“When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took from its fruit and ate; and she gave also to her husband with her, and he ate.” — Genesis 3:6
I know what it means to stand before a tree and choose.
The year was 1989. I was eighteen years old. I had just given myself to God, been baptized in a hotel swimming pool, and experienced prophecy spoken over my life through six strangers who had never met me.
And yet, even as I received divine love and promises, my heart remained fixed on something more tangible. Like the cardboard women plastered on every wall, I wanted to be chosen—by a man. I wanted it so badly that I was willing to sacrifice who I was to feel like I belonged to him.
So I gave myself to a man I now recognize as a predator, though I didn’t see him that way at the time. I wasn’t acting from wisdom, but from a deep wound—a desperate ache to be seen, chosen, and loved. He filled a hole I didn’t even know I had.
He was a neighbor, married, twenty years older than me, with sons I babysat after school Monday through Friday. His wife was like a second mother. His family had been a refuge when my parents were going through divorce. When I was an adolescent, he would come over and tuck me in at night, rub my nervous belly, and even pray with me. I grew to trust and love him deeply.
He tended a wound left by a father who had disappeared from my life. The wound I didn’t accept, the daddy I wouldn’t allow to disappear, the ache I didn’t hand over to God. So I used my imagination to transform the man, the predator, into what I wanted and needed him to be: my daddy.
He was my karate instructor, my closest father figure. Karate is more than fighting. It teaches five tenets: character, sincerity, effort, etiquette, and self-control. That it’s better to avoid a conflict than to win a thousand battles. That weaker women and children can cleverly overpower big strong men. It is life formation.
He prepared me thoroughly for self-defense—even teaching me how to kill. He’d simulate a real-life rape attack, and I had to defend myself—physically, without crying or giving up, and emotionally, against his verbal assault: words designed to break me, to convince me I was worthless.
We fought in the dojo and had pillow fights at home. He took me fishing and hunting. He taught me how to make fruitcake and all kinds of other things. He gave me cassette tapes of Zig Ziglar, a motivational speaker who would help me succeed.
He seemed to care for me like a father cares for his daughter. And then, a few days after I turned eighteen, something shifted. He became someone I never imagined—though by then, I had already let him in. There’s a certain kind of trust and respect that forms between a student and a teacher, a daddy and his daughter. I let his age, his authority, and what I thought was his love lead me.
In my trust and love for him, I let him do things to me I can barely think about now. I became divided against myself, double-minded. One foot stood in the spiritual awakening that had just begun—a voice I could hear but was not choosing to follow. The other was entangled in a secret relationship that was consuming me. I knew I was hurting a woman I loved, children I loved, and a family I loved. And I couldn’t stop.
Addiction? Probably. What I learned is that the mind can mount a powerful defense. I convinced myself that God had brought this man into my life for a reason. I saw his attention as divine providence, his pursuit as destiny. I did not see him for what he was. I mistook possession for protection.
As a newborn in Jesus Christ, I was God’s temple, and I felt defiled. I couldn’t close either of the doors that had opened—my commitment to God or my relationship with this man. So I closed something inside myself, something that never found a way out.
I read Matthew 7:6 over and over: “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.”
Yet I did not heed its warning, and I was torn to pieces.
The Tree in the Middle
I couldn’t see it then, but I was reenacting the oldest human story. Adam and Eve hide. They cover themselves. They blame. Exile begins long before they ever leave the Garden.
I was doing the same. I hid behind my wound instead of letting myself be healed.
The choice to reach for the fruit—to grasp for something outside the Garden—is a choice I know intimately. And it is a choice humanity has repeated again and again.
The Garden of Eden was not a static paradise. It was a place of potential—a place where human beings were given the astonishing gift of freedom.
At the center of the Garden stood two trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The Tree of Life was not forbidden. It was there, available, waiting. But the Tree of Knowledge came with a warning: “You shall surely not eat from it, for in the day that you eat from it, you will surely die” (Genesis 2:17).
The Tree of Knowledge has always reminded me of something we have come to call “The Science”—and, by extension, technology, AI, and the larger apparatus of technocratic control. These systems promise certainty and, when treated as unquestionable authorities, can become instruments of control rather than vessels of truth.
