HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? Part Eight
The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
(Revelation 22: 2.)
About four years ago one of our five children gave me on Father’s Day a remarkable book: The Global Forest by Diana Beresford-Kroeger. From it I learned that trees not only breathe and communicate, provide shelter, medicine, and food but they also connect to everything else in nature, even influence our minds: the very sight of trees has a healing influence on sick people, and invigorate us all.
The author also relates something ominous. It involved a sacred dream making its way in the world today. It came from an elder of the Hopi people. It is a vision quest of death. Before he was about to die, the elder asked that the people of all nations pay attention to the trees of the forest. One such tree entered his dream. It held a circle of light in its trunk. The light came from the power of the sun. This was transferred to all the creatures of the earth as a life force. This dream is a warning to all people to respect nature, beginning with the trees of the forests, because the web of all life as we understand it depends on the tree.
We live in an era of the great rape of creation. The universal loss of forests foreshadows the finality of life. Trees can live without us, but we cannot live without trees.
The most astounding happening in the last 100 years has been how Hitler in 7 short years, from 1933-1939, rose from a relative nonentity to the greatest threat of the 20th century, a grave peril that took 6 years to overcome. Now it certainly looks that the 21st Century will be dominated by our very own self-induced disaster: Climate Change, which already in 2014 has become a world-destroyer. It is our utmost duty to fight this menace as well. Will we? Or are we too dependent on our carbon slaves? When the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.
Here’s what is happening. North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. Two years ago, in urban Texas, the prolonged heat there killed more than five million shade trees and mega millions more in parks and forests. In the Amazon, prolonged severe droughts are decimating the rain forests. Should I mention that millions of hectares are clear-cut there also to make room for soya beans and other crops? Trees also fueled Australia’s fires during this year’s record heat, and the same is true in California, where forests fires now are a year-round event.
Every tree that dies or burns adds to Global Warming as trees breathe oxygen and inhale CO2. Dying trees mean a dying planet. There is no doubt in my mind that ‘the creative destruction’ of capitalism will persist to its bitter end, when money, the all-consuming Mammon, will have accomplished what has been Satan’s aim from the beginning: to destroy God’s creation. Just as Jesus had to go through death to achieve life, the Bible tells us that creation too has to go through death to achieve life, and this time we humans are the cause.
The New Testament, in 2 Peter 3: 10, makes clear that the days of the world are counted and that the end will come unexpectedly: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”
My particular emphasis this week is on that poetic sounding sentence in the Bible’s very last chapter where the presence of trees restores what we have destroyed:
“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
Let me start with ‘nations.’ When in Matthew 28: 19 Jesus gives us the Great Commission the same word ‘nations’ is used. It actually does not refer to individual countries, but to everything connected to people, such as races, sexes, ethnic and faith communities, economic classes, families, and tribes. Thus “the leaves of the trees are for the healing of all humans in the world”, and that healing also applies to the world itself, because humans and earth are one.
The last two chapters of the bible, Revelation 21 and 22, picture a world where, as yet, no humans are present. But there are trees, lots of them.
The Garden of Eden had an identical development: everything there had to be in perfect shape before humans could appear. It is my argument that prior to the saints’ arrival in the new creation, the presence of trees will be instrumental for them to enter a virginal, pristine, unpolluted planet. I believe that the earth must first go through a recuperating process with trees as the primary agents of healing, because, basically, there is nothing wrong with God’s world that time – and the absence of sinful humans – cannot heal. And time is immaterial for the Lord for whom a day is as a thousand years.
We know about forest fires: they are a natural phenomenon, needed to rejuvenate forests, because a fire will kill the old and sick and bring to life the buried seeds. Peter was right about the all-consuming fire. For the new creation to come, our worn-out world needs a total conflagration to reveal the new to come, and trees play an enormous role in this process.
For that purpose a closer examination of what trees do is necessary.
We all know that trees are the lungs of the world. For humans to have one hundred percent pure air and ‘live forever’ a totally clean environment is required: hence the need for the new world to be fully filled with forests of trees.
