Two Gardens: Eden and Gethsemane

The Garden of Eden and the Garden of Gethsemane. In the first garden we see the love of God as He prepared a perfect place for Adam and Eve to live. And we see the wrath of God as He judged their sin and disobedience. In the second garden we see the love of God as He suffered and prepared to die to satisfy His own requirement for the atonement of sin. And we see God’s wrath as He prepared to lay all our sins on Jesus.

These two gardens have taught me two very important lessons that have colored and seasoned how I view suffering in my own life. They remind me that my Lord knows something about  suffering. He knows deeply about suffering, because His whole earthly life was wrapped up in suffering. After He began His ministry He had no place to call His home. He was rejected by the people He came to save and betrayed by the ones He chose as His disciples. He suffered an agonizing death on the cross for my sins. He knows about suffering.

When I watched the movie The Passion of the Christ, I flinched every time the whip lashed His back. I couldn’t bear to watch them nail the spikes into His feet and hands. He knows. He knows suffering. He sees our suffering and He rushes to us. I love that song “No, Never Alone.” It reminds me of His promise to never leave me alone. I need to remember that He is with me when I suffer. And I take comfort in knowing that He knows just how much I can bear.

Some people think that God won’t put more on you than you can endure. I’m not sure I agree with that. I believe that He does put more on us than we can handle. If I could handle it all on my own I wouldn’t need Him. But because the burden is so heavy, it makes me cry out to Him. And when I cry out to Him, He meets me right there in the place of my pain. And He feels what I feel. He hurts when I hurt. I believe that.

“God is speaking. Let’s be still. Let’s listen for His still, small voice.”

And these two gardens teach me something else. They teach me that He loves me. He loved me enough to die for me. I don’t know any other person who would do that. He died for me. He loves me. Suffering has a way of making you forget this one important truth. You can spend a lot of time in sorrow’s valley feeling like God has forgotten about you and doesn’t care. I love the words of J. I. Packer in Knowing God:

What matters supremely …is not …the fact that I know God, but the larger fact which underlies it—that He knows me. I am graven on the palms of His hands. I am never out of His mind….He knows me as a friend, one who loves me; and there is no moment when His eye is off me, or His attention distracted from me, and no moment, therefore, when His care falters. There is unspeakable comfort . . . in knowing that God is constantly taking knowledge of me in love and watching over me for my good.

Oh, how I need to remember that when I’m in sorrow’s valley.

The Garden of Gethsemane and the cross remind me of His care. Both gardens help me see suffering a little differently. I must somehow fit together in my mind the reality of my suffering with the truth that He loves me. My suffering is real. So is His love. He loves me. All of this helps prepare my heart for when suffering chooses me.

The words of this simple children’s song ring in my heart and cover me when I hurt the most: “Yes, Jesus loves me . . . for the Bible tells me so!”

A good friend tells me that when she was growing up in Kansas they would often be struck by tornadoes that swooped down from Topeka to Kansas City. This area was known as Tornado Alley, and they were the worst at nighttime. When the tornado alarms went off, her mother would hurry around unplugging every electrical device in the house. She would turn all the lights out. They would sit perfectly still in their living room while the storm passed overhead, because her mother said, “Be still . . . listen . . . God is speaking.” In the storm, God was speaking. When we suffer, it’s a lot like that. Sometimes we just have to be still and hear what God is saying. There’s a lot of suffering going on in our country right now. We’re in the midst of a dark, dark storm of a pandemic and racial strife. People are hurting. We’ve already had to unplug from a lot of our usual activities. Many of us have sheltered in place. God has caused us to be still. God is speaking. Let’s be still. Let’s listen for His still, small voice.

God’s love is not content to leave us in our weakness, and for this reason he takes us into a dark night. He weans us f rom all of the pleasures by giving us dry times and inward darkness. . . . No soul will ever grow deep in the spiritual life unless God works passively in that soul by means of the dark night.[1]

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[1] “John of the Cross: Purifying the Soul,” in Devotional Classics, revised and expanded, Richard J. Foster and James Bryan Smith, eds. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 37; quoted in John Ortberg, Soul Keeping: Caring for the Most Important Part of You (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2014), 182–83.