How Can the Leaves of the Tree of Life in Heaven Be for the Healing of the Nations If There is No Sickness in Heaven?

Revelation 22:2-3:
In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
And there shall be no more curse: but the throne of God and of the Lamb shall be in it; and his servants shall serve him.

First, the word used for healing in that verse is not the Greek word ioamai that is used to indicate healing in many verses.  Rather, it is the word therepeia, which is used in Matthew 24:45 and Luke 12:42 to indicate ruling over a household, and in Luke 9:11 to indicate healing where Jesus healed those who had need of healing.

Still, almost all translations render this word as healing; the one standout is Young’s Literal Translation, which uses the word service.  The Greek root word can refer to service, though it is used extensively to mean healing in the New Testament.  Young’s use is not due to an obvious error in the other translations; it is more a matter of preference given the Greek word used.  Perhaps Young was aware of the seeming contradiction posed by the question being answered here.  So it is possible that the leaves are somehow for the service of the nations, though it would be hard to imagine what kind of service they would provide.  Then again, heaven is rather hard to imagine for us too.  The most obvious service, food, would seem to have been stated if it were case, in other words, John would just have written that the leaves would serve as food for the nations.  So despite the facts above, it would still seem that healing still makes sense as the meaning.

So will there be sickness in heaven?  If not, why would you need leaves that can heal it?

The very next verse states that there will be no more curse, and sickness is clearly defined as a curse in Scripture.  Therefore, there will definitely be no sickness in heaven.

So now we seem to have reached a conundrum.  It seems that there are leaves for healing for people who don’t need healing!  This is an apparent self-contradiction, like having multiple competing auto insurance companies all boast that people saved hundreds of dollars when they switched to them.  (Wouldn’t only the cheaper ones have saved people money and it would have COST people to switch to the more expensive ones?)  But as is the case with the auto insurance companies, an apparent contradiction is not always an actual contradiction.  In the auto insurance case, multiple companies give you a cheap rate when you first switch to them, but then they keep methodically jacking up the rates as much as you will tolerate before you “cry uncle” and shop around for another company that will give you a low initial rate to switch to it.  So people switching from Company X to Company Y save money, but people switching from Company Y to Company X also save money, and both claims of savings are true – at least at first!  We’ve played this merry-go-round for some time, bopping back and forth between companies that will give us cheap rates to switch, and saved a LOT of money on auto insurance in the process!  So it was profitable to see the difference between an apparent contradiction and an actual one.

As you could expect, there are opinions all over the map from people who have tried to explain this particular healing “contradiction” – which can’t really be a contradiction because the entire Bible is the Word of God.   Some say that the tree represents Christ rather than being a literal tree, though that doesn’t really solve the contradiction being addressed regarding a healing tree for those who don’t need healing.  Others say that the tree is something present during the 1000-year rule of Christ, but that doesn’t make any sense, because people can still die during that time, whereas death will be abolished in the New Jerusalem.

Then we could ask ourselves if a tree could ever make some kind of spiritual difference.  And the answer is YES!  Adam and Eve ate from the TREE of the knowledge of good and evil and thus ruined the earth, causing a new one to become necessary in the future!  In fact, God then had to guard the way to the Tree of Life to prevent Adam and Eve from living FOREVER in a sinful state!  There is no reason to believe that either of these trees were merely symbolic.  So we must assume that this tree of life is also a literal tree that has special properties.

So what difference would a Tree of Life that provides healing make in heaven, where no one can die anyway?  One “obvious” suggestion would be that people from nations that were at war with each other and hated each other’s guts would be reconciled after eating from this tree, thus providing “healing for the nations.”  But that’s impossible because there’s no SIN in heaven.  So no one in heaven could hate anyone else’s guts because of his ethnic background (or any other reason) even prior to eating a certain tree’s leaves!

Another possibility would be that once you eat of this tree, your body becomes immortal just as Adam’s body would have been immortal if he had gotten to that tree and eaten from it.  But your body was ALREADY transformed “in the blink of an eye” to be incorruptible instead of corruptible before you set foot in the New Jerusalem.  So you ALREADY have an immortal, incorruptible body before you ever get to see this tree, so the tree cannot be what provides immortality.

So it seems that our backs are against the wall with this one.  We need to look at other statements made about heaven and the New Jerusalem to see if just maybe there could be a hint somewhere about how to solve this dilemma without dismissing the translations made by everyone except Young.

Well, at first it seems that all we find is another apparent contradiction!  But this is a helpful one, as it could give us the key to explaining the first one:

Revelation 21:4:
And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things have passed away.

Here God wipes all tears from people’s eyes in a place where there is no crying!  How can that make any sense?  This is the same kind of “contradiction” we’re already dealing with concerning the healing leaves.

And the answer is obvious – the tears must be ones from crying the people did before arrival based on what they had gone through BEFORE they got there.  Since there is no crying there, there cannot be any NEW tears, so they have to be OLD tears from prior crying.

One could speculate that the tears could be from a rough life on earth or speculate that they are from sorrow after having stood at the Judgment Seat of Christ and having the majority of their works burned up, to receive no credit or eternal heavenly reward.  We don’t know because the Bible doesn’t tell us the source of the tears.  All we know is that they were from crying before arrival because no new crying goes on after arrival.

So that “heavenly contradiction” is solved, and it makes sense to me that we could apply the same logic to the original “heavenly contradiction.”  In other words, there is something therapeutic about those leaves that causes people who arrive broken to be made whole.  It couldn’t be their immortal bodies that are broken, as they can’t break.  Besides, the word iaomai, which would more specifically denote physical healing, wasn’t the word used to describe the healing that the Tree of Life provides.  It couldn’t be people’s spirits that are healed either, as they were already made perfect on the earth, created after God in righteousness and true holiness (Ephesians 4:24).  So the “healing” would have to be in the soulish realm.  Apparently, this life-giving tree would be for therapy or medicine for anyone dealing with soulish issues when he gets to heaven.