Adam was called to guard and keep the Garden. This certainly included his need to protect his bride from the temptations of the evil one. When Jesus entered into his sufferings on the cross, he did so with His bride—the church—with him there in the Garden. As Adam should have warned Eve to “watch and pray that you may not enter into temptation” (Matt. 26:41), so Jesus warns his bride—the Church—to do that very thing. There is a striking parallel between the events of the two Gardens—Eden and Gethsemane.

The Scriptures tell us that the Son of God began His sufferings in a Garden and brought them to a close in a Garden. That is an absolutely amazing display of God’s wisdom. After all, Jesus is the second Adam undoing what Adam did and doing what Adam failed to do (Rom. 5:12-21; 1 Cor. 15:47-49). He is the Heavenly Bridegroom, entering into his sufferings in a garden for the redemption of his bride, the Church. He is the Heavenly Gardener, giving himself to the cultivation of the souls of his people through his atoning sacrifice and continual intercession.
When he hung on the cross, Jesus spoke of glory under the name of “Paradise”—an evident allusion to the paradise in which our first parents dwelt and the paradise from which they fell. He is the second Adam who, by the shedding of his blood, secured the new creation. As we consider the double entendres of the fourth Gospel, we come to those specifically concerning the biblical theology of the second Adam in the Garden. Consider the theological significance of the following two Garden settings in which Christ carried out the work of redemption.
1. Jesus began his sufferings in a Garden in order to show that he came to undo what Adam had done.
In his soul-stirring book, Looking Unto Jesus, Isaac Ambrose explained the theological significance of the Garden motif in the gospels—both with regard to the beginning of Christ’s sufferings in the Garden of Gethsemane and at the end of his sufferings in the Garden where his body was laid to rest in the tomb. Concerning the first of these symbolic gardens, Ambrose suggested:

“Jesus went forth with his disciples over the brook Kidron, where there was a garden [John 18:1];” many mysteries are included in this word, and I believe it is not without reason that our Savior goes into a garden…Because a garden was the place wherein we fell, and therefore Christ made choice of a garden to begin there the greatest work of our redemption: in the first garden was the beginning of all evils; and in this garden was the beginning of our restitution from all evils; in the first garden, the first Adam was overthrown by Satan, and in this garden the second Adam overcame, and Satan himself was by him overcome; in the first garden sin was contracted; and we were indebted by our sins to God, and in this garden sin was paid for by that great and precious price of the blood of God: in the first garden man surfeited by eating the forbidden fruit, and in this garden Christ sweat it out wonderfully, even by a bloody sweat; in the first garden, death first made its entrance into the world; and in this garden life enters to restore us from death to life again; in the first garden Adam’s liberty to sin brought himself and all of us into bondage; and, in this garden, Christ being bound and fettered, we are thereby freed and restored to liberty. I might thus descant in respect of every circumstance, but this is the sum, in a garden first began our sin, and in this garden first began the passion, that great work and merit of our redemption.[1]

Since “a garden was the place wherein we fell…therefore Christ made choice of a garden to begin there the greatest work of our redemption,” Jesus is the second Adam. It is fitting, therefore, that his work of undoing all that Adam did should begin in a Garden. Charles Spurgeon drew out this same observation, stating:

May we not conceive that as in a garden Adam’s self-indulgence ruined us, so in another garden the agonies of the second Adam should restore us. Gethsemane supplies the medicine for the ills which followed upon the forbidden fruit of Eden. No flowers which bloomed upon the banks of the four-fold river were ever so precious to our race as the bitter herbs which grew hard by the black and sullen stream of Kedron.[2]

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The church needs a Christlikeness which is modeled on Christ himself, and on every aspect of His character and teaching. When the church once again looks like Jesus, then—if history is any indication—more seekers than ever will say, as I once did, that “there must be something in this idea that gives it power.”

