The Tree of Life

Part 14 examines the Tree of Life as a symbol of the Spirit of God — the giver of eternal life, the producer of spiritual fruit, and the source of new birth in Christ.

Revelation 22:1–2 describes the Tree yielding “her fruit every month,” its leaves for the healing of the nations, and Proverbs 3:18 calls Wisdom “a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her.” The episode also considers Proverbs 11:30, the fruit-bearing imagery of Luke 1:41–42, the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22–25, and Luke 7:35, “Wisdom is justified of all her children.”

It reflects on the grammatical and contextual reasons the King James Version and the earlier Geneva Bible rendered the Tree in Revelation 22 with feminine language, and asks: could the Tree of Life, Lady Wisdom and the Holy Spirit be interconnected symbols revealing different aspects of the same divine mystery?