1. The source of the waters. In the Revelation, it is described as proceeding out of the throne of God and the Lamb. In Ezekiel the same idea is presented under the figure of the temple, God’s dwelling-place. The waters issue out from under the threshold of the house “at the south side of the altar”—the altar where the sprinkled blood and burning sacrifices testified to the Person by whom, and the price at which, the Spirit is sent. (Compare John vii, 39; xvi, 7; Acts ii, 33.) 2. The exhaustless and increasing flow of the waters is shown to the prophet, who, at a thousand cubits from their source, is led through them,—a stream ankle deep. A thousand cubits farther, he passed through, and they had risen to his knees. Again, a thousand cubits, and the waters were to his loins; and at a thousand cubits more it was a river that he could not pass over. “And he said unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen this?” 3. The river was a fountain of life. On its banks were “very many trees,” “all trees for meat,” with fadeless leaf and exhaustless fruit, “the fruit thereof for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine.” “And there shall be a very great multitude of fish” in the Dead Sea, “because these waters shall come thither.” For “it shall come to pass that every thing that liveth which moveth, whithersoever the river shall come shall live. Every thing shall live, whither the river cometh.” 4. By these living waters, the Dead Sea of depraved humanity shall be healed. “Now this sea of Sodom,” says Thompson, “is so intolerably bitter, that, although the Jordan, the Arnon, and many other streams have been pouring into it their vast contributions of sweet water for thousands of years, it continues as nauseous and deadly as ever. Nothing lives in it; neither fish nor reptiles nor even animalculæ can abide its desperate malignity. But these waters from the sanctuary heal it. The whole world affords no other type of human apostasy so appropriate, so significant. Think of it! There it lies in its sulphurous sepulcher, thirteen hundred feet below the ocean, steaming up like a huge caldron of smouldering bitumen and brimstone! Neither rain from heaven nor mountain torrents nor Jordan’s flood, nor all combined can change its character of utter death. Fit symbol of that great dead sea of depravity and corruption which nothing human can heal!”[4] But the pure waters of the river of life will yet pour into this sea of death a tide of grace by which “the waters shall be healed.”—Ezek. xxvii, 8. Footnote 4: “The Land and the Book.” Vol. II, pp. 531, 534.