The Tree of Life

“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.” — GENESIS iii. 24.

THE recent discussions about, and criticisms of, the first chapters of the Book of Genesis have left a certain vague and uncomfortable feeling in the minds of many men. Not a few people, probably, think in a dim sort of way that geology, or something else, has made those chapters of very doubtful worth. The worst part of this feeling is that it robs the early story of our race of the spiritual power that it possesses. Apart from the question of its historic character, the account of man’s origin which is given in Genesis is profoundly true to man’s spiritual experience, and its imagery is representative of perpetual and universal truth. Among its images one of the most prominent and striking is this one of the “Tree of Life.” Let us try, with the beautiful words of the Genesis-story fresh in our minds, to see if we can get at the meaning of it, and understand what is meant by the history of the tree of life which runs through all the Bible.

Let us briefly recall the story. In the garden where God first placed man, the scene of his earliest experiences, it is said that God, his Creator, planted two trees. There were many others, but these two were noticeable and distinct. One of them was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the other was the Tree of Life. There they stood side by side, both beautiful, both tempting. But on one of them — the most tempting — a prohibition is laid. Of the tree of knowledge man must not taste. But man rebels, wilfully, independently, against God’s word, and does eat of the tree. The consequence is that he is not allowed to eat of the other tree. He is driven out of the garden where it stands, and is forbidden to return; and his return is made impossible by “cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.”

Thus begins the long career of humanity. Man is forced to undertake the work and drudgery of living. The centuries, laden with wars and pains and hopes and fears and disappointments and successes, start on their slow procession. But no more is heard of the tree of life. It is not mentioned again in the course of the Bible. It is left behind the closed gate and the flaming sword, until we are surprised, at the extreme other end of the Bible, the New Testament, to see it suddenly reappear. In the book of St. John’s Revelation, where the promises of the world’s final glory are gathered, this promise stands among the brightest: “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the Paradise of God.” The long-lost tree is not lost after all. God has only been keeping it out of sight; and at last He brings man to it and tells him to eat his fill. “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.” Into this glory the angels of God are to bring His people at the last.

This is the story. And now, what does it mean? Certainly nobody can read it and not be sure that the element of allegory is very large in it. Whatever literal events may correspond to it at the beginning or at the end of the human history, certainly that losing and finding again of the tree of life may be taken to represent the course of man’s career in spiritual things, the way in which the race and the individual are trained and punished and rewarded. That interpretation, at least, is open to us, because that meaning of the story finds its commentary in our own experience, and in all the history of man kind. If we can understand that meaning, we have reached some idea of the purpose for which the revelation of the Book of Genesis was given.

And that meaning is not hard to find. The tree of life evidently signifies the fulness of human existence, — that complete exercise of every power, that roundness and perfectness of being which was in God’s mind when He made man in His own image. It represents not mere endurance, not merely an existence which is going to last forever. It represents quality more than quantity, or quantity only as it is the result of quality. To eat of the tree of life is to enter into and occupy the fulness of human existence, to enjoy and exercise a life absolute and perfect, to live in the full completeness of our powers. We can feel, I think, how this luxuriousness and fulness is naturally embodied under the figure of a tree. In many myths of many races, the tree has seemed the fittest symbol of the life of man; and the tree perfect in God’s garden is the truest picture of man’s whole nature complete under His care.

On the other hand, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represents that mottled and mingled experience of life by which men’s lives are formed, their understandings opened, their characters decided. To eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil — what is it but to go through just what you and I have gone through ever since we were children? It is to deal with life; to come, by contact with the world, to judgments of what is good and what is bad; to form habits of thinking and ways of feeling about men and women and about their actions. In one word, to have had experience is to have eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The little, irresponsible child has never tasted it. It is its savor in the grown man’s mouth which gives his face its soberness, and oftentimes its bitterness.

