• Original picture by Leonsbox/istock photo

The Tree of Life

And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food

• Genesis 2.9 ESV

In the Bible, trees are a blessing, providing shelter from the sun, refuge, food and (though unknown to the biblical writers) precious oxygen. They are a gift from God:–

I will give you rain in its season, the land shall yield its produce, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit.

• Leviticus 26.4

The righteous themselves are pictured as trees:

He shall be like a tree
Planted by the rivers of water,
That brings forth its fruit in season,
Whose leaf shall not wither;
And whatever he does shall prosper.

• Psalm 1.3

Uniquely, as the most enduring living thing on our planet, the tree represents longevity:

... as the days of a tree, so shall be the days of My people.

• Isaiah 65.22

So it is not surprising that we find a tree used as a symbol of the greatest gift God has in store for mankind – life, life in the fullest sense of the word, uncompromised by weakness, life without end. The Book of Genesis describes the tree of life in the Garden of Eden, the way to it protected by cherubim until the time when in God's purpose its fruit would be freely available to mankind, and men and women would live forever in perfection.

The prophet Ezekiel and Jesus himself in his last message saw that time in a vision of the future:

Along the bank of the river, on this side and that, will grow all kinds of trees used for food; their leaves will not wither, and their fruit will not fail. They will bear fruit every month because their water flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food and their leaves for medicine.

• Ezekiel 47.12, compare with Revelation 22.2:

To him who overcomes I will give to eat from the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God.

• Revelation 2.7

Remarkably, the Bible is not the only place where we find this symbol of the tree of life. It seems that many religions across the world have their own version. You would expect it to be shared by the Abrahamic religions, but it appears in many others: in ancient Persia, Mesopotamia, the Buddism of India and Tibet, Taoist China, in Hinduism, German paganism, Norse mythology and in the Americas. It is celebrated in many works of art in different cultures across the world (see cover).

Why is this?

The Flood story poses a similar question. The Bible story of the great Flood of Noah's day is found in various forms in religions across the world. Could it be that all these stories of the Tree and the Flood, hugely distorted though they often are, bare witness to the earliest days of human history, and when mankind repopulated the earth after the Flood they carried with them the memory of the events described in Genesis, the record of Moses validated by the Apostle Paul and by Jesus himself? Sadly in modern times the expression "tree of life" has been applied to something very different. When Charles Darwin published the first edition of his "Origin of Species" in 1859, it had just one illustration, a quite sketchy diagram like a tree, showing how all living things could, according to his theory, have arisen from one or two primitive organisms by a process of small accidental changes.

• Charles Darwin

Starting with the original trunk, as changes take place branches grow, then twigs, with the outermost twigs representing the myriad animals and plants we see around us today. It was a powerful picture of Darwin's "big idea" and it is still used today – but is it based on scientific evidence?

Darwin himself lamented that the fossil evidence to support his theory was missing, but he was confident that future discoveries would support it. 150 years, and millions of newly-discovered fossils later, the evidence is still missing; the myriad intermediate forms required to complete the tree are imaginary, not one but billions of "missing links". Seen against the generally accepted scheme of geological ages, fossil life forms appear suddenly, (even explosively as in the "Cambrian explosion"), then flourish unchanged for generations ("stasis" is the term used for this period of stability) and then suddenly disappear, for reasons scientists can often only guess at. This is definitely not evolution.

The rapid advances in DNA research this century seem to offer a different route to supporting Darwin's "big idea". Surely if all living things were linked together in this chain of descent, their DNA would show evidence of how these changes took place? Since the first publication of the complete human genome in 2012, the genomes of many other living things have now been found.

Note: the "genome" is the complete set of genetic information, present in any particular organism. The human genome includes about 20,000 genes, which are smaller "packets" of DNA that do a particular job.

From the genomes which have so far been established it now appears that every species has hundreds of what are called ORFan genes, commonly referred to as ‘orphan’ genes – genes that have no resemblance or apparent relationship to others found in similar organisms. Evolution by small incremental changes requires that each gene will have similar "sister" or "cousin" genes in other similar organisms, but these don't – the family resemblance that evolutionists predicted is absent. "Each such gene is a huge challenge to the theory of evolution ... ORFan genes contradict this evolutionary prediction" (Matti Leisola Dsc, former dean of Chemistry and Materials Science at Helsinki University of Technology, author of "Heretic" 2018).

DNA evidence is now routinely used in courts of law throughout the world to establish identity and familial relationships beyond doubt. This same evidence now shows that all living things are not related to each other; evolution never happened.

It is a huge tragedy that this powerful biblical symbol of the tree of life has been been supplanted by an emblem of the atheistic, materialist philosophy of our times. It is imaginary, it is unscientific, and it is an attack on faith and purpose and hope in human life. It is not a tree of life – it is a tree of death.

This omnipresent and hugely damaging philosophy is one of many things that the believer in God's Word has to "overcome", looking forward in faith to the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise:

    To him who overcomes
     I will give to eat of the tree of life.