Every year in January I begin another journey through the bible over the upcoming year.  Last year I started a little early and began the 2021 journey the day my daughter was born.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read through the bible but this year as my daughter turned one, I could tell you I read through it at least once.  Every year after, I will be able to say I have at least read the bible as many years as my daughter has been alive.  I find that oddly encouraging on the days I don’t necessarily feel like reading the bible.  You don’t have to read all the way through the bible every year, but I would encourage you to develop a regular reading plan and stick to it.

My reading plan requires that every January I find myself again in Genesis.  This year I’ve been thinking about the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen 2:9).  Adam and Eve could eat of any tree in the garden except this one.  On the day they ate of this tree God told them that they would die.  We know that this tree’s fruit was good for food and that it was a delight to look at (Gen 3:6).  Eve had even been convinced by the serpent that the fruit of this tree was desirable for gaining wisdom (Gen 3:6).  According to Adam Clarke, from a, “literal point of view, it may mean any tree or plant which possessed the property of increasing the knowledge of what was in nature, as the esculent vegetables had of increasing bodily vigor; and that there are some aliments which from their physical influence have a tendency to strengthen the understanding and invigorate the rational faculty more than others (Clarke 1810-1826, 41).”

Traditionally, the fruit of this tree is depicted as an apple and often an apple is representative of sexual desire i.e., the forbidden fruit.  The implication that this story is somehow an allegory of inappropriate sexual desire.  Of course, it could be bigger than sexual desire and might be representative of any illegal or immoral pleasure.  At any rate, it must have been some fruit to be capable of both increasing knowledge and desirous enough to be representative of not just illegal or immoral pleasures but representative of our most immoral pleasures.

But the question I find myself asking this year is, “does it need to be anything more than an ordinary fruit?”

What is it to know good and evil?  Is it an intellectual knowledge or an experiential knowledge?  Can you understand the heart ache of breathing the last breaths for an infant as he slowly passes from this life into the next apart from being the one conducting CPR?  Yes.  I think you can even understand enough to be empathetic to a person in the midst of that heart ache.  But to experience it is to know it at a deeper level and consequently to be able to empathize from a stronger position of authority.  When that person tells you that you too will get through that anguish you are more likely to believe them than the first.

דַּעַת (daʿat), the Hebrew word translated knowledge, “abstractly refers to the capacity, content, and recollection one has for knowing someone or something, especially based on one’s own experiences (Lexham Theological Word Book 2014).”  This knowledge negatively belonged, to someone who had come to have knowledge of evil through detrimental actions (Lexham Theological Word Book 2014).”  Here, at the fall, Adam and Eve directly disobey a command of God.  To be experientially good or to be experientially bad is directly tied to obedience to God.

Pharaoh helps us understand when he asks rhetorically, “Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go (Exo 5:2)?”  Who indeed!  Or in the words of Job, “What is the Almighty, that we should serve him (Job 21:15)?”  God’s identity is directly tied to the morality of obedience.

God answers Job over four chapters (Job 38-41) and if what He says about His own person is true does it matter what He tells us to do or not to do?  God could have picked any tree and the second its fruit struck the tongue it would be known, in an experiential sense, what it was to be in disobedience to the creator of everything, to stand imperfect in the presence of perfection, to stand beneath the all-knowing gaze of the one who made you for obedience.  How naked would you feel in that moment?  Naked enough to hide?

But why didn’t Adam and Eve die on that day?  The Message, a paraphrased translation reads, “the moment you eat from that tree you’re dead (Gen 2:17).”  They went on to bear children (Gen 4:1-2)!

If it is true that we, apart from Christ, are dead in our trespasses (Eph 2:1) then isn’t true that Adam and Eve are now dead in their trespass?  This death is spiritual.  A physical death is when you can no longer communicate with the living, but a spiritual death is when you can no longer communicate with God (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 622).  “The phrase “in your transgressions and sins” shows the sphere of the death, suggesting that sin has killed people (Rom. 5:12; 7:10; Col. 2:13) and they remain in that spiritually dead state (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 622).”

Today, we may have taken our disobedience to another level because the simple act of eating a fruit that God told them not to eat doesn’t seem that bad.  But how bad an act of disobedience is has more to do with the authority demanding obedience then the actual act of obedience.  We live in a world marred by that original act of disobedience and because of that marring it is even more challenging to be obedient.  But make no mistake, it is your own disobedience that has you as spiritually dead as Adam and Eve.

