Into the Garden - Part A

In the Bible, it would seem that God's plan always included a garden. God's creative plan, God's redemptive plan, God's restoration plan, all speak of a garden, all revolve around the use of a garden. When Christ endured and the hope it gives you in your own suffering.

Right now, we want to tell you about a resource that will encourage you to boldly live out your faith so you can make a difference for Christ. Some people find comfort in the status quo. Others just can't wait to challenge it. If this were a recovery meeting, I would begin by saying my name is Skip and I'm a nonconformist.

How about you? Do you go with the flow or swim against the current? The truth is going against the status quo can be difficult. But following Jesus requires it. The Bible's account of Daniel shows how God can transform lives by one person's willingness to defy what's normal.

I like to think of it this way. When the waves of life came crashing down, Daniel decided to go surfing. He thought I'm going to ride these waves. If these waves are the will of God for my life, I'm going to learn how to master these things and I'm going to get propelled forward. Learn to soar above the status quo with Skip Heitzig's book, Defying Normal. It's our way of saying thanks for your gift of $35 or more to help connect more people to God's word. And when you give, we'll also include the booklet, What on Earth Am I Here For? by Rick Warren. These two resources will help you stand out from the crowd for God's glory.

Visit connectwithskip.com slash offer to give online securely today or call 800-922-1888. Now let's join Skip Heitzig for today's teaching. Americans participate in some type of gardening activity, from planting vegetables to planting flowers, et cetera. My mom loved working in her garden. We had about an acre and a half growing up and she planted asparagus. My mom and dad planted grapes. They grew nuts, melons, a whole number of things. And I read that there's a gardening boom taking place right now in the United States and that, get this, one in three American households now grow or participate in a community garden.

And it is the highest that it has been in over a decade, probably due to COVID. I'm thinking if I have to be at home, I'm going to start growing stuff. A song of the birds from mirth, one is nearer God's heart in a garden than anywhere else on earth. Cute little poem, isn't it? There's a lot of truth to that little poem because in the Bible, it would seem that God's plan always included a garden. God's creative plan, God's redemptive plan, God's restoration plan, all speak of a garden, all revolve around the use of a garden. So if you were to look up in the Bible how many times the idea of gardening shows up, you'd find out a lot. So whether it's planting or harvesting or sowing, reaping, having vineyards, it was an agrarian culture.

It was very profuse with the soil and growing plants. But there are four gardens. I'm going to take you through a little tour of them this morning. Four pivotal gardens in scripture that we're going to look at. Three of them are on earth, one of them is not. Two of them I have personally visited and two I have not.

But one I will one day and you will as well if you know the Lord. All four of these gardens were gardens of peace, places of peace. Yet at the same time, they were also places of sadness for three of them. So we're going to take this little tour. We're going to begin in Eden, the Garden of Eden and end in eternity, the Garden of Eternity.

The first, and you can turn if you want to or we can put the scriptures up on the screen because we're going to be in four places this morning. The first garden is the Garden of Creation. That is Genesis chapter two. The Garden of Creation is of course the Garden of Eden.

This is how the text is read. Genesis chapter two, verse eight. The Lord God planted a garden. Don't you love the fact that God says I'm a gardener? The Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground, the Lord God made every tree grow that is pleasant to sight and good for food. God had a green thumb. What he planted worked.

What I plant, eh, not so much. It says the tree of life was also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now a river went out of Eden to water the garden and from there departed and became four river heads. In this garden was creation. In this garden was breathing, laughing, enjoying, exploring, loving and it says there were four rivers. If we read on we would see that two of them became very famous rivers in the region.

Two of them are well known to geographers, the Tigris and the Euphrates River, part of the Persian Gulf network of rivers in that area. The name Eden is a name that means pleasant or pleasantness. In fact there's even a word in Persian at denu which means Eden-like and that is because of what the text here says. Every tree that is pleasant to see and good for food God planted there. So you gardeners just imagine this garden.

No weeds, no thorns, no thistles, no brambles, no maladies, no diseases, no death, no decay, no COVID-19, no sorrow and everything God made for that garden he said seven times it is good or it is very good. And Adam and Eve came into the garden. God made them, what they say in Latin, and when Adam and Eve came into the garden they came to tend it. They came to name animals. It's a great job.

Just sort of make up names and they'll stick and to enjoy it. Not only did they come into the garden, the Bible says God came into the garden. We're told in Genesis chapter 3 that God came into the garden walking in the garden in the garden in the cool of the day. Literally the breeze of the day.

