Gardens & Graves

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…”

Stillness and shadow. Formlessness precedes form. A place where the yet-to-be hovers on the edge of divine and mysterious creation. A hallowed hush hangs in the moments before a spark of life cascades into form.

“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”

A dance of mysterious silent tension, a holy silence in dark, watery depths. A divine Artist hovering over a formless void, the dark womb of the cosmos, before the first divine command.

“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”

With a creative word there was form and future.

A thousand heartbeats of sun and sky, moon and stars, rising waters and scented winds.

The heavens grew and stretched over surging oceans and winding rivers. The push and pull, the perfect balance, of night and day, evening and morning, ruled by sun and moon.

Life began to breathe.

Completeness and all of its complexity giving glory to the Creator.

‘Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness… So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him…

Mankind, crown of creation, fashioned from dust and living breath and from man’s side, a helper fit for him, mother of all living. Humanity, set apart from the rest of creation to bear the Creator’s image and charged to nurture and protect what God had made. They found perfect peace and harmony in their relationship with the Creator and in their God-ordered purpose.

“And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good…”

And then it was not.

Satan, deceiver, adversary of the Creator. A twisted snake brought death with a sharp sword of sweetened words.

“Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?””

So unfurled a blackened seed of doubt in the woman’s mind. A deadly question stirring questions—what if death was not death, but freedom after all?

The world would forever lament the cursed serpent’s campaign of death and empty promises. A fatal choice was made to reach and take and taste and end all that could have been. So began the fatal descent of man into shame, separation, blame, pain, curse, and death.

Profound heartache, creation’s groan began at sin’s first breath.

The perfect fellowship of created and Creator was rent in two and there was now a divide that came between the perfect relationship of God and mankind. The curse of death that enveloped the world now required Holy blood to undo it.

Cursed and cast out, sin followed Adam and Eve from the garden. It touched the fruit of their hands and the fruit of Eve’s womb.

And the LORD said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground.”

The first murder. A brother succumbing to the sin that desired to have him. From the same dust where life began, Abel’s blood returned. But life taken in secret could not stay silent—the turbid blood-stained ground lamented and cried out for God’s perfect justice.

The fruit of Eve’s womb—in promised pain of labor she brought forth sons and in their faces she saw Him. Now she bitterly weeps at night.

Her children inheritors of the curse she chose for a taste of false freedom. The first son forever exiled and the younger succumbed to death.

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”

But she recalled a hope was given in the garden so long ago and now it echoed in her mind.

She didn’t fully understand what it meant then or now but she found it pierced through all her pain. Every day since then she had felt and seen sin’s keenly cost. And now as she stood in the yawning curse of death she felt an unlikely hope as she recalled her Creator’s promise.

Untold years passed—floods and covenants, the rise and fall of kings, the faithful and fallen, prophets and priests. Now only a few remembered the prophecies and held onto hope.

The world was in chains—not only to rulers who oppressed but to the growing shadow of sin.

The Promised Land was drowning—buried beneath tradition’s demands, blood-thirst from zealots, and the iron fisted rule of foreign kings. Only a faithful remnant still waited, still hoped, still believed.

“And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, for behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”

John and Jesus, Savior and servant meeting, offering worship from the womb. The unborn baby was joyful, though yet without word or sight, recognizing the presence of his Savior he would live and die to serve. God’s work had already begun in the silent, unseen mystery of the womb.

The Giver of Life—the world’s Redeemer & Savior—reentered humanity as an unborn child in an unlikely mother’s womb.

He was innocence embodied, perfection walking the cursed ground. His gentle hands healed the lame, gave sight to the blind. Crossing cultural lines, reaching out to the violent and unclean. Preaching on mountains and by the sea, feeding the soul and offering eternal water to drink.

He was not what was expected and He was perceived as a threat. Threat to authority, to power, to the the people’s idea of a king. So they conceived a cross for His end and offered thirty pieces of silver for his betrayal by someone who claimed to be His friend.

In a garden He anguished—He knew that just shortly His body and His heart would be broken by violence and betrayal.

But He lifted His empty hands and submitted to the Father’s will. He had been sent to fulfill a promise that had been made in that first garden so long ago. There death had been unleashed but now that very first promise the Son would fully and finally keep.

The quickened march to certain death drawing near in this garden where He weeps, where blood and sweat mark His suffering, anguished praying while His disciples sleep.

“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Profound darkness drove away the sun—earth and creation mourning the Creator’s death.

Jesus enduring agony of slow dying, bones and sinew separating, iron nails pulling through His hands and feet. By evil men encircled, casting lots for His clothing while the sky began darkening.

Untold agony, wounded head bowed, the ineffable price of sin about to be satisfied. Drops of holy blood received by the waiting ground that would give birth to eternal hope.

Hope for the crowds that cried “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” and shed His innocent blood. Hope for the thief on the cross that asked to be remembered though his life was only marked by his death. Hope for the one who drove the nails, the one who brandished a whip to his back. Hope for the one who twisted the thorns and pushed them into his head.

They offered vinegar for His thirst and through parched and gasping lips, the Man of Sorrows breathed His last, the rescue mission finished. His body had been poured out like water and He was laid in the dust of death.

