The Simple Answers… To Life’s Most Important Questions.
Bible Study Course Lesson 7 – 6
When Adam and Even sinned, God cast them out of the Garden “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever… So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” (Genesis 3:22, 24).
Why was the sword there? To keep people out of the Garden? No! To keep people from living forever? No! To keep them from eating from the tree of life? No! Those are the reasons man was evicted from the Garden in the first place.
But these angels and this sword were put there specifically to protect the way to the tree of life. The WAY to the tree!
If you were truly awake, you’d instantly know what I mean by that. Then again, if I were truly awake, I’d have seen it in this verse long ago. But here’s a hint: what protects that way to this very day?
As always, if the Bible doesn’t specifically give you the answer (“a flaming sword is like unto…” or something like that), then break the symbol down into simpler pieces – what is flame, and what is a sword?
The sword represents war or death throughout the Bible, and by extension the tongue’s ability to kill (John 15:22). It also represents the power of a civil government to kill with brute force. “Flame” is a synonym of “fiery”, which is a symbol for testing, as you well know by now.
If these symbols are combined, then a flaming sword would be tempting words (Revelation 19:21), words which kill those who are deceived by them… or, put differently, a flaming sword would mean deadly temptations!
Now let’s build on that foundation. Where was this flaming sword placed? Eastward from Eden. What else was there? Genesis 4:16. What are words that come from that direction like? Job 15:2. Remember, the sword wasn’t alone; there were also “cherubims”, multiple angels, placed to “protect the way to the tree of life”.
Since, “wind” equals “spirit” and often “angel” in the Bible, Job 15:2 could read that “vain knowledge” comes from “the angel to the east”. Who might that be? Daniel 10:13 (Persia was to the east of most Bible lands).
What happens when that east wind touches things? Ezekiel 17:10, 19:12, Hosea 13:15. And it is from out of the east that Abraham was called – out of Ur, out of the Chaldees, out of the land of Babel. (Genesis 11:1-4, 12:1-4).
But now think about this: couldn’t Abraham have said the same words David did in Psalms 57:4? And what do lions represent? Jeremiah 50:43-46, 1 Peter 5:8. Nebuchadnezzar’s palace was covered in lions, and according to Peter, the prince of Persia himself was a lion from the east!
It was these lions which set David’s soul on fire, because their “tongue was a sharp sword”! The lions of Babylon the Great (Daniel 11:33-35). The empire whose doctrines tempt the righteous, and whose armies kill those it can’t deceive.
With a church that seduces them with her words, which cause them to die (Proverbs 2:10-19). This is the flaming sword God uses to “plead” with all flesh (Jeremiah 51:5-8, Ezekiel 21:8-13, 31-32). But notice that this cup was in God’s hand – the bow in His cloud, from which He launched arrows at the wicked! (Psalms 7:11-13).
God has always used Babylon “to try them [the righteous], and to purge, and to make them white”, as Daniel says. “Try them” (fire) and “purge them” (sword)… equals a flaming sword! Which was put here, by God, to PREVENT people from finding the tree of life!
And how does an “east wind” hide a “way”? It blows sand across the tracks; it blows trees across the way; it brings rain to wash out the bridges and the markers. It sows confusion and misdirection and obstacles all along the path… and who has done a better job of that than Babylon?
THE SHORTENING OF LIFESPANS?
I know we talked about this at length in the last lesson, and concluded the average lifespan today is so much shorter than it was before the Flood because God is paying closer attention to our sins. But that doesn’t explain why that didn’t seem to affect the patriarchs after the Flood.
Study this chart for a moment. Noah (the gold line at top) lived 950 years in total, 350 of them post-Flood. Now everyone thinks that God “shortened the lifespans after the Flood”, but if you look closely you’ll see that’s not what happened at all.
The Flood didn’t shorten life spans at all! For if the Flood, or some environmental or atmospheric change as a result of it, were the cause of the lifespan change, then how did Noah go on to live a normal lifespan for nearly four centuries after it?
Let’s pretend you’re reading a history book, not knowing what’s coming next. Look at the world as it was in 1900 FC (years From Creation, the number at the top of the chart above). Not knowing what would come after, would you still think lifespans had shortened after the Flood?
How could you… when not a single person in this lineage has died yet? For nearly four hundred years after the Flood, everyone seemed well on their way to a normal day’s lifespan. But then, around 2000 FC, they started dropping like flies.
