The Tree of Life

To him that overcometh, to him will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God.—Revelation 2:7.

The Church at Ephesus had an early history full of promise. St. Paul addressed to it a noble and eloquent Epistle; but in the end of it he gave emphatic warning of spiritual dangers, and charged the Ephesian Christians to put on the panoply of God that they might “stand in the evil day.” The same Apostle, in an address to the elders of the Church, warned them that “grievous wolves” would enter into the fold “not sparing the flock.” His exhortation to them to watch, and the subsequent admonitions of St. John, were not without good effect. Firm discipline was maintained; false apostles were detected and repudiated; a libertine sect tried to obtain a footing, but was deservedly scouted. And yet a temptation had made some way among the orthodox Christians of Ephesus. Their fault was a decay of spiritual affection; there was a waning of their first love. There were, it is true, work, labour, patience, intolerance of evil men, spiritual discrimination, unfainting perseverance. The Ephesians saw through the pretensions of those who falsely claimed apostleship; they resisted the wiles of the Nicolaitans, who would have sapped their very life through fleshly indulgences. But, with all that was good among them, they had left their first love. The process had not produced lukewarmness, as in Laodicea; nor was there, as in Sardis, the chill of death. But the cooling process had begun; the fervour of first love was gone. Whatever individual exceptions there might be, this was the condition of the church as a whole. The overcomer, in Ephesus, therefore, would be the man who rose above the tendencies to waning love, the man in whose heart love continued not merely to abide, but to deepen and intensify. Health and strength might fail, inducing physical languor; age might come stealing on, with its feebleness and loss of enjoyment; but even unto death would love continue, profounder, more ardent and more fit for service and sacrifice in the end than in the beginning—able to take up the glorious challenge, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors, through him that loved us.” To this victor, loving on in spite of all deadening and benumbing influences, a very great promise is given: “To him that overcometh, to him will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God.” The Nicolaitans promised sensual enjoyment, as in an earthly paradise, in the gratification of the appetites of the flesh; the Christian victor shall inherit the paradise of God, and shall eat of the tree of life in the midst thereof.

I have a recollection of a book I read when a boy called Danesbury House. It was written in order to illustrate the value of temperance. Though it is forty years since I saw it, or read it, there is a scene in that book which has remained with me all my life. It describes one of the boys of the house who had become a victim of drink. By the grace of God he determined to break the habit and to overcome. The picture is given of the struggle in his room, of his turning to the Bible and opening at this text, “To him that overcometh I will give to eat of the tree of life.” And the picture is drawn of that young man, broken by indulgence, his will weakened by drink, falling on his face and covering the Bible with his tears as he prayed to overcome. And the end of it was he did overcome, and became completely reclaimed. That has haunted me all my life. It seems to me that to overcome temptation, even one temptation, is to taste of the tree of life. To overcome all temptations is to eat of the tree and dwell in the paradise of God.1 [Note: R. F. Horton.]

I

Access to the Tree of Life

“The tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God.”

1. The word “Paradise” has a curious history. Originally it was a name given to certain royal pleasure parks in which the sovereigns of ancient Persia took delight; a vast tract of enclosed country abounding in natural forest, timber as well as cultivated fruit trees; a place half park, half orchard, with springs of clear water keeping cool the meadow-lands, as well as open glades for sport, with here and there a terraced garden gay with flowers. Such was the scene styled first a Paradise. The Hebrews learned the word through their captivity in the East, as the Greeks learned it a little later during the campaigns of Alexander; and when the Old Testament came to be translated into Greek it was by this borrowed name that scholars interpreted the ancient garden of God, which had been man’s primeval seat in his golden age of innocence. Thus it became fairly naturalized among the Jews, and in our Lord’s time it had come to be transferred from Eden to the site of that Hades where the disembodied spirits lived—the region where all the Jews were believed to await Messiah’s coming.

