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It is in the middle of the street of the city, this is Revelation 22:2, on either side of the river the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. What is that? Revelation 22 is again a part of a book that is a symbolic book. The point of the tree of life, I believe there was a literal tree in the Garden of Eden, but what is the point of that tree? It is a concrete symbol of an expression of communion with God. It is to have life with God, eventually eternal life with God.
So, don’t get caught up with the issue of whether we could take a photograph of that tree. I think we could have. But that is not the point of it. It is an expression of a spiritual reality. If you ask me, “is there going to be a photographically real tree in the new heavens and new earth?” Then I have to say, “that is up to God!” What he is expressing here, the heart of it, is the spiritual communion of saying “you will have eternal life and joy” and the kind of sweetness we experience now in a eating a sweet fruit, you will have that. And it will be ongoing—every month, every year he could have said. That is at the heart of it. How God is going to do that, I am going to leave that to Him.
I do believe that it will be physical. We will have physical bodies just like Jesus’ resurrection body could be touched and handled. But they will be transformed. The whole universe will be transformed. I think there will be surprises for us. So, that is why I’m saying don’t try to calculate it beforehand. It is surreal but it surpasses what we could imagine. “Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, neither has it come into the mind of man what God has prepared for those that love him.”
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