Trees of life and immortality

JohnClay said:

In Genesis it seems that the tree of life would grant the eater immortality:

Genesis 3:22b:
"...He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."

Though it seems the traditional church view is like the Greek philosophers - all humans have an immortal soul. (i.e. the tree of life wouldn't really make a difference)

Revelation 2 and 22 also talks about a tree of life which bears fruit every month.

Revelation 22:19 says:
"And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll."

If people are always immortal then what effect does the tree of life have?

Some people say that "death" (e.g. "the wages of sin is death") could mean "spiritual death" (yet being immortal) so perhaps "eternal life" just means living in Heaven with God since apparently people are already immortal.

This site talks about conditional immortality:
http://jewishnotgreek.info

Apparently the Sadducees, who seemed to believe what Moses taught, didn't believe in the after life so I guess the Torah didn't clearly teach immortality for everyone.

BTW I hope that if Christianity is true that conditional immortality is also true so that most of the planet eventually die rather than suffering forever and ever and ever. An end to hell is merciful.

Click to expand...

It is the spiritual life that we are concerned with, because that is what separates us from God (John 4:24, Isaiah 59:1-2, Numbers 6:24-27). A person who goes into the grave has no more share in what is done under the sun (Ecclesiastes 9:5, John 8:21-24).

St. Paul writes "I was alive once apart from Torah, but when the commandment came, sin came to life and I died". Likewise, St John writes "we know that we have passed from death to life because we love our brothers and sisters. The one who does not love remains in death" .. and he says "do not be like Cain who murdered his brother - and why did he murder him? because Abel's deeds were righteous while Cain's were wicked", and "he who hates his brother is a murderer, and we know that no murderer has eternal life in him", and James writes "Where do quarrels and conflicts among you come from? Don't they come from your passions that battle within your body parts? (see 1 Corinthians 12:23-27, FYI). You crave and have not, you murder and you envy, yet you cannot get it. You fight and you wage war. You do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives so you may spend it on your passions."

.. so the sin of tree of the knowledge of good and evil (the knowledge of function and dysfunction as the Mechanical Bible puts it), it was Eve choosing to use her knowledge of function and dysfunction for her sustenance and pleasure (food - pleasing for the eyes, making one wise, consider Proverbs 23:10-11, Proverbs 20:10, Proverbs 3:29) - instead of simply doing what she knew to be right and being grateful for God having supplied her every need (Matthew 6:25-34). It is the flesh' desire that robs the fruits of the spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) through anxiety of not being sure of tomorrow's well-being or suffering some discontentment in the present (resentment, bitterness). We become slaves to the flesh when we fall into the carnal mindset, and our life is then filled with toil (Genesis 3:19).

Jesus says in Revelation 2:7 "To the one who overcomes, I will grant the right to eat from the Tree of Life, which is in the Paradise of God." - that is, to have perpetual rest like Hebrews 4:10-11 and Colossians 3:22-24 describe - it is not a sudden arrival in heaven, but a renewed mind that undoes the effects of the curse (Romans 5:17) and restores the essential life that is the light of mankind (John 1:4).

JohnClay said:

In Genesis it seems that the tree of life would grant the eater immortality:

Genesis 3:22b:
"...He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."

Though it seems the traditional church view is like the Greek philosophers - all humans have an immortal soul. (i.e. the tree of life wouldn't really make a difference)

Revelation 2 and 22 also talks about a tree of life which bears fruit every month.

Revelation 22:19 says:
"And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll."

If people are always immortal then what effect does the tree of life have?

Some people say that "death" (e.g. "the wages of sin is death") could mean "spiritual death" (yet being immortal) so perhaps "eternal life" just means living in Heaven with God since apparently people are already immortal.

This site talks about conditional immortality:
http://jewishnotgreek.info

Apparently the Sadducees, who seemed to believe what Moses taught, didn't believe in the after life so I guess the Torah didn't clearly teach immortality for everyone.

BTW I hope that if Christianity is true that conditional immortality is also true so that most of the planet eventually die rather than suffering forever and ever and ever. An end to hell is merciful.

Click to expand...

16For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.

Those without faith will perish in the *second death".

But through Christ you can be given eternal life.

Sheol is where the dead go, those that are in sheol are dead (in reference to their bodies) and those that are not are alive (in reference to their bodies). If I stop eating food I will begin to die and shortly enter sheol. But because I am mortal and age unto death I am slowly dying and headed to sheol. If I ate of the tree of life I would not be head toward sheol.

There are two deaths that one may experience, the first death which takes us from the present world to sheol, and the second death which destroys the soul in the lake of fire. I don't believe that ones soul remains eternally in the lake of fire. I think they cease to exist. The lake of fire appears to be a place where things are destroyed, so that abstract concepts like "death" get thrown into the lake of fire, and places...like "hell" get thrown into the lake of fire. This effectively destroys them in the mind of the reader, and I think that concept follows through to whatever is thrown in there. There are verses that seem to give the impression of eternal suffering but on closer inspection in Greek I don't think that they do.