When someone says, “The Science says,” they can be claiming an authority that tolerates no dissent—a posture not unlike the Serpent’s claim to know what God really meant. Knowledge becomes a kind of secular priesthood, bypassing relationship, humility, and wisdom. We gain information but lose the capacity to question. We master nature and, in the process, lose ourselves.
And yet, even as I write this, I must pause. I am not against science. I am not against technology. I use both every day. The problem is not the tool; it is the posture toward the tool.
When we treat science as a god rather than a gift, we eat from the wrong tree. We grasp at certainty without relationship, and then wonder why we feel so empty despite knowing so much.
But the question still lingers, as it must: Why would God place such a tree in the Garden if He did not want humanity to eat from it? Why give a command if there was no possibility of disobedience?
It is the same question we might ask about nuclear physics, genetic engineering, or artificial intelligence: Why give us the knowledge to create such things if we weren’t supposed to use them?
The answer lies in what love requires.
Love cannot be forced. Trust cannot be coerced. A creature without choice is not a child in relationship with a parent—it is merely a possession.
The Tree of Knowledge was not a trap. It was the boundary that made genuine relationship possible. Without the possibility of saying no, humanity could never truly say yes.
To gain the knowledge of good and evil apart from God is to gain power without the relationship that gives knowledge its context and perspective. To become like God without being in communion with God was the fatal error. To become like God without being in communion with God was the fatal error.
The problem was never knowledge itself. It was the attempt to possess what could only be received through relationship.
The Grasp
The Serpent’s Approach
Enter the Serpent.
In Hebrew, the Serpent is called Nachash—connected with cunning, subtlety, and perception. Genesis does not introduce the Serpent as a random evil force invading creation. It is described as one of God’s creatures—“more cunning than any beast of the field” (Genesis 3:1).
The danger is not that the Serpent possesses something evil. The danger is that it takes something good—discernment, intelligence, the capacity to question—and turns those gifts away from relationship with the One who gives them. These are gifts. They become destructive when separated from trust, humility, and love.
The Serpent does not begin with a lie. It begins with a question: “Has God really said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1).
This is the first fracture: not outright rebellion, but suspicion.
Did God really say that? Did God really mean it? Can He really be trusted?
The Serpent plants the first seed of separation—the suggestion that God’s command is not protection, but limitation. Then the temptation deepens: “You will not surely die! For God knows that in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4–5).
Here is the heart of the temptation:
You can become like God without God.
You can possess divine knowledge without divine relationship.
You can grasp the gift while rejecting the Giver.
The Serpent offers a shortcut: wisdom without relationship, skill without trust, knowledge without communion.
It is an appealing offer—and it is also a trap.
Knowledge severed from relationship eventually becomes a burden—or a weapon. There are no shortcuts to genuine wisdom.
The Choice
Eve saw that the tree was good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desirable for gaining wisdom. She took its fruit and ate. And she gave it to her husband, who was with her, and he ate.
Notice what the text emphasizes. He is her husband, and he is “with her” when she eats. He is not absent from the scene. He is there.
There was no ceremony, no exchange of vows, no witnesses—because none were needed. She was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. Their union wasn’t something they achieved; it was something they were. The covenant simply named what was already true.
But after the fruit, something shifted.
They saw their nakedness. They covered themselves. They hid. They blamed.
The marriage was still there—but trust and intimacy were gone.
This is what the knowledge of good and evil does when it is severed from relationship: it gives us the ability to evaluate, and the first thing we evaluate is our own vulnerability. We begin to see ourselves as objects to be judged rather than persons to be known.
The Personal Parallel
This is what Scripture calls the Fall—and it was my fall, too.
I am not building a theology on a childhood wound. I am recognizing that the fracture I experienced personally is the same fracture that has shaped every one of us—and civilization itself.
The wound did not create the pattern. It revealed it. Made it visible.
Growing up doesn’t erase our wounds, but awareness is the beginning of healing.
I was already chosen by God—just as Eve was already one with Adam. I had received His love, His promises, His unconditional embrace. But I reached for a different kind of fruit.
I wanted to be chosen by a man—selected, pursued, possessed—by someone who could not give what he did not have. I didn’t want to wait.
The consequences of that reaching were immediate and devastating, both for Eve and for me.
Genesis records God’s words to the woman: “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” The Hebrew word for pain—itzavon—doesn’t mean curse. It describes a condition: the painful struggle of bringing anything good into a world that resists it, whether children, projects, or meaning. The harmony between man and woman is broken. Longing for connection becomes tangled with the drive to control. The one who was meant to be a partner becomes someone to be dominated.
