***
I'm now about to give you the skinny on what really happened with the fruit tree and the snake in the Garden of Eden. It's a story that I happen to know a lot about.
God intelligently designed the Garden of Eden like one of those "Reality TV" shows, where they put you on an island, and your object is to win a million dollars – only you never really know what the rules are, or where you stand. You think you're doing okay when suddenly you're kicked off the island and you don't even know where you went wrong.
Most of the trees in the Garden of Eden were quite ordinary – figs, olives, date palms, cacti, citrus groves. But God invested two trees with miraculous power. These were "the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil," which killed you on the same day you ate of it (or so God said), and "the Tree of Life," which conferred immortality on those who had already eaten from special tree number 1. God didn't tell Adam and Eve about special tree number 2, the Tree of Life, until later, because He wanted it to be a secret; which is also why He had to fib, a little.
The trick was to eat from tree number 1, against God's prohibition; and then to eat immediately from tree number 2. If Adam and Eve had done that – if they had just been a little quicker to solve the puzzle (or more attentive to my advice) – they could have become the fourth and fifth members of the godhead. Yahveh Himself has said that the holy Trinity could have become a holy Quintet (Gen. 3:22-23). But Eve blew it.
By the way: if you were ever told that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was an apple, then you were given bad information. Dad permitted Adam and Eve to eat "every seed-bearing plant" on Earth (Gen. 1.29, 2.16), including apples, pomegranates, and watermelon. The fruit that God forbade Adam and Eve to touch was Eden's one and only seedless fruit, the humble banana. God never called the banana a "banana." He called it "the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil." But it was most definitely a banana tree. And He said to Eve, "Don't even think about it."
When the Lord commanded Eve not to taste the fruit of the banana tree, nor to think about it, He knew she would spring for it the first chance she got. That was the cornerstone of His intelligent design. He knew that He could then justifiably punish Adam and Eve and all human generations thereafter with horrific suffering until Jesus made forgiveness possible by getting himself crucified, to pay the penalty for human sin. In this way, the name, Yahveh, would be magnified (Rom. 5:14-21).
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I have not yet told you about Eve and the snake.
– L.
(Tomorrow: Exactly what went down in the Garden of Eden [and up; and down again]. The Fall of Man! And it wasn't funny!)
