Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 1233
“The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.” Revelation 22:2
WE have in the 21st and 22nd chapters of the Book of 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 benefits us to reveal, 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 here employed, for we must, to a large extent, regard the language as figurative, is 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, but with added bliss and superior joy! We shall dwell where a river rolls with placid streams and compasses a land where there is gold, “and the gold of that land is good, there is myrrh and the onyx stone.” The river is watering every tree that is pleasant to the sight and flows hard by the Tree of Life in the middle 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, hedged about by a solemn threat, 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 Divine 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 Wafer 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 12 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 forever.” 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. 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, means 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 center, 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!