Endure Chapter 4: The Tree

Welcome to Chapter four of Endure. My name is Ben Greenfield and what you're listening to is an audio version of my book Endure, which you can find@getindoor.com all of the resources for this particular reading are@getindoor.com Chapter 4 Chapter the number four and each week I'll release to you a chapter from this book, which you can also get again@getindoor.com Chapter 4 the Tree I've always wondered about the story of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and more specifically, the nature of that tree itself. Just in case you're not familiar with this tree, a quick explanation may enlighten you as to why I'm quite curious about it. The first time I encountered this tree was when I was a boy reading the Book of Genesis in the Bible in chapters two and three. And the story of the tree goes like this, pretty much verbatim. This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created in the day that the Lord God made them. Now no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth, nor had any plant of the field sprouted, for the Lord God had not yet sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground, but springs welled up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, where he placed the man he had formed out of the ground. The Lord God gave growth to every tree that is pleasing to the eye and good for food. And in the middle of the garden were the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Then the Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it. And the Lord God commanded him, you may eat freely from every tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for in the day that you eat of it, you will surely die. Later, after God created a woman to be a suitable helper for the man Adam, the story continues. Now the serpent was more crafty than any beast of the field that the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, did God really say, you must not eat from any tree in the garden? The woman answered the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden, but about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God has said you must not eat of it or touch it, or you will die. You will not surely die, the serpent told her, for God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be open and you'll be like God, knowing good and evil. When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom, she took the fruit and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. And the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked. So they sewed together fig leaves and made coverings for themselves. Then the man and his wife heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden, the breeze of the day. And they hid themselves in the presence of the Lord God amongst the trees of the garden. But the Lord called out to man, where are you? I heard your voice in the garden, he replied. And I was afraid because I was naked. So I hid myself. Who told you you were naked? Asked the Lord God. Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? The man answered, the woman whom you gave me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate it. Then the Lord God said to the woman, what is this you have done? The serpent deceived me, she replied, and I ate. So the Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and every beast of the field. On your belly will you go, and dust you will eat all the days of your life. And I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your seed and her. See, he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel. To the woman he said, I will sharply increase your pain in childbirth. In pain you will bring forth children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you. And to Adam he said, because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat. Cursed is the ground because of you. Through toil you will eat of it all the days of your life, both thorns and thistles it will yield for you. And you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread until you return to the ground, because out of it were you taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return. And Adam named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all the living. And the Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife, and he clothed them. Then the Lord God said behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. And now lest he reach out his hand and take also from the Tree of Life and eat and live forever. Therefore the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. So he drove out the man and stationed cherubim on the east side of the Garden of Eden along with a whirling sword of flame to guard the way to the Tree of Life. Now here's what I find interesting. There's plenty of ideas floating around out there, especially in theological circles, about the mystery of what exactly this tree was and why God put it there in the first place. But I think this is important because what I'm about to tell you I think will serve you quite well when it comes to resisting temptations and desires. Along with some more of the type of temperancy that I'm going to tell you about when we get to chapter seven. So let's start with what the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was. Though as you may have noticed, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is actually one of two specific trees in in this story. In Jewish tradition, this tree and the eating of its fruit represents the beginning of the mixture of good and evil together. Before that breaking of God's law. The two were separate and evil had only a nebulous potential existence and it was not in human nature to desire it. Eating the forbidden fruit changed this and thus was born what is called in Hebrew the yetzer hara or evil inclination. From a Christian perspective, Church father and theologian Augustine of Hippo taught that the tree should be understood both symbolically and as a real tree, and that the fruits of that tree were not inherently evil because everything that God created was good. Rather, it was the disobedience of Adam and Eve that caused disorder in God's creation and that all humankind inherited sin from Adam and Eve's original sin. The tree appears in Islam religion too. The Quran never refers to the tree as the tree of the Knowledge of Good and evil, but rather as the tree or as the Tree of immortality. Muslims believe that when God created Adam and Eve, he told them that they could enjoy everything in the garden except this tree, but forbade them to eat from the tree so that they would not become become angels or immortal. The Quran also mentions the sin as being a so called slip and that consequently Adam and Eve repented to God and were forgiven. As far as the identity of the actual forbidden fruit on the tree. Of course, in most Western cultures and art the fruit is often depicted as an apple, quite possibly because of a misunderstanding of two unrelated words, malum, a native Latin noun which means evil, and malum, another