The Certainty of Spring

The forest has a tired look about it. The sword ferns are sprawled out on the duff in a posture so sharply contrasting with their erect, green vitality in spring. The stormy winds of winter have knocked down fir branches and fir boughs and spread them around the grove. The cling to the little life they have left, but eventually they too will become one with the forest floor. The reeds in the marsh are but husks of their summer glory. The branches of the alder and maple tree remain bare. The cold, the wind, the rain, and the absence of sunlight have taken their toll.

The Creator has ordained that as long as the earth remains, “seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” The natural world thus lives a constant and repeating cycle over and over again. The light dies at the end of each day and lives again at daybreak, only to die again and rise again. The branches leaf out each spring and the flowers bloom, only to fall victim to the dying light and chilly nights of autumn. The heat gradually increases, reaches its peak, and then dwindles and dies in the face of winter’s cold. Why is this so? Firstly, the seasons, temperatures, and lights rise and fall because the Creator has ordained that it be so. Just as a car performs in the way its designer and mechanic have designed it to do, so the natural world walks according to the inner rhythms and codes deeply instilled within it by its great Designer.

The second reason flows from the first. The natural, programmed rhythms of the natural world are reflective of the story of creation as a whole. Sin and choice have placed the world and everything within it under the curse of death. Five minutes watching the news should convince you of this fact, but the natural world tells this story also. Life is real and beautiful, but it always ends in death. Morning will always lead to evening. Summer will always end in winter. Life will always end in death. Whether we like it or not, the day will come when the life is drained from us, leaving only a husk just like the barren maple tree and the whitish brown reeds protruding from the marsh.

Life would be a miserable expectation of death at best were this the whole story. But recall that another morning always succeeds every evening and another summer conquers every white winter. I think about this fact as I look at the forest floor and the marsh. Evidence of the impending renewal and reawakening is all around me. Green buds cover the barren maple. New bracken ferns are springing amidst the deadfall of the winter, their light green husks and new fronds protruding in victory from death. The undergrowth is leafing out all around me, likewise clothed in new leaves and some with tiny flowers of pink and white. The sputtering, squeaky song of the marsh wren emerges from the dead reeds. The whistle of the red-winged blackbird echoes across the water as if to wake up the dead earth from her sleep.

The natural world is showing me anew what I already know to be true. All death is only temporary, including my own. Just as certainly as a spring will succeed every winter, my certain death will also lead to eternal life forevermore. “For I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth. And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.”