our proceeding appropriate to the subject that's before us today. We have to say, Lord, that we don't know as we ought to know, that even the church has made hash out of this and reduced it to a few simple precepts, principles, statements.

And I don't know, Lord, that the tragic import of this Adamic failure has really registered upon our souls. It's the anatomy of sin itself, the quintessence, the constituent elements of sin. And this transgression, my God, needs to be registered upon our souls.

And we're asking for that grace this morning. We don't know how to proceed, Lord, our Bibles are open and we look to you. Register my God, something of your own grief upon our hearts that came upon you in this failure, Lord, to observe a simple admonition of all of the trees of God, of the garden you may eat, but of this tree you are forbidden.

What does it mean, my God, when we can't obey that simple prescription? What is in us, Lord, and why do we want to be like God, knowing good and evil? What does that mean, Lord? And has that been excised out of us or is there something in that Adamic propensity that yet remains where we choose and prefer to know and to live from our knowing rather than from your life?

And so, Lord, instruct us this morning, precious God on high, I would to God I just could vacate my own responsibility here and you would be seated in this place and you instruct us, you who were witness to this whole tragedy, you who in fact set it up that we might understand deeply, Lord, beyond even our own minds, something in the deeps, my God, that there would be a permanent kind of sorrow that this tragic failure set in motion the necessity for a lamb slain from the foundations of the earth.

There's no other remedy. You had to give us a second Adam who did not fail. And so, my God, we're a generation that has reduced salvation to a formula, step one, step two, step three, make a decision, accept Jesus.

Lord, the whole thing has become trivialized and we're asking that there'll be a last latter day's restoration of something for our understanding and the proclamation of the gospel that would not be a cheapie and that people would really be soundly converted by its proclamation because their Adamic sin would be identified that remains.

So we bless you, Lord. And without your grace, without your help, without your communication this morning, Lord, we're like blind men where we've got the thing over our eyes trying to pin the tail on the donkey.

There's no way that we could succeed. Grace, Lord, we ask grace because you've called us to these last days to bear your word before men, to understand the sinful condition of men and nations, Lord, and to address it firmly, sternly and compassionately with an understanding.

So bless us this morning, my God, and open our hearts, open our minds, open our understanding, we pray. Thank you for this now, the privilege which is ours. Come my God and teach us. We thank and give you praise in Yeshua's holy name.

Amen. Well, we can't talk about the Adamic fall without looking a little bit in passing to the advent of Adam's partner, a help meet for him, appropriate for him, that it required the woman to bring in the great sin.

God’s Limitations and True Freedom

And I'm trying to say this without any undue implication. But I think it needs to be recognized because Paul says later that the woman was the first to be tempted and God sets limitations. And what happened in the garden was the transgression of the limitations that God had established.

It's a remarkable irony and a paradox that true freedom only comes in the willing submission to the limitations that God proscribes. And when he says you cannot and shall not, it's for our good. And that there's a wisdom in this.

Freedom is not some untrammeled, do your own thing. Freedom and to be free in Christ is to recognize the divine limitations that God himself has established in his own wisdom because he has created us male and female.

Eve’s Creation and the Unity of Man and Woman

So we want to look at the comments of some of these men who have invested themselves in this tragedy and helped to illuminate for us. So just looking at the text of the creation of Eve out of Adam, isn't that a remarkable thing in the genius of God that she was not made an independent entity like Adam himself?

He could have easily have as much formed her out of the dust as he formed Adam. But no, he takes her out of Adam so that the whole drama of male and female and marriage in the church has got to do with the bringing back again into him from whom it was taken that they might be one.

The remarkable thing about being made one that the two shall be one flesh is the whole drama that's before us in our marriage and in the church. And as we know who have struggled through with it and have passed through failed marriages and are perhaps struggling even now, it's no light thing for the two to be made one flesh.

That the God who took out in sleep requires a restoring and a coming back that they might be one in wakefulness. And I don't understand this, but there are great meanings in this that we need to hold intention.

So, God brought the whole of the animals that he had created before Adam to name them. And that naming of them is more than just tacking a label on them. For Adam to name them is to identify them and to have sovereignty over them.

To identify them in what their task is, an ox, an ass. By giving it that name, God gives to Adam something of a reflection of his own godly prerogative because to name something is to have sovereignty over it.

