Eve, Mary and their Men - an Easter Meditation.

Back in Genesis 3, The first man, Adam a man made from the dirt of the ground, rebelled against God.

The man didn't physically die, but he spiritually did. For that rebellion he was judged dead even as he lived.

Spiritually speaking, the woman, Eve  - the mother of the living, was now a widow with nothing to look forward to but pain, bereft of her former husband, standing alone in the garden.

Fast forward to resurrection morning, and we pick up the scene almost as if we had never left the garden of Eden. The woman comes to the garden to mourn the man who has gone the way of all flesh - to judgement and death, yet when she gets there, she doesn't find him where she expects him. She finds him alive.

This is a wholly different kind of man - the true man - Jesus Christ. He steps in where Adam left off. He is alive, not dead. He is potent, not impotent.

The Old Testament church, symbolically a 4000 year old widow, is to marry again - not to the man of dust, but to the man from Heaven.

The book of Ruth symbolically tells this story too...