The Bible exists in a symbolic world where particular images are common: trees, tables, bread and wine, mountains, the sea and its denizens, the creation week, and many more. These have specific meanings developed across the canon that they take with them (progressively) and that can be read backwards to fit texts within the Bible’s wider story.
Each tree participates, to some extent, in Eden’s two trees, the New Jerusalem’s two-trunked tree, and the Bible’s pivot as Jesus hung on a tree for our sake. They all carry other meanings in other contexts. Genesis 1 compares us to trees; Psalm 1 picks up that language and continues it. These two threads are played with in the language of fruitfulness—we are fruitful and the grand narrative of God in Christ through his Church is fruitful—which is a common thread in the Bible.
Isaiah talks about trees near the start and end of his prophecy. In 1.29-30, Isaiah compares ‘rebels and sinners’ within Jerusalem to withered oaks. There’s some quite on the nose phallic imagery going on here. It’s a motif he refers to a few times, especially in his polemics against idols made of wood, skilfully using the poetic connection between elah (oak), elil (idol), and el or elohim (God/gods).
By Isaiah 61.3 we have oaks of righteousness (a different Hebrew term for the same tree). What was to droop and wither, is now strong and righteous. To massively truncate the complexity and detail of Isaiah’s work, there is transition and rescue through the oracles of doom and the promised servant and conqueror.
There’s a theological connection we could draw, as Isaiah is concerned with ensuring that we trust the one God of Israel, not any pretender gods we could hew out of wood. Don’t build idols or images, trust Yahweh. Of course, obliquely, there are two images of God we’re supposed to use: Christ, the exact image of Yahweh (Hebrews 1), and then we too are images of God (Genesis 1). This isn’t as neat a parallel as we might like as Isaiah doesn’t use the same words for idols as Genesis does for humans in the image of God—we can find this parallel in other Biblical books which do use the words like that—Isaiah prefers either elil which is connected to ‘worthless’ or pesel which is connected to the verb ‘to hew,’ as he deliberately uses highly freighted language to help his hearers realise that idols are worthless things they hewed from wood themselves.
Nevertheless, there’s a biblical idea here, even if it wasn’t one Isaiah was thinking of: don’t make images of God because you’ve already been given one, and it’s you. Then Isaiah’s tree language can help us think this through. We shouldn’t be the sort of living image of God that is withered and droopy. We should be ‘oaks of righteousness,’ strong, tall, and visible as ambassadors for Jesus.
How do we apply this to ourselves?
Idolatry is rife. Sin starts from making something which wasn’t God into God. Most often this is our selves. There’s an irony here, because I’m saying you’re an image of God so stop making yourself into an image of God. Don’t be a withered oak, be a righteous tree by streams of living water.
When we make ourselves ultimate, we wither. When we acknowledge Yahweh as God and live like that’s true, we flourish. Not only do we flourish but we manage to function successfully as images of God. When we attempt to be the Lord we utterly fail, when we tell the truth and allow the Lord to be the Lord, we start to look like him.
There’s something beautiful about that dynamic. It’s only by doing the opposite of everything that our culture tells us leads to flourishing, by not placing yourself at the centre but instead making the maker the centre—or more accurately, acknowledging that the maker is the centre and we don’t have any control over that—is the way that we can flourish authentically as human beings.
This is not a revolutionary thought, but it is one that the tree language of the Bible would want us to consider. Humans are supposed to be flourishing trees by the living water of the word of God. When we turn to ‘hewed things,’ things that we’ve made or just to ourselves to provide ultimate things we do not have the strength for, then we wither and die. We become flaccid oaks, unable to flourish, unable to bear fruit, unable to be of use to the world.
It can be worse, of course, because you can stop being a fruit tree entirely and become a thorn bush (Genesis 3, Micah 7, Matthew 7). They have no place in any garden.
Of course, without the resurrection of the branch from David’s tree (Isaiah 11), and Isaiah 6-11 is all about trees (the stump in 6, the seed as seen in the children of 7-9, the axe of 10 and the branch of 11), we are just dead trunks on the ground, good for little except colonies of beetles.
Thankfully, in the grace of the cross, that tree of cursing made a tree of blessing, the myrtle grows where once there was a briar (Isaiah 55), and you too can be a tree of resurrection, fruiting for the benefit of the world.
Photo by redcharlie on Unsplash
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