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| PentecostalTheology.com
JESUS, OUR TREE OF LIFE – Ray E Horton
I read about the fall of man in Genesis 3 this morning. They ate of the forbidden fruit and gained knowledge of good and evil from a worldly perspective. It wasn’t a good result. It brought shame as they become aware for the first time that they were naked.
They choose to separate from their life-source and thus lost the opportunity for eternal life, and gained pain, toil and death, that which there is without eternal life, and would return to the dust from which Adam’s body was made.
Yet, God did not completely abandon the children whom He loved. He made them clothing out of skins to replace their fig-leaf loincloths.
Pre-figuring Redemption
The effort to eat of the Tree of Life is works-focused religion trying to gain redemption by good deeds
Skins come from animals, so it is said that this was the first blood sacrifice, prefiguring the eternal plan for man’s redemption through the once-and-for-all perfect blood sacrifice of Jesus, God Himself in human form.
But, for fallen man to be reunited with God his own way without atonement would be contrary to basic principles of creation, God had to remove them from the garden lest they eat from the Tree of Life in their fallen state. I see that the effort to eat of the Tree of Life as works-focused religion trying to gain redemption by good deeds – impossible, for you can’t get past the cherubim.
The chapter concludes with a cherubim stationed at the entrance to the garden “to guard the way to the tree of life.”
No-one had access to the
Tree of life until Jesus came
No one had access to the Tree of Life until Jesus’ redemption of mankind by His blood on the cross and resurrection, Himself paying the price for making eternal life available to us once again.
We hear of the Tree of Life once more in the Book of Revelation: “To him who overcomes (by receiving Jesus) I will give permission to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God” (Revelation 2:7).