JohnClay said:

In Genesis it seems that the tree of life would grant the eater immortality:

Genesis 3:22b:
"...He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."

Though it seems the traditional church view is like the Greek philosophers - all humans have an immortal soul. (i.e. the tree of life wouldn't really make a difference)

Revelation 2 and 22 also talks about a tree of life which bears fruit every month.

Revelation 22:19 says:
"And if anyone takes words away from this scroll of prophecy, God will take away from that person any share in the tree of life and in the Holy City, which are described in this scroll."

If people are always immortal then what effect does the tree of life have?

Some people say that "death" (e.g. "the wages of sin is death") could mean "spiritual death" (yet being immortal) so perhaps "eternal life" just means living in Heaven with God since apparently people are already immortal.

This site talks about conditional immortality:
http://jewishnotgreek.info

Apparently the Sadducees, who seemed to believe what Moses taught, didn't believe in the after life so I guess the Torah didn't clearly teach immortality for everyone.

BTW I hope that if Christianity is true that conditional immortality is also true so that most of the planet eventually die rather than suffering forever and ever and ever. An end to hell is merciful.

Click to expand...

A couple of things. First Adam and Eve had mortal bodies subject to corruption, in contrast to those who would rise from the dead and live in incorruptible bodies. The tree of life extended the lifespan of Adam and Eve. In fact secondly I would add the idea that it wasn't a one time eating of the tree that would give them eternal life, but rather a periodic eating of the fruit. So to maintain their life they needed constant access to the tree. Notice the genealogies in Genesis how long people lived - adam lived 700 years. The tree not only affected his genes, but also impacted his descendants for many generations who decreasingly shorter lifespans. So I take it that that tree was about maintenance.

But concerning the Old Testament, it does say
"Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise will shine like the brightness of the heavens, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever." Dan 12:2,3
and
"I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God; I myself will see him with my own eyes— I, and not another. How my heart yearns within me!" Job 19:25-27

After death, we are Soul and Spirit.

Partaking of the Tree of Life gives us the Glorified Body on top of the Soul and Spirit.

JohnClay said:

I thought normal Christians would say that everyone is going to live forever, whether in Heaven or hell.

Click to expand...

Kind of. It would be difficult to describe the state of second death as anything that could be called "life". C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce describes things this way:

"The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing. But ye'll have had experiences...it begins with a grumbling mood, and yourself still distinct from it: perhaps criticizing it. And yourself, in a dark hour, may will that mood, embrace it. Ye can repent and come out of it again. But there may come a day when you can do that no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood, nor even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine."

That either it is some kind of Platonic "immortality of the soul" coupled with perpetual conscious torment or the "conditional immortality" of Annihilationism is a false dichotomy.

I personally hope and pray that, in the end, everyone is saved--that is to say, "hell" is effectively empty. But that isn't a position I hold dogmatically, because I can't. By the same token I can't say that hell won't be empty, not dogmatically, because I don't know that (and I certainly hope that this is true).

But as for what "hell" is, in any meaningful sense, I would define it primarily in an apophatic way: I believe that God's will for the whole of creation is the glorious fullness that is to come when, in the end, God makes all things new; the Lord Jesus will return, the dead will be raised, all of creation made whole, God will heal all things. That is the life of the age to come. "Hell", if it is anything at all, is not that.

So I'd hardly call it being alive, it may be something, but it isn't life. I don't know that it is possible to conceive of what a death so total looks like; what it means to identify with death, to choose an existence of nothing. I think St. John in his Apocalypse captures the horror of it by calling it "the second death", but imagining some literal lake of fire and sulfur misses the point (keep in mind that this is the Apocalypse, it is fundamentally by definition a work of apocalyptic literature). Lewis' description "just the grumble itself going on forever like a machine" also captures something of it.

-CryptoLutheran

JohnClay said:

If people are always immortal then what effect does the tree of life have?

Click to expand...

I believe that the story itself has prophetic meanings and can be many-fold. First "eat from it" indicates that we are capable of living eternally but have to rely on God to be so. Second, we are now guarded from reaching it. It means that we are guarded from reaching the knowledge that how life will continue after our first death.

To me, "every month" in Rev 22:2 denotes that though we can live forever we can't reach what lying ahead in our future, only God can tell what our future is.

Metaphorically, Tree of Knowledge denotes all kinds of knowledge humans can acquire but except for what our future is. Tree of Life denotes our future which is an eternity.

During our earthly time, we can try to get to whatever knowledge but our future (of how our life will continue beyond the first death) remains unknown to us no matter what. Thus "afterlife doesn't exist" is just a one-sided human wish, which at the same time is an easy conclusion we can get to after acquiring the different kinds of knowledge such as our science. That's why "the day you eat of it, the same day you shall surely die".

JohnClay said:

I think the tree of knowledge of good and evil would only have given knowledge about good and evil..

Click to expand...

That's why it's many fold. "Good and evil" indicates that only God can actually define and tell good from evil. "Good and evil" can also denote that we can make a judgment about what is right and what is wrong basing on our knowledge.