Pillar 4 — Biblical Spirituality
We died to the old tree.
The law was good. The tree was good. Neither could give life. Paul knew why — and the answer changes everything about how we understand the cross, the body, and what we are actually reaching for.
If you’re asking…
Why does religious effort — even sincere, disciplined effort — keep leaving me empty?
What did Paul actually mean when he said “the power of sin is the law”?
Is there a connection between the garden, the law, and what happens in my body when I try to be good?
What does the cross actually solve — at the level of mechanism, not just metaphor?
A thought experiment
What if the moral law Paul describes in Romans — the one written into the conscience of every human being, the one that condemns us all — is somehow connected to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Not identical, perhaps. But an echo. A shadow. What if they are, in some deep architectural sense, the same reality operating in different registers?
Don’t close the idea down yet. Let it breathe.
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.
1 Corinthians 15:56
Sin needs a mechanism. A leverage point. Something to work through. And that instrument — that power base — is the law. If the law and the tree are connected, then what sin uses as its power, it may once have found in a garden. In fruit. In a reach toward independence that looked entirely reasonable at the time.
The first thing to establish: the tree was good
This is critical and almost always missed. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not a dark tree. It was not labelled poison. The record says it was good for food, pleasing to the eye, desirable for gaining wisdom. It was genuinely, actually good.
And so is the law.
So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.
Romans 7:12
Holy. Righteous. Good. The tree was good. The law is good. And yet Paul raises a devastating possibility:
For if a law had been given that could give life, then righteousness would indeed be by the law.
Galatians 3:21
If a law had been given that could give life. Follow that thread back into the garden. If a tree had been given that could give life — it would look something like that tree. Good. Wise. Desirable. The very thing you’d reach for if you were trying to become what you were made to be.
What the law exposes
For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead.
Romans 7:7–8
The law doesn’t create sin. It surfaces it. It reaches into the motivational core and reveals what is already there — the deep hunger for self-determination, the quiet insistence that we can be our own source, our own standard, our own gods.
You shall not covet — and immediately, covetousness stirs. Not because the commandment is bad. But because it illuminates a desire to grasp after something beyond our boundary, a reach toward a life we were not designed to generate on our own.
Sound familiar?
You shall not eat from that tree — and immediately, the desire surfaces. Good for food. Desirable for wisdom. We could be like God. We could know. We could govern ourselves.
The tree exposed the motive. The law echoes it.
Both are revealing the same ancient orientation of the human heart: I want to be my own source. I want the energy of life to come from within me.
The problem is not evil. It’s the flesh.
And the flesh, Paul is careful to tell us, is not evil. It is simply insufficient. It does not contain the energy of genuine goodness.
For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh.
Romans 7:18
Remember what Jesus said when a rich young ruler called him “Good Teacher”? Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. Only one is good. Only God carries within himself the actual energy of goodness — the divine momentum that can actually fulfil what the law requires and what the tree promised.
What if goodness isn’t just a moral quality — but an energy? A divine frequency that has only one source? If that is true, then to look for it in the flesh is not just difficult. It is structurally impossible. Every reach toward self-sufficiency — every attempt to generate life from within our own willpower, our own religious effort — is a hand extended toward a tree that cannot give what we are actually hungry for.
For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
Romans 7:19
This is not a man describing laziness. This is a man describing a structural reality. The flesh reaches, and the flesh comes up empty, and the pattern repeats. The tree of knowledge cannot give the life it seems to promise. The law cannot generate the goodness it rightfully requires.
The answer had to arrive at the same location
For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
Romans 8:3–4
The righteous requirement — everything the law demanded, everything the tree seemed to offer — fulfilled in us. Not by us. In us. By those energised not by the flesh, but by the Spirit.
The Divine did not send a better law. He did not plant a better tree. He sent His Son. And His Son went to the only place that could settle this once and for all.
Jesus died on a tree.
The power of sin is the law. And the law’s shadow reaches all the way back to a garden. And in a moment outside time, the Son of God took that entire mechanism — the self-sourcing, the independence, the reaching of flesh toward a goodness it could never contain — and condemned it. In the flesh. On a tree.
We died on the old tree.
We are born on the new one.
Go deeper
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Seven Spirits
The biblical framework for understanding the fullness of God — and how it becomes available to all, not just a gifted few.
The Spirit is the energy the flesh never carried.
We don’t generate this. We don’t achieve it through effort or discipline or religious seeking. We receive it. We discover it. The Spiritual Realities Academy is where this practice lives — in community, in real time.