SOG POD - EDEN

Prologue

The world began with words. The Author of life started His great story with a whirlwind of words that pushed up dry land out from the watery waste; that beckoned trees and plants to crawl out from a barren, bald land and stretch upwards toward a ball of light that floated in the heavens. With His voice He cracked the crust of the earth so springs of water could rush to the aid of a budding garden. Rabbits, rams, wolves, and white-tailed deer bounded out from from every corner of this first forest. From the tops of the trees birds burst forth in song and joined the Author’s anthem of life and light.

All of this crowded creation was born of divine Breath, and from the beating heart of a triune God who had a plan and purpose for this lush land. He formed it in three days, and filled it in three more. And on that sixth day, God, in the midst of all his heavenly host, stood and sang the climactic chorus that fashioned a man from the ground and a woman from the man’s side.

But to what end? What was his plan and purpose for it all? Why clutter the cosmos? Why the matter-making melody? Here, I contend that he did all of this so he could dwell with us and we with him always and forever, world without end. The story of all creation, and of the whole Bible, is ultimately a story of God building a house and making it into a home for him and his people. This is The Story of God Podcast and my name is Kenneth Padgett welcome to our exploration of The Story of God with Us.

Eden: The Mountain of YHWH

Most great stories start “a long long time ago in a land far, far away” but this story is the true story of the whole world, including the land beneath your feet right now. And the first words were spoken when there were no humans ears yet to hear them.

You see, in the beginning the world was formless and void, Tohu va-Vohu in the Hebrew, wild and waste, uninhabitable chaos.

But God spoke into the dark, watery wilds and he ordered it according to His good pleasure. Light, land, and living things all appeared exactly where God told them to be. He gave form to the wild, and he gave function to the waste. He shaped the shapeless according to his own infinite wisdom.

And it was Good. Tov is the Hebrew word for good. It was Tov!

He turned this new well-ordered world into a home for him and His people. But this holy house was actually a flourishing garden-sanctuary filled with life and light. A river flowed out from Eden and it watered the trees of the garden and split into four rivers that went down weaved through the world.

Perhaps surprisingly to many modern readers, Eden and it’s garden sat on top of a mountain. This would’ve been expected in the minds of the first readers of Genesis, but it has been largely lost in a world so different from the ancient one from which the story derives.