There is confusion in the church about the distinction between giving and taking. It is a disorder that traces all the way back to the Garden of Eden (of course). Man chose to try and do God a favor and take being like God into his own hands. You know, helping God out in a small way by taking from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It looked so helpful on the surface, but when man stepped towards the Tree of Knowledge, he stepped out of relationship.
All relationship is positional. There are always boundaries that indicated proper relating. Like the two trees of Eden and the gender distinction that God put in place by forming woman from man’s side. We reflect God’s image best by being positioned in right relationship with God, just like the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all secure in their position. They are a perfect, set apart trinity of relationship, so that Jesus can say, “My Father is greater than I,” and the Father can give Jesus “a name which is above every name” (Phil 2:9). And the Holy Spirit takes what belongs to Jesus and the Father and reveals it to us, not speaking on his own initiative (John 16:13-15).
God is three and one in perfect trinity because he is purely functional and properly positioned in relationship. Everything he does emanates from this place of honor in his person. He is totally other than us and is wholly holy in One perfect relationship. He calls us to be holy and to enter into that divine love. We are dysfunctional and divided beings that don’t know how to walk in community, so it is sometimes a long journey home.
When man ate of the wrong tree, his ability to interface relationally with God was misaligned. He lost his position by trying to be like God and fell into the great void between…that space that God rules, where he separates light and darkness, water and land, man and woman and even good and evil, creating definition and position in the universe. So man stumbled into that place away from his positional ability to know God’s life, that great divide of relationship represented by the Tree of Knowledge. Trapped in the world of division that God had tried to protect him from, where good and evil, pleasure and pain constantly contend and prey on man’s inborn design for eternity. There, he was stuck outside of his position of relationship as a son and became lost in the outer darkness. So, Jesus came to earth and became the spotlight, the way back out of the dark divide and into relationship with the Father, repositioning us where we could be sons and eat of the tree of life yet not perpetuate evil.
The present difficulty is that we still live in a compromised and corrupted world that is stuck in the death cycle, so we are constantly interfacing with the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This confuses us, especially how its good side could bring death, since God is good. The only safe way to interface with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is from being localized and grafted into the Tree of Life. If we say yes to the position of relationship with the Tree of Life and the positional restraints that brings, we can be positioned to receive the entire Amazon-River flood of Life that God gives, and we have enough pure life to drown out the confusion of living in the great divide. And we do look forward with passionate desire to the day when heaven will come down to earth, with all of its weighty influence and glory, and the curse of the divided tree will be silenced in our world.
Our world tells us, “An eye for an eye.” It claims reality is harsh and “The strong shall live.” But the new lens is: “Does whatever I am putting my hand to or walking in give the life Jesus speaks of?” “Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God” (Mat 4:4). The lens is a giving lens. We give. But it is a receiving lens, too. We also receive. It is not, however, a taking lens. That is what the other (wrong) tree does. Taking is not relational. Giving and receiving are relational. Relationships are what build healthy societies. Healthy societies are indicative of emotional well-being and prosperity.
Jesus has helped us cross a great divide that we have all been wandering in as lost souls, where death was always demanded of us whether we tried to turn to good or evil. “A eye for an eye” was the law we lived under. But now, one eye taken is replaced by an “I” freely given, and the old cycle of death, an eye taken equals another eye taken, is defunct. We are givers instead of takers, and a fresh economic paradigm that actually accelerates our own world of happiness forward rumbles onto the scene.
Are you willing to risk being a giver and not a taker? God seems to be willing. He made this world and gave us breath and freedom. There is lots of risk involved in being giving when we consider the emergence of evil and pain. But maybe there are rewards that far outweigh the conflict? That is what the Holy Scriptures claim.
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