With what set of assumptions do you begin as you open the pages of Scripture?
I find myself in agreement with James B. Jordan, Protestant theologian, with Matteiu Paggeau, the Greek Orthodox polymath, and even the insights of the Jewish mystical texts: To interpret Genesis 1–3 only as historical narrative may be correct on one level, but it misses the deeper meaning. The opening chapters of Scripture do not merely recount events—they unveil the architecture of reality.
To understand Genesis, one must think not only historically but symbolically, for the Bible itself trades in the currency of symbol.
And at the root of it all—pardon the pun—stands the tree.
There are three trees explicitly named in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of Life, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the fig Tree, whose leaves Adam and Eve used to clothe their shame. But then, curiously, God also points to “every other tree of the garden” and says to Adam, “You may freely eat” (Genesis 2:16).
Why so much attention to trees? Why not flowers or mountains, or meadows? Perhaps because the very structure of creation mirrors the form of a tree. Reality itself is arboreal. It is fractal—that is, it repeats its structure at every scale.
The branching veins in a leaf, the rivers on a map, the bronchi in your lungs, even the wiring of neurons in your brain—all mirror the same pattern. Roots, trunk, branch, twig: the same design, echoed and re-echoed in miniature. As Solomon wrote, “What has been will be again; what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9, ESV).
“The branching veins in a leaf, the rivers on a map, the bronchi in your lungs, even the wiring of neurons in your brain—all mirror the same pattern.”
The Bible confirms this recursive structure. When God separates the waters above from the waters below in Genesis 1, He creates a pathway for life to emerge. Later, He parts the Red Sea through Moses (Exodus 14). Again, the Jordan River opens before Joshua (Joshua 3). And then comes Jesus—the true fruit of the tree—who does not part the water but walks upon it (Matthew 14). The same divine pattern, revealed on a new scale.
You see the same fractal rhythm in the births of Scripture: Sarah’s barrenness answered by Isaac, Hannah’s prayer rewarded with Samuel, Elizabeth’s womb quickened with John. Each a smaller echo of the ultimate miracle—the Virgin Birth of Christ.
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes, as Mark Twain is said to have quipped.
When you begin to attend to Scripture with this symbolic vision, the text begins to read you. The fractal structure of grace unfolds within your own story. The same divine patterns—creation, fall, exile, redemption, restoration—play out at smaller scales in every human life.
In fact, that’s what the Bible teaches in James 1:23-24. James compares the person who only listens to Scripture without acting on it to someone who looks in a mirror and then immediately forgets what he looks like. The point isn’t just moral obedience—it’s recognition. You’re supposed to see yourself in light of Scripture’s stories.
When you read the Bible rightly, you don’t stand over it as an observer; it stands over you as a mirror. You begin to notice your own reflection in Adam and Eve, in David and Bathsheba, in Peter and Thomas. Their stories become the pattern of your story—so that when you see the Word, you remember who you are and whose you are.
“Their stories become the pattern of your story—so that when you see the Word, you remember who you are and whose you are.”
Let me give you an example of that. My best friend in Slovakia was named Andrej—Andy. He was an African-Slovak, a brilliant lawyer, the son of a Nigerian economist and a Slovak village girl. His parents divorced early, and Andy grew up without his father, raised by his grandparents in a small town. Each day, he walked through a Roma settlement to get to school, and the boys there would beat him. He was eight when communism fell—he had no faith, no church, no prayers.
But as a teenager, Andy found a Bible. He read of David’s courage before lions and giants, and then he found Psalm 23. He memorized it. He told me that as he walked through that same village, reciting, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me,” the attacks stopped. His enemies melted away. He knew then that God was real.
Andy’s story was not identical to David’s, but it rhymed. Courage takes the same shape, even at smaller scales. Faith, like the kingdom of God, is a tree that reproduces after its own kind.
That’s the mystery of Scripture’s fractal beauty: it is alive, repeating the divine pattern in every generation, every soul, every movement of faith or disobedience. When you meditate on the Word of God day and night, you don’t just learn the stories—you begin to live them. And soon you start to notice those same recurring patterns emerging in your own life. That’s what the Bible calls wisdom—the skill of recognizing God’s design woven through the fabric of your days.
“That’s what the Bible calls wisdom—the skill of recognizing God’s design woven through the fabric of your days.”
Now, here’s another example of that pattern.
