What is Red Tree?
The Christian story is about God painting a tree red with his own blood at the death of Jesus. Everything changes in light of this news. Our blind eyes are given sight, our deaf ears are told to listen, our self-seriousness is replaced with belly-laughing self-forgetfulness, our lame legs are restored and begin to dance, our dead souls are brought to life, and our religious programming is brought to an end. By his wounds we are vivified.
Red Tree is a platform for sharing observations on how life, Scripture, and the gospel intersect by providing resources to illuminate the big story of the Bible and our everyday lives in light of the always better news of the grace of God.
More to the Story
We believe that in Christ all things hold together (Col 1:17), and that in Christ all things are clarified (at least as much as they can be in this life). And “all things” means all things — it includes the Bible, our daily experiences, good stories, and human relationships.
But as we dig deeper into the mine of Christ, we realize that the pieces of gold around us have a particular luster to them. The gold isn’t simply Jesus himself, but more specifically his sufferings which express the Father’s love to us at the highest level.
Digging deeper still, we see that this grace of God is contrasted with an alternate way of thinking, that the Bible is a tale of two covenants, not one. The Apostle Paul’s use of the Old Testament in Galatians 4 is a microcosm of this idea. Referring to Hagar and Sarah, he says, “These women are two covenants,” one representing moral effort and one representing the promise of God’s grace. Paul’s comfort level with allegory and symbolism is foreign to a lot of modern interpretive theory, but biblical literacy is inextricably connected to it, so a recovery is needed. We hope to be another voice in that recovery.
Red Tree is both an inward-looking and an outward-looking project. We aim to be a resource for Christians who are wanting to know how to read their Bibles better and to see the law/grace paradigm play out in the world around them, and we also want to be accessible to those who haven’t yet met Jesus.