Probably the late afternoon, early evening when things cool off or perhaps early in the morning and the language of the text seems to indicate he did this regularly. It's like God said it's time for a walk. I'm going into the garden with my creation Adam and Eve to walk with them. So to come into the garden is to come to a place of pleasantness abundance, peace, joy, fun, and fellowship and intimacy with God.

Sounds like a great place. But someone else came into the garden we are told and he had malevolent intentions. He was a super being. We know him as Satan or the devil or the evil one. He goes by a number of different monikers in the scripture. He spoke to him in Ezekiel 28 and said you were in Eden, the garden of God. Every precious stone was for your covering. When he came into the garden he came in with a stubborn will and a big mouth.

Not a good combination. He came to defy God, to challenge God and at his suggestion man usurped the will of God with his and her own will. And all the problems began. And when they began, God put them out of the garden, never to return. It got so bad that he placed security guards outside the garden to keep them from ever getting back into the garden of Eden. But there was a second garden. This brings us to the New Testament in the book of John. If the first was the garden of creation, the second garden is the garden of affliction.

It is the garden of Gethsemane. In John chapter 18 we are told in verse 1, when Jesus had spoken these words, that was at the last supper to his disciples, he went out with his disciples over the brook Kidron where there was a garden. Which he and his disciples entered.

And Judas who betrayed him also knew the place for Jesus often met there with his disciples. Now ever since the fall in the first garden, the garden of creation, the Bible anticipated a coming one, a deliverer, a savior. It predicted it in Genesis chapter 3. It says the seed of the woman will come and destroy the devil, the enemy, the evil one, Satan.

He will crush his skull. So the Bible began to anticipate that there is somebody coming to undo what was done in the first garden. He lived on earth and he spoke words and he preached the gospel and he healed diseases and he raised people from different maladies and death itself and he offered hope. But one night he came into this garden. This garden is the garden of Gethsemane. We are not told that here in John's gospel but in the other text it is called the garden of Gethsemane. Gethsemane is a place you can visit today.

It's on the western slope of the Mount of Olives just outside the old city of Jerusalem in a valley known as the Kidron Valley. The name Gethsemane is a Hebrew word, gotshmanim, and it means literally the olive press. The olive press. It's a place where olives were pressed.

Pressed, right, good, good, good. So it was basically an olive farm. That's where they grew olives and today on the Mount of Olives you still see thousands of olive trees growing in that area. So they grew olives there, they harvested olives, and then they crushed or pressed the olives to get out a very important substance that the entire nation lived on. It was olive oil. They needed oil to light their lamps, to light their homes at night. They used olive oil for cooking, by the way.

That's an excellent base. When you cook stuff, forget the butter, olive oil's your friend. They also used it to anoint themselves.

They would put perfume in it and they would put olive oil on their faces for their skin, also very, very good for your skin. It was a ghost town, it was abandoned. So it's a perfect place for him to go to and to retreat with his disciples.

By the way, just a little FYI, this is no extra charge. If you were to go there today, and I encourage you to do so because we take people to the Garden of Gethsemane, we walk through it and have a little service there. But there's a part of the Garden of Gethsemane that's run by the Franciscans and they have these old olive trees there, eight of them, eight ancient olive trees. And they'll make a big deal out of the fact that olives grow for hundreds, thousands of years if preserved. And they have these old olive trees that they say are a couple thousand years old that were there, no doubt, in the time of Jesus. Jesus may have leaned against this tree or that tree. They have eight of these old trees. They preserved them. And it's beautiful.

It's a great setting. The only problem with that theory is a thing called history. History tells us that when Titus, the Roman general, surrounded the city to destroy it, in 70 AD, Josephus, the Jewish historian, said that Titus cut down all of the trees around Jerusalem for timber, for lumber, to build his siege works against the city. So the Garden of Gethsemane being that close to the ancient city, these trees would not have been spared. So they may be almost a couple thousand years old, almost from the time of Christ, but not quite. So just a little FYI. None of that is germane to our story today.

I just wanted to throw that in. And to say what was really the most important is that it was in Gethsemane where the Son of God was being pressed, crushed like the olives. Like the prophet said, He was crushed for our iniquities, pressed for our sins, and the chastisement of our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. This is the second garden, the Garden of Gethsemane. Now, Jesus came into that garden as He often did with His disciples.

He spent regular time there. But on this particular night, the Bible tells us that when Jesus was in the Garden of the Olive Press, He was sweating. And it says He was sweating great drops of blood. If you think that He was sweating, you might think, well, you know, it's the Middle East, it's springtime, it must have been really hot. No, in fact, it was really cold.

