By now you’ve likely figured out that the Gardener I’m talking about is God.
When God created our planet, it was “very good.” It was flawless. Problem free.
God planted an amazing garden – the Garden of Eden (literally Garden of Delights) and gave Adam and Eve the job of garden keeping. Their work would have been far different from what gardening is today. The garden was perfect. Not a leaf died. The trees didn’t send up unruly water sprouts. They would have simply had the pleasant task of training the plants into useful features – houses of living green with fruit ripening within the walls and flowers blooming out of the window frames… whatever they wanted.
The animals were not rebellious. On an animal level, they were intelligent to understand and cooperate with Adam and Eve’s instruction. They were easily trained live their lives in a way that would do no harm, and not interfere with the pair’s garden plans.
Every plant and animal had lessons to teach Adam and Eve. They taught lessons about engineering and other physical things. More importantly, they taught lessons that showed glimpses of their Creator. God is love. As Adam and Eve studied the creative handiwork in anything in nature, they learned new perspectives of what love really is.
Why God planted the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden is a topic for serious contemplation. A short answer is that love can only exist where there is also freedom to not love. The fact that God let Adam and Eve eat from that tree without interfering in the matter shows just how much God values freedom of choice.
Though Eve and Adam were deceived and manipulated, they literally chose death when they ate fruit from the forbidden tree. It would have been easy for God to simply give the pair what they had chosen. Wouldn’t it have been easy for God to just forget about Adam and Eve, and create a new holy pair to tend His garden?
No! Love can’t forget like that!
God chose to do the difficult thing. The painful thing. He couldn’t just leave Adam and Eve to be lost without doing all He could to save them.
It hurt God to expel Adam and Eve from the Garden of Delights. But He had to. Their characters had been changed. Their conversation with God after their fall showed a change of core principles. Self was now first – selfishness the highest motive. But they didn’t realize who they had become. And they would never understand if they remained in a perfect garden where everything selflessly cooperated with them. Only a life with hardships could teach the pair the lessons they now needed to learn.
When God added thorns to Adam’s gardening experience, He knew that some of the worst of these thorns would be pressed onto His head. As He chose for Adam to experience blood sweat and tears, He knew that He was also choosing even worse trials for Himself. Alone in a garden, He would endure a trial so close that the emotional pressure would press bloody sweat through His pores to mix with tears streaming down His face. He proved that He would rather go through any trial than to let us be hopelessly lost.
Now God invites you to get to know Him. And one of the best places to get to know Him is in a garden. Yes, even a garden with stubborn soil, persistent weeds, and many unexpected challenges.