10 June 2024
A question came up during our weekly Skype chat.
When discussing the narrative of the Fall, we aren't given much except parables and symbolism. The honest truth is that we have very few details, and what we do have does not lend itself to easy discussion in concrete terms.
There is some literature outside the Bible that also speculates. We cannot treat those works as definitive by any means; they are mythology -- some truth, but embellished a bit. We are left to speculate for ourselves, and my personal understanding does not always agree with others. But I'll share what I have.
Eden was God's private garden. What relationship it had to the world we live in today is hard to assess. I believe we can definitively say that it was not in the world we have today; I don't believe you can search out the location geographically. But at the same time, I'm pretty sure the Garden was a place of mortal creatures. The exception is that the beings God appointed to tend His Garden were not mortal at that time. Their bodies were qualitatively different from ours today, having access to "the Tree of Life".
We don't have that access; we die and our bodies rot. I'm convinced that Jesus' resurrection body is pretty much the same as what Adam and Eve had in the Garden. It was functional in time and space, but not bound by them. Something about the time/space continuum is confining in ways that didn't restrict Adam and Eve, yet they no doubt dealt with things that did exist in that continuum.
Please don't forget what we learned about those terms (time and space) from Pageau. The inherent conflict between those two is part of the punitive nature of having both Lucifer and us locked here. We are forced to endure that conflict, and cannot escape their presence and power over us.
This was not designed for us. It was designed for Lucifer; it is his prison. He doesn't have to wear a fleshly body, but he's here. He is compelled to endure the strictures of time and space along with all the creatures of the Garden. It's no mystery how he got in the Garden; he was there and decided to tempt Adam and Eve to come under his dominion. Doing so cost them their detachment from time and space. Instead of ordering it from outside, they were under it.
There is some sense in which they "left the Garden" in the Hebrew symbolism of Genesis 3. Thus, we are all now outside of the Garden. At the same time, there is a continuation of the Garden creatures here, but without the orderliness of God's Garden. We don't have access to the Tree of Life any more.
Along with that we are forced to endure the limits of flesh, the lack of thinking on a higher plane, not even able to understand it. This is why it's all so fuzzy and difficult to nail down in concrete terms: It exceeds those terms. Yet, those terms are all we know. It's impossible to reconcile how we can be in the same kind of world as the Garden of Eden, yet for us it is nothing like Eden.
Our existence is rather like an uncultivated wilderness just outside of Eden.
Comments
Jay DiNitto
"I’m convinced that Jesus' resurrection body is pretty much the same as what Adam and Eve had in the Garden."
I have always though this as well. I may have heard or read it somewhere in the past, but it apparently has stuck with me. It's almost as if He were demonstrating what we were and possibly what we could be in later times.
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