Deuteronomy 29:29—The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.
Yesterday I posted a blog with observations and thoughts concerning the serpent in Genesis 3.
I keep circling back to one simple theme: God establishes boundaries, especially around certain kinds of knowledge. Some things are simply off limits, and the Bible keeps showing what happens when people step over those lines instead of trusting him.
In what follows I’m just tracing that pattern. I’m not preaching a sermon. I’m looking at three stories that, on the surface, sit far apart: the serpent and the tree of knowledge in Eden, the Mazzaroth in God’s speech to Job, and Saul’s choice to consult a medium. I’m asking whether they might all be telling the same story about forbidden knowing, boundaries, and trust.
The Garden as Enclosure and Boundary
The Eden story is about more than a piece of forbidden fruit. The whole setting is boundary language.
The word “garden” itself carries the idea of an enclosed, cultivated place, something set apart from what surrounds it. A garden is a defined space, a yard, a garth, a place marked off and protected. In Genesis, the garden is planted by God, given to the human pair as a place to work and keep, and then, after the fall, it is closed and guarded: cherubim and a flaming sword are set there to guard the way to the tree of life.
Even inside that enclosure there is another boundary: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It’s not physically fenced, but it is fenced by a word. “From this tree you shall not eat.” So before anything goes wrong we already have multiple layers of “this far and no farther”: the garden itself, the tree of life, and the tree of knowledge marked off by a simple command.
The Tree of Knowledge as Forbidden Knowing
The name of the tree matters: “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” At minimum, that points to a kind of moral discernment or judicial authority — knowing good and evil in the sense of defining and administering it.
When the serpent speaks, the focus tightens. The promise is not about a new flavor of fruit; it is about a new kind of knowing: “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The temptation is epistemic. It invites the human pair to move from receiving God’s definitions to taking that role for themselves.
I find it helpful to see this in relation to the “dark arts” that show up later. Occult practices, divination, attempts to speak with the dead, reading the stars for control of fate — all of these are essentially bids to access a God-reserved knowledge or power, to cross into realms that are not ours to manage. The tree is not a spellbook, but it represents the same move: stepping into knowledge God has fenced off instead of trusting him with what he has and hasn’t revealed.
The Serpent and Occult-Style Knowing
The Hebrew word for serpent in Genesis 3, נָחָשׁ (nachash), carries some suggestive overtones. As a noun, it means “snake.” As a verb, it can mean “to practice divination,” to observe signs, to whisper and interpret omens. That’s not proof that Genesis 3 is “about” the occult in a narrow sense, but it does put the serpent in the same semantic neighborhood as secret arts and forbidden insight.
The serpent’s message fits that profile. It presents God’s word as restrictive and incomplete. It presents the tree as a shortcut into godlike perspective, a way to be “in the know” beyond the boundaries God has publicly given. In that sense, it is an offer of hidden knowledge without trust.
Eve’s response fits this too. She sees that the tree is good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desirable to make one wise. The longing for wisdom is not wrong by itself. The twist is that she now believes she can gain it by crossing God’s line, and her own seeing becomes the final authority. She upgrades the tree from “off limits” to “good,” based on her own evaluation over against God’s.
Job, the Mazzaroth, and Hidden Knowledge
Job brings this same theme at a different angle. Job wants to know why his suffering has come. His friends want to know too; they lean hard on explanations, as if the ways of God can be reduced to a system they can read and apply.
When God finally speaks out of the whirlwind, he does not hand Job the secret reasons behind every blow. Instead, he puts Job in front of creation. Among the questions, he points directly to the heavens:
or loose the cords of Orion?
Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season,
or can you guide the Bear with its children?
Do you know the ordinances of the heavens?
Can you establish their rule on the earth?”
The Mazzaroth is usually understood as the circle of constellations, likely the zodiacal band. In other words, God is talking about the ordered star paths that later generations would be tempted to treat as a codebook for fate.
Here the emphasis is not “these things are unreal” but “they are not yours to command.” Job can see the constellations. He can track their seasons. He cannot bind, loose, lead, or legislate them. The ordinances of the heavens are real and they touch life on earth, but they remain in God’s hands. That is a rebuke both to astrology and to the broader human impulse to turn the heavens into a system we can master.
Job’s resolution is not that he gains this hidden knowledge. He gains a deeper encounter with the One who has it. He moves from demanding explanations to trusting the God who holds them.
Saul and the Self-Destructive Path of Divination
Saul shows what happens when someone refuses that path of trust.
Blocked by his own disobedience, and with God no longer answering him by prophets or dreams, Saul reaches for another source. He seeks out the medium at Endor and asks to speak with Samuel from the dead. Earlier, Samuel had already told him that rebellion is “like the sin of divination,” which ties the heart of the matter directly back to Genesis: refusing God’s word and trying to secure your own way by other means.
In Saul’s case, that “other means” is necromancy: an attempt to break into the realm of the dead for guidance. The result is not clarity and life. It is confusion, fear, and, soon after, his own death. The biblical summary is blunt: Saul dies because he did not keep the word of the LORD and because he consulted a medium instead of inquiring of the LORD.
Saul’s choice is essentially a royal replay of Eve’s: when God’s way feels closed, look elsewhere. If heaven is silent, force open a door to the underworld.
Boundaries, Gardens, and Guarded Ways
This brings me back to the boundary theme.
The garden already suggests an enclosure, a yard with an edge and a gate. Genesis does not just say there was a garden; it shows that garden being guarded. After the fall, cherubim and a flaming sword are placed there to guard the way to the tree of life. The way is real. The tree is real. The path is now off limits.
That image is bigger than geography. It says there are ways into life that only God can open and close. We are not free to cut another route in through the fence, whether that fence is a word about a tree, a law about divination, or a limit on how much we can know about the ordinances of the heavens.