You stand condemned of disobedience to your very creator.  Don’t wait!  Jesus died in your place all you have to do is believe that He is and has done what He said He would do.  If you have already accepted Jesus and find yourself in a place of disobedience, don’t wait!  Confess your sins to Jesus, “he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1Jn 1:9).”  Get back into right standing so you can begin to live for Him again.

Thank you for reading my random thoughts on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Maybe next year I’ll get to the tree of life.

Clarke, Adam. Adam Clarke’s Commentary On The Bible. Public Domain, 1810-1826.

“Lexham Theological Word Book.” In Bible Reference Series, edited by Douglas Mangum, Derek R. Brown, Rachel Klippenstein, & Rebekah Hurst. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2014.

Walvoord, John F., and Roy B. Zuck. The Bible Knowledge Commentary. Dallas: Cook Communications Ministries, 2004.

Graduating High School, I didn’t have a clear idea or path towards what or who I was to become as an adult.  The year I graduated my High School offered three one-year tuition waivers to our local community college.  One was for an athletic candidate.  That was not me.  While I was average in skill at most sports, I came in at just under 100 pounds and so I wasn’t necessarily competitive; especially in my favorite sport, football.  Another was for academics.  Again, this was not me.  I had potential and even capability, but I would come to discover I had to be interested and challenged.  In High School I was mostly bored.  The final tuition waiver was selected by the faculty and for what ever reason they decided to award this waiver to me.  I had to select a program.  After careful consideration I chose to pursue an associate degree in criminal justice.  After all, it was the only program at our local institution with an indoor firing range.  The choice was clear.

Greg Pierce was my advisor and professor for many of my classes.  He introduced me to many of the great enlightenment thinkers.  Especially the criminological thoughts of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jeremy Bentham.  But I will never forget our discussion on the Code of Hammurabi.  We were studying the history of criminal codes and their necessity for civil and ordered society.  The Code of Hammurabi is one of our earliest examples of such a code.

Hammurabi was a king of Babylon, in the second millennium before Christ, and his code contained 282 various laws (Faithlife n.d.).  This code made social distinctions along the social classes such as free men, middle class, and slave and provides an interesting look into their daily lives in those days (Faithlife n.d.).  Not only did it cover crime but also included things such as the price of hiring a boat for a day, the cost of a jug of beer at harvest, and many other legal situations of their times (Faithlife n.d.).

There are some who have even supposed that the Law of Moses was built on or evolved from the Code of Hammurabi.  Either indirectly or directly the claim is that the Law of Moses drew on the Code of Hammurabi or served as a model upon which to draw (Hamme, Babcock and Strong 2016).  But I think this rests on naturalistic assumptions that what comes later comes from what came before.  But there are two reasonable arguments against the necessity of the Code’s influence on the Law of Moses.

First, that the Code came before the Law assumes first that the Law wasn’t around until it was given to Moses.  In the strange story of Tamar (Gen 38), we find the law of Levirate Marriage (Gen 38:8) long before the duty was dictated to Moses (Deu 25:5-10).  This would make the Law of Moses at least close to contemporaneous with the Code of Hammurabi and the plus or minus in error could put it contemporaneously on either side; before or after.

Additionally, the idea of clean and unclean predated Hammurabi’s code all the way back to the flood.  Noah was commanded to take one pair of every unclean animal and seven pairs of every clean animal onto the ark (Gen 7:2-3).  The increased number of clean animals was presumably to meet the need for ritual sacrifice.  If we allow that everyone died in the flood it would appear that at least elements of the Law of Moses existed before the Code of Hammurabi.  The possibility that the acceptance of Abel’s offering over Cain’s (Gen 4:3-5) as a statement of obedience to a known requirement could also suggest that the Law was known before the flood. “From the beginning God’s law lay at the center of his dealings with humankind (Elwell 2001, 679).”

Second, is an idea that Paul introduced in Romans.  “For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law.  They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them on that day when, according to my gospel, God judges the secrets of men by Christ Jesus (Rom 2:12-16).”  The moral law is written on the hearts of both the Jew and the Gentile.  They are written on the hearts of every person.  Whenever someone does by instinct that which is required by the law, even though they don’t know the law, they are demonstrating, “the existence of a guiding principle within themselves (Mounce 1995, 94).”  This “guiding principle”, while not perfect, could have produced not only the Code of Hammurabi but two separate legal codes on the opposite ends of the planet, absence of any communication between the two cultures, that had many, if not most, parts resembling the other.

Back to Greg Pierce’s class.  What stood out on that day was my own inner question, “Apart from the obvious, that the Law of Moses was given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai, what would make the Law of Moses superior to any other code of conduct such as Hammurabi’s Code?”  The answer is that the Law of Moses is so much more than just a code of conduct.