What was the original temptation in the Garden? The serpent, the craftiest of God’s creatures, slithered up to the representative human family—Adam and Eve—and whispered, “Take and eat, for God knows that when you do, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
And what does that mean? Theologically, it means this: humanity grasped at the prerogative that belongs to God alone—the right to define good and evil, to chart the course of life on our own terms. Sin, in its essence, is the seizure of moral authority. It’s not ignorance—it’s autonomy. It’s the moment we take the law written on the heart and rewrite it in our own image. That was the loss of innocence.
And if you think long enough, you can probably name the moment your innocence vanished. Some of you didn’t lose it by choice; it was stolen. You were sinned against. Something evil, shameful, unjust was done to you—and I want to say this clearly: what was done to you was not your fault. That shame does not belong to you. God sees you. He grieves with you.
But I’m speaking now of those moments when we ourselves chose to transgress—when we knew the good and did not do it. I can tell you mine.
When I was eight years old, my grandparents gave me a BB gun for Christmas. My dad filmed it on his camcorder—me grinning, posing like Ralphie from A Christmas Story. Before I ran outside, my granddad said, “Now don’t shoot any of the bluebirds or cardinals I’ve been feeding.”
“Humanity grasped at the prerogative that belongs to God alone—the right to define good and evil, to chart the course of life on our own terms.”
But there he was—a bluebird on the fence post. I must have missed five or six times before the seventh BB hit him in the neck. I ran around the back and found him flopping in the snow, blood spattering the white like crimson petals. And in that instant, I felt something I had never felt before—something that sank down into my chest and stayed there. Shame. I buried the bird under the woodpile—covering my sin as best I could—and, let’s just say, when I went back inside, I no longer believed in Santa Claus.
Then came the lie.
“Did you shoot anything?”
“No,” I said.
That’s the pattern. See, take, eat, hide, lie. Genesis repeats itself in miniature. We seek knowledge in an illegitimate way, and we’re not equipped to bear the weight of it.
You see, I grew up in a family of hunters. Every Thanksgiving, the men would go bird-hunting—my dad, uncle, granddad, their Brittany spaniels bounding through the fields. I wasn’t allowed to go yet, but when they came home, I’d help clean the birds, listening to their stories. To my young mind, manhood itself seemed tied to that ritual. The men I admired most all shot birds; it was the mark of belonging. And so I wanted that knowledge before I had earned it. I wanted the fruit without the discipline. I wanted to be like them before I was ready.
That’s what the forbidden fruit always is: knowledge seized without maturity, power grasped without responsibility. The sin wasn’t curiosity—it was presumption.
“That’s what the forbidden fruit always is: knowledge seized without maturity, power grasped without responsibility.”
And that, incidentally, is why artificial intelligence will never be godlike, no matter how much information it acquires. It can store data, but it cannot judge righteously. It can replicate thought, but it cannot love. The divine likeness is not in omniscience but in virtue—love, mercy, grace, goodness, holiness, and righteous judgment—all held together in perfect harmony. Knowledge alone, detached from goodness, is not divinity. It’s dangerous.
You see, it’s not knowledge that makes you like God. It’s character. It’s not mastery over information that restores our humanity—it’s mercy over those entrusted to us. True dominion, the kind God gave to Adam and Eve, is not domination but care. To bear God’s image is not to wield knowledge as a weapon, but to exercise wisdom as stewardship.
Ah, but that’s the thing, isn’t it? We want the knowledge that is forbidden us, but we’re not prepared for the consequences of the inevitable fall. That’s the pattern of reality—at least, as the Bible sees it.
The same pattern reappears in miniature in every one of us. We reach for what we cannot yet bear. We chase after wisdom that wounds. We learn what good and evil are not by contemplation but by collision. And ever since Eden, the human story has been one long attempt to manage the knowledge we were never ready to hold.
If you’re not already very familiar with the text of Ecclesiastes 12, pause your reading/listening and go reread those 14 verses of Scripture.
“We learn what good and evil are not by contemplation but by collision.”
If you’re not used to reading that kind of poetry of Ecclesiastes chapter 12, here’s what the first part of the chapter is about: “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come and the years approach when you will say, ‘I find no pleasure in them.’”
Why remember God while you’re young? Because time itself will teach you what the serpent promised far too early—the difference between good and evil, joy and sorrow, strength and frailty.
Solomon then describes in exquisite, almost haunting detail, the slow unraveling of the human body and finally death. He pictures the slow fading of the senses—eyes dimming, ears dulling, teeth falling, steps slowing. The silver cord loosens, the golden bowl breaks, the dust returns to the ground. It’s so poetic we almost forget what he’s saying: this is where all our learning leads.
