Easter 2023: Four Gardens

Four Gardens: John 20:1-18

Easter 2023

Good morning, and Happy Resurrection Sunday! Please open your Bibles to John 20, but for now just put your bookmark there, because we are actually going to be going through the whole Bible, from Genesis to Revelation. But don’t worry, I will still have you out in time for lunch!

I know on days like this, when there is a larger than normal crowd, preachers tend to say something snarky and sarcastic like, “Just to remind you, we do have church every week.” And if I have ever been guilty of that, I’m sorry. Every Sunday morning, every person is fighting an incredible spiritual battle with the devil, who will do anything and everything to convince you to spend your Sunday morning doing something else. So the fact that you are here, whether it’s the first time, the first time in months, or every Sunday, tells me that at least for this morning, you gained a victory over the enemy.

And today, we get to talk about the story of how Jesus won the victory against the enemy for all time and for all of us!

Many of you know that In February 2022 I was part of a group that toured Israel. The last day we were in the country, we went to the Garden Tomb. This is one of two possible locations for where Jesus was crucified, buried, and resurrected.

The theory started getting traction in the mid-1800’s. The Bible says that Jesus was taken outside the walls of the city to a hill known as the place of the skull. So a group of scholars was looking at the hills and cliffs outside of where the walls of Jerusalem would have been in Jesus’ day. And they noticed a rock formation that resembled a skull. This picture of the site is from 1900. Do you see the skull on the side of the hill?

By the way, here’s what it looks like today. The cliff overlooks a bus parking lot. But you can still see the skull in the side of the cliff.

In1867, archaeologists unearthed a tomb less than a tenth of a mile from where I was standing in this picture. Israeli archaeologists have dated the tomb to the 8th century BC, 800 years before Jesus was born. Here’s a picture of the inside of the tomb.

This is a huge deal, because if you know the story, you know that the tomb had to be near the site of the crucifixion. According to Jewish law, the body had to be buried before the beginning of the Sabbath at sundown. So finding a 3000 year old tomb so near a rock formation that looked like a skull was pretty epic.

Scholars will continue to argue about whether or not this is the actual location of the garden tomb. But as we sat there that afternoon getting ready to receive communion, something occurred to me that I had never thought about before. It was the Garden tomb. And I started thinking about how gardens have a way of showing up at crucial times in the Great Big Story of God’s redemption plan:

• There was a garden at the beginning.

• A garden on the last night of Jesus’ life.

• A garden on the morning Jesus rose again.

• And when this world comes to an end, there will be a fourth garden: the garden of Paradise.

So this morning, I want us to talk about Four Gardens that tie together the whole story of God’s plan for creation, our need for salvation, our reconciliation with God through Jesus, and God’s ultimate restoration of heaven and earth. By the way, don’t worry about matching up the blanks with what’s on the screen. A lot changed between Thursday and Sunday. Just take notes on the back of the listening guide, and if you are desperate to know what goes in the blanks, just see me after the service.

[Pray]

Let’s talk first about the garden of Eden. Let’s review some of the details of Genesis 1. How does Genesis open?

1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. 3 And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

Then you have all the five more days of creation, ending with the creation of Adam, the first human being. We read in Genesis 2 that

8 And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.