In the New Testament the word “Paradise” is to be found only three times. Its first occurrence is in the great word of our Lord addressed to the penitent malefactor on the cross “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise.” What the rude outlaw understood by the gracious words of his great Fellow-Sufferer that day could be nothing but this, that when death should release them both from their agony they should be received together among the righteous dead—he, undeserving child of Abraham, received beneath the favouring of Israel’s martyred Christ and King. On each of the two other occasions in which the term “Paradise” occurs in the New Testament it is used in a new sense—to describe the heaven of the Christian. The first time it recurs is where St. Paul is boasting of his rapture from earth to the immediate seat and vision of God—“caught up into Paradise” he writes, “and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.” The last time the word occurs, which is in this text in Revelation, it is again used as an equivalent for heaven—the final home of the beatified saints. Of this celestial Eden restored to men we have a description, very familiar to all of us, in the closing chapters of this same Apocalypse—a description which has coloured all the imagery of Christendom and its sacred songs.

That Eden of earth’s sunrise cannot vie

With Paradise beyond her sunset sky

Hidden on high.

Four rivers watered Eden in her bliss,

But Paradise hath One which perfect is

In sweetnesses.

Eden had gold, but Paradise hath gold

Like unto glass of splendours manifold

Tongue hath not told.

Eden had sun and moon to make her bright;

But Paradise hath God and Lamb for light,

And hath no night.

Unspotted innocence was Eden’s best;

Great Paradise shows God’s fulfilled behest,

Triumph and rest.1 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 162.]

The Paradise of God can no more be determined locally than the original Garden of Eden. It is no more invisible than visible. It belongs to a region of another kind of experience than that of the senses. A paradise of God—we shall get the meaning of it by being of it. Let us repeat it to ourselves day and night for a week: “The tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God.” The meaning of it will begin to clear itself without effort. It is a state, a condition of experience which is closely connected with Jesus. It is not in a particular locality; it is in Him, or, rather, He is in it. It is a place where His thought has become the atmosphere and His life the life.2 [Note: R. F. Horton.]

2. It is touching to see, in the later Jewish literature, how conscious men were of that shut door which Adam had closed against himself and his posterity; and in their books a favourite image of the goodness of the end was that then the prohibition should be withdrawn, and men should come back to what they had lost. In the Book of Esdras we read, “For you is Paradise opened and the tree of life planted”; and in Enoch, “No mortal is permitted to touch this tree of delicious fragrance till the Great Day of Judgment; but then it will be given to the righteous and the humble.” In this Book of Revelation the image comes again and again: “Blessed are they that wash their robes, that they may have right to the tree of life.” It had become a symbol of all that men had lost in their existence, which only God could restore. It was a symbol of great depth of meaning; for when men talked of the hope of Eden they confessed that what they lamented daily was not a fresh disaster or exclusion, but an old one, running back to Adam and the beginning.

In the first glimpse of the Garden that is given us in the Book of Beginnings we are shown a picture of the ideal home of innocence, of the soul of the untried child of humanity. But there falls a shadow upon the picture as we note the entrance of sin, which results in the loss of innocence and the expulsion from the Garden and the unsheathing of the flaming sword to guard the sacred Tree of Life.

But there is given us another picture of the Garden in that other Book of Beginnings, the revelation that was given to John of the new heaven and the new earth. Beautiful is the Garden now as when it first sprang fresh from its Maker’s hand. The gates are open to the four quarters of the wilderness. The flaming sword is in its sheath, and One like unto a Son of Man, clad in white robes and wearing a crown of victory, stands to welcome the returning exiles. As they come, they come by way of a Cross in the wilderness and along the banks of a glorious river, whose source they find to be in the Garden, where it waters the Tree of Life, of which they may now freely eat. One Garden is lost to us—we may not go back to Eden. But there is another Garden we may gain—it is ours to go forward, and the way of the Cross will lead us to its gates.1 [Note: J. B. Maclean, The Secret of the Stream, 138.]

