The Garden of God | Genesis 2:4-17
Brian Hedges | May 22, 2016
I wonder if you have ever felt what we might call an acute homesickness. Have you ever been really deeply homesick? Have you ever longed to be back, maybe, to where you grew up, your upbringing?
My own experience is kind of unique. I grew up on a farm in Texas; it was actually a little community called Tokio, Texas, so when people used to ask me, “Where are you from?” I’d say, “I’m from Tokio,” and I’d wait for the eyebrows to rise and I’d say, “Tokio, Texas.” It’s about as opposite to Tokyo, Japan as you can imagine. There was not even a stoplight in this little community.
We grew up on this farm, and I had so many wonderful memories of growing up there with my brothers; there were horses, there were cattle. We were just kind of free to roam the area, and it was a really wonderful childhood.
When I left home, I was nineteen years old when I moved out, and I had just a brief two-day visit. Leaving in July, I came back for a brief two-day visit in August, and then, before Christmas break, my parents moved. My dad was a pastor, and he had been pastoring a church, and they had been looking for a house. They found a house in those months and they moved, and so I never went back to the place where I grew up. I visited one time, but never went back inside. Never, when I visit my parents, has it felt like home. It’s just never felt like home to go visit my parents, my family, again, and there’s kind of a wistful, nostalgic homesickness when I think about that farm in Tokio, Texas. Now, there was a number of years ago when Holly and I together went out to visit, just to see the place, and it wasn’t as great as I remembered. I imagine that if my parents still lived there, it wouldn’t be as great as I remember it.
But there’s something about that feeling that we all have of homesickness, of longing to go back. It’s really an index to our situation. We experience something like a cosmic homesickness.
J.R.R. Tolkien, the great author of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, in one of his letters said these words: “We all long for Eden, and we’re constantly glimpsing. Our whole nature, at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of exile.” Our nature is soaked with the sense of exile. It’s cosmic homesickness . . . longing for Eden. Of course, that’s a reference to the Garden of Eden, which is described for us in Genesis chapter two, which is where we’re going to study this morning, if you want to turn there in your Bibles.
The portrait of the man in the garden in Genesis 2 sets the stage for the rest of the Bible. It sets the stage for man’s temptation and fall into sin in Genesis 3, for God’s judgment on sin, and then for God’s rescue plan to restore us to our true home.
Genesis 2 gives us a portrait. It gives us a portrait of what we were made for, it gives us a portrait of what we have lost, and it gives us a portrait of what God promises to restore us to through new creation in Jesus Christ.
So we’re going to look at this passage together this morning, Genesis 2:4-17:
“These are the generations of the heavens and the earth, when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. When no bush of the field was set in the land, and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground—then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is the Gihon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
This is God’s Word.
Now, just a couple of introductory comments before I launch into the main point of the text. You might notice in verse four this phrase, “These are the generations of the heavens and the earth, when they were created.” That’s an important phrase to note just in understanding the structure of the book of Genesis.
This is the beginning of a new section, and that phrase, “These are the generations,” is a key phrase in Genesis that appears, I think, eleven times, marking off different sections of the book. So if you want a good way for outlining, just go circle every time you find that phrase, “These are the generations of…” So, 1:1 through 2:3 is really something of a prologue to the book of Genesis, and then the first major section begins here in Genesis 2:4.
You might also have noticed that the name of God here in chapter two is slightly different than you have in chapter one. In chapter one we read about God who is Elohim, God creating the heavens and the earth. But here in chapter two the phrase is “the Lord God”, or Yahweh Elohim. This is God’s covenant name. It’s a name that’s used nineteen times in Genesis chapters two and three.
Some have viewed this as a reason to believe that Genesis is a composite document made up of multiple sources. This is the old JEDP theory, or the documentary hypothesis. If you don’t know about it, don’t worry about it. If you know about it and you’ve wondered what I think, I think that there are better ways of understanding Genesis than the documentary hypothesis, and that a better question to ask -- rather than, “What sources did all this come from?” -- we’re on better grounds to ask, “What are the literary and the theological reasons that the author or the editor of Genesis had for these kinds of changes?”
