466. The Fact That Two Trees - the Tree of Life, and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil [Genesis 2:9] - Were Placed in the Garden of Eden Means That Free Choice in Spiritual Matters Has Been Granted to Humankind

Many have come to believe that Adam and Eve in the Book of Moses do not mean the first created people. They support their position with evidence that people existed before Adam, which is based on calculations and the chronologies of various peoples. They also point to what Cain, the firstborn of Adam, said to Jehovah:

"I will be a wanderer and an itinerant on the earth - whoever encounters me will kill me. " Therefore Jehovah placed a mark on Cain so that whoever encountered him would not kill him. (Genesis 4:14-15)

And after he left the presence of Jehovah, he lived in the land of Nod and built a city. (Genesis 4:16-17)

Therefore the land was inhabited before Adam.

But Adam and his wife mean the earliest church on this planet. This is demonstrated in a number of ways in Secrets of Heaven, which I published in London. That work also indicates that the Garden of Eden means the wisdom of the people of that church; the tree of life means the Lord is in us and we are in the Lord; the tree of the knowledge of good and evil means we are not in the Lord but in a sense of our own autonomy instead, like people who believe that they do everything, even what is good, on their own; and eating from this tree means incorporating evil into ourselves.

The number "four" in the Bible represents things being linked together or joined. This is partly because four is two times two, and two represents the ultimate linking between our desire to be good and our understanding of truth. We can also see this in the fact that most buildings are rectangular, with the four sides linking together to make a whole. We also divide directions into four -- north, east, south and west -- and talk about the "four corners" of something meaning all of it. So our special thinking naturally looks at four sides as linking together into a whole.

(Odkazy: Apocalypse Explained 417; Arcana Coelestia 1686, 9103, 9601, 9767, 9864)