WHY THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT?

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Why did God create the forbidden fruit? It’s a question for deep thinkers only. Some accuse God of cruelty for putting a temptation like “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” in the Garden of Eden. Such talk shows they either doubt God’s goodness or don’t know how temptation works, or both. When God pronounced everything He made “very good” (Gen 1:31) that tree was included. And long ago we were instructed about the nature of temptation in James 1:13-14,

When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.”
For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone;
but each one is tempted when, by his own evil desire,
he is dragged away and enticed.

But the question remains, “Why the forbidden fruit?” If a tree’s fruit was dangerous enough to kill humans, then why did God create it and place it in Paradise [the literal meaning of Eden], right “in the middle of the garden”?

Nothing is directly stated about that tree’s purpose, but some clues in those first 3 chapters of Genesis point to its edibility and its function. We already know God deemed it “very good,” and Gen 2:9 tells us it was among trees that were “good for food.” God indicated its significance by centrally locating it next to the crucially important “tree of life.” But what was its function?
 
After “the serpent”—identified in Rev 12:9 as “Satan”—deceived Eve by saying, “You will not surely die” (Gen 3:4), both she and Adam ate that tree’s fruit, and they at once died, but not at first physically. Later, in the New Testament, we learn their immediate death was spiritual (Rom 5:12-24). But Satan had told them a partial truth about the fruit’s power: “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” God Himself confirmed this in Gen 3:22a (NKJV), “Behold, the man has become like one of Us, to know good and evil.” While this divine statement greatly supports the doctrine of the Trinity, it also gives us a hint about spiritual death.

God warned Adam and Eve in Gen 2:17, “you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.” But when they did, He prevented them from living forever physically in their fallen, spiritually dead state. He removed Adam’s race from Eden’s source of everlasting life: “He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever. So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden...” (Gen 3:22b-23a). Both alchemy’s old quest for the life-extending philosopher’s stone and the proverbial search for the fountain of youth express a human longing for regaining access to that “tree.” But Paradise and “the tree of life” have been relocated from our planet to Heaven (Rev 2:7; 22:2,14,19).

To see why fruit from “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” brought spiritual death, we must first understand how the “Us” of the Trinity “know good and evil.” The Eternal Persons of the Triune Godhead have an absolute “knowledge of good and evil.” If Gen 3:22a is a divine Self-revelation, then They each “know” independently in Themselves—intrinsic to Their uncreated nature as God—the precise distinction between “good and evil.” No created being—angelic or human—intrinsically has that divinely accurate “knowledge.” While they can learn it (Heb 5:14), they are forever dependent on God for it. But in Eden, through this “tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” God made a way for something “like” it to become a part of humanity. Evidently, God wanted human creatures, who already imaged the Trinitarian “Us” of Gen 1:26 (NKJV), “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness...”), to be able, at some future stage of progress, to “become like one of Us.” Since we were already bearing His representative “likeness,” this further “like”-status had to be of another sort, perhaps relational.

Human survival depends on the God of Truth, for “man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (Deut 8:3). The exact story of fallen angels is obscure, but our own story is clear. Our human ancestors took and ate that fruit when it was forbidden to them, and its transformative power worked. It gave them independence in their “knowledge of good and evil”—an internal means, independent from God, for knowing and determining distinctions between “good and evil.” In other words, we became morally independent of divine guidance and direction, able to decide our own personal and cultural moralities, and that’s how human history has played out from our earliest days up to modern times. The spiritual death in such moral independence from God has proved to be blatantly obvious.

But in contemplating the Trinity—a Union of Three eternally distinct Individuals as One God, and so much One that They name and speak of Themselves in the singular (“I AM that I AM”)—we must come to terms with the mutual and simultaneous Self-Denial, even Self-Death, intrinsic to Their absolute Unity as morally independent Persons. God never asks us to do what He has not done or is not doing Himself. In Mat 16:24-25 (NKJV) Jesus called us to a self-death similar to His own: “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desires to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” Our self-denying self-death is a prerequisite for experiencing “life... in abundance” (John 10:10, CSB) by intimate union with Christ, and through Him, ultimate union with the Triune God.

