While meditating in my garden recently, I sensed that God seemed
to be looking around at everything He had made and He was content. So it
surprised me when I heard His Spirit whisper with a smile, “If you remove human
beings from the Garden, everything is simply holy.”
“What?” I reacted. “Take me out of the garden? But it’s my
favorite place to meet with you, Lord!” So of course I had to ponder His
statement more carefully, because I couldn’t imagine that He really wanted to
remove me from the garden…
It occurred to me that He had indeed removed human beings from the
Garden when he expelled Adam and Eve long ago. That garden—the paradise of
God—is first mentioned in the book of Genesis, chapter 2. Verse 8 tells us that
“the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put
the man he had formed.” (New International Version)
So the Garden of Eden was designed and planted before human
beings were placed there. In its original creation, the Garden was pure-- in a
sense ‘holy.’ Verse 9 says that “The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow
out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.”
But the trouble begins in the second half of verse 9: “In the
middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil.” Aha! Herein lies the original problem—knowledge. Without
human beings, there is no one with whom to impart knowledge. Plants don’t
recognize or utilize knowledge. Animals have an innate wisdom not related to
the practical ‘knowledge’ we seek in our human ways, such as math or physics,
etc.
“But Lord,” I said, “You are the source of life and of knowledge.
Why would You put a tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden?” I figured that
Adam could just ask God for knowledge when he needed it, like King Solomon did.
(This obviously worked for him!)
“Without temptation,” the Spirit replied, “Adam would have had
nothing to overcome.”
Hmmm.
So…. unlike the plants that surrounded him in Eden, Adam was the
first fleshly being who was given a choice—to obey God or to not obey God. And
we all know what happened next…
I think (for now) that in my humble little garden the Holy Spirit
must have been reflecting with a bit of nostalgia upon how sweet, how peaceful
it was in the Garden of Eden before mankind entered. How unblemished and
guileless was creation before our appearance!
Does God sometimes long wistfully—just for a moment in time-- for
that day when He had the Garden all to Himself? When everything was holy? I
know some parents who (although they deeply love their children) remember
together from time to time the sweet joy of the early days in their marriage
when they existed for each other alone…
Back to the premise that started this discussion: without human
beings in the Garden, everything is simply holy. It seems that we’ll need a
larger discussion on this: what is a ‘human being’? To which garden is He
referring? What is ‘everything,’ and how holy is ‘holy’? For the time being,
I’m going to go with the following:
Because I am a spiritual being on a human journey, I’m going to
presume that God spoke of the flesh—the physical body that I lug around with me
day and night. If this gravity-driven, age-aching, bruised and otherwise
failing vessel is removed, could my spirit conceivably more easily approach a
higher degree of holiness? Would I need the same God-allowed temptations in my
life so that I would choose to overcome in His power?
If my soul is intangible, and if as a spiritual being I still
(once free of the physical body) have the soul that has been developed over the
span of my earthly existence, then wouldn’t I retain all of the experiences,
knowledge, memories, emotions, and willful struggles I endured during this
earthly life?
If that’s true, would I still need to learn to overcome until I
had finished the course of my journey, resting at God’s own feet, before His
own holiness? What do you think?
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