Everyone has a family tree. And when you know who’s in your family tree, you get a better sense of your family, and how that shaped your mother and father. And that, in turn, even lets you know something about yourself.
But does it surprise you to know that God also has a family tree? But His family tree is different, for it goes back more than several generations—it even goes back into eternity. For the Triune God has always existed, and He is the Source and Creator of this world and universe.
But what do we learn when we look into God’s family tree? It shows us how God sent His Son into the world to graft us back into His family. In God’s family tree, you can trace the ancestors of Jesus to see who He is and what He does for you. You can also find out who you are in God’s family, by looking to the one who made it possible for you to be in God’s family: Jesus.
As we prepare to celebrate God being born as a baby boy, Jesus’ family tree shows us how God worked through human history to save us. But our need for God to do this came about because of what our first parents (Adam and Eve) did.
When God created the world and everything in it, He put Adam in a garden of paradise, the Garden of Eden. He then told Adam to tend and watch over everything in the Garden, which even included his wife, Eve.
Adam and Eve could eat from any tree in the Garden. But one tree was in the Garden that God told them not to eat. That was the Tree of Knowledge. All the other trees would give and strengthen life, but the Tree of Knowledge delivered death. God wanted Adam and Eve to trust Him so they wouldn’t need this one tree. After all, they had an orchard of other trees from which to eat.
But for a moment, let’s consider a tree. A tree pictures for us the bond between the Triune God and His created people. God is like the roots and trunk of a tree, and His creatures are like the branches. Just as a branch can only live when it’s connected to the tree, we can only live when we’re connected to the living God.
But when Adam and Eve devoured the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, they tore themselves away from God. They chose to become a severed branch, broken off the tree and left lying on the ground. Oh, the leaves may still look alive for a time, but the branch is severed from its source of life, and so death is now its destiny.
In our sinful, inherited nature, we’re just like Adam and Eve—separated from God like a branch severed from a tree. It’s like the book of Romans tells us: “Just as sin entered the world through one man [Adam], and death through sin, in this way death came to all people” (Romans 5:12). And 1 Corinthians tells us that “in Adam, [we] all die” (1 Corinthians 15:22).
God told Adam and Eve what would happen if they ate of that tree. They would die. And die they did—as have their descendants since then. Indeed, this curse of death haunts us and affects every person in every time and place. And it’s not just dying. It’s sin’s corruption in every cranny and crevice of our life. It’s getting sick. It’s aging. It’s bad weather. It’s even hatred and crime.
When Adam and Eve walked away from God, they fell from God’s grace like a branch falling from a tree. And this fall continues to have its aftershocks. Disastrous earthquakes rock this world. Raging tornadoes tear up homes. Terrorists kill others, trying to get their way. Corrupt governments abuse power. Disease stalks us as its prey. As a branch fallen from a tree is dying, so also is this world.
You see and feel the effects of this in your life, every day! But what you experience are just the symptoms. For what you experience is the result of sin’s corruption. Sin’s corruption is the disease; what you experience are just the symptoms of that sickness.
This corruption has even set our hearts against God, which makes us naturally hostile to Him. Despite your outward appearance, in your heart, you’re like Adam and Eve. You want “be like God” (Genesis 3:5), calling the shots when it comes to Him.
When we live like that, that’s like a broken-off branch trying to be the tree. But that’s not how it works! Not only can a branch not be the tree; it can’t even reconnect itself to the tree, any more than sin-sick humans can connect themselves back to God. Only God can heal the breach of sin.
So, God steps in and plants His family tree. Even as death enters the world from sin, God speaks His words of promise. He says to the serpent: “I will put hostility between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel” (Genesis 3:15). God plants the seed of His family tree by promising the Seed of the woman. That Seed will save us from sin and death.
If you read through Genesis, you could easily miss that great promise from God. For God’s promise of a Seed from the woman, who is the Savior, is, well, only a seed. But when God plants this promise in the ears of Adam and Eve, it takes root and produces faith. For “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” (Romans 10:17). And that faith also gives them hope—hope that God’s promise will come true.
Adam and Eve knew what God meant. God intended to send a man. But no mere man would do. We would need a God-man to correct the catastrophe that Adam and Eve had wrought. And how do we know that? Ah, we find out in the next chapter of Genesis, Genesis 4.
After Adam and Eve had their first child, this is what Eve says in unvarnished Hebrew: “I have gotten a man—the Lord.” God’s promise of the Seed of a Savior kindled faith in Adam and Eve. And so Eve knew that, through her in some way, the Savior of the world, the serpent-crusher, would come.
Now, she didn’t how or when. God would reveal that in time. But Eve believed God’s promise. And so in her excitement, she thought that when she gave birth to her firstborn son, she gave birth to the promised Seed, the Savior of the world.
We even see that in the name of Eve’s first son. He was Cain. Cain comes from the Hebrew word meaning “to get.” Cain’s name shows the hope that Eve had. She believed that she had given birth to the one whom God had promised would win salvation for her. But as Cain grew, Eve realized that he wasn’t the promised Seed.
And, over time, God sprinkled more of His promised word, speaking of the promised Seed. And God’s faithful kept looking and hoping. Generation after generation looked forward in anticipation, even as God continued to promise His Seed of a Savior.
Abraham trusted God’s promise and hoped for the Savior. God told him, “All the nations of the earth will be blessed by your Seed” (Genesis 22:18). King David heard, believed, and looked forward to the same promise. God told him, “I will raise up your Seed to succeed you, who will come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom” (2 Samuel 7:12).
The Apostle Paul shows us how to understand these Old-Covenant promises fulfilled through God’s family free. Paul said: “The promises were spoken to Abraham and his Seed. God doesn’t say “seeds,” referring to many [seeds], but “Seed,” referring to one person, the Messiah” (Galatians 3:16).
God’s family tree comes to full bloom in the Seed that is Jesus, the promised Savior, who is the Messiah, the Christ. God promised a Seed of the woman to Adam and Eve. And God was faithful. He later sent His Son to be the Seed, born from the blessed virgin, named Mary.
What Eve hoped for, Mary saw and experienced. Mary could correctly say, “I have gotten a man—the Lord!” She gave birth to God in the flesh, in the Person of Jesus.
Jesus would do what Eve’s son, Cain, could not. Cain murdered his brother, Abel. But Jesus, instead of killing, came to be killed, to die, even for the killing that Cain committed. Jesus came to heal the fatal wound that sin had brought into the world.
This man, Jesus, would overcome and reverse the fall into sin. By His death on the bloody cross, He would graft the branch of humanity back on the tree of life with God.
What God did isn’t just ancient history or theological navel-gazing. It’s your story. It’s your family tree, in the family of God, that is. The Holy Spirit, working through Word and Sacrament, has given the Seed that God promised to Adam and Eve, to Abraham, and to David, to you.
What the saints of old hoped for, you have seen come to full fruition. By this Seed of the woman, by the forgiveness that He won for you on the cross, God has grafted you back into life with Him. The waters of baptism birth you into this new life with God. And then God feeds in His supper, giving you Jesus’ body and blood. That’s how God nourishes you with life-giving nutrients that come up from the roots and the trunk.
It’s true: Adam and Eve severed the branch of humanity from the tree of life with God. But God is greater than our sin. He has planted the Seed of His family tree, so you—even you—would be grafted back into life with Him forever. Amen.
