What is the tree of life in Revelation 22?

Question 10130.

The tree of life in Revelation 22 stands on both banks of the river that flows from the throne, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month, with leaves for the healing of the nations. It is the same tree that stood in the middle of Eden, and its reappearance is the Bible tying off its longest thread.

Humanity was barred from that tree in Genesis 3, with cherubim and a flaming sword set to guard the way. The last chapter of Scripture announces that the guard has been stood down.

The tree of life in Eden

Genesis 2 places two named trees in the middle of the garden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve were free to eat from the first and forbidden the second, which is often forgotten in the retelling.

Nothing suggests they had eaten from the tree of life before the fall, and nothing suggests they were forbidden to. It stood there available, and the tragedy is that they reached for the one thing withheld while the greater gift stood untouched.

Afterwards God says that the man must not reach out and take also from the tree of life and eat and live for ever. Expulsion from the garden was mercy as much as judgement. Eternal existence in a fallen condition would have been the worst possible outcome.

Guarded, not destroyed

Notice what God did not do. He did not cut the tree down or burn the garden. He set a guard, and a guard implies something worth guarding and a possibility left open.

The cherubim with the flaming sword are the first appearance in Scripture of the theme of barred access, which then runs through the tabernacle veil and into the temple. Every curtain in Israel’s worship was a descendant of that sword.

So when the tree of life reappears in an open city with gates that are never shut, the whole biblical story of exclusion has been resolved. Nobody is being kept away from anything any more.

On both sides of the river

John’s grammar is unusual here. The tree is described as being on either side of the river, which has led some readers to think of a whole avenue of trees and others to picture a single tree spanning the water.

The Greek noun is singular, and Ezekiel 47 has trees on both banks, so either reading is defensible. What is not in doubt is the abundance. This is not one specimen behind a rope.

See it in Revelation 22:2 and notice that the tree of life is accessible from the main street of the city, growing where everybody walks.

Twelve kinds of fruit

Twelve fruits, one for each month, is a picture of variety and of rhythm. It implies that eternity has a texture rather than being one endless unvarying moment, which I find rather cheering.

The number twelve runs all through the city. Twelve gates, twelve foundations, twelve tribes, twelve apostles, dimensions in multiples of twelve. The tree of life keeps the pattern, tying the fruit to the people of God in both covenants.

Monthly yield also implies time continuing. Eternity is not the abolition of sequence but the abolition of decay, and there is a real difference between the two.

Leaves for the healing of the nations

This phrase puzzles people, and understandably. If there is no more pain or death, what is left to heal?

The Greek behind healing is therapeia, which carries the sense of care, service and tending rather than emergency treatment. It need not imply illness at all. The leaves sustain health rather than cure sickness.

Ezekiel says the same of his trees, whose leaves will not wither and whose fruit will not fail, because their water flows from the sanctuary. The tree of life is the permanent provision of a God who intends His people to flourish rather than only survive.

The nations in the city

The mention of nations is itself worth pausing over. National identity is not erased in the new creation. The kings of the earth bring their glory into it, and the nations walk by its light.

Babel scattered humanity into rival languages. Pentecost began the reversal, and the city completes it, with every tribe and tongue present and none of them at war. Diversity without division is one of the quiet promises of the last chapter.

That the leaves of the tree of life are for the nations rather than for individuals underlines it. Whole peoples are in view, healed of everything that made them dangerous to one another.

Who gets to eat

Revelation is careful here. To the one who conquers, Jesus says in the letter to Ephesus, I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. It is a promise to overcomers, and John’s letters define overcoming as believing that Jesus is the Son of God.

The closing beatitude of the book says blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and enter the city by the gates. Washed robes, not clean records.

The final warning is the mirror image: anyone who takes away from the words of this prophecy will have his share in the tree of life removed. Access is real, and so is exclusion.

A tree, a cross, a tree

There is a pattern here that has moved me for years. A tree in Eden brought death. A tree at Calvary bore the curse, since Peter says Jesus bore our sins in His body on the tree. And a tree in the city gives life without end.

The middle tree explains the last one. Nobody eats from the tree of life in Revelation 22 except by virtue of what happened on the tree outside Jerusalem, and the Lamb who was slain is on the throne the river flows from.

Is it literal?

I take it as a real tree, in a real city, on a real renewed earth. Genesis describes a real tree, and I see no signal in the text that Revelation means something less concrete.

Whether the fruit sustains life the way food sustains us now, or signifies a dependence on God that never ends, Scripture does not say. My working assumption is both, since the sacraments of this age work in exactly that way.

Why Eden had to be closed

People sometimes read Genesis 3:22 as though God were jealously protecting a monopoly. Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil, and now lest he reach out his hand and take also and eat and live for ever.

Read it as mercy and it makes far better sense. A creature now corrupted, made permanent in that condition, would be beyond rescue. The barring of the way was the necessary condition of there ever being a way back at all.

Death entered as a judgement, and it also functioned as a limit on the spread of ruin. That is a hard thing to say at a funeral, and it is still true. The whole rescue depends on this life having an end. You can read the verse in Genesis 3:22-24.

The Hebrew and Greek behind it

Genesis uses chay, the ordinary word for living, in the phrase for that first garden tree. There is nothing exotic in the vocabulary. It is simply the living tree, the one whose fruit sustains.

John’s Greek phrase carries the same plainness, and by using it he is not inventing an image but retrieving one. Every Jewish reader would have heard Genesis in the words and understood immediately what was being announced.

That is how Revelation works throughout. It is a mosaic of Old Testament pieces, and readers who know their prophets find themselves on familiar ground far more often than they expect.

Between the two gardens

There is a long silence in between. From Genesis 3 to Revelation 2 the phrase appears only in Proverbs, where it is used of wisdom, of a gentle tongue, of hope fulfilled and of righteous fruit.

Those four uses are not a change of subject. They are what the loss feels like from inside a fallen world, where the things that give life come to us in fragments and never last. A kind word heals for an afternoon.

Then Jesus speaks to the church in Ephesus and the silence breaks. To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of what is in the paradise of God. The promise is reopened by the only person entitled to reopen it.

The tree and the city

Notice where this tree is planted. Not in a private garden and not behind a fence, but along the main street of the city, beside the water that flows from the throne. Access is public and permanent.

The river and the tree belong together, and I have written about the water in my article on the river of life, and about the city itself in my article on the New Jerusalem.

Eden was a garden with a river and a tree in it. The eternal city is a garden that has grown up into a civilisation, and nothing that made the first place good has been left behind.

So, now what?

Proverbs uses the same phrase four times of things available now. Wisdom is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her. A gentle tongue is a tree of life. Hope fulfilled is a tree of life. Righteous fruit is a tree of life.

That is not an accident of vocabulary. What we will have in full then, we can taste in fragments now, through wisdom, kind speech and patient hope. Which of those four could you offer to somebody this week?

“Also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation 22:2)