What happened to the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden?

Obey your flesh and descend into darkness

How can we know anything about anything

To try to explain truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation. George Macdonald

Do we have to make a choice between science and the Bible?

NO!

That is NOT where the problem is, but that is what everyone seems to want to talk about.

Take science as an example. How can we know anything about the created material world around us?

How can we know anything from what we can see using natural sciences?

We all see the same things in the material world, but we don't come to the same answers.

Why is that?

How can we know anything about the Bible and what it teaches? Every person believes different things about the Bible and how it should be read.

Why is that?

Same scientific facts. Different answers.

Same Bible. Different answers.

Why is that?

The true question is this: How do we come to our answers that we get from what we can see through science or what we can read in the Bible?

How do we think about what we see using science or what we read in the Bible?

How do we analyze what we have seen and read?

How do we interpret what we have seen and read?

We use logic, but logic always has a foundation. Jesus talked about building on the Rock. That Rock is Jesus Christ. He is the true foundation. There are also the false foundations of the ungodly.

An example might help.

Question: Why do you believe in evolution?

Answer: Because my science teacher told me that evolution is scientific fact.

Question: Why do you believe your science teacher?

Answer: because he agrees with the textbook he assigned us to read.

Now, we have asked, "Why?" twice.

If we continued to ask, "Why?" we would come down to the foundation of this person's thoughts.

When we get down to the foundations, there are no more questions that can be answered. So where to the foundations come from?

There are three possibilities.

things that we make up, pulled from the air
demonic lies
divine revelation

Question: Why do you believe in creation?

Answer: Because God revealed this to me. He spoke to me through the Bible and gave me His faith so that I could believe Him.

See how quickly we got to the foundation. This is a belief that has a foundation that is solid and that cannot be moved.

In reality, the things that we make up, that are pulled from the air, are actually from demons and all the lies of demons spring from the prince of demons, Satan. So these are one and the same.

Divine revelation comes from the Almighty, Creator, God, Jesus Christ. So there are only two choices, but how do we know there are only two choices? Because God has revealed this truth to us.

The question then is how do we tell the difference between the revelation that comes from God and the lies of Satan?

The answer is that everyone who sincerely wants to do the will of God will know.

Jesus said, "If you really want to obey God, you will know if what I teach comes from God or from me"

The rejection of the revelation that comes from God is not an intellectual problem. It is a moral problem.

Jesus said, "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you: For everyone who asks receives; and he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks it shall be opened." *

Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to those who ask him? Matthew 7:7-11 *

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. You can set the truth before someone, but you can't make anyone believe those things that they don't want to submit to. They have to want to obey God.

How frequently it is brought to our attention that nothing good can be done if the will is wrong! Reason alone fails to justify itself. Richard M. Weaver

Jesus said, "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free" (John 8:32)

"If we are not prepared to buy the truth at the cost of our own humbling we shall not receive it"

Lies appear to have no price upon them. They seem cheap and they abound everywhere. But for the truth there is always an obvious price to pay.

"[God] has set a day when He will judge all the world's people with fairness. And He has chosen the man Jesus to do the judging for Him. God has given proof of this to all of us by raising Jesus from death" (Acts 17:31).

"There is a judge for the one who rejects Me [Jesus] and does not accept My words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him at the last day" (John 12:48)

That also stands for every person who speaks the utterances of Jesus. When we hear them, we hear Jesus Christ, and we either accept or reject. Every person who follows Jesus Christ is commanded to only speak His utterances and not their own.

"When we love others, we know that we belong to the truth, and we feel at ease in the presence of God" (1 John 3:19)

Ravi Zacharias did two open forums in a university. On the second night, one man told him that he had brought two Atheists in the night before who said that the arguments presented were so strong that they could not contend with them, but they were going to remain Atheists because that is what they prefer to be true.

In another case of just listening to an unbeliever and drawing out his reasoning, the unbeliever finally came to his foundations.

They turned out to be assumptions that were pulled from the air. When asked why he believed his basic assumption, the unbeliever looked startled and blurted out, "I guess I'm making the whole thing up." It was quite a revelation to him since he hadn't even known that he had any assumptions. However, he decided to remain an Atheist because he didn't want God to rule over him.

We know only what God has told us about the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the tree of life, and the Garden of Eden. I don't think that we have any revelation on what happened to the tree itself. We do know that, ever since partaking of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, mankind has been plagued with an over-active sense of what is right and what is wrong. We can judge wrong-doing in each other very well. Of course, we are never fully right in our judgment.

With the power of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the religionists of Jesus’ day were able to turn God’s spiritual law into something ugly. Jesus said, "... except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven." They had a righteousness that was from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It was the kind of righteousness that motivated them to bind heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on men's shoulders; but they themselves would not move them with one of their fingers. Matthew 23:4 They were hypocrites, judges with evil thoughts. They were self-righteous, so they found that they could not accept the free gift of real righteousness from God—the gift that is only available through Jesus. Real righteousness is by grace through faith.

Even with this higher level of righteousness, we know that it is wrong with someone strikes us on the cheek, but we turn the other cheek. We know that it's wrong when people curse us, but with this higher level of righteousness is the we bless those who curse us. We pray for those who despitefully use us. How can we do this? We cannot, but Christ can do the work in us. Love and righteousness are synonyms and come from God.

We see this tree-of-knowledge judgment exercised by the religious people in John 8:3-11. They had caught a woman in the very act of adultery, a capital offense under the Law of Moses. Of course, they were laying what they thought was a clever trap for Jesus. However, Jesus was operating by a righteousness that far exceeded the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. He told them that the one who had no sin should throw the first stone. Of course, they all left, and no one threw a stone. Then, Jesus told the woman not to sin again or a far worse thing would happen to her. It would have been cruel had He not told her to sin no more. Jesus actually died for us to deliver us from our slavery to sin.

What happened to the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden?

How can we know anything about anything

Cults

By Grace Through Faith

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