The Name of the Tree

God named the forbidden tree before anyone ate from it. And there was knowledge in the name.

If we read the story carefully we see that in Genesis 2, before anyone had done anything wrong, before the serpent has said a word, God planted two trees in the middle of the Garden, and He named them both.
The first is the Tree of Life; that’s simple enough.
The second is the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
And then God told Adam: not to eat from it.
Most of us move straight from God’s command to what followed—the serpent, the fruit, the shame, the exile. But there’s something worth pausing on before we get there. Something hiding in plain sight. The name of that tree is not just a label, it’s also a piece of information. It tells Adam, and Eve by extension, what will happen if they do eat from it. They gain knowledge, of some kind, before they ate from it, and it’s knowledge they had whether or not they disobeyed God’s command.
God gave Adam and Eve knowledge of the tree—in the very name of the tree—before they had done anything at all.
That’s what this piece is about. Not the Fall itself. What came just before it.

A Name That Teaches

When Adam named the animals, he was not just sticking labels on things. He was recognizing their characteristics—seeing what they were and giving that recognition a word. The name carries meaning. It says something true about the thing.
So when God names the second tree the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, He’s encoding something in the name itself. He’s saying: this is what eating the fruit from this tree will produce. He’s putting the outcome of the act into the name of the thing before the act.
In Genesis 2:17. God said: “but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”

Here’s what strikes me: that prohibition only makes sense if Adam and Eve already understood, at least in some basic way, what the tree would do. You can’t meaningfully warn someone about a consequence they have no concept of. The warning presupposes comprehension at some level. It assumes that the name has already done its work. “There is dangerous knowledge that results in death that is to be avoided.” presupposes an understanding of what knowledge is and that there is knowledge one doesn’t yet have. It also presupposes an understanding of death.
In other words—before the first bite, before the serpent’s first word, before Eve even looks at the fruit—there is already a kind of knowledge in Eden. Not the full, experiential knowledge that would come later. But propositional knowledge: and it was encoded in the name of the forbidden tree.
I call this knowledge anterior epistemology—knowledge that precedes the act. Knowledge that was already there, already given, already received. Before the Fall.

Two Trees, Two Kinds of Knowing

There is something curious about the other tree. The Tree of Life is named in the same breath, in Genesis 2:9. But it is not called the Tree of the Knowledge of Life.
Why not? Life, apparently, didn’t need its effect announced in advance. We don’t need to be told what life will do to you. You just live, or receive it. 
The forbidden tree is different. Its name announces what it produces. And this, I think, is deliberate. God could have named it something simpler—something more like a warning label (more about this later). But God named it after what it would produce, not just after its danger. The name is more measured than it blunt. It reveals something real about the act, but it reveals it as a proposition, not as an experience. It tells you what will happen if you do it. It doesn’t tell you what it will feel like if you do it.
Those are two very different kinds of knowing. And the gap between them is where the whole drama of Eden takes place.
Think of it like a warning label on a pack of cigarettes. You know smoking causes cancer (propositional knowledge). But you don’t really know what it’s like to battle lung cancer until you’re lying in a hospital bed, gasping for air (participatory knowledge). The label gives you enough information to choose wisely. What you do with that information is up to you.

What You Know Before You Act

Søren Kierkegaard—the great Danish philosopher and one of the most honest writers about the human condition who ever lived—once wrote in his journal: “What I really lack is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I am to know.”
He wasn’t dismissing knowledge. He was pointing to a gap that we all feel but rarely name. There’s what we know in our heads, and then there’s what we come to know by living through something, especially some act we chose to do. They’re not the same thing. And the second kind is only available on the other side of the experience. Kierkegaard put it elsewhere like this: “Life can only be explained after it has been lived.”
He’s right. You can read every book ever written about grief, and still be surprised by grief when it arrives. You can know, in theory, what it means to forgive someone who has badly wronged you—and still discover, when the moment comes, that the knowledge in your head was not the same as the knowledge from the experience of forgiving someone who badly wronged you.
This is the gap Adam and Eve stood in. They knew—from the name, and from God’s command—what eating would produce. What they couldn’t know in advance was what it would be like to do it. That knowledge was only available on the other side.
And this matters enormously, because it means the Fall was not a leap into the dark.