J.A. Motyer writes that “the law that God gave through Moses had many aspects—e.g., civil, dealing with the legal system of the people of God considered as a state, with courts and penalties; moral, the law of holy living; and religious, the law of the ceremonies and sacrifices (Elwell 2001, 675).”  But, of those many aspects the aspect that most distinguishes the Law of Moses from any other code of conduct is perhaps its purpose.  Reflecting the narrative of Genesis 2-3 in which man’s obedience would place him in the garden nourished by the tree of life and conversely through disobedience would grow death so too obedience to the Law promised life and disobedience death (Elwell 2001, 675).  But the ultimate purpose of the Law was to point to life.

The Law, given to Moses by God, teaches the difference between righteousness and unrighteousness through its concepts of clean and unclean.  It teaches man’s unrighteousness before a righteous God and the serious consequences and judgment of that unrighteousness.  But most amazingly it also hints at a restoration of righteousness.  The idea that something that is unclean can be made to be clean again; that unrighteous can become righteous.  The hope that peace between man and God is even and still possible.  The hope of this peace, proclaimed by angels (Luk 2:14), is not found in the Code of Hammurabi or any other code.  Only God’s Law, the Law of Moses, offers and expects the realization of that hope.  This is the hope that was fulfilled in Jesus (Rom 5:1)!  He came not to abolish it, but to fulfill it (Mat 5:17)! He came to make the unclean clean and the unrighteous righteous by becoming the one judged on behalf of the unclean and unrighteous!

Socrates once quipped,  “it may be that God can forgive sins but I do not see how.” The Law of Moses told God’s people that He would forgive sin and even hinted at how.

Thank you for reading my blog today.  I hope I have encouraged you to spend some time in the Old Testament.  It is the historical record of Israel’s relationship to God through the Law, Their failures in regard to the Law and God, and their hope of ultimate redemption to God.  A redemption that would ultimately be fulfilled in Jesus.  If you are struggling to understand the Old Testament, keep going.  Ask questions, find good commentaries, and trust in God’s spirit to guide you.  His love for you is His vested interest in your continued growth.  God is complex and His plans are complex.  But as your understanding of that complexity grows your understanding and your appreciation of what He has done on your behalf will also grow.

Elwell, Walter A., ed. Evangelical Dictionary of Theology. Second Edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2001.

Faithlife, LLC. Code of Hammurabi. Prod. Logos Bible Software Factbook. Bellingham, WA, n.d.

Hamme, Joel, Bryan C. Babcock, and Justin David Strong. “Code of Hammurabi.” In The Lexham Bible Dictionary, edited by John D. Barry. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016.

Mounce, Robert H. “Romans.” In The New American Commentary. Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1995.

“I am the resurrection and the life (Joh 11:25).”

I teach National Guard Army staff officers the staff process.  It is a practical approach.  We give the officers an order that was supposedly produced by their higher headquarters, we teach a step of the process, and then they do that step of the process.  When it is complete the staff has produced their own order that would then be issued to their subordinate organizations.  One of the challenges is that the order we give them is never perfect.  In fact, it is often riddled with errors.  One of the ways we address this is by briefing the order to the staff.  That way they can get a better understanding of the intent of that order.  At the conclusion of the brief, we love to show a slide that shows Homer Simpson handing a manuscript to Mr. Burns.  The caption reads, “It was the best of times it was the blurst of times.”  To which Homer replies, “You stupid monkey!”

The idea is based on the infinite monkey theorem; a monkey typing random keys for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text. In the case of Homer and Mr. Burns the monkeys almost produced War and Peace. Given more time, they would have eventually fixed their error. The problem is, especially in the case of our staff, their doesn’t exist an infinite amount of time. It almost never fails, that at the end of the exercise as we, the instructors, are going over the mistakes in the produced order that some staff officer will respond, “Stupid Monkeys!”

I’ve been wrestling with Jesus’ response to Martha after He told her, “Your brother will rise again (Joh 11:23).”  Martha replied, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day (Joh 11:24).”  Jesus then tells her, “I am the resurrection and the life (Joh 11:25).”  What does it mean to be the resurrection and the life?