Latin noun borrowed from the Greek, which means apple. Interestingly, the larynx, the large prominence that joins the thyroid cartilage in the human throat, is noticeably more prominent in males and is often called an Adam's apple, derived from the notion that it was caused by a forbidden fruit getting stuck in Adam's throat as he swallowed it. But other proposed possibilities include grape, pomegranate, fig, carob, etrog or citron, banana, pear, and even magic mushrooms. For example, the non canonical Book of Enoch describes the tree as like a species of the tamarind tree, bearing fruit which resembles grapes, extremely fine, and its fragrance extended to a considerable distance. I exclaimed, how beautiful is this tree and how delightful is its appearance. In Islamic tradition, the fruit is usually either identified with wheat or with grapevine. And yes, I even said magic mushrooms just a moment ago. For example, one Fresco in the 13th century Plain coral Abbey in France depicts Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden flanking a tree that has the appearance of a giant Amanita muscaria, a commonly known psychoactive mushroom, which is the spotted red and white one that looks kind of like the Mario mushroom. Plant medicine enthusiast and ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna, brother of a podcast guest I've had named Dennis McKenna, proposed that the forbidden fruit is a reference to psychotropic plants and fungi, specifically psilocybin mushrooms, which he theorizes played a central role in the evolution of the human brain. And it's actually not uncommon to encounter theories about so called psychedelic medicines in the Bible, several of which I'll link to on the Resources webpage for this chapter@getindoor.com Chapter 4 Although I really don't think any of those sightings are relevant to our salvation or particularly the whole scheme of things. But my own personal conundrum with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil isn't so much curiosity about what kind of tree it was or what kind of forbidden fruit it produced, and more a matter of wondering why God put it there in the first place. After all, wouldn't everything have been just kind of perfect without it? So why did God create the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil? Well, there's many theories about why God may have originally created the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but I think the most compelling notion is that the tree really wasn't there to test or tempt Adam and Eve to see if they would obey or disobey. Rather was there to provide an opportunity to either delight only in God and the true life he gives, or to take an alternative path to satisfaction. By refusing to eat of the fruit, Adam and Eve would have affirmed the totality of their satisfaction as being fully rooted in God. In other words, God is enough. In him, Adam, Eve, you and I can discover the fullness of life. But if we do not live life through the lens that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, and instead seek satisfaction in other forbidden trees and lust and pride in the delights of the eyes and the flesh that I talked about in chapter one of this book, we can show where our true desires lie, even if those temptations are not eternally satisfying. The Dutch philosopher Spinoza claimed that desire is the very essence of a man. This means that if you watch what a person desires, it can reveal their true character. And boy, oh boy, from money to power to prestige to popularity to food to drugs and beyond, there's plenty of abusable and desire satiating shiny pennies and forbidden fruits scattered throughout every day of each of our lives, aren't there? Even including our precious, noble and laudable temptations like exercise or food or self care. However, as I talked about in my book Fit Soul, no matter how impressive those attainments and no how good we eventually feel about ourselves and our accomplishments, there will never be enough. It's not that desire is bad. God made us to desire. He made us to produce, to sense and to feel pleasurable neurochemicals like dopamine and serotonin, which can seep into our brain and produce a temporarily satisfied feel good effect when we say bite into a fresh luscious strawberry. He made us to delight, to love and to savor his creation. But it is when we seek to satisfy those desires apart from God, without acknowledgment of God, union with God, or a recognition of the healthy boundaries that God has set, that we experience a diminished finishing life based on the satisfactions of Las Vegas esque worldly pleasures, rather than an ultimate deeply satisfying life based upon an obedient relationship with God. That is the only satisfaction which can fill the eternal hole, the God shaped abyss in our hearts. God created us with a desire of such magnitude that it can only be fulfilled in Him. This was not meant to be a cruel, torturous trick making us yearn for what we can never find in earthly goods and experiences, but rather an opportunity to look above the earth. To look to God for our ultimate fulfillment, satiation and satisfaction. As 17th century English clergyman Thomas Treherne said, my desires are so august and insatiable that nothing less than a deity can satisfy them. So that was likely one possible purpose of the existence of the tree of the Knowledge of good and evil. To point to the true object of our desires and to give us the opportunity and free will to seek fulfillment in a life with God immersed in his joy, his love and his peace, instead of fulfillment in the things of earth. When we succumb to the temptation and take that same free will and seek satisfaction apart from God, the consequences are devastating. We experience death not so much in the immediate physical sense of the word, but rather death in the sense that we are cut off from experiencing the complete fullness of life. We were intended and created to experience a separation from the very source of life itself, our Creator, and a banishing from the life of a paradise in Eden. Arguably, this separation is even more painful than physical death, because while still breathing, standing and walking, we are severed from the joyful, satisfied life for which we were created in the first place. We become like the walking dead, pursuing our own shallow pleasures in exchange for an existence without God, which, as I'll tell you about in chapter 19 of this book later, is really just the definition of hell. Furthermore, the tree also offered an opportunity to display haughty and selfish self dependence versus humble and trusting obedience upon God and acceptance of all his good gifts. Almost as if you were as a child gifted with a host of wonderfully wrapped presents on Christmas morning. But your parents commanded that only one of those gifts was to remain under the tree unopened. See, in prohibiting the eating of one tree out of a countless number of other trees, plants, leaves, vines, shrubs, fruits, nuts and seeds, God was essentially saying.

