The gardening God

Ezekiel 36:9

For I am for you, and I will turn to you, and you shall be tilled and sown.

Thought for the day – The gardening God

One of my abiding memories as a child is going to visit my great aunt Nellie on their smallholding in Zimbabwe. Nellie was an amazing gardener. There wasn’t much she couldn’t grow and her garden was always full of snapdragons, foxgloves, flame lilies and roses. And she would spend hours cultivating the flowers and preparing the ground for the next season’s planting. And that love of gardening stayed with her all the way till her final few years. And today’s verse from Ezekiel took me to her garden and the time I spent there as a kid and watching my aunt intentionally do things in her garden to make it the paradise I remember.

And that’s the things about God. God is intentional about everything. Even when he is preparing Israel for coming home. He is preparing them for their return, and he is being very intentional about it. Hear the words God speaks. ‘I am for you…you will be tilled and sown.’ There is a purpose there.

But God’s purpose is not just for the people of Israel. It’s for his own Holy name’s sake. It’s to keep his promises and his covenant. And to this he needs to prepare the people returning to the land. So, he sifts, and tills and sows, until the time is right and the harvest is ready. Just like God is doing today to prepare us for whatever he has planned for us, including that beautiful paradise that, while my Aunt Nellie’s garden wasn’t far of it, it wasn’t the new earth, one day we will live in and enjoy God in together.

This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

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