In part 1 of this article, I argued that a temperament of “Christian passivity” is a problem in the contemporary church. In part II, I argue that the Bible warns us against sins of passivity and calls us to boldness. I also offer some suggestions for promoting a Christian culture that can cultivate the virtue of boldness. 
A second argument—one less outwardly vapid—urges that “while Christ’s harsh language is always righteous, ours is tainted by sin.” Like the previous argument, the statement is entirely factually correct, but does nothing to justify the implied conclusion.
The problem with this argument it is not that it observes that human anger is usually sinful, which is obviously true. Instead, the problem is that it assumes that human passivity is not sinful—or, at least, that it is less sinful than anger. But this is simply begging the question: the argument commits the very practice it is trying to defend, assuming a standard of passivity and then reading the Bible according to that standard.
What, then, do biblical ethics teach us about passivity? To begin with, if passivity is good, or even preferable by comparison to anger, we would not expect Jesus to single out sins of inaction as particularly egregious. Yet this is precisely what Jesus does, such as in the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats.
The Bible presents passivity as sinful in direct terms. To take the most well-known example first, consider Peter’s denial of Christ. When Jesus asked Peter “Do you love me?” three times in John 21, this seems to have wounded Peter far more than when Jesus called Peter “Satan” in Mark 8. Yet Christ delivered the rebuke, not because Peter was sometimes abrasive—which he was—but because Peter had been a coward. Peter’s denial of Jesus—a sin committed specifically to avoid conflict and its consequences—is presented as a profound betrayal of Jesus, not a minor offense. This fact, by itself, refutes the idea that conflict-avoidant meekness is somehow the standard of goodness.
Likewise, when God warned Ezekiel about what would happen if Ezekiel did not “speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way,” He was not warning Ezekiel away from being overzealous, but from being too passive. This verse—Ezekiel 3:18—has been cited throughout church history by Christians who have taken bold positions, such as Ambrose of Milan when he barred the Emperor Theodosius from communion in 390, or by Gregory VII when he excommunicated Henry IV in 1076.
The reason the Bible condemns passivity is because it leads to hellish suffering and hell. In some of the most grotesque passages in the Old Testament, the authors condemn cowardice using the motif of a man who will not risk his safety to defend his wife or concubine from sexual abuse. This occurs in Judges 19, in Genesis 12, 20, and 26, and in 1 Kings 20. One striking aspect of these stories is that they present pure inversions of the Gospel. Christ loved the church as His bride, and therefore gave Himself up for her sake. In contrast, the man in each of these stories loved his own bride so little that he was willing to give her over to be raped for his own sake. He committed, in other words, an act of pure evil.
Appropriately, then, Revelation 21 lists “the cowardly” first among those who “will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur,” together with “the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars.” The Greek word translated as “cowardly” connotes—among other things—being agreeable in order to avoid conflict. In the Iliad, for example, Achilles uses the same word when he tells Agamemnon “Surely I would be called cowardly and of no account, if I am to yield to you in every matter that you say.”
I note with some hesitation that, while the Bible also condemns sinful anger—in Greek, “Ὀργίζεσθε”—this word does not appear in Revelation 21’s pantheon of evil. I mention this not to make light of sins of anger—which I know firsthand can be ruinous—but because Christians have committed the opposite error. We assume that sins of passivity are less deadly than sins of zeal but, if anything, the inverse is true. When Simeon and Levi defend their sister by massacring the entire male population of Shechem, there may be a suggestion of moral judgment from the author. But this judgment pales in comparison to the nihilistic abyss of Judges 19. By the end of the story, the Levite protagonist seems like Tolkien’s Gollum: a withered creature barely recognizable as a human being. This is cowardice, one of the fathers of all sin, in all its wretchedness.
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Written by Glenn D. Jerrell |
Monday, June 27, 2022
I share Mr. Castle’s criticism of social media, though he and I may have distinctly different takes on the criticism. But, nonetheless, we should both confess that sins of the tongue can be like a fire, they spread rapidly in a negative and as well in a positive culture. 

