My brother and I were thrashing through the bush en-route to a peak overlooking Airlie Beach in far North Queensland. A short hike which was only meant to be 800 metres long seemed to go on forever. The steep incline and muddied tracks gave my brother the “great” opportunity to educate me about some of the local flora. “There’s a plant in Queensland that, when you touch it, the pain is so bad that you want to kill yourself,” he told me. “One man used it as toilet paper, and he committed suicide because he couldn’t bear the pain.”
Dendrocnide Moroides is the scientific Latin name for the plant that has also been called the stinging brush. Merely brushing against the plant’s leaf will stab your body with countless microscopic needle-like hairs. The pain allegedly feels like being electrocuted and baptised with acid—at the same time. There’s no cure; trying to remove the tiny hairs is nigh-on impossible, and even attempting this feat could break the needles, causing even greater pain. There’ve been reports that excruciating pain from the moonlighter plant can last for months and, in some case, years.
You’d have to be an idiot to even approach this plant, right? Even though the plant’s intentions are fundamentally evil, it has one trick up its sleeve to entice passers-by. It spawns a beautiful red berry hanging off its stems, tantalisingly swaying in the wind and immediately capturing people’s attention. Even in Australia where pretty much all of nature is out to murder you, some people have fallen into the trap of attempting to wrangle the moonlighter plant to reach its berry.
Can you believe that earth’s downfall also started with a tantalizing plant? In this case it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve, the original humans who God had created to enjoy earth, were given the blessing of chilling in the Garden of Eden; an idyllic and lush setting filled with heaps of awesome trees, plants and animals. But just like a very clear sign saying, “Do Not Touch,” God told Adam and Eve,
“You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
(Genesis 2:17)
Fair enough, right? The instructions were clear as day. Most Christians have deduced that the forbidden fruit was an apple, leading to a man’s larynx colloquially being called an Adam’s apple. Notable rabbis have speculated that it was a grape, while others claim that it was a fig; based on the later reference to Adam and Eve covering themselves with fig leaves. In my opinion, the fruit was a date: it’d have to take the best fruit in the world to convince someone to trigger the downfall of humankind.
But it wasn’t the fruit alone that tipped Eve over the edge; but rather Satan in disguise as a serpent, planting seeds of doubt: “You will not certainly die” (Genesis 3:4). The harmless-looking plant combined with Eve’s uncertainty about the validity of God’s initial command to stay away led her to disobey. She took the fruit and ate it and shared some with her husband Adam.
It wasn’t the plant that caused sin, it was Adam and Eve disobeying God. Just like many locals in Queensland know to give the stinging brush plant a wide berth because of its toxicity, earth’s original caretakers knew that approaching the tree was a major no-no. A whole planet is now racked with selfishness, sin and decay; “groaning as in the pains of childbirth” (Romans 8:22) as a result of the choice made in the Garden that day.
That’s how sin works. We get suckered into thinking that we can break God’s commandments and it’ll be fine, but there are always consequences. It hurts us and the people around us. Many in our generation, particularly my friends at university, were heavy into alcohol. Though I never understood the appeal, I remembered how the Bible said it “…bites like a snake and poisons like a viper” (Proverbs 23:32). There’s good reason for this, 22% of Aussie millennials aged 14 and over reported being victims of an alcohol-related incident in 2016. There’s a great many things that the Bible warns against that are still relevant for us today.
Ultimately, it’s because God knows what’s best for us that He tells us to stay away from certain things. He outlines these in the Bible; not because He wants us to experience major FOMO, but because He knows what can happen when we indulge. Just like how an inconspicuous-looking plant can drive people to insanity from pain.
What “toxic plant” in your life has God been calling for you to stay away from?
AUTHOR: Daniel Kuberek, assistant editor of Signs of the Times.