HOW ABOUT THEM APPLES?

 

  Apple season made me hungry in the 1990s. I then often worked in Ellijay, Georgia, on carpet-dyeing projects at “Courier” (part of Blue Ridge Carpet Mills that closed in 2011). While in Ellijay, I bought tasty apples and fried apple pies.

This year celebrates the 50th year of the Georgia Apple Festival (Oct. 9-10 and 16-17, 2021). 

Most Georgia apples are grown in the north Georgia mountains. Ellijay, in Gilmer County, is the state’s apple capital. Its apple season can extend from July through December. An estimated 360,000 apple-bearing trees grow in Georgia, sources say. 

I like Fuji apples. Granny Smiths are too tart for me.

“I wouldn’t want to be eating Granny Smiths just to be eating them,” Barbara, my wife, says. “They make good pies, though.”  

In 1900, there were about 14,000 varieties of apples in the U.S. “By the late 1990s, U.S. commercial orchards grew fewer than 100 apple varieties,” Eric J. Wallace notes. About 11,000 varieties of apples have become extinct, he says. 

As people become less attached to the natural world, their sensitivity to God can suffer. 

St. Paul said that the natural world reveals to us that God exists. Paul wrote, “For the invisible things of him [God] from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” (Romans 1:20 KJV).The English Standard Version (ESV) translates that this way:

“For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”

Psalm 19:1-3 (ESV) says that God is seen in his created world:

“The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words, whose voice is not heard.”

The Greenville News is delivered to our house. Barbara recently said she “saw” me in the “funny papers” (the comic strips). Shoe is a strip about a crew of newspaper folk depicted as birds. Professor Cosmo Fishhawk is an osprey who wears glasses and sports a tuft of white hair on the back of his head. He sits at his computer and writes for a newspaper, the Treetops Tattler.  

In one strip, Cosmo grows tired of working at his computer and says he needs to get away from “the screen” for a while. In the next panel, you see him sitting in front of his TV. Barbara has seen me do the same thing — go from the computer screen to the TV screen. 

Ms. Tish Harrison Warren, writing in Christianity Today, says, “I spend my days talking to colleagues on screens. I eat food that appears magically on my table with hands never dirtied in planting or harvesting. … For many of us, bodies seem hardly necessary.”

As we move away from the wonderful natural world that God created (Genesis 1-3), we become less aware of the evidence for God’s existence. 

Scott Turpin wrote about Bertrand Russell, the famous English atheist philosopher. When asked what he would say after death if God asked why he had not believed in him, Russell said, “Not enough evidence, God, not enough evidence.”

“While Russell believed he could charge God with not providing enough evidence for his existence, this goes against the apostle Paul’s argument that human beings already know God exists through his revelation in creation, so no one has an excuse,” Turpin says. “This includes all people living in all places and all times.”

Turpin says that idolatry (whatever replaces God) is the result of suppressing God’s general revelation in creation, but it is only God’s special revelation through the Gospel that turns people from idolatry to trust in the living and true God.”    

“ … [O]ur gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. … and … you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God” (1 Thessalonians 1:5-9).