Satan tempted Eve with “knowledge.” Why would I want knowledge?
Question: “Is knowledge valuable?”
Answer: That’s such a great question in light of Satan’s temptation to take from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I believe that the story in the Garden of Eden is the story of the cross—the tree in the garden where Christ was crucified. I think “The Good” that hangs on the tree is Jesus. God alone is Good. And Jesus is God in the flesh—so what else could it be hanging there on that tree?
Well, the snake tempts Eve (The “mother of the living,” the bride of the Adam – and Christ is the ultimate Adam, the church, the people made at his bleeding side, us)… The snake tempts us to take knowledge to make ourselves in God’s image. (Remember Adam takes, because she took. He takes to be “with her,” Emmanuel—“God with us” even in our sins. Even there, Adam is foreshadowing Christ.)
When we take “knowledge” of the Good to apply it to our lives in order to make ourselves in God’s image, we crucify the Good. We take the living breathing Good, that is God, and turn Him into a law—a dead thing that we control. But when we see that he has risen from the dead victorious over our sin—we allow him to “take us”—Remember we are his Bride and He (eschatos Adam) is our groom.
In other words, when we see that our lust for knowledge to make ourselves in the image of God crucifies the good, we can then begin to receive the good for what—that is who—He is. God is good and Jesus is God in flesh. God is Grace—Body that we broke and blood that we shed. But now, “Believers” receive his body and blood as a gift of living grace, rather than a piece of dead legislation. He is risen from the dead, even in us. That body broken and blood shed, literally becomes my body, which is his Body and his Bride!
This is why the communion table is judgment. I can come to the table attempting to justify myself and in doing so, I turn “the Good,” Jesus into a dead thing that I control (I crucify the Good) OR I can come to the table allowing the risen Christ to justify me (I can surrender to my living Lord). Probably we do both all the time. And so communion exposes our sin and, at the same time, communicates life. That table is the Judgment of God.
The Judgment of God is the Word of God. Jesus is the Word of God. And it’s the Word of God that creates us in the image of God. We pass from the sixth day of creation to the seventh day (God’s eternal rest) as Christ rises from the dead in us—no longer Friday, but Sunday (first day of the new and finished creation—the eighth day symbolized an endless seventh day).
Do you see the picture? When I take the knowledge to justify myself, I literally crucify Christ–my Bridegroom. When I surrender to the knowledge of the Living Bridegroom, I get pregnant. I begin to bear the fruit of Love.
That’s another way to think of it: God is Love. If I think that I create love, I crucify love and create hell—alone in outer darkness, for I crucified my husband. However, if I see Love as my living Lord, I surrender to him in the Sanctuary of the Covenant of Grace and am impregnated with His very life—the literal fruit of Love in me, Eternal Life.
Jesus is the Promised Seed (sperma in Greek). Faith in me, as well as all the fruit, is His Life rising in me. When I claim it as my own creation (I think this is why “Christians” hang on to an unbiblical notion of “free will”—they like to tell themselves that they create faith)…when I claim Faith Hope and Love as my own creation I crucify Christ, on the cross (where eternity meets time), and in my own heart–now my dead heart, for it thinks it creates the good, but it doesn’t know “the good” for it crucified the Good.
This is a vortex at the edge of space and time—but do you see that the miracle of faith is Christ rising in me, you, or any son or daughter of Eve?
So why am I saying all of this in response to the question, “Is there benefit to knowing the Truth?” Well, Jesus is the Truth. So if you know him a certain way, you crucify him and send yourself to Hell. If you know him in another way, you begin to experience the ecstasies of heaven and you give birth to his Life in the world.
Knowing the Truth makes you want to proclaim the Truth. And proclaiming the Truth, get’s you crucified. And getting crucified helps you know the Truth. And the Truth is Life. The rejection is for a time… the great banquet of restored relationships and endless Grace is eternal.
“Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father…that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead.” (Ephesians 2:9-11, 3:10-11)
I think the real problem that “believers” have with the knowledge that “Love wins” is that they don’t believe “Love” is God and our living Lord.
We seem to believe that Love is a law, which I apply to myself to make myself better or worse than other people that are “supposed” to apply it to themselves. That’s why we compete and want others to lose, that is, want others to go to “hell”… it’s because WE want to win; we want credit for love. It’s because we still believe the lie of the snake—that if we take the fruit we can make ourselves in the image of God, that we can be our own creators, saviors, and judges, that we can be God. And so we crucify God over and over again, rather than allow God to impregnate us with His Life. Jesus is “the way, the truth, and the life.”
Having this knowledge (living knowledge) that love wins, because Love is the Creator, stops us from crucifying God and impregnates us with his Life.