Is Christianity good?
Is Christianity beautiful?
Is Christianity true?
If you’ve ever stood halfway out the church door, you’ve asked some version of those three. They’re fair questions, and old ones. The first person to weigh them was standing in a garden, looking at a tree.
“The woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom. So she took some of its fruit and ate it; she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.” (Genesis 3:6)
Good for food. Delightful to look at. Desirable for wisdom. Good, beautiful, and true, in that order, in one verse. The third phrase doesn’t say true, but it names the same hunger: to know what’s real, and to know it yourself.
Genesis 3 says plenty about those questions. Most of it is about the one asking.
For a long time, the church answered these questions from the bottom up. Is it true? Here’s the evidence for the resurrection. Settle the truth, and goodness and beauty will follow.
More people now come at it from the top. They want to know whether this faith is good, and whether it’s lovely. The arguments can wait.
The dechurched especially. If your church protected an abuser, you don’t want a lecture on the empty tomb. Question one is answered. If faith felt like a rulebook and a fog machine, question two is answered. Question three never gets a hearing.
I won’t wave those answers off. A faith that wounds people should have to answer for it.
Ready for one that may step on your toes a little bit more?
Every one of us asks these questions from somewhere, usually from the judge’s bench, with Christianity as the defendant. That posture feels like the only honest one. The alternative is getting fooled twice.
Genesis 3 is the story of the first time someone took that seat.
Before the serpent says a word, Genesis 2 has already answered two of the three questions.
“The LORD God caused to grow out of the ground every tree pleasing in appearance and good for food . . .” (Genesis 2:9)
Pleasing in appearance. Good for food. Every tree. When 3:6 calls the forbidden tree good and lovely, it tells us what was true of the whole orchard. That tree had nothing on the others for flavor or looks.
It offered one thing the rest didn’t. The Hebrew makes the point quietly: “desirable” in 3:6 (nechmad) is the same word 2:9 uses for trees “pleasing” to the eye. The word for the beauty God gave now describes a wisdom she plans to take.
Good: who gets to say it
Six times in Genesis 1, God saw that it was good. The seventh is the verdict: “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good indeed” (1:31). Genesis 3:6 opens the same way: the woman saw that the tree was good. Same verb, same verdict, different one doing the seeing.
The serpent set that up. God’s first word to Adam was generosity: “You are free to eat from any tree of the garden” (2:16). The serpent’s opening line flips the ratio: “Did God really say, ‘You can’t eat from any tree in the garden’?” (3:1). Then he supplies the motive: “God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God” (3:5). God isn’t generous. He’s guarding His turf.
Once God looks like a withholder, someone else has to decide what’s good. Before she took the fruit, she took the verdict.
Beautiful: what the eyes were for
The tree was delightful to look at because God made it so. Beauty isn’t the villain here. But her eyes now work under someone else’s promise: “your eyes will be opened.”
And they were. “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (3:7). The serpent technically kept his promise. The first thing they saw was themselves, and they couldn’t stand it.
They reached for something lovely and ended up hiding in the bushes.
True: wisdom you can take
The serpent never mentions how the fruit tastes or looks. His whole pitch is about what God said. He misquotes God (3:1). Then he repeats God’s warning, “you will certainly die” (2:17), almost exactly, and adds one word: not (3:4).
That order matters. Once she believes his account of what’s real, the good and the beautiful rearrange themselves around it. The fruit didn’t change. Her story about God did, and her eyes followed.
Interpreters disagree about exactly what “knowing good and evil” means. In context, the most natural reading is that it means claiming the right to decide good and evil for yourself. That’s why the wisdom is taken. Scripture’s wisdom starts elsewhere: “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). She wanted wisdom without Him, and got the knowledge of shame.
In Eden, we reached for a tree to become like God. On Calvary, Christ hung on a tree to make us like Him.
Redemptive Correlation reads the culture’s questions through Scripture, carrying them across the whole story: Creation, Fall, Redemption, Restoration. Genesis 3 is only the second act.
Creation: given. Good, beautiful, and true arrived as gifts before they were ever questions. Even the truth about the forbidden tree came freely. God told Adam plainly, ahead of time, what it would cost (2:17). Nobody had to pry it out of Him.
Fall: grasped. Taken on our terms, all three curdled. Good became a verdict we issue. Beauty became something we hide from. Wisdom became the knowledge of our own nakedness. Then, in the same chapter, the gift returns: “The LORD God made clothing from skins for the man and his wife, and he clothed them” (3:21). God covers what fig leaves couldn’t.
Redemption: received. Where Adam reached, Christ refused to. He “did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited” (Philippians 2:6). Then He went to a tree as the one being given: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree” (1 Peter 2:24).
He calls Himself “the good shepherd” (John 10:11), and the Greek kalos means both “good” and “beautiful.” He calls Himself “the truth” (John 14:6). The three things Eden grabbed for turn out to be a person, and He offers Himself.
Restoration: given back. The Bible ends at a tree: “The tree of life was on each side of the river, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit every month” (Revelation 22:2). Good for food again. The eyes get what they were made for: “They will see his face” (22:4). And the mind gets its wisdom: “I will know fully, as I am fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). All three come back the way they first came, as gifts.
Some of us have spent years proving Christianity is true. But the people around us are asking two other questions first, and they’re answering them by watching us.
If your theology is airtight and your life isn’t good, you’ve told your neighbor something false about God. Paul aimed this at false teachers in Crete, and it stings because it can describe us: “They claim to know God, but they deny him by their works” (Titus 1:16).
Ouch.
That’s orthodoxy without orthopraxy, and Jesus expected the opposite: “let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:16). The world isn’t wrong to ask whether we’re good. Jesus told them to look.
If someone watched your home, your church, and your feed for a month, would they find anything good or beautiful enough to make them wonder whether it’s true?
You may be right about the church you left. Some of what you saw wasn’t good or beautiful, and the people responsible will answer for it.
But notice what you’ve kept. You still believe some things are good and some evil. You still know beauty when you see it. You still want the truth, or you wouldn’t have left because of a lie. Genesis says all three came from the same Giver. You can’t keep the gifts and put Him on trial.
So bring your questions to Jesus Himself, not His worst representatives. When Nathanael doubted anything good could come from Nazareth, Philip didn’t argue. He said, “Come and see” (John 1:46).
That’s still the invitation. Come and see whether He’s good, beautiful, and true. Just come to receive, because Eden showed us what happens when we come to take.
Back to the tree
What would it look like for a church to answer all three questions at once?
What if your congregation was known in town as the people who show up when a marriage falls apart, or a diagnosis comes back bad? What if your Sunday gathering had something a stranger would call lovely, and mean it? What if the truth we preach were the most obvious explanation for how we live?
The watching world would start asking a new question: “Where does this come from?” The answer is a person, and He’s been giving Himself away since Genesis 3:21.
In Eden, we reached for a tree to become like God. On Calvary, Christ hung on a tree to make us like Him. At the end of the story, a tree stands on both banks of the river, heavy with fruit every month.
No one will ever have to reach for it again.