Adam and Eve’s sin of not listening to and obeying God contained its own lethal consequence. It was much like the death of children who, being told not to do it, disobediently run into a busy street after escaping balls or abandoned toys and are killed in the traffic. The balls or toys did not cause their death, but their desire for them, outweighing their fear of the warning, tragically led them to it. If they had listened and obeyed, their parents might later have seen the traffic disappear, grabbed their hands and walked them safely into the empty street to help them retrieve their desired items.

Although the above illustration is inadequate, I believe it points to the possibility of God’s original intention for “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” as hinted earlier: a relational purpose. Created beings can never become the Uncreated, but God can invite us to become as “like” Him as He has become “like” us in Christ’s Incarnation. In His Plan A, He might have brought us to maturity in a self-death “like” His own Trinitarian one. In that case, humanity’s future might have had this tree’s fruit—deadly to us without that self-death—served to us on the table of “the wedding supper of the Lamb” (an unsacrificed one), for Whom we, “his bride [had] made herself ready” (Rev 19:7-9) through a much less difficult self-denial. But, deceived into acting on our own, we ate that fruit without divine permission, and in Plan B, “the Lamb” did have to die, to provide the way for us, the Church, to make ourselves ready as His Bride. Now—in a fallen world, surrounded by fallen people, and hampered with our own fallen sin natures—we must struggle daily to resist that internalized fruit of moral independence and to embrace a self-denying self-death that is much harder than it would have been, yet is still possible. Christ, living in us through the Holy Spirit, teaches us to practice His prayerful lifestyle of “not my will but Yours be done,” and the more we do, the more progress we make in our earthly sanctification.

While Scripture has “the tree of life” in Heaven for us to eat from freely, we do not see there the misused “tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” We already carry its fruit inside of us as now part of us. Even becoming “new creations in Christ” (2 Cor 5:17, CSB) does not erase its intended effect, for Christ Himself had its result in Him through becoming genetically human through Mary.[1] By learning from Jesus how to use our individual moral independence in the way God originally intended, we will make ourselves ready for our coming wedding with Him, our Bridegroom. It will be a true marriage of equal partners, because He became one of us, partaking fully of our human nature, so that we could become “like” Him as fully as humanly possible by partaking of “the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4). Without that comprehensive sharing of natures, corporately redeemed humanity could not even have a friendship with Christ, let alone an equanimous marriage.

So, far from being a temptation, or even a test, as some teach, I believe the Biblical clues behind my speculation show that this, at first, deadly “tree” was to be an awesome wedding gift from our Creator. It allowed us, as lowly human creatures, to stand in exaltation forever beside Jesus in a mutually self-denying, eternal marital union.

Some people hate to read poems, probably because much poetry is written as enigmatically as Old Testament prophets sometimes proclaimed their prophecies. But I’ve tried to capture in a sonnet many of the concepts I’ve shared above. I hope it forms both an adequate review and an apt conclusion to this article.

FORBIDDEN FRUIT

No, not a test, but gift put on reserve,
a present for unwrapping later on,
a prize to guard and carefully conserve
till youthful immaturity was gone.

But Satan knew the fruit upon that tree
could sow false independence in our race
and blind—through open eyes—ability
to fellowship with Maker face to face.

What would have served as food for marriage feast,
when Son of God would win His human Bride,
became a path of bondage to the Beast,
who laughed to think our destiny had died.

But Mary’s Son would crush that Serpent’s head
and rise to raise His Spouse back from the dead.

— David L. Hatton, 4/16/2018
(from Poems Between Fear and Faith © 2019)

— — — — — — —
[1] See my blog article, “THE FIRST ADVENT: THE INCARNATION,” which explains this in great detail.

PORNOGRAPHY IN THE PULPIT

Michelangelo's David 

How can American Christians not fall into porn problems, when they’ve sat for years under preaching that paints a pornographic image of the body on the video-screen of their minds?