Eve Knew What She Was Doing (to some degree)

Genesis 3:6 is worth reading carefully. When Eve looks at the tree, three things register in her mind: it is good for food, pleasing to look at, and—significantly—desirable to make one wise.
That third observation is not accidental. She knows what the tree will do. She’s been told, she confirms it in Genesis 3:3. She is not confused about what eating will produce.
There’s something else worth noting. When Eve rehearses her reasoning, she does not include God’s warning of death on the other side of the ledger. She lists the advantages, but she omits the consequence. That’s not ignorance. That’s a very human kind of selective knowing, we call it willful ignorance—the kind we all do when we’ve already decided what we want.
Jesus did something very similar, but in the positive: He “did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.” (Php 2:6).
The Fall was not a failure of information. It was a failure of the will, in full possession of what it needed to know; just like the kenosis was not a success of omniscience, it was a success of the submission of the will of the Messiah.
And the realization that followed the Fall—the shame, the hiding, the sudden awareness of nakedness—was the arrival of participatory knowledge. “Oh. So this is what God meant.” That understanding was not available in the name of the tree. It was only available from inside the experience. In the same way that Christ “learned obedience through what he suffered.” (Heb 5:8). 

Thinking Comes Later

A philosopher named Paul Brockelman made an observation that has stayed with me. He wrote that existential thought—our reflection on what it means to exist—is “fated to always come puffing up after existence as a reflection upon it.”¹
I love that image. Human thought, or reflection, is a wheezing latecomer who arrives after the party of existence has already started. We don’t think our way into existence. We exist, and then we reflect. Understanding follows experience; it doesn’t precede it.
This is one of the reasons that Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am”—has always felt slightly upside-down to me. If thought always arrives after the fact, then it’s existence that grounds thought, not the other way around. I am, therefore I think. And I would go further: I think, therefore Thou art—because thought, at its deepest, is always addressed to someone; “deep calls out to deep.” (Ps 42:7). It reaches toward an Other. But that’s an argument for another day.²
The point here is this: the gap between knowing-about and knowing-through-experience is not a gap we can think our way across. It can only be crossed by living, and the cost of crossing it must be weighed very carefully.
Karl Jaspers, another philosopher wrestling with the limits of pure rationalism, put it sharply: there is “something real outside our philosophical assertions and systems which cannot be contained within them and yet which is presupposed by them.”³ Participatory knowledge—the kind you only get from the inside of an experience—is exactly this something. You cannot fit it into a proposition. You can only enter it or not.

The Pattern Runs Through Scripture

Once you see this pattern, you start seeing it everywhere in the biblical narrative.
Adam names the animals after encounter, not before. He meets each creature, and then he starts naming them. Eve is made and named after the search for Adam’s companion has exhausted the existing options—after the fruitless parade of creatures that were not quite right. God tells Abraham to go to a land He will show him—not a land He is naming in advance. The destination is disclosed in transit.
And then there are the disciples on the road to Emmaus, walking with a stranger they don’t recognize, their hearts somehow burning within them—and only afterward, when He breaks the bread and vanishes, do they understand: “Did not our hearts burn within us?” (Luke 24:32). The recognition comes after. It always comes after.
The one exception—the one that proves the rule—is God’s own speech. “Let there be light.” Here, naming precedes existence. God speaks and the thing comes to be. His word is not a response to reality; it is reality’s origin. This is the deepest difference between Creator and creature: God’s naming is ontologically generative. Ours is ontologically responsive. We name what we encounter after we encounter it. He makes what He names when He makes it.
Even in naming, in the very beginning, the Word of God was already alive and active—“sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit” (Hebrews 4:12). The name of the forbidden tree was not a neutral label. It was a living word, doing something in the hearts of those who heard it.

