“Like the Garden of the Lord” Isaiah 51:3
“When Jesus had spoken these words, he went out with his disciples across the brook Kidron, where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered.” (John 18:1 ESV)
Well, spring officially begins on March 20 and that means its time to start thinking about your garden. Who doesn’t love beautiful gardens, and lush hills and valleys aflame with rainbows of beautiful colors? What do all these awesome ecological smorgasbord gardens and parks and valleys and hills that come alive in the spring mean? They mean that God loves life, that God loves variety, that God loves beauty, that God cares about his creation, that God is not monotonous. They remind is that life began in a garden (Eden) and it will end in a Garden (new earth); and that as his image-bearers we should love life and beauty and God as well. If flowers could talk they would say, ‘that God is an artist and that one day He is going to make the arid desert blossom as a rose, that He is going to make frigid north and south poles a panoply of breath-taking colors; they would tell us that we are a little bit what heaven is going to be like.
After Jesus left the last supper with His disciples he walked together with them, as they crossed over a small brook and entered the little garden called Gethsemane. Eventually he left the disciples and went farther into the garden alone for a time of solitary prayer.
Perhaps He remembered how, long ago, He had walked in His first garden with Adam and Eve in beautiful fellowship. But then they had rebelled against His word, and had to be expelled from the Garden of Eden, leaving Him alone there also (Genesis 3:8).
As He prayed in Gethsemane, He knew that it would be only a few hours before He would be buried in still another garden, one “in which no one was yet buried.” (John 19:41). He would be carried to a new tomb prepared in a newly planted garden by the loving hands of Joseph and Nicodemus, but then He would be alone once again.
He had walked alone in the first garden, seeking His own; then had knelt alone in the second garden, praying for His own; and finally, was buried alone in the third garden, after dying for His own.
But because He came “to seek and to save that which is lost” (Luke 19:10), and because He now “ever lives to make intercession for them” (Hebrews 7:25), after paying the awful price of “redemption through His blood” (Ephesians 1:7), all those who believe and trust Him will spend eternity in fellowship with Him in a beautiful garden city, where flows “a pure river of water of life” surrounded on both sides by “the tree of life, which bear twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month” (Revelation 22:1,2), and all will be “very good” forever.
Flowers tell me that this earth is but my temporal home. Here beauty fades and death reigns supreme, but like the flowers of the fields we will discard these obsolete earth suits and exchange them for an eternal body like his eternal body, clothed in light and a beauty that will rival even the angels.
Heaven is The Garden of The Lord.
He’s Only A Prayer Away!
Pastor Bryant