Look at this blowup of the chart below; you’ll see that every patriarch from Noah to Ishmael died within a 200 year period – whether they were 950 years old, or 137 years old. So age wasn’t the issue; they all just started dying!
Ishmael died within a single decade of his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Shem! So the lifespans didn’t shorten… instead, all of the lifespans of this lineage collectively terminated in a very short period. Every man for 11 generations died within a little over a hundred year period… 450 years AFTER the Flood!
Imagine if every single ancestor of yours going back to the time of Columbus’ voyage had been alive at the beginning of the last century, and only now were in the process of dying off, one by one. That’s what we’re looking at here. You wouldn’t say their lifespans were shortened; you would ask why, all of a sudden, everyone is dying!
Everyone asks the wrong question, and therefore they can’t see the obvious answer; when you’re asking why people lived shorter lives, you look for a divine limitation of all men’s lives. But when you ask why did everyone die off so abruptly, you open yourself up to a whole new set of answers!
Here, it’s obvious we need to look for the catalyst; what happened here to change things so suddenly after all this time? A plague? A curse? Not Babel, for it had been around for 200 years before the first of these men died after the Flood! Not Abraham’s covenant, for people had already been dying for almost 50 years.
The truth is always obvious when you ask the right question; and the right question isn’t “why did lifespans shorten?” The right question is “who was the last man to live a normal life?” And the answer is Noah; he died at 950, the normal age for his ancestors.
Until shortly before his own death, every single one of his descendants was on their way to a normal lifespan of 1,000 years! But with the death of Noah, ALL ELEVEN GENERATIONS of his descendants died within 200 years. Men who, before the Flood, would have lived a MILLENNIUM died after a mere 137 years!
ENFORCING MANY HARD CHOICES
As you learned in the last lesson, lifespans dropped for the world as a whole due to God more proactively watching and tempting and judging mankind. But if that’s true… why did it not affect Noah and 11 generations of his children? How did they stay awake so long?
Our soul’s capacity to stay awake is not measured by righteous judgments, but rather the total effort expended by the soul. This means it’s the number of judgments, the difficulty of enforcing the judgments, and the amount of angst that goes into making them, that wears us out and eventually kills us.
It isn’t sin or the wrong choice that wearies your soul, it’s the stress of enforcing – many – hard choices; note the three words, enforcing = applying the choices, many = number of choices, hard = difficulty per choice.
If it’s easy to decide what the right thing is, and your fractions are eager to do it, then you can make infinite judgments without tiring. You would, in short, live forever. But change a single thing – add a grumpy spirit, a hesitating soul, or a lazy heart – and that infinite span of wakefulness drops quickly to a thousand, a hundred, even fifty years.
Most of us wear ourselves out agonizing over choices because we’re unsure of the answer. Or because we know the right answer, but it’s hard to make ourselves do it. Or because we just have too many things to think about. This exhausts our souls, for obvious reasons.
Noah didn’t have that problem because Noah knew the truth. He didn’t believe the truth, he KNEW it. You and I will never know what the Flood was like the way Noah did. There was a certainty in his mind that made it impossible to deceive him.
Babel was making up stories about events he had lived through. Babel was reinterpreting words he had spoken. So it required no effort for Noah to dismiss their nonsense. Noah lived to be almost a thousand years old because the deception of Babel couldn’t touch him, and he had long ago conquered the feebler deception of Cain.
Noah was above this war of disinformation, since he KNEW the path that led to the tree of life. But his children didn’t! Noah had always walked the narrow road, and it had always been a narrow road. But he did it so assuredly, so unerringly, that to anyone following him, it BECAME a wide road.
And when the path is easy, as it had always been for Noah’s children, your soul can walk for a millennium without getting drowsy as indeed theirs did! But when Babel flooded (get it?) Noah’s survivors with confusing choices, even if they made the right ones, as Abraham did, the sheer volume exhausted them! (Judges 16:16).
Unlike with Noah, every judgment took them some effort, there was some uncertainty, and therefore some exhaustion – even if they made the right choices! The mere act of choosing was exhausting to their souls because there were so many choices to make now (Galatians 6:9).
And that’s why Noah’s sons died young. Because they allowed themselves to be distracted by Babylon; they allowed people saying “Excuse me! Hang on! Look here!” to get them to look back, and they lost the trail in front of them!
They allowed Babel to distract them and make them worry about things that Noah would have known were nonsense. They let themselves get engaged in debates about subjects that were not worth discussing (Titus 3:9), arguing with people who were not worth their time (Proverbs 14:7), and wore themselves out trying to save people who didn’t want to be saved (Jeremiah 5:31, Matthew 15:14).
