Sunday 3 April 2016

A Tale of Two Gardens.


Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, there was a most beautiful garden.
It was new, fresh, and teeming with life!
In it was planted every kind of seed-bearing plant, and trees laden with fruit.

And there were birds soaring across the expanse of the sky, great creatures diving in the ocean depths,
and beasts creeping, scuttling and roaming through the fields and forests.

The tale begins in an Edenic paradise planted by the Great Gardener for the ones he cared for most 
- two perfect human beings – the apple of his eye!

But the goodness of the garden was soon shattered in a moment of betrayal...
the humans disobeyed their Creator, taking a deadly taste of sin from the forbidden tree,
and Evil came flooding into the garden destroying its beauty.

Grief and Death entered the garden and corrupted the cosmos.
And when the Gardener came in the cool of the day to walk and talk with the ones he loved most,
ashamed they hid away, and His heart was broken.

But this is not The End...


The tale continues... many, many years later, a woman stood sobbing in the middle of a garden.
A new day was dawning, but through her tears she couldn’t see it.
Her world was dark.
The One she loved most had been cruelly executed before her very eyes.
His pierced and battered body had been laid in a tomb in the garden.
Oh, how she longed to see Him one last time. But his body isn’t there. It's gone.

Then, in the midst of heartbreak in the garden, she hears a voice. She thinks it’s the gardener.


“Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?”


She had come expecting to find Death. Instead, she finds that Life has burst back into the garden!
She IS standing with the Gardener in the cool of the day, but doesn’t realise it’s HIM...

until he calls her by name,
“Mary.” 
Called by the Living One who cares most for lost men and women in a dying world:

 “Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.” ~ Isaiah 43:1

Are you listening for his call?
A Tale of Two Gardens (Genesis 1-3 & John 20:1-18) is really part of a much bigger Story - 
It's all about getting humanity back into a fully restored Edenic paradise
when can we finally see the Gardener face to face (Revelation 21:1-4; 22:1-5).
Garden of Gethsemane, Jerusalem ~ 15 June 2012

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