“Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat …” (Gen. 2:16, NKJV)
In the previous teaching we concluded that with the Fall, man lost his position in the eternal God of eternity/before time/the east, who exists as a liveable space of a different reality.
Before we can examine the space to which they fell in greater detail, we need to look at one other pressing clue regarding this matter. In Gen. 2:16 God states that “of every tree of the garden you may freely eat …” Man and Woman were allowed to eat from the Tree of Life, BUT ALSO from the other trees in the garden. What would the symbolic meaning of these trees be?
According to Isa. 61:3 a tree points to man as “the planting of the Lord, that He may be glorified”. Deut. 20:19 (KJV) makes it clear: “When thou shalt besiege a city a long time, in making war against it to take it, thou shalt not destroy the trees thereof by forcing an axe against them: for thou mayest eat of them, and thou shalt not cut them down (for the tree of the field is man’s life) to employ them in the siege …” In Isa. 65:22 this is explicitly presented:
“For as the days of a tree, so shall be the days of My people …”. An interesting equation is found in Mark 8:23-24: “So He took the blind man by the hand and led him out of the town. And when He had spit on his eyes and put His hands on him, He asked him if he saw anything. And he looked up and said, ‘I see men like trees, walking.’”.
Wood symbolically points to flesh, and people are thus symbolically presented as trees, but more specifically the Bride are these trees that are planted in Eden.
We now clearly now that the Man and Woman surely died, were uprooted, and thus fell from the garden of Eden. But the question is: where did man (and the other trees) end up once they had fallen from Eden?
In Ezek. 31:16-17 (ASV) a clear key is found: “I made the nations to shake at the sound of his fall, when I cast him down to Sheol with them that descend into the pit; and all the trees of Eden, the choice and best of Lebanon, all that drink water, were comforted in the nether parts of the earth. They also went down into Sheol with him unto them that are slain by the sword; yea, they that were his arm, that dwelt under his shadow in the midst of the nations.”
The trees of Eden, according to this version, thus fell to “the nether parts of the earth”, or rather: the realm of the dead.
What is the definition of the realm of the dead? It is a space or domain in which death/the dead find themselves. What did we learn in the previous teaching about death/ mortality/temporality? Everything that is temporary and mortal, IS VISIBLE. Where is the realm of the dead to which the trees from Eden fell when they “surely die[d]”? On EARTH! More on this in the next teaching.
- Selah: What would the implications of this be?
- Read: 8; Gen. 9-10; Eph. 5.
- Memorise: Write a song with Ps. 8 as basis.