The term resurrection never actually appears in the Old Testament and so there were factions in Jesus’ day that did not believe in the concept. It was one of the doctrinal points that separated the Pharisees from the Sadducees. The Pharisees believed in a resurrection and the Sadducees did not. However, even among those who believed in resurrection there was a diversity in opinion. Scott Identifies seven intertestamental thoughts on resurrection. (1) That a good person would be remembered, (2) the survival of the righteous soul, (3) bodily resurrection, (4) the eternality of reason over pain and death, (5) the fires of Gehenna as both punishment and purging before heaven, (6) that the dead would go to somewhere until bodily resurrection and (7) eternal life for God’s people and annihilation for the rest (Scott 1995, 279-280). Ideas almost as diverse as those held today.

In Jesus’ day, “many understood salvation to include immortality and resurrection (Scott 1995, 278).” While the term resurrection may be absent the idea is grounded in the Old Testament. Solomon wrote, “In the path of righteousness is life, and in its pathway there is no death (Pro 12:28).” The Old Testament term Shoel is, “an obscure, shadowy, gloomy place of existence and forgetfulness after death (Scott 1995, 278).” It was the abode of the dead. Yet against the dread of Shoel was set the Old Testament hope that God would not leave them in that place. “For you will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption (Psa 16:10).”

But perhaps in Daniel we find the clearest statement of the idea of resurrection, “And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt (Dan 12:2).”  Where the ESV translates many the NIV translates multitudes.  The idea isn’t that some will, and some won’t awake but that the number of those who awake is large.  In fact, apart from those who are alive it will be all those who have lived at one time.  That will be a great multitude indeed.

So, what did Jesus mean when He said that He was the resurrection?  To be the resurrection was to be the same power that not only brought you into being but will one day resurrect you into eternal life or eternal contempt.  In essence it is a claim to deity.  The problem is that no one can live in the presence of deity, the righteous judge, and live.  “But you, are to be feared!  Who can stand before you when once your anger is roused?  From the heavens you uttered judgment; the earth feared and was still… (Psa 76:7-9).”  When will God’s anger be roused?  At the judgment.  “It is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment (Heb 9:27).”  Will you be able to stand at your resurrection?  Make no mistake, on that day, you will stand before Jesus the resurrection!

The good news is that not only is Jesus the resurrection, but He is the life.  I quoted Psalm 76 above, but I did not finish the thought.  In the ninth verse we read, “God arose to establish judgment, to save all the humble of the earth (Psa 76:9).”  The hope of the Old Testament was that God would not leave them to this judgment and the good news of the New Testament is that the judgment has already come!  The psalmist wrote, “But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me (Psa 49:15)” and “…great is your steadfast love toward me; you have delivered my soul from the depths of Sheol (Psa 86:13).”

Jesus said that He, “came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many (Mar 10:45).”  That is what He means when He says He is the life.  Paul, told Timothy that Jesus, “gave himself as a ransom for all (1Ti 2:5-6),” Peter wrote that Jesus’ blood ransomed us (1Pe 1:18-19), and John wrote that Jesus blood ransomed us for God (Rev 5:9-10).  To be the resurrection and the life is to be both the power of resurrection and the love that will deliver you from the judgment to come.

This was the plan of God from before the beginning developed by His mind alone and perfect in its execution and result. It was not devised by man (2Pe 1:16) or dare I say stupid monkeys over the course of an eternity. Anything produced by man or monkey will be woefully incapable of salvation or a grotesque distortion of God’s plan; equally incapable of salvation. Believe on Jesus and live (Joh 11:25-26)!

Scott, J. Julius. Jewish Backgrounds Of The New Testament. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1995.

“And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us (1Jo 3:23).”

For Christmas this year a friend of mine gave me a book of funny quotes.  I read quite a bit before I realized that the party had moved to another part of the room and that I was no longer a participant.  I politely closed the book, set it down, and got up from where I was sitting and rejoined the party.  But before I did, I found a quote from E.E. Cummings, “unbeingdead isn’t being alive.”  It struck me as potentially profound but not that funny.  At least not funny in the way that many of the other quotes were.

What did E.E. Cummings mean by “unbeingdead?”  It comes from a poem he had written in 1962 for The Pen Review entitled, POEM (or “the divine right of majorities,

that illegitimate offspring of the divine right of kings” Homer Lea).  In it, Cummings identifies “five simple facts no subhuman superstate ever knew” with the fifth one being that “unbeingdead isn’t being alive.”  The poem was not helpful in clarifying what Cummings meant.  That’s the trouble with poems.  They can sound brilliant without being helpful at all.

