“The Lord God planted an orchard in the east, in Eden; and there he placed the man he had formed.” (Gen. 2:8)
The basecamp at the foot of the towering mountain of God’s dealing with humans is set in Eden. Much like the theme of the Kingdom of God, few themes in Scripture receive more attention and are more divergently interpreted. For our purposes here, we are looking to uncover just how the thread of Eden ties into the larger story of the Kingdom of God, and how it can help us see a more realized image of that final vision. At the heart of the Eden narrative is the grace of God—and while the “Fall” tells us much about our human nature, it has infinitely more to do with the character of God. As we approach this root narrative in Scripture, we must fight the modern impulse to man the principal actor in order to get an accurate reading. This may not be the way we are accustomed to approaching the story of Eden, but it was certainly the intention of the writer of Genesis, as we will see.
Eden as True Myth
For many modern readers of the Old Testament, there is something like a pang of embarrassment at the fairytale qualities of Genesis. To our twenty-first century ears, there is a strong connotation to the word “myth” as synonymous with “untrue”. It’s time we admit that this understanding of “myth” as something inherently divorced from “truth” is an invention of enlightenment era thinking and not the mind of the divine Word. Today, we’ve skewed the word “myth” much like we’ve skewed the word “mystery”, which I explained in chapter 5. As Christians we should not shy from the word “myth”, only its connotations as something untrue to reality. For the purposes of our continued study of the Word of God, here is a definition of what I will mean by “myth”: a heavily image-based narrative rendering of a mysterious (i.e. beyond inborn human rational faculties see ch. 5) truth for the purpose of conforming the mind and heart to reality.
With this definition in mind, it’s evident why the Bible begins with a myth. The origins of the world we see did not spring from an abstract other. The act of creation—especially the creation of man—was not an impersonal, sanitary process which can be known outside of a relational context. According to Scripture, the birth of history is intimately personal—forged in love between a fatherly God and His children in a garden of perfect union and harmony. It should not surprise us that Scripture’s imagery of perfect harmony and unity with God does not segregate the spiritual and the physical. It also shouldn’t surprise us that Genesis doesn’t put us through exhaustive metaphysics in order to explain how God, Who is spirit, could plant a garden or walk in the cool of the day (Gen. 3:8). In fact, much of what we debate and wrestle about in Genesis today—the origin of man, the timeline of creation, etc.— is not satisfactorily explained. Instead of technical or scientific precision, we’re given a highly relational, even mythopoetic story rendering of creation. A sizable swath of modern Christians find it nearly impossible to permit this reading and still hold the meaning of the text as true, blushing with embarrassment at the talking serpent the woman being created from a rib from Adam’s side. We can write-off the first chapters of Genesis as “myth”, keeping instep with our modern mechanical methods, or we can just give up critical evaluation all together and say Genesis is a text-book of scientific fact. If you’re afraid these are the only two options for reading mythic passages of Scripture, fear not. There is a time-honored reading of these passages which allows for the truth of the text to flow freely, as it was intended—both from the mythical and the literal.
As scholar Nahum Sarna said, “the more one attempts to focus on modern scientific questions reading these texts, the less likely one will be to hear their theological intent” (Sarna Understanding Genesis, 2–3) The writer of Genesis didn’t have scientific trivia about six-day creation in mind when he was inspired to write. Rather, using the best and most gilded literary techniques of his day, he set out to reveal the character of YHWH, the tender mother and guiding father of humankind. I believe what was on the writer’s mind was closer to what C.S. Lewis has called, “true myth”. Eden is a prophetic myth told by God, far removed from the kinds of myths conjured up by Egyptian, Assyrian, or Babylonian writers—we know that these were without God, drawing at best on their own reason and imagination, worse on their drive for political power, and worst of all on the national spirits (elohim) who opposed the rule of YHWH God. The Hebrew creation account borrowed from these contemporary creation myths and develops on them, reorienting and sanctifying them to reveal YHWH God. God’s creation of the world, the Fall in the garden, and even the Kingdom itself are all undoubtedly true, but they are also undoubtedly myth. They are mysterious—God’s rendering of incomprehensible realities into humanly comprehensible stories. They are themselves Torah (instruction), having more to do with teaching people how to live in light of the order of the world, rather than teaching people exactly how the world was made. God knows that our minds naturally absorb stories better than longhand exposition—think of Jesus’ parables for instance—and stories have the unique advantage of shaming scholars and the worldly wise only to be grasped by the child and the child-like (Prov. 21:30; Matt. 11:25; 1 Cor. 1:27).
