The Healing of the Nations
Revelation 22.1-5
The Tree of Life has reappeared here at the very end of the Bible after disappearing at the very beginning of the Bible. The Tree of Life reappears in the world to come, after the entire cosmos has undergone a kind of purge. Everything that is evil or in opposition to God, or that which is offensive to Him, or that which is not in harmony with God’s nature, has all been permanently removed. What remains after this purge is the City of God, the New Jerusalem, which is the people of God, and a regenerated earth, which is where the people of God will live forever. John is seeing a vision of this new world order and what will be waiting for us there.
There is more said here about the Tree of Life than what is mentioned in the beginning in Genesis. There is nothing mentioned in Genesis, for example, of the power of the leaves of the Tree of Life. The emphasis in Genesis is on what mankind lost. Paradise regained is something even more glorious than what was lost and this vision is meant to give us hope for the future. This passage in Revelation is a preview of coming attractions and it is meant to provoke a deep longing in the hearts of God’s people.
The Tree of Life is a picture of having access, at the very source, to eternal life. And this source of Life is so potent that even the leaves of the tree will heal the nations. God’s purpose is to reverse all the effects of sin so that all the nations are fully healed. Healing is just another way of talking about salvation. To be saved is to be healed from the deadly effects of sin. These deadly effects culminate in the Second Death, the effects of which will continue forever.
There is a way of escape from the Second Death and some will never experience the ultimate and final effect of sin. Some will have access to the Tree of Life. Instead of dying forever, they will live forever. If the leaves of the Tree can heal the nations, what do you think the fruit of the Tree will do?
We are not yet at the source of Life. We are still strangers and aliens in this world and we are not yet at home. We might think that tasting of the power of the world to come is potent and intoxicating even now. What would it be like to be at the Source of all Life? When we see the Tree of Life, the Door that had been shut to us will finally be opened, and we will be welcomed inside forever.
The Tree of Life stands as bookends to the story of the Bible. In Eden, the Tree of Life was there. And the presence of God was there. Adam and his wife had access to the source of eternal life in the presence of God and would have lived forever in that state. But there was another tree there from which they were forbidden to eat. Here are two choices: fellowship with God or a life apart from God. God told them that if they disobeyed Him, or chose to separate themselves from Him, they would die. That would be the price of their freedom from obeying His commands. In other words, they could go their own way, do their own thing, and choose not to live in harmony with their Creator, but there would be a price to pay for that freedom and the price was death.
We know what happened next. They chose to be independent from God and the Bible says that the way to the Tree of Life was blocked and they were exiled from Paradise.
Before they were exiled from Eden, God pronounced a curse: the man and his wife would be alienated from the presence of God, from the earth itself, and from each other. Eventually their physical bodies would return to the dust. But the Lord had said that in the DAY they ate from the forbidden tree they would die. This death was not just a physical death. They died spiritually that day that they sinned. Unless God intervened, that spiritual death that began when they fell would eventually culminate, not only in their physical deaths, but in what the book of Revelation calls the Second Death, which is eternal separation from the presence of God.
All of Adam’s children are destined for the same fate. We cannot rise higher than our Father Adam. All the nations sprang from Adam’s loins and that means that men from every nation must suffer Adam’s fate. In Adam, we all died. As soon as we are born we start to die and nothing can stop that natural descent. The problem is that people today think of sin only as transgression, or the things we do that break God’s commands. But sin is much more than that. Sin is a state, a condition, even a Power, under whose dominion we are born and under whose dominion we will remain forever unless released by a greater Power. Death is the great enemy of humanity.
From the very beginning God has set Himself against Death and promised to bring Life. Even there in the Garden there was the promise of the Seed of the Woman who would come to defeat the Enemy who held the power of death. The Gospel promises eternal life. Eternal life is the gift of God. We cannot remove ourselves from Death’s grip, but God has provided a way out.
What is eternal life? When we use the word “eternal” we usually only think of a certain amount of time that never ends or cannot be measured. But eternal is not just a quantity it is a quality. And there is only one Being in the universe who possesses the quality of eternality. God said to Moses “I Am.” No other personality in heaven or on earth can say “I have always been and I always will be.” Everything and everyone draws its being from another source. But the source of all being has no other dependencies. At the center of all reality there is an eternal being, an eternal life, from which all other life proceeds and on which all other life depends.
This eternal life consists of three personalities who all share this Divine quality. Eternal life is Divine life. We must think of a quality not just a quantity. This is much more than simply existing, because those who experience the Second Death will continue to exist but they will not have life. To have eternal life is to share in the Divine Life. As C.S Lewis said, this Divine Life is like a great, eternal, cosmic dance and we are being invited to join in. Life consists of activity and movement as well as a relationship or reciprocity. Just like people who are dancing are moving together in perfect harmony and rhythm, in agreement about their next move, those who have eternal life are in perfect agreement and unanimity with God.
