We have seen that after God created man, He put him into a garden. In that garden, there are two striking items: the tree of life and a flowing river. The tree and the river are for God's dispensing. God created man in His own image with a human spirit, yet at that time man did not have the life of God. Man was only created by God and was an empty vessel ready to contain God. Thus, man was put in front of the tree of life for God to dispense Himself into man. Man was to receive God as his contents. God as life desired to come into man to be man's contents. Therefore, the New Testament tells us that if we do not have God (the Son), we do not have life (1 John 5:12). Our human life is not a long life. It is not a life that lasts forever, but a temporary life. The everlasting life, the eternal life, is God Himself. We human beings need to have God's everlasting, eternal life as our contents. This God who is life wants to dispense Himself as the divine life into man.
God and life are abstract, so this abstract God who is life needed an embodiment. This embodiment of the divine life is the tree of life which is a picture of Jesus as the embodiment of God to be life to us. One day God came in the flesh and this God-man's name was Jesus. The man Jesus was the embodiment of God as life, so John says that in Him, in Jesus, in the embodiment of God, was life (John 1:4). Jesus also told us that He was life (John 14:6), and He came that we may have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10). Furthermore, He told us that He is the bread of life to supply us and that we can receive Him by eating Him (John 6:35, 57). Eventually, Jesus is revealed in the Gospel of John as the vine tree, which is the tree of life (John 15:1). By receiving Him, by eating Him, we become a part of Him; we become a branch of this great vine.
In 1958 I was invited to England and stayed there for about one month. One day a friend took me to see the so-called great vine of the queen. The queen of England has a great vine tree in a greenhouse. Someone asked me if I had ever seen such a great vine. I replied that this vine did not surprise me because I had seen a bigger one! The queen's vine may be about a hundred feet long, but the vine that I had seen is so long that it encircles the globe. The vine that I had seen was Jesus with all His branches. All the millions upon millions of believers are the branches of this great and long vine around the globe. What a great vine tree! The brothers and sisters in the churches are all the green branches of the great vine tree. We have become the branches of Christ because we have received Him, we have eaten Him, and we are still eating. We are eating Jesus every day, and we are growing by Him. When we enter into the state of being the New Jerusalem, the tree of life should not be something new to us because we will have eaten and enjoyed this tree already. We have seen that the tree of life is the focal point of the entire Bible. This tree of life, the very embodiment of God as life to us, is for God's economy to dispense Himself into His created, chosen, and redeemed people. I hope that we all have a clear vision of the tree of life as the embodiment of the divine life for God to dispense Himself into us.