So what does the Eden account tell us, through story or myth, which we would have lost in expository teaching? First of all, like all stories and myths, it is written within a context of other stories and myths—and where the Biblical story diverges from the other common myths is where both scholars and its original hearers would listen most closely. There are two points of divergence from other ANE creation myths which I want to focus on here, namely: 1.) God Himself as the sovereign King of the universe, and 2.) the average human as being a royal subordinate of God the King.
God the King
It can be challenging for us today to fully grasp the weight of what royal language is getting at in Scripture. For the ancient Israelite, the word “King” came with a thousand converging thoughts and meanings—with smells of incense, gilded halls, music, feasting, and all that lent meaning to words like “glory” and “splendor”. Unfortunately, over the past few centuries in the west the word “king” has become synonymous with “tyrant”—even the word “father” has tragically begun to lose its potency in the west.
In the ANE context, the concept of “king” was inseparable from the concept of the divine, much the same way a priest might be considered a heavenly conduit. In cases, such as pharaoh, the king himself was considered a deity, while in Babylonian and Assyrian thought the king the hand of God. In each case, the human king was the supreme authority to the nation. This was not the case in Israel’s context, something powerfully exemplified in the Hebrew creation story. “Genesis 1:1–2:4 contains several implicit metaphors regarding God, each with its own theological nuance. The metaphor of God as King lies behind those instances where creation is described as occurring through God’s word of command (1:3, 6, 9, 11, 14, 24)….God’s command is sufficiently powerful in itself to produce its intended results, even if no delegated subordinates exist to carry out the divine command”. This unique quality of YHWH is a crucial difference between Him and the other gods which surrounded Israel. God is sovereign, meaning He does not need subordinates to do His will. God is not just sitting up in His executive office calling the shots over the intercom. He has the power and ability to will and to do what He desires.
This does not nullify the fact that God does in fact create subordinates, and does seriously intend for them to do His will. This point of God’s character is not to make us question our position as agents of God, but to question the claims of other Gods and rulers who claim themselves to be king and ruler of all. Whereas other gods and kings rise from one place and fade into another, YHWH has no beginning or end. In short, Genesis sets a very high bar for what it means to be a king.
In Genesis we see God acting in an administrative capacity, allocating the categories and subcategories of nature based on “kinds” and symmetry—things we see reflected and re-reflected on throughout the Hebrew canon. In many ways, through creation we see God commanding the construction of a cosmic palace, a sacred and ordered space fit for a king. We see this in the overwhelmingly aesthetic language of Genesis 1–2, as God does not only make a functional palace, like some kind of municipal city hall, but He makes a glorious palace, weaving His own beauty into the fabric of every tapestry and into the vault of every ceiling, declaring it to be, much like Himself, “good”.
The Royal Family of God
In Mesopotamian cosmogonies human beings are invariable slaves created to maintain the universe for the gods, who are idle by vocation. When Mesopotamian accounts include a king, he is created separately in order to oversee the human race’s service to the gods….Genesis 1 portrays the man (who with the woman stands for the race) as a king, and the human task as far broader than temple maintenance. The God of Genesis does not require human servants in the manner of other gods; the human race consequently has a different relation to work and to the world. (Clifford, Creation Accounts, 143).
The creation of humankind is one of the most wild deviations from contemporary ANE creation stories. Basically, in the ANE the king was the only human made “in the image of God”, being himself the representative of the gods for the earth. In the Hebrew story, this paradigm is flipped upside-down. Now Adam (lit. Hebrew for “Mankind”) is a kind of ethnarch, or regional ruler. A familiar parallel might be the passage in 2 Corinthians 5:20, where Paul is reminding the Corinthian church that they “are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us” (2 Cor. 5:20). Paul writes this in the perspective of God’s renewing creation through Jesus, and that in this new creation the followers of Jesus are like Adam and Eve were in the first days, the royal representatives of God’s will on earth. However, doesn’t this sound like humans are just servants or slaves of God, much like the ANE stories? This is another fascinating point to be made about the Genesis story.
There is a curious relationship, even in the earliest pages of the Old Testament, between royal rulership and humble servanthood. While Adam and Eve are servants of the Lord, they are also made kings and queens of the earth, themselves multiplying and subduing it—by which we shouldn’t read a violent or conquering subding, but an ordering, much the same way God subdued the sea by creating land, for example. Thus, rather than mankind being made to be subservient to a human god-king on earth, man himself is made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27).
