I have already anticipated that in pointing out that it flows from the
very Temple itself. The Prophet sees it coming out of the house--that is
to say, the Sanctuary. It flows across the outer court of the house,
passes the altar, comes out under the threshold, and then pours itself
down on to the plain beneath. This is the symbolical dress of the
thought that all spiritual blessings, and every conceivable form of
human good, take their rise in the fact of God's dwelling with men. From
beneath the Temple threshold comes the water of life; and wherever it
is true that in any heart--or in any community--God dwells, there will
be heard the tinkling of its ripples, and freshness and fertility will
come from the stream. The dwelling of God with a man, like the dwelling
of God in humanity in the Incarnation of His own dear Son, is, as it
were, the opening of the fountain that it may pour out into the world.
So, if we desire to have the blessings that are possible for us, we must
comply with the conditions, and let God dwell in our hearts, and make
them His temples; and then from beneath the threshold of that temple,
too, will pour out, according to Christ's own promise, rivers of living
water which will be first for ourselves to drink of and be blessed by,
and then will refresh and gladden others.
Another thought connected with this source of the river of life is that
all the blessings which, massed together, are included in that one word
'salvation'--which is a kind of nebula made up of many unresolved
stars--take their rise from nothing else than the deep heart of God
Himself. This river rose in the House of the Lord, and amidst the
mysteries of the Divine Presence; it took its rise, one might say, from
beneath the Mercy-seat where the brooding Cherubim sat in silence and
poured itself into a world that had not asked for it, that did not
expect it, that in many of its members did not desire it and would not
have it. The river that rose in the secret place of God symbolises for
us the great thought which is put into plainer words by the last of the
apostles when he says, 'We love Him because He first loved us.' All the
blessings of salvation rise from the unmotived, self-impelled, self-fed
divine love and purpose. Nothing moves Him to communicate Himself but
His own delight in giving Himself to His poor creatures; and it is all
of grace that it might be all through faith.
Still further, another thought that may be suggested in connection with
the source of this river is, that that which is to bless the world must
necessarily take its rise above the world. Ezekiel has sketched, in the
last portion of his prophecy, an entirely ideal topography of the Holy
Land. He has swept away mountains and valleys, and levelled all out into
a great plain, in the midst of which rises the mountain of the Lord's
House, far higher than the Temple hill. In reality, opposite it rose the
Mount of Olives, and between the two there was the deep gorge of the
Valley of the Kedron. The Prophet smooths it all out into one great
plain, and high above all towers the Temple-mount, and from it there
rushes down on to the low levels the fertilising, life-giving flood.
That imaginary geography tells us this, that what is to bless the world
must come from above the world. There needs a waterfall to generate
electricity; the power which is to come into humanity and deal with its
miseries must have its source high above the objects of its energy and
its compassion, and in proportion to the height from which it falls will
be the force of its impact and its power to generate the quickening
impulse. All merely human efforts at social reform, rivers that do not
rise in the Temple, are like the rivers in Mongolia, that run for a few
miles and then get sucked up by the hot sands and are lost and nobody
sees them any more. Only the perennial stream, that comes out from
beneath the Temple threshold, can sustain itself in the desert, to say
nothing of transforming the desert into a Garden of Eden. So moral and
social and intellectual and political reformers may well go to Ezekiel,
and learn that the 'river of the water of life,' which is to heal the
barren and refresh the thirsty land, must come from below the Temple
threshold.