One of the issues with claiming Jesus is the tree of life is that in doing so, it ignores the larger context that the tree of life is in.
For example, on a pro-LC blog, agodman.com, they say:
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God put man in front of the tree of life to show him that this should be his source, his everything; the tree of life is God Himself in the form of food for man to take in."
So first of all we actually have an all-mighty, infinite, Creator God who speaks things into being who.......became actual food that goes through our digestive system? Utterly ridiculous.
Here is another quote from the blog:
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The Bible clearly shows us that God doesn’t want us to do the right thing and not do the wrong thing – God wants us to eat Him as the tree of life. The principle of the Christian life is not doing the right things vs not doing the wrong things but taking care of the tree of life. The tree of life is meant to be the center of our Christian life and church life. Besides the tree of life there’s another tree – the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which brings in death. Many people think that since the Bible is “the good Book”, it teaches us about good and evil, encouraging us to do good and not do evil. But the truth is that the Bible doesn’t teach us to do good, and the Bible doesn’t teach us to do evil either. The Bible teaches us God as life to man. The principle of good and evil is not Christianity – it is something pagan, foreign from God."
I think anyone with a brain can see the problems here. They think that eating the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was what killed Adam and Eve, but as usual they completely skip over the crucial information about the tree of life - that losing access to it was punishment for Adam and Eve's sin, and that's where death came in.
In so doing, they lambast anything related to knowledge or good (and evil, but that part's accurate), and all of a sudden, the Jesus who is the tree of life is somehow contrary to knowledge or good.....contrary to using your own mind and contrary to discerning right from wrong. Discerning good from evil - which the Bible clearly says is an attribute of God - is somehow "pagan" and "foreign from God".
That's the fuller picture in the LC landscape that makes me care about whether calling Jesus the tree of life is biblical or not.
Lastly, somehow in Witness Lee's mind, everything is simply everything. The Son actually is the Father, we are God, and now the tree of life is Jesus. He's created a world without distinctions. And if Jesus is the tree of life, the importance of the fact that God punished Adam and Eve with death for their sin has been swallowed up in the metaphor.
It's like stealing a $10 bill from your dad's wallet, and being punished by not being allowed to eat the chocolate cake after dinner that your mom just made. Your sibling takes the blame for you and you go around telling everyone that "my brother is my cake".
It gets old. And it just creates a world of confusion where everything represents everything else and it becomes ripe for all the abusive tactics the local church uses.
Trapped