This Imago Dei language has been tossed around liberally among Christians throughout history, having been made out to represent things like: human rationality, free will, emotions, or vaguely the “spiritual element” in humanity, to name a few. Bluntly put, while you might see some of these attributes reflected in Scripture, none of these are what the Bible means when it speaks of humans as made in the image of God. The image of God, much like the divine council, has more to do with the idea of delegated authority in a greater hierarchy.
Put on your imagination caps for a moment. Imagine yourself in a small rural village in ancient times. It can be 1000 BC or 1000 AD, in ancient Europe or ancient Asia, it doesn’t matter. What do you think you’d see if you walked into the town square? You guessed it, likely a statue of your nation’s ruler. It could be a conqueror or a regional governor, the point is the ruler of your land has set his image in the land. He may not be physically present in your little village, but his image, or authority, is. Blow this up to a cosmic level. God is the supreme ruler of creation, after all He made it, and He has set His image in the land—His mark of rule and authority over creation in individual human beings. This is not a privilege reserved for rulers, a certain gender, or even a certain race, it is given to everyone with human DNA.
“We are created to image God, to be his imagers. It is what we are by definition. The image is not an ability we have, but a status. We are God’s representatives on earth. To be human is to image God” (Michael Heiser p. 43). While this might bother some people today, it was an absolute abomination to ancient civilizations who held no one but their king was a manifestation of the gods’ authority on earth. The implication that all human beings, including women, have the God-given status as co-ruler of creation was deeply subversive to the ancient mind.
Moreover, God sets his imagers in a garden, not just to enjoy the fruit of God’s labor, but to work it, eventually to actually expand it into the whole world (Gen. 1:15, 28). Evidently the garden was not that big at first, and the rest of the earth needed people to tame its vast tracts of wilderness. But why couldn’t God have just created nature in such a way that it tended to itself? We could also ask at this point the glaring question, why would God create an assembly of other Gods, or establish a priesthood, or dare we ask why would God send His Son to die for our sins? This points us back to what we established at the end of the last chapter: God delegates authority—not because He has to, but He chooses to. This is a core principle in both Old and New Testaments, and it is essential for grasping the good news of the Kingdom of God, both in its biblical context and for us today. God has intentionally arranged creation to require a functioning chain of command, including divine agents, humans, and the natural world.
In addition to adopting and reshaping a whole library of cultural imagery from Israel’s ANE neighbors, the Eden account in Genesis sets in motion a thread of allusions and references found in nearly every book of the Bible. Scripture is replete with references to trees and high places at moments of critical decisions, the reference to the woman’s seed, and to humanity’s calling to subdue the earth. Biblical authors reuse certain key phrases from the first three chapters of Genesis, such as: he/she looked and saw it was pleasing to his/her eyes (Gen. 6:2; Jos. 7:21; 2 Sam. 11:2), and to work it and keep it (Lev. 22:9; Num. 3:7–8, 18:7). The imagery of the temple in Jerusalem later is itself a monument built on allusions to Eden and the eternal life in God’s presence which it represented. Eden is more than just a good starting spot for Scripture, it’s the rhythm Scripture is set to. It’s the first pebble that starts generations of ripples which can be traced all the way to Revelation and subsequent Church history. So what exactly is Eden, and what does it tell us about God, ourselves, and the Kingdom?
In the Center of the Garden
Eden is where the biblical idea of the Kingdom of God originates. It is where God’s will is being perfectly done in and through His infant creation. In Eden, God’s perfect realm of harmony and order in heaven corresponds exactly to the physical created order of earth, and the result is peace, love, abundance, meaning, and life. It was the object of which all human pleasure and joy is only a shadow. God Himself, the neverending spring of joy and life, made His home there, the cosmic palace completed, to rest in mutual love and enjoyment with His creation. In the center of that garden, we’re told, was what equates to God’s own throne: the tree of life.
“8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 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” (Gen. 1:8–9).
Most Bible readers tend to overlook the tree of life and skip directly to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—but without the tree of life the garden would just be a garden, and humanity would not be immortal (Gen. 3:22). The story implies that Adam and Eve did in fact have access to this tree, as with every tree in the garden, but they were simply not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because it would lead to death. The later prohibition of the tree of life was not to say they had not yet earned the fruit of eternal life—as if God was testing them to see if they would measure up to eternal life. Adam and Eve are to be understood as eating the fruit of the tree of life as part of their perfect existence with God in His perfect habitation. What comes later is God cutting off their access to the tree of life, because to live eternally in sin would be a cruel existence.