John's gospel, chapter 18, verse 18, says it was so cold that people were lighting fires to take the chill of the night air away from them. But yet Jesus was sweating. And the reason He was sweating and the reason He was sweating great drops of blood, that's not a figurative statement. He was literally sweating blood, is because doctors, medical experts, will tell us that there is a condition that a person can experience when they are in extreme mental anguish.

It is where the tiny capillaries around the sweat glands in the head burst. If a person is under incredible duress, this condition known as hematidrosis occurs where the capillaries burst. And the person sweats drops of blood. That's what Jesus was going through. In fact, He said to His disciples, My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even unto death. When Jesus was in that garden, He even prayed, Father, if it's possible, let this cup pass from Me.

Jesus prayed that in His humanity. He didn't want to suffer. He knew what was coming. He didn't want to go through that. If there's any other way people can be saved other than this happening to Me, let it happen.

Let this cup pass. But in His deity, He prayed this, nevertheless, not what I will, but what you will. And there in this second garden, Jesus began to experience the suffering that sin had brought from the first garden. Jesus, in the garden of affliction, was suffering because of the sin that was brought in the garden of creation.

But someone else came into the garden that night. His name was Judas, we are told in the text. And just like Satan, who entered the first garden, Judas entered the second garden to betray his master.

And he brought with him a Roman contingent of soldiers. Judas was arrested and he stood trial, not one trial, not even two trials. Jesus went through six, no less than six trials, beginning immediately and ending the next day before Pilate.

Three of his trials were religious trials and three of his trials were civil trials until finally he was condemned to die on a Roman cross. When he died on that cross, Jesus went into a third garden to undo what happened in the first and second garden. Now this third garden is the garden of resurrection. It is a garden-like place that was owned by a wealthy Jewish man named Joseph, Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling class.

He owned this garden. And he was also a secret disciple, we are told this in John chapter 19. I'm reading now John 19 beginning in verse 38.

It says in verse 40. Now Jesus did not walk into this garden. Jesus was carried into this garden as a corpse. He was dead. He had spent six hours on a cross on a Friday afternoon. There he died, and he died earlier than most victims. Romans were going around to break the legs of the victims so they could get the bodies off the cross because of the Jewish Passover. Jesus was already dead after six hours on the cross.

He gave up his spirit. And the bodies were taken down so that the Jews could go home and have their party, their Passover celebration. By the way, you can visit this garden today. In fact, I'm not going to pitch our tours to Israel, but we are going to do one next year.

I get asked that all the time. And the last day of the tour we take our group into what is called the Garden Tomb area. It is preserved by the Garden Tomb Association, a group out of England that for years have preserved it. And there they, like the biblical record, have found a tomb.

Many believe it is the tomb from which Jesus rose again. And they have preserved this garden, so we'll take our tour. We'll take our group into that garden and take communion together around the open tomb of the Lord Jesus Christ.

It's a very, very moving time. But this garden was a garden of hope. If the first garden brought despair and if the second garden brought death, then this garden brought deliverance from both death and despair.

It was a garden of hope. Where death was conquered. You see, when Jesus rose from the dead, death died. Death died. That's where death got killed. Blew death out of the water. Death is gone.

Now people can live forever. Because though Jesus was carried into this garden by friends, He walked out of this garden by foot. He said that all of those promises that Jesus made about living forever, eternal life, everlasting life, suddenly all those promises were true. I mean, without a resurrection, a lot of the things Jesus said, you'd listen and go, huh? Oh, He must have meant that figuratively. That must be some kind of deep spiritual analogy. Until He rises from the dead and it's like, oops.

Really meant that. Promises like, I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will never die. Okay, check.

That's real. How about this one? I am the way, the truth, and the life.

Or this one. He who hears my word and believes in Him who sent me has everlasting life. That's Skip Heitzig with a special Easter message called Into the Garden. Now, here's Skip to tell you about how you can keep encouraging messages like this coming your way as you help connect others to the good news of Jesus. You can be a partner in that through your generosity. When you give a gift, you also keep this ministry going strong so you can continue to receive encouragement through these messages.

Here's how you can give today. As Skip Heitzig shares about the complete hope and restoration you can find in Jesus alone. The curse that was once placed on the earth in the first garden will be gone forever in the fourth and final garden. If the first garden was paradise lost, then this garden is paradise found, paradise restored. Because of what Adam did in the first garden, Jesus had to do in the second garden. Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.