From the Old Paradise to The New

As a perfect contrast to this tree of the kingdom of Mammon stands Jesus, the personification of the creative power of God, in the preparatory kingdom of faith as the figurative symbol of the true vine. He had received of the Father the gift of having life within himself, and he gave his soul for lost man that the latter should live—through His death and resurrection, which he yearly reminds us of in nature. This governmental tree, Christ, is acces­sible to the person who hears the gospel of life and permits him­self to be grafted into its branches. In Him we find the same secret power as in the tree of life, though in Christ it is of a much higher value, since it can even give life to nature in its state of death. By him as the Word of God both the tree and the river of life are created, and everything living is nourished by the power he represents. Christ is therefore a Michael, because a real ruling-ability requires not only the power to kill, but also the power to give life, which means more than to prolong life. This govern­mental tree is now visible only through the eye of faith, and no one, except he who believes in the truth of God, can gain citizenship in the kingdom it represents, because faith is the very means by which a person may be united with it.

The prehistoric prefigures enable us to follow the stream of the secret power of the Word of God through the ages, and to see how it reveals time and again the existence of this secret power, the kingdom, and the sword of the cherubim.

Enter again the environment of nature and see how spring breaks the fetters of winter. Both sea and land are as it were released from the prison of death. What is this? Does it repre­sent emanations of life from the kingdom of brick and stone 9 No! There the ravages of death continue to prevail with undiminished fervor, good and evil continually racing with one another. But in nature you see life, only life, so that the very earth underneath your feet seems to bound with new life. Nature has once again risen from death. Why? Because heaven and earth obey the Word of God.

The basic element of the governmental tree of Christ is the Word of God. Do you see the embryonic form of a new Paradise, having for its foreshadow the original pleasure garden in the East? We see an aged couple, who, in expectation of the fulfill­ment of the promises of God, are as though resurrected to life from a seventy-five year winter. All at once these withered old people receive a son, and then. the fruit of their lives gradually expands into a mighty nation, which expels and destroys thirty-one tribal branches of the kingdom of brick and stone. Wonder­ful changes take place, and this lively governmental tree finally grows an ornamental crown on its trunk, before which the imperial branches of the brick kingdom bow to the earth in humiliation. Who would have thought that in this old pair of the wilderness—the centenarian, Abraham, and his ninety year old Sarah—there existed such a mighty spring of life? No one but the Invisible knew the hidden course of this throbbing artery. It was the Word —the Word of life—that united things visible with things in­visible in a life which was a living demonstration of the will of God. And the whole was the accomplishment of the Word of God in the form of a real kingdom.

Do you see the kingdom? No! It is hewn down because it was only the first prefiguring model of the reality; but the stump still remains. It enroots itself more and more, and the producing characteristic of the Abrahamitic race is stamped at its roots. The name of Jesse, the father of David, is on the upper end of the stump, while the name of Abraham is at the nethermost roots.

A rod shoot's forth from the old root. It was expected that a new crown would grow on the large stump, but from the im­perial tree of knowledge came a prohibition forbidding a descend­ant of David to establish the old competitive scepter, and the Son was torn. away. The symbolic tree, Christ, was plundered way down to the roots. But see, spring followed winter—life again broke the chains of death. He was raised to a position still higher, and a more glorious body was resurrected. The true Son of David rose, invisible to unbelief, but visible to faith as the Word portrays him. Unlike the products of the imaginations of men, this por­trait of the Word contained a seed of life which, when the resur­rection of spring came, returned to us the death-torn Hero in immortal form.

Now read Isa. 11:1-16 and you will see a beautiful picture of the devastated governmental tree. When will the spring come that will raise it from the dead? The answer is given in the 11th verse. The kingly scepter of Jesse shall rise out of the dust when the Lord "shall set his hand the second time to recover the rem­nant of his people ... from the islands of the sea" and "shall as­semble the outcasts of Israel and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth."

Then the Rod, the Son of David, will come, who shall "smite the earth with the breath of his lips ... and slay the wicked." All nations now endeavor to hinder his growth, but "he shall come upon princes as upon morter"—iron bars, copper doors, and forts will melt as frost before the sun when he raises his kingly scepter over the thrones of his enemies.

The Invisible, the Father, is the husbandman of the vineyard, and the Word, personified in the flesh of Christ, is the vine—the everlasting tree of life, accessible to the children of faith who bow themselves under the sharp sword of the Word. In order to be grafted into this tree, a person must subject himself to the flaming sword of the cherubim, inasmuch as this sword separates the con­stituent parts of the two governmental trees from each other, hews off limbs, and unites similar parts.