3. Men who have little thought of the sin of Adam have yet a haunting sorrow because of what they have lost in life. There is a real pathos in the common legend of a golden age coming first which Greeks and Romans cherished, when existence was sweet and fresh and right, and all men lived in peace. The Jews also thought of a blessed spring-tide of the world. Man’s life began in a garden with flowers and streams, and God walked with him there, till by the one disobedience the charm was broken, and Adam must go out to a world with thistles instead of flowers, with labour and sickness and dying. They believed in God enough to believe that Eden was not lost, though no wandering horsemen ever came to encamp in it, or water their horses in its rivers, or caught sight of the flashing sword of God’s angel who kept the way of entrance. They believed that there was a way back, but they tried in vain to find it. To some the story of the earthly paradise, standing at the head of the Bible history of man, has seemed a mere fable or myth, with no more truth in it and of no more account than the dream of a golden age; to some it has seemed an allegorical method of setting forth, as for children, the sinlessness and happiness of man’s original estate and the misery of departure from God, true only in the sense in which the “Pilgrim’s Progress” is true; to some the outward and literal have been all in all, and under the influence of a strong fascination they have even dreamed of discovering some lingering traces of the garden, or at least finding out where it lay. In vain: every trace of it has vanished as completely as the dew from last summer’s grass. The paradise of promise and hope is the paradise of God; no earthly garden, however fair, no restoration (through a cancelled forfeiture) of the paradise that has withered and died; in the paradise of God grows the tree called “the tree of life.”

The tree of life was as significant a symbol of life-giving Divine power to the Asian Greeks as to the Jews, though in a different way. Trees had been worshipped as the home of the Divine nature and power from time immemorial, and were still so worshipped in Asia Minor as in the ancient world generally. On some sacred tree the prosperity and safety of a family or tribe or city was often believed to depend. When the sacred olive-tree on the Acropolis of Athens put forth a new shoot after the city had been burned by the Persians, the people knew that the safety of the State was assured. The belief was widely entertained that the life of a man was connected with some tree, and returned into that tree when he died. The tree which grew on a grave was often thought to be penetrated with the spirit and life of the buried man. The tree of life in the Revelation was in the mind of the Ephesians a Christianization of the sacred tree in the pagan religion and folk-lore; it was a symbolic expression which was full of meaning to the Asian Christians, because to them the tree had always been the seat of Divine life and the intermediary between Divine and human nature. The problem which was constantly present to the ancient mind in thinking of the relation of man to God appears here: how can the gulf that divides human nature from the Divine nature be bridged over? how can God come into effective relation to man? In the holy tree the Divine life is bringing itself closer to man. He who can eat of the tree of life is feeding on the Divine power and nature, is strengthening himself with the body and the blood of Christ. The idea was full of power to the Asian readers.1 [Note: W. M. Ramsay, The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 247.]

4. “To him will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God” is the mystical expression of the great truth that Jesus can incorporate us in His own life, and make us sharers of His own joy. He is in paradise. If we are in Him, we are in paradise.

Why should a Divinely sustained and everlasting life be promised as the reward of victory, seeing it is the present possession of all believers? For thus runs the testimony of Scripture: “He that believeth on the Son of God hath everlasting life”—hath this life already; it is already kindled and shrined in his breast. “This is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life.” Not only is all this true, but it is pre-supposed in the promise given in the text to the overcomer. For it is to be borne in mind that the earnest, enjoyed in this life, is of the same nature as the future felicity and glory. While the life eternal in its beginnings is a present possession of the believer in Jesus, yet in its glorious fulness, or what Jesus calls its “abundance,” it shall be also the future reward of him that overcometh. Hence St. Paul writes to Timothy, “Lay hold on eternal life”; and the Apostle John says, “This is the promise that he hath promised us, even eternal life.”

It will not meet us where the shadows fall

Beside the sea that bounds the Evening Land;

It will not greet us with its first clear call

When Death has borne us to the farther strand.

