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Chapter Nine

TREES

EXCURSIONS INTO ARBOREAL AESTHETICS

AND BOTANICAL METAPHYSICS

Ephesians 3:17, Isaiah 55:12-13, 56:3ff., 61:1-3,
Psalm 1:3, Daniel 4,
Isaiah 6:13, Revelation 22:2,
Ezekiel 17:23ff.

THE ARCHITECTURAL AESTHETICS

THE MOBILE MARVELS

THE GROUNDED GREATNESS

THE COMPOSITE GLORY

I

The tree ... birch in Canadian profusion, spruce in its mountain recesses,

the oak in its English grandeur, the magnificent Autumn maple, the river gum of Australia, the mountain giant ... it continues its copious contribution.

Think of the power to prevail amid wind and whine of aerial bombardment,
to remain settled in squall,
of the weights, the forces imposed as massive branches,
some perhaps 30 or even 40 feet in themselves away from the trunk,
have pivoting forces wrought,
leverages of gusts delivered as if a wind tunnel experiment were being imposed.

All this they must resist, yielding yet rooted, waving yet bending before the blight with a grace which is surpassed in the delicacies of the slender extensions with which many are adorned.

Consider the symmetries, sometimes all but complete though the arboreal massif soars,
as you often see in Norfolk pines; and yet

ponder the individualities, where each tree is almost like a person with a trademark,

not in finger print or face, but in the quality of its grace

as leaf or tassel, mini-branch or leaf cluster in different tree models

drapes itself in beauty, sealing the interiors, tossed about a little in milder breezes,
with a fluency at the margin of fluidity, yet distinct, attached.

Dwell on the movement
away from the differentiated samenesses,
where the individual graces
are provided with variations on a theme,
like some haunting melody,
controlled in its creative input
while diversified in its lilting introits, from time to time,
as the superb mystery of life is expounded in intelligence,
expressed in grace,
governed by controls, allowed its responses,
kept to theme, as created,
impelled and not impounded,
expressed and expounded.

Estimate thee eager surges into life, in tree dynamics,
young pines even where rainfall is rather low,
vigorous in insistence, persistent in quality of thrusting life,
contained in symmetry, expatiating individuality;
and look at the trees amidst rocks,
even in stony plains,
limited in life,
yet thrusting to the depths through cracks,
penetrating through resistant rock,
to find support both vast and yielding,
while eagerly they spring to light above.

Look on the eucalypts,
their barks a symphony of colour very often,
pastels amid more colourful growths
in their seasons, persistent in type, individual in expression,
pictures in themselves,
artistries almost like arboreal sunsets sublime,
the lemon gum, its delicacy linked to a statuesque dignity,
not an effrontery
but a musing grace in pink bark so refined and delicate
that it is almost too much to style it bark, rather skin,
while the creases about the branch exits from the trunk,
so resemble creases about muscular shoulder in man
as to suggest a botanical physiognomy, a latent life
that flows now to trunk, to branch,
to artistries in motion,
singing with sappy happiness.

Small wonder the Bible talks of the trees clapping their hands (Isaiah 55),
and what hands, some leaves with the artistry to resemble ferns,
while they stretch them to the heights, fearless of winds,
their individual stands like chatting groups,
their close assemblages in forests
like crowds bent on the resources of life;
and this, while they provide help,
cover from the sun,
some, deciduous, even making an exception for Winter,
when shade is undesired.

In its coverage from storm, the tree reminds us of another Biblical passage (Isaiah 32)
where a man will be as a hiding place from the wind,
And a cover from the tempest.

But what a man! Also it is He who is
"as rivers of water in a dry place,
As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land",

under whose ministry,

"the eyes of those who see will not grow dim,
And the ears of those who hear will listen.
Also the hart of the rash will understand knowledge,
And the tongue of the stammerers will be ready to speak plainly."

Indeed in that day, "a king will reign in righteousness"
and "the work of righteousness will be peace,
And the effect of righteousness, quietness and assurance for ever";

for He to those who see in Him the Tree of Life,
the fountain of truth and the Lord of life,
is offered so that through His reception by faith, a new wonder comes:

"surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows"

and "with His stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53).

