God’s sentence of death… was it due to legal judgment or was it not a sentence of a judge at all but just a warning of fact that the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was a poison to Adam?

It was a judicial death sentence.

The exile from the Garden of Eden indicates that the fruit of the Tree of Immortal Life was already a part of the provision for Adam.  Had they not sinned it would have been ready for them.

What was this?  Would it have caused a new creation for adam to eat this?  No. How then could have it brought immortal life, since this first order of creation cannot sustain immortal life?

Lack of information about this is clearly an aspect of the exile.  

Corresponding to lack of information about the Tree of Life resulting from our exile from it, we will also learn that a lack of knowledge and even information about the corporate nature of humanity, our own corporate nature, resulted from our exile from the Garden of Eden. For when Adam and Eve, who were the corporate head of humanity, were exiled from the Garden they were no longer able to act naturally and fully in their capacity as the corporate head of humanity. Generation by generation the information about the corporate nature of humanity was lost and our knowledge of our corporate nature was greatly diminished. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes as individuals. The idea that human nature was defined in accordance with the nature of the isolated individual began to arise. This idea was very appealing to the mind of sin, which is a selfish mind.

The corruption in exile from the Garden of Eden of our knowledge of our own corporate human nature compounded our developing ignorance of the Tree of Life and our relationship to it.  God only offered the fruit of the Tree of Life to us through planting it in a garden for Adam, our corporate human head. If the fruit of eternal life was eaten, it would be eaten by one for all.  

The idea in exile, that some people have come up with, that an isolated individual might be able to eat of the fruit of the tree of immortality and live forever apart from corporate humanity is an impossibility. An individual soul might be forever cut off and lost from corporate humanity, if God does not save it, but and individual soul cannot be saved apart from corporate humanity. 

For the nature of humanity is corporate and the individual is made through the human corporate headship which God made.  For the child is born from the relationship of mother and father and God.  Adam and Eve themselves were made and finished in creation as whole individual souls through the same relationship.

Accordingly, in the Revelation of Yehoshua HaMashiach the Tree of Life is made available to all souls through the redeemed and redeeming corporate headship of the Mashiach of Jerusalem himself.  But to fully understand the Tree of Life we must start at the beginning.  We must go back to consider the corporate sentence of death in the sentence of Adam for disobeying the commandment of God.  And we must understand how that sentence of death took the form of our corporate exile from the Tree of Life.

Since death was not a direct automatic result of the chemistry of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but was instead the result of the word of God for disobedience to the commandment, what is this judgment?

We see that this judgment is against failure to obey and eat of the provided fruit and not that fruit which was not provided.

We see, further then, that eating of the fruit of the Tree of Life was commanded, as this fruit was provided in the Garden and was not prohibited.  This observation will lead us to further considerations.

We can ask, why would have Adam not immediately eaten of the fruit of the tree of life.  Again, lack of information about all of these matters is an aspect of our exile from the Garden and from our own access to that tree. Some have speculated that they did eat of it but that it required that they should eat of it in an ongoing manner if it were to sustain them endlessly. This idea can be shown to be inconsistent with further statements of Scripture.

It is also possible to suppose that the fruit of the Tree of Life had not come into season, so to speak.  Indeed, in the Book of the Revelation of Yehoshua HaMashiach the fruit of the Tree of Life is described as being seasonal, uniquely seasonal, but seasonal.

It is not the idea that the fruit of the Tree of Life was made to be eaten on a continuing bases, instead of being a one time act, that is ruled out by Scripture.  It is that it was to be a part of the practical nature of this order of creation, so that Adam would have naturally eaten of it. This is what is ruled out. Immortality is not a natural part of this creation.

The nature of this creation was to be a balance scale to tip either one direction or the other.  Either Adam would go toward eternal life or toward eternal death.  If through obedience, eternal life.  If by disobedience, eternal death.  The first Adam had this power and no more than this power.

Later Scripture would reveal the second Adam, the Son of Adam, the Heir of the World, who would have a greater power, a power to redeem Adam from having fallen toward eternal death.  This is the revelation of the redeemed and redeeming corporate head of sinful and legally dead Adam.

It will be seen that had the first Adam chosen to obey God this could have led to eternal life only through a good form of death for the first corporate head of humanity.  In dying Adam would not have died - would not have ended in death - but in dying would have lived - would have entered eternal life. Therefore God said to them, if you disobey and do not eat of all the fruit of the trees of the garden, but eat of the fruit of the tree that I have forbidden you to eat of instead, “In dying you will die.”  That is, God was saying to them that their death would not be a good death that would lead to their being raised from the dead in a new incorruptible and eternal creation. Instead, they would come to their final end in death.  

