Perfection In Paradise Series

“God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’

So, God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

“And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’ And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the heavens and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”

U

sually, my daily schedule is to resume working on messages and pursuing some light reading for a few hours following our evening meal. Sometime later in the evening, I will wander upstairs to sit for a brief while with my wife as she watches television. She is often watching a show, and I often come in at the middle of whatever she is watching. She will pause the show and briefly explain what is going on. It is a considerate gesture on her part as she wants me to understand the story line.

Without knowledge of where a story begins, we are seldom able to make sense of the events described. Worse still is the possibility that we will find ourselves moving toward adopting an unwarranted conclusion if we don’t know how the story began. Beyond that, if we don’t understand who the characters are and how they arrived where we meet them, the conclusion of the story won’t necessarily make sense. That is certainly true when we are asking how we arrived at the place we now find ourselves as a race. If we could but understand how we got here, perhaps we would not be inclined to make some of the disastrous choices we make as a society. At least, that seems to make sense to most of us.

There is an unrequited longing for what was once ours as a race created by God’s hand. None of us has ever seen Eden, though occasionally researchers have postulated a vague reference to the location of such a Garden. For all that, we Christians hold to the belief that there was once a paradise in which death did not exist, and in which all nature existed in harmony. Though we have never seen that paradise, there is within the human heart a longing for such a paradise to again be present on the earth. Even those who are lords of chaos sell their dark acts as necessary actions meant to achieve paradise.

It seems that even a casual exploration of the origin accounts found among all cultures have stories that speak of a pleasant location where the first humans lived. That perfect environment was ruined by man’s own action in violation of the Creator’s command. We are familiar with the biblical account of the creation and how our first parents plunged the entire creation into ruin. We will consider the ruin and devastation visited on creation in future messages, but we want to look back to what was so that we can anticipate what shall be. Though we are trapped in this present condition, for all who walk with the Saviour, we know what He has promised shall shortly be revealed. And what He has planned will be an eternal paradise. All who enter that which Christ is preparing for His own will be changed so that they can enjoy that eternal bliss.

THE CREATION — Let’s go back in our minds, and in the Word of God, to the account of the Creation. The Bible begins with the statement, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day” [GENESIS 1:1-5].