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 wady, 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.