This is the birth of a pattern we all know: love and control twisted together.
I experienced the same shame, the same hiding, the same fragmentation. I was Eve, grasping for what was not yet given.
I chose this man over God. And in that choice, I traded relationship for control, trust for self-reliance, receiving for possessing.
The human heart turns from receiving wisdom and love through connection to grasping at them as objects.
Perception Severed from Relationship
Eve’s perception was not the problem.
She saw correctly: the fruit was good for food, pleasing to the eye, and desirable for wisdom. Those things were true.
The problem was not what she saw.
The problem was how she saw it: through her own eyes alone, outside of relationship.
To understand good and evil, you need a perspective beyond yourself. Without it, you see only from your own limited view. Eve entered into the reality of good and evil—and in doing so, became subject to them.
This is why the fruit was so dangerous outside of relationship with God. It was not simply about acquiring facts. It was a transformation of perception itself—from open to the Giver, to closed in on itself. And that ultimately leads to death.
Outside of relationship, there was no reference point beyond herself. Her perception became isolated, self-referential, and absolute. She became the sole arbiter of what was good and what was evil.
This is the birth of the isolated self: the self that judges without love, evaluates without humility, and grasps without trust.
It is a lonely way to live.
It is also unwise.
We see this pattern everywhere today—in how we consume information, how we judge world events, and how we reduce complex realities to simple villains and heroes.
Consider any heated argument you have ever had.
You are certain you are right. You have facts. You have logic. You have evidence. The other person is wrong—maybe even deluded. And you are so certain that you cannot hear them. Their motives seem clear to you. Their flaws are obvious.
And then, later—sometimes much later—you discover that you were wrong.
Maybe about the facts. Maybe not.
But about them.
You did not know their wounds. You did not know their history. You did not know the weight they were carrying. You judged from a distance. You evaluated without love.
This is the isolated self at work.
It happens in marriages, families, friendships, workplaces. We reduce complex people to simple villains, and we become so certain we are right that we can no longer see our own blindness.
The same pattern plays out in our personal lives. We judge other people’s motives while excusing our own. We demand accountability from them while offering grace to ourselves. We see our own wounds but not the wounds we inflict on others.
Perception has been severed from relationship.
That is the essence of the Fall.
The capacity to discern good and evil is not evil in itself. But when discernment is exercised apart from love, trust, and humility—apart from the perspective of the Giver—it becomes a weapon of separation.
It turns the world into a courtroom instead of a garden.
It turns the self into a god.
The transformation was immediate: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (Genesis 3:7).
Before the fruit, they were naked and not ashamed. After the fruit, they saw vulnerability. They saw themselves as objects to be judged.
But here is the pattern, and it plays out in two directions.
Some turn inward. They look at themselves and see only failure, shame, and unworthiness. They become their own harshest judge.
Others turn outward. They look at everyone else and see their flaws. They blame. They accuse. They judge others to avoid facing themselves.
Either way, the result is the same: perception severed from relationship.
Either way, the result is the same: perception severed from relationship. Whether we condemn ourselves or condemn others, we are still standing outside the Garden, holding the fruit, and calling it wisdom.
The Long Brokenness
The choice to eat the fruit was not a single act. It was the beginning of a pattern—one repeated in every generation.
Every time we choose control over trust, fear over faith, or self-protection over love, we are eating from the same tree. The Fall is not simply an ancient event we have left behind. It is a pattern we repeat every day.
Humanity reaches for knowledge without wisdom. We seek power without relationship. We grasp for control without trust.
Empires rise. They accumulate power. They extract from the world around them. And eventually, they collapse under the weight of the very forces that built them.
The seed of the knowledge tree is woven into human consciousness itself—into the way we perceive, organize, build, and relate. We see its consequences all around us: institutions that serve themselves, technology that outpaces our moral imagination, a culture flooded with information yet starving for understanding, politics reduced to spectacle and division, and an economy organized around extraction rather than relationship.
All of it flows from the original fracture: the choice to grasp at knowledge without wisdom, to reach for power without trust, to judge without love.
But here is the hidden mystery:
The Fall was not the end of the story. It was the beginning.
