We begin our Gardens meditations this week, and of course, the first Garden we will be visiting is the Garden of Eden. We’ve recently heard excellent sermons on the first chapters of Genesis; today we’re going to explore a bit more of how the creation story would have been understood by its original audience and, in turn, how that can affect our own understanding of God.

The lengthy quote above, from John H. Walton’s book “The Lost World of Genesis One,” introduces to us the idea that the original audience of Genesis—Israel, living in the context of the ancient Near East—would have understood the creation accounts in Genesis not as science or an explanation of how the material universe came to be, but as how the cosmos was created, ordered, and ordained to function as God’s dwelling place: as a temple. Within this framework, Eden would have been understood as the sanctuary where God resides in the midst of God’s creation, especially for the purpose of face-to-face interaction with the Living Images God places in that temple on Day Six: humans. Then, on Day Seven, at the completion of the cosmic temple, the ancients understood that, after bringing order from chaos, “…God takes up his rest and rules from his residence” (Walton).

Here’s why it matters: This understanding reveals that all of creation is sacred space meant for God’s presence. It shows us that God is not aloof, that God is not distant, only living somewhere “up there” in an abstract “heaven.” God’s desire, from the beginning, was to inhabit this cosmos and live with us in face-to-face communion. And the good news—the spectacular, belief-beggaring Good News—is that, in Christ, we have been re-embraced into the original conditions of Eden: we again live with God, face to face, cleansed into innocence by the love and blood of Christ, forever sustained by the Tree of Life from which we partake every week. Friends, the unceasing invitation to us is to enter again into the Garden of Eden, by faith in Christ, to walk face-to-face with the Creator and Lover of our souls. Let’s walk in the Garden, together.