Comments? Ideas? I know there are a few people out there who might help inform us all on the issue.
Monday, April 20, 2009
The Tree of Life
Time to lay out a question. What was the purpose of the tree of life in Eden? Was it to ward off death even before the existence of sin? Was it something from which our first parents would have been eating already before the curse? A friend asked me this question, which someone else had asked him. Since I'll be on the road for a couple of days I might have a chance to think through this account and deal with the data in Genesis 1-3.
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Off the top of my head, as it were, it has always seemed to me to be one of those mysteries. The way I look at it, there was no death before sin, so there was no need to ward off death. And judging from God's reactions to Adam's sin, I'd say they had not yet eaten of it.
On further reflection, however, I tend to think that it might be a physical representation of eternal life, and God's relationship with man, a sort of God-on-earth monument, if you will. Or it could be the element by which God continued to sustain the world with life. We see a somewhat similar figure in Revelation, combined with a river and God's throne, so it seems this tree is significant to God's plan in some way. Now that the tree is physically gone, well, we all see how corrupt and death-filled this world is. There might be some relationship between the spiritual life of mankind and the tree of life which seemed to be very special in Eden.
I have a question, very unrelated. How do you explain and scripturally defend consubstantiation (the belief that Christ is also physically, not only spiritually, present at the sacrament of communion)?
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