In the Christmas story, the wise men bring gifts to the Lord: gold, frankincense and myrrh.

The gold is listed first, because it is the inmost - signifying good, e.g. the good that we do when we love the Lord and the neighbor.

The frankincense is next. It signifies rational truth, which is the set of true ideas that we know, not about external things like cars or cooking, but about what is really good, and what is really true.

These rational truths are built on earlier knowledges that we learn, before we have really made them our own. Those early knowledges about spiritual things - often learned in childhood - are represented by the myrrh.

In a way, these gifts are really a reciprocation. We can't actually give them to the Lord until the Lord has given them to us. We necessarily start out by learning and doing the Lord's law (myrrh). The Lord can then call up those memories to become rational truths (frankincense). Then, over time, and with effort, those truths can be transformed into good (gold). The wise men from the East had gone through this process of learning and becoming vessels that could receive truths and goods. They were able to perceive the Lord's birth, and find him, and bring gifts to him.

241. 1. The wisest people of all, Adam and his wife, let themselves be led astray by the serpent, and God did not use his divine providence to prevent it. The reason for this is that Adam and his wife do not mean the first people created on earth but the people of the earliest church. It is their new creation or regeneration that is being described in this way, the actual new creation or regeneration by the creation of heaven and earth in the first chapter, their wisdom and intelligence by the Garden of Eden, and the end of that church by their eating of the tree of knowledge.

At heart, the Word is spiritual, containing secrets of divine wisdom; and in order to contain them it has been written entirely in symbolic and figurative language. We can therefore see that the people of that church--who were supremely wise at first, but who eventually became the worst because of their pride in their intelligence--were not misled by any serpent but by self-love. That is the head of the serpent that the seed of the woman, that is, the Lord, would eventually trample under foot.

[2] Can anyone fail to see on rational grounds that this means more than what is being said in the literal narrative? Can anyone take in the notion that the creation of the world happened the way it is described here? That is why scholars sweat to explain what it says in this opening chapter and finally say that they do not understand it.

Then there are the two trees in the garden or paradise, one of life and one of knowledge, with the second there to make problems; and there is the fact that simply eating from this tree is such an immense sin that not only Adam and Eve but the whole human race as well, as their descendants, became liable to damnation. There is the serpent's ability to mislead them, along with other matters; there is the creation of the wife from her husband's rib; there is their recognition of their nakedness after the fall and covering themselves with fig leaves; there is the provision of leather garments to cover their bodies; and there is the stationing of the cherub with a flaming sword to guard the path to the tree of life.

[3] These are all images used to describe the establishment of the earliest church, its state and its change, and eventually its demise. You may find explanation of the secrets of them all, secrets contained in that spiritual meaning that is in the details, in the volumes on Genesis and Exodus published in London under the title Secrets of Heaven.

We may conclude, then, that the tree of life in Genesis means the Lord as to his divine providence, and that the tree of knowledge means humanity as to its own prudence.