So God is calling Adam almost to a co-creative participation with him in naming the animals that he has created. But one of the reasons for that is that he should go through the whole of animal creation and recognize that however diverse and precious and brilliant each one is in its diversity and in its call and in its purpose, there was not one among them found appropriate to Adam as a helpmate.

He himself had to come to that recognition. And then God brings him into the sleep and gives him the helpmate out of himself. So Adam in verse 20 gave names to all cattle, to the fowls of the air and to every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a help fit for him.

And the Lord God caused the deep sleep to fall upon Adam and he slept. And he took one of the ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And the rib which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called woman, woman, because she was taken out of man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife, and they shall be one flesh.

And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed. This is one of those pregnant moments where silence is appropriate because of the terseness of God and his word. How remarkable this event, so described so sparingly.

One of the commentators says, when God brings Eve before Adam, it's something like a father bringing his daughter to the bridegroom to present her. Isn't that a beautiful picture? And Adam immediately recognizes the genius of what God has done.

Hey, this is bone of my bones, this is out of me, this is for me, this is from me. And then verse 24, Adam doesn't have a mother and a father. So what does this mean that a man shall leave his father and his mother?

I would have thought it more appropriate for the instruction to go to the wife rather than to the man, because it's the woman that usually has very strong attachments to her mother and to her family. But this is here, this is it for us to consider, a man shall leave his father and his mother.

Of course, when God says man, I don't think he's meaning Adam exclusively, because both Adam and Eve constitute man. He made them female and male. So it's a prescription to the whole of man about being joined and cleaving to one another.

And they shall be one flesh. Lord, do you know what you're saying? Would to God it were as simple and as expedient as you say it. But what is left unsaid requires volumes. In all of the differences, though woman has come out of man, she's distinctively unique in the way that God has formed her.

And if she were not that, how could she be the supplement and the help and the completion to Adam? If she's a mere reiteration of what he is, there's no value gained. But she's a unique creation, though coming out of man, she is distinctly different from him, or she could not provide the completion and the supplement that that uniqueness alone can provide.

Gender Distinctions, Marriage, and the Effects of the Fall

And that's why the devil is so busy in making women masculine and robbing them of their femininity, bringing them into this fever for equality with man and to show themselves equal, if not superior to man.

I know what I'm talking about, because I was in that seminary in St. Paul for two years. 65 of the students were women, and virtually every one of them were not only feminists, but witches. And they were going to correct Christendom of its, not only of its imbalance, but its error, because the scriptures were sexist and male dominated, and God has called he and him pronouns of masculine kind, and that they were going to rectify this and bring again, mother goddess that precedes father, I mean, oh, I can't tell you.

So the spirit of this age is running wild, and everything that contradicts what was God's intention from the beginning. So if God, if the world and the devil can feminize man, homosexuality, and masculinize women, he will have destroyed the very distinction that would have revealed God's glory and the two becoming one.

So we need to especially to be jealous to God, those distinctions and to prize them, because I think I've said on other occasions, there's no way for man to understand his manhood independent of what a woman is, that somehow you define yourself by the opposite.

It's like the Jew and the Gentile, we need these distinctions in order to define ourselves and fulfill the uniqueness of those callings, because the Jew and the Gentile are also called to be one. We talked about the issue of unity this morning in our prayer time.

So it's the great thing that's on God's heart. Of course, it's the unique differences that exacerbate the issues of marriage and bring the difficulties and the problems. It's the lack of our wisdom and grace in living with those differences and receiving the benefit of them and where they become oppositional, there's another better word, adversarial, that's the word.

My wife learned it from her mother, that her mother's relationship with her father was adversarial, that the husband was looked upon somehow as the enemy. And one with whom one is a natural contention.

So there was always this note in the air of defending your interests against the one who is adverse against you, a complete contradiction of what God intended in the complementary relationship between man and woman.

But that is the result of the fall, this perverse twisting and playing upon the differences as calculated now to exacerbate and to compound the problems rather than to be the basis for the reverential acknowledgment of what God has wrought in male and female is exactly the kind of thing that we're fighting against and that's the result of the fall.

The pity is that Christians who have come into Christ and have had the curse negated by his bearing the curse are still in some measure living under that curse and have not fully appropriated what the redemptive work that God has done that would have brought them back to an original and endemic relationship that God intended at the first between Adam and Eve.