This eternal life is a gift that God wants to give and to share with Adam’s race. He is inviting us into the Divine dance. Those who were once alienated, estranged, and exiled can be brought back into harmony with the heart of all reality. To know God intimately and experientially is to have eternal life. God is giving us Himself. The gift of God is God. Without God, we die. With God, we will really begin to live. This is the life for which we were created and for which we are also recreated in Christ. Jesus, the Son of God, is the distributor of this Divine Life. He has this Life in Himself and He can give it to whomever He touches.
Get close enough to Jesus and He will inject you with His eternal, Divine life. Jesus Himself is the Tree of Life.
But in the book of Revelation we do not see or have access to the Tree of Life until the New Creation appears. The Gospel promises us eternal life through Jesus now, yet access to the Tree of Life has not yet been given. Right now, you and I are living in that tension between the “now” of the Gospel and the “not yet” of the Kingdom of God. We are not in the New Creation yet. The old order of things has not yet passed away. We still find ourselves bound to a world where the principles of sin and death still hold sway. The children of God are promised eternal life, yet it is obvious that every believer occupies a physical body that is destined to return to the dust.
There is a sense in which this New Creation, this new world order, has already broken through. We have become new creatures in Christ. But the project is not complete. There is more to come, in fact, the best part of the Kingdom of God and our salvation is still in the future tense. The children of God are in a state of patient waiting in this world and the incompleteness of our redemption causes us to groan and to travail, like a woman who is in labor. A woman who is with child must wait in hope. And even though the bringing forth of a new life is filled with joy, as she progresses toward her time her pain and her labor increase in intensity. We are experiencing birth pains, along with the rest of Creation, as we wait for the New Creation to be born. Only when the New Creation has fully come will we be given access to the Tree of Life. Until then, we groan with longing for our complete redemption as the children of God.
The idea of waiting for a new world to come or going to heaven immediately raises a chorus of objections from our modern culture. It was Karl Marx who said that religion is the opiate of the people, the thing that keeps them numb to their misfortune in this world while they wait for heaven. Modernity is all about progress. But how do you make a better world here and now when people are content to wait for heaven instead? And modern thinkers have done their best to convince people that this world is the only world there is and that every step should be taken to improve it for all concerned. Christianity is often seen as the enemy of modern, scientific progress. The charge against Christianity is that Christians are content to wait for heaven instead of making the world a better place now. Let’s admit there is a real concern here. There is a brand of mystical, escapist religion that neglects the duty to love our neighbor, help the poor, and stand against evil and injustice.
The Modernist is concerned about the state of the world because he believes this is the only world. They urge us to be concerned about humanity while also teaching that humans are the random product of time and chance and that all our thoughts, hopes, and dreams are just the products of chemicals in the brain. Eventually, says the Modernist, we will all become extinct like the dinosaurs and the whole history of humanity will prove meaningless in an uncaring universe.
But the Christian is concerned about the state of the world because he believes people are made in the image of God and are loved by their Creator. The Christian believes in a righteous God who cares about injustice and will eventually right every wrong.
If there is a world coming in which righteousness will reign, then it makes sense to begin to prepare for that world now. If there are things that won’t make it into the world to come, then it makes sense to root them out now.
And that’s why Christians have always been the most socially active people. It was Christian influence that ended modern slavery, established hospitals for the sick, built orphanages for neglected children, established universities for learning, and championed the cause of the poor and oppressed all over the world. Like a gardener who clears the rocks from a field in preparation for planting, Christians want to prepare for the world to come.
The fear of the secular person is that people who believe in heaven and a spiritual world are simply waiting for pie in the sky that they will never obtain. We naturally have a real fear of disappointment. Are we hoping in a myth and just playing make-believe to help us deal with the natural difficulties of life? Some say faith is just a crutch for the weak who cannot deal with the harsh realities of the world.
But we must ask these same questions of the secular world view. On what do they build their hope? How do they know that human progress will continue to achieve all their goals? Perhaps the utopian vision of modern man is nothing but pie on the earth instead of pie in the sky. Why should we trust humanity and put our hopes in the progress of science and technology? Do we really have evidence that a better world is coming? Many secular people are beginning to wonder if the earth itself can endure as the home of humanity and are beginning to look at colonizing other planets! Almost all the Hollywood movies are depicting dystopia in the future rather than utopia. We are living in a generation of despair not of hope for the future.
But Christians claim to have hope for the future. We say there is a new world coming and the book of Revelation gives us a glimpse of that future hope. How do we know that vision of the future is real and reliable? If we want hope for the future, we must look to the past. We have already seen a glimpse of the future in the past. We know there is a world coming in which there will be no more death because Someone has already overcome death. Jesus, risen from the dead and exalted into Heaven, is the first fruit of this New Creation. Jesus is the Second Adam, the first of the New Humanity. And we shall be like Him. Jesus is our guarantee that we will one day eat from the Tree of Life in the New Creation and live forever. We live because He lives! Our hope is based on the resurrection. If He has not been raised, then we who have placed our hope in Him are of all men the most pitiable.