And they died because the act of controlling their heart and spirit was so much more tiring when Babel was there to help them resist their soul, to provide their fractions with excuses and apologists. Thus, the great whore became the importunate widow (Luke 18:5), who wearied the righteous with well doing (Daniel 7:25).
When the angel sharpened his flaming sword, many fell; too many (Isaiah 14:4-7, 12, 16-18). Mankind needed a challenge; not necessarily a war. And the angels who guarded the way of life… may have enjoyed their job too much.
Because what was supposed to be a test became torture; and what was meant to be a trial became a persecution. That is why God turned on His own cup, and will break His own rods of anger (Isaiah 5:5-12, Psalms 82:1-7).
OUR OWN SALVATION
Babel – from the east, just as Cain had been – took a simple religion, a simple path, and confused it so that every simple choice became complicated. And that wearied every soul, even the righteous – because it greatly multiplied their soul’s workload!
God allowed the devil to besiege us with choices; which is the right day of worship? Which is the true God? Which is the true Bible? Which day is the birth of Christ, and should we observe it? Is there a hell? Should we not venerate the image of the true God?
It doesn’t matter if we eventually get the right answers to these endless questions. Satan doesn’t need to deceive us, he just has to distract us and exhaust us for 70 years or so. If he can slow us down enough, it doesn’t even matter if we’re on the right path… just as long as we never get where we’re going. (Luke 9:62, 17:31-32).
The whole point of Babel was to hide the way to the tree of life by confusing the world. Yet when that east wind blew away the tracks of the righteous men who walked the path before us, it didn’t slow Noah down at all.
Nimrod sowed red herrings and turned all the trail markers around, but Noah didn’t need them to walk the Way of God. Because Babel was easy to defeat if you KNEW the truth… or were faithfully following someone who did.
And that’s why the effects of Babel didn’t show up in Noah’s lineage… because as long as Noah lived, he kept God’s words and certainly commanded his family after him (Genesis 18:19), which made them immune to deception as well.
But when the shepherd was smitten, after a normal thousand-year-day’s work, the sheep were scattered (Zechariah 13:7). And Eber, who had been able to lean on the strength of Noah’s certainty, suddenly found himself having to work out his own salvation! (Philippians 2:12).
Eber hadn’t been there in the Flood. He remembered what Noah and Shem had said (2 Peter 2:5) and he presumably believed them… but he lacked the totality of knowledge necessary to disarm every clever deception of Babel – the sword which turned every which way.
And when he found himself without Noah, then without Shem, without everyone he had looked up to, and his soul became overwhelmed by it! (Psalms 124:3-5). And this shouldn’t surprise us; for God names things what they are; and in Genesis 5:29, God explained the name Noah.
But while that’s the answer, it doesn’t tell us something that His Hebrew-reading audience already knew: that the literal meaning of the name of Noah… is “rest”.
NOAH’S REST
Noah gave his children soul rest. We already knew this without realizing it; the only reason Shem, Ham, and Japheth survived the Flood was because of Noah; “you only in this generation have I seen to be upright” (Genesis 7:1 BBE).
God allowed Noah’s sons to come, but on their own merits it’s doubtful they’d have survived the Flood. It was because of Noah that they “entered into His rest” for that year in the Ark (Hebrews 4:3). So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the only reason they continued living full lives after the Flood was because of Noah’s righteous leadership giving them rest.
Take that away… and they die like anyone else. That’s why not a single one of them died until Peleg and Nahor, a decade or so before Noah’s own death – a time when he was about to fall asleep for the day, and therefore, likely very tired and absent from their affairs… and no longer able to effectively judge them.
So ten generations of his descendants were given soul-rest by his mere existence; just by walking the path, he gave them a beacon to look to, and shouldered the burden of decision-making (Matthew 11:29). For as long as he lived, his children had only to ask him to know the full truth.
If one of them sinned, he would have certainly judged them appropriately – leaving nothing for God to judge them for (1 Corinthians 11:31-32). And likewise, leaving little for Noah’s sons to judge for themselves, and no deep questions for them to worry over.
And that’s a great way to live this life; but it’s not the way into the Kingdom of God (Acts 14:22). And that, of course, is precisely why Noah had to eventually die; to see who loved God… and to see who just loved Noah (and who just liked the free food (John 6:26) and safety (Job 1:10) that Noah’s way of life provided).
