“The king’s garden.”–Nehemiah 3:15
There have been many very famous kings’ gardens, such as those
“hanging gardens” in Nineveh, wherein Sardanapalus delighted himself,
and that remarkable garden of Cyrus, in which he took such great
interest, because, as he said, every tree and every plant in it had been
both planted and tended by his own royal hand. Imagination might bid
you wander among the beauties of the celebrated villas and gardens of
the Roman emperors, or make you linger amid the roses and lilies of the
voluptuous gardens of the Persian caliphs, but we have nobler work in
hand. I call you to come with me to the orchard of pomegranates, to beds
of spices, camphire with spikenard, calamus and cinnamon, myrrh and
aloes, with trees of frankincense. I am not about to speak of the gardens
of any earthly monarch, for we can find far fairer flowers and rarer fruits
in the gardens of the King of kings, the resorts of his Son, the Prince
Immanuel.
There are six of these “kings’ gardens” to which I shall conduct you, but
we shall not have time to tarry in more than one of them.
I. The first of these kings’ gardens was The Garden of Paradise, which was
situated in the midst of Eden.
You will read of it in the book of Genesis. It was doubtless a fairer place
than we have ever seen, and much more marvellous for beauty than we
can imagine. It was full of all manner of delights, a fruitful spot wherein
the man who was set to keep it would have no need to toil, but would
find it a happy and refreshing exercise to train the luxurious plants. No
sweat was ever seen upon his happy brow, for he cultivated a virgin soil.
Abundance of luscious fruits ministered to his necessities. He could
stretch himself upon soft couches of moss, and no inclemencies of
weather disturbed his repose. No winter’s wind scattered the leaves of
Eden, no summer’s heat burned up its flowers. There were sweet
alternations of day and night, but the day brought no sorrow, and the
night no danger. The beasts were there; yet not as beasts of prey, but as
the obedient servants of that happy man whom God had made to have
dominion over all the works of his hands. In the midst of the garden
grew that mysterious tree of life, of which we know so little literally, but
of which, I trust, we know so much in its spiritual meaning, for we have
fed upon its fruits, and have been healed by its leaves. Hard by it stood
the tree of knowledge of good and evil, placed there as the test of
obedience. Adam’s mind was equally balanced, it had no bias to evil, and
God left him to the freedom of his will, giving this as the test of his
loyalty, that, if obedient, he would never touch the fruit of that one tree.
Why need he? There were tens of thousands of trees all of which bowed
down their branches with abundant fruit for his hunger or his luxury.
Why need he desire that solitary tree which God had fenced and hedged
about? But, in an evil hour, at the serpent’s base suggestion, we know not
how soon after his creation, he put forth his hand and plucked from the
forbidden tree! The mere plucking of the fruit seems little to the
thoughtless, but the breaking of the Maker’s law was a great offence to
heaven, for it was man’s throwing down the gage of battle against his
Creator, and breaking his allegiance to his Lord and Master; this was
great, great in itself and in its mischievous effects, for Adam fell that
day, and out of Eden he was driven to till the thankless, thorn-bearing
soil, and you and I fell in him, and were banished with him. We were in
his loins. He was “the father of us all,” and on us he has brought the
curse of toil, and in us all he has sown the seeds of iniquity. Let it never
be forgotten, in connection with the garden of Eden, that we are not now
a pure and sinless race, and cannot be by nature, however civilised we
may become. Men are born no longer with balanced minds, but a heavy
weight of original sin in the scale. We are averse to that which is good.
The bias of the mind of man, when he is born into the world, is towards
that which is evil, and we as naturally go astray as the serpent naturally
learns to hiss, or the wolf to tear and to devour.
Ah! brethren and sisters, beware of thinking too little of the fall. Slight
thoughts upon the fall are at the root of false theologies; the mischief that
has been wrought in us is not a trifling matter, but a thing to be trembled
at. Only the divine hand can reclaim us. The house of manhood has been
shaken to its foundations; each timber is decayed; the leprosy is in the
tottering wall. Man must be made new by the same creating hand that
first made him, or he never can be a dwelling place fit for God. Let those
who boast of their natural goodness look to the garden of Eden and be
ashamed of their pride, and then examine their own actions by the glass
of God’s most holy law, and be confounded that they should dream of
purity. How can he be pure that is born of woman? “Who can bring a
clean thing out of an unclean thing? Not one.” As our mothers were
sinful, such are we, and such will our children be; as long as men are
brought into the world by natural generation, we shall be “born in sin
and shapen in iniquity;” and, if we are to be accepted by God, we must
be born again, and made new creatures in Christ Jesus.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