Although we’ve become accustomed to considering the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as the center of the story of, what has become known as the “Fall” narrative in evangelical theology, the tree of life in fact takes center stage with God. The tree of life was set in the center of the garden as an unavoidable focal point—but so was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Every time Adam and Eve would come to receive fruit from the tree of life, there was the forbidden tree just yards away. I implore you not to think of some gnarled, villainous looking tree. The language of Genesis paints it as just as attractive, or perhaps more attractive, than the other fruiting trees of the garden. In fact, this tree itself was not evil—it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or in Hebrew Tov and Ra. A concept rendered elsewhere in Scripture as Wisdom (Gen. 3:6; Deut. 4:6; Ps. 19:7).
It threw me for a major loop when I first learned that tov and ra do not equate to our modern moral categories of “good” and “evil”. It’s english equivalent is closer to “good and bad”, “right and wrong”, or “helpful and harmful”. Theologian Tim Mackie discusses this in detail in a podcast on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “They [Adam and Eve] don’t know what is right and wrong. They need God to teach them how to be wise and how to choose what is right from wrong….“Knowing tov and ra’” is a sign of maturity.” The english way of scolding a child by saying, “you know better than to do that” would equate to the Hebrew as “you have knowledge of tov and ra”. So why was the divine command not to know right from wrong when later God would encourage them to know right from wrong with the Mosaic Law? The point is not primarily the merits of knowing right from wrong, so much as the choice behind the action of eating the fruit. The divine command, and therefore the divine/human relationship is at stake.
“[T]he narrative is primarily about choice, and its portrait of the human person is that of a responsible moral agent” (John Kessler pp. 136).
Many Hebrew Bible scholars think God did not always intend for humans not to have tov and ra, because it is not an inherently bad thing, and is actually praised elsewhere in Scripture (Deut. 1:39; 1 Kng. 3:7–9). The trouble came if human beings took and ate of the fruit themselves, outside of God’s timing. The core tenet of life in the garden was it was life out of God’s hand, living completely sustained by His provision. To do anything contrary to that would be, not only to mistrust God, but to fall out of line with His created order.
The tree planted by streams of water in Psalm 1 echoes this theme. Here the psalmist describes the kind of man who lives on God’s time and from God’s life. He likens the man to a tree planted by streams of water and adds interestingly that he bears fruit in season. The idea of fruit in season is all over Scripture as a symbol of loving trust in God, and children lovingly ought to trust their Father. The desert wanderings are filled with moments where the Israelites are tempted to take fruit out of season. Abram and Sarai take fruit out of season when they scheme a way to have an heir before God’s timing (Gen. 16:3). In this fascinating story, God has promised Abram a son who will become a great nation, but the couple wait for years and nothing happens. Sarai remains barren and they’re both getting very old. So she has her husband Abram hook up with her maidservant Hagar to have a son. It’s another test like in the garden, only here the tree of life is waiting on God, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is having a son through, what would essentially be, the rape of her servant. There is a tree of life (God’s way) and there is a tree of the knowledge of good and evil (man’s way). The language has unmistakable overtones of Genesis 3, as Sarai looks on Hagar and sees she is good to her eyes, gives her to her husband, and he listens to the voice of his wife, which is word for word associated with God’s curse to Adam in Genesis 3:17.
But note, Hagar is not the villain of the story. Even after she gives birth to Ishamael and Sarai and Abram have sent into the wilderness with her child, essentially to her death, God provides a spring for Hagar in the desert and promises to do great things through Ishmael. God redeems this particular tree of the knowledge of good and evil, just as He does with the knowledge of good and evil, tov and ra, elsewhere in Scripture, even in Isaiah’s prophecies about the Messiah (7:15–16). So, if the tree of the knowledge of good and evil isn’t the villain, what is? The actual villain of the story is an enemy we see throughout all of Scripture.
In the Center of Mankind
Yes, the serpent is the villain to a point, but he is only the Satan (lit. “the adversary” or “withstander”). Even Eve had a chance to deny herself and the Withstander by just trusting the word of YHWH. The actual enemy of the story is something within human beings—a wild, untrusting, disorderly tendency which ought to be tamed and cultivated to trusting God, just as the whole earth was meant to be turned into a garden and not a wilderness. It is the tendency to hear God, ignore Him, and believe we know best. It is to take the fruit out of season, to make ourselves into gods who can decide when something is in or out of season. When we decide what is good and what is bad, we forfeit our position as co-rulers with God, ruling instead a made up kingdom which gives us all the power, but denies us the real power that leads to eternal life. You can jump back to chapter 6 if you want a refresher on this strain in human thought.
