Editorial July 13, 1974 Issue

To Each His Own Fig Tree

Naomi Price

Man, in reality, lives in a good, well-ordered, spiritual universe. He is God's beloved child. The divine Father plentifully supplies all that He creates with everything needed. He ensures that every one of His sons and daughters lives peacefully in an individually prepared place, fulfilling a unique, God-assigned purpose. This is the teaching of the Scriptures and the actual spiritual truth of being that everyone can prove.

One of the Old Testament writers has given us a proverbial expression for the demonstration of such dignity and abundance in human life. Looking back idealistically at his country's brief period of union and peace under Solomon in the tenth century B.C., he writes, "Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree."^{I Kings 4:25;}

Today, this idea that peace and plenty are available to everyone may be hard to accept. In the Sahelian region of West Africa, for instance, where millions of people are facing famine conditions as the result of a six-year drought, God's care may well seem remote. In Ethiopia and other African areas where chronic food shortages very evidently exist, and blight has attacked even the date palms in the desert so that they no longer bear fruit, it is not easy to maintain that the divine law of supply is actually in operation right there, and that all the people are able to enjoy the peace, place, and plenty that it is God's will for each one to have.

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