Following Noah was a wide road; too wide. When he died, it narrowed drastically, and most of his sons fell off, or wearied themselves to death trying to find the path again. They found the path they thought they knew confused by deceptions which morphed and adapted to their every argument.
They were confronted at every fork in the road by false doctrines which “turned every which way”, which shaped themselves around every half-remembered word Noah had ever said. And that’s why none of his descendants survived him by more than 180 years (Eber), all of them dying roughly one average lifespan after his death.
Because that’s how long we, without a beacon to guide us, can walk the path on our own.
SWORD BEFORE THE FLOOD
One way or another, all souls fall asleep because they are tired from trying to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling. People had always had to do this, even before the Flood. Indeed, deceptions existed from the moment they left the Garden (that was in fact why they left Eden).
And it didn’t stop there; Genesis 4:25 was the first attempt to apply Genesis 3:15, meant for Christ, to a false savior. It’s just that the deceptions weren’t as good (Psalms 64:1-6), so the false religion worked harder (Ecclesiastes 10:10) and practiced until they got better (Proverbs 24:2).
Even before the Flood God had set a flaming sword along the path to life. Yet that flaming sword was, shall we say, less sharp (Deuteronomy 32:41). The choices were easier because the false religion couldn’t be too complicated when everyone alive knew Adam and Eve and heard what happened from their own lips! There were only so many versions of the story around to choose from!
How much deception can there really be, when most of the people who have ever lived are still alive? Lies can’t gain much traction until everyone involved in them is dead (1 Corinthians 15:1-8). Deceptions about recent events with many witnesses can only be so absurd before you lose your audience (Proverbs 1:17).
That’s why the flaming sword didn’t prevent full-day lifespans before the Flood, it just prevented the wicked from “living forever”, which was all God asked. It hid the way to the tree of life; yet it did not prevent it from being found by the righteous. It just made it harder. And after the Flood, it got MUCH harder.
God clearly didn’t forbid or prevent full lifespans after the Flood. Many men lived, if not full lives, at least super-centenarian ones. But the sword was much sharper after Babel, and the bow in the cloud much stronger – yet as before, those who impressed the eyes of God didn’t face as much stress (1 Samuel 26:23-24).
The Flood didn’t cause the shortening of lifespans, but it made it possible by creating a distant past only a few knew the truth about. That gave Babel fertile soil for creating “secret” knowledge it could never have pulled off before the Flood, since very little could be truly secret when Adam and Eve were still alive!
God would still have been “gazing” at men more closely, which would have shortened the lifespans of the wicked to what we call normal today. But the righteous would not have been bothered by that, as well-watered grass enjoys the light of the sun.
So the shortening of lifespans after the Flood must be understood in two parts; the reason why the wicked died young was covered in the previous lesson. But now we’re asking why the righteous died young as well.
Before the Flood, and while Noah yet lived, there were few secrets to wonder about. Fewer moral decisions for his children to agonize over. The ones they did have were more of the “obey God or don’t” variety.
After Noah died, like today, we don’t enjoy such luxury; our quandaries are not “obey God or don’t”, but “obey which God… and how?” That legacy of Babel is a far more difficult question… one which brings far more soul stress, and shortens our lives accordingly.
But doesn’t, necessarily, have to…
ABRAHAM’S WAY
Anyone who followed Noah would, in effect or at least in type, live forever. So God had to block the way to that tree of life; but not take it off the Earth altogether – just as He didn’t remove the original tree of life from the Earth, He just confused the way to it.
If you’ll look at that chart one more time, you’ll see that God never left us without access to the truth. Some form of the tree of life never truly left this Earth. The path to Eden has always been here; because before Noah died, God replaced him.
Like most old men, Noah probably grew sleepy well before he actually died. That’s probably why Nahor and Peleg died shortly before Noah himself did; because Noah simply wasn’t active any more in their lives.
But well before that happened, well before Noah became too old to function as patriarch, Abraham was born; and Abraham was called out of the cesspool in the east and promised a covenant; either before Noah died, or possibly as an immediate result of it (Genesis 12:1-4).
God chose Abram because God realized there here was someone who could lead his family, just as Noah had done. And God made a covenant with Abraham; the same covenant He had made with Noah – the covenant of faith (Hebrews 11:7-8).
So those among Noah’s sons who wanted the truth could have humbled themselves and turned to Abraham. Perhaps some did; but Abraham didn’t have Noah’s authority as the oldest man living, and following Abraham was a much harder choice.
