Our Trees of Life

The Darkening Sky Over Christ's Believers

Graef

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498233323
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

God's word begins with the tree of life and the tree of knowledge watered by a river nourishing Eden. As it ends with the image of a tree by a river appearing in heaven, the redeemed who have stood as "a tree planted by streams of water, bringing the fruits of the spirit, and birds and animals of every kind find shelter" are healed by its leaves. In the ecology of trees, we find the believer, rooted in living water, lifting to the heavens, sheltering others, and bearing fruit. From communities of pines and oaks of the North American continent, to the solitary baobab silhouetted on the African savannah, to the restoration of Israel's cedars in Asia, trees are being felled under a darkening warfare to silence God's words. Every year an estimated 100,000 Christians die for their faith. Hundreds more suffer loss of home and jobs. Churches burn and worshippers are slaughtered. Jesus is being argued in the courts and classrooms. His believers are imprisoned and beheaded. Our Trees of Life combines the tangible world of trees around us with an image of God's concern for us in a world increasingly hostile to his word.

1

North America

He cut down cedars, or perhaps took a cypress or oak. He let it grow among the trees of the forest, or planted a pine, and the rain made it grow. (Isa 44:14)

High winds blast through pillars of clouds blowing so strong that stellar jets leave trails of cold dust through miles of space. Debris is flung around burning balls of light at supersonic speeds as they collapse into dense globes. Lightning flashes as a 60 mph storm fires up the sky. Forty thousand mile magnetic pulls whip funnels of hot gas into tornadoes that span the size of earth. Spinning at speeds of more than a million miles per hour it sparks electrical currents into the ionosphere powering auroras like the northern lights. Somewhere in the constellation Aquarius comets that would have orbited a star are suddenly tossed into each other, kicking up celestial dust storms as collisions and mergers build a kingdom of galaxies. Fueled by heat, fashioned by friction, asteroids as large as mountains speed by on their way into deep space. Swirling around Saturn celestial gases crash, massive clouds of hydrogen mixing with oxygen, sulfur, and other elements sculpt orange-red glows that separate into green streams of light.

Luminous blue stars, white stars, violet, red, and orange shine through the heavens. Earth hurtles through the stars at eighteen miles per second, smashing through stone fragments, storms of meteor fireballs showering the heavens, and comets with million mile tails, held in the gravity of a star 93 million miles away.

An ordinary star turning counterclockwise, the sun’s rays stream 186,000 miles per second at the speed of light, churning up solar flares shooting millions of tons of charged particles toward earth as it pulls the planets around a wheel. Earth is electrified with some 40,000 thunderstorms every day, more than a thousand storms of lightning every moment. The moon pulls bulges of ocean water on the side of the planet rotating closest to its light. The crust covering earth releases seismic waves millions of times every year. The tremors quake across the land, shifting earth to landslides, sending up a force from the ocean bottom into tsunamis. Volcanoes awaken. The trade winds, the westerlies, and polar winds ceaselessly work to redistribute heat in the atmosphere as the earth spins round and round.

We are born into the middle of raging storms.

God has not left us without shelter. Like a bird safely nested in the arms of a tree when the storm winds blow all around her, we’ve been given a promise passed to us through generations of believers willing to suffer and die so the truth could be heard.

She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her; those who hold her fast will be blessed (Prov 3:18).

God created earth to bloom an array of trees in the world he knew his son would come to save. The trees became the pictorial language ancient in its tradition of shelter, spiritual growth, transformation, and markers of consecrated places and times across all lands. Trees are seen as archetypes of consciousness and of creation, gates to heaven and roots to the past. Found in the Shamanic, Hindu, Egyptian, Sumerian, Toltec, Mayan, Native, Norse, Celtic, Judaic, and Christian traditions, trees are a universal language understood on each of earth’s seven continents.

North America is the third largest of the continents at 9.54 million square miles. One of the last continents free to worship Jesus, it covers about 17 percent of the earth’s land and is home to about 8 percent of the people, 529 million who are both the original people of the land and the Europeans and others who have migrated here.

Nearly all the old growth forests in the east were cleared for agriculture, urban development, or left for second growth forests now devoid of American chestnuts and under attack by invasive species colonizing the land. The vast lands of oak in the Midwest were cleared for corn fields. In the Northwest ancient forests were cut down to be planted with monocultures of one type of tree in checkerboard patterns. More than 256 miles of forest were cleared to make way for mining oil sands near the Athabasca River in Alberta. In the southern continent the small yew tree only grows on bluffs and ravines along the Apalachicola River. Adult trees have been dying and young seedlings replacing them are few. Science has not yet figured out why. The tree’s bark contains taxol, discovered in 1971 to treat cancer. Critically endangered, it is not yet known what future medicine may yet be discovered in its roots, trunk, branches, seeds, or foliage.

