The Bible is a book of the divine mysteries. As we have seen, the first mystery in the Bible is the divine economy. But this mystery has been missed, lost, and buried for centuries. Thank the Lord that in these last days He has opened up this mystery to us. We can even see such a mystery in the first two chapters of the Bible. Here the divine economy has been sown in the Word as a seed. Many of the divine truths in the divine revelation are sown in Genesis as seeds, and in the following books of the Bible these seeds grow and develop. Whatever is revealed in Genesis is developed throughout all the books of the Bible until the last book, the book of Revelation, where there is the harvest of all these truths.
The truth concerning the tree of life is sown in Genesis 2, and this truth is reaped in Revelation 22. In between Genesis and Revelation there is the development of the truth concerning the tree of life. The tree of life is for God to dispense Himself into His chosen people. The tree of life signifies God Himself as life to us. God Himself desires to be our life. We have to realize that life is mysterious, abstract, and altogether invisible. You cannot see life, but it is so real, living, organic, and powerful. Our physical life is an invisible entity, but it can be realized. Life is living, organic, vigorous, energetic, and powerful.
God desires to be life to us, but how can we realize and touch this life? It is for this reason that God as life has to be embodied. Electricity is real and powerful, but no one can see it. For the electricity to be appropriated and applied, the electricity needs to be embodied. A cable or a wire is the embodiment of electricity. The electricity is embodied in the wire. When we have the wire or the cable, we have electricity. In like manner, the tree of life is the embodiment of life. The tree is the embodiment of the divine life just as your physical body is the embodiment of your physical life. The tree of life is the embodiment of God as life, the embodiment of the divine life. The Bible reveals that the embodiment of the divine life is Jesus. Where is God? He is embodied in Jesus. Outside of Jesus there is no God. Outside of Jesus you cannot see God or find God. This is the same as saying that outside of the cable or wire you cannot see electricity or find electricity. God is embodied in Jesus, and this very God embodied in Jesus is life. This embodied God makes Jesus the tree of life.
In the Old Testament the tree of life is mentioned only once. Its mentioning in Genesis 2 is a seed of the divine truth sown there. Due to the fall of man, there is a long history of silence concerning the tree of life. Then in the New Testament, we are told that God became a man. The Word in the beginning was God Himself, and this very God became flesh, a man in the flesh by the name of Jesus. In John 1:4 we are told that "in Him was life." When God became a man, life was no longer abstract. Life was embodied in the flesh. In Jesus was life. The tree is the flesh, and the flesh is the tree. John told us that the apostles saw this tree and touched this tree (1 John 1:1). When they touched Jesus, they touched the tree of life. They received life because in Him was life. He told us that He came that we may have life and that we may have life abundantly (John 10:10b). He did not only want us to have a small amount of life but the abundance of life. Jesus is the divine life embodied. In Him was life. Life was His content.
From my youth, I was taught by many Christian teachers that Jesus came to save sinners. First Timothy 1:15 tells us that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. This is a wonderful fact in the Scriptures, but very few Christian teachers told me that Jesus came that we may have life. Jesus came not only to be our Savior but to be the embodiment of life. When we believed in Him, we not only got saved, but we also received the divine life because He is the embodiment of this life.