Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 790
Delivered on Lord’s-Day Evening, December 29 , 1867, by, the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.
“The king’s garden.” Nehemiah 3:15.
THERE have been many very famous king’s gardens, such as those “hanging gardens” in Nineveh, in which Sardanapalus delighted himself, and that remarkable garden of Cyrus in which he took such great interest, because, as he said, every tree and every plant in it had been both planted and tended by his own royal hand. Imagination might bid you wander among the beauties of the celebrated villas and gardens of the Roman emperors, or make you linger amid the roses and lilies of the voluptuous gardens of the Persian caliphs but we have nobler work in hand.
I call you to come with me to orchards of pomegranates, to beds of spices, camphor with spikenard, calamus and cinnamon, myrrh and aloes, and trees of frankincense. I am not about to speak of the gardens of any earthly monarch, for we can find far fairer flowers and rarer fruits in the gardens of the King of kings, the resorts of His Son, the Prince Immanuel. There are six of these “king’s gardens” to which I shall conduct you, but we shall not have time to tarry in more than one of them.
I. The first of these king’s gardens was THE GARDEN OF PARADISE, which was situated in the midst of Eden. You will read of it in the book of Genesis. It was doubtless a fairer place than we have ever seen and much more marvelous for beauty than we can imagine. It was full of all manner of delights—a fruitful spot in which the man who was set to keep it would have no need to toil, but would find it a happy and refreshing exercise to train the luxurious plants. No sweat was ever seen upon his happy brow, for he cultivated a virgin soil. Abundance of luscious fruits ministered to his necessities. He could stretch himself upon soft couches of moss and no inclement weather disturbed his repose.
No winter’s wind scattered the leaves of Eden! No summer’s heat burned up its flowers! There were sweet alternations of day and night, but the day brought no sorrow and the night no danger. The beasts were there, yet not as beasts of prey, but as the obedient servants of that happy man whom God had made to have dominion over all the works of His hands. In the midst of the garden grew that mysterious Tree of Life, of which we know so little, literally, but of which, I trust, we know much in its spiritual meaning, for we have fed upon its fruits and have been healed by its leaves.
Hard by it stood the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, placed there as the test of obedience. Adam’s mind was equally balanced—it had no bias to evil—and God left him to the freedom of his will, giving this as the test of his loyalty, that, if obedient, he would never touch the fruit of that one tree. Why need he? There were tens of thousands of trees, all of which bowed down their branches with abundant fruit for his hunger or his luxury. Why need he desire that solitary tree which God had fenced and hedged about?
But, in an evil hour, at the serpent’s base suggestion—we know not how soon after his creation—he put forth his hand and plucked from the forbidden tree! The mere plucking of the fruit seems little to the thoughtless, but the breaking of the Maker’s Law was a great offense to Heaven, for it was man’s throwing down the glove of battle against his Creator, and breaking his allegiance to his Lord and Master. This was great, great in itself and in its mischievous effects, for Adam fell that day, and he was driven out of Eden to till the thankless, thorn-bearing soil. And you and I fell in him and were banished with him. We were in his loins. He was “the father of us all,” and on us he has brought the curse of toil, and in us all he has sown the seeds of iniquity!
Let it never be forgotten that in connection with the garden of Eden we are not now a pure and sinless race, and cannot be by nature, however civilized we may become. Men are born no longer with balanced minds, but a heavy weight of original sin in the scale. We are averse to that which is good. The bias of the mind of man, when he is born into the world, is towards that which is evil and we as naturally go astray as the serpent naturally learns to hiss, or the wolf to tear and to devour. Ah, Brothers and Sisters, beware of thinking too little of the Fall. Slight thoughts upon the Fall are at the root of false theologies. The mischief that has been worked in us is not a trifling matter, but a thing to be trembled at.
Only the Divine hand can reclaim us. The house of manhood has been shaken to its foundations—each timber is decayed—leprosy is in the tottering wall. Man must be made new by the same creating hand that first made him, or he never can be a dwelling place fit for God. Let those who boast of their natural goodness look to the garden of Eden and be ashamed of their pride—and then examine their own actions by the glass of God’s most holy Law—and be confounded that they should dream of purity! How can he be pure that is born of woman? “Who can bring a clean thing out of an unclean thing? Not one.”