There could never be, in the human heart, the certainty that Abraham had the words of God that there was that Noah, the father of all flesh, had them. And that’s why Abraham made following God harder; so that those who could manage to follow the dimmer tracks of Abraham would, in time, not need Abraham at all.
Unlike with Noah, every soul who would follow Abraham had doubt; it had a bit more of a fight, every day, with its carnal nature, its spirit, and with the ever-strengthening flaming sword of Babylon. It was harder to resist Babel based on Abraham’s words than on Noah’s.
And so even if they successfully did it… it was more tiring to their souls. Because Abram’s name didn’t mean “rest”. Abram’s name meant “exalted father”. Those who were sent to Abraham were not sent to have rest for their souls – although they certainly could find it there.
They were sent to find God the Father; not coming to find an Earthly rest, as they found in Noah, but a heavenly rest. And those who learned from him didn’t necessarily learn how to keep this body alive for a thousand years – although there’s no reason they couldn’t have (Ecclesiastes 6:6).
But what they did learn is how to live forever. And that’s something Noah’s sons hadn’t necessarily been learning.
THE WAY TO LIFE
Noah knew the way to life – clearly. Even his more rebellious children knew this, as the Epic of Gilgamesh shows the hero traveling thousands of miles to find Noah to learn from him the secret of immortality. As the man asked Jesus, “what must I DO to inherit eternal life?” (Luke 10:25 GWV).
But what no one could seem to understand is that walking as Noah walked wasn’t the answer. It was BEING what Noah WAS which guaranteed that Noah and others like him would “deliver their own souls by their righteousness” (Ezekiel 14:20).
After he died, Noah’s descendants faced the greatest deception known in the world up to that time; yet the eldest had also sheltered in the shadow of Noah’s judgment for nearly four centuries. They had every opportunity to pay attention to how Noah chose his steps; instead, they had merely memorized where he placed his feet.
They had learned the steps he walked; the days he observed, the foods he ate, the offerings he made. And they thought that was the path. But that was only the most superficial part of the path Noah knew. Because no man is the sum of the things he does; he is the sum of the choices he makes.
Not realizing that, or not caring, Babel observed Noah’s actions, and set about counterfeiting what they thought was the path to life. This was the WAY of truth that Babylon confused and hid; it was the GATE that led to heaven that Babel pretended to be, the flaming sword that hid the path to paradise.
And by counterfeiting Noah’s actions, by counterfeiting the dogmas of Noah’s beliefs, they successfully focused attention on all the wrong things. Thanks to Babel’s misdirection, we spend our lives trying to recover the true doctrines Noah, Abraham, Jesus, or Paul taught so we can walk in their footsteps…
…and all for nothing. For even if you knew exactly what Noah did, exactly what he believed, and did everything exactly the same as he did, you still would not find the tree of life! (2 Corinthians 5:7).
THE INTERNAL TREE
Noah wasn’t saved because he did the right things; Noah was saved because he couldn’t do the wrong things (1 John 3:9). Noah wasn’t saved because he believed the right things; but because he couldn’t believe the wrong things (Matthew 24:24).
Noah didn’t inherit eternal life because he figured out how to rest his soul; but because his soul made sure his fractions could never weary it again; yes, after a day’s work he was weary of the job and needed to sleep for awhile; once. But if it was a good day’s work, it would never need to be done again.
That was the WAY he learned that so eluded his descendants. That was the thing they couldn’t see Noah doing, so they could never copy it – because it took place entirely inside Noah’s temple, in his most secret places, and all they could see were the secondary effects of a wise soul, a meek spirit, and a humble heart.
Noah’s offspring could have lived for a full day by mimicking him… but not forever Galatians 3:12. And God’s post-Flood gaze made sure they couldn’t mimic him by giving them brand-new situations every day. Precisely to prevent people from sneaking into the first resurrection on someone else’s coattails.
Can you find the true garden of God by looking and copying someone else, however perfectly? Luke 17:20. How do you find it? Luke 17:21. And that is the real secret: the tree of life was inside them all along.
That’s what Noah couldn’t seem to teach his children, the thing men have always had trouble understanding. Because the truth about this cannot be taught; it must be learned. And the truth is, the tree of life was never that far away (Romans 10:5-9).
It has never been far from any of us (Acts 17:27); we never needed to do something to inherit eternal life; we simply needed to be something we weren’t. The path was never about the things you did, the things you knew, or where you faced when you prayed.
