When God plants His garden in your life, He will till and tend your life for you.
Genesis 2:8 says this. “The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden, and there He put the man whom He had formed.” The bible says God wanted Adam to tend and keep it the garden.
I have often wondered how it is that God chose to put Adam into a garden. Why didn’t He just build him a house along some river where Adam could live and thrive? Now, I’m not saying a garden was a bad idea. In fact, a garden is great place. And in this case, we know God Himself planted the garden. So, we know that it was a great place that would be cared for.
But how come the choice was a garden? I guess if we will call it a garden, the place must be an intentional place. Gardens do not just spring up and grow in the wild. There seems to be more here than God’s simple desire for Adam to tend and till His garden. But what more?
Perhaps God knew Adam and eventually Eve, would need some help learning how to live in the world with each other and with others. They would need to learn how to care for children from birth to death. The garden is a perfect place for God to practice being a Father before Adam so that Adam could learn how to be a son and in time learn how to be a father himself.
Perhaps God did not want to see Adam and Eve struggle with life before they understood what was important in life. Many of us do that today. Before we really know what life is and what it is supposed to be, we pursue our desires before we know how to care for our needs.
So, a garden was a perfect place for God to do several things:
- Create a place of development and provision for Adam and Eve. Since any garden is intentional, it stands to reason, the person who plants the garden will care for all that is there. With the garden, God could keep them from developing a sense of self before they developed a sense for others. For sure, Adam and Eve would learn the benefits of working with their hands by tilling and tending the garden. But they also learned that God would till their lives there and He would show them how to be His children before they learned that lesson from social media.
- A garden teaches you that life is more about what you give than what you get. The garden is perfect to teach you to do what is right so that you get the right result from what you do. You learn to be dependent on what you cannot provide. And you learn to be responsible for doing what you must do so you can have that benefit of what you do. A lazy gardener will go hungry, but a responsible gardener would live as much as he was willing to give.
- A garden was perfect to teach Adam and Eve that they would need to be shepherds not only of the animals around but also of their children that would later come. God used the garden teach them to think like sheep but to act like a shepherd. Wouldn’t that be great today. If we could see ourselves as sheep in the Lord’s pasture but shepherds of the Lord’s sheep. The garden gave God the controlled environment to teach them this important life lesson.
Many years later, Jesus would come along. He would spend most of His life teaching His disciples in and around the garden of Gethsemane. In a way, He lived there. It is from there He was taken to His death. He was buried near there and so He was raised to life all from a place in a garden. The garden is God’s way of teaching us the cycle of life in Him and the way we should live while we are here on earth.
We are born. We live. We die only to be born again in the life of Christ. If you give your life to the Lord today, He will have a place to plant the garden of His life into you. In this way, His Life in you becomes the garden of your life.
Live a Delivered Life. Love you.
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