THE RIVER OF LIFE

     Waters issued out from under the threshold of the house ...  Ezekiel
     xlvii. 1.

Unlike most great cities, Jerusalem was not situated on a great river.  True, the inconsiderable waters of Siloam—­’which flow softly’ because they were so inconsiderable—­rose from a crevice in the Temple rock, and beneath that rock stretched the valley of the Kedron, dry and bleached in the summer, and a rainy torrent during the rainy seasons; but that was all.  So, many of the prophets, who looked forward to the better times to come, laid their finger upon that one defect, and prophesied that it should be cured.  Thus we read in a psalm:  ’There is a river, the divisions whereof make glad the City of our God.’  Faith saw what sense saw not.  Again, Isaiah says:  ’There’—­that is to say, in the new Jerusalem—­’the glorious Lord shall be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams.’  And so, this prophet casts his anticipations of the abundant outpouring of blessing that shall come when God in very deed dwells among men, into this figure of a river pouring out from beneath the Temple-door, and spreading life and fertility wherever its waters come.  I need not remind you how our Lord Himself uses the same figure, and modifies it, by saying that whosoever believeth on Him, ’out of him shall flow rivers of living waters’; or how, in the very last words of the Apocalyptic seer, we hear again the music of the ripples of the great stream, ’the river of the water of life proceeding out of the Throne of God and of the Lamb.’  So then, all through Scripture, we may say that we hear the murmur of the stream, and can catch the line of verdure upon its banks.  My object now is not only to deal with the words that I have read as a starting-point, but rather to seek to draw out the wonderful significance of this great prophetic parable.

I. I notice, first, the source from which the river conies.

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.