Last time we looked at the river of life in Revelation 21:1, and learned the river symbolizes the life that God gave us. It is the spring of life that Jesus spoke of in John 4, and it flows from the throne of God in the new Jerusalem.
In Revelation 22:2, we see the tree of life, “On either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Is this a literal tree or a symbolic tree and could it not be both? Perhaps it is a true literal tree, and it seems to have that function. We are told that it bears fruit every month, and the leaves it says is for the healing of the nations. It has some kind of a healing or a spiritual component to it. It bears fruits. When we think of fruit, we think of consumption of food, and we think of that which nourishes us. The water of life quenches our eternal thirst, and the tree of life then also nourishes us eternally.
We need to go to the beginning of the Bible, and we find that the Lord had planted numbers of trees in the Garden, but two trees in particular Genesis 2 talks about:
1. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from that tree, but they went ahead and ate from it anyway, and that caused a great deal of problems for them.
2. The tree of life. Then we have in Genesis 2:9, the tree of life that was spoken of even earlier, it says, “Out of the ground the Lord God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
So, we have these two predominate trees. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from that tree. They ate from that tree and brought about the fall of humanity and the curse on humanity. We will look at that later. There is also another tree there. It is called the tree of life. Its purpose is not defined right here, but it is a tree, and it is symbolic of life indicating that this tree has some substance that can give life. It is a life-giving tree of some sort.
