https://app.dropwave.io/episode/27de5146-f511-4ec2-8a61-d9236037ad0f/trinity-8-ad-2025.mp3

A tree and its fruit

Trees produce fruit according to their kind. You don’t get apples from orange trees or figs from thistles. According to Jesus, there are two kinds of spiritual trees and fruits: healthy and diseased trees; good and bad fruit.

The Greek is more precise. The good tree is described as morally good, the opposite of evil; its fruit is called beautiful. The bad tree is described as corrupting or decayed; its fruit is called evil — what we pray against when we say “deliver us from evil.” We might say it this way: Every morally good tree produces admirable and rightly ordered fruit, but the corrupting tree produces wicked fruit. That’s why Jesus says that no morally good tree can produce evil fruit, and no corrupt tree can produce what is rightly ordered.

Of course, this isn’t a lesson in gardening. Jesus is speaking spiritually. Good does not produce evil. Evil does not produce good. God has the perfect tree. The fruit that comes from the tree of God’s Word cannot be evil. But the fruit that comes from the tree of the devil can only be wicked.

The devil doesn’t want you to have the nourishing and wholesome fruit of God’s Word. He wants to feed you poison. So he makes his diseased fruit look good. He tells you how God’s Word and God’s order is bad. He makes sin enticing, filling it with empty promises. The devil’s tree has many different kinds of fruit: lying and gluttony and rage and murder, blasphemy and pride and unforgiveness and holding a grudge, sexual immorality and drunkenness and disobeying parents, laziness and fearing man more than God — and things like these. Some of the fruit on this tree is in outright rejection of the order God has given. It commands what God forbids and forbids what He commands.

But other fruits don’t look quite so evil. Sometimes the devil has the most success among Christians by taking the temptation to what is evil and covering it up with the veneer of God’s Word. I think this is what Jesus has in mind when He talks about wolves dressed up in the clothing of sheep. Luther says that wolves dress themselves up with Scripture itself. That’s why we hear about satan coming as an angel of light. That’s why he so often uses the Bible as a cover for temptation. He takes what is evil and covers it up with Bible words like “love” and “mercy.” He takes a temptation and conceals it with a Bible verse. That’s how he sought to tempt our Lord Jesus.

But there’s something about the devil’s tree that we often and easily forget: To eat of the fruit is to be joined to the tree that gave that fruit. It doesn’t matter which fruit you pick; they are all joined to the same corrupting tree. They all have the same source. This is also why one sin often leads to another. King David’s failure to lead his men into battle directly resulted in adultery, lying, and murder — and trying to cover up the whole thing with a show of righteousness.

Judge the tree by its fruits

So judge the tree by its fruits. And judge the fruit by the tree. This is something that God called man to do from the very beginning. Even before the Fall into sin, Adam and his wife had to discern different kinds of fruit — but it was very simple. If the fruit wasn't on the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil," then it was safe to eat. God had given them a word about that tree: in the day you eat of its fruit, you will surely die.

But the serpent brought them a different word. He said this tree was not bad for them. He said it was good for them. He told them that God had kept their eyes closed, but this tree would open them. He told them that they were different than God, but this tree would make them like Him. He told them they would not surely die.

So Adam’s wife judged the tree. She judged that the tree was good for food. She judged that the tree was a delight to the eyes. She judged that the tree was to be desired to make her wise. Since she believed the tree was good, then it only made sense to eat the fruit and share it. So that’s what she did. She ate of the fruit and thereby joined herself to the tree.

Her judgment wasn’t ultimately about a tree though. She was making a judgment about a teacher. She listened to the devil, all dressed up in serpent’s clothes, the craftiest of all the livestock — and she believed his words. She believed the devil and not God. The serpent-clothed devil had no credibility of himself. He simply whispered a lie — an imagined word about a false reality. But his words had a mysterious depth and the feeling of truth. He had a secret knowledge that had been concealed. He said that God was conspiring against her. Instead of fleeing from the lies about God, she listened to them, believed them, inwardly digested them, and followed them.

Sins of omission

The woman was deceived. And when she was confronted by God about her sin, she tried to claim deception as an excuse. It’s the serpent’s fault. He deceived me. But do not be deceived, dear Christians, being deceived is no excuse for sin. Adam’s wife still received the consequence of her sin.

But how did it go so wrong? Adam had preached God’s Word. (That is, after all, how his wife knew what God said about the tree.) He had warned her. He had told her what would happen if they ate of the fruit. He said that in the day they ate it they would die. He even told her not to touch it. But then, when the suggestion of eating the fruit was set before his wife, he was silent. He just let it happen. He didn’t speak up — even though he was standing right there. He didn’t rebuke the serpent. He didn’t rebuke his wife. He didn’t get the shovel to use on the serpent.

It was a sin of omission — of failing to do what was right and necessary. Adam failed to defend his home against false doctrine — and the whole world suffered. Now, these kinds of sins can be harder to discern because they involve inaction. That’s how it is with false doctrine, though. False doctrine doesn’t only happen when people say false things about God and His Word. It happens when one fails to speak. It is a kind of lying: lying by omission. And it is deadly.

Of course, we still wonder how this could have happened? What went wrong? They had one job: don’t eat the fruit off that one tree. It wasn’t like there was some faraway shoot that happened to spring up from that original tree, and they didn’t know it was the same one. No — they took from the tree directly. Nor were they forced or commanded to eat the rotten fruit. And Adam, especially, wasn’t even tricked. He knew exactly what they were doing. But they did the thing. The one thing God said to not do. They had forgotten about the order God had built into the world: To eat of the fruit is to be joined to the tree that gave that fruit.

To some extent, we know this. Would you be surprised if your child went to med school, and then became a doctor? Or if he went to law school, and then became a lawyer? That is the ‘fruit’ these schools bear: med school makes doctors; law school makes lawyers. This seems self-evident. But then we are surprised when anti-Christian schools make graduates who are not Christians. Are Christians gathered from anti-Christian education?

That’s not to say that everyone who teaches in these schools are bad — there are countless courageous men and women who speak up for the truth. But it is foolish to pretend that sending people into places where they will be hated and mocked for being Christian won’t have a negative effect on them.