And this is very similar to what John Piper says in a sermon that he gave about this tree like this. I've given you life. I've given you a world full of pleasure, pleasures of taste and sight and sound and smell and feel and nourishment. Only one tree is forbidden to you. And the point of that prohibition is to preserve the pleasures of the world. Because if you eat of that one, you will be saying to me, I'm smarter than you. I'm more authoritative than you. I'm wiser than you are. I can think and care for myself better than you care for me. You're not a very good father and so I'm going to reject you. So don't eat from the tree because you will be rejecting me and all my good gifts and all my wisdom and all my care. Instead, keep on submitting to my will, keep on affirming my wisdom, keep on being thankful for my generosity, keep on trusting me as a father, and keep on eating these trees as a way of enjoying me. There are 10,000 trees every imaginable fruit. Just go eat, be thankful I've given them to you and see them as expressions of my goodness and savor them that way. So see, despite all those gifts under the Christmas tree, so to speak, that God gave us in the very beginning, Satan comes along and says God isn't generous. Ignore all these other amazing gifts because God is selfish and stingy and a skinflint. See, he's obviously not giving you that one. It's as though Satan portrayed the prohibition of one forbidden tree and treated it as a prohibition of everything in Eden, which of course really wasn't the case. Instead, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a test for us based on the free will that God gifted us us with from the very beginning to choose independence instead of God dependence and as a result to risk losing the pleasure of the entire garden in full union with God along with our choice to go on our own and forsake supreme pleasure in God. Now I'd be remiss not to give a head nod to one alternative, perhaps a simpler suggestion for the existence of the tree. Perhaps it really was just pure poison. No, really, I mean, perhaps the forbidden fruit contains some kind of ancient variant of a highly potent THC or psilocybin or DMT or some other mind tweaking brain bending alkaloid or chemical that God knew would fry early humans neurochemical eggs to the extent to which they would become incapable of savoring his creation or being in a state capable of fully honoring and worshiping Him. In the same way that God may have warned against excess consumption of honey in proverbs, or warned against trying to walk off the edge of a cliff and fly. He just knew that although he made it for some purpose we just don't know about, it wasn't going to be a biologically beneficial thing to have as a staple in our diet. In other words, maybe the tree and its fruit literally was poison. And although God had some good reason for creating it, like some kind of built in plant defense mechanism to keep this gorgeous sacred and ancient tree from getting consumed by birds and mammals or something like that, the Bible doesn't say exactly why it was there in the first place, but it does indicate God was just giving a command rooted in say, friendly gardener advice, right? Maybe he knew that. Very similar to the rampant effects excessive plant medicine and psychedelic compounds harvested from nature in modern day times can potentially cause, the chemical soup such as a plant like that might create in our brains could threaten to drive us away from him and not closer to him as we create some kind of ego dissolved godlike state within our own minds. Perhaps God didn't want Adam and Eve. Perhaps he didn't want Adam and Eve laying on their backs for three days drooling and staring up into space. Or worse. For example. Though I'm not against responsible use of some plant medicines, but I recently saw a video of a guy stumbling out of an Ayahuasca retreat, deciding he was enlightened and proceeding to cut off his own genitals with a pocket knife. You know, that kind of thing. So in the same way God put THC in cannabis but warned us to stay sober, or put razor like teeth in the mouth of a great white shark but gave us pain receptors and enough common sense to not stick our heads into a set of giant shark jaws. Perhaps his warning about the tree really was just practical advice designed to assist us with our own protection and preservation. Based on this idea, maybe God would have let us eat of the forbidden fruit at some time later in an appropriate set and setting and after he had taught Adam and Eve responsible use and the intended natural utility of the tree. Or maybe the tree was necessary as some vital part of the ecosystem for nourishing creatures aside from humans, such as serving as some kind of a food for ancient