The rapid response of the 88th General Assembly of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church under the guiding hand of the moderator and others, was exactly what was needed regarding incidents of reported racial disparagement. Mr. Bennie Castle makes a salient point, which should not be lost, that we live in a “negative” culture.

A negative world is nothing new. Ask the Suffering Servant about a negative culture. From our first parents Adam and Eve through Christ to the apostolic witness, sin is exposed in every generation and that is why the Word makes clear from beginning to end that a Savior from sin is absolutely necessary. Racial disparagement is a destructive and negative manifestation of sin.
I share Mr. Castle’s criticism of social media, though he and I may have distinctly different takes on the criticism. But, nonetheless, we should both confess that sins of the tongue can be like a fire, they spread rapidly in a negative and as well in a positive culture.  Given the ability of social media to spread information rapidly (a curse and a blessing), the 88th General Assembly (GA) was pastorally on target to make a statement rapidly. The GA’s statement on race addressed a specific situation and contains statements that we would use in a sermon without having a trial. Those statements are simply good applications of the Scriptures to a specific situation.
The expression, “doubling down on Presbyterianism,” fuels questions which may not be fair to the OPC and its GA. What is within the power of a GA to deal with in such a situation? Many situations are resolved without formal charges. From a Presbyterian governmental perspective, what tools did the moderator have available to him to address this situation? If it had occurred on the floor in debate the moderator would have called it out of order and even perhaps reproved the person from the podium. But this incident occurred outside of the Assembly’s hearing. It came to us initially by a report from a party outside the church. The moderator and the Assembly realized the immediate need to respond in a Christ-like, pastoral fashion. The Assembly and its representatives worked tirelessly on the situation with prayer and with communication to the University. They took solid steps towards dealing with the situation.
A further Presbyterian governmental point is this: the 88th GA no longer exists. It has been dissolved. Furthermore, original jurisdiction is not given to the general assembly, but the general assembly may communicate the Word in pastoring the church.
It appears to me that the statement served well in that it handled pastorally a real problem that could have proven explosive in our negative culture in which social media governs much debate. If not dealt with rapidly it could have turned out much more poorly. Now it belongs to a presbytery or session to do the rest! The officers of the Assembly recognized that news of the incident would be on social media whether or not the OPC posted anything. Better to acknowledge what happened and how the church was dealing with it.
It has been reported that the comments were meant as a joke. We learn several things from this:1) Don’t wait five days to own it! Be forthright on day one. The delay magnified the problem. 2) Be careful with humor; it can reveal callousness, insensitivity, or even a lack of love. 3) Mr. Castle writes that the “the only real instance of a GA commissioner giving offense was the instance of a bad joke made at the wrong time.” But that minimizes the importance of the biblical call to wholesome, upbuilding speech (Ephesians 4:29). Not long ago, the use of demeaning, abusive language towards several women and men, posted by some (not all) participants on a “private” website, was dismissed as bad humor. Particularly as officers of the church of Jesus Christ, we need to guard our tongues and not minimize the negative impact of disparaging words. Humor can be destructive. Perhaps we need to think about our “humor” in the light of the ninth commandment and the commandment to love our neighbors.
While it is useful to look forward in cultural analysis, it may prove more useful to look back at our own history. John Newton’s hymn, “Amazing Grace” should be played in one’s mind while considering the 13th Amendment. Newton’s history and our nation’s history intersect when considering the sin of slavery.
When it comes to offenses, hurts, and injury we should be quick to listen and to seek to resolve matters, but slow to defend ourselves.

If Presbyterianism is confused with procedure, it will prove to be hollow and devoid of the heart-warming pastoral shepherding that is embedded in a genuine Presbyterianism. Our hearts and minds should be attuned to our resurrected Lord and echo the words of the elders around the throne in glory as they sing “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God almighty.”
Glenn D Jerrell is a Retired Minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC); he is living in Knoxville, Tenn.
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