Leaves for the Healing of Nations

WE have in the twenty-first and twenty-second chapters of the Book of the Revelation a very wonderful description of heaven upon earth. I shall not attempt to go into any prophetical explanations as to when this will be fulfilled, but we know this for certain, for we have it in so many words, that the holy city, New Jerusalem, will descend out of heaven from God, and that, in a word, there will be for a time at least a heaven on earth. But inasmuch as heaven, be it where it may, is still heaven, the description of heaven on earth sufficiently avails to reveal to us in some measure the present joys and blessings of the celestial state. We shall not make any mistake if we read the passage as hundreds of thousands have done before us, and as all common readers will always persist in doing, as a description of the heavenly state as it is at present, for what can come down from heaven but that which is in heaven? The results of the revealed presence of the God of love must be to His saints very much the same at all times; the same glory will be revealed, the same happiness bestowed, the same occupations followed, the same fellowship enjoyed. We may, therefore, consider that we have before us a description of what heaven now is and shall be world without end, save only that the bodies of the saints are not yet raised, and therefore all the minute details may not be fully developed. The glowing metaphors

* Revelation xxii, 2.

here employed, for we must to a large extent regard the language as figurative, are evidently taken from the Garden of Eden. That was man’s first inheritance, and it is a type of his last. That Paradise which the first Adam lost us the Second Adam will regain for us, with added bliss, and superior joy; we shall dwell where a river rolls with placid stream, and compasses a land where there is gold, “And the gold of that land is good, there is bdellium and the onyx stone”; a river watering every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and flowing hard by the tree of life, in the ‘midst of the garden. Yet, though there is a likeness between heaven and Eden, there is a difference too; for the earthly paradise, with all its perfections, was still of the earth earthy, and the second paradise is, like the Lord from heaven, heavenly and divine. The fatal tree of knowledge of good and evil, nedged about by a solemn threatening, grows not in the garden of the immortals. They have known evil, but they now “know the Lord,” and know evil no more. Everything in the diviner paradise is fuller and more abundant. The gold, which in Eden lay in the soil, is used in the -heavenly paradise to pave the streets; the river has no earthly source, but is “a pure river of the water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb”; the Lord, who in Eden walked only at solemn intervals “among the trees of the garden in the cool of the day,” has in heaven His tabernacle among men, and dwells among them; while the trees which grew in Eden, and ripened their fruits only in autumn, are succeeded by trees with twelve fruitages in the year.

It has been thought that man would have preserved the immortality of his body by eating of the tree of life in Eden, and that therefore when he sinned he was shut out from it, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever.” Some even go so far as to think that the extreme longevity of the antediluvians may have been helped by the remaining influence of that wondrous food upon the constitution of man for many generations. Of that we know nothing, it is all conjecture. It is, however, very customary for expositors to speak of the tree of life in the garden as the sacrament of the primeval age, the eating of whose fruit they conceive to be the grand means of preserving Adam from death. Now, there is a tree of life in heaven, but there is this difference, that it is more accessible — more accessible even than when Adam was in perfection, for if there were but one tree of life in the garden, the garden was certainly divided by the river which flowed in several streams through it, and therefore the tree could not always be easily reached from all parts of the garden. In the passage before us we have the tree of life on either side of the river, which I suppose intends that there were many such trees; though there was only one tree as to its kind, yet many in number. The picture presented to the mind’s eye would appear to be that of a wide street, with a river flowing down the centre, like some of the broader canals of Holland, with trees growing on either side, all of them of the same kind, all called the tree of life. I do not know how we can make the figure out in any other way. Some have represented the tree as only one, and growing in the bottom of the river, rising out of the water, and so sending boughs on either side, “being itself so large as to shade all the city. - Such a ‘conception is almost monstrous, and to conceive of many trees of life, all one tree as to quality and nature, growing all along the street, is to present a beautiful image, which can very readily be conceived by the mind. At any rate, to all the inhabitants of heaven the tree of life is equally and perpetually accessible. They may come at it when they may. No cherub’s flaming sword stands there to keep them back, but they may always come and eat of its twelve fruitages, and pluck its healing leaves.

“Joy Here holds court within its own metropolis. And through its midst the crystal river flows Exhaustless from the everlasting throne,

- Shaded on either side by trees of life
Which yield in still unvarying interchange
Their ripe vicissitude of monthly fruits
Amid their clustering leaves medicinal.”

The leaves of this true arbor vite were for the healing of the nations. Of what can this tree be a type but of our Lord Jesus Christ and His salvation? What can it signify but that the presence of Christ preserves the inhabitants of heaven for ever free from sickness, while beyond heaven — the precincts, among the nations — the saving influence is scattered? As the leaves fall from the trees, so does sacred influence descend from our Lord Jesus in heaven down to the sons of men; and as the leaves are the least precious products of a fruit-bearing tree, so the least things that have to do with Him and come from Him have a healing virtue in them. The heavenly city is described as having an abundance of all manner of delights. Do men rejoice in wealth? “The very streets are paved with gold exceeding clear and fine.” The gates are pearls and the walls are built of precious stones. No palace of the Czsars or of the Indian Moguls could rival the gorgeous riches of the city of the Great King. “That city with the jewelled crest Like some new-lighted sun;

A blaze of burning amethyst,
Ten thousand orbs in one.”

In our cities we feel greatly the need of light. It must have been a dreary age when our ancestors groped their way at night through unlighted streets, or gathered poor comfort from the feeble, struggling rays of a poor candle placed over each householder’s door. The heavenly city knows no night at all, and consequently needs no candle; indeed, its endless day is independent of the sun itself, “for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.” Conveniences for worship are terribly needed in many of our great cities, and it is a good work to erect temples in which worshippers may assemble; but, speaking paradoxically, heaven is well supplied in this respect, because of an utter absence both of the need of such places and of the places themselves. “I saw no temple therein,” for indeed the whole place is a temple, and every street is in the highest sense hallowed ground. O blessed place, where we shall not need to enter into our closet to worship our Father who is in heaven, but shall in the open street behold the unveiled vision of God!