What, then, is the truth about these trees? He who wilfully and rebelliously, in his own way and not in God’s way, eats of the tree of knowledge, he shall be shut out from the tree of life. He who wantonly, selfishly, and by the dictates of his own appetites, uses his powers and wins his experience, shall not come to the fulness of those powers, nor get the best out of life. He who insists on knowing things or doing things away from God, shall not rise to the completest capacity of skill or strength or knowledge. Wilfulness, selfishness, independence, self-confidence, shut man out from the perfection of his life.

And one point more. Adam and Eve being thus driven out from the tree of life, who were the guards that stood to hinder their return? Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way. And the cherub in Scripture is a being with a certain symbolic character. He is ordinarily represented as a composite creature-form, as a winged man or a human-headed beast — a way to represent that combination of intelligence and force which was also expressed in the Egyptian sphynx and in the winged bulls and lions of Assyria. The essential idea of the cherubims seems to have been that they represented the forces of nature as the servants of God. “The Lord sitteth between the cherubims, be the earth never so unquiet,” says David, and in another psalm, “He rode upon a cherub and did fly.” These forces of nature, these things of the world about us, these objects and circumstances, made by God to assist in the pleasure and culture of man kind, — these same things they are which, when man is rebellious and selfish, stand between him and his fullest life. Those objects and circumstances which, if a man were docile and humble and lived his life with and under God, would all be developing and perfecting him, making him stronger, making him happier, — all those things, just as soon as a man cuts himself off from God and insists on getting know ledge and doing work by himself, become his enemies. They hinder him instead of helping him; they are always pulling him down instead of lifting him up; making him a worse and smaller instead of a better and larger man.

Now, follow on with the parable. Man has been driven out, and the cherubims are keeping guard. The tree of life disappears from man’s sight, but it is not lost. Man is driven out of the garden where it stands, but immediately the education begins which, if he will submit to it, is to bring him back at last to the Paradise of God where the tree of life will be restored to him. And all the training that comes in between is of one sort. Everything from Genesis to Revelation has one purpose, — to teach men the hopelessness, the folly, the unsatisfactoriness, of a merely wilful and selfish life; to bring men by every discipline of sorrow or joy to see the nobleness and fruitfulness of obedience and consecration. When that is learned, then the lost tree reappears. Hidden through all the lingering centuries, there it is, when man is ready for it, blooming in the Paradise of God.

Is not the meaning of that symbol plain? Is not the truth it teaches worthy of a revelation? The highest, fullest life of man has ceased to be actual upon the earth. You cannot find one man who is living it, not one who, in some part of his nature or his conduct, is not pinched and meagre, missing the completeness for which he was made. But the possibility of that highest life never has been lost. It is waiting till man is able to reclaim it. And man shall reclaim it just as soon as he is completely in harmony with and obedient to God.

One other point comes in, — not very clearly, but with a suggestion that completes the picture. Again and again in Scripture we read of the angels as God’s agents in the restoration of His people to their long-lost glory. “The reapers are the angels,” in the mighty harvest. The beggar Lazarus, after all his waiting and wretchedness was over, was” carried by the angels into Abraham’s Bosom.” And the angels are said to watch with joy as each new repentant sinner claims forgiveness and, being forgiven, returns into harmony with God and into his possibility of perfectness. It is not clearly said, but if, among these rescuing and helping angels, there are found the cherubims who were set to guard the gate of the first Paradise against the unhappy man’s return, — then, the whole story is complete. It is by those same forces of nature which are now his hindrances that man is finally to overcome. Not by a new dispensation, not by a new world of things, but by these same things, these very same old things which have so long stood between him and his highest, he is finally to reach his highest. The cherubims who so long shut him out from, are at last to bring him back to, the tree of life.

