Part 1: Two Trees, Two Rivers
“My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:30
“If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water.” John 7:37-38
“All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.” Isaiah 64:6
Simple
In the beginning, things were simple. And I mean REALLY simple. God made a garden, put two people in it, and walked with them. Not above them. Not ahead of them. Not sending memos from head office. WITH them. Adam and Eve didn’t have a religion. They didn’t have a prayer routine or a Sunday service or a worship team with matching T-shirts. They had something infinitely better — they had GOD, right there, in the cool of the day. No program. No bulletin. No awkward greeting time where you shake hands with someone whose name you’ve already forgotten three times. Just walking with God.
And here’s what I want you to notice, because this is the foundation of everything we’re going to talk about in this series: they weren’t TRYING to be righteous. They just WERE. They were wrapped up in God’s righteousness like a child is wrapped up in their parent’s love — not earning it, not thinking about it, not filling out an application form for it, just LIVING in it. They didn’t know any other way. Jesus said something centuries later that sounds a lot like the Garden: “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30). THAT’S what it was like. No striving. No performing. Just walking with God. HOW COOL IS THAT?!
Two Trees
But there were two trees in that garden. And this is where the whole story of humanity pivots, so pay attention.
The Tree of Life stood right there in the middle of it — open, available, offering everything they’d ever need. And then there was the OTHER tree. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The one God said to leave alone. Just one rule. ONE. And if you’ve ever been a parent, you know exactly how this is going to go.
Now the serpent was cunning. He didn’t come to Eve with an ugly lie. He came with a BEAUTIFUL one. He said, “God knows that in the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:5). Do you hear what he’s REALLY saying? “You can be righteous on your own terms. You don’t need to depend on Him.” Let me tell you, that whisper has been echoing through every generation since, and it sounds just as reasonable today as it did in the Garden. It’s the oldest sales pitch in history, and people are STILL buying it.
And that was the real sin. Not just biting into a piece of fruit. It was Eve deciding, “I’ll determine for MYSELF what’s good.” It was Adam standing RIGHT THERE — the man was literally within arm’s reach, he didn’t even have the excuse of being in the next room — taking it from her hand, and making the same choice. They traded God’s righteousness for self-righteousness. They stepped out of His covering and tried to cover themselves. And what did they do next? They sewed fig leaves together. They HID. That’s what self-righteousness ALWAYS does — it covers and it hides. It performs and it pretends. And if you’ve ever tried to make yourself look good with the wrong materials, you know how that goes. Fig leaves don’t exactly hold up in the wash. They’re not even good in a salad.
God came walking through the garden — the same way He always did — and called out, “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). Not because He didn’t know. He’s GOD. He knew exactly where they were hiding. He asked because He wanted THEM to see where they’d gone. They’d stepped out of the river of Life and into another current entirely.
Two Rivers
I want you to picture two rivers flowing out of that garden. Because that’s exactly what happened, and this picture is going to carry us through this entire series.
One river flows from the Tree of Life. It’s fed by God’s righteousness — His goodness, His truth, His love. It runs clear and straight. It has run since the beginning, and it will run FOREVER. The other river flows from the fruit of that other tree. It’s fed by self-righteousness — man deciding for himself what’s right, what’s good, what’s true. And that river? It TWISTS. It turns. It looks refreshing in places, but it’s polluted at the source. You can put it in a fancy bottle and slap a label on it, but it’s still contaminated water.
Every human being born after Adam and Eve has been born near those two rivers. And every one of us, at some point, has to decide which one we’re drinking from. The Bible tells us that things got so bad, so fast, that within a handful of generations, “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5). Self-righteousness had flooded the whole earth. So God sent an actual flood to wash it away. He saved Noah and his family — eight people out of the WHOLE WORLD — and started again. But here’s the hard truth: the seed of self-righteousness survived. It lives in us. Every one of us carries it. Noah’s descendants proved that soon enough.
The Levee
So God did something different. He raised up Moses, a prophet, and through him He gave the Law. Now, I used to think the Law was a signpost — something that pointed toward righteousness, showed people the way, and left them to follow it. But I don’t think that’s right. I think the truth is deeper and harder than that. Israel had been so polluted by the world that they couldn’t run straight on their own. They had been in Egypt for four hundred years. Four HUNDRED years. And Egypt wasn’t just a place — the Hebrew word for Egypt is mitzrayim, which literally means “narrow places.” They had been squeezed, oppressed, and shaped by a pagan culture for generations. And even after God brought them out with signs and wonders and a parted sea, their hearts kept pulling them back. They grumbled. They complained. They wanted to go BACK. “We remember the fish we ate in Egypt at no cost” (Numbers 11:5). They were FREE, and they were homesick for slavery.