It is not something yet to be revealed—

The everlasting life—’tis here and now;

Passing unseen because our eyes are sealed

With blindness for the pride upon our brow.

It calls us ’mid the traffic of the street,

And calls in vain, because our ears are lent

To these poor babblements of praise that cheat

The soul of heaven’s truth, with earth’s content.

It dwells not in innumerable years;

It is the breath of God in timeless things—

The strong, divine persistence that inheres

In love’s red pulses and in faith’s white wings.

It is the power whereby low lives aspire

Unto the doing of a selfless deed,

Unto the slaying of a soft desire,

In service of the high, unworldly creed.

It is the treasure that is ours to hold

Secure, while all things else are turned to dust;

That priceless and imperishable gold

Beyond the scathe of robber and of rust.

It is a clarion when the sun is high,

The touch of greatness in the toil for bread,

The nameless comfort of the Western sky,

The healing silence where we lay our dead.

And if we feel it not amid our strife,

In all our toiling and in all our pain—

This rhythmic pulsing of immortal life—

Then do we work and suffer here in vain.1 [Note: P. C. Ainsworth, Poems and Sonnets, 9.]

II

Access through Christ

“To him will I give to eat of the tree of life.”

1. Every word of the text might stand our scrutiny, and none calls for more careful examination than the word “give,” indicating that Christ is the bestower of the reward. He who overcomes might seem to have earned something, and the reward be his by right. But in the Kingdom of God there is no thought of meriting. All faithfulness in duty has its reward, and many Scriptures declare that the reward is in some way proportioned to the work, so that a man may actually reap the thing which he has sown. And yet has any man who has known God ever dared to think of Him as in his debt? At every stage of life such a man is apt to be impressed by his own extraordinary mercies; the element of grace in life, of things better than he has worked for, bulks largely in his view. And when he comes to the end, and the question of the wages due to him comes up for settlement, the thought of self-assertion is far away; for the least of God’s rewards has in it something that passes human expectation. A man might humbly ask only to be within the door, to have a sight, however distant, of that Face; but to be within the door includes the whole—“a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.” And those to whom that blessedness is given take it not as the deserved return for their poor services on earth, but as one last miracle of the grace of God, who gives men what they never could have earned; and they take it from the hands of Him who “overcame the sharpness of death, and opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.” For it is Christ who says, “I will give,” Jesus Christ risen and enthroned, who has ascended on high, and has received gifts for men.

The result of our Lord’s varied teaching about life is to exhibit it as the ultimate and fundamental form of human good, the highest and the deepest blessing which man can in any wise attain; and that especially because it is what most closely links him to God, and may most truly be represented as issuing from God’s own being. But while the disciples were being led by this gradual and often indirect guidance to esteem rightly the preciousness of life, they were learning also in like manner that the life thus highly exalted was in some sense embodied in the person of their Lord. After the earlier days of intercourse had brought them to recognize Him as a trustworthy teacher concerning life and the way to attain it, nay as Himself a giver of it, they soon came to feel that when He was giving them life He was giving them of Himself, for they received it after a fashion which the externality of such terms as “given” and “gift” renders them incompetent to describe.1 [Note: F. J. A. Hort, The Way: the Truth: the Life, 109.]

2. In the text Jesus Christ claims to be the Arbiter of men’s deserts and the Giver of their rewards. He has said that He will give to all the multitude of faithful fighters who have brought their shields out of the battle, and their swords undinted, the gift of life eternal. In Christ risen from the dead we have, says St. John, the assurance of things which the past never had. The tree of life is promised, which was denied to Adam. The Eden of earth’s sunrise had a beauty of its own, yet, fugitive and ill-secured, it was not fit to last; but the things which Christ brought in are not to be withdrawn. If He undid by His long warfare an old disaster, it is for ever; the salvation of Jesus is irreversible. The text at least implies that there is some power in Jesus Christ to give lost things back again; and those who know His work must have seen startling resurrections of old things—purity returning to those whose life had been sullied, hope returning to some who had sinned their chances all away. “I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten,” says God. All is not lost; and Christ holds the secret of how to give it back to men. Eden is not lost, it is with God; and through the grace of God we may see what life took from us—the wishes too great, the hopes too fair, the knowledge too wonderful. After all, it is a heathen fancy that the golden age is behind; it is the thought of those who erred, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God; and we should learn from Jesus Christ to trust Him to do better for us than the best the past has seen.

