It Happened in the Garden

 Dear Friends,

It's the time of the year when we all begin thinking about the celebration of the birth of Jesus.  As is usual for me, I'm writing  about the reason we celebrate.  Would you journey through those thoughts with me?

The Wall
and the Promise

God walked with a man and a woman in a beautiful garden.  He knew them, because He had created them.  He knew their strengths and limitations and they knew Him.  They saw Him, felt His presence, and talked with Him. They were His children. They were held in the arms of their Father.  They were family.

But as time went on, they chose not to follow His direction, and they chose to listen to another voice.

That changed everything.  With that choice they built a wall that would stand between them and home – between man and woman and their Maker.  God wouldn’t live with that wall.  It wasn’t His wall. He told His children they were to leave the freedom of the garden.  He would no longer be right there in their sight because of the wall they had built. 
 
But He also promised that someday, when “The fullness of time” had come, He would send a someone to carry that wall away.  That "someone" would be the Son of God.  And of His own free will, in His humanity, He would be the perfect one to destroy the wall.

The Son of God would walk with mankind.  He would feel their humanness and would know of their desire to live within the wall.

The Son would live as a man, but only as God had originally planned for mankind to live.  He would live as a clear unblemished, see-through man, and He would remind them of the beauty they had shut out with the wall.  And through Him  they would then see their Father, once again.

And it happened!  When the fullness of time had come – it happened.  

But when the fullness of the time had come, 

God sent forth His Son, 

born of a woman, born under the law, 

to redeem those who were under the law, 

that we might receive the adoption as sons.
Galatians 4:4  (NKJV)  

God sent His own Son to tear down that wall. The Son pulled the wall down on himself - the wall that was made of the bricks of sin and self that we humans want to love, or use, or keep.  The Son chose to take that wall on his own shoulders, and it killed Him.

The sin that men love killed the Son - the perfect One. He was the only one who could destroy the wall.  He gave His life to destroy the wall.  

But that was not the end.  The Son rose from the grave.  He not only overcame the wall of sin, but He overcame death - the horrible result of man walking away from God’s presence.

No longer does the wall need to separate men from God.  Because of what our promised Savior did, we can come back home to our Father.  We can walk with Him in the garden again. 
 
We can!  If only we will look up and reach toward His welcoming arms.

We can!  If we but trust in the name of Jesus, The Christ, The Son of God.

Love, Diane