You can master ten languages, hold three degrees, and have a shelf full of awards, but the same end awaits us all: “Then the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” (Ecclesiastes 12:7, ESV) No, the Preacher is not anti-intellectual; he is anti-illusion. He’s simply warning us against thinking that knowing more will let us live longer or better. Knowledge is good; it’s just not God.
“You can master ten languages, hold three degrees, and have a shelf full of awards, but the same end awaits us all.”
And that’s where the modern world has stumbled. We’ve confused information with transformation, access with insight, curiosity with faith. We live in an age where ignorance is almost impossible—yet wisdom feels rarer than ever. Every morning, before we even rise from bed, we reach for the glowing little oracle beside us and open the day’s flood of information. News updates, market trends, weather alerts, scores, scandals, opinions—oceans of words, wave upon wave. And still we are restless. We know everything and understand nothing.
Your phone can tell you the number of stars in the Milky Way, the distance to the moon, or the calories in a doughnut. It can give you the facts you want to find. But it cannot tell you why you are lonely, or how to forgive someone who has hurt you, or what to do when the light goes out of a loved one’s eyes.
Solomon would have understood. “Of making many books there is no end,” he wrote, “and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12, ESV). He said that nearly three thousand years ago—before printing presses, before the internet, before we could scroll endlessly through “books without end.”
Solomon says it plainly: that study itself can exhaust the soul. “Much study is a weariness of the flesh.” (Ecclesiastes 12:12) It’s not the fatigue of learning—it’s the fatigue of never arriving. The mind, like the eye and ear, is never satisfied. The more we know, the more we realize how much we don’t. A century ago, the world’s information doubled every hundred years. Now it doubles every twelve hours.
“It’s not the fatigue of learning—it’s the fatigue of never arriving.”
We are drowning in what Solomon would call “vanity”—hebel in Hebrew—vapor, breath, a mist that glimmers and vanishes. We’ve built a civilization of data, but not of depth. Our universities overflow with facts yet starve for meaning. Our newsfeeds are updated by the second, yet we’re unsure whom to trust. We’re like travelers carrying an atlas but forgetting the destination. That’s the vanity of information: it multiplies without making us wise.
Let me give you another biblical picture.
In Acts 17, Paul arrives in Athens—the Silicon Valley of the ancient world. Marble colonnades line the streets, philosophers debate in the marketplace, and shrines to every god imaginable decorate the skyline.
Luke adds a curious note: “Now all the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new” (Acts 17:21, ESV).
That could be the mission statement of our age, too, couldn’t it?
According to a recent study from the University of Maine, people today use an average of 6.6 different social networks each month, spending about 2 hours and 24 minutes a day scrolling, posting, refreshing—always telling or hearing something new.
The Athenians didn’t suffer from a lack of curiosity; they suffered from addiction to novelty.
And into that whirlwind of opinion, Paul stands up and preaches the most unfashionable message imaginable: the resurrection of the dead.
Not a new theory.
Not an innovative system.
Not a rebrand of Stoicism or Epicureanism.
A resurrection.
“The Athenians didn’t suffer from a lack of curiosity; they suffered from addiction to novelty.”
Paul’s Athenian sermon became the seed of his letter to another knowledge-obsessed city—Corinth. Later, Paul would write to the Corinthians, reflecting on that very moment: “For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Corinthians 1:22–23, ESV).
In other words, God refuses to play by the world’s categories of credibility. The Jews wanted proof, the Greeks wanted philosophy, but God gave them something that looked like neither: a crucified and risen Savior.
To the world, that message still sounds absurd. The cross looks like failure. The resurrection looks like wishful thinking. Yet, Paul insists, “the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men” (1 Corinthians 1:25, ESV).
We are not saved by what we know. We are saved by whom we trust.
You can learn all about nutrition—my wife, in fact, has a degree and multiple certifications in that field. You can learn all about fitness, all about economics and financial planning, and still go to the grave with a full head of information and a heart empty of hope.
Knowledge can extend your life, but it cannot resurrect it.
You can count your calories, balance your books, and still die in your sins.
Only Jesus Christ—crucified for your sin and risen from the tomb—can lift you from the dust.
“Only Jesus Christ—crucified for your sin and risen from the tomb—can lift you from the dust.”
That is the foolishness of the cross: that what looks like defeat is victory; what looks like weakness is power; what looks like the end of knowledge is the beginning of wisdom.
At Athens, they sneered when they heard about the resurrection. At Corinth, they scoffed at the cross. But Paul preached it anyway—because the wisdom of this world, dressed in all its learning, still cannot save itself.