gods. As books like the Unseen Realm by Michael Heiser point out, we know that there were other non human spiritually conscious beings who existed in addition to the one God. There are plenty of theories out there. You know, maybe it was a dwelling abode for beautiful rare snakes or pollen for some kind of insect that kept other plants and trees thriving, but was poison for human. Well, who knows? But in summary, you know, one could weave down these hypothetical rabbit holes for quite some time. But here's what we do know. A God created humans to glorify and worship him by enjoying his magnificent creation while being fully satisfied in Him Him. He also made us non robotic beings of free will. B He told us something that was very important not to do, not to eat one thing, but based on our own free will and our desires for self satisfaction, we rebelled, broke our trust with him and ate it anyway. And then C As a result, we lost full union with God and visited A curse upon ourselves. But quite beautifully when you really think about it, God gave us a merciful out through another tree, the more powerful tree upon which Jesus Christ was crucified. Because of that third fact, I'm okay with the true nature of the tree of knowledge of good and evil remaining perhaps a little bit a mystery. And I'm okay with continuing to be curious about it. But ultimately, in the end, see, it doesn't really matter because I've been given the grace to walk in full union with God and to eat of all the trees of Eden for the rest of all time with one simple act of faith, trust and belief in the deity, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And one last thing, in case you find this whole tree theology thing to be really interesting and you want to take an even deeper dive, I recently discovered the book Reforesting what Trees Teach Us about the Nature of God and His Love for all us. This intriguing walk through all the ways trees are woven into religion in the Bible, written by former physician and carpenter Dr. Matthew Sleath, makes the convincing case that trees reveal more about God and faith than I could have ever imagined. Any spiritually minded person looking to reconnect to the natural world will relish this book as a really good way to be more aware of a tree aware stewardship of the earth. Fifteen years ago, the author, Dr. Sleath, believed that science and logic held the answers to everything. But then he went through a tragedy and he opened the Bible for the first time and was surprised to find that God chose to tell the gospel story through a trail of trees. There's the trees you just heard about on the first page of Genesis, but also in the first psalm, on the first page of the New Testament, on the last page of Revelation. The Bible's wisdom is even referred to as a tree of life. Every major biblical character and every major theological event has a tree marking the spot. A tree was the only thing that could kill Jesus. A wooden cross and the only thing that Jesus ever harmed, a fig tree. Reforesting Faith is a book that builds bridges by connecting those who love the Creator with creation and those who love creation with the Creator. And I think it's a really, really good way to explore life and death and rebirth through the trail of trees in the scripture. And I think your walk through the woods or the Bible will never be the same if you read that one. So if you enjoyed this chapter, you may want to add that to your list. My favorite quote from the book is when the author asked his son what superpower he would want. And the son said he'd want to be able to grow as many trees as he could as fast as possible. Reasoning like this. Think about it dad. You could plant mangrove trees and slow down a tsunami. A dense forest could stop an army. There'd be no more hunger. Everyone have wood for house and fires? Well, a little bit of a rabbit hole there, but. But. Amen. Definitely read that reforesting book for more I'll link to it on the resources webpage for this chapter along with all resources, references, links and additional resources reading and listening material which you can find@getindoor.com chapter four that's getindoor.com chapter the number four. And in the meantime, if you have the physical or the digital version of this book, you'll find a note taking section at the end of each chapter. And for this chapter, here's what I want you to think about. What do you think the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil actually was and why do you think it was created? Perhaps more importantly, ask yourself this question. Are there similar trees in your own life that you desire for satisfaction? Rather than finding satisfaction in God alone? Try listing those and identifying those. Thanks for listening.