Daily Devotionals

Bowen's Daily Meditations

Devotional: March 31st

"To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God." - Revelation 2:7.

There is not only the one transcendent prize of everlasting life held up to the assured hope of every believer; but it would seem that the Lord Jesus Christ (out of his treasury bringing forth things new and old,) holds out particular and altogether wonderful rewards to those who throw themselves into the thick of the conflict of life, and overcome where there were peculiar difficulties in the way of their overcoming. The records of the past bear their not unwilling testimony to this.

They speak of Enoch and Elijah; of Moses and Ezekiel; of Elisha and Daniel; of Paul and John; of Luther and Whitefield. But we know that this earth is to be the scene of things more glorious than have yet been witnessed; the kingdoms of this world are to become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ; and all his enemies, the last being death, are to be made the footstool of the King of glory. Nor does it please the Lord Jesus Christ to accomplish the sublime reduction of all things to himself, otherwise than by the instrumentality of his servants; for he says expressly, " The glory which thou hast given me I have given them." It is by the branches that the vine brings forth fruit and glorifies itself. And the universal kingdom which the Son of man in the presence of the Ancient of days is represented as receiving (Daniel 7:14) is that kingdom which (in verses 18, 22, and 27) in language most explicit, the saints of the Most High are described as taking and possessing for ever, even for ever and ever.

The paradise of God vanishes from our view in the first chapter of the Bible, and returns to our astonished gaze in the last, where the description of it is subtly and beautifully interwoven with that of the descending Jerusalem. The tree of life was a tree of whose fruit had Adam eaten, he would have lived forever; and lest he should eat thereof he was expelled. What is the life that he was not allowed to appropriate? Not surely the life of the soul, for nothing but want of faith could separate him from this. No doubt it was corporeal immortality. Had he refrained from eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he would thereby have retained the life of God in his soul; and the tree of life seems to have been appointed to ’supply an immortalizing aliment to his body, by which it should be nourished with a life that nothing could harm, a life corresponding in exaltedness with the life of the spotless soul. This tree was a type of Christ in one of his aspects. He has brought life and immortality to light. He that overcometh and entereth upon the full fruition of spiritual life, shall eat of the tree of life, and live forever. We shall not all die.

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