Victor Hamilton in his commentary makes the observation, that in Genesis chapter one the emphasis is on creation via the majestic God who speaks and it is done. So the more generic name for God, Elohim, is used, and that fits the emphasis of Genesis chapter one. But in Genesis chapter two the emphasis is more personal, and here the context is not the universe but a garden, and the picture of man here is not of one with authority but of one under authority, a vassal in a covenant relationship, and so this covenant name of God is used, “the Lord God.”
But the main focus of this passage, really the big idea of this passage, is this portrait of the man in the garden under the authority of God. I’ve quoted many times the definition of the Kingdom of God by Graham Goldsworthy, from his book Gospel and Kingdom. Goldsworthy, who is an Australian biblical theologian, defines the Kingdom of God in this way: “God’s Kingdom is God’s people, in God’s place, under God’s rule.” “God’s people, in God’s place, under God’s rule.”
I was wrestling with multiple ideas for outlining this passage, and I finally just landed on that, because it so aptly summarizes what this chapter is about. So I want to use that as our outline this morning. We’re going to look at God’s people, that is, human beings as God created them; we’re going to look at God’s place, the garden of Eden, which is also called in Scripture the garden of Yahweh or the garden of God; and then we’re going to look at God’s rule, that is, how God ruled his people through his Word. So that’s our focus this morning. Let’s take a few minutes to look at each one of these things.
I. God’s People: Humanity
First of all, God’s people. You see this account of the creation of human beings in Genesis 2:5-7. Verses 5-6 are really just kind of describing the circumstances prior to the Lord’s creation of man, when there’s no bush in the field, there’s no small plant in the field that had sprung up, because of two reasons: God had not yet caused it to rain, but there was also not yet a man to work the ground, verse 5 says.
That leads, then, into the reason of God’s creation in verse 7, and again affirmed in verse 15. The Lord created the man with a purpose. Look at verse 7 again. “Then the Lord God formed the man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Then when you get down to verse 15, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and to keep it.”
Now, these verses serve to complement what we’ve already seen in Genesis 1, a couple of weeks ago. We looked at this and we saw how God created man in his image. “In the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” So human beings, in their very nature, are image-bearers of God. But Genesis 2 adds to that picture. It adds to that picture. It complements that picture.
In Genesis 2, we have two actions of God described in relation to the creation of man. “Then the Lord God formed the man of the dust from the ground—” that’s the first action. That word “formed” is an important word. That’s the word in Scripture very closely related to the work of a potter, who takes the clay and he molds the clay; he skillfully molds and shapes the clay to form it into the image that he desires. So here God is portrayed as a skillful artisan who forms the man from the dust of the ground.
There’s an assonance in the Hebrew here where the man and the ground have very similar sounds in the Hebrew language. It’s showing us here the essential nature of man in his physical and material properties. Human beings are born of the dust of the ground; they are made of this stuff called dust. As Hamilton says in his commentary, “Dust is the womb from which man emerges, and we know from 3:19 that dust is the receptacle to which one day he will return. Dust defines the beginning and the end of man’s physical life.”
So God formed the man from the dust of the ground, and then he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and the man became a living creature! So here we have something that’s very personal, this breathing into his nostrils. This is a face-to-face kind of personal interaction. Derek Kidner says, “It’s warmly personal, with the face-to-face intimacy of a kiss and the significance that this was an act of giving as well as of making.” God formed the man and God breathed into the man. He gave him the kiss of life, the breath of life, and man became a living being.
This shows us here the two essential components of man that make up the unity that is a human being. We are material creatures, and yet we are spiritual creatures. We are dust, but we are what an author of a new book, Kyle Strobel, calls in his new book, “Beloved Dust.” We are beloved dust! We are made of the dust, but we have received this inbreathing of life from God, and we live in relationship to God.
So we are material, and we are spiritual. We are God’s representatives as his image-bearers on earth, but we’re also God’s subjects as those who live under his rule and his Word, as here in Genesis chapter two. Then, of course, we are male and female, created in the image of God, something that we will look at in more detail next week as we look at the end of Genesis 2.
