Plant a summer garden, and we will know death, even as we see the green shoots of life reaching for the sun. The seed buried in the soil falls apart even as new life bursts forth. Those first leaves will wither and die as the plant leaps for the sun. Even the flowers that bring joy and allow for pollination of the species will drop from the vine, matted and brown.
In addition, something every gardener comes to accept is that not every plant makes it. Some do not survive the first months of life, and we are wise to overplant and thin rather than trust every plant to reach maturity.
A garden is a place of death even as it brings forth life. It is part of the process of the seasons, and it will occur no matter how much we insist otherwise.
God planted Adam in the Garden of Eden. Genesis 2:7 tells us:
“Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”
God had a need for man. He had a job for him to do. There was a point to his creation. Genesis 1:26 gives us God’s plan:
“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ ”
Yet, if we, as humanity, remain an Adam, we are no more than seeds waiting to become something more. We will never spread our branches to bask in the sun; we will never produce flowers to pollinate new life; and we will never ripen our fruit to feed the spiritually hungry.
Our lives are as the seeds in a garden. We must be planted, and we must die, so that something new can come from us. 1 Corinthians 15:22 explains the process of this new life to us.
“For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”
There is no other way. This is the process of life. All of creation is God’s summer garden, and on his timescale, we are at the height of the growing season. Adam was his seed. Now we must flower before him. When we turn to 1 Corinthians 15:45, we see our best example of God’s ongoing expectations revealed in the person of Jesus.
“Thus it is written, ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.”
We are all Adams when we come into this life. We are creatures of the flesh. However, God wishes us to become creatures of the spirit. It is in the death of our Adamic natures that we begin to mature spiritually. That is when we find the God we seek, and we can spread our branches into the air and catch the brilliant rays of the sun.
That is when we will find true life in the person of Jesus Christ.
When we plant our inner man in the soil of Christ, our spiritual man can grow into God’s glory.
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