But trees are more than oxygen providers. The tree’s underground system is as important as its foliage: the roots and its capillaries are just as essential for the welfare of the earth as the more visible branches, because a tree stands in its own decomposition. Much of the tree sheds its own weight many times over to earth and air, eventually becoming grass, fungus, and promoting the life of insects, birds and mammals. It is the cooperation of these many ‘by-products’ that make a tree so rich – they exist because of the tree, belong with it and function as part of it. Birds nest, squirrels burrow and eat fungi, and insects prune and assist in decomposing the surplus leaves and activate essential soil bacteria. Animals are messengers to the tree and trees act as a garden for animals, providing an excellent example of life depending on life. A tree is a total being that involves minerals, plants, animals, debris and life. The sum of these elements make up the ‘tree cooperative’. All this has to be in place before the saints are coming home.
“The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the human population and for the earth itself.”
The leaves absorb the CO2 but the unnatural extra supply of Carbon Dioxide and a rapidly decreasing number of trees has now made our weather so unpredictable and even deadly. The leaves themselves are marvels of ingenuity. Many trees have leaves that differ from one species to another. This diversity is found in the leaf’s anatomy. Some leaves have a waxy cuticle on their upper surface. These leaves repel water and attract particles that are water insoluble. The undersurface of the leaf is downy. This down is composed of thousands of fine hairs, all only a few microns in size. These hairs are multiplied in the full canopy into trillions of fine hairs. All this holds the answer to the curse of pollution of whatever kind because this microscopic world of the leaf within the tree canopy acts like a fine-toothed comb for the air.
The new earth, covered with healthy trees will completely heal the earth and clean the air, making it the perfect place for the ‘redeemed of the Lord, who will enter singing’ (Isaiah 35: 10) on the way to embrace their new abode.
So what else do I know about these leaves? Leaves have twice the specific heat capacity as soil, meaning plants can be about 9 degrees Celsius warmer than their surrounding environment. Consequently trees moderate extreme temperatures and humidity so it is tolerable enough to accommodate life. The leaves catch the rain, some of which the tree absorbs, and the remainder returns to the air through evaporation. Any rain that falls through the canopy has, on its way down, collected plant cells and nutrients and is much richer than regular rainwater. This through-fall is then directed to shallow roots, and serves all the needs of growth in that forest. Therefore trees use, collect, enrich and properly direct water so it can best be used in the forest system without human intervention.
Trees are not just here to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen for us to breathe. Their purpose reaches much farther. Trees fight drought, prevent soil erosion, stabilize earth, shade us from sun, are key in the conservation of water, provide us with heat, control the effects of wind, provide shelter for animals and encourage biodiversity and nutrients for soil. God created trees because the trees are life: Yes, the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.
Trees are not only for the earth: the seas too benefit as do the inland streams. Revelation 22: 2 this time: “at each side of the river stood the Tree of Life.” Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrives, so does the rest of the food chain. Fishermen have planted trees along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.
Before the humans can return to paradise, trees have to clean it for them. Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of soaking up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phyto-remediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution: indeed the leaves of the tree are cosmic healers!
So it makes perfect sense that the Bible starts with the Tree of Life, ends with the Tree of Life and has at its centre the Tree of Golgotha where our eternal life was assured. These three ‘trees’ are symbols of all trees explaining that simple sentence in the last chapter of the Bible which says:
“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
What does this mean for “How Should We Then Live?”
Every piece of paper comes from a tree. Every kilometer we drive brings pollutants that affect trees adversely. I know it is not possible to live ‘without sin’, and yet…. Revelation 22, that very last Bible chapter, verse 11, has some strange words: “Let those who do wrong continue to do wrong; let those who are vile continue to be vile; let those who do right continue to do right; and let those who are holy continue to be holy.”
Those are mysterious words. They suggest to me that we must redefine sin. We must include sin against trees as part of our lives, clothe ourselves in other garments, so to say, live by different standards, change our entire mindsets, orient ourselves away from the realm of death, which is the current orientation, and embrace hook, line and sinker, the shalom of eternity, the Way of Life Eternal which awaits us in the New Creation.
These words also suggest to me that, while sinners persist in their evil behaviour God’s people will grow in grace. It reminds me Deuteronomy 30: 19: “I call the heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live….”
Next week Part Nine: Where do animals fit into the larger picture?