But there is another piece of evidence that the Tree of Life is real. This evidence is more subtle and personal. Within the heart of every person there are desires and longings. We go through life desperately trying to fulfill these desires. We turn to relationships, career, romance, and family to satisfy the longing of our hearts. Most of the time we fail to think about this longing in any rational sense and when we do it often hurts us to realize that there is nothing that we have found that has really fulfilled those deepest desires. To avoid this painful longing, we just don’t think much about it and we keep on trying to find those little distractions to dull the ache. At the same time, we must also deal with the painful reality that, no matter what we might gain in this world that means so much to us, eventually we are going to die and we will suffer the loss of all our earthly dreams and accomplishment.
Every pleasure on earth is tinged with the bitterness of mortality. But we desperately want something that does last forever. We want a love that will never end. We want to be happy forever and yet we know that in this world we can’t be, and it breaks our hearts.
We often fail to realize that this deep longing of the heart is a clue to the central meaning of our lives. That desire which nothing in this world can satisfy was placed in our hearts by our Creator. The fact that nothing in this world can satisfy those desires means that there must be another world where God will satisfy all our desires. I do not mean to imply that everyone will eat from the Tree of Life. The book of Revelation makes it clear that some will be excluded from the New Creation. But if there are desires in our hearts that nothing in this world can satisfy, then surely the central point and meaning of our lives is to seek for that which can satisfy us, even if that means letting go of everything else in this world. The whole reason for our existence is to look for this Tree of Life.
But you will never find the Tree of Life in this world. The Tree of Life will only reappear in the New Creation. And that is why a large part of the Christian life consists of learning to wait patiently. It is when we are not willing to wait on God but seek to fulfill our own desires that we fall into vanity and foolishness. This is one of the great follies of youth, and sometimes the lesson only comes through painful experience. This world is not the Kingdom of God. The Christian must learn to lower his expectations about life in the world. If we do not learn this lesson, we will continually be disappointed with life and will eventually come to despair.
Christians can become uncompromising idealists. We have the image of the perfect marriage, the perfect family, the perfect Church, the perfect Christian society. And these things keep eluding us and it is frustrating. Even more dangerous is the doctrine that Christianity is a way of getting what you want in the world. The Gospel of health and wealth is as popular as it has ever been. We have simply baptized the American Dream.
And the number of people who have become angry with God when they did not get out of life what they want continues to grow. Most people don’t quit Christianity or become atheists because of some convincing intellectual argument. People stop believing in God because this world has failed to deliver their expectations for perfect happiness. But, why should it? The Tree of Life is not here.
This vision of the Tree of Life in Revelation is not meant to make us passive. The Tree of Life has not yet appeared, but the healing of the nations has already begun. Earlier in the book of Revelation we saw a great multitude that could not be counted from out of every nation on earth. The Bible does not teach that every person will be saved, but the book of Revelation makes it clear that there will be saved persons from out of every nation on the planet. It is God’s express purpose to make Himself and His salvation known throughout the world and in every nation on earth. The leaves of the Tree of Life will eventually heal the nations, but before that the message of salvation must be preached among the nations.
We are preparing for that time when the Tree of Life appears again. We are making our reservations for that new order. The Gospel is the harbinger of that new order, that new world. Some people have said that talking too much about the world to come is a distraction from the mission of the Church to the nations. But this vision at the end of the Bible of the Tree of Life is the very thing that motivates us to keep preaching the Gospel.
Eternal Life has been made available and God is inviting, through the Gospel, all the nations to come and participate. Everything has been made ready.
But think for a moment what was required for us to be able to come to the Tree of Life. After they sinned the way to the Tree of Life was blocked by an angel with a flaming sword. That meant that anyone who sought access to the Tree of Life would have to pass under the sword of judgement and death. The price for access to the Tree of Life was death.
When Jesus went to the Cross He passed under the sword of God’s judgment and death to give us free access to the Tree of Life. That’s why in the book of Revelation Jesus is most often pictured as a lamb freshly slain. God wants us to see and understand the price that was paid to give us access to the Tree of Life.
We could never have found our way back to the Tree of Life or managed to pass under the sword of God’s judgment. But a way has been made for us. There is a way back into the presence of God without any fear of death. Jesus is that way. If we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, He will begin to share His Divine life with us, securing us a place in the New Creation. He came to share God’s very life with us, to invite us to come into that Divine, eternal dance at the center of all reality where we can be happy forever. At any moment, we may step into this eternal life and begin to enjoy it.