So what does God do with a river that won’t run straight? He builds a levee. The Law was God’s way of FORCING the river to run where it should, because men’s hearts wouldn’t do it on their own. It wasn’t a gentle suggestion. It wasn’t a signpost saying “righteousness this way.” It was rigid, it was absolute, and it had to be — because their hearts were too crooked to hold the water. Where love SHOULD have guided them, rigidity had to step in. God essentially said, “Since you won’t walk in My righteousness by love, I will give you a structure so that you walk in SOME semblance of it until your hearts are ready.”
And then, after years in the wilderness — years of manna and murmuring, years of the Law shaping them, years of God patiently channelling that crooked river — they came to the edge of the Promised Land. And look at what God calls it. A land flowing with milk and honey. Milk in Scripture represents nourishment, sustenance, the basic provision of God — Peter tells us to crave “pure spiritual milk” so we can grow (1 Peter 2:2). And honey? Honey represents sweetness, delight, the very words of God — “How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (Psalm 119:103). And here’s something beautiful: milk and honey are both produced without killing anything. They represent LIFE. Abundant life. The opposite of mitzrayim — the narrow places. God was saying, “I’m bringing you out of the narrow places, out of oppression, into a place of nourishment and sweetness and LIFE where you can walk with Me again.” It’s an echo of the Garden.
And right there, at the border of that abundant life, Moses gives them something extraordinary. Not another rule. Not another regulation. An INVITATION. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Do you hear what Moses is saying? He’s saying, “The levee has held you this far. But where you’re going, you don’t need the levee anymore. Let your heart run straight on its own. LOVE Him. Not because the Law forces you to, but because He has brought you out of Egypt, through the wilderness, and to the edge of everything He promised.” THAT’S IT. That was the whole thing. If they had grabbed hold of that one command — really GRABBED hold of it — it would have carried them right back to what Adam and Eve had in the garden. Walking with God. Resting in His righteousness. Not striving in their own. The river running clear and straight, not because of the levee, but because of LOVE.
But they didn’t. They took the land of milk and honey and they hardened their hearts all over again. And by the time we get to the Pharisees and the Sadducees, centuries later, they had turned the levee into a RELIGION. They worshiped the structure instead of the God behind it. They polished the outside of the cup while the inside was filthy (Matthew 23:25). They tithed their mint and dill and cumin but neglected justice, mercy, and faithfulness (Matthew 23:23)*. The levee that was meant to hold them until love could take over had become the very thing they hid behind. And the river of self-righteousness was flowing stronger than ever. The prophet Isaiah said it plainly: “All our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isaiah 64:6). Our BEST efforts, apart from God, are filthy rags. Not because we’re worthless — God forbid — but because self-righteousness can never do what God’s righteousness does. It can never make us clean. It can never make us whole. It can never give us LIFE.
*Note: The Law of Moses required tithes on crops like grain, oil, and wine (Leviticus 27:30, Deuteronomy 14:22). It said nothing about garden herbs. Mint, dill, and cumin were the smallest, most insignificant things growing in their gardens, and the Pharisees extended the tithing law beyond what God ever required. They built the levee higher for everyone else while giving God their mint leaves.
The River Never Stopped
But God never stopped flowing. That river from the Tree of Life NEVER dried up. It runs through Abraham. It runs through David. It runs through every prophet who had the courage to say, “Thus says the Lord.” And it is always heading somewhere. Or rather, it is always heading toward SOMEONE. “For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). The Law was the levee. Jesus is the river itself — running straight, running true, running free.
Everything — from the garden to the flood to the wilderness to the prophets —points to Him. He is the Tree of Life in human form. He is the river of God’s righteousness made flesh. He didn’t just TEACH righteousness. He IS the full embodiment of God’s righteousness. And He stands today, the same as He stood two thousand years ago, and offers the simplest invitation in the world: “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water'” (John 7:37-38).
Two trees. Two rivers. One choice. You don’t have to earn it. You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to sew fig leaves together and pretend you’ve got it all figured out. You just have to come to Him and drink. THAT’S where the power of righteousness begins. Not in you. In HIM.
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A Moment Before You Go
Lord, I don’t want to sew fig leaves together anymore. I don’t want to hide from You or pretend I’ve got it all figured out. I’m thirsty, and I’ve been drinking from the wrong river. Lead me back to the Tree of Life. Lead me back to You. In Jesus’ name, amen.
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A.W. Tozer wrote, “The whole course of the life is upset by failure to put God where He belongs. We exalt ourselves instead of God, and the curse follows.” Jesus put God exactly where He belongs — at the centre of everything. That’s the righteousness we’re invited into.
C.S. Lewis said, “We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are rebels who must lay down our arms.” The fig leaves were the first act of rebellion. Laying them down is the first act of coming home.
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Next: The Power of Righteousness — Part 2: The Watergate
i-CH