Genesis 3:21-24. 21 And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them. 22 Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—”23 therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken.24 He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
Here’s the shocking reality that we are left with by the end of Genesis 3 – Death is the only way to God’s life.
God wants us to live forever, that’s why he offered the Tree of Life to us in the first place. But now that we are infected with sin, living forever would be dying forever. It would be getting worse and worse without end. Without hope. So God, in his grace, drives the first family from the garden and guards the way back to the Tree of Life.
What does this mean? It means that by God’s grace now they can die. We all can. In dying we can find a resurrection unto eternal life. Eternal life that comes through a sacrifice for sin. A lesson God teaches them as he clothes them with garments of skin from an animal that had to die sacrificially so that they might live.
Ever since what happened in Genesis 3 death is inevitable. Keep reading into Genesis 5 and you will see over and over again this phrase “and he died.” Everyone dies. Why? Because everyone is born dying, both physically and spiritually. Without a work of God’s life giving grace, we are all moving further and further away from God. A destiny that, apart from divine intervention, will lead to death.
What is that intervention? What will prevent our death? Death…then resurrection.
God’s salvation plan, starting right here in Genesis 3, is to rescue us from death through death. God wants us to live, but first, he needs us to die. God wants us to live in his eternal life, so first HE will need to die. Jesus came to earth precisely for that mission – die for us. He was sent out of Heaven’s garden by God into the wilderness of earth to be tempted and trialed like us. He was turned away from the Father in his humanity on the tree of death, the cross.
But then, three days later, that same cross became our tree of life. Hallelujah!
This is our union with Christ, union with his death defeating death. A death that removes all of sin’s power over us. Sin can no longer control us or destroy us. What’s the worst thing that can come as the result of our sin? Death. But now in Christ, death is actually the best thing that could happen to us. This is why we can taunt death with Paul and say:
1 Corinthians 15:55-56. “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
To live is Christ is union with Christ’s death in order to find life. His death is now where our peace, hope, and joy are found. It is in the daily putting to death of our selfishness and learning to embrace the dying of self-sacrifice that we find true living. And it will be in our death unto resurrection that we find Jesus, our tree of life, waiting for us on the other side.
You: Do you fear death, or do you see it for what Christ has made it, a door to God?
You in Christ: How would trusting more and more that in Christ you have passed from death into life change how you live today?
Christ in you: Is there a specific way that you can sacrificially bring life to someone today?
To Live is Christ 