When God made the World, He created it perfect. Genesis chapter one describes it as “very good”. In the Garden of Eden, God gave man every tree to eat from, except that God forbade eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil saying, “You will surely die.” This brings up the question: How did Adam know what death was? In a perfect world, how could Adam understand death without knowing evil? He must have known through the only illustration available to him – the trees of the garden. When a branch is cut off a tree, it no longer has the life of the tree even if it’s still green for a short while. So Adam knew he would be cut off from God by eating the fruit, and so we are cut off through Adam.
We’re all dead in the same way that a green branch is dead; being cut off is the point when it actually dies; biological death is just played out over time. We lack the fundamental lifeblood to make us truly alive, and we have limited time on this earth. Praise God for sending His Son, Jesus the Christ, to be crucified and resurrected.
Christ is the redemption from being cut off as we all were by Adam’s sin. That is the restoration of what was lost in the Garden of Eden. Jesus in John 15 says: I am the vine you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. When Jesus says “Abide in Me” does that instruction simply mean “don’t do something that will cut you off like Adam?” Are we cut off every time we do something wrong? Of course not. Otherwise, Jesus would have to be repeatedly crucified for repeated sins, which would turn His statement on the cross, “it is finished,” into a lie.
Jesus Christ died once and for all.
Now that we are fallen (but redeemed!) people, doing what came naturally to Adam must be taught to us by God; both spelled out in the Word of God and lived out in the day-to-day. And so Jesus promises us a Helper, the Holy Spirit, to guide us. It is this Spirit in us that is the lifeblood of the branch; Christ living in you is the nature of being truly alive and not cut off. Yet apart from Christ’s life in us, we are merely dead, drying branches.
Are we perfect? No, but we’re not stuck as we were. Christ is in us and we are in Christ; There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
So what are we to do? Not just “don’t do anything catastrophically stupid” (you shouldn’t sin, but that’s already been taken care of). Instead, we are to live out the process of being perfected, as the Holy Spirit lives and works within us, and we will see the glory of God.
By: Chris Waters
