EPHESUS: THE GREAT REWARD

Revelation 2:1—7 (contd)

FINALLY, the risen Christ makes his great promise to those who overcome. In this picture, there are two very beautiful ideas.
(1) There is the idea of the tree of life. This is part of the story of the Garden of Eden; in the middle of the garden, there was the tree of life (Genesis 2:9); it was the tree of which Adam was forbidden to eat (Genesis 2:16—17). Eating its fruit would make human beings like God; and, because they ate from it, Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden (Genesis 3:22—4).
In later Jewish thought, the tree came to stand for that which truly gave life to individuals. Wisdom is a tree of life to those who lay hold of it (Proverbs 3:18); the fruit of the righteous is a tree of life (Proverbs 11:30); hope fulfilled is a tree of life (Proverbs 13:12); a tongue is a tree of life (Proverbs 15:4).
To this is to be added another picture. Adam was first forbidden to eat of the tree of life, and then he was barred from the garden so that the tree of life was lost forever. But it was a regular Jewish belief that, when the Messiah came and the new age dawned, the tree of life would be in the centre of all people, and those who had been faithful would eat of it. The wise man said: ‘Those who do what is pleasing to him enjoy the fruit of the tree of immortality’ (Sirach [Ecclesiasticus] 19:19). The Rabbis had a picture of the tree of life in paradise. Its boughs overshadowed the whole of paradise; it had 500,000 fragrant perfumes and its fruit as many pleasant tastes, every one of them different. The idea was that what Adam had lost the Messiah would restore. To eat of the tree of life means to have all the joys that the faithful conquerors will have when Christ reigns supreme.
(2) There is the idea of paradise, and the very sound of the word is lovely. It may be that we do not attach any very definite meaning to it; but, when we study the history of the word, and when we see how the great thinkers of the Church have used it, we come upon some of the most adventurous thinking the world has ever known.
(a) Originally, paradise was a Persian word. The Greek historian Xenophon wrote much about the Persians, and it was he who introduced the word into the Greek language. Originally, it meant a pleasure garden. When Xenophon is describing the state in which the Persian king lived, he says that he takes care that, wherever he resides, there are paradises, full of all the good and beautiful things the soil can produce (Oeconomicus, 4:13). Paradise is a lovely word to describe a thing of serene beauty.
(b) In the Septuagint, paradise has two uses. First, it is regularly used for the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:8, 3:1). Second, it is regularly used of any stately garden. When Isaiah speaks of a garden that has no water, it is the word paradise that is used (Isaiah 1:30). It is the word used when Jeremiah says: ‘Plant gardens and eat what they produce’ (Jeremiah 29:5). It is the word used when the preacher says: ‘I made myself gardens and parks, and planted in them all kinds of fruit trees’ (Ecclesiastes 2:5).
(3) In early Christian thought, the word has a special meaning. In Jewish thought, after death, all souls went to Hades–a grey and shadowy place. Early Christian thought pictured an intermediate state between earth and heaven to which all people went and in which they remained until the final judgment. This place was described by Tertullian as a vast cavern beneath the earth. But there was a special part in which the patriarchs and the prophets lived–and that was paradise. The Jewish philosopher Philo describes it as a place ‘vexed by neither rain, nor snow, nor waves, but which the gentle zephyr refreshes, breathing ever on it from the ocean’. As Tertullian saw it, only one kind of person went straight to this paradise, and that was the martyr. ‘The sole key’, he said, ‘to unlock paradise is your own life’s blood’ (Concerning the Soul, 55).
Origen was one of the most adventurous thinkers the Church ever produced. He writes like this: ‘I think that all the saints [saints means Christians] who depart from this life will remain in some place situated on the earth, which holy Scripture calls paradise, as in some place of instruction and, so to speak, classroom or school of souls … If anyone indeed be pure in heart and holy in mind, and more practised in perception, he will by making more rapid progress, quickly ascend to a place in the air, and reach the kingdom of heaven, through these mansions [stages] which the Greeks called spheres and which holy Scripture calls heavens … He will in the end follow him who has passed into the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, who said: “I will that where I am, these may be also.” It is of this diversity of places he speaks, when he said: “In my Father’s house are many mansions” ’ (De Principiis, 2:6).
The great early thinkers did not identify paradise with heaven; paradise was the intermediate stage, where the souls of the righteous were prepared for entering the presence of God. There is something very lovely here. Who has not felt that the leap from earth to heaven is too great for one step and that there is need for a gradual entering into the presence of God? Might it have been of this that Charles Wesley was thinking when he sang these lines in the final verse of his hymn ‘Love Divine’?

Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.

(4) In the end, in Christian thought, paradise did not retain this idea of an intermediate state. It came to be equivalent to heaven. Our minds must turn to the words of Jesus to the dying and penitent thief: ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise’ (Luke 23:43). We are in the presence of mysteries about which it would be irreverent to dogmatize; but is there any better definition of paradise than to say that it is life forever in the presence of our Lord? As Ray Palmer’s hymn, ‘Jesus, these eyes have never seen’, has it:

When death these mortal eyes shall seal,
And still this throbbing heart,
The rending veil shall thee reveal
All glorious as thou art–

and that is paradise.

Barclay, W. (2004). The Revelation of John (3rd ed. fully rev. and updated., Vol. 1, pp. 77—80). Louisville, KY; London: Westminster John Knox Press.

On this day...

• Leviticus 19 - 2024
• Leviticus 18 - 2024
• A Living Message - 2012
• Our dependence upon God will increase - 2012
• Our evangelism is a fool's errand unless God moves upon the hearts of men - 2012
• Praying earnestly - 2012
• The message is not a compromise but an ultimatum - 2012
• The Christianity that saves - 2012
• Friendship of naked personalities - 2012
• Psalm 37:39-40 - 2011