I find it amazing that there are faithful Christian folks who – in our day and age – are able to share their God-given passions with us through books. Julian Evans was a professor of forestry at Imperial College and prior to that he was the Forestry Commission’s Chief Research Officer (South) in the United Kingdom. He wrote a book not too many years ago titled “God’s Trees” that explores every reference in the Bible to trees, forests, and wood. As I was looking up his comments on several passages in Genesis and 1 Kings, I came across this quotation, which provides good food for thought:
“There is another narrative too. Many have thought it, but few articulated it as well as the ‘grandfather’ of forestry in England, John Evelyn. In his famous Silva, presented to the fledgling Royal Society in 1662, and first published in 1664, he writes: ‘In a word, and to speak a bold and noble truth, trees and woods have twice saved the whole world; first by the ark, then by the cross; making full amends for the evil fruit of the the tree in paradise, by that which was born on the tree in Golgotha’.” (God’s Trees, p.16)