There is a pattern written into history—the Greeks called it enantiodromia—the tendency of something pushed to its extreme to generate its opposite.
The seed of the Fall set the pendulum in motion. Empires rise and fall. Religions harden into legalism. Institutions designed to serve become institutions designed to preserve themselves. Every extreme contains the seed of reversal.
The wilderness became the birthplace of the prophets. The suffering of the Cross became the doorway to resurrection. The death of the old becomes the soil from which something new emerges.
The Church and the Pattern
I have named hard things in this essay. The fracture in my own life. The fracture in creation. The pattern of grasping that has shaped empires and institutions. But there is one pattern I cannot leave unnamed—because I know it too well.
The Church—the institution that has carried the Christian tradition for two thousand years, that claims to speak for God and guard divine truth—has also stood before a tree and chosen.
It has sometimes chosen to protect itself rather than protect the vulnerable, to preserve its power rather than confess its sins, to cover up rather than bring truth into the light.
And like me, the Church has been double-minded.
One foot stood in the gospel—in charity, beauty, the sacraments, and the witness of saints. The other was entangled in a hidden history of exploitation and abuse—a history it could not fully confront because it had built too much of its identity around its own authority.
This is not only a Catholic problem. The Southern Baptist Convention documented hundreds of cases of abuse across decades. The Church of England faced a “series of failures” to protect children. Charismatic megachurches like Bethel and Gateway have faced allegations involving sexual abuse and the misuse of spiritual authority.
The pattern is not denominational. It is institutional.
When I say the Church, I mean every Christian tradition that has ever placed the institution above the people it was meant to serve. Across Catholic, Protestant, Anglican, Reformed, and charismatic traditions, scandals of sexual abuse, financial exploitation, and institutional cover-up have revealed the same underlying temptation: the preservation of the institution becomes more important than the protection of the person.
This is not a few bad apples.
It is the same tree.
The tree of grasping. The desire to possess what cannot be possessed. The temptation to use authority without relationship, power without accountability, knowledge without wisdom.
And yet, hear me clearly: I am not saying the Church has never done good.
My karate instructor did good things for me. He taught me discipline. He gave me confidence. He prepared me to defend myself. He taught me how to make fruitcake and how to hunt. His family was a refuge when my parents were divorcing.
And he also exploited me.
The Church is no different.
It has built hospitals, schools, and cathedrals. It has sheltered the poor and educated the ignorant. It has created art that lifts the soul and music that seems to touch heaven.
And it has also sheltered predators, betrayed the vulnerable, and covered up its sins.
Both are true. And both must be named.
The Church must do what I had to do: admit openly that it was wrong, seek forgiveness, and return to God.
Not as an institution preserving itself.
As a people turning back to the One who called them.
The theologian Hans Küng put it bluntly: “Every institution, even the most sacred, every organizational level can be deformed, needs renewal, and must be reformed and renewed.” His point was simple: the Church’s hierarchy is human, not divine. If even the sacraments and the papacy can be deformed, then surely the institution’s self-understanding can be—and has been.
Jesus does not call us to follow an institution any more than He called me to follow that man.
He calls us to follow Him.
And until we remember this, we will remain divided against ourselves—a house that cannot stand.
But here is the hope.
The same pattern that brought the Church to this moment also contains the possibility of reversal. Just as I stood before my tree and chose—and then, slowly, painfully, beautifully, learned to choose differently—so the Church can choose again.
Because the truth the institution has forgotten is this:
We are the Church—you and I.
Not the hierarchy. Not the bureaucracy. Not a denomination. Not a building.
The apostle Paul made this explicit when he asked the Corinthian believers: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16). The “you” there is plural. He wasn’t speaking to a building or an institution. He was speaking to a community of people—to us.
We are not merely members of an organization. We are the dwelling place of God—not a temple made of stone, but a people made living stones, being built together into a holy priesthood.
We—the people who have been loved by Christ, called by Christ, and woven into His body—we are the Church.
We are the Bride.
Not the Vatican. Not a denomination. Not a building.
We.
And the Bride is not passive. She is not silent. She is not a child cowering before spiritual abuse.
She is alive.
She is active.
She is strong.
And she is rising.
Just as I had to finally face the predator and stop mistaking his attention for love, the Church must face the predators in its own shadow—and stop mistaking institutional self-preservation for divine authority.