This is the story of the world then, and the story of man as the Bible tells it — the story of the lost and refound tree of life. There is something broad and primal in that universal figure of the tree. It is interesting, I think, to turn to the New Testament and see how, when Jesus Christ came, the story which He had to tell of man’s condition and prospects was just the same with this old story of the tree of Genesis. Take the parable of the prodigal son — how different it is! how quiet and domestic and familiar! how homely in its quaint details! But if you look at it, you will see that the meaning is the same. There, too, there is a first native possibility, the place in the father’s house to which the boy was born. There, too, that possibility ceases to be actual because of the wilfulness of him to whom it was offered. “Give me the portion of goods that falleth to me “; it is exactly Adam and Eve over again. There, too, the possibility is not destroyed, but stands waiting, out of sight of the wanderer, but always expecting his return; the father’s house from which the son goes out, and which stands with its door open when long afterwards he comes struggling back. There, too, the instant that submission is complete, — “I will arise and go to my father,” — the lost possibility is found again, for, “While he was yet a great way off, his father saw him and ran and fell on his neck and kissed him.” The story of the tree of life and the story of the prodigal son are the same story. Drawn with such different touch, colored in such different hues, they set before us still the same picture of the life of man.

It might be well to look at that picture as it represents the world’s life, and as it represents the life of the individual. I shall only undertake to do the latter. Of the other let me merely remind you in a few words how true a conception, how complete an explanation, of the state of things which we see everywhere around us is this great Bible conception of the hidden tree of life. It is not lost, not totally destroyed forever, not taken out of man’s hope — that better possibility of man, that full condition of humanity, in which every act has its most perfect motive, and every motive its most perfect act. It is not lost, but it is hidden; hidden where the powers of the world will not let men get at it, but where men feel that it exists, live otherwise than they would live if they knew that it had perished, and never give over the hope of reaching it some day again.

Could any picture more completely describe this mixed state of the world we live in? The alternations of hope and despair, the way that generosity and meanness by turns take possession of the world, the wars and tumults, the eagerness for progress and the dreary clinging to old sins, the history of the world for any one week, the passions that agitate the breast of any ruler, the motives and feelings that contend in a political convention, — where is there any theory of man that takes them all in more perfectly than this Bible theory of the tree of life; lost but not destroyed, blooming somewhere still behind the cherubims, never quite forgotten, and to be made visible again when man shall have become able, by long education, to enter in and take of its fruit and eat?

But let us leave this larger view, and turn to see how, in the life of each of us, the story of the tree of life finds its fulfilment. Every man has his tree of life, — the full completeness of life for him, the best that those powers which he has, that special combination of qualities that he is, is capable of being. It gives a dignity to every human being to think this of each. It breaks the herd and sets the individual before you. Walk down the crowded street some day, and think of it. They all look so alike, these men and women, such hosts of them, with the same narrow, vulgar, greedy faces! They sweep by you as little distinguished as the drops in the stream that goes hurrying and whirling past your feet.

But think of them again. Every man and woman of them has a tree of life — a separate completeness of character, a possibility which, if he could fulfil it, would stand a distinct and perfect thing in the universe, the repetition of no other that ever went before, and never to be repeated by any that shall come after. Take out the meanest and most sordid face that passes you, the face most brutalized by vice, most pinched and strained by business; — that man has his tree of life, his own separate possibility of being, luxuriant and vital, fresh, free, original. 4 ‘How terribly he has missed of it,” you say. In deed he has. A poor, undistinguishable thing he is, as wretched as poor Adam when he had been driven from his tree of life, and stood naked and shivering outside the Garden, with the beasts that used to be his subjects snarling at him, and the ground beginning to mock him with its thorns and thistles. That poor man evidently has been cast out of his garden, and has lost his tree of life. And is it not evident enough how he lost it? Must it not have been that he was wilful? Must it not have been that, at the very beginning, he had no idea but for himself, no notion of living in obedience to God? Do not say that that is a false and artificial explanation, a mere ministers’ sermon explanation of how this insignificant creature on the street lost all his chance of a strong, vital life. Tell me, nay, ask yourself, if he had realized God, if he had known and been glad to know from the beginning that his life belonged to God, if he had really tried to serve God, could he have come to this? If consecration could have saved him, is it not the absence of consecration that has ruined him?