So this is the essential nature of human beings. This leads us to make observations about some of the essential characteristics of human beings as they are created in the image of God—human beings as they are this beloved dust.
It shows us the dignity of man. The dignity—raised above the animals. Made of the like stock, but given something more. Given something more: the image of God, the breath of God. Given something more. So there’s a dignity to human beings. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, here’s the basis for human rights, for human freedoms, for all of the necessary work of battling injustice in the world, because every act of injustice is an assault on an image-bearer of God.
Here also we have the basis of human responsibility. We are responsible because we are created with reason and with conscience and with moral capacities, and because we’re created in the image of God and under the rule of God.
But notice also that human beings, in their original creation, were innocent. They were innocent. Here is the man yet without sin. He’s innocent, and that innocence especially gets emphasized at the end of Genesis 2, when the man and the woman are both created and they’re both naked and unashamed. There is no shame. Why? Because of complete innocence. Created in perfection by God.
So here’s God’s people. Here’s God’s people. The initial father, and by the end of Genesis two, the father and mother of the human race.
II. God’s Place: The Garden
But notice that they are placed somewhere. Where is it they’re placed? They’re placed in the garden, in God’s place. Genesis chapter two, you see it in verse eight: “And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the East, and there he put the man whom he had formed.”
Now, it’s interesting how the garden is designated, what it’s called in Scripture. Here it’s called the garden in Eden, which seems to imply that perhaps Eden was a place with a garden in it. Maybe Eden is larger than the garden. But then in verse 15 it’s called the garden of Eden. It’s called that again in Genesis 3:23-24, as well as in the book of Ezekiel, Ezekiel chapter 36. In Genesis 13:10, it’s called the garden of the Lord, that is, the garden of Yahweh, and in Ezekiel 28:13 and 31:8 it’s called the garden of God.
Now why this emphasis in Scripture on the garden being the garden of God, the garden of Yahweh? I think the reason is because it was God’s dwelling place on earth. The garden of Eden was God’s dwelling place on earth; it was the place where the Lord God set something apart on earth, placed the man in the garden, and there would dwell with the man in the garden. In Genesis 3 we read about how the Lord God would come and he would walk in the garden in the cool of the day. He’s coming there to walk, to have fellowship, to commune with the human beings he had made.
In fact, when you look at all of the imagery about the garden of Eden as it’s used here in Genesis 2, and then as it is fleshed out in other places of Scripture, we get certain pictures of this garden.
(1) The garden is, first of all, a temple sanctuary. It’s a temple sanctuary. Scholars have done a lot of work to show that the description of the creation, in many ways, views the creation as something like a cosmic temple, and the antechamber of that temple is the garden in Eden. So it’s like a temple sanctuary.
You could see this when you see how the language of Eden is used in places like the book of Exodus, in Exodus 25-27, and again in 1 Kings 7. In Exodus, you have instructions for the construction of the tabernacle; in 1 Kings the temple, and then also a description of this eschatological temple in Ezekiel 41-47. So you have a river coming out of the temple in Ezekiel 47, just as you have rivers coming out of Eden here in Genesis 2.
You have fruits, of course, in the garden, and all kinds of fruit that’s kind of woven into the tapestries and the garments and so on of the priests in the tabernacle.
You have these precious gems, the gold and the bdellium and the onyx. You might remember that onyx stones were used in the breastplate of the high priest, when that breastplate was constructed, also described in the book of Exodus.
All of these things are kind of building a case here that Eden, the garden of Eden, is to be seen not just as a nice park with beautiful trees and lush vegetation and fruit and all this—of course it is that, but it’s more than that; it has a symbolic meaning. That symbolism is the symbolism of the temple.
So, Old Testament scholar Gordon Wenham says, “The garden of Eden is not viewed by the author of Genesis simply as a piece of Mesopotamian farmland, but as the archetypal sanctuary, that is, a place where God dwells and where man should worship him. Many of the features of the garden may also be found in later sanctuaries, particularly in the tabernacle of Jerusalem temple. These parallels suggest that the garden itself is understood as a sort of sanctuary.” The sanctuary of God, the temple sanctuary of God!