Grace in the Name

God did not have to name the tree the way He did. He could have simply forbidden it, without explanation. He could have called it something very opaque—He could have named it after its danger alone: the Tree of Death is one option that comes speculatively to my mind. That name would have put it in a binary position with the Tree of Life, and it would have explained the consequence of eating it without the built in temptation in the name the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
But He didn't name it the Tree of Death, He named instead it after what it would produce. He encoded, in the name itself, enough information for the choice to be a genuine one. He gave Adam and Eve, in advance, the propositional knowledge they needed to make their decision meaningful. The name of the tree was an act of epistemic grace—God giving knowledge before the act, so that the act could be genuinely moral.
Without that anterior knowledge, there is no real choice. There is only stumbling and guessing. But with it, there is the full weight of human freedom: knowing, and choosing one way or the other.
The tragedy of Genesis 3 is not ignorance. It is the first failure of the will in full possession of what it needed to know.

The Reversal

Earlier I mentioned Philippians 2 and Christ not counting equality with God something to be grasped. What happens there is extraordinary.
Christ, who possessed all propositional knowledge of what obedience-unto-death would mean, chose to enter the participatory knowledge of it. He didn’t merely know about crucifixion. He went through it. He learned, as Hebrews 5:8 says with stunning plainness, “obedience through what he suffered”—despite having anterior, propositional knowledge of every moment in advance.
Adam and Eve had propositional knowledge of what disobedience would produce, and chose to acquire the participatory knowledge of it anyway. Christ had propositional knowledge of what obedience would cost, and chose to acquire the participatory knowledge of it also—to pay the cost, not just know what it would be. The structure is identical but the direction is reversed. Kenosis—the self-emptying of Christ—is the precise inversion of the Fall.
And at the end of that road: “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name” (Philippians 2:9). The one who went all the way through receives the name. Not as a label. As a reality earned from the inside.

What This Means for You and Me

If the Fall was a failure of will rather than of intellect, then the work of discipleship is not primarily a knowledge project. It’s a heart project.
This reframes some important things for us. It tells us about the depth of our problem and the extent of sanctification: In John 8, Jesus was speaking to people who had believed in him (v31)—and by the end of the conversation, they were picking up stones to kill Him. The letters to the churches in Revelation 2–3 are not written to pagans. They’re written to congregations of believers. In both cases, the question is not “do they know enough?” The question is “where does their love lie?” 
Anterior knowledge is assumed. Romans 1:19 says, “for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.” The divine concern, however, goes much deeper: what will we do with what we’ve been given?
The name God gave for the tree gave Adam and Eve enough propositional knowledge to make the choice genuinely moral. The name of Christ gives us enough to make discipleship genuinely costly. We are not in the dark. We have been told.
The question—in Eden, in Ephesus, and in your local church—is always the same: having been told, what will you now choose?

This changes how we read the Bible—and how we live.

This is not an argument against thinking. Repentance begins with the mind being convinced. But it doesn’t end there. The mind’s job, finally, is to bring the heart to the place where it submits to the Lordship of Christ. Knowledge that stops short of that has only done half of the work.
The tree was named before anyone ate from it. That name was not decoration. It was grace—anterior, propositional, freely given. Enough to make the choice real.
We are still standing in front of that tree. The name has not changed.

Key Takeaways:

1. The name of the tree was a gift—God gave Adam and Eve propositional knowledge so their choice could be meaningful.
2. The Fall wasn’t ignorance—Eve knew the warning but focused on the perceived benefit, Adam remained silent. Sin is not stupidity.
3. Jesus reversed the Fall—He knew the cost of obedience and chose the Cross (Phil. 2:8).
4. The question for us: Having been told, what will we choose? (Rom. 1:19–21).

Notes

¹ Paul Brockelman, Existential Phenomenology and the World of Ordinary Experience (Washington: University Press of America, 1980), 15.

² Alan R. Jones, “Cogito Ergo Tu Es,” Mesotopia, https://www.mesotopia.grouplands.com/cogito-ergo-tu-es.

³ Karl Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, trans. William Earle (New York: Noonday Press, 1955), 47.

© Alan R. Jones