Eden, the Temple and the Church's Mission

One of the reasons I teach is that it forces to me to study. When I take the time to read and research, I find such treasures. A recent article to which I am in indebted was written by Gregory K. Beale and can be viewed here. In this article he shows how the Garden of Eden is really the first temple. It is the place in which God walked with man. Adam was the first priest. He was given a charge to "cultivate and keep" the garden. Those same words in Hebrew can mean to "serve and guard". Adam failed in his mission and God had to drive him out of the garden and place 2 cherubim at the entrance to then guard it. When the world turned so evil that God decided to destroy the world with a flood, Noah was given the same charge. The ark becomes a symbol of God's preservation. Again, when Noah came out of the ark and worshipped he and his sons failed to follow the charge that God had given them.

God then starts over with Abraham and makes his covenant with him in Genesis 12. Through Abraham's descendants, Israel establishes the tabernacle in the wilderness and later the temple in Jerusalem. The use of the cherubim on the mercy seat of the ark and on the veil in the temple that separates the Holy of Holies ties back to the creation story. Both the tabernacle and the temple foreshadow the culmination of God's design to reunite himself with mankind through his Messiah. Jesus becomes the epitome of the temple when he came and dwelt among us. Through his life, burial and resurrection he re-establishes the ability of God and man to once again dwell in union. While the "new" heaven and earth is something we look forward to in the future, the fact is that right now God dwells among his people through the power of the Holy Spirit by living in our hearts. When the church gathers it becomes God's temple, or as Paul says in I Cor. 3:16: " Do you not know that you are God's temple and that God's Spirit dwells in you? "

Beale writes:

The temple was a symbol to Israel of the task God wanted them to carry
out; the same task that Adam (and likely Noah) should have carried out but
did not, Israel was to execute: to “multiply and fill the earth and subdue it”
(Gen 1:28) by expanding the local boundaries of the temple (where God’s
special revelatory presence was) to include the entire earth. That is, Israel
was to spread God’s presence throughout the entire earth. Interestingly, the
land of promise, the land of Israel, was repeatedly called the “Garden of
Eden” (cf. Gen 13:10; Isa 51:3; Joel 2:3; Ezek 36:35) partly perhaps because
Israel was to expand the limits of the temple and of their own land to the
ends of the earth in the same manner as should have Adam. That this was
Israel’s ultimate task is apparent from a number of OT passages prophesying
that God will finally cause the sacred precinct of Israel’s temple to
expand and first encompass Jerusalem (see Isa 4:4–6; 54:2–3, 11–12; Jer 3:16–
17; Zech 1:16–2:11), then the entire land of Israel (Ezek 37:25–28), and then
the whole earth (Dan 2:34–35, 44–45; cf. also Isa 54:2–3).
Similarly, as we have seen, God gave Israel the same commission as Adam
and Noah: e.g. to Isaac, the progenitor of Israel, is said, “I will greatly bless
you and greatly multiply you . . . your seed shall possess the gate of their
enemies” (Gen 22:17; cf. Gen 12:2–3; 17:2, 6, 8; 26:3–5, 24; 28:3; 35:11–12;
47:27; 48:3–4; on Noah’s commission, see Gen 9:1, 7). Interestingly, Gen 1:28
becomes both a commission and a promise to Isaac, Jacob, and Israel.
Israel, however, did not carry out this great mandate to spread the temple
of God’s presence over the whole earth. The contexts of Isa 42:6 and 49:6 say
that Israel should have spread the light of God’s presence throughout the
earth, but they did not. Exodus 19:6 says that Israel collectively was to be
to God “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation,” going out to the nations and
being mediators between God and the nations by bearing God’s light of revelation.
Instead of seeing the temple as a symbol of their task to expand
God’s presence to all nations, Israel wrongly viewed the temple to be symbolic
of their election as God’s only true people and that God’s presence was
to be restricted only to them as an ethnic nation. They believed the Gentiles
would experience God’s presence only through judgment.
So God sent them out of their land into exile, which Isaiah 45 compares
to the darkness and chaos of the first chaos before creation in Genesis 1 (cf.
Isa 45:18–19). So God starts the process of temple building all over again,
but this time he planned that the local-spiritual boundaries of all the past
temples of Eden and Israel would be expanded finally to circumscribe the boundaries of the entire earth.


The corollary to the church today is significant. When we become exclusivistic in our thinking that "we are the only ones" and that our goal is to preserve ourselves as "God's only true people" we betray the mission of the church to spread the light of the gospel unto world. Within the larger context, this is the same mission that God gave to Adam in the Garden of Eden. It is nothing new. Viewed in the context of history we see that the plan of God began with the Garden and will end in Paradise regained. Our purpose then is temple building; but, not with earth or stone. Instead, we are to build with "living stones". We exist to fill the earth with the message of the kingdom of God and bring every heart into submission.