(2) The garden also has significance as a source of life. So you have these statements, beginning in v 10 and really then following through v 14, where a river flows out of the garden, it flows out of Eden to water the garden, and there divides and becomes four rivers.
Now this may be giving us some geographical information about the location of Eden, and of course explorers—for years, there’s these stories of explorers who tried to find Eden. In fact, it’s said that Christopher Columbus, when he first discovered the New World, he thought he was in Asia, and he thought that he had discovered something close to the location of Eden!
Now that’s not the point of the passage here. It’s not so much here to give us geographical information. That may be included, but rivers have great significance in Scripture as being symbolic of life and of God’s provision. We read, for example, about this river in the city of God, in Psalm 46. Indeed, when we get to the end of Scripture, in the final city of God, the New Jerusalem, there’s a river there in that city, this river that brings life. So, Eden is seen here to be a source of life to the rest of the world.
(3) Along with that, it’s something like a capital to the Kingdom of God. God had created the world, but he hadn’t created the world full of lush vegetation everywhere.
The description in verse 5 is something like the description of a desert—“no bush of the field was yet in the land, no small plant of the field had yet sprung up.” It sounds like Texas, right? You look around for miles and miles and there’s almost nothing there! That’s kind of what this description sounds like, and the reason is because no rain, on God’s part, but no man there to cultivate the ground.
Then God creates the man and he puts him in the garden. He tells him that he is to work it and he is to keep it. What is God doing? He’s giving man a vocation, and this is a vocation to extend the Kingdom of God, to turn this wilderness world into a garden.
So, Eden is something like the capital of this Kingdom of God. It’s the beachhead from which man will work. So God gives man great purpose and great significance here by placing him in the garden, in this dwelling-place.
III. God’s Rule: His Word
Well then we get to verses 15-17, where we have God’s rule, that is, God’s purpose and his commandments and his instructions to Adam. God’s people, in God’s place, under God’s rule.
What we see here in these three verses is how God rules by his Word. We can really break this down into three components. We can call this: vocation, permission, and prohibition.
(1) First of all, you have vocation. Look at Genesis 2:15, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden to work it and keep it.” Now I’ve already alluded to this, but these two words are very important, “work and keep”. Some translations may say, “tend and keep”, or “till and keep”.
The word “work” here is actually the Hebrew word for “serve”. It’s the idea of service, and so man here is placed in the garden as the servant of the Lord. His vocation is to serve; he serves the garden and he serves the Lord by tending this garden.
This shows us something of the basic dignity of work. Work is not a result of the Fall. Work is the result of creation. God created us with purpose; he created us with dignity, and part of human dignity is to work, and in our work to seek to extend the Kingdom of God, the reign of God. Hamilton says, “Physical labor is not a consequence of sin. Work enters the picture before sin, and if man had never sinned, he would still be working.”
As we’ll see in Genesis 3, we work now in the sweat of our face. We work against harsh conditions. So all of our problems with work, they result from the Fall, but the essential dignity of work comes from God’s vocation for the human being.
So Adam was to work it, but he was also to keep it. The word “keep” means to “guard”. He was to guard it. He was to be the guardian of the garden. Why did he need to guard it? The reason he needed to guard it is because in chapter 3 there’s an insidious power that will come and disrupt God’s good creation. Adam should have guarded the garden against this power. Instead, he succumbed to it; he became complicit with it. He fell to the temptation of the serpent.
He’s to work it and to keep it, to serve it and to guard it. Here’s the other thing about these words. These two words, when they’re used together in the Old Testament, much of the time, they refer to the vocation of the priests as they would work in the tabernacle. They would serve, and they would keep. So here we see Adam as the priest, the priest king. He’s the original priest king. God’s priest and God’s king on earth, representing the presence of God, mediating the presence of God, the rule of God, the work of God, in the world.
That’s man’s vocation. That’s what God made us for.
(2) Then you see God’s provision and his permission in v 16, where it says, “The Lord God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden.’” Every tree of the garden!
We don’t know how large the garden was, but presumably a large garden, a place that’s lush with all kinds of vegetation and fruit, everything that you could imagine. God created it, he provided it, he gave it to the man and then, of course, to the woman as well.
