Gardens, Temples, and Jesus
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Intro:
We are part of a cosmic story.
We may feel comfortable in our lives. We may just want to live our lives out in peace and be left alone.
But, we are part of a cosmic story.
And central to this story is Jesus. That makes all the difference.
We each are a part of this magnificent, cosmic story that should shape our life. How we live our life. What is important in our life. The purpose of our life. We connect our lives to the story through the kingship of the Anointed one (Christ!) Jesus.
The Bible tells this story. It has a beginning, a middle, and an end. There is a goal to this story. There is drama in this story. There is conflict, tension, and a happy ending to this story.
Our life is part of this story. We each have a role to play.
Central to this story is that each of us must have a relationship with Jesus to see the happy ending in our part of the story.
First, let's look at the overview of this story.
Overview of the Story
Overview of the Story
You probably know some of this story. Maybe not, if you are new to attending