Genesis 2:8 Commentary and Bible Study

There were two trees in the Garden of Eden, in the midst of the Garden of Eden – the tree of life and the tree of death, or the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As the old Puritans used to love to point out, the preoccupation of Satan before the fall was to try to persuade our first parents to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so that they would surely die. Ever since then it is the tree of life which has been presented to fallen men and women, and it is his chief occupation to persuade people not to eat of the tree of life. So you can sum up the whole of satanic activity by that simple picture and illustration.Now there is some geography in these verses. There evidently was a time when you could quite clearly determine where the Garden of Eden had been; now it isn’t there anymore. After the fall, and especially after the flood, any signs of that precious place have been eradicated. Many people think it was under this or that particular desert; some place it in Iraq, some place it elsewhere; there is a little bit of geography here but we do not have sufficient knowledge to understand it. We only learn that it had a real location and was not a mythical location. There was a time when people could figure it out with the names of the rivers and everything else, and get some intelligible idea. It was a definite place, ‘eastward in [or of] Eden’. Eden was a region of the newly-created earth, and at a particular point to the east of it the Garden of Eden is planted. God planted a garden especially for man, a region which was different from the untamed creation all around. A garden is a place of order, a place of beauty, a place where human artistry and skill transform the wildness of raw nature into something which is the product of his own workmanship. The garden of Eden was an ordered portion of creation which man was to tend, showing him in microcosm how he was to bring order on God’s creation and subdue it. And God placed man in this garden to give him a start in this work of having dominion over creation. It was a place Adam would not want to leave, and indeed he had to be driven out of it after his disobedience to God.