This past week I was visiting in the Iron Range of the Minnesota northwoods at Storybook Lodge Christian Camp. Each day at meal-time, in an effort to shrink the growing evidence of my lack of exercise, I took a four-mile walk along the highway towards the little town of Biwabik.
At the junction of the camp road and the highway is the ball field. And looming over the third baseline is a majestic white pine, topping out at over one hundred feet. Uncle Ben Tuininga estimates its age at approximately 150 years. It was a sapling at the time of the Civil War.
Thursday evening, in lieu of supper, I decided to take a shorter walk than usual. Storms had been forecast for the area and, as I headed down the gravel road toward the highway, I could already hear rumblings just across the lake. I quickened my pace.
I had just cleared the backstop and the white pine beyond it when I looked straight over my head. Still blue sky. Maybe I wouldn’t get wet after all.
Then it happened. An ear-deafening roar was followed by a mighty rending of wood. The majestic white pine, thirty yards from where I stood, had taken a direct hit. I found myself flat on the ground.
In the dining hall, a moment before the explosion (so loud that one of the staff thought a plane had crashed), several observed a fireball hurtling through the trees. One woman thought, “We’re being fired on!”
Later, a member of the camp board scaled the tree to its midpoint where he found a hole, badly charred, blown right through the trunk. The trunk is split almost the whole length from root to crown. It’s unlikely the behemoth will survive. More’s the pity.
It is not the first tree, however, that took a death-serving blow for me. Half a world away, and two millennia ago, outside old Salem’s gate, another tree stood upright, awaiting the blow. Already stripped of its bark, its branches sheared off, severed from its life-giving roots, its ultimate indignity–this symbol of life–was to be pressed into service by heartless men and made an instrument of the goriest of deaths.
If only that were all. Other trees had been so abused before; untold thousands of them standing as a grisly memorial, a veritable forest to the ruthless inhumanity of humanity. But there was more, infinitely more.
It was true that a Man was destined to die outstretched and spiked to this particular tree. But what a Man! This was the Man who made the tree, who sustained its life, who set the hydrologic cycle in motion that watered it, who hung in space the planet on which it grew, who spread the thin, blue mantle of air around its bosom.
But more. This Man gave life to the men who nailed Him thereon. He gave them the intelligence to smelt the iron for the ax and the adze, the nails and the hammer. He gave them the ability to speak, to speak the blasphemies they hurled in His face with their spittle. As they tried to extinguish His life, He sustained theirs. All their attempts to stop that mighty heart from beating out life–and love–failed.
What men did not, could not see in the awful shroud of darkness was the blow taken by the tree. It is true that the Man upon the tree took more blows there than we could ever know. Enough blows to satisfy the claims of divine justice. Enough to set believing prisoners free. Enough to open heaven and vanquish hell. But the tree also received a blow which we must never forget.
In spite of the nails in His own hands, the Man who was Nazareth’s carpenter and earth’s architect wielded a hammer of His own: “And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath He quickened together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses; blotting out the handwriting of ordinances that was against us, which was contrary to us, and took it out of the way, nailing it to His cross; and having spoiled principalities and powers, He made a show of them openly, triumphing over them in it” (Col. 2:13-15).
That was the tree that took the blow for me.