So the story of the two trees in Eden is more than just a historical narrative, it is a window into the human self and the two choices. It’s a mistake to assume the Eden narrative is a stand-alone story in Scripture. In fact, many scholars hold that it is the backbone of the whole story of Scripture. The biblical skeleton of the human personality is found right there in Genesis 1–3. Humans were created to be with God, and not just to coexist with God, but to rule with God in His Kingdom as His unique imagers. As the unique imagers of YHWH, we were made to draw our life directly from Him, and this life comes from an intimate relationship of trust with Him in ceaseless delight (Eden is Hebrew for “pleasure” or “delight”). Eternal life did not derive from being in the garden, eternal came from knowing and trusting God (Jhn. 17:3; cf. Gen. 2:15–16). The challenge to eternal life came when that relationship was tested, and this kind of testing is unique. It is not an arbitrary challenge, like a math test, to prove the worth of the person being tested, it is any time the temptation to take fruit out of season arises. Remember, in the reality God created the tree of life and the forbidden tree are planted very near each other—and we know this from experience.
When a good thing happens, when we’re walking in step with the will of God, there are always new ways to spoil that good thing. When someone gets married, it is a life-changing good that can be used to glorify God and grow the couple in godliness. But it also opens up a thousand new pathways to sin, injure trust, and allow bitterness. The deciding factor is how the individuals decide whether to trust God or trust their own practical wisdom. Or take for example someone becoming a pastor. There are few better ways to manifest Christ’s Kingdom than to minister as, what Paul called, a shepherd of the Church. But the amount of trust and authority given to pastors can lead to thousands of opportunities to trust in man’s knowledge of good and evil and not God’s, thus the endless sea of heartbreaking stories of church-goers who have had their trust abused by pastoral leaders.
Take this principle into any mode of human life and you’ll find it rings true. There is a tree of life and a tree of the knowledge of good and evil planted in the center of every human heart, and the decision to listen to God or listen to our own reason is always before us. The central, binary, on-off switch of human life or death is our decision to trust and obey God’s will or to follow our own line of sight or intuition.
This crucial decision is soaked into every page of Scripture, from Adam to the Apostles, and it is taking place in your heart right now. But don’t imagine it’s a decision you can make on a dime. It’s not the same kind of decision we make when we change brands of laundry detergent, or decide to start working-out again. We make the decision to trust or disobey God every day implicitly, without giving it much thought. The problem is deeper than just our decision making paradigm, it’s anchored in what kinds of people we are. The “come as you are” mantra in Christianity is a good place to start, but we were never meant to stay where we are. Where we are is anchored in sin, in worldly wisdom which leads to more and more sin, and consequently death.
We are to become the kinds of people who naturally choose the tree of life without even glancing at the forbidden tree—at least until God gives it to us to eat. Impossible, you ask? Jesus doesn’t think so. The world you see around you today is built on a false schema of mankind’s knowledge of good and evil, redefined and catered to our whims and desires and, according to Scripture, to the rebellious elohim who still hold sway over people, nations, and organizations (Deut. 32:6, Eph.2:1–3, 6:12, Col. 2:20; Rev. 18:2). Jesus came to offer another way—Himself as the substitution for our sin and as the example for us to live by. Listen to Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount, as He describes the Kingdom of God come to earth through Himself and how we are meant to respond to it,
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matt. 7:13–14).
If you read the Bible as “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”, as I’ve heard it put before, basically as an instruction manual for how to get to heaven when you die, you’ll be sorely disappointed. The core meaning of Scripture is not getting people to say the magic words to allow a malignant deity to let them into paradise. It is about humans turning into something greater than just humans. It is the human being eating from the tree of life. There is a choice at the center of Scripture and at the center of every human heart, a choice we don’t make once but every moment. Do we choose God’s way, or mankind’s way.
Jesus says the way to life is difficult; it’s narrow and easy to overlook—but it is not an impossible way. It’s there for those who are willing to trust God, give up their expectations of how God ought to be running the show, and give up their right to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Jesus provides this way, and the result of choosing the narrow way is life in a way we’ve never known it, but the way it was always intended. Co-ruling with God on earth as it is in heaven—today and on into eternity. If this topic has your cylinders firing then skip down to the next unit, where I begin to talk more about living in the Kingdom of God today. In the following chapters we will continue to trace the drama of the Kingdom of God through themes in Scripture, as God draws mankind back to, and beyond, the garden of Eden.