Of all the various ways in which the imagination has distorted truth none has worked so much harm as reverence for past ages. It is this which inspired poets with the notion of a Golden Age, in which the world was filled with peace, and crime was unknown. And it is this same principle which diffused a belief that in the olden time men were not only more virtuous and happy, but attained to a larger stature and lived to a greater age than is possible for their degenerate descendants.1 [Note: A. W. Momerie.]

The Golden Age is in the future, not in the past, whatever the poets may say. We look back with humiliation to one Garden, the defiled and deserted Paradise of Eden: we look forward with joy and hope to another Garden, the glorious and incorruptible Paradise of Heaven that shall never be destroyed.2 [Note: J. B. Maclean, The Secret of the Stream, 136.]

3. In the promise “I will give” there is involved the eternal continuance of Christ’s relation to men as the Revealer and Mediator of God. Not only when the victor crosses the threshold and enters the Capitol of the heavens, but all through the ages, Christ is the Medium by which the Divine life passes into men. True, there is a sense in which He shall deliver up the Kingdom to His Father, when the partial end of the present dispensation has come. But He is the Priest of mankind for ever; and for ever is His Kingdom enduring. And through all the endless ages which we have a right to hope we shall see, there will never come a point in which it will not remain as true as it is at this moment: “No man hath seen God at any time, nor can see him; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” Christ is for ever the Giver of life, in the heavens as on earth. There all the blessedness and the existence, which is the substratum and condition of the blessedness, are ours only because, wavelet by wavelet, throbbing out as from a central fountain, there flows into the redeemed a life communicated by Christ Himself.

The immortality which Christ proclaimed in His own Person and life had indeed been adumbrated in deeds of valour and lives of heroic self-sacrifice, but as a revelation of life, of the true and proper life of man, it was as new as it has ever since been unique. “I am come that they might have life” was the burden of all He taught and did and suffered: and but for that “coming” it is impossible to conceive of our eyes being opened to the measureless possibilities of our spiritual life. When St. Paul exclaimed in the simple rendering of Luther, “Christ is my life,” he defined what immortality really is. The triumph lies in the instinct to triumph; the extension of life in the quality of the life.1 [Note: T. J. Hardy, The Gospel of Pain.]

To be a Christian is to have a new life in the soul. Christ Himself lives in each one who believes in Him. St. Paul puts it very graphically when he says that he is dead, crucified with Christ, that is, as to his old life. Then he adds: “Yet I live; and yet no longer I, but Christ liveth in me: and that life which I now live in the flesh I live in faith, the faith which is in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me.” These words reveal the secret of St. Paul’s wonderful life. It was Christ living in him that made him the man he was. This is the secret of every transfigured life. There is no other way to get it. We must open our heart and let Christ enter into us and fill us. He is ever eager to do this, and will possess us just as far as we yield our life up to Him.2 [Note: J. R. Miller.]

III

Access for the Victor

“To him that overcometh.”

Whilst access to the tree of life is a gift, we cannot miss the fact that there is a condition—the gift is only “to him that overcometh.” In all God’s greater gifts there is a certain condition of congruity. These noble things cannot be passed from hand to hand like sums of money; even Christ can give only to those who are in a condition to receive. “If ye forgive not,” He said, “neither will your Father forgive you.” Now, as to this condition of overcoming, it tells us how St. John conceived of the Christian life. To him it was a course of overcoming the world and one’s self, and he found its earliest impulse in that great victory of the cross.