We're still fighting, we're still enemies, we're still contending and we've not fully appropriated the redemption that God has wrought. So it takes a conscious understanding of God's intention from the first and fighting for that contending for that faith and not giving ourselves to the temptation again to find ourselves oppositional and adversarial rather than to see ourselves as complementary and supportive.

So it's over a 35 year struggle over these things that are speaking and a lot of you can give testimony of the same. We'll continue to probe that yourself, maybe we'll come back to it later or in these days and to dwell on that and shall cleave unto his wife and they shall be one flesh.

Cleaving, Separation, and Marital Faithfulness

What God leaves unsaid is awesome and what's implied is that this is not going to be accomplished without my grace. You're going to complete what began in sleep and in darkness in consciousness and awareness of the difficulties compounded all the more by the tenor of modernity of the modern world and its anti-Christ, anti-God, anti-unity, union mentality in exaggerating and playing one off against the other then it's going to take a remarkable grace.

We're not in an environment that is hospitable, this is what I'm saying, to the fulfillment of God's mystery. We're in an environment that is conspiring in every way against it and it comes to us in the air that we breathe through the TV, through the magazine ads, through the billboards everywhere that you can look, everything is conspiring against God's design.

So to be a saint and to see the fulfillment of this which is intended for something more than our marital compatibility and the harmony of our homes, however important that is, the greater and the ultimate thing is, it's intended for the glory of God and unless we're conscious of this and contend for this and are alert and watchful over everything that seeks to threaten it, isn't it amazing how often how petty the issue is that brings the division between husband and wife, absolutely petty and yet how magnified that can become.

Talk about exacerbating the differences and the frictions until more often than not the whole relationship is skewed and set apart. Probably there are more divorced couples living under one roof, even in Christendom, than we can know.

So to become one flesh, wow, and unless we have a heart of intention for that and that our motive is more than the satisfaction of our sex life or our marital compatibility but it is the glory of God, we'll not succeed.

The glory of God has got to be the predominant motive because whatever sacrifice is required of an ultimate kind, only the glory of God can be the sufficient motive to bear it and marriage is a sacrifice and a struggle but you know cleave is a wonderful existential word, it's an ultimate word, it's an intense word, it's the contradiction of just being lightly regarding one another, the kind of cooperative mutuality where we share the same facility, she has her career, her ministry, you have yours and you recognize and acknowledge one another and live happily ever after under the same household, that's not cleaving, that's a worldly, what's the word, compromise, a mutuality of accommodation.

