Tree huggers...

And they heard the voice of the LORD God

   walking in the garden in the cool of the day:

And Adam and his wife hid themselves

from the presence of the LORD God

      amongst the trees of the garden.   Genesis 3:8 KJV

Adam and Eve sought shelter from the singing voice of the Lord God among the trees to which they were now trying to conform themselves.  Wearing fig leaves and trying to appear nonchalant about their new alliance with the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the loving presence of the Lord was painful to their newly awakened consciences.  But, like it or not, there He was; walking, talking, singing and enjoying life as only God can live it. 

The devil’s plan for Eve and Adam was to reconstitute the life that the Lord God had given them into something they could live on their own terms.  He wanted them to share his distorted condition that rejected the boundaries that God had creatively set for them…Satan’s as a bloodless angelic creature and the humans’ as blood-filled biological spirits.  The Lord had prescribed certain by-products from other plant “biologics” as sustaining life while others were unhealthy, dangerous or deadly.  The fig was designed to provide a spiritual death: all the ramifications of which are still being explored to this day.

It is high time that humans revisit this moment in our history with our hearts.  Admittedly, we men need to be led humbly back to this place where our mother was deceived (1 Timothy 2:14) and our father’s love for her compelled him to throw himself into the fray of spiritual warfare by wrapping himself in the death that she had died.  Too long has humanity had to endure the foolishness of cerebral men who work out logical systems and inflict them upon philosophy and theology.  “Original sin” did not make humans that followed by procreation into spiritual filth any more than it did so for the original sinners.  All of humanity is still qualified to participate in spiritual warfare just as all of humanity is subject to spiritual attack.  The devil takes seriously that humans are worth something to God, even if many human philosophies scream loudly that it is not so.

The place that the Lord God prescribed as His rallying point for humans in the war against evil is the Cross of Calvary (1 Peter 1:19-20).  Christianity demands that believers be tree huggers of a different sort than Adam and Eve attempted.  We must meet Jesus in the place where His shed blood became available to all humans.  We must not depart from the cross since it is prescribed for us to take it with us (Luke 9:23).  It is the only tree that has value and the only one from which the onslaught of the enemy tries to separate us.

Come to Jesus.

Come to the Cross.