The Garden of Eden: The Corollary Between Israel and Adam and Eve
A Meditation based on the devotional reading of 11/2/03, from “Every Day With Jesus”
Archeologists, as well as many Bible commentators, suggest that present-day Israel might well encompass the original Garden of Eden. Whether or not this is so, there are certain factors that suggest a remarkable corollary between the expulsion from the Garden and the present untenable situation of the modern state. It seems that the “ground” is as inhospitable to Zionist Israel, cursed as it were, as the earth would be to Adam “resisting him” as he sought to cultivate it for food.
This curse, Selwyn Hughes writes, “was not pronounced out of petulance and was not merely retributive. It was intended to discourage them from thinking that their lives could ever work effectively unless they returned to the original design of being dependent upon God.”
However impressively malarial swamps and destitute landscapes have been transformed into the modern state of Israel, it is not yet a Garden of Eden, nor can it be, I would suggest, for the same reasons. We might “overpower” the cherubim that guard and reserve it for a covenant-faithful Jewish people, but it will continue to resist us until we recognize and accede to God’s greater purpose.
Adam and Eve’s sin, Hughes suggests, was independence. The hard terms of God’s expulsion was so that “they were put in the position where they would discover that life was meant to work one way only—by dependence on the Almighty…God introduced problems into the very core of their lives that were calculated to turn them back to Him in dependent trust.” Cannot the same be said for the present state? How can we, any more than they, force our way back into “Eden”? What model would Israel have provided the nations had they succeeded in the same? God is far from the nation’s present consideration, and even the mounting severity of crisis has not altered in the slightest that disposition. Merely to assert that the Land was given to Abraham’s seed without coming to the character of the Patriarch and his relationship to God as a friend, is insufficient reason to claim it. The land is holy—and so must its permanent possessors be.
One would think, then, that the first step is repentant recognition of ourselves expelled and under judgment for sin as even our ancient ancestors before us. The issue of our return, then, is the same as also are the necessary conditions. We have reiterated their sin and are under the same cataclysmic judgment which God pronounced on the world. Christian Zionists in all their fervor for the success of the present state have not considered a fallen Israel because they have not adequately considered a fallen Creation. The curse that fell upon Eve as a travail and suffering in childbirth remains for Christian intercessors to voluntarily bear in the birthing of that redeemed nation born in a day! For “before Zion travailed she gave birth; before her pain came upon her she was delivered of a man-child.” God describes that future nation as an Edenic wonder in “the abundance and brightness of her glory. “For thus says the Lord, ‘Behold I will extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream…’ ” (Isaiah 66:7-12).
Topics: Articles by Theme, Israel and the Church |