Cleaving is an existential word, this is what I love about the faith, that the depth of what God is after, cleaving is something that, well probably we could not perform it except by God, it's like the burning quality of love and of faith, the God who is a fire, cleaving is an intensity of full participation with another but again everything in the world militates against that, not only with our wives but in our fellowships because what are most of our fellowships but ships passing in the night, how are you brother, fine, how are you, good, I'll see you in the lobby of the church, I'll give you a back slap, I'll cleaving in marriage and in the church and that's why we so lightly regard both institutions and cast them off or find another and try, try again if this one has not been successful, so the word cleave is really very precious and we know that every word that's before us is divinely chosen, God could have said this in another way, he could have said it in a lighter way but he chooses one of the most intensive existential requirements to indicate what will be necessary if the two are to become one flesh because this whole girlfriend boyfriend thing probably is one of the most demonic assaults on the genius of this that the powers of darkness have ever conceived and has become so culturally acceptable that in fact if they don't have girlfriends, boyfriends, we think they're unnatural, but where is there a Christian teenager who will keep themselves for the one for whom God has appointed them and will not give themselves in dalliances and alliances of an emotional and soul binding kind with a half a dozen other girls or boys before they're married, let alone the intimacy that usually accompanies that, so by the time we come to marriage we've already been so squandered, so compromised, so diffused that we cannot give ourselves to one, the memory of this past guy or that will you know and measuring the one against the other, a pox on dating, a pox on easy liberal boyfriend girlfriend and maybe one of the reasons why we allow our kids to indulge in that is that there's not a sufficient and compelling reality in the body of Christ that would keep our kids, that they're not receiving sufficient affection, hugs, warmth from the body that they need to find it in some exclusive relationship in the back seat of a car, so I'm just talking off the top of my head, but it's a profound area of examination and that we have to resist the culture that encourages dating, encourages these easy relationships and now even giving out the condoms that they can have safe sex in it, we have a battle on our hands, everything encourages romantic preoccupation with the other sex that our kids do not know, have never been instructed to wait and to believe the Lord for the time in which he himself will give the appointed partner as a once and for all and cleave to them, so we're all victims of this, my God I've left a trail behind me of relationships and girls and marriages and then you come into a relationship with a woman who's also had a comparable background and you're going to make a match of it, it's the mercy of God that we're kept together to the degree that we have been, it sounds like a full time calling, so you have to shut off the football game and the golf course and this kind of, this call is not something that can be done in our spare time, it's got to be a foremost priority and why does it say about father and mother here, shall a man leave his father and his mother, you know often when God speaks if not invariably, he's speaking symbolically as well as actually, father and mother represent a whole multitude, a panoply of things, of domestic values, of good things, of relationships, of culture, it's more than just literally father and mother, in order to cleave there's got to be a radical separation, not just from questionable things, little and evil things but even good things, you can't have a mixed loyalty, I think this is what God is getting after, father and mother are good but if this mystery is going to be completed, even the good thing has got to be set aside or kept in its place and not be allowed to distract from the kind of fullness of attention that will complete this mystery and probably that's been a factor in mitigating against this completion as it's not the evil things that have distracted us but the good things, mother and father represent something good but cloying, you know this word and maybe I know this especially in Jewish life, where the mother is so possessive and cloying and dominating the sons, that's where we have a lot of outraged Jewish writers and revolutionaries because their vexation had its advent in being matriarchally dominated by a Jewish mother and they did not know to separate themselves from the good, the good thing became evil because they had not heeded the word of God, if you're going to cleave, it's going to require a radical separation, not just from mere distraction but from things that have a validity and a goodness in them but they contend against this and you need to know, be able to say no, you need to impose a limitation as I did on the brother this morning who was going on too long, see what I mean?

Divine Restriction as the Way to Expansion

And most of us would refrain from that and we would allow the thing to spill over, we don't want to impose limitation but we can see from the very beginning in the garden that the whole genius of God that is testing man is the willingness to submit to the limitations that God in his wisdom has established, somewhere in the Psalms, I don't know where it is, is that wonderful statement about contracted, the genius of which is contraction is the place of expansion, that when we submit to the limitations of God is really the door of the opening to great expansiveness and one of my favorite illustrations is my time in East Germany when the wall was still up and I was in relationship with Lutheran men because it's the state church, Pentecostals and Baptists were looked upon as sects and I was relating to Lutheran men who were under the supervision of Lutheran superintendents who were under the supervision of communist authorities and the Lutheran superintendents were not even saved but these men operating under them were spirit-filled men of apostolic stature that would have made you drool to spend five minutes with them and to sense the remarkable maturity and breadth of understanding and virtue that were in those men and I could not put it together.

I said there's no American that would have submitted to this kind of restriction of an unsaved Lutheran superintendent who is operating under the restriction of an atheistic communist overseer and you are submitting to all that?

Yes, Art. And what I realized was that it was in that submission that this apostolic character had its formation so that the place of contraction and restriction that we Americans are too spoiled ever to submit to we would have been chafed by it and we have so much opportunity to go to another place in this place or form our own place.

They submitted to it because they had no alternatives and it was their making. So the place of restriction is the place of expansion by anyone who understands the way of God and who demonstrated that more than the Lord himself when he took upon himself the form of a man.

Every time I have a bowel movement I'm reminded of that, that my God had to suffer the humiliation of that necessity when it was not required of him being spirit but when he compressed himself into the limitation of humanity that's about as humiliating a thing that a God could ever experience but he did it for our sake.

Talk about restriction. So he's not giving us abstract principles and say go take a shot at it. He himself is the archetypal illustration of one who has submitted to the divine restriction and because of it salvation has come to all men.

So thank you Lord. May we kiss our limitations. May we thank the Lord for every restriction and every imposition as purest blessing because contrary to the wisdom of the world full freedom is bondage but submitting to the restriction of God and his wisdom is liberty, freedom and true expansiveness as we can see even from the beginning in the beginning.

Contentment With God’s Provision

How about the one woman that is given? Surely there are others who have commendable virtues and other kinds of attractions that would be even a richer supplement. Do you know what I mean? Like a polygamist.

