Today there is a lot of debate about the environment and its political implications. But Matthew Sleeth shows how the Bible is filled with references to trees and their part in increasing faith. Sleeth is a former Emergency Room physician and atheist, whose own trials and traumas led him to pick up a Bible. There, he says, he met Jesus and saw the presence of trees and things that grow mingled throughout the Scripture’s narrative of redemption. From the Garden of Eden’s Tree of Life and the fruit of the tree responsible for man’s fall from Grace, to the tree used for Jesus’s crucifixion, and to Revelation when the Tree of Life is present again at the end of time and the redemption of the world. Trees figure prominently in the Christian theology. In his book, “Reforesting Faith: What Trees Teach Us About the Nature of God and His Love for Us”, Sleeth is opening up a new understanding of how God has directed his followers to be good stewards of nature as a way to draw closer to him and all of creation.