Transformed under sun’s light dappling the floors where the seeds wait, a tree sends signals to its roots to begin new growth in the moist soil. Aspens reach for full sun next to black cherry, oak, and birch. Deer browse among the young trees. Beavers come and create wetlands. Woodpeckers and owls find food and shelter in the older trees. Ruffed grouse come for the mature flower buds. The aspen ages and thins, and the pines, oaks, and maples grow tall as the sunlight reaches them.

Under winter’s low gray sky, exhausted from their fruitfulness, the trees drop their precious jewels. Empty nests rest on bare silent branches, but the leaves did not fall without presenting their promise. Nothing has been lost. Trees hold their new flowers and leaves wrapped in buds biding their time for the warm light of spring to signal them to unfurl, come and grow toward the light. Having developed in the summer months, the hickories hold clusters of tiny leaves. The beginning of a flower is in the birch, alder, and hazelnuts. Larger buds are on the ash and the poplars. Through the cold months deer, mice and rabbits nibble on the buds, twigs and roots, the promise of the spring sustaining them. Finches are kept by maple flower buds. Squirrels find nourishment in the tips of balsam firs.

The eastern white pine stands among its companions of oaks, hickories, elms, beeches, and poplars supporting more than 200 species of butterflies and moths and charms of black-capped chickadees. The flames of autumn in earth’s temperate zones consume every green leaf except the tribes of evergreens that remain witness to the far off heaven still present in the benediction of the morning. White-tailed deer and cottontails, beaver and mourning doves depend on the evergreen’s bark to help them through winter months. Its niches house woodpeckers and squirrels. Bald eagles favor them for nest sites high above the ground and its dense green foliage protects from winds and cold. The pine can live more than four centuries, feeding chipmunks and meadow voles with its pine needles and seeds and keeping its green leaves when the frost comes and then the snow. Warblers and nuthatches too depend on the seeds inside the pinecones maturing from small yellow cone flowers.

Winter brings birds and animals in search of branches of shelter or to lay dormant snuggled safely by its roots. Yet not all the animals and not every bird will survive to see God make a new day. Some will pass away never knowing the warmth again as birds return with their songs and squirrels chase each other beneath the sun. The trees green and deer are born to a new season without them.

Not everyone will know there is a bright morning star that will dawn after frost blankets the valley a sun of righteousness with healing in its light moving across the earth. A soul may wither not hearing of the tree of life calming the storm or the words softening the hardened soil with dew, resting like God’s spirit on a soul. They will not stand among the fresh flowering grasses and new growth if the words of life are silenced.

Unleashed across the ocean to the shores of North America, Christianity became a standard of neighborhood morality and the identity of government. The Bible arrived with reverence for its place in the home and community.

You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love (Gal 5:13).

But after five centuries of congregating on the continent with liberty to live under God’s laws, the Bible is obscured and faded into the background as light vanishes in the dusk. Canada’s national motto, “From Sea to Sea,” was adopted in 1921, derived from Psalm 72:8, “May he rule from sea to sea and from the river to the ends of the earth.” In 1956 “In God We Trust” became America’s motto. By the 1990s a rise in spiritual quests sought grafting in every idea outside of God’s water of life. A decade later the name of Jesus was being banned as an extremist, offensive movement.

North America is wandering away from its nest in the tree of life. In place of the consensus of Bible basics, rationalizations woven from the twigs of the tree of knowledge question the authority of God. Jesus is not saying what we want him to say or being the worldly king that his crucifiers had expected of him to elevate us with wealth and power. Policies are emptying the land of Jesus.

A great light dawned when Jesus came to his people. Let there be light, God said as he began the creation. He sent light again to create a new man from fallen humanity. This light is the glory of God, and the Lamb is the light. (Rev 21:23).

After Jesus declared his faith when he was baptized in the Jordan, the tempter came to Jesus asking him to turn stones into bread, to test God to keep him safe even if he threw himself off the highest point of the temple, or to rule the world’s kingdoms (Matt 4:1–11) Jesus was uncompromising.

Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

It is also written: Do not put the Lord your God to the test.

Worship the Lord your God, and s...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: North America
• Chapter 2: South America
• Chapter 3: Europe
• Chapter 4: Africa
• Chapter 5: Asia
• Chapter 6: Australia
• Chapter 7: Antarctica
• Bibliography