'Not a Wild Tree'

Near the very beginning of the Bible, in the second chapter of Genesis, God plants a garden and puts a tree of life at its center, fed by a river that flows out to water the whole earth. It's the first picture Scripture ever gives us of a flourishing world — and notice the word: planted. Not a tree that happened to grow up wild in a good spot. A tree someone put there, on purpose, exactly where the water was. Near the very end of the Bible, in the last chapter of Revelation, the image comes back — a river, and on both sides of it, a tree of life, and this time we're told exactly what its leaves are for: the healing of the nations. From the first page to the last, Scripture keeps returning to the same picture of a flourishing life, and it's never a wild tree. It's always a planted one.

The Psalms pick up the same image for describing a person rightly aligned with God: "He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in season, and its leaf does not wither" (Psalm 1:3). The Hebrew word behind "planted" here is the word for something deliberately transplanted, not something that sprang up on its own. This psalm was written in dry country, where a tree survives a drought for exactly one reason — its roots stay in the one water source that never runs dry. There's no backup fertile ground to wander toward instead. You stay planted, or you don't survive.

That's worth pondering because most of us quietly think spiritual growth should feel automatic if we're doing things right — like it should just happen the way weeds happen, no watering required. It doesn't. It never has, not in the garden, not in this psalm, not in the city at the end of the story. Everything that flourishes in Scripture was placed was planted, on purpose, by someone who intended for it to survive what was coming. When we put our lives in the hands of God, He plants us by streams of living water.

We aren't wild trees but plantings of God.

Where have you been hoping to grow without being willing to be planted?

Blessings,

Jonathan