| E-MAIL SERVICE | Sign me up to receive the daily Word of Righteousness free via my E-mail address! ( ONLY AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH ) | |
| ARCHIVES | I want to check out the daily Words of Righteousness for any of the last fourteen days or from previous weeks. ( ENGLISH ONLY ) | |
| FEEDBACK | I have a question or comment about today's Word of Righteousness. ( ENGLISH AND SPANISH ONLY ) | |
| BOOK LIST | I would like to see the complete book list of the Words of Righteousness author Robert B. Thompson. (SOME SPANISH TITLES AVAILABLE ) |
The Daily Word of Righteousness
White Clothes To Wear
I counsel you to buy from me gold refined in the fire, so you can become rich; and white clothes to wear, so you can cover your shameful nakedness; and salve to put on your eyes, so you can see. (Revelation 3:18 NIV)
"White clothes to wear." Precisely what are the white clothes we are to wear?
We know the "gold refined in the fire" is our faith that is purified by being tested in the furnace of life. We know the "salve" to put on our eyes has to do with our ability to escape deception and see matters as God sees them. The believers in Laodicea were poor, naked, and blind but they did not understand the wretchedness of their shameful condition.
Our minds go back to the Garden of Eden. The first people were unclothed. The Bible in several passages refers to nakedness as a shameful condition. God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden in a shameful condition. He knew they were naked and assuredly did not intend to leave them that way.
But in what manner did God intend to clothe them?
There were several trees in the Garden of Eden. The tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were in the middle of the garden.
Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2:8,9 NIV)
It is evident that the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil were not trees as we know them. Perhaps the other trees were actual fruit trees, although there is a passage that suggests they all were allegorical.
Which of the trees of Eden can be compared with you in splendor and majesty? Yet you, too, will be brought down with the trees of Eden to the earth below; you will lie among the uncircumcised, with those killed by the sword. This is Pharaoh and all his hordes, declares the Sovereign LORD. (Ezekiel 31:18 NIV)
The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. (Genesis 2:15 NIV)
I think there were real fruit trees there and, as is the case in other descriptions in the Bible, we have a mixture of symbolism and actuality. The new Jerusalem seems to be an example of this kind of mixture.
Let's go back and think for a moment about the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Obviously these were not fruit trees as we know them. What kind of fruit from a physical tree would give us eternal life or the knowledge of good and evil?
My own thought is that the tree of life is the Lord Jesus Christ, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is the eternal moral law of God, the law inscribed however faintly in the conscience of every person.
To be continued.