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The Tree of Life

Barred in Genesis, opened in Revelation, and the same word for the tree He hung on

The Bible opens with a tree we were put beside and closes with the same tree offered back. In between stands a flaming sword. That is the whole story in one image, and the middle of it is a Man on a piece of wood that Scripture insists on calling by the same name as the tree in the garden.

The tree in the midst, and the sword

It is there from the third day of the garden, named before anything has gone wrong:

Genesis 2:9 · KJV

And out of the ground made the LORD God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

The Hebrew is ‘ets ha-chayyim, the tree of the lives, plural. It is not a reward set at the far end of a test. It stands in the middle of the garden, among the trees that were good for food, and nothing in the text says Adam was forbidden it. One tree was forbidden, and it was not this one.

Then comes the strangest sentence in the chapter. God does not bar the way because man has become too wicked to live. He bars it because of what the man might now reach:

Genesis 3:22, 24 · KJV

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever… So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

Read it slowly and the mercy in it shows. A man who has taken the knowledge of good and evil into himself, and cannot now put it down, is kept from eating and living for ever in that condition. Tertullian noticed the small word that carries it, that God says and now:

“Then what follows? ‘And now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, (and eat), and live for ever.’ Inserting thus the particle of present time, ‘And now,’ He shows that He had made for a time, and at present, a prolongation of man’s life. Therefore He did not actually curse…”

Tertullian, Against Marcion · c. AD 208

The sword keeps the way. It is a guarded road, not a demolished one.

One word: the tree, and the tree

Here is the thing that is easy to miss in English and impossible to miss in Greek. The word the New Testament uses for the tree of life is xylon. It occurs twenty times. Four of them are the tree of life, in Revelation 2:7, 22:2, 22:14 and 22:19. And five of them are the cross.

Acts 5:30 · KJV

The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree.

Galatians 3:13 · KJV

Christ hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree:

1 Peter 2:24 · KJV

Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.

Peter says it twice more in Acts (Acts 10:39, 13:29). The apostles could have said stauros, cross, and usually did. When they wanted to name what He hung on, they reached instead for the word that names the tree in the garden.

What the early church saw in that

They did not need it spelled out. Ephraim the Syrian, in the fourth century, says it in one line, and puts Adam back in the sentence:

“He saw in the Cross a tree of life; that was the fruit, he was the eater in Adam’s stead.”

St. Ephraim the Syrian, The Pearl · 4th century

And elsewhere in the same tradition, the sword itself is dealt with: “the curse nailed to the cross, the edge of the sword removed from before the tree of life and it given as food to the faithful, and Paradise promised to the blessed.”

Athanasius says the same thing about the gate rather than the tree, and names the first man through it:

“For, indeed, it was shut from the time He cast out Adam from the delight of Paradise, and set the Cherubim and the flaming sword, that turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life—now, however, opened wide. And He that sitteth upon the Cherubim having appeared with greater grace and loving-kindness, led into Paradise with himself the thief who confessed.”

St. Athanasius, Festal Letters · 4th century

The One who set the cherubim is the One who walks back past them, and the first man He brings through is a criminal who asked to be remembered. Augustine, reading the garden as a figure of the church, puts it plainest of all: “the tree of life is the holy of holies, Christ.” Hippolytus says it in four words: “The fruit of righteousness and the tree of life is Christ.”

Offered again, and on a condition

The tree is the first promise made to the first church in Revelation, and it is made to a particular kind of person:

Revelation 2:7 · KJV

He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith unto the churches; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God.

In the midst again, exactly where Genesis put it. And at the very end of the book it is standing in the open, no longer guarded:

Revelation 22:2 · KJV

In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.

Ezekiel had already seen it: trees along a river running out of the sanctuary, whose leaf does not fade, “and the leaf thereof for medicine” (Ezekiel 47:12). Jamieson, Fausset and Brown stop at this verse to say what the shape of it means:

“The harmonious unity of Scripture is herein exhibited. The Fathers compared it to a ring, an unbroken circle, returning into itself.”

Jamieson, Fausset & Brown, on Revelation 22:2

Then, twelve verses from the end of the Bible, the access is stated with a condition attached:

Revelation 22:14 · KJV

Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.