Why be restricted to one? I mean after all did she graduate high school? Does she have this interest in art? Does she have this that? How about this other woman who has it was really spiritual and has a background so much more amenable to your own.

So here you're restricted to the one that God has given while all around you are the possibilities of temptations of supplement or even displacement. But to find in that limited one the full gratification for your soul and the supplement and the complement of yourself and the completion of yourself is God's intention.

You know I've almost come to the place where it doesn't matter to me anymore who is the bride or the bridegroom. Like well are they compatible? Have you taken a test to see if you're compatible? Will this marriage work?

I don't care who you are. What your background is. If God has established that union in that union is all of the potential fullness of God's glorious design. Amen. You know art. No just one thing and the same thing in fellowship.

Who's going to be part in Ben Israel? Who's going to be admitted into this fellowship? What are their credentials? What are their qualifications? What are their histories? You know what I've come to realize more and more?

It doesn't matter what their background is. It doesn't matter what their condition is. If God is sending them let them come because in them is all of the Godhead all of the possibilities and it's God's intention and we'll work it out.

We'll find the realization of our fellowship in that. We don't have to be selective and look for qualification. You understand what I'm saying? And so be content with the spouse that God has given because the enemy is going to play upon the what is lacking what can be found in another and to take you away from cleaving.

Cleaving is a full-hearted giving yourself to what God has given perfectly persuaded that in that one no matter what the visible limitations are all the expansive possibilities of the most glorious realization that can come in relationship because it's the one given.

It saves you from marrying and remarrying and all of the kinds of things. See the fact that Adam was there while the serpent was addressing Eve and kept his mouth shut and allowed his wife to be seduced and then he himself seduced by her.

That's not cleaving. That's probably more like accommodating. So there's a true cleaving would have been the man standing for his wife and saying let me take care of this dear. I'll answer this guy. Well we're coming into the area of our concern for today.

I don't know what to say about verse 25 they were both naked the man and his wife and were not ashamed because one of the first things that takes place after their sin was the sense of shame. The new experience for mankind the awareness of their nakedness and of their shame which is a crippling thing and a form of death.

Interesting in today's devotional reading it's a statement on life and death where Eugene Peterson says on the first page of the Bible read that God creates life. Two pages later men and women choose death.

History narrates the antiphony between God's will to life and the human will to death. The word life in the Bible and in all deeply imagined literature means far more than biological existence. The word death likewise means far more than the termination of biological function.

But what he's saying is we need to understand death as something much more than the cessation of biological function and what I'm saying is to experience shame and fear and to hide yourself in the garden and to be aware of your nakedness is death, is restriction, is new dimensions of things that atrophy the human spirit and impede human relationship and relationship with God.

Hiding in the garden from God is a form of death. Sin sets in death but we need to understand death as more than just the cessation of biological life even though it did mean the limitation of years progressively that men were to live.

But death is shame and fear that was the fulfillment of God's word. The moment you'll eat of this you're going to experience death and death is this sense of shame. If we could examine the contents of mental institutions and the unnumbered multitude of those that are sitting on psychiatrists couch or seeking counseling we would find out that shame and fear, self-hatred, failed relationships are the things that have shredded and made their lives wretched which is the consequence of sin which is death.

So the church needs to stand for life. Well it's an interesting question to ask why the first expression right on the heels of that eating is the sense of nakedness and shame, guilt, hiding, fear. The very first reaction to sin is that.

Let's roll this one over on our tongues. This is rare wine folks. We don't want to quaff this down like coca-cola. This is too precious to run over. Hold your other comments. Think of this. The loss of Edenic innocence and the advent and introduction of self-consciousness.

The recognition of your nakedness and that becomes an impediment of relate to the relationship with it of the two when now the other one needs to be named as a separate identity. Wow. Hold on. Let's not rush over this.

Let that sink in. This is the tragedy. If we could see as God has seen over the millennia the broken lives, the suffering, the shrieks, the crime, the murders, the failed things, the wretchedness of mankind that has its advent with this.

And can we come back to the garden? We who are saved and for whom the curse has been lifted. Can we come back to an Edenic innocence? That is to say that we can live and move and have our being without self-consciousness and relate to each other as innocent.