Nothing you do, nothing you believe, no direction you walk will take you closer to that tree; because the tree was inside of you the whole time. And so was the other tree, and the river of life. All through history, people have been looking for the fountain of youth in the wrong place: outside their bodies (John 4:14).
Our own spirit can be a tree of life to us – or a tree of death (Proverbs 15:4, 11:30). It’s up to our soul to break our spirit, and teach it to be a meek example of the Truth. So looking for the tree of life on a distant mountain is a waste of time.
Seeking it by going to church diligently or being burned as a martyr is equally pointless. All of the things men do in order to suck up to God and get saved are meaningless… because nothing that happens outside your body can bring you closer to something that’s already inside of you!
THE INTERNAL GARDEN
The path was always towards the way, the truth, and the life; not towards the destination where they dwelt; but towards becoming the way, the truth, and the life. Because if you truly agape your brethren, you are a soul; and any soul who is full of agape is life to everyone who knows him (John 15:13, 1 John 3:16).
Noah had become a well watered garden (Isaiah 58:11). A garden in which was a river of life, to water all nations – a heart with a perfect copy of the law of God (John 14:4, Zechariah 14:8, Micah 4:2, Romans 2:15, etc.).
Thus, in a very literal sense, Noah’s heart was the life (Proverbs 14:30). Noah didn’t merely have life. Noah was life (1 John 3:14-15, John 8:51, 11:26), before he even slept! For his heart was full of living water (John 7:38) – the spiritual law of God.
And Noah had nourished a tree of life in his garden (Proverbs 11:30), a tree rooted in that water (Ezekiel 47:12). A tree that took that law and broke it up into smaller and smaller branches and leaves – statutes which could apply to any situation; a tree which took the water and made it a growing, breathing thing, capable of giving life to all nations.
And in the shade of that tree all of his children dwelt, safe from the judgment of God (Psalms 1:1-3, Matthew 7:18-20). Because his spirit loved mercy and truth, and meekly and contritely took correction; thus, in a very literal sense, Noah’s spirit was the truth.
The fruit of such holy spirits will feed all nations, which is why it and others like it line the river of life in the new Jerusalem (Revelation 22:2). Yet these fruits of our spirit don’t ripen all at once; we must learn them, one at a time (Ephesians 5:6-10).
And that’s what truly made Noah special; not that he was life, nor that he was truth; but that his soul had created that spirit, that heart – starting with the same flawed specimens you and I have. He created them by correcting them, reasoning with them, and guiding them, one judgment at a time.
And it’s those choices that are the true path to life. Because Noah didn’t just know the way to life; Noah was the way to life. Because being what Noah was IS the way of life! And because of that, he became a wise soul, a spirit that loves truth, and a heart that deserves to live forever; which is to say, he was the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6).
SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION
You and I never were in the Garden of Eden, never were cast out of it; but when we were young, we had access to our heart. When we were young, our soul was awake.
But as we aged and made mistakes, through the processes you learned in these last lessons, our spirit was hardened and our heart grew a foreskin, a barrier, and became closed off from our soul’s prying eyes.
And in that sense, every one of us, beginning with our first sin, were cast out of the Garden, and our heart posted a sentry with a flaming sword which turned every which way, deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, to guard against our soul’s intrusion.
As always, this is plainly visible for anyone to see; for the literal foreskin does indeed cover something that looks disturbingly like a flaming sword growing out of a garden (try to unsee that!). And it is that thing which so dominates most lives, in one way or another, that they are too distracted to find the garden again.
But now our soul must earn its way back in; choice by wise choice. It must learn to love what God says enough to choose it over our spirit, and over our flaming-sword obsessed heart, even when God’s will is vague and the trail is faint.
To find the tree of life within you, you must have a conscious, sober, self-aware soul within the garden. You must plant the garden and make it to grow. As always, this lesson is summed up in a single verse for all to see; for everyone, that is, who is looking for the tree of life… in the right place.
Deuteronomy 30:20 That thou mayest love [soul] the LORD thy God, and that thou mayest obey his voice [spirit], and that thou mayest cleave [flesh] unto him: for he is thy life [length of day], and the length of thy days [number of future days]: that thou mayest dwell in the land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them [the New Jerusalem].
Moses said those words just after telling us exactly where to look for the tree of life; the water of life; and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: Deuteronomy 30:11-15; so if we can’t find them… it’s because we weren’t listening.