An honest note on that verse. The manuscripts divide here. Some read “they that do his commandments”; others read hoi plynontes tas stolas, “they that wash their robes,” and most modern versions follow the second. It is worth knowing that the oldest witnesses who quote the verse quote the first. Cyprian, in the third century, cites it as “Blessed are they that do His commandments, that they may have power over the tree of life,” and Tertullian before him as “Blessed they who act according to the precepts, that they may have power over the tree of life and over the gates.” The two readings do not fight each other, either: a washed robe in this book is what a man is given, and doing His commandments is what a forgiven man does. But the variant is real and should be named rather than leaned on.

And five verses later, the same access can be lost: “God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city” (Revelation 22:19).

And the broken branch can be grafted back

The warning in Romans 11 is usually quoted and then stopped, which leaves it harsher than Paul wrote it. He does not end at “cut off.” He keeps going for two more verses:

Romans 11:23-24 · KJV

And they also, if they abide not still in unbelief, shall be graffed in: for God is able to graff them in again. For if thou wert cut out of the olive tree which is wild by nature, and wert graffed contrary to nature into a good olive tree: how much more shall these, which be the natural branches, be graffed into their own olive tree?

The door swings both ways. A branch off the tree is not firewood yet, and the only thing holding it out is the unbelief it can leave. God is able to graff them in again, and the argument is from the harder case to the easier: if a wild branch could be grafted in against nature, a natural branch can certainly be grafted back.

Ezekiel says the same thing about a whole life, in both directions, and refuses to let either one be a formality:

Ezekiel 18:21-23 · KJV

But if the wicked will turn from all his sins that he hath committed, and keep all my statutes, and do that which is lawful and right, he shall surely live, he shall not die. All his transgressions that he hath committed, they shall not be mentioned unto him: in his righteousness that he hath done he shall live. Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not that he should return from his ways, and live?

The next verse turns it around on the righteous who leaves, so nobody can use the first half as a guarantee and skip the second. Both halves are the same doctrine: it is the direction you are walking that decides it, and the direction can change. “turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?” (Ezekiel 33:11).

And it happens to one man, in the worst chapter of his life. Samson breaks his vow, loses his hair, loses his sight, and is put to work grinding in a prison house. Then one sentence, easy to read past: “Howbeit the hair of his head began to grow again after he was shaven” (Judges 16:22). He prays “remember me, I pray thee, and strengthen me, I pray thee, only this once” (Judges 16:28), and God answers. Centuries later the writer to the Hebrews lists him by name among the faithful (Hebrews 11:32), and does not attach an asterisk.

So the sword is not the last word, and neither is the cutting off. A branch can be grafted back. A man who turned away can turn again. That is the same mercy that set the guard in the first place, working from the other side.

Is it the same tree?

Scripture never says in so many words that the tree of the garden, the vine of John 15, the olive tree of Romans 11 and the tree in the city are one tree. It would be more than the text says to claim it.

What the text does say is that the shape is the same every time. Life that is not ours by nature, held out to us. Access lost by our own act. Access restored at cost, and held by remaining. “If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch” (John 15:6). “…because of unbelief they were broken off… otherwise thou also shalt be cut off” (Romans 11:20-22). “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life” (Revelation 2:7). Three images, one pattern, and in Greek two of them are not even different words: the tree we were kept from and the tree He was nailed to are both xylon.

Wisdom gets called a tree of life too, four times in Proverbs, and so does the fruit of the righteous, and hope that finally arrives, and a wholesome tongue (Proverbs 3:18; 11:30; 13:12; 15:4). The phrase in Hebrew had become a way of naming whatever gives life rather than merely sustains it.

Where this lands

We were not driven away from a rule. We were driven away from a tree, and the sword was set to keep the way to it, which means there was a way. The whole middle of the Bible is God walking that road back and paying to open it, and when the apostles name the thing He was nailed to, they use the garden’s own word for it.

So the last chapter is not a new offer. It is the first one, made good. The tree is standing in the open street, bearing fruit every month, with leaves for the healing of the nations, and the only thing that keeps a man from it now is not a sword.

Study the passages

Read them in context.

See also The Vine, where the same pattern is drawn as a plant, and Saved, and Kept. Scripture quotations from the King James Version. Greek word counts checked against the Berean translation tables in our own library; Tertullian, Ephraim, Athanasius, Augustine and Hippolytus from the Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (CCEL, public domain); Jamieson, Fausset & Brown from our commentary set.