These are threefold: fertility, healing, life. Fertility. In the East
one condition of fertility is water. Irrigate the desert, and you make
it a garden. Break down the aqueduct, and you make the granary of the
world into a waste. The traveller as he goes along can tell where there
is a stream of water, by the verdure along its banks. You travel along a
plateau, and it is all baked and barren. You plunge into a wâdy, and
immediately the ground is clothed with under-growth and shrubs, and the
birds of the air sing among the branches. And so, says Ezekiel, wherever
the river comes there springs up, as if by magic, fair trees 'on the
banks thereof, whose leaf shall not fade, neither shall the fruit
thereof be consumed.'
Fertility comes second, the reception of the fertilising agent comes
first. It is wasted time to tinker at our characters unless we have
begun with getting into our hearts the grace of God, and the new spirit
that will be wrought out by diligent effort into all beauty of life and
character. Ezekiel seems to be copying the first psalm, or vice versa,
the Psalmist is copying Ezekiel. At any rate, there is a verbal
similarity between them, in that both dwell upon the unfading leaf of
the tree that grows planted by rivers of water. And our text goes
further, and speaks about perennial fruitfulness month by month, all the
year round. In some tropical countries you will find blossoms, buds in
their earliest stage, and ripened fruit all hanging upon one laden
branch. Such ought to be the Christian life--continuously fruitful
because dependent upon continual drawing into itself, by means of its
roots and suckers, of the water of life by which we are fructified.
There is yet another effect of the waters--healing. As we said, Ezekiel
takes great liberties with the geography of the Holy Land, levelling it
all, so his stream makes nothing of the Mount of Olives, but flows due
east until it comes to the smitten gorge of the Jordan, and then turns
south, down into the dull, leaden waters of the Dead Sea, which it
heals. We all know how these are charged with poison. Dip up a glassful
anywhere, and you find it full of deleterious matter. They are the
symbol of humanity, with the sin that is in solution all through it. No
chemist can eliminate it, but there is One who can. 'He hath made Him to
be sin for us, who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness
of God in Him.' The pure river of the water of life will cast out from
humanity the malignant components that are there, and will sweeten it
all. Ay, all, and yet not all, for very solemnly the Prophet's optimism
pauses, and he says that the salt marshes by the side of the sea are not
healed. They are by the side of it. The healing is perfectly available
for them, but they are not healed. It is possible for men to reject the
influences that make for the destruction of sin and the establishment of
righteousness. And although the waters are healed, there still remain
the obstinate marshes with the white crystals efflorescing on their
surface, and bringing salt and barrenness. You can put away the healing
and remain tainted with the poison.
And then the last thought is the life-giving influence of the river.
Everything lived whithersoever it went. Contrast Christendom with
heathendom. Admit all the hollowness and mere nominal Christianity of
large tracts of life in so-called Christian countries, and yet why is it
that on the one side you find stagnation and death, and on the other
side mental and manifold activity and progressiveness? I believe that
the difference between 'the people that _sit_ in darkness' and 'the
people that _walk_ in the light is that one has the light and the other
has not, and activity befits the light as torpor befits the darkness.
But there is a far deeper truth than that in the figure, a truth that I
would fain lay upon the hearts of all my hearers, that unless we our own
selves have this water of life which comes from the Sanctuary and is
brought to us by Jesus Christ, 'we are dead in trespasses and sins.' The
only true life is in Christ. 'If any man thirst, let him come unto Me,
and drink. He that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of
his heart shall flow rivers of living water.'
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