The same pattern appears again and again:
- In Eden, the boundary is around a kind of knowledge — good and evil as defined by God.
- In Job, the boundary is around cosmic order — the Mazzaroth and the deep structure of suffering and providence.
- In Saul’s story, the boundary is around the unseen realm — the dead, the spirits, the future.
In each case, the human temptation is to step over the line, to get hold of what is on the other side. In each case, the healthy response would be trust: to live within the enclosure God has actually given, and to leave the closed gates closed.
Dreams and Hidden Knowledge
There is one more distinction worth making here.
The Bible presents dreams and visions as real means by which God may speak. God says he makes himself known in visions and speaks in dreams. Job itself says God can instruct a man “in a dream, in a vision of the night.” So dreams belong to the means God himself gave man. They are part of ordinary human life, and God may use them.
But that is not the same thing as using a forbidden method.
That difference matters. A dream is something received. Divination is something pursued. In a dream, if God chooses to speak, he is the one initiating. In occult practices — consulting the dead, omen-reading, sorcery, astrology used as guidance, or any other black arts — the human being is trying to force access to hidden knowledge by stepping outside the boundaries God set.
That is why the distinction is important. The issue is not whether hidden things exist. The issue is whether man waits for God to reveal what he wants revealed, or whether he reaches past God’s boundary and tries to obtain it another way.
Scripture allows for dreams. It forbids divination. That difference alone says a great deal.
Trust in God
I won’t try to land this with a moral lecture. For me, the observation is simple: Scripture keeps pairing off-limits knowledge with the call to trust.
Eve is told she can be like God if she takes what has been fenced off, and she believes it. Job is shown that he cannot think like God or manage the heavens, and he bows. Saul, afraid in the dark, forces open a door God had shut, and it destroys him.
Underneath all the details, the same choice keeps reappearing: will man trust the God who keeps some things in his own hands, or will he try to reach past God’s hand and take them?
In our own time, we’re watching a clear surge in occult practices and “alternative” spiritual shortcuts. Astrology, crystals, tarot, witchcraft and the use of spells, channeling, and a flood of online “mystery” teachings all promise access to hidden power or inside knowledge about our lives. To me, it looks like the same old impulse in a new wrapper: reach past God’s boundaries to get what feels withheld, instead of living inside the limits he has given. The rise of these practices only underlines how strong that desire still is — and how needed simple trust in what God has already spoken still remains.
Closing: The Way Back
These stories all make the same point. Every time people reach past God’s boundaries for secret knowledge or control, they lose him. The garden, the tree of knowledge, the Mazzaroth, Saul at Endor — all of it is about crossing lines God drew.
God has already given us the way back. It is not in hidden techniques or dark arts. It is in the path he has put in front of us, in his Word. The choice is simple: chase what he has fenced off, or walk the way he has actually given.
Underneath all these stories, I keep hearing the same quiet conclusion: it is God’s will that is done, not mine. I can bring my prayers and questions to him, but events still unfold inside a plan I don’t see. My part is not to control that plan, or to get secret leverage over it, but to trust and accept that he is God even when I don’t understand what he is doing. And somehow, in ways I usually recognize only later, he really does work all things for good.
Knowing without knowing. Knowing that there are mysteries beyond our knowing, some very painful and unfair events, but still maintaining faith in the goodness of God. God’s will be done. Surrendering to His will. That is such a vital message that Jesus taught us in THE GARDEN. (Amazing how this corrects the choice that Adam & Eve made in the first Garden.)
Epilogue:
As I look at it, the promised land, Israel, is another way God teaches us about boundaries. He doesn’t tell Israel, “Go take whatever you can grab.” He draws specific borders and says, in effect, “This is the land I’m giving you.” It’s the same lesson as Eden, but more concrete
In the biblical story, the boundaries of the promised land are not incidental. They are part of how God keeps teaching the same lesson I’ve been tracing all along: gift, limit, and trust. Numbers 34 spells this out very plainly: “this is the land that shall fall to you for an inheritance… as defined by its borders,” and then it walks the reader around the south, west, north, and east lines in detail. The land is not “wherever you can take,” it is a specific gift with a specific outline. That already tells me boundaries belong to God’s generosity, not just his restriction.
In that same section, God also commands Israel to drive out the inhabitants and their idols before settling, so they won’t be trapped by their worship. The borders, together with that cleansing, work like the fence around Eden: they mark off a space where Israel can live under God’s rule without being swallowed by the systems around them. Commentators also point out how small the territory is compared to the whole earth — a narrow strip rather than a global empire. That makes the point even sharper. God is not handing Israel “everything.” He is staking his name on a particular people in a particular land, and promising to be faithful within those limits.
Later, when prophets like Ezekiel look ahead to a restored future, they reuse the Numbers 34 border language. That tells me the boundaries are part of God’s long-term design, even when Israel’s political control shrinks or expands. The map on the ground can move; the defined inheritance in God’s promise does not. Put next to Eden and Sinai, it’s the same pattern. Eden has a fence and a guarded way. Sinai gives a law with clear “inside/outside” lines. Canaan has borders drawn by God’s own instruction. In all three, God is not vague. He marks out where life with him is to be lived, and he calls his people to stay inside that space — geographical, moral, and spiritual — instead of constantly testing the edges.
2 Kings 14:25-27—He restored the coast of Israel from the entering of Hamath unto the sea of the plain, according to the word of the Lord God of Israel, which he spake by the hand of his servant Jonah, the son of Amittai, the prophet, which was of Gathhepher.
For the Lord saw the affliction of Israel, that it was very bitter: for there was not any shut up, nor any left, nor any helper for Israel.