1. Here is life promised in all its range and detail; in all its clear meaning and wide power: life through all eternity. But how hard a promise it is: “to him that overcometh will I give,” leaving all with ourselves. Christ does not say here—I give thee life that thou mayest overcome; but, Overcome and the life will be thine. The responsibility, the start, the strain He leaves upon our own wills; even as His Apostle intends, where he says, not “accept the faith,” but “fight the good fight of faith.” Yes, it is stern; but how true to our experience. Did we ever pass through a temptation in which we did not feel: Here even God cannot go before us, nor stand instead of us. Otherwise it were not worth the name of temptation; it were not in any wise our temptation. For who is it that is to be tempted, tested, put to proof and trial? Is it God or Christ? It is ourselves. But precisely as the loneliness and rigour of such an experience come home to us, God has begun to fulfil His promise of life. For it is in the bare realization of ourselves—and all the more if it even come upon us for the moment without any religious mitigation of its solitude and its pain—it is in this very moment, of lonely responsibility and unmitigated strain, that life begins. It is the necessity and prerogative of our manhood that in its moral conflicts, God, who has assuredly called us and is ready to help us, must wait for a decision and victory which shall be our own. However clear His call,—and all our salvation starts from that,—however near His help, we have to decide, we have to overcome.

Bishop Welldon in one of his sermons to the boys at Harrow, of which famous public school he was for many years head-master, spoke of the many bright lads whom he had known as scholars—pleasant, popular, courteous, and frank—of whom every one spoke well, but who never dreamt of such a thing as self-discipline or self-denial, who made no effort, who would never do what was irksome or unpleasant. After these boys left the restraints of school, a subtle, surprising change came over them. Some from mere self-indulgence lapsed into open sin; others became simply do-nothings, amusing themselves in sport or luxury or worldly ways, doing little or nothing of good to any human being. They lacked any power of overcoming; and this it was which proved so dangerous or fatal to their lives. “Since this is so,” said Dr. Welldon preaching in the school chapel, “I put to you the pointed question—to every one of you—what have you ‘overcome’? Has there in your life been any battle, any victory? Are there any scars upon your breast, or any laurels on your brow? Is there any habit, any disposition, any desire of which you can say, ‘I have fought and I have overcome it; it is beaten’? Yes, I know you will be brave in the face of danger; but oh! that I could be sure you would be equally brave in the face of temptation. You will conquer others; but, my boys, will you conquer yourselves? What does God ask of you—of every Church, of every person? It is one thing—one thing only. It is not that he should be great or clever or adventurous. It is that he should ‘overcome.’ ‘To him that overcometh,’ to him who is patient and strong, to him alone is given the amaranthine crown.”1 [Note: J. E. C. Welldon, Youth and Duty, 249.]

There was once on a door in Edinburgh a motto, and it ran: “He that tholes overcomes,” and a lad passing the house on his way to school read the motto, but did not understand it. He came home and asked: “What is the meaning of that word ‘thole’?” He was told by his parent it meant to bear with patience—“he that tholes overcomes.” The boy, passing that motto day by day, formed the resolution that he would thole, that he would bear with patience. That boy eventually became the founder of the great Edinburgh firm of Chambers, and he attributed the extraordinary success of his life to realizing the meaning of that motto, “He that tholes overcomes.”1 [Note: R. F. Horton.]

2. But the question is, “Can we overcome?” Is it to be assumed the victory is easy? Is it easy to overcome the obstacles, the difficulties of life, to overcome the temptations in our own nature and in the world around us, to overcome ourselves and stand supreme over that lower self which is of the earth earthy? Is it possible to overcome? The prize is beautiful. The promise is a vision. But is it possible? We can overcome if there is an adequate power behind, and that adequate power is there—Christ, who is the reward of overcoming. It all turns upon that. The power by which we can overcome cannot be said to be ours. It would be a contradiction in terms to say it is. We have to overcome ourselves. What is the power to overcome the self? It must be another. It is Christ. “This is the victory that overcometh the world.” “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” He can enable every one to overcome. The victor can conquer only in one way. If we trust in Christ we shall get His power into our hearts, and if we get His power into our hearts, then “we shall be more than conquerors through him that loved us.” The power of sin is great, but His power is much greater. Temptation is dazzling and sometimes seductive; but He can give us the victory. Actual sin is overcome by an actual Saviour.