Among the questions addressed in one of the 700 Club’s “Bring It On-Line” sessions (link) was this art student’s concern:

I am pursuing a Fine Arts degree, and I am having trouble reconciling my Christian faith with this environment. Specifically, I have been asked to draw nude models and peruse through nude artwork. I know that many Christian artists, even ones during the Renaissance, painted nude portraits (including Michelangelo). But I think it’s pornographic and shouldn’t be portrayed as “art.” What’s your perspective? – K. R.

Pat Robertson’s response was excellent:

Life Drawing Class

Pornea has to do with sexual intercourse. That’s what the Greek word means. The human body is not pornographic. It was made by God, and Adam and Eve didn’t have any clothes on, when they were first created. So God Himself doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the human body. And you look at the David that Michelangelo did, and it’s so magnificent . . . a statue of a naked man, but it’s a magnificent piece of art. So, I don't think it’s pornographic. If you think it’s pornographic, then don’t do it. . . . But the truth is, you know, male and female models have been doing art forever, and I don’t see anything wrong with it.

As an L&D nurse, I see real-life pregnant bodies as nude as artist’s models are in “life drawing” classes. But when I made the following artistic representation of pregnancy, a devoted sister-in-Christ called it “pornographic.” My firm reply to her was that nothing in God’s beautiful design of the human form is indecent or pornographic.

Pregnancy by DLH

Why is this pornographic view of the naked human body so popular and widespread among Christians in America? Pat Robertson’s hint that pornography “has to do with sexual intercourse” gives us a clue. But a quote from Madeleine L’Engle’s book, Walking on Water (pp. 187-188), offers even more insight:

I would not hide the human body . . . , as though it was something to be ashamed of—though neither would I flaunt it. Let it be natural and holy. The incarnation was a total affirmation of the dignity of this body, and Paul goes on to emphasize that we are, moreover, the temple of the Holy Spirit, and if we abuse or reject or ignore our bodies we are abusing and rejecting and ignoring this temple. // I was both amused and appalled in a rotunda in the Prado, filled with Greek and Roman statues, to see that all the genitals had been removed, and covered with some kind of leaf. This prudery is in itself a form of pornography. (bold emphasis mine)

Her observation nails it! God did not create porn. We did, by creating a sexual focus when it comes to the nude body. In the beginning, this was not so.

Scripture’s very first description of humans implies gender-distinguishing genitals: “male and female He created them” (Gen 1:27). We still identify newborns as “him” or “her” by looking between the legs. God’s first command was for us to use that equipment properly: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Gen 1:28). By creating us naked, God made our procreative and gender-identifying anatomy fully visible. He included human nudity in evaluating “all” His handiwork as “very good” (Gen 1:31). Believers overlook this at great cost to themselves and to society, and they do so with the same diabolical help that misled our first parents into adopting a pornographic view of their own bodies.

The Original Sin (Sistine Chapel)

I challenge anyone to find a Bible commentary that honestly addresses what God asked Adam when He found him “afraid” of his nudity: “Who told you that you were naked?” (Gen 3:10-11). Great Bible scholars either entirely skip over it or boldly change His words to mean “What made you conscious of nakedness?” Why did they avoid God’s direct implication that Satan played a role in the adoption of body shame by the first human sinners? Does this divine question embarrassingly expose the deceptive source of our own fear of nudity? What could salvage Christian prudery if it was actually a liar “who told”our first parents that naked genitals should be hidden (with fig-leaf “loincloths,” Gen 3:7)? Is our religious devotion to a sexualized view of the nude body so sacred that even Christian teachers feel free to ignore the light God shed on its satanic origin?

Judging from modern body-image dysfunctions, our society’s porn-addiction epidemic, the objectification of the body in human trafficking, and the contemporary trends of gender-confusion in politics, Satan had an extremely far-reaching strategy in his original deceit. Hiding gender-distinctive body parts objectifies them, creating a sexual focus on what’s hidden. Satan knew this would create a doorway for pornea. His informational influence after getting humans “opened” to decide “good and evil” on their own—apart from divine guidance (Gen 3:5)—has been the fountainhead of human sexual waywardness ever since.