(3) So, ample provision from God. Any tree you can eat, but there’s this one prohibition. Verse 17: “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
You read that and you might initially be puzzled and kind of think, “Well, that just seems like a problem. Why did God do that?”
I was talking about this not too long ago with someone who’s really wrestling with some deep questions about Scripture and about Christianity, and brought up this story, and said, “This doesn’t look like a good God. It doesn’t look like a good God.” He said, “If I told my kids, ‘You can come in the house, you can play with anything in the house,’ but then I set a jar of M&M’s on the table and said, ‘But you can’t eat from the jar of M&M’s,’ I’m just setting them up for failure.” That’s what it looks like. It looks like God’s just setting them up for failure.
Why is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil there? What does it represent; what does it mean?
I think we have to remember that God had abundantly provided everything they could desire. Everything they could desire is there in the garden, but why is this tree there and what does it represent? What is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?
There have been all kinds of interpretations of it. Some people have thought that this was sexual knowledge, sexual experience. It’s not that, okay? It’s not that. We know that because of the rest of Genesis 2. We’ll see next week, God created the man and the woman together, created them for one another, right? There’s a complementarity there; God created the woman for the man and they were to be joined together, become one flesh, the man and his wife, naked and unashamed. So the tree of the knowledge of good and evil has nothing to do with that.
Others have said it’s comprehensive knowledge. If they were to eat this tree it would make them omniscient, like God. Well, I don’t think that works either, because they did eat the tree, and they did not become omniscient.
There are other views that have been suggested as well. The one that makes most sense to me—and there are exegetical reasons for this that I won’t go into—but the one that makes most sense to me is that the tree of the knowledge of good and evil represented something like moral autonomy. That is, the right to decide for oneself what is good and evil, the knowledge of good and evil, the ability to decide for oneself what is right, what is wrong, rather than relying on the word of the Lord God.
So Victor Hamilton says, “What is forbidden to man is the power to decide for himself what is in his best interest and what is not. This is a decision God has not delegated to the earthling.”
Moral autonomy—the right to decide for oneself. Derek Kidner agrees: “As it stood, prohibited, it represented the alternative to discipleship: to be self-made, wresting one’s knowledge, satisfactions, and values from the created world in defiance of the Creator.”
Why is it here? Why is the tree there? I think at least one reason for it is because God seems to have desired human beings who would willingly and freely and lovingly obey him and trust him and live in relationship to him, submitting to his Word. It wasn’t that God was putting an irresistible temptation, like a jar of M&M’s on the table, and saying, “Just don’t have that.”
It wasn’t that. This tree represented something. It represented man’s choice to either obey or to disobey, to live in fellowship with God or to relinquish that fellowship. To live as a creature or to try to be God. So that’s why it’s there.
Doesn’t that have incredible implications for us in our day? I mean, we live in an age where moral autonomy seems to be the primary value! The right to choose for myself how I will live! We’re all infected with that more than we think. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like people telling me what to do. I don’t like it. That’s a bad thing that I don’t like it. It means that there’s an independence in me, there’s a pride in me, that resists submitting to someone else, that wants to defy authority, and that’s in you as well, in some degree. It’s really built on a lie. It’s built on a lie that we are better judges of what is good for us than God is.
Kent Hughes says, “‘I Did It My Way’”—remember that old Sinatra song, “I Did It My Way”?—“is an autonomous dirge of death.” That’s what it leads to. To insist on defining for myself how I will live, it leads to death. Isn’t that what God says? Verse 17: “In the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” That’s what happens in chapter 3.
So here we see what we were made for. We’re made to be God’s people, in God’s place, living under God’s rule, and here we see what we’ve lost. What have we lost? We’ve lost the garden. We’ve lost Paradise. We’ve lost our innocence. We’ve lost the Kingdom of God; we’ve lost the presence of God! We’ve been banished, exiled from the garden!
We’re outside, now, looking in, and so we have cosmic homesickness. There’s something in us that wants things to be different than they are. We’ve lost goodness, we’ve lost truth, we’ve lost beauty, we’ve lost justice, the world is not the way it was meant to be.
