God’s Word for You

Genesis 2:9 The two trees

by Pastor Timothy Smith on Friday, August 21, 2026

9 Out of the ground the LORD God made every kind of tree grow—trees pleasant to see and good for food. The Tree of Life was in the middle of the garden, and also the Tree of Knowing of Good and Evil.

The Garden of Eden was watered by a generous river, and it was filled with delightful trees. It was the most pleasant grove imaginable. The trees themselves were as pleasing to look at as their fruit was to eat. I have walked in one or two places in the world with delightful trees such as these. The finest was in Wisconsin, just outside the village of Poynette where I spent my childhood. The grove I’m thinking of was small but utterly relaxing in every way. It was completely devoid of danger or decay; one can only imagine that the trees of Eden were so very much more delightful.

Two trees are singled out for their importance. They both grew in the middle of the Garden. Sometimes a student will ask, were these individual trees, or were they species of trees? What does the grammar teach us? Since the second half of this verse has no verbs, we cannot judge from singular as opposed to plural verbs, that is, “was” as opposed to “were.” Instead we must visit three other details.

First, the nouns and adjectives are singular but not collective. Second, during the temptation, Eve uses the singular with the definite article when she says, “the tree that is in the middle of the garden” (Genesis 3:3), and Adam uses the same singular article during the confession (Genesis 3:12). Finally, when God places the angels at the entrance to Eden, it is to guard “the way” to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24). All of these things seem to point to individual trees and not a variety of tree.

The Tree of Life had fruit that would allow the man and his wife, even in their sinful state, “to eat and to live forever” (Genesis 3:22). We conclude that this tree originally “was to confirm man in the possession of physical life and to render physical death an impossibility” (H.C. Leupold, a respected Lutheran theologian, 1892-1972). It never got to carry out this purpose, since the sinners were driven from the Garden immediately after the fall. Luther muses about how a fruit tree could have carried out this task: “This [tree] would have been like a medicine by which man’s life and powers were forever maintained at their utmost vigor.” How could a physical food, a fruit of some kind, have the power, curative or durative ability to preserve a physical human body in such a way that in the course of time, of centuries stretching out into centuries of centuries, what we think of as the natural wearing out of the body did not take place? No sickness? No cancers? No arthritis? Again, Luther says, “The answer is easy (Psalm 33:9): ‘He spoke, and it was done.’”

I think that in these trees, we have the power of God associated with a command or promise and an earthly element. In this way, the trees are similar or analagous to the sacraments. But since we are speaking of the world before sin, they are not sacraments exactly. Yet we can use our understanding of the sacraments to help our understanding of the two trees:

Question: How could the eating of the fruit of knowing good and evil bring death?

Answer: Since God is not the author of sin or any evil, and death is the result of sin, the fruit of the tree was not poisonous or lethal. Rather, it was disobedience which showed itself in the eating of the fruit that brought death, for that very disobedience was the sin.

Question: How could the eating of the fruit of the tree of life stave off death forever?

Answer: This was the will of God, and since God said it was so, it was so. In the same way, it is not only the eating that would have brought life, but the word “life” which God gave to the tree and its fruit. This word, then, was the main thing. Whoever believed this word had what the word plainly said, that is, life.

Had there been no sin, Adam and his wife and their children would have had to teach these things to their families, for even in their original sinlessness there would have remained the ability to sin (or not, “posse non peccare”) until such time as they reached out their hand to eat the fruit of the Tree of Life, becoming unable to sin (“non posse peccare”). But that state, only enjoyed by the good angels today, will not be ours until we have risen from the dead, and thanks to Christ we will be made new and sinless in every way, living in the heavenly Paradise, where the Tree of Life will not be a single trunk with its leaves and fruit, but a series of trees growing “on each side of the river… bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).

Perhaps there in heaven under the blessing of the Son of God you and I will touch fruit the way that here on earth we sometimes clink our glasses before we drink a toast. “To eternal life! To Jesus our Savior! Amen.”

In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith

 

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