The root-word definition of pornography relates to a picture (imaged or written) of fornication. God’s own portrayal of the human body is very clear: “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psa 139:14). So, who is the gatekeeper on depicting it as a stimulus of unholy passions? The success of those who shoot and sell nude sex scenes depends on a much more fundamental portrayal of the body’s obscenity: the view held and promoted by popular Christianity. Society’s investment in Western Christendom’s perpetuation of Satan’s original lie is the sustaining power behind our culture’s exploitation of nudity. Commercial pornographers exist for business only because conceptual pornographers persist in painting this perverted picture.

From art students claiming this porno-prudery as part of their “faith” to preachers exhorting men to “bounce their eyes” at women, the bulk of American believers need to abandon this ungodly, Creator-dishonoring deception. Only by eliminating what porn profits from—the church’s pornographic fantasies about the nude body—can we effectively fight the naked obscenities of the porn industry. Either we stand with the Original Designer of beauty and glory in the unclad human body or we join as accomplices of the original pornographer who deceived us in the first place.

(for further reading, see my blog article Prudery and Porn Addiction, my website article Incarnational Truth about Humanity’s Sexual Nature (Doing Body-friendly Theology Free from Gnostic Prudery) or read my novelette Meeting at the River to explore the biblical research behind my reason for treating this issue of body acceptance so seriously.)

SEX IS CENTRAL TO GOD’S SALVATION PLAN

Evangelical pulpiteers can shout louder than ever about sexual morality, but most are still reluctant to frankly address the physical aspects of human sexuality, even at a time when society desperately needs to hear a Christian voice. Why this characteristic shyness about sex? Believers have no biblical warrant for it. Such a squeamish attitude certainly didn’t come from our Maker. Neither in Scripture nor in orthodox Christian theology is there even a shred of support for our long history of embarrassment about the body’s sexual nature. In fact, a careful review of the Bible itself—done in the fear of God and not in the fear of tradition—will actually show that our reasons for avoiding the anatomy of gender and its physiological purposes in sexuality are not only unscriptural but may have heretical roots.

Why not boldness rather than bashfulness in our approach to sex? Christians, of all people, should be so open about the physical wonders of human gender and reproduction that it makes the world’s treatment of these subjects seem prudish in comparison. We owed it to the Designer of the human body to have developed such expertise and excellence in the realm of sex education that secular authorities would resort to us for in-depth informational and audio-visual teaching materials, rather than vice versa. In this crucial area of stewardship, the church has not only failed our Lord but left a promiscuous modern society to flounder in a more diabolical degree of sexual confusion than history has ever known.

Why didn’t we take our cue from God’s Word in this area? The very first words God uses to state how humans reflect His image are not the commonly assumed aspects of personality (ie., reason, emotion, volition, etc.), but physical gender! (Re-read Genesis 1:27, and if you don’t say “Ouch!” you’re in theological denial!) Yes, He did equip us rationally for the task of governing creation, but His very first command to us in Genesis 1:28 was what? To reproduce!

If God’s very first words about His purpose for humans—that is, procreativity from sexual union between complementary genders—aren’t sufficient to gain our attention, maybe we’ll listen to His last words. There’s someone who joins the Holy Spirit in the last few sentences of Scripture (Revelation 22:17) to invite sinners to salvation? It’s “the Bride,” the Church, the corporate “wife of the Lamb.” The present symbolism of gender and sexual union ultimately find fulfillment in our spiritual union with Christ the Bridegroom. But until then, God has placed marriage as the Bible’s bookends for the redemption story, and right in the middle of it all is an erotic drama portraying just how sensually passionate He means for His symbolism to be (Song of Songs)! If both temporal and eternal marriage have such centrality in God’s mind, where have our minds been? When it comes to dealing with the fleshly dust from which God fashioned sexual body parts and their physical union, it’s obvious that our minds have been in the gutter.