C.S. Lewis describes this when he talks about how we long “to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we’ve always seen from the outside...to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become a part of it.” We long for the tree of life. We long for the river of God’s sustaining grace and blessing, pleasure and satisfaction. And that’s what we’ve lost.
This also shows us what God is restoring to us. When you get into the book of Ezekiel there’s some really interesting things. The book begins with Ezekiel seeing the glory of God leave the temple, but by the end of the book he’s starting to have other visions, and he has a really interesting vision in Ezekiel 47. I’m not going to read it all, but I’ll just kind of summarize it to you.
He’s brought to the door of the temple and he looks inside, and he sees water seeping through the threshold of the temple towards this east, this water that’s coming out. It’s just a trickle at first, but he begins to walk around the temple, and he starts measuring, and the further he gets the deeper the water gets.
So he gets a thousand cubits away from the temple and the water’s ankle deep, and then he goes another thousand more and it’s knee deep, and then he goes a little bit further and it’s waist deep, and he eventually gets to the place where this water has become a surging river, and it’s so deep that you can only swim in it and nobody can pass through it.
Then he looks and this water is going out, it’s flowing out, and it’s flowing out into the Dead Sea. The amazing thing is it’s making the Dead Sea, which is a salt sea, it’s turning it into fresh water. The fish are alive and trees are blooming on the branches and the leaves of the tree are bringing healing. It’s a wonderful vision! What is it? It’s the restoration of Eden!
Then you get to the New Testament, and Jesus talks about those, if they will believe in him, out of their hearts will flow rivers of living water. And then you get to Revelation 22:1-2, and I will read these verses: “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb, through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.”
What is this? It’s the life-giving river of God! The tree of life—it’s the presence of God. You know what it is? It’s the reality of the Kingdom of God reestablished on earth. John had already said it: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man.”
That’s what the story is about! We’ve been banished from the garden, we’ve lost the Kingdom, and the whole story of redemption is about how God is bringing us back. And how does he do it? How does he do it?
The crux of the story takes place in another garden, when another man is also faced with a temptation, but rather than succumbing to that temptation, he follows the will of God. He follows the Word of God all the way to another tree, and that tree becomes for him a tree of death. Of course, I’m talking about Jesus on the cross.
George Herbert, in a stanza of his great poem “The Sacrifice”, written in the voice of Jesus, says,
“Oh, all ye who pass by, behold and see:
Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;
The tree of life to all, but only me
Was ever grief like mine?”
You see, Jesus had to eat from the tree of death so that you and I could eat from the tree of life.
The good news of the gospel is that Jesus defeated the great enemy of sin and death, and he did it in our place. He did it as a new Adam so that he could bring about a new humanity, a new creation, and could lead us in his train into the Kingdom of God. What’s he doing? He’s bringing us back to the garden! He’s bringing us back to Eden. Paradise will be regained.
Let’s pray.
This is, Father, the greatest story ever told. This drama captures our hearts, because it taps into this deepest part of us, this cosmic homesickness, this longing to be reunited with ultimate truth and goodness and beauty, to be reunited with you, our God. To be restored to your presence.
Every nostalgic yearning, every pang of conscience, every stab of grief at the sorrow and the injustice and the suffering and the death of this world is a reminder to us that things are not the way they’re supposed to be, but the empty tomb of Jesus shows us that a change is underway, that the Kingdom of God has been established once again on earth, that there’s a beach-head.
The Kingdom of God, the dwelling-place of God will once again be with human beings. We will be restored to your divine image, restored to your presence, and restored to a true hope.
So Father, this morning we embrace this truth, we embrace this story. I pray for any this morning, perhaps some who are, for the first time, beginning to understand this story but never really embraced it, they never really found their place in it. I pray that they would today. That they would say “yes” to the Lord Jesus.
I pray that as we now move into another part of our worship and we celebrate the Table together, that we would do so as those who are co-heirs of the Kingdom of God, those who are fellow participants with Christ, the new Adam, who has opened this new and living way into your presence.
So draw near to us now as we take the table, we pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Brian G. Hedges
