The Tree - In Scripture (Part 1)

"Do you think trees are beautiful? You’re in good company. God loves trees, too. By highlighting every sentence containing a tree in the first three chapters of Genesis, you can get a pretty good sense of what God thinks about trees. Nearly a third of the sentences contain a tree.

Genesis 2:9 declares that trees are “pleasing to the eye.” This aesthetic standard does not waver throughout the Bible. Whether God is instructing his people on how to make candlesticks (Exodus 25:31–40), decorate the corbels of the temple (1 Kings 6), or hem the high priest’s robe (Exodus 28:34), the standard of beauty is a tree (and its fruits). If we were to examine the most comfortable seat in a home today, odds are that it faces a television. In heaven, God’s throne faces a tree (Revelation 22:2–3).

In Genesis 2, God makes two things with his own hands. First, he forms Adam and blows the breath of life into his nostrils (verse 7). Then, before Adam can exhale, God pivots and plants a garden (verse 8). It is here, under the trees, that God lovingly places Adam, giving him the job of “dress[ing] and keep[ing]” them (verse 15, KJV). The trees have their only divinely established tasks to accomplish. God charges them with keeping humans alive (Gen. 1:29), giving them a place to live (Gen. 2:8), and providing food to sustain them (verse 16).

Strangely enough, Scripture continuously portrays trees as things that communicate. They clap their hands (Isaiah 55:12), shout for joy (1 Chronicles 16:33), and even argue (Judges 9:7–15). What makes this pattern especially odd is that creatures that obviously do communicate — such as fish or birds – are virtually mute in the Bible. 

One (the Tree of Life) represented humanity’s connection to the divine and the eternal. The other (the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil) represented human agency – and possible rebellion. When Adam and Eve ate from the wrong tree, they tried to cover up their crime by undressing the very trees they were charged with “dressing” (Genesis 2:15; 3:7). Their next move was to run and hide behind them (Gen. 3:8). Chapter three of Genesis concludes with Adam and Eve being banished from the Garden. What is the Bible, then, if not a story of God meeting humanity’s need for a Savior to reunite us to the Tree of Life?

Without trees in the Bible, the waters of Marah would have forever remained bitter (Exodus 15:25), the Giant of Gath would not have been thrown off his game (1 Samuel 17:43), and David would have missed his call to battle (1 Chronicles 14:15). Deborah would have been without a place to judge Israel (Judges 4:5), and God wouldn’t have called his people to be oaks of righteousness (Isaiah 61:3). There would have been no almond grove (Luz, renamed Bethel, means almond tree) for Jacob to fall asleep in and dream of a wooden ladder that spans the gulf between heaven and earth (Genesis 28:10–19), and Job wouldn’t have uttered his famous line about trees and resurrection (Job 14:7). Most importantly, without trees it is impossible to understand the Fall or Jesus’ atoning death.

Nathaniel had forgotten the words of the prophet Isaiah: “He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (53:2). As Isaiah predicted, something great would indeed come out of a town named after a little tree: Nazareth!

Jesus is one tough carpenter – the kind that can heft two three-quarter-inch sheets of plywood on his own. He is hard to kill. From the moment he was born, his enemies set about trying to kill him. They tried to kill him as a baby (Matthew 2:16–18), stone him (John 10:31–39), and throw him off a cliff (Luke 4:29), but it didn’t work. Jesus could go 40 days without food, climb into the ring with the toughest opponent on the planet, and walk away a winner after three rounds (Matthe. 4:1–11). There was no point in trying to drown him – he’d walk away from that too (Matthew 14:22–33).

No, the only thing that could harm the carpenter from Nazareth was a tree. Why? Because he who is hanged on a tree is cursed (Deuteronomy 21:23, Gal. 3:13), not he who is stabbed, stoned, or burned. (Note that in Hebrew, the word for gallows and tree is one and the same.) Without trees, there is no resurrection, no Good News on Easter morning. The cross is really a tree of life chainsawed down by man’s sin. Yet Jesus’ blood caused a dead tree used as a Roman torture instrument to grow into the symbol of life everlasting – the Tree of Life. Jesus is the Tree of Life, and one day his followers will eat from the leaves of this tree and be healed (Revelation 22:2, 14)."

Source: https://www.ncfgiving.com/stories/what-trees-teach-us-about-life-death-and-resurrection-part-1/#:~:text=Other%20than%20people%20and%20God,(Proverbs%203%3A18).

_______________________

Song: He Made The Tree (Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VFu4bkC5Cc

Lyrics

You made the life from the darkness
and the stars to out number the sands
you were born into the world a baby
and still held the whole world in your hands

you made a hill called Calvary
where you made a way for me
you made the man that drove nails in your hands
you even made the tree

you sent the rain and the sunshine
and the tree grew sturdy with time
and like you it didn't bend or waiver
as you bore the weight of this worlds sins and mine