Week 2 December 2025, Devotion Part 2

The Lord God said, “Since the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil, he must  not reach out, take from the tree of life, and live forever.” …He drove the man out and stationed the cherubim and the flaming, whirling sword east of the Garden of Eden to guard the way to the tree of life.  Genesis 3:22-24

The fragrant live tree in its prime, set up in the homes of God-loving families, marks Christmas Day as a cherished event.  Advent is known as a sacred season of spiritual preparation, observed over the span of four Sundays preceding it. The word means “arrival” or “coming.”  By the 6^th century it was on the official calendar of the Roman Church, but initially focused on Christ’s Second Coming. It was only in the Middle Ages that Advent became explicitly linked to the anticipation of Christ’s first coming as God’s Word incarnate in Bethlehem. After his conversion to Christianity, Constantine must have been painfully aware that tyrannical Nero had martyred both the apostle Paul and Peter between 64 and 68 A.D. The Roman historian Suetonius wrote that many people believed that the Great Fire was instigated by Nero to clear land for his planned “Golden House.” What was Constantine’s reaction, we wonder, when he read in 1 Peter 2:17, “Show proper respect to everyone, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the emperor.” How did it strike him that in Paul’s letter to the Romans he did not mention Christ’s birth at all?  Neither did the epistle writers, and Mark, Peter’s protégé, skipped the Nativity completely in his gospel. Only Luke and John elaborated on the event that would change the course of human history as radically as “Paradise Lost” at its dawn.

If we picture the 4th of July as a unique annual event of celebration, we understand it is not the norm for the day-to-day business of the government. Its job is to protect the rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” promoted in the Declaration of Independence, and to be actively, daily pursued by the American citizen.  Part 2 of 2

Comment:  The biblical tree of life represents eternal life.  The Christmas tree hyped as lasting forever in the mid-50s, lost its appeal right after “A Charlie Brown Christmas” aired in 1965.  He picked a small live tree over a “big shiny aluminum tree,” making it look undesirable as a symbol of commercialism.  God’s “tree of life” is adorned with truth, not tinsel and trinkets.  “What is truth?” That was Pilate’s question of Jesus as the accused stood before him at His mock trial. “Truthiness” was the word of the year in 2005 as selected by a panel of linguists.  Coined by Stephen Colbert, “the term describes the quality of stating concepts one wishes or knows to be true, even if they are factually incorrect, prioritizing gut feelings over evidence.”  If this rings a bell that feels like a gut punch, let’s not sing “Jingle Bells” for distraction.  The third stanza of “Joy to the World” provides proper perspective and the guts to take God’s Word at face value in order to live it out.  “He rules the world with truth and grace, and makes the nations prove / The glories of His righteousness, and wonders of His love.”  Genesis 3