“It was the woman Eve who was completely fooled and sinned.”
(1 Tim 2:14, CEV)
Strangely enough this mystery of iniquity that works WITHIN us has a very long history that stretches back to the garden of Eden – it is aimed at deceiving us, a spiritual people, into walking according to the ways of the flesh.
We read in Gen 2:9 – “And out of the ground the LORD God made every tree grow that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” It is explicitly stated that the tree of life is located in the MIDDLE of the garden. The middle points to the heart, the centre, the most important position. In juxtaposition to the tree of life we find the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. God has very strict guidelines concerning this tree (verses 16 and 17) – “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you may freely eat; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
Please note that the tree of life is in the middle of the garden. The other tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, is mentioned twice, but God does not once refer to it as being in the middle of the garden.
In conversation with the snake, in Gen 3, Eve is asked about the ordinances God has stipulated concerning the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and makes the following remark – “We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.’”
This is something we have not caught onto for years. Something radical must have happened in Eve’s thinking to confuse the two trees. She explicitly states that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is in the middle of the garden, in the centre. It is this tree that is the most desired one! 1 Tim 2:14 (CEV) states that it was not Adam that was seduced, “It was the woman Eve who was completely fooled and sinned”. Note that she was not deceived, but allowed herself to be deceived. She must thus already have had some conscious desire to be deceived. Before Eve took hold of the forbidden fruit, the seed of deception was already sown.
In his seminal art history text, Art and illusion Gombrich makes this very important observation – “Expectation creates illusion.” In The Zohar (notes about the Torah and other important texts rabbis have produced over the ages) it is written that Satan’s actual words to Eve that day about why God did not want them eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, were: “With this tree God created the world.; eat you of it and you shall create worlds.”
Although we do not necessarily accept all the teachings of the rabbis it is still interesting to note that the snake manages to carry over that which was the cause of his own downfall, and by creating a false expectation manages to capture Eve into an imaginary world or thought construct.
We examine this more closely in the next teaching.
- Sela: Ensure that your concept of God is not false.
- Read: Jos 17 Est 10; Isa 33
- Memorise: Isa 33:6
- For a deeper understanding: Read chapter 1 of John Daniel‘s Scarlet and the Beast (Vol II).
