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the flesh, but after the Spirit" (Romans 8:1-4)

So, if the "law of sin and death" was so toxic, why did a good God impose such misery on Mankind?

The answer, as I said earlier, lies at the very beginning of the Bible, in the book we call Genesis, but in Hebrew is simply "Bereshith", meaning "In-the-Beginning".

You remember the stuff about Adam and Eve and the snake and the trees!

Well, the trees were both real and symbolic. They had branches and leaves and roots and fruit like every other tree. But they were also very different. Both were freely accessible and the one called "the tree of life" bore fruit that man was free to eat. The other tree, however, was called "the tree of the knowledge of good and evil" and although accessible, its fruit was forbidden to Adam as food.

That was the visible reality: Two trees in the midst of Eden; two quite different destinies. Because, the tree of life' represented God's grace openly accessible, with freely available and unearned fruit, there for the taking. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil' was quite different. Of the fruit of that tree, God cautioned, Adam was not to eat, because it represented "the law of sin and death", and eating of it would submit Adam and all his descendents to such consequences as he could hardly begin to envisage. But God put it more simply by saying: "In dying you shall die!"

Tragically, Adam did eat of it, and the consequences that God had promised would ensue, spilled out as surely as if Adam had opened Pandora's box.

And that's why, one of Jesus' titles in (1 Corinthians 15:45) is "the Last Adam"; because he was appointed by God the Father to unravel the terrible mess that the First Adam had left.

Another title given to Jesus, we already read in Hebrews 9:15, where he is called "the mediator of the new covenant".

And a mediator' is one who stands in the middle to make reconciliation possible. God often spoke in the Old Testament of looking for one to stand in the gap' to intercede for his people, that he may extend his mercy to them. Often, he was heartbroken that there was no-one willing to do so, and declared that he would ultimately provide just such a one by himself.

Indeed, the Hebrew for priest kohen' (or, cohen'), simply means, one-who-stands', and Jesus is our High Priest.

So it was, one Passover afternoon, that Jesus hung on a tree, between two criminals each hanging on their own tree, each tree once again representing grace' and law'.

The criminal hanging on the law-tree', venomously

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