“You clothed me with skin and flesh, and knit me together with bones and sinews. You have granted me life and steadfast love, and your care has preserved my spirit.”

“It is I who made the earth and created mankind on it. My own hands stretched out the heavens; I marshaled their starry hosts.”

Stillness and shadow. Another place, another garden, where God’s voice still echoes: Let there be life.

A genesis, a life beginning in the dark mystery of the mother’s womb. Immediate and powerful, the Creator’s delicate artistry creates unique identity, a holy work crafted into living being. Intricacy ordered into identity and conception into possibility.

“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb…my frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”

Vast and inscrutable power bending low.

The same Heavenly hands that formed the stars in the sky above bent low to create the very hairs upon our heads.

God and Creator, so powerful and tender, vast and minute, cosmic and omniscient.

Every child is endowed with God’s image—knit together, made for purpose—every child that is placed in the garden of the womb is a part of God’s plan. His hands shape and mold and make. He creates and purposes, provides and sustains. By His will the wonder of human life unfolds and His very Spirit gives life and breath.

First from the dust, then from man’s side, now from the womb. Set-apart from everything else created was the creation of humankind. Given special dominion, dignity, and worth, we are bearers of God’s glory, priests of creation, a messenger of His story.

“A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.”

Sterile and absolute.

The finality of death chases the slowing of a baby’s breath. In the end there was no sense of relief, no emerging empowered or liberated—instead the acrid shame threatens to drown and devour.

The culture is so loud and they say women like her should feel proud, but in the end she’s alone.

The serpent whispering lies through a friend who said her future was bright, a culture that said this was her right, and a doctor dressed in white.

But nothing prepared her for the aftermath, the deep sense of loss, the battle that rages in her thoughts after dark.

She thought she’d only ever feel hate for a child and she’d trembled at the thought of what unplanned motherhood meant that she would lose. But maybe this gaping hole would have been where love was meant to have grown.

The steward surrenders and ingests the poisoned pill. The costly price of reckless desire is the fatal twist and pull of a clamp, a life for a life, helpless innocence surrendered to a merciless knife. Dismembering and undoing, ruining and ravaging, our ever-hungry hearts consuming, grasping, destroying, hating, betraying, bending, breaking.

Today murder has been twisted, its horror shifted. With growing volatility our fractured world decides what is life and what gives it worth before there is birth. Unborn life hangs in the balance—based on a feeling, debated in the halls.

The requirement is hands and feet, ability to speak, the ability to move and breathe, the ability to feel pain, when it’s right for us, for me.

Just as in the first garden, taking and eating has replaced receiving and tending. Worship of self, the created, has replaced worship of God, the Creator. Self-rule has replaced stewardship. Protection of the garden has been replaced with its exploitation. The sanctuary is desecrated, the holy place violated.

The serpent still lingers, the prince and power of the air. He whispers life but his words are demise.

Like the holocausts before, we close our eyes and we ignore the largest genocide in world history that has claimed more than 60 million lives.

“For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead. For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.”

When He died on that tree He knew the way we would groan today under the weight of untold deaths.

He knew the names of those who would be killed before they would ever draw breath. He knew the grief that would score our hearts at murder and prolonged injustice.

He stood there in the ache of decaying creation, there in the blackened stench of death, in the blindness that chooses boundless sin. He tasted death and blessed with his last breaths.

He knew that we’d ask questions: Why murder? Why hate? Why loss? Why pain?

But He knew that if we looked closely we’d see His divine Creator’s hand. A finger tracing in the dust—from blood will rise redemption. Death is not the final plan.

Three days later, from the heart of the earth, would spring life, the resurrected Christ. Finally fulfilled, His suffering and glory that was foretold. Death could not hold Him, murder could not subdue Him.

“…but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

So unfurled a seed of hope in the woman’s mind.

A question stirring questions—what if death was not life, not real freedom after all? What if in dying, in submitting, in accepting, in sacrificing, in laying down hollow desires, this was truly living? What if that craving, hollow hole in her soul could indeed still be filled with love?

Her choice to end a life she could not undo, but what if the requirement is that she didn’t have to?

“But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

“Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.”

We live in a time where unborn babies are no longer safe in their mother’s womb.

Even some who claim Christ remain silent and unmoved. But the Bible intentionally traces an overarching story and pattern from Genesis to Revelation and all of its words are true—we cannot pick and choose.

They’re meant for now, for me and for you.

They warn, they direct, they pierce, they divide light from lies. His truths are black and white—He doesn’t leave us to guess or assume.

We wait in the period between his ascension and His return, the in-between and eternal. Equipped with His Spirit and given His unchanging Word, He builds believers up to be bravely, fiercely, and boldly unafraid. We proclaim hope and freedom to the captive, we speak for those who can’t and we challenge those who will not.

Our Savior, Jesus steps into our absolute brokenness, rebellion, lies, hate, and mistakes. He steps into all of the heartache, all of the breaks. He redeems, rebuilds, and remakes.

The war on the womb, a desecration of a sacred place that should only know life, reverberates with the sovereignty of a Savior who died for this, too. He died for me and for you. He is not shaken. He is not overwhelmed. He is not undone.

His loving and powerful hands hold in perfect control the story unfolding from the garden all the way to the grave.