Far from honoring the human body and it’s gender distinctions as sacred ground, we’ve religiously depicted them as avenues of temptation and lust. Our confident legalisms and manmade scruples to insure purity and morality have basically pornified the body! By redefining our physical forms and our sex organs as obscenities, we’ve paved the way for pornographers to defile that which was meant to be part of our Trinitarian Maker’s Self-portrait. With a prudish brush we’ve painted a lewd image of the sexuality through which God intended to proclaim His message of redemption. If this theological error is not sin, then missing the mark has lost its meaning!

Sexuality wasn’t created as an end in itself. It was intended, first, to image the Trinity’s unity in divine love and cosmic creativity through marital love and human procreativity. The sexuality of our complementary genders was meant to prophetically display the future one-flesh union we will enjoy with the incarnate Son of God, our Bridegroom. Why have we neglected or ignored these aspects of God’s emphasis on sexuality in Scripture? Perhaps they would have been more easily recognized, if Christian minds had not been culturally mesmerized through early Gnostic influences that heretically despised the material world and the physical body. But just as heretical, and even more blinding, has been the Protestant church’s wholesale religious embrace of the false standards of Victorian prudery.

It’s way past time for Christian repentance in this area. The need for reformation in the church’s view and treatment of the body’s gender and sexuality has never been greater nor more urgent. Embarrassing as it may be for Christian leaders to confess to bowing down for so long before the idol of cultural Victorianism—difficult as it may be for the average believer’s mind to be purged of the rituals of such idolatry—we can still return to the healing Word of God. The truth in Scripture about our bodies and their gendered sexuality has the power to set the church free from an unholy prudery and to equip saints with the transforming message our sex-obsessed, gender-confused, marriage-deforming world needs to hear.

[For an even more thorough critique of our failure to deal properly with the human body and its sexuality, I challenge you to read my doctrinal paper on this subject: “Incarnational Truth about Humanity’s Sexual Nature (Doing Body-friendly Theology Free from Gnostic Prudery).”]

ART IS A TEACHER

Art is not just a skill but a teacher. When I began art courses in 2006, I started seeing things differently. I noticed shapes and arrangements, colors and tones, lines and curves, schemes and designs, everywhere around me.

One night in the hospital, I caught myself staring at the typical row of skin creases around one of my patient’s armpits where her pectoralis inserted beneath the deltoid. I was suddenly fascinated and wanted to capture on paper an area of the body I’d seen for decades without noticing or appreciating its uniqueness. The same was true for other parts of the naked anatomy, but especially the structures of the face: eyebrows, noses, lips, jawbone angles, ears, hair; all were more interesting now. Art had given me renewed vision, awakening my eyes to see more of what I'd been looking at without really seeing.

Because my mind is steeped in theology and logic, it was easy to see another dimension where art is a teacher. In meditating on humanity’s bent toward creativity, I saw how artists, even in their most innovative moments, are essentially imitators. All human art is an imitation of the artistry within creation. Even the abstract artist selects and recombines the same lines and forms and colors, even the randomness, which have always been resident in nature. This teaches us something about God and something about ourselves.

After I’d been taking art classes for a few years, I wrote this poem:

ARTIST

Paint clouds that really rain
And noisy, running streams,
Or birds that can take flight
And sing beyond your dreams,
Or sculpt a lovely nude
That wakes to your embrace . . .
If not, then praise the Artist
Who made the human race.

— David L. Hatton, 10-20-2009

Today, in thinking more about the theological lessons of art, I finished another similar poem:

DESIGNERS

We’re designed to be designers
By the Maker of the skies.
When they copy nudes and nature,
Artists often plagiarize.
Praise the Artist of creation,
When you render earthly art.
Our designs are mere reflections
Of the great Designer’s heart.

— David L. Hatton, 12- 27-2012

Human artists and their compositions provide a powerful, extra-biblical proof that we are made in the image of the Original Artist.