Just a thought by coppi

“Gardens are a form of autobiography,” someone said. God as gardener, the intimate vision at creation’s beginning, can be traced throughout the Old Testament, in the psalms, and in the prophets. Jesus, too, concurs: I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. Such a reading of the world’s creation and the thought of a gardener tending to me, stirs a response akin to that of the man after God’s own heart:  (Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.)

In Jill’s message this morning referring to God as gardener caught my attention.  Jill also stated, “i can’t say that I have ever heard a sermon about creation as gardening, the creator of the world as Gardener. I had never considered what such an identity of God might mean to me or to the world around me. Yet here is one of the first passages in the Bible where we are introduced to who God is—and God is not a warrior or a judge or even a sovereign, but first, a gardener, a nurturer of all life, protector and planter, a designer, keeper, and pruner concerned with life’s flourishing. 

I grew up on a farm in Fredericksburg, Tx and watched my mother plant a garden yearly.  Firstly, she had to till the soil, turn the soil, dig a trench in the soil, and then plant her seeds.  She cultivated her garden with care.  Watering, trimming, watching that the different kinds of bugs did not destroy what she planted;  she worked diligently making sure her seedlings survived and weathered the storms of nature before maturity.  It was a difficult job but a rewarding one too.  She was able to witness growth, beautiful growth of each seedlings when it fully matured.  Yes, I can relate to God as a  gardener, a nurturer of all life, protector and planter, a designer, keeper, and pruner concerned with life’s flourishing,  because He has been all those things in my life.  He has been my gardener.