I’m disappointed in myself that on a theme dear to my heart, the River of God, I’ve missed more than one opportunity to blog here about the sermon for the week on that theme. Yet all those sermons are available on our church website at http://www.valleycovenant.org/sermons%20text.htm.
However, the fact that I’ve missed those chances fits with how I want to talk about this week’s final text on the River, from Revelation 22:1-7. As we come to the end of the Bible we find there a river like we found at the beginning, in Genesis 2, a river which springs up at God’s command to water our world and even the Tree of Life which offers us life eternal. As I’ve been saying right along about its appearance throughout Scripture, it’s the same river, the River of God.
Yet that is so contrary to experience. As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus discerned millennia ago, “You cannot step twice into the same river, for fresh waters are always flowing in upon you.” He is also supposed to have said the simple little Greek phrase panta rei, “everything flows.” These sayings were part of his larger picture of our reality as a realm of constant, inevitable and often regrettable change. Nothing, absolutely nothing, it seems, stays the same.
All it takes is enough years of living to start to believe Heraclitus had it absolutely right. Everything flows away from us. A good friend from graduate school, only a couple years older than I, dropped dead of a heart attack while hiking with his family last week. With just a random survey of my life I consider the facts that my barber of twenty years retired a few months ago, my youngest daughter just announced her engagement, and that I just learned our favorite Greek restaurant in Seattle has closed and the building has become a bank. Every aspect of life is in a constant flow of change.
Yet the Gospel good news is that Heraclitus was wrong. Here at the end of our story is the same river. As its water flows out of God’s throne in verse 1, we understand that it is constantly the same water, the same refreshing gracious Spirit of God who never changes, but constantly saves and renews and restores.
There’s so much here I hope to say and explore on Sunday. In verse 2 the promise from Ezekiel 47:12 is repeated, that the tree of life growing along the River will be “for healing.” John adds, “for the healing of the nations,” in other words, for healing the whole world. We will be healed by the gift of life eternal, time enough to discover that in God, in His River, nothing is really lost.
This promise is secured in verse 4, with the words, “they will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.” We will look upon our Lord who cherishes each of us enough to mark us as His own. And I must believe that if God love us that much, then He loves what we truly love, that nothing good we desire will be forgotten or lost, that all the pleasures and joys that seemed to have drifted away on time’s current are still there, still deep in the channels of God’s River.
So verse 6 says, “These words are trustworthy and true.” My understanding of them may be flawed, but the words are true. The same River will be there as was there at the beginning, because the same God will be our God forever and always. May verse 7 be fulfilled and may we come soon to that River’s shore.