English Oak

The English Oak tree is an iconic national symbol. Its wood is hard yet beautiful; its trees grow tall and broad. One specimen, the Majesty Oak, in Kent, is thought to be 600 years ago and has a trunk girth of forty feet. Little wonder the modern Conservative Party elected to use the oak as its symbol from 2006. Readers may judge for themselves in the oak’s stability, vintage and security is an appropriate Tory metaphor.

In republican Rome, any citizen who saved another’s life by killing an enemy, was awarded a wreath made of oak leaves, called the civic crown. Pliny explained:

The receiver of the wreath may wear it for the rest of his life; when he appears at the games it is the custom for even the senate always to rise at his entrance, and he has the right to sit next to the senators; and he himself and his father and his paternal grandfather are exempt from all public duties.

I wonder if the reward the Lord Jesus offers to His people will take into account the boldness with which they shared the gospel with the lost and dying. In Jude 23, saving others is likened to ‘snatching them out of the fire’. Evangelism is not just talking to people about spiritual truth, it is a rescue mission. 

Rescue the perishing,
Care for the dying,
Snatch them in pity from sin and the grave;
Weep o’er the erring one, lift up the fallen,
Tell them of Jesus the mighty to save.

-FC