Not an Apple

Every time I talk to God, He's eating an apple.  I shared that much with you on Friday.

At first, I was amused.  Because if anyone can eat an apple, I thought, certainly it is God.  (And certainly, it is not Eve.)  But the more I thought about it, the more I simply wondered: Why is it we always think of Eve eating an apple in the Garden?  The Bible simply says "fruit."

Eve picked fruit from the tree and ate it.  She shared that fruit with Adam.  After being specifically instructed not to eat the fruit of that particular tree.  Where's the apple?

We probably picked up the apple because it is particularly identifiable in pictures, which is how we all first learned about the apple.  Vacation Bible School, church preschool, wherever - I didn't even grow up in the church but I remember distinctly at these two places coloring pictures of two people in a garden eating apples.

Color an orange.  Are they eating a basketball?  Grapes.  What are those little candies they have?  Peach.  What even is that?  Pear.  Visually identifiable, but how common is it to see a whole pear?  Banana.  This image just makes me laugh.  Is the banana the source of all knowledge?  Regardless...we pick up on the apple right away.

There's another reason, though, that I like the apple.  It is one of few fruits with a core.

That speaks to me.  At the center of all knowledge and at the center of life itself, there is a core.  We know that core to be Christ, but back then, it was a little...juicier.  It was a fruit.  But I think that's just a beautiful image that when we start to eat and partake of this goodness and knowledge and life of God, we nibble down to a core.

A peach, an avocado, a mango - these have pits.  It's easy some days to feel like at its depths, life is a pit, but that's not entirely truth.  It would seem awkward to have a piece of fruit be the bearer of all knowledge and life only to have a remnant so hard and callous and thistly as a pit left over to be disposed of.  We can rule pitted fruits out.

Fruits like the banana and the orange have nothing particularly definable in their center.  There's not a part of these I personally dispose of while eating - except, of course, the peel, which presents two problems with this category of fruit.  1) Would knowledge - as created in the Garden in its most perfect form - come with a peel?  And 2) Would it have nothing at its center?  Of course not.  We can rule peeled, empty fruits out.

There are fruits that do not grow on trees.  Watermelon and grapes grow on vines.  Tomatoes, too.  (Yes, that's a fruit.)  So we can rule vined fruits out, as well.

Which brings us back to the core issue.  That is, the fruit with a core.  Some could argue that like the pit of a fruit, there are those among us who discard cores, as well.  This is true, but you don't have to. There are many others who eat every bite of an apple and leave only the stem and the seeds.  So in our cored fruits not otherwise excluded for having a pit, having a peel, or lacking a center, we are down to apples and pears and persimmons.

No, the source all knowledge and all life wouldn't have to be a cored fruit; it could have been anything that grows on a tree.  I'm not trying to paint God into a box.  But let's be honest about our Creator for a second.  You know He put a core in the center of the fruit.

Every time I talk to God, He's eating an apple.  After much consideration, I've decided it wouldn't have to be.  He could be eating a pear.  (And for giggles, the occasional banana.)