And I'm going to repeat my question by virtue of the blood of the Lamb and the redemption of God by the second Adam of which we are all beneficiaries. Have we now access to Eden in the sense that we can come again into a pristine and original innocence that is to say not goo goo goo but an innocence in which we can relate to each other without self-consciousness, without fear, without shame?

Can you imagine how blessed that is? How paradisical that is to relate like that? Wow. I mean, you can't taste that. Imagine that. What fellowship would be if we were in that kind of condition? There's a wonderful perverse self-exaltation that comes to saints when at the cost of another they can exalt themselves by spotting the defects or the nakedness of another and seeing themselves as being more spiritual.

That's eating from the wrong tree. Where do they get the knowledge of that defect that they can now play upon it and gain advantage in self-exaltation by fingering it? Who told them about that defect in that person?

Did they get that from the tree of life or did they get that from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? As I said to a brother on this trip in Canada, you are not at liberty to make a direct discernment of another or even of a situation.

You can only receive it in purity from God and not from the thing or the person himself. So we think that we are at liberty to observe and discern. Oh, now I see everybody is applauding art cats, but I can see the defect.

And now I'm the one who's going to really bring this guy down to the place of humility that he really needs. I'm God's appointed vessel. I can't tell you how much men in public places suffer that kind of abuse, but what it is, is eating from the wrong tree.

It's eating from knowledge. It's operating from knowledge by going directly to that tree rather than receiving something from the Lord. And if the Lord gives us a discernment about the condition or the need of another, it's not that we should finger them or identify them or bring correction to them, but to intercede for them over that thing.

So the whole different operation, whether you're eating from the one tree or the other. So everything goes back to the beginnings, but it's still with us. We need to see that. Probably more damage is done in the church and in relationship through this direct discernment, which is very self-exalting, which is exactly the motive for eating from that tree.

For you shall be as God. You don't have to wait for him to receive your discernment secondhand. You yourself can make it like him. But not only are we impaired in our relationship with each other for the want of innocence, but we're impaired in the relationship with God for the want of it.

That he's waiting to fellowship with us in the absence of self-consciousness about our spirituality and about him. So we're impaired in our relationship with each other. We're impaired in our relationship with him because the Edenic condition in which Adam walked with God in the garden was the absence of self-consciousness.

And I would say from my observation in 36 years as a believer, the deadliest form of self-consciousness is spiritual self-consciousness. Just when we think we're rid of every other form about our maleness or our intelligence or this or that, it's our spirituality is the last thing that finds us out.

We want to be recognized as spiritual. And we're so concerned for our spirituality, our spiritual reputation. But that's still self-concern and is still a major blockage and an impediment to an innocence of relationship with God.

How much does that color and affect our prayer? Even our devotional times, even that compulsive necessity to read so many chapters for the day and call that our devotion. It's more a religious obligation than it is a reverential devotional time with God to touch his heart.

You understand? So this is the impediment. I can't even imagine what would it mean to walk with God in the garden without an agenda, without a whole list of petitions that need to be fulfilled or a sense of terrible unworthiness, but just the most natural flowing kind of a thing which he waits for and for which he designed us.

So the return to the garden, the return to Eden is so fraught with possibility, both in our relationship with each other, in the church and our relationship with him. May God grant that may that be our prayer today, that we will be brought back to this pristine and original Edenic condition as children of innocence who have nothing, no agenda to press, no defect to find, even in ourselves, let alone in others, and can relate to God as being the creature of the creator and be in the harmony that he intended and for which reason he created, because this is what he wanted, and this is what he will have millennially and eternally.

He will have it. I will be your God and you will be my people. I'm going to have fellowship with you the way that I originally had with Adam, and I'll have it eternally. What else has the power to crucify the desire to know and to be as God than the cross?

And I am determined not to know anything but Christ in him who selects. This is the Jewish intellectual speaking. Listen, you guys will have any kind of intellectual propensity. Do you know how seductive knowledge is?

Do you know how self-exalting it is to know? Why of the two trees that were in the garden, they were not forbidden to eat from the tree of life, but they never touched it. Boom, they went directly to the other and sinned.

The Tree of Knowledge and the Seduction of Self-Exaltation

What is there about a tree of knowledge that is so seductive and so powerful that it occasioned the basic transgression? And to what degree is that operative still? It's so powerful that I'm picking up on what Adam is saying, that only the cross has the power to negate it.