That is the choice before us.
The Church can continue to grasp—or it can learn to receive. It can protect the institution—or protect the vulnerable. It can cling to power—or surrender it.
And then, only then, can it become what it was always meant to be: the Bride of Christ—rising, strong, and making herself ready for her Beloved.
The Tree of Life is still standing.
The invitation is still open.
And the Giver is still calling.
The Tree of Life
There were two trees in the Garden.
We have spent so long staring at the one we were forbidden to touch that we have almost forgotten the other.
The Tree of Life stood there too—in the midst of the Garden, available, its branches heavy with fruit. No prohibition. No warning.
Just an open invitation to eat and live.
What was this tree?
The ancient fathers saw in it a figure of Christ Himself. Its fruit was not magic; it was the visible sign of an invisible reality—the life that flows from relationship with God. To eat from it was to receive life itself, to be sustained by the Giver rather than grasping at the gift.
The Tree of Knowledge promised wisdom apart from relationship.
The Tree of Life offered life through communion.
One was a grasp; the other was a reception.
One was control; the other was trust.
And then we chose.
We reached for the wrong tree. We grasped at what was not yet given. And in doing so, we exiled ourselves from the one tree that could have sustained us.
But the Tree of Life was not destroyed.
It was hidden.
Guarded by a flaming sword, yes. But not destroyed.
The prophets remembered it. The psalmists sang of it. The wise man wrote that wisdom herself is a tree of life to those who embrace her. To pursue wisdom is to find the tree again. To receive her is to receive its fruit.
And then, in the fullness of time, the Tree of Life appeared again.
Not as a tree in a garden, but as a man on a cross.
Where the first tree brought death, this tree brought life.
Where Adam grasped, Jesus released.
Where Eve reached, Jesus received.
The cross—that tree of surrender—became the Tree of Life.
Now the Tree of Life stands at the end of the story as it stood at the beginning. It grows on both sides of the river of life, bearing fruit every month, its leaves for the healing of the nations.
And that healing is what this essay has been pointing toward all along.
“To him who overcomes I will give to eat of the Tree of Life.” (Revelation 2:7)
The Choice That Remains
This is where we stand now.
The reversal—the enantiodromia that has been building for centuries—appears to be reaching a limit. The systems built on control and extraction are revealing their fractures. The institutions we trusted are losing legitimacy. The technologies we believed would save us are exposing new forms of emptiness and dependence.
And in the midst of this unraveling, a choice remains.
We can continue to grasp—to cling to systems that have lost their soul. Or we can open ourselves to receive.
Where Adam grasped, Jesus released. Where Adam took, Jesus gave. Where Adam hid, Jesus was revealed. Where Adam blamed, Jesus forgave. Where Adam chose control, Jesus chose surrender.
Surrender became the doorway to life.
He does not force us. He stands at the door and knocks.
“For in the day that you eat from it, you will surely die.” (Genesis 2:17)
They died slowly—through separation, isolation, forgetting. The knowledge of good and evil made them orphans. It has made us orphans too.
I took this journey at eighteen. I reached. I grasped. I hid. I blamed. But that was not the end of my story. It was another beginning.
Slowly, painfully, beautifully, I learned to stop hiding. To receive rather than grasp.
Wisdom cannot be seized. It can only be received.
I am not the woman who reached for the fruit anymore. I am the one who learned to receive.
The trees are still standing. The fruit is still there.
One leads to control; the other to trust. One leads to isolation; the other to belonging. One leads to death; the other to life.
What will you choose?
References
Guidepost Solutions. (2022). Report of the Independent Investigation of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee. https://www.sataskforce.net
Makin, K. (2024). Independent Review into the Church of England’s Handling of Allegations of Serious Abuse by the Late John Smyth. Church of England. https://www.churchofengland.org
Religion Dispatches. (2026, February 25). Allegations of Sexual Abuse Emerge at Influential Bethel Church. https://religiondispatches.org
CBS News. (2024, November 2). Gateway Church removes 4 church elders, releases investigation results. https://www.cbsnews.com
Küng, H. (1962). The Council, Reform and Reunion. Sheed & Ward.
In the next essay of this series, I trace the long exile of Wisdom itself—how She was suppressed beneath empires, buried beneath religion, and silenced in the city. But the exile was never the end. It was the condition for Her return.
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