Recently, I was in John’s First Epistle.  While it is not known who John was writing to specifically, it is known that he was writing to a group of Christians who had run into some trouble with some false teachers (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 880).  John referred to these false teachers as antichrists (1Jo 2:18-26).  Not only do we not know the particular recipients of John’s letter, but he also fails to identify the particular false teachers.  Some argue that they were the Gnostics who had some peculiar views about the difference between spiritual and material (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 880).  Some argue that that they were Docetists who held that Jesus only appeared to be human and only appeared to have a body (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 880).  Still others argued that Jesus was a man on whom the divine Christ descended when he was baptized but was abandoned by the divine Christ before the Crucifixion (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 880).  In each of these cases the teachers were teaching a false doctrine and could be considered antichrists.  They may have even been the antichrists John was writing about.

But the specific passage that stuck out for me reads, “and this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us (1Jo 3:23).”  What struck me was that this commandment has two parts separated by an and.  According to Oxford and is, “used to connect words of the same part of speech, clauses, or sentences, that are to be taken jointly.”  You can not take one part of the commandment without taking the other.

Today, everyone wants to remind us that we are to love one another (Joh 13:34), even our enemies (Mat 5:43-44 and Luk 6:27), and that God is love (1Jo 4:8 and 16).  This is pretty consistent throughout the New Testament (Rom. 13:8; Col. 3:14; 1 Thess. 4:9; 1 Tim. 1:5; 1 Pet. 1:22) and can even be found in The Law and the Old Testament (Lev 19:18, Job 31:29, Psa 7:4).  This is so commonly understood in our culture that it would be hard to determine if it is innately known or if we know it because we come from a Judeo/Christian background.  We also know that if we don’t have love, we are noisy and clanging cymbals, who are nothing, and have gained nothing (1Co 13:1-3).  Far be it from me to argue against any of this but what if this is all we have or more specifically profess to be all we need.  What if we profess love but deny God’s Son, Jesus Christ?  Is love really enough? 

On one occasion a crowd asked Jesus, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God (Joh 6:28)?”  How would you expect that to be answered today?  To love your enemies, to help the poor and the oppressed, to give to orphans and widows…?  Jesus answered them in his day differently, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he sent (Joh 6:29).”

D.A. Carson comments that, “The work of God—i.e. what God requires—is faith…  Faith, faith with proper Christological object, is what God requires, not ‘works’ in any modern sense of the term (Carson 1991, 285).”  Edwin Blum noted that the crowd, “could not please God by doing good works.  There is only one work of God, that is, one thing God requires.  They need to put their trust in the One the Father has sent (Walvoord and Zuck 2004, 295).”  i.e. Faith in Jesus the Christ.

I guess what I have been thinking about as a result of this quote from my friend’s gift is whether or not a person who loves apart from a faith in God is truly alive.  We read that apart from the work of Christ we are already dead in our trespasses (Eph 2:1 and Col 2:13).  Is love apart from Christ “unbeingdead” or apart from Christ are you “all dead?”  The answer according to scripture is clear.  No work apart from faith in Christ can save you from your trespasses.  And yet today, many “Christians” would argue that God’s good news isn’t about your sins, the ontological fall, or original sin but rather it is “about God’s will being done on earth… through solidarity with all humanity in our suffering, oppression, and evil (Childers 2020, 30).”  The good news is that you can do good works in this life.

John, in his epistle we know as First John, uses the word love around forty-six times because the Christians of his day were being deceived by false teachers into not loving one another.  Today Christians are being deceived by an emphasis on a human understanding of love that draws them away from Jesus the Christ of the New Testament.

This is today’s deception.  One part, faith in Christ, separate from the other part, love for one another leads to the deception of “unbeingdead” the appearance or feeling of being alive.  However, the mere appearance of life is not enough for real life.  Jesus came that we might have life more abundantly (Joh 10:10).  Faith in His act of love on our behalf not only leads to eternal life it leads to a life of love hear and now.  But beware a life of love apart from Christ.  “Unbeingdead isn’t being alive.”

Hey everyone, thanks for reading today’s blog. If you want to know some more of my thoughts on the interaction between Faith, Hope, and Love check out my blog on that very topic. I would like to thank my regular readers for their patience. I didn’t write much this holiday season as it is Sarah and my first Christmas, New Years, and birthday celebration with our daughter and I didn’t want to miss any of it. Last year was a good year and I couldn’t have increased my readership over the previous year without you so thanks again. I am looking forward to 2022!

Photo by Sergey Nikolaev on Unsplash

Carson, D. A. The Gospel according to John. Grand Rapids, MI: Inter-Varsity Press, 1991.

Childers, Alisa. Another Gospel? A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Reposne to Progressive Christianity. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale Momentum, 2020.

Walvoord, John F., and Roy B. Zuck. The Bible Knowledge Commentary. Dallas: Cook Communications Ministries, 2004.