It is He of whom Ezekiel also speaks, the shelter from the tempest
there seen as a sprig planted on a tall mountain,
growing into relief reinforcement,
providing rest and remedy to many|
through the cover
of His branches (Ezekiel 17).

Only God could make a tree, as the old song has it.
It is the God who made man, participant from the Tree of Life,
the Lord of glory in His creation (Isaiah 45),
who was crucified as Peter declares, on the tree (I Peter 2:22ff.),
having taken the format of creation,
though Himself its Creator (Colossians 1:15, John 1:3),
sent as a Servant to redeem (Isaiah 48:16, 53:6-10).

Though sovereign in due course, with grace,
having weathered every tempest,
He has sailed to complete the divine voyage in life,
at first in the humility of vicarious suffering for sin,
now past,
at the last moving in the majesty of over-ruling its tempests
bringing peace in its demonstration (Revelation 20),
till the earth is itself dismissed by the divine artist,
and the eternity of the children of God
is no more bound to this earth,
but to Himself alone:
in individuality like trees,
in society like forests,
in grace like the force relaying branches
which yet move with facility in articulation,
in righteousness which thrusts out sin,
while bringing remedy to the renegacies of many.
 

So He has shown, does show
and will show royalty its reality,
sublimity its place and
majesty its might.

Only God can make a tree.

Only God can make man,

and engender the man of God,

free

amid the programmatics of enablement,

individual

amid the thrusts of society,

uncaptured within the interstices of culture,

concerned with morals whatever the froth of his fellows,

abiding in the God of his creation,
the thoughts of His gift,
the power of His hand,
rooted and grounded in the love
of which only God has the beginning.

It is this which is
available for any man, for any woman or child,
and to the end freely offered (John 1:12, 4:14),
while the day of opportunity lasts

This love, it is eternal as He is, being His own,

providing mankind

with a freedom to revile and resist, to distort and to lie,
conscious in its connivings,
or else
the way home to His friendship,
and an alternative
in worship of the One

who made error possible
because concept is functional,
and folly is available:

and remedy certain,
because its provision is not only secure,

but secured by Himself who died

the just for the unjust to bring us to God (I Peter 3:18).

It is He who provides all:

no dictator, but emblem of grace,
engineer of thought,
creator of concept,
permitting what arises with the life of man,
either for nobility or for nastiness,
and yielding history a while as it withers,
till its day done,
His own glory being revealed,
and many having been tested,
find their place through grace.

Man, in nature but not of it,
 in spirit,
being fashioned
and moulded both by and for God,
or misusing all, misalinged:
he continues,
till the earth is filled with the knowledge of the glory of God
(Habakkuk 2:14)
as the waters cover the sea,
yes and its knowledge is as clear as the skies above,
no longer darkened by brooding passion,
which at last purged,
 

Then it is consigned to judgment .
with all that hates life and love and grace and glory,
or seeks to put it in as if resident
in that creation called man,
a pseudo-president:
who neither makes nor can make liberty,
but merely utilise the methods of its denial.

 

FROM TREE TO TRUTH

When it comes to man:
programmatics enable;
but his spirit disables
as often as it seeks its own fulfilment
in its own functions
and its own limitations,

saving its life merely to lose it,
misusing it in order to confuse it,
seeing the good and doing the evil,
seeking power and finding abuse,
wandering with will,
like a dog with a precious bone,
fascinated by intriguing options,
blind to simple truth,
so erring and then overcome with guilt.

And why ?
because of the knowledge of error,
in man,
grieving but in vain,
aligning himself
to do it again;
fastidious without facts,
dreaming of not being responsible,
while conscious of guilt,
exhibitor of guile,
arguing necessity
while displaying liberty in the process:
assuming error that is without meaning for the determinate,
on the part of those who reject the musings of such infirmities of mind,
who resist him in his sally into self-contradicting
irrationalities,
thoughts of such information sallies 'arising',
where no information lies or can be found,
in the nonentities of nothingness,
or the servilities of the bound.

This is given its bondage to control,
given its destiny, but not acquiring it,
a cosmos of recipients not creators:
and to this,
the material sub-structure,
many would consign themselves,
like pathological children
with a fixation on being a truck or a plug,
while avoiding
the intelligence which conceives and categorises,
with a mind of its own,
neither using their own,
nor acknowledging its source.