And he is only a single emphasized and recognizable example. All the failures of men are of the same sort. What makes the scholar’s life a failure? What makes him sigh when at last the books grow dim before his eyes, and the treacherous memory begins to break and lose the treasures it has held? He has been studying for himself, wilfully, not humbly, taking the fruit from the tree of knowledge. What makes the workman turn into a machine? What makes us feel so often, the more his special skill develops, that he is growing less and not more a man? What shuts the merchant up to his drudgery, making it absolutely ridiculous and blasphemous ‘to say of him, as we watch the way he lives and the things he does from the time he rises till the time he goes to bed, “That is what God made that man 172 THE TREE OF LIFE

for “? What makes every one of us sigh when we think what we might have been? Why is every one of us missing his highest? Why are we all shut out from our trees of life? There is one word, one universal word, that tells the sad story for us all. It is selfishness — selfishness from the beginning. If we had not been selfish, if we had lived for God from the beginning, if we had been consecrated, we know it would have been different; we should have had our Eden inside and not outside; we should have eaten in God’s due time of our tree of life, and have come to what He made us for, — our fullest and our best life.

And then add to this sense of exclusion, this consciousness of having missed our best, the other symbol of the cherubims. What is it that keeps us from our tree of life to-day? What is it that, when we have once lost it, keeps us shut out from the dream and pattern of our existence? Behold, it is those very forces, those same circumstances which ought to and which might have taken our hands and been our guides, to lead us to our highest possibilities. If you are a student who scoffs and is irreverent, what has made you so? That very study, that very science, which might have led you to a profound and thoughtful and tender awe of God. Or you are a working man or a working woman, and your work has made you bitter and discontented, that very work which was sent to make you happy and healthy. Or you have lived a life of society and you have grown frivolous and selfish by that contact with your fellow-men which might have made you earnest and self-forgetful. Or you have been rich, and your riches have made you proud instead of humble. These are the powers which ought to make us good, and do so often make us bad; whose mission is to bring men’s souls to God and to their own best attainment, but which our obstinacy so often compels to stand between us and God, and shut us out from Him. These are the cherubims with flaming swords that keep us from our tree of life.

I cannot set before you as I wish I could that universal tragedy of human existence, — the consciousness of every man living that he has not found his best. I can only rely on what I know is in the heart of every one of you giving confirmation to my words. The lost tree of life! we were driven out from it before we tasted it, and we have lived in exile from it all our days, the most successful and the most unfortunate of us alike. How little is the difference of our success or our misfortune, after all! we have all together failed of the best that we were made for, failed of the fulness of our life.

So true is the beginning of the Bible to our continual life! so in our own experience we find the everlasting warrant of that much-disputed tale of Genesis! But, thank God! the end of the Bible is just as true. As true as this universal fact of all men’s failure is the other fact, that no man’s failure is final or necessarily fatal; that every man’s lost tree of life is kept by God, and that he may find it again in God’s Paradise if he comes there in humble consecration.

Let us put figures and allegories aside for a moment. The truth of Christianity is this: that how ever a man has failed by his selfishness of the fulness of life for which God made him, the moment that, led by the love of Christ, he casts his selfishness aside and consecrates himself to God, that lost possibility reappears; he begins to realize and attempt again in hope the highest idea of his life; the faded colors brighten; the crowding walls open and disappear. This is the deepest, noblest Christian consciousness. Very far off, very dimly seen as yet, hoped-for not by any struggle of its own but by the gift of the Mercy and Power to which it is now given, the soul that is in God believes in its own perfectibility, and dares to set itself perfection as the mark of life, short of which it cannot rest satisfied.