I saw some time ago a beautiful remark. Among the Irish labourers who come over every year to the harvest in England was one who was accustomed to come to the same place year after year. He was of a sullen, moody nature, but one year he came completely changed—bright, joyful, ready to help, encouraging every one. They asked him what the cause was, and they twitted him, and made humorous suggestions about the change that had come over him. At last he turned to them all and said: “You are quite right about the change, but you are wrong about the cause. The truth is, I found the greatest friend in the world, Jesus, and my heart is just full of joy.” That was his answer. I cannot see how it could be better or truer. When you have found Jesus, you may be sad in a sense, and sick and weary in a sense, but your heart is full of joy. He has given you “to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God.”2 [Note: Ibid.]

3. Let Christ Himself be our example, whose whole life on earth was a warfare with the powers of evil; who found its crises and its agonies in the hours when He was alone with the Father; “who in the days of his flesh when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears … was heard for his godly fear.” Let us follow Him, who was tempted in all things like as we are, till by feeling our fellowship with Him in agony and the awful difficulty of doing the Father’s will, we shall also share His faith that we have this conflict to endure just because we can bear it, just because of our freedom, and just in order to realize that we are alive. “As I also overcame, and sat down with my Father in his throne.” Our Lord Jesus conquered all opposed to Him. In their presence He never fainted, He never failed, He never suffered defeat. Calm, confident victory rests upon every page of the sacred story. As one reads the narrative of conquest, one is amazed at the prolific and abundant spiritual energy which everywhere confronts the powers of ill. Our Lord overcame the world; He never bowed to the enticements or the glitter; they would make Him a king of the worldly order, but He rejected the allurement and went away to pray. He overcame the flesh; His life is characterized by order and beauty; on the one hand there was no harsh asceticism, and on the other hand there was no unseemly excess. He overcame the devil; they met again and again; “the prince of this world cometh”; he was ever coming, but he came to no purpose, and he achieved no triumph. Our Lord was always victor over the antagonists which stand in our path to-day.

There is, perhaps, no one term whose significance is less truly understood than that of overcoming. When Jesus said, “In the world ye shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world,” there was something meant quite different from its commonly received interpretation. Many persons have translated it to imply that in this world—this present life—tribulation is the appointed lot of man; but that death will end this, and by that event we “overcome the world”—that is, enter into joy and peace as inevitable conditions of the life beyond. But is there not undoubtedly a far deeper and nobler meaning than this? The “world” does not refer merely to life on this planet—the threescore years and ten allotted to man in this present state of existence—but rather it has reference to a condition. By “the world” is meant all that materiality which must be overcome before one can enter into that state of mind which is the kingdom of heaven, and which may be the condition of life here just as surely as hereafter. We overcome only as we rise to the spiritual plane. “Be of good cheer,” said Jesus: “I have overcome the world.” Where He has gone we may follow. If He overcame the world, so may we. It is not easy; it is possible. Not being easy to achieve, it is, when once attained, a condition so easy that it preserves itself and progresses by its own momentum. One who is succeeding in living to any perceptible degree the spiritual life rather than the material, realizes for himself the profound truth in the assertion of the Christ, that His yoke is easy and His burden is light. There is in it the peace which indeed passeth all understanding, and the joy that the world can neither give nor take away. Believe and love—all the duties of the world and all the privileges of heaven are condensed in those three words. Believe and love. Not only trust, but know, believe. Hold fast to the conviction that the forces of life are Divine. Come into harmony with them, and thus live above the plane on which discord is possible, thus overcome the world.1 [Note: Lilian Whiting, The World Beautiful, 161.]

