God is a big fan of metaphors. He built them into his world in all kinds of ways, and then he points to them throughout Scripture, all to help us understand who he is, who we are and what our role is in creation. The metaphor God uses throughout the Bible more than any other might surprise you: Trees.
On the very first page of Genesis, God places the father and mother of the human race in a garden filled with trees, all of which – save one – he gives them for food. We all know how the disobedience of Adam and Eve in eating the fruit from that tree cost them paradise. But trees continue to follow humanity throughout the rest of the Bible too, all the way through the story of God’s redemption. On the last page of Revelation, there again, is a tree. The tree of life grows in a Garden-City, bearing leaves and fruit for the healing of the nations.
This week on the BreakPoint Podcast, I interviewed my friend Matthew Sleeth, who has written a new book titled “Reforesting Faith: What Trees Teach Us About the Nature of God and His Love for Us.” Sleeth is a retired medical doctor, and the author of another book, on the Sabbath – which literally changed the way my family does Sundays.
The natural world might be Sleeth’s greatest fascination, especially trees. As he told me, he’s been planting trees his whole life, and he’s made conserving them a big part of his work. Along the way, he came to realize that most Christians don’t realize how central trees are to God’s story.
Sleeth told me how he once offered to plant trees around his church because, as he told his pastor, doing so is scriptural. In response, he was chided for his “tree-hugger theology.” Now, this kind of suspicion of environmentalism is common among Christians, and it’s understandable. Radical environmentalists have, in the words of the Apostle Paul, exchanged worship of the Creator for the worship of creation. Many of them actually revere nature as a god or goddess – often a mother-deity named Gaia – and thank her for life and provision instead of God.