Fundamentally, the central purpose of the law was to drive us beyond it to Christ. By condemning us, the law exposes the impossibility of our ever living in perfect union with God so long as our relationship is filtered by our knowledge of good and evil. The law thereby prepares us to receive God’s judgment of our rebellious knowledge in Christ and opens us up to being reconciled with God in Jesus Christ. In his mercy, the all-holy God works...

As we are slowly unwrapping the dynamic between the truth and the lie in the Genesis narrative of the fall, we have found that the lie about God and the lie about us is overcome by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. God warned Adam and Eve that eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil would bring death. Consequently, Adam and Eve passed from the realm of life, which is relationship with God, into the realm of death,...

We have neglected the biblical teaching that the origin and essence of sin is rooted in the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 3:1-5). Consequently, we have tended to define sin as that which is evil, over against that which is good, rather than defining it more profoundly as that which is not in union with Christ, whether “good” or “evil.” Consequently, the church has tended to focus on symptoms rather than on the source of the disease. We...

Everything we are in Christ, and thus everything we are called to be in Christ, is summed up in the word love [agape]. To truly love God includes loving others with the same love God has for us and the same love God has for them (John 13:34). This is part of what it means to be a participant in the divine nature. It is, in fact, what it means to be Christian (Christ-like). The central mark of a maturing Christian, and of a maturing...