Common Coral Tree

One of the beautiful flowers I beheld in New South Wales is despised as a weed by the various state governments. Of the Common Coral Tree, Brisbane City Council writes:

[It] has spread from garden and street plantings and become an environmental weed in the coastal regions of New South Wales…This species does not produce viable seed and only propagates vegetatively, via stem segments and suckers. Logs, branches and even twigs will grow into new plants and they break easily, thereby aiding its spread during floods. The spread of common coral tree is often aided by the dumping of garden waste in bushland areas. It is primarily a problem along creeks and rivers, but will also grow in disturbed natural vegetation and open woodlands.

It is a rather beautiful flowering tree with harmless seeds, yet even its broken twigs can sprout and become a new tree. To an ignorant foreigner, its flower is most pretty; to the informed Australian, it is a diffusion of menace to the native wildlife of which that country is so proud. Sin, too, often appears attractive to the ill-informed and it propagates and proliferates from the tiniest twigs and splinters. This is the point that Paul seems to be making in the book of Romans. Sin and death sprang from one man and his one rebellious act of fruit consumption:

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned— (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law. Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come. (5:12-14, New King James Version).

Yet a few verses later, he describes the wonderful remedy:

For if by the one man’s offense death reigned through the one, much more those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life through the One, Jesus Christ. (v17)