Creation In the Garden, Eternal Paradise
Let’s begin our look at the evidence for Genesis 1–3 being descriptive of creation in the eternal realm with an examination of some unique words in Scripture. Our English word “paradise” translates the Greek word paradeisos in the New Testament. There are only three passages where paradeisos occurs in the Greek New Testament.
(Luke 23:43) And He said to him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.” (Jesus speaking to the thief on the cross.)
(2 Corinthians 12:3-4) And I know how such a man–whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, God knows—was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which a man is not permitted to speak. (Paul speaking of his encounter and conversations with Christ out of this world.)
(Revelation 2:7) ‘He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will grant to eat of the tree of life which is in the Paradise of God.’ (Jesus speaking to his church.)
In the passage from Luke, Jesus tells the crucified robber next to him what his immediately future estate will be after he dies. This promise of Christ responds to the robber’s expressed trust in Him.
Luke 23:42 And he was saying, “Jesus, remember me when You come in Your kingdom!”
In the second passage, Paul attempts to describe the indescribable estate in which he found himself during his personal encounter with the resurrected Christ, and Paul finds himself speechless. The third passage is Jesus’ promise that those who trust and obey Him will be with Him in the real estate of Paradise, which is the eternal realm of God.
These three New Testament passages clearly suggest movement out of the time-delimited universe of our common temporal awareness into a durable communion with God in his eternal environment of “divine time,” which is free of the entropic depredations of our historic time. The real estate of Paradise is described more fully in the last two chapters of the Bible (Revelation 21 & 22).
The Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament of the Bible) speak of the original creation of God as a “garden” in the following passages from Genesis 2. The pertinent words for analysis and interpretation are underlined.
(Genesis 2:8) The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed.
(Genesis 2:9) Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
(Genesis 2:10) Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers.
(Genesis 2:15) Then the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it.
(Genesis 2:16-17) The LORD God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”
The original Old Testament Hebrew word for “garden” is gannah. Two hundred years before Christ, seventy Jewish scholars translated Hebrew Scripture into the common Greek language spoken by their contemporaries. Their translation is called The Septuagint (abbreviated as LXX), after the original number of seventy translators. What Greek word did these learned Jewish scholars use to translate gannah in Genesis? They chose paradeisos, which is the same Greek word that refers to the blessed eternal estate in the Greek New Testament.[1] We should note that this choice was made more than 200 years before the New Testament was written.
The term Eden is closely associated with the Hebrew root word adan, which connotes delight. Hence paradise may be referred to as the “garden of delight.” These seventy Jewish scholars decided that the linguistic phrase, “garden of delight,” best described God’s original garden creation, because it was his Paradise, and his Paradise is the delight of his people, or would be, if they could see it clearly.
The Garden of Eden, from which the first man and woman were expelled in Genesis 3 is thus the equivalent of the blessed estate of Paradise in the New Testament. A verbal form (ganan) of the Hebrew noun for garden (gannah) supports this view. The word ganan is frequently used in the Old Testament to refer to God’s personal and particular protection and defense of his people, as seen in the following examples.
(2 Kings 20:6) “I will add fifteen years to your life, and I will deliver you and this city from the hand of the king of Assyria; and I will defend [ganan] this city for My own sake and for My servant David’s sake.”
(Isaiah 31:5) Like flying birds so the LORD of hosts will protect [ganan] Jerusalem. He will protect [ganan] and deliver it; He will pass over and rescue it.
God’s Garden of Eden (or delight), or Paradise, is His special creation and place for His people where he keeps and guards them from all harm, and from sin and evil. God is personally present and has social and verbal intercourse with man in Eden/Paradise. Satan cannot enter God’s Paradise after he is cast out of it by Christ’s payment of the penalty for sin on the cross (John 12:31; 16:11; 19:30). Neither can anyone else who practices evil enter God’s Paradise (Revelation 21:27; 22:14-15).
Clearly, if the Genesis creation takes place in God’s eternal real estate, the Garden of Eden/Paradise, then there is no reason at all to impose the events described in Genesis upon our present moment fallen Earth.
[1] Although the Septuagint translators also used paradeisos to translate gannah, when specifying the “gardens” of men in other portions of the Old Testament, all usages of the word gannah for the gardens of men are by simile and metaphor to the “garden” of God. There is a clear distinction between the beautiful gardens of men, and the distinctive Garden of Eden to which they were often compared, because they clearly are not of the same rank or quality.
Leave a Reply