Ezekiel 47:9 And it shall come to pass, that every thing that lives, which moves, wherever the rivers shall come, shall live… I have somewhere seen a picture, which I will endeavour to describe. The scene is in the far East; the hour, when the earth is just lighted up with that rare oriental sunlight, which we Westerns long to see; the time, the sultry August, when the fierce sun has it all his own way, and the country has a sickly cast upon it, as if it fainted with the intenseness of the glare. The plain is scorched and arid, and the river running between its sedgy banks seems to have hardly strength enough to propel its own sluggish stream from the mountain beyond. Beneath a group of ancestral palms stands a knot of Egyptian peasants, swarthy and muscular, talking wildly to each other, and with eyes strained wistfully in the direction of the south, in which quarter there seems to hang an indescribable haze, the forecasting shadow of some atmospheric or other change. Why look they there so eagerly? Why do they gaze so intently just where the river faintly glitters on the horizon's dusky verge? Oh, because they know, from the experience of years, that the time has come for the inundation of the Nile. They do not know the processes, perhaps, by which the waters are gathered — how in the far Abyssinia the sources of wealth are distilled; but, as certainly as if their knowledge was profound and scientific, do they calculate upon the coming of the flood. And they know, too, that when the flood does come, that scorched plain shall wave with ripening grain, that there shall be corn in Egypt, and that those blackened pastures shall then be gay with such fertile plenty, that all the land shall cat, and shall be satisfied; for "everything shall live whither the river cometh." This picture has struck me as being a very vivid and forcible representation of Ezekiel's vision, embodied in the experience of Eastern life. Nothing, surely, can better represent the moral barrenness of the world — a wilderness of sin — than that plain, on which the consuming heat has blighted and withered the green earth, and induced the dread of famine. Nothing can better set forth the grace and the healing of the Gospel, than the flow of that life-giving river; nothing can better image to us the attitude befitting all earnest Christian men, than the wistful gaze of those peasants to the place whence the deliverance shall come, that they may catch the first murmur of the quickened waters, and feel and spread the joy. I. THE SOURCE OF THESE HEALING WATERS. There was a copious fountain on the west side of the city of Jerusalem. At this fountain, which was called Gihon, Zadok and Abiathar stood beside the youthful Solomon, and with many holy solemnities proclaimed him king. The prudent Hezekiah, foreseeing that in a siege the supply from this fountain might be cut off by the enemy, conducted it by a secret aqueduct to the very heart of the city; and David, deriving from this same fountain one of his choicest emblems of spiritual blessing, struck his harp and sang — "There is a river," etc. The prestige and the sanctity of the ancient Jerusalem have passed away forever. But yet God is still present in the sanctuaries of His Son in peculiar manifestation, and there are special promises of favour for those that wait upon Him, and that call in His house upon His name. Here, as in a spiritual laver, the soul of the polluted receives the cleansing of the water and of the Word. Here the poor children of sorrow smile through their tears, as they are satisfied with the goodness of His house, and the lame halts no longer as he emerges from this Bethesda of the paralysed, whose waters have been stirred from on high. It is from between the cherubim that God especially shines; it is among, the golden candlesticks that He still walks to bless His people; and here, as in a gorgeous and well-furnished hall of banquet, believers eat of the fatness of His house, and drink of the river of His pleasure; and in the temple are at once the highest teaching and the most satisfying comfort, the closest fellowship with God and the most effectual preparation for heaven. While, however, these healing waters came through the temple, the blessing did not originate there. The springs of them were in the everlasting hills. In other words, God is the one source of life; and means, unless He vitalise them, are but the letter which killeth — the shadow of good things to come. II. THE PROGRESS OF THE HEALING WATERS. The narrative tells us that the progress of the waters was gradual, and that it was constant. There was no ceasing of the flow — there was no ebbing of the water. And this is a very graphic description of the progress of the Gospel of Christ. Simple and feeble in its beginnings, those trembling but earnest fishermen its earliest preachers — wealth, and rank, and patronage and power, all arrayed against it — Caesars conspiring to strangle it, and armies marched out against its fugitive sons — how marvellous was its triumph! Only think of the rapidity of its spread. Jerusalem was filled with its doctrines; Antioch, Corinth, Thessalonica, Ephesus, Athens, Rome, all trembled beneath its denunciations of their vices, and admitted its transforming energy within a century of its Founder's death. , one of the early apologists for the faith, says, "We are but of yesterday, and we have filled your halls, villages, boroughs, towns, cities, the camp, the senate, and the forum." A writer at the commencement of the second century speaks of the whole world of the Roman Empire being filled with the Gospel of Christ. It is well known that Constantine the Great blazoned the cross upon his banners, and throned Christianity as the established religion of the state. And at the close of the third century, when Julian gasped out his celebrated dying