Sitting in my backyard on a gorgeous autumn afternoon, I reached down and picked up a handful of leaves from the ground. As the brown and yellow leaves crackled in my hands, I remembered days of my childhood. I would rake a pile of autumn leaves and carve out a hole in the center. I would then sit there, delightfully surrounded by the leaves as I read book after book. Days seemed simple then, and my memory of reading in the leaves is amazingly vivid. As I lay in the pile of leaves consuming my books, my heart would leap as my imagination ran wild with all the possibilities of life.
Now a grown adult, I was tempted to smell the crackling autumn leaves in my hand. Knowing that our sense of smell is greatly related to memory, I took time to hold those leaves close to my face and breathe deeply. Ah . . . the comfort of childhood days came rushing back.
What amazed me was the constancy of the smell of the autumn leaves. Though my childhood reading in the fallen leaves occurred decades earlier, the scent of those leaves is exactly the same. I know not much of the biology and chemistry behind dying leaves, but I know this: they smell the same today as they did then.
Much else has changed in the decades between my experiences, but the scent of autumn is constant. God promised in Genesis 8:22 (NASB), “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”
The changing of seasons and all the accompanying details continue on unhindered because God is a God of constancy.
He is a Savior on whom we can fully rely. The God who said, “Let the earth bring forth vegetation, plants, and trees” is a God we can trust. His way of cycling the leaves through life and death – and all the reactions producing the smell of autumn – will continue on as long as the earth endures.
And when earth no longer does endure – when this broken planet has to flee from the presence of a righteous God (Revelation 20:11) – our Savior will still be reliable. He is the one constant in all of life. He will re-make this earth into a home of righteousness for the redeemed.
As the earth and its current regularity remind us of God’s constancy, so the return of Jesus and His re-making of this old earth remind us that only God is unchanging. Though the scent of autumn goes on and on in this life, the God who created autumn will outlast this world.
He alone is the One on whom we can depend to usher in the next world, and carry us there.