EVERYONE LOVES A GARDEN. I, for one, am waiting for the winter to wane and the coronavirus to pass over to get restarted on mine.
Some love the work it takes to make a beautiful garden, and others just love the results. But either way, everybody knows how difficult gardens are to grow and maintain.
The garden—from the first chapters of Genesis to the last chapters of Revelation—is one of the Bible’s most pervasive metaphors. Here I am expanding the term ‘garden’ to include orchards, farms, and fields. So, I’m basically speaking of any defined area where plants are grown outside of their natural habitat. We’ll also touch on plants, trees, vines, grains, and the soils they grow in, both here and in future posts.
Both His Grace and Our Faithfulness
One of the first things we find about the biblical picture of a garden is that sometimes the garden is where we are, sometimes the garden is who we are.
In multiple places, God uses the beautiful image of living as a ‘well-watered garden’ (Genesis 13:10, Isaiah 58:11, Jeremiah 31:12, Job 8:16) to illustrate his blessing. Here we see the abundance of God’s provision, far beyond what we could ever do for ourselves. There is no farmer or gardener who can control the rains or the subterranean water supply. He or she knows that those resources are solely in God’s hands (to borrow another metaphor).
But, just as often, the Bible says that we are responsible for our spiritual state as the result of our own attitudes and actions. So, there are two questions we must ask ourselves—using garden imagery: Are we receptive and grateful for God’s guidance and provision (and therefore ‘fruitful’) and do we do our best to keep out forces and influences that would ruin or stunt that fruitfulness?
I Couldn’t Give a Fig
Let me illustrate, using two New Testament passages. On one occasion (Luke 13:6) Jesus used a parable in which an owner of a fig orchard was ready to cut down one of his trees because it had borne no fruit in three years. His gardener begged for more time. On another occasion (Matthew 21:18), the Lord cursed a fig tree for not having figs, even though—as one Gospel records—it was not the season for figs. Both images were presumably aimed at the religious leaders of the time, but can easily be applied to us as well.
Jumping (down) from the tree to the soil, we find the parable of the sower/soils (Matthew 13:1-9; Mark 4:1-9; Luke 8:4-15) which Jesus actually deciphers for his disciples privately, saying “… the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop”
As Certain as Weeds and Foxes
Then, between the Old Testament and the New, we see several images of an untended or an unguarded garden (say that three times fast). Here, again, the responsibility is placed on the hearer/reader to be faithful for his or her own spiritual well-being,
With apologies to Ben Franklin (you know, the “death and taxes” guy), one of the certainties of gardening is vegetation and animal intrusion—aka weeds and pests.
In the sower/soils parable mentioned above, it is strongly implied that weeds were not inevitable but rather controllable. That is, weeds are equated with the worries, riches, and pleasures of this life (Matthew 13:22, Mark 4:19, Luke 8:14), definitely influences that we are responsible to deal with in our lives.
Finally, we must keep the critters out. We might think of rabbits, deer, groundhogs, caterpillars, cutworms, (and the list goes on) but the scripture mostly uses foxes/jackals (Lamentations 5:18) and locusts (Joel 2:25) to illustrate the destruction that animals can wreak on a garden as a result of man’s unfaithfulness and God’s resultant punishment.
Conclusion
We see in this sampling how much God in his benevolence uses so many aspects of the garden and gardening. And hopefully, we are not so out of touch with our agricultural roots (pardon the pun) to understand, relate, and apply these lessons to our everyday lives of faith.
Now, go wash your hands.