4. After every temptation conquered, after every self-indulgence refused, after every duty accepted and patiently performed, we do feel, in a hundred fresh impulses of moral vigour and hopefulness, this life which those enjoy who overcome. He who conquers is a new man—fresh, elastic, confident. The skies are bright above him, and his heart is clear within. There is given to him an enjoyment of God’s world denied to other men; and at the same time a power of patience with things that are evil, for he has already conquered these in himself, and knows that their day is determined. What a generous trust in others our victories over ourselves give us! What an eye for the good that is in them! What a power of encouraging that good! While about us is the atmosphere of peace which springs from the faith that God reigns.

When Philip Henry was thirty years old, he noted in his diary that “so old and no older was Alexander when he conquered the great world; but I have not subdued the little world, myself.”2 [Note: J. Moffatt, The Golden Book of John Owen, 159.]

A life of renunciation appeared to Francis as the goal of his efforts, but he felt that his spiritual novitiate was not yet ended. He suddenly experienced a bitter assurance of the fact. He was riding on horseback one day, his mind more than ever possessed with the desire to lead a life of absolute devotion, when at a turn of the road he found himself face to face with a leper. The frightful malady had always inspired in him an invincible repulsion. He could not control a movement of horror, and by instinct he turned his horse in another direction.

If the shock had been severe, the defeat was complete. He reproached himself bitterly. To cherish such fine projects and show himself so cowardly! Was the knight of Christ then going to give up his arms? He retraced his steps and springing from his horse he gave to the astounded sufferer all the money that he had; then kissed his hand as he would have done to a priest. This new victory, as he himself saw, marked an era in his spiritual life.

This victory of Francis had been so sudden that he desired to complete it; a few days later he went to the lazaretto. One can imagine the stupefaction of these wretches at the entrance of the brilliant cavalier. If in our days a visit to the sick in our hospitals is a real event awaited with feverish impatience, what must not have been the appearance of Francis among these poor recluses? One must have seen sufferers thus abandoned, to understand what joy may be given by an affectionate word, sometimes even a simple glance.

Moved and transported, Francis felt his whole being vibrate with unfamiliar sensations. For the first time he heard the unspeakable accents of a gratitude which cannot find words burning enough to express itself, which admires and adores the benefactor almost like an angel from heaven.1 [Note: Paul Sabatier, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, 26.]

The Tree of Life

Literature

Bickersteth (M. C), Unity and Holiness, 129.

Cox (J. C.), The Gardens of Scripture, 147.

Culross (J.), “Thy First Love,” 103.

Dean (J. T.), Visions and Revelations, 16.

Fraser (D.), Seven Promises Expounded, 1.

Gordon (A. J.), Yet Speaking, 131.

Lee (W.), From Dust to Jewels, 146.

Macgregor (W. M.), Some of God’s Ministries, 286.

Mackay (G. P.), Immortality on God’s Terms, 39.

Maclaren (A.), Expositions: Epistles of John to Revelation, 187.

Maclaren (A.), The Victor’s Crowns, 1.

Matheson (G.), Sidelights from Patmos, 17.

Momerie (A. W.), The Origin of Evil, 306.

Peck (G. C.), Old Sins in New Clothes, 57.

Ramsay (W. M.), The Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia, 246.

Scott (C. A.), Revelation (Century Bible), 139.

Smith (G. A.), The Forgiveness of Sins, 156.

Vaughan (C. J.), Lectures on The Revelation, 24.

Welldon (J. E. C.), Youth and Duty, 243.

Christian World Pulpit, xii. 206 (G. T. Coster); xxix. 248 (J. O. Dykes); lxxvi. 113 (R. F. Horton).

Dictionary of the Bible, iii. 671 (S. D. F. Salmond).

Examiner, Oct. 27, 1904 (J. H. Jowett).