And when this change has come, when a soul has dared again to realize and desire the life for which God made it, then also comes the other change. The hindrances change back again to their true purpose and are once more the helpers. That, too, is a most noble part of the Christian’s experience, and one which every Christian recognizes. You prayed to God when you became His servant that He would take your enemies away, that He would free you from those circumstances which had hindered you from living a good life. But He did something better than what you prayed for. As you looked at your old enemies they did not disappear, but their old faces altered. You saw them still, but you saw them now changed into His servants. The business that had made you worldly stretched out new hands, all heavy with the gifts of charity. The nature which had stood like a wall between you and the truth of a Personal Creator, opened now a hundred voices all declaring Him. The men who had tempted you to pride and passion, all came with their opportunities of humility and patience. Everything was altered when you were altered. The cherubims had left their hostile guard above the gate, and now stood inviting you to let them lead you to the tree of life. This is the Fall supplanted by the Redemption. This completes the whole Bible of a human life.

This, then, is the truth of the tree of life, its loss and its recovery. We turn to the only human life in which it was never lost, the life of Jesus Christ. We own in Him the perfection of humanity — every human power at its best used for its best. With Him there was none of this brooding dissatisfaction that there is with us. Many a time His hard and heavy work weighed on Him, and once He cried to be released; but never is there any word of bitter regret as He looks back, never in all the Gospel oneself-reproach that He had fallen short of completeness either in character or work. Oh, below all the pain, what a satisfaction there must have been in that tried and tortured heart! Who would not feel that any pain were easy if one could be as free as Jesus Christ was from self-reproach, if one could say as He said, “I have finished the work that thou gavest me to do,” and at last, with one more “It is finished,” lay a life that had completely succeeded back into the Father’s hand?

Yes, Christ always lived to His fullest, and as we read His story we know why. The secret is not hard to find. It is in that one clear power of consecration that runs through all His life. It is be cause He is living to God from the beginning to the end that He lives so completely. And where His obedience is most manifest, the completeness of His life is most manifest, too. We see that in the Cross. He was never so alive as when He was dying there. There, where He reached the consummate obedience, He reached the consummation of life, too. The Being most alive, the Being whose life is running out into most vast and stupendous consequences, is He who hangs expiring there. The Cross is His Tree of Life.

And so with us, my friends. If we do really give ourselves to God, whatever cross that consecration brings us to will be our tree of life. It may seem as if, in making ourselves His, we strip our lives of their richness; we give up friends, we give up amusements, we give up easy days, we give up our own will to be the Lord’s. It looks like death. It looks like emptying the precious wine of life away, and breaking the precious vase that held it. But as you go on in your sacrifice, behold! the memory of Eden is revived, and the prophecy of Paradise is fulfilled. The cross on which you stretch yourself sends its strength and abundance into you; and it is not dying, but living. No matter what men call it, you know that it is living. Your cross is your tree of life.

And yet again, the Cross of Christ may be not merely His Tree of Life, but ours. If it imparts its power to us; if, loving Him because He died upon it, we grow eager to give ourselves to Him and to our brethren; then that old wood on which they crucified Him becomes the source and fountain of our life. It is not merely that He never was more alive than when He hung there, but our life also is revived when we come nearest to it. The power of our self-sacrifices is in that self-sacrifice of His. Our crosses are cut out of that one inexhaustible Cross of Calvary.

Behold, then, for every man there are not two, there are three trees of life — the tree in Eden, the tree on Calvary, and the tree in the Paradise of God. For every man there is God’s first design, and there is God’s final salvation; but between the two there is Christ’s Redemption. We lose our life; we find it in our Saviour; we keep it unto Life eternal.

Where do we all stand? Behind us is the loss; we have sinned and come short of the glory of God. Have we recovered our life at the Cross? If we have, then, by obedience springing out of gratitude, the way is open for us into the eternal life of God. “Blessed are they that do his commandments,” that they may have a right to the Tree of Life, and enter in through the gates into the city.