“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God” (Revelation 2:7)
In the Garden of Eden, this race we call “mankind” as represented by our most distant ancestors, was given a choice between literal fruit-bearing trees. And a simple test was presented to them that might have been very brief or it may have lasted for a considerable time; decades, centuries, even millennia. All of the fruit trees we know about today were there in the Garden, such as bananas, apples and oranges, but there were many more that are now gone. Most of the trees they took for granted have become extinct since then and the geologic column suggests that for every one we have today, there were at least a hundred types of fruit-bearing trees in the place that was the cradle of humanity. There was no need to eat meat because the incredible variety of vegetation contained more than enough of all that was needed for everyone in the world.
Incredibly perfect and abundant nutrients, what we would call “supplements” and “vitamins” were everywhere and easily obtained. There was no need to eat anything other than vegetation because of the wonderful sufficiency within what we call the “plant kingdom.” Even the concept of eating meat would have been strange to the earliest people and it wasn’t until much of the plant life of earth was destroyed by what is called the “Genesis Flood,” that God surprised the few remaining human beings by telling them, “Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you” (Genesis 9:3).
Our early ancestors had exceptionally long lives, wonderfully robust health and there was plenty to eat everywhere they went. They were offered a personal relationship with the God who made them, the God we all need today. They had what we might call “everything” and yet we, through our ancestors were offered even more: Humanity was given the right to choose.
On the one hand, they were offered LIFE. Humanity has searched ever since for a physical mechanism that would give people long life. The search has been on by explorers who have sought some version of the “Fountain of Youth.” Scientists are trying to prolong life, and many others have tried for centuries to find some way to stay alive, to be young once more. Adam and Eve were freely given something amazing that Scripture calls the “tree of life” – and it worked!
All they had to do was periodically eat its fruit and they were being enabled by it to live forever. In our world, everything that lives – dies, but it was different then. If they had continued to eat of that tree, whatever its fruit was, they would have lived. Even when they were prevented from eating more of it, the effects lingered on, passing genetically to their descendants but lessening in life-giving intensity during the generations that followed the spiritual “death” of Adam and Eve.
There was another tree within the place that was the ancestral home of mankind. That tree was identified with a warning in Genesis 2:17 as “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” which “you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” Do you think of yourself as dead? If you are alive enough to hear or read these words, your response might be something like, “No, of course I’m not dead – I’m alive!” But as a human race, we are not really ALIVE in the way that our earliest ancestors were. The true nature of death is that our direct relationship with the Giver of Life was severed and as a race of beings, we died spiritually! We were born animated but – dead! When humanity creates a movie or a book about “the living dead,” we are portraying ourselves!
Adam and Eve disobeyed God and even though they walked around, worked, loved and had children, they were “dead” because their personal relationship with the Lord who made them in the first place was severed. To be without Christ, the Lord of Creation is a state called “death.” We walk around, talk and have feelings, but God’s perspective is that to lack faith in the Lord is not truly life.
Revelation 2:7, our Scripture for today, is the beginning of the Lord’s observations about the churches of history and the churches that exist right now. The words of that verse were addressed to the “church of Ephesus” a representation that might well speak of our Evangelical (Fundamental) churches of today. It’s an interesting thought for us all that for the past two thousand years we have been continually re-inventing the same “seven churches” over and over again, as though we have uniquely done something each time. The words and the formalism may differ somewhat, but it’s our attitudes that often, from God’s perspective, don’t change very much at all.
Jesus Christ, who is the speaker of the words in Revelation Chapter Two, identifies Himself as “He who holds the seven stars in His right hand, who walks in the midst of the seven golden lampstands.” In Revelation 1:20, we learn that “the seven golden lampstands” are “seven churches.” The “seven stars are the angels of the seven churches.” And the “oil” that empowers those “seven lampstands” was revealed centuries before the Book of Revelation, as the Holy Spirit of God, which you can see in Zechariah 4:6 and the verses that preceded it. The Lord said in that verse about the oil of the lamps, “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit…” It is the Spirit who empowers us.
Any “power” that you might have, as an individual or as a group, is from the Lord. God will start something in our midst that is an expression of the church in this world, but our tendency is to try and complete the work in our own strength. As Jesus pointed out in Revelation 2:2-3, “I know your works, your labor, your patience, and that you cannot bear those who are evil. And you have tested those who say they are apostles and are not, and have found them liars. And you have persevered and have patience and have labored for My name’s sake and have not become weary.”
He knows us just as He knew those in the church at Ephesus and He is alerting us to a great danger: We can become so busy with church activities that we forget to love the ones we serve. He cautions the church: “You have lost your first love” (Revelation 2:4). And He urges those who are in the church, as seen in Verse 5 - to “repent.” What is called “revival” must start with us.
There is another “tree” in Scripture, the most important one of all, but it’s not so much the tree itself as it is what happened ON that tree and especially WHO all this is about. In Deuteronomy 21:23, the Lord said through Moses: “If a man has committed a sin worthy of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall surely bury him that day, so that you do not defile the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance; for he who is hanged is accursed of God.”
The Lord spoke through Paul about the subject, citing Deuteronomy 21: “Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree’) that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith” (Galatians 3:13-14).
Humanity DIED in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve sinned. They were our representatives and they failed God’s test. When they fell, we fell with them in the sight of God. Millennia later, Jesus Christ came to this earth as a human being and He became the Representative who did NOT fail the test. He is legitimately the Hero of the human race. God views us individually and He also views us corporately. As a race we all fell, but through Christ, as individuals, we are rescued, we are saved when we place our faith in the Lord. He literally died the death on a tree that He did not deserve, so that we who fell and died in the sight of God, might live.
Dear God, thank You for sending Jesus Christ who died so that we might live. We sinned, I have sinned, but I trust in Jesus and because of Him, I am saved. Thank You. In Jesus Name. Amen.
