The Bridge

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By:  Staci Stallings

Last week we talked about the Tree of Life and the Tree of Me.  They looked like this:

Now when Eve sinned and chose the tree of Me over the Tree of God, God came and put a barrier up so that Adam and Eve and the human race could not get to the Tree of Life.  He wasn’t being mean and cruel or vindictive.  He knew that a person going on their own power, strength, plans was dangerous… and allowing them to be immortal by eating off the Tree of Life was a horrible idea.  So He put up the barrier and posted an angel with a fiery sword there to guard the tree.

Stay with me here, because this is where the story gets interesting.  For thousands of years the people lived on their own.  Read how well they did in the Old Testament.  Over and over, they started off okay, but soon fell back into selfishness and violence and worshiping other gods.  So God sent His Son to save the people from themselves.  Jesus willingly crossed the barrier from the Tree of Life to the side where everyone was going on their own agendas.

Jesus came to tell us that although Adam and Eve had made that disastrous choice, we weren’t stuck living there.  Jesus came to literally be the bridge between the way we were living and the way God always intended us to live.

It looks like this…

Through His cross and resurrection, Jesus was able to bridge the barrier that God had put into place to keep us (who had chosen to go our own way) from eternal life.  But how do you cross that bridge?

By renouncing doing it yourself.  By stopping eating off of the Tree of Me.  But those are self-done.  What you most need to do is take Jesus’s hand, tell Him you’re sorry for trying to do it on your own and trust Him to do it for you.  When you do that, you are doing exactly what God intended you to do from the very beginning.  THIS was the way He wanted life to work!

On the cross beam of the cross, think of the words of God:  forgiveness, mercy, grace, love, hope, joy, peace…  They all fit there.  They all are found in crossing that bridge that Jesus made for us–from sin and darkness into light, life, and God’s presence.

The question is, are we going to take it, or are we going to choose to stay, existing off of the Tree of Me and calling that “life.”  It’s not.  It never was.

But it’s still our choice.