Only God can make a man.

Only God can make a liberty for man.
Not only man, however, but the devil can make a mess
of that liberty.

The world is its testimony,
where spite joins fight,
and lying mingles with appearances of goodness,
as the shrewd deceive,
the mutinous exalt themselves
or instead, their futile,
man-moulded gods (the biblical 'vanities'),
inane before the Creator, mischiefs made by man,
emblems of pride, depictions of power,
rendered as powerless at last as the red-necks among men,
whose glory is their shame,
and whose destiny becomes exclusion from life.

 

╬

 THE MAGNIFICENCE OF GOD, THE TRUTH

The mind, the spirit, the body, the synthesis called man, what of him ?

In the white light of intelligence, in the brilliant colorations of wisdom,
in the entrenpreneurial majesty of creation,
the flowing coverage of mind, the controlling concepts of construction,
the cosmos of captive thoughts and living applications,
the realm of reality and realisation from powers sufficient even
for the spirit of man to be created, unconformed,
but configured with liberty,
there, where there are
the envisagements of loftiness
and the magnitudes of imagination,
untrammelled by convention and uncaptured by control,
where beauty dwells,
where power does not need to erupt, being integral:
in God the Maker of mind, the grantor of liberty,
the moulder of spirit, the lover of liberty, the overseer of destiny:

there is his source.

Eternal
(for nothing can have no future, which would be for 'something with a future',
so can never be the base for  a world where in the end, nothing is not the case),
it is He who governs; and giving government to man,
shows the necessities which liberty requires;
but freely are these to be found,
not by force which does not enlighten,
but in understanding always available,
set in word,
enabling mind,
creating spirit,
vacated by will,
found in repentance
and realism,
which receives redemption
from the errors of heart and the blights of spirit,
which make of man
a wonder of mischief,
a baron of pride,
a bucolic of misalliance or
a prodigy of folly.

He acts as one, he works as many.

Empires arise to demonstrate a point, a system,
an idea, an ideal,
and fall as its flagrancies fail it,
or its presumption dismisses it.

It is not cyclic at all, this process, but repetitive indeed.
It moves to an end, first in this empire or that, as specified so often in the word of God,
and in series in Daniel (as in Highway of Holiness),
moving, always progressing regressively,
till the end becomes apparent,
in the power that corrupts
becoming the lowering that destroys
massively.

All imperfection goes, but only what is God,
or makes peace with Him by the peace with which He has enabled peace for man,
this stays.

In the end, the stage goes too, this very earth.

It is well, for as Isaiah puts it (51):

"Lift up your eyes to the heavens,

And look on the earth beneath.

For the heavens will vanish away like smoke,

The earth will grow old like a garment,

And those who dwell in it will die in like manner;

But My salvation will be forever,

And My righteousness will not be abolished.
 

"Listen to Me, you who know righteousness,

You people in whose heart is My law:

Do not fear the reproach of men,

Nor be afraid of their insults.

For the moth will eat them up like a garment,

And the worm will eat them like wool;
 

But My righteousness will be forever,

                           And My salvation from generation to generation."

The Lord proceeds in Isaiah 52-55 to specify that salvation, just as
Daniel dated its centrepiece of performance by the Saviour (Highway of Holiness Ch. 4),
and Isaiah declared that this good news, which we now call the Gospel, would be rejected by Israel (Isaiah 49:7), but received by many of the Gentiles, including Kings, which of course as always with biblical prophecy, has happened; indeed it has come on a vast scale, till some little time ago, the greatest empire on this earth, for hundreds of years, was ostensibly at least, committed to it!

In the next Chapter, we plan to survey,  back with the trees of God's good creation, some of the exposés of the Bible, on the topic of trees, to regale ourselves in its imagery, beyond which is the divine mastery which replaces the misery of its rejection.

II

This is to be found in Ch. 10,
 where it is given detailed attention.

Clapping Their Hands

The Dry Trees

Trees of Righteousness

River Trees

Chopped Trees

Tree Stumps

The Ultimate Tree

Trees with Fruit

The Tree of Life