If you renounce all connection with the bewitching world tree, it is necessary that you not only be severed from its rights of citizenship, but that you disappear, so to speak, and merge into the vine of the Word of life. During the first process you feel the bitterness of death, but as soon as the joining-act is effected, you experience the sweet comfort of life. Your position in the world becomes more and more critical according to the degree your de­velopment is worked upon by the husbandman. You become the subject of double exertions on the part of both god powers. The imperial tree of "good and evil" has a mortgage on your flesh which is great or small according to the degree you have eaten of its fruit; and the enchanter mobilizes all his skill and genius in order to regain his missing customer. If he fails to win by good means, he resorts to evil means. Most people allow themselves to become enticed or intimidated by these equally dangerous and powerful means from assuming a position of complete union with the Word of life—they fear temporal death more than eternal death. But the one who continues to remain as a branch in the tree, eating of the Word of which the tree consists, is constantly subjected to a cleansing process—a painful operation, intended to make the branch small but the good fruit better. The natural cultivation of grapevines may here serve as an illustration.

The trunk of a grapevine is allowed to grow until it reaches the height of about three feet. Then the husbandman begins to prune, or "chasten," the plant. As soon as a new branch shoots forth, it is pruned more or less by the shears, only a bit of the beautiful, richly foliaged limb being left. But if you will observe the result of this chastening, you will find that the largest and juiciest fruit grows on these small branches. While the unpruned, or unchastened, vine becomes richer in leaves from year to year, and requires more and more room, it produces less, poorer, and less nourishing fruit. Nature offers a good illustration of the ruling-systems of the two governmental trees. When we consider how it is with the tree of knowledge, we find that this unpruned tree produces poorer fruit from year to year, for instance, artificial foodstuffs as a substitute for the real. And the profiteers of that system rejoice during years of famine and need.

Christ and his disciples (the governmental tree in flesh) con­stituted a fountain of benevolence, which revealed, by spiritual and temporal good things, the Father of life to a people that had received the sting of death. At the side of this beautiful, spiritually enlightened, and God-chastened congregation stands the tree of good and evil. This tree has now become religious too; it has even a greater appearance of godliness than the tree of Christ, its saviors receiving the titles, "generals," "popes," "princes of peace," "cardinals," and "bishops." It has branches all over the world. It is richly foliaged, having castles, churches, temples, houses of prayer, institutions, and factories.

It took Christ more than three years to rear twelve disciples, and when they were going to pass their examinations, one of them turned out to be a traitor, another sought to forswear all acquaint­ance with the Master for fear of death, and the other ten fled from the life-testing onslaughts of the cherubim sword. Do you see how the husbandman stunts the appearance, reducing it as it were to a subterranean artery of life?

But the undisciplined tree of Baal manufactures in its modern seminaries thousands of disciples each year, and the honor and power of the bewitching tree grows daily. But observe the fruit more carefully—it is truth and falsehood, good and evil. If you are hungry, you are confronted by stone—stone in churches and stone in, prisons. Consider their pompous "divine services," their eulogized "charity," evidenced in dances, church socials, tea and coffee parties. Loudly they proclaim the announcements of the proceeds, which "are for the poor." This is divine service that can be seen. "Good!" say the feasting drones. "Hypocrisy !" cry the deceived and disappointed people.

Listen! Do you hear a dull distant murmur? What is it? Curses are called down upon the "feasting churchgoers," who have withheld the wages of the laborer, who have robbed the widow, dishonored the virgin, and sold worthless articles in their houses of prayer for large sums of money. Evil! It is the crown on all that is evil, say the deceived masses. The religious people who have been grafted into the tree of life are dry limbs, cut off because they have not adhered to the truth. Truth, which creates and nourishes, constitutes the tree of life which we have access to.

Turn again to the true vine! Do you see how experience grows within these humble fruit-bearers? But where is the fruit? Ah, it is not stored up; it i eaten by the hungry and the bewildered. Sometimes it serves as a lifeboat for persons half drowned in sin, or crushed by infidelity, and other times it assumes the shape of lodging and clothes. But it journeys into the kingdom of life with the life that has been nourished and saved; and new harvests go the same way.

The fruit-bearer is ridiculed by his false brethren with the words, "Where is the fruit? You don't save any souls! What do you accomplish ?" and so forth. Inquire of the apple tree for the apple, or of the wheat for the kernel, which hunger has devoured! Not so in the case of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; it leaves behind dead works in great multitudes. This is just what Christ came to save the believer from.—Heb. 9:14.