cry, it was not the apostate, but the world, which the Galilean had overcome. And though, after the establishment of Christianity, there came upon the world a seeming eclipse of faith — though corruptions blemished somewhat the comeliness of the bride of Christ, its progress among the nations has been gradual and unceasing still. One after another they have received its teachings and submitted to its sway. Insensibly, here and there the institutions of society have been moulded by its impress, and it has stamped upon them its own beauteous image. Sanguinary codes have been relaxed; unholy traffic has terminated; cruelty has had its arm paralysed, and its sword blunted; fraud, and lust, and drunkenness have become things not of glorying, but of shame. There has been a gradual uplifting in the moral world, as if there flowed upon it the airwaves of a purer atmosphere, and men have wondered whence the healing came. Oh! it is the river that has done it all, ever flowing on — now through the darkening brake, now in the open plain, now fertilising the swards upon its banks, now rejoicing in the depths of its own channel, imperceptible almost in the increasing volume of its waters to those who constantly behold it, and yet, gazed upon at intervals, seen to widen and to deepen every day. 1. If we believe that this Gospel shall progress, then our faith should be strong. Christ has sent it into the world, knowing that it can do what He has sent it to accomplish, and it is never to be amended — it is never to be superseded. He has not lost faith in it, and from the moment of His first commission until now, He sits expecting until the work is done. 2. Surely there is great responsibility in being connected with a Gospel like this! What the waters do not melt, they sometimes petrify, and there are some spirits that have got so thoroughly hardened, that they are not to be broken, even by the hammer of the Word. III. THE EFFICACY OF THE GOSPEL OF CHRIST. "Everything shall live whither the river cometh." This is true of the Gospel of Christ. There is no desert of worldliness which the Gospel cannot change into a garden; there is no dead sea of error which the Gospel cannot purge from its pollution, and change into a receptacle of life. The completeness of the salvation is a remarkable characteristic of the Gospel, and we may rejoice in it the more, because it works thoroughly. In the Gospel there is life for all! Its voice can reach the farthest wynds of the dark sepulchre; no catacomb of the moral death is too remote, or too crowded, or too loathsome to be visited, and to be emptied, by the Gospel of Jesus Christ. However long the death may have continued, the Gospel can chase it from the heart again; ay, although time may have resolved the dust into dust again, and though the soul, like a mummy of the Pharaohs, has been dead, and swathed, and embalmed for many wintered centuries of years. "Everything shall live whither the river cometh." And not merely shall each man be reached, but each part of each man shall be reached also. Life for all; life for the understanding, that it may no longer be preyed upon by a brood of pestilent errors; life for the imagination, that it may quench its strange fires in the blood of the Lamb, and gather from His Cross a purer flame instead; life for the memory, that it may no longer be haunted by the wrecks of ghostly sins or spectral visions of evil; life for the affections, that they may have something on which they may pour out the full wealth of their souls, without danger of idolatry; life for the whole nature, that it may be sublimed from ruin to royalty, and from sin to God; life for the destiny, that it may not be darkened, even by the shadow of death, but that there may brighten upon it, in ever-increasing lustre, the light of the everlasting day. I stood some years ago near the fair city of Geneva, where two great rivers meet, but do not mingle. Here the Rhone, the arrowy Rhone, rapid and beautiful, pours out its waters of that heavenly blue, which it is almost worth a pilgrimage to see, and there the Arve, frantic and muddy, partly from the glaciers from which it is so largely fed, and partly from the clayey soil that it upheaves in its impetuous path, meet and run on side by side for miles, with no barriers, save their own innate repulsions, each encroaching now and then into the province of the other, but beaten back again instantly into its own domain. Like mighty rival forces of good and evil do they seem, and for long — just as it is in the world around us — for long the issue is doubtful; but if you took far down the stream, you find the frantic Arve is mastered, and the Rhone has coloured the whole surface of the stream with its own emblematic and beautiful blue. I thought, as I gazed upon it, that it was a remarkable illustration of the conflict between truth and error; and in meditating upon this subject — in thinking of the flow of the healing waters, and reading that they should flow into the sea and heal it, the whole thing rose up before me, fresh and vivid as a thing that happened yesterday, and as my own view of the passage has been cleared, and my own faith strengthened by the recollection, I would fain, by this simple picture, impart the same blessedness to you. Oh! with a glad heart and free, do I believe and preach, that there is no ailment, no leprosy, no death, that is beyond the power of the healing of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Is it yours? (W. M. Punshon, D. D.) Parallel Verses KJV: And it shall come to pass, that every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live: and there shall be a very great multitude of fish, because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed; and every thing shall live whither the river cometh. |
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