I had written about my experience of having God direct my attention to a beautiful fresh plowed field and hearing Him say, “This is you!”
Many of us have been journeying in an online FB community foreign g a devotional by JD Walt of seedbed.com on Fruit of the Spirit. I shared my “field” reflection with the group and I’ve been considering further the beautiful agricultural references in God’s Word……
JD wrote today about his boyhood experience on a family farm helping “chunk” a field cleared of trees to create a new field for planting crops…
“It’s not often on the farm you get to be part of creating a field. It happened for me only once. It involves the task known as clear-cutting. The fields of our farm all began as forests. The trees are harvested by loggers and sold to lumber mills. Next come the Cats (aka Caterpillar Bulldozers) and the pushing, pulling, and piling of all the stumps with their entangled roots. Then comes the burning with the fires that blaze and then smolder for days on end. After what seems like forever the ground is broken by discs and plows and finally we get to the chunks. The chunks are the seemingly endless pieces of wood, mostly roots, pulled up to the surface by the discing and plowing. They have to be removed from the field because they would tear up the planters in the sowing season.” (The Wake-Up Call, 10/27/22)
It stirred my imagination……
To think that before God created man He created the field from which He scooped up the clay to mold mankind with His own hands. Since the earth and vegetation came first, did God do some clear cutting, plowing, and chunking before scooping up that handful of dirt? Was the devil already cast down upon the earth before God created the garden of Eden in its midst and man and woman?? Was the earth, like Australia and Georgia, originally a penal colony for satan in which God placed the beauty of the garden and mankind to become the seed of God’s means of redeeming all that satan would attempt to destroy? Was the earth the original hell into which satan was cast and we are here to remind satan that he will never one-up the sovereignty and goodness of God??? Even with creatures that satan considers inferior to himself and disregards as weak and manipulatable due to their physical needs and desires??Christ, the perfect first fruit…… that for which all the previous work was simply to show the labor required to chunk out the residual wood chips and roots created by one creature ‘s pride and rebellion. Did satan, once cast down to earth, in his bitterness and rage began clear cutting the vegetation with his vile temper, leaving it marred like the work of a Cat 5 hurricane upon God’s own beautiful physical vacation paradise….so God put caretakers in it to start the physical work of reversing satan’s mess. And Christ would later come to redeem the spiritual and physical debris of humankind’s encounters with satan…..interesting plot for a trilogy of epic proportions.
1.) God creates heavenly beings in His image for fellowship with and service to the Godhead with freewill. One of them pridefully sets out to undermine God and gets relegated to the constraints of a physical realm “prison” or “house arrest”, albeit within a beautiful and lush world created by God. End of volume 1.
2.) The Prisoner, in his rage and rebellion against God’s discipline, creates such a mess of his own confining habitat like a Cat 5 hurricane plowing through lush Southern forests. ( think Tasmanian devil!). So God sent another generation of new spiritual beings with physical bodies to begin the restoration and care for the physical realm, creating a lush garden as a beach head for them from which to begin the restoration of the earth. End of volume 2.
3.) The new generation of earthly spirit/physical beings become compromised by the crafty spiritual prisoner trapped in the physical realm before they have become fully self-aware and abandoned to God’s desires. But God, in His infinite patience continues to work among them to redeem first one corrupted effort after another by his slow-learning stewards in earth. Eventually, when God is ready to slap the trap on the wily satan, He comes in disguise as a human baby and will lure the devil into his final contest. But God, the ultimate Author/Finisher, the CREATOR , GUIDE and the JOURNEY’S DESTINATION GOAL of ALL THINGS, proves to be far superior to all in His creation- its angels, mankind, even earth. It takes millennia, even eons of patient redemption for God’s creation to fully awaken to the awareness of the reality of His very presence in their midst and their relationship to Him as His beloved children, not slaves to a demanding master…. ( read THE SHORT VERSION OF THIS TRILOGY IN OUR BIBLE…
4.) To be continued….(although God has already begun revealing His ultimate ending of the story and the role ALL THINGS of creation will have in the exciting…. and redemptive…. climax.) God has planted seeds of the future harvest throughout the eons through His glory observable in creation, through His prophets of old, and through His Incarnation, Victory over Death in Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost. It’s just the grand finale, staged and ready to cue the Triumphal Entry with Christ wearing the red sash made from all the red signaling threads of redemption pulled from all time before to this now-expected Revelation that ends time and history as we have known it…again.
When God in Christ Jesus Incarnate arrived on the scene 2000 years ago His impact altered time, literally, BC to AD or “BCE” to “CE” for the “NONES”. When I encountered the personal nature of Christ in my own life, it altered my time and history, as well. I began my new life in the EverPresent Eternity with Him and I am now walking out the rest of my earthbound days in transcendent abiding and in having Christ’s Holy Spirit abiding in me.