It is not enough' to be a limb in this vine. Yearly the limb must yield more and better fruit for the sustenance of life. When you as a limb have completed your course, the husbandman—not you—has the harvested fruit in his garner, a decoration for you, an honor to him, and the life which the branch has saved a source of help forever. It is the Word in flesh, revealed by the kingdom to which it belongs. Can the tree of life yield dead fruit, or can its limbs preserve their own fruit of life? Impossible! That is why Christ and his disciples did not build temples and houses of brick and stone, nor demand the money and belongings of the people.

The sword of the cherubim guards the way to the new Paradise and the tree of life, and is described with the following words: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in right­eousness: that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly fur­nished unto all good works." (2 Tim. 3:16, 17.) "For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart."—Heb. 4:12.

At the end of the ages a desperate struggle will be fought be­tween the kingdoms of Life and Death. The battle, and the re­sulting victory, is described in the following manner: "And out of his [the resurrected Champion's] mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it lie should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron [lie shall turn their own weapons against them] : and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Al­mighty God."—See Rev. 19 :11-21.

Through this process, Christ, "the true vine." becomes the "King of kings and Lord of lords." When his servants have hewn down the tree of knowledge of good and evil, the fowls and the wild animals are invited to a feast—they are permitted to avenge them­selves on. their Nimrodian enemies—and they "eat the- flesh of kings and the flesh of captains and the flesh of mighty men, and the flesh of horses, and of them that sit on them, and the flesh of all men, both free and bond, both small and great."

The good is separated from the evil, and then for the first time you will see the two governmental trees of the past—the tree of life and the tree of good and evil—assume perfect shape. The power of life has then produced a beautiful crown on the tree of life, consisting of the Word of God personified in many victorious heroes. These are the kings and priests "of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years." (Rev. 5: 10; 20:6.) This administration reverts over the past ages in order to separate, inch by inch, the roots of the two kingdoms from each other. Fire envelops the kingdom of brick and stone, and for every inch that the kingdom of Christ grows, a new springtime makes its appear­ance, bringing forth its harvest, long dormant in the bosom of the earth, but now assimilated with the roots of life. The good, con- sisting of righteousness and truth, is inseparable from the govern­mental tree of life, but the evil is left to vanish in the fire, inas­much as it has been united with the governmental tree of death. A thousand years of this process uncovers the stumps and roots of both trees. A short description of this concluding scene is given in Rev. 20:4-15. A wonderful, magnificent spring! Sea and land give up all the dead—small and great are resurrected in the pres­ence of the administration of the kingdom. This weeding-out pro­cess continues until all who have engraved their names • in the Book of Life, representing the victorious experiences they have lived through, have been amalgamated with everlasting life, and all who have done evil have been united in the fire with the govern­mental tree of death.

Then death, as it really is, is visible in all its indescribable ruthlessness, transferring to an eternal night all who have allowed themselves to become united with deceit and falsehood under the scepter of the tree of good and evil. They are then separated forever from life and good things—for them there is no more spring. Oh, how terrible!

Now you can see the stump, upon which the beautiful crown of life fits. It is made up of an industrious people who have been obedient to the Word of God as far as they have understood it. Obedient to the first commandment God gave fallen man, they have honestly fed themselves in the sweat of their brow. With respect to knowledge, some are like the beast of burden which has suf­fered under yoke and harness, hunger and death. The dual devel­oping ability of the Word of God has become, through this painful but instructive process, a means of bringing about perfection in the once fallen but then redeemed people. The tree of death, with its defenders, will be changed to ashes under the soles of the feet of the saints.—Mal. 4 :3.

A great and wonderful change takes place "under the whole heaven." The paradisiacal earth steps forth in a complete, per­fect, and enlarged form. It is written concerning its government, "Righteousness shall be the girdle of his loins, and faithfulness the girdle of his reins."—Isa. 11: 5.

The result of this is best visible in the word-picture which the prophet has written concerning the kingdom of the future. (See Isa. 11.) Wolves and lambs, leopards and kidsy calves and lion cubs, and small children—all play in peace with each other. The old are united through their little ones. Cows and bears, lions and oxen, snakes and little tots, find pleasure in each other's company. Bloodthirsty hunters, with their brick walls, are not to be found there, neither enmity, nor destruction.

What do you see in the middle of the land? Not the smoky, sooty city of brick, with its lie-manufacturing and crime-producing establishments, its bloody corpses, and weapons of murder. No! Place the prophet's telescope, found in the 21st and 22nd chapters of Revelation, before your eyes! Now you will see an indescribable capital city, having a radiance corresponding to that of a thousand suns. The surrounding beauty of nature defies all endeavors of description. There is the tree of life. But the tree of knowledge of good and evil does not exist any more; the people are now de­veloped. Knowledge of how to rule has been gained through the experiences of the past. For this reason the tree of knowledge of good and evil finds no room in the perfect Paradise of Truth.