The gospel does not flatter the intellect; it humbles it. It tells us that all our libraries, our degrees, our brilliance, all our progress, all our titles, all our charitable contributions and memorial bricks—none of it can break the silence of a tomb. Only a voice stronger than death can do that and raise us also from the dead.
When Paul later wrote to Corinth—another city bursting with ideas—he warned, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Corinthians 8:1). The danger is clear: knowledge inflates the ego; love enlarges the heart.
There’s such a thing as gnostic pride—the “know-it-all syndrome.” It doesn’t just make you unteachable; it makes you unloving.
Because with knowledge comes, like anything else, a temptation to the pride of possession. You begin to treat what you know as leverage instead of light. You start to look down on your brother or sister, as if insight were altitude and you’ve somehow climbed higher. But that’s not love. Paul says love builds up. It never looks down. It doesn’t tower over; it edifies.
“Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” (Ephesians 4:15, ESV)
“Speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”
Love always builds in the upward direction—toward Christ, not toward self, and not looking down.
Knowledge without love stacks bricks of pride; love, joined to truth, raises a temple fit for the Spirit of God.
Knowledge makes you clever; love makes you kind.
It’s possible to be brilliant and brittle, educated and empty. The more we know, the easier it becomes to treat others as topics rather than people.
That’s what Solomon means by “weariness of the flesh.” Study doesn’t just make you need coffee. Knowledge without love will exhaust you. It makes you heavy with pride and light on mercy.
Wisdom isn’t in what facts you can recall at what speed. AI has already got us beat on that front.
Here’s where wisdom really lies: in how deeply you’re willing to trust, to commit your heart to Him in faith and obedience. Ask Him to give you wisdom—to see the world more nearly as He sees it. The promise in James says that if anyone lacks wisdom, he should ask God, “who gives generously to all without finding fault” (James 1:5). And He will answer.
“Ask Him to give you wisdom—to see the world more nearly as He sees it.”
Solomon’s story proves it. When he first became king, he was just a young man overwhelmed by the weight of the crown. One night, God appeared to him in a dream and said, “Ask for whatever you want Me to give you.” Now imagine that! The Almighty offers you a blank check. Most of us would’ve asked for wealth, health, or a little less stress. But Solomon didn’t. He said, “Give your servant a discerning heart to govern your people and to distinguish between right and wrong.” And the Bible says God was pleased with that request. Not only did He give Solomon wisdom, but He gave him everything else besides (1 Kings 3:5–14).
That’s the pattern of God’s generosity: Seek wisdom first, and all these things will be added to you.
Solomon began well. And though he didn’t always walk perfectly, his early prayer stands as a model for us: ask God to make you wise, not just smart—to give you insight that leads to obedience.
If you’re young—remember your Creator.
If you’re middle-aged—remember Him still.
If you’re aged—remember Him.
And if you’re in your twilight—remember that if His eye is on the sparrow, it’s surely on you.
Life is not a mystery to be solved or a question to be answered. Life—abundant, eternal life—is found in knowing Christ Jesus, crucified, buried, and risen as Lord.
“Life—abundant, eternal life—is found in knowing Christ Jesus, crucified, buried, and risen as Lord.”
So let’s bring this down where we live.
It’s one thing to talk about Eden and serpents, knowledge and trees—but at the end of the day, you and I have to decide what we’re going to reach for when we get up in the morning.
In your prayers, ask the Holy Spirit to give you wisdom—to open your eyes to the patterns of Scripture, that is, to see the world as it really is in light of God’s revelation. Don’t just see their stories as Sunday school memories; see your story in light of what’s been revealed.
Secondly, put down the phone and pick up the Tree—reality, that is. Every morning, before you pick up your phone for the latest novelty, open the scriptures instead—like Andy memorizing Psalm 23 on his dangerous walk.
Stop doom scrolling at lunch and at night for five hours. Let the living Word take root in your heart. Meditate on one section of Scripture or story until it branches into your day, guarding you from the serpent’s whisper of endless and frequently unverified or decontextualized information. Pray for discernment in how you’re being discipled by your algorithm.
Whether you’re young and chasing wisdom, middle-aged and weary from study, or aged and facing the golden bowl’s break—fear God, keep His commandments, and trust the risen Lord.
Surrender your atlas of facts to the One who parts waters and raises the dead. In Him, your story takes root and bears fruit that lasts. And when it’s all said and done, wisdom won’t be found in what you know but in who you know.