This good form of death would, then, have been the death of the old order of creation, the first order.  It would have taken the form of creation being transformed into a new creation.  It was God’s purpose that through Adam’s obedience all the harmonics of creation might be perfectly tuned in and through the one who would be the heir of Adam. 

From the instant they were created, Adam and Eve could only live forever by entering into the death and resurrection of Mashiach, the Son of Adam. They could only do so through obedience to the commandment of God, or through redemption.  Redemption can ultimately be based upon nothing else than upon the restoration of this potential of Adam’s corporate entrance into the death and resurrection of the Son of Adam, the one Anointed by God. This was the power and potential of the fruit of the Tree of Life, had they eaten of it in obedience.  This is the promise of the Torah, which is now given as the embodiment of the Tree of Life and this is the claim of Israel’s Good News, that the Torah of Israel should bring life to the world through the grace and mercy of Israel’s Redeemer.  

What was the relationship of the fruit of the Tree of Life to this potential of eternal life in the Son of Adam? How did the fruit of a tree embody this power and potential?  It might be that we will be made able to see the plan of this potential as it is revealed in the Book of The Revelation of Yehoshua HaMashiach. 

In the redeemed creation, the new creation, we see that the Tree of Life is said to have twelve manner of fruits, one fruit appearing in twelve forms, one for each of twelve months. It is possible to say that this was the nature also of the Tree of Life in the beginning. Adam did not yet eat of the fruit because its fruit for the first month had not yet appeared. In order to obey the commandment to eat of the fruit of all the trees of the garden they would have had to wait for this fruit.  They did not wait on Hashem.

Another approach is one through which we can make a discovery by pursuing the question of where the Tree of Life was in the Garden. 

Scripture speaks of it as being at the center of the Garden, just as it does about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. One line of rabbinic thought is that these two trees grew together almost as one, entwined with one another.  

A certain narrative within rabbinic thought can even be found that suggests that Adam would later have been allowed to eat of the fruit of the Tree of The Knowledge of Good and Evil, upon their maturity in obedience.  So long as such knowledge did not move Adam away from faith in and reliance upon God alone, it may have been something God would supply to Adam at a later time, for the sake of a more mature service.  This thought is very suggestive.  

In order to refine this thought, we might imagine a narrative about these two trees for the sake of illustration. Our narrative would be that the two trees were actually entwined genetically. In the first month the two trees, which were two in the beginning but would become one in the end, would bring forth fruit that possessed the essence of the knowledge of good and evil if eaten byAdam' in a state wherein God prohibited it to Adam. In the first order of creation the two trees would be distinctly two, and while two the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was named by God as not being a tree of the Garden at all.  Should Adam obey and not eat of it, and eat instead of the Tree of Life,  they would sleep in death and awake to be rewarded to find that the two trees became one!  The next month would be to them the first month of the new creation, bringing forth a fruit of another kind for them, a fruit permitted to them, a fruit of the tree of life, removing from them the whole nature of mortality and giving to them through their own freewill the moral power of incorruptibility.  

And so it would go for twelve months.  For most of the month the tree would be the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and would be one whose fruit they needed to wait upon and not eat; and every month at the first of the month the tree would be The Tree of Life to them and as such one that they were commanded to eat from.  At the end of twelve months they would have arrived, through obedience, at a level of immortality that was even higher than the one that they had previously attained, a level that would require a transfiguration of all creation to match the transfiguration that they had themselves arrived at.

Since Adam failed to obey in the very first season of the one tree that was permitted to them, they were driven out of the Garden, and were never allowed to even see the fruit that would lead to immortality.  Yet in this way, by the sentence of death being defined by God in this form, it would it be possible for them to be redeemed by the Son of Adam, so that they could be saved and returned to the Garden and freely correct their actions.  

For no longer would it be by their personal, natural obedience, as the corporate head of humanity, that they would come to the new creation.  It would now be by the action of the Seed of the Woman. When their own actions were corrected, they would already be in The World To Come. Nevertheless, the gift of their redemption, the form their salvation would take in their personal experience, would be fully realized in their empowerment to learn now how to make the right choices and thereby to learn to understand fully the stages of merit leading to life eternal — that life they had lost but that had been found for them again by the one whom God would fashion from the seed of the Woman. 

In this way they would become who they were meant to be and much more, for they would not only be filled with thankfulness for the experience of salvation but would be filled with thankfulness with perfect understanding.

We see that it is not simply the unique physical fruit of the Tree of Life that gives eternal life.  It is the power of the mitzvah, the commandment, that God gave concerning it. So also, when we see the Tree of Life growing in the New Jerusalem we know that is growing there as a representation of the eternal gift of mitzvot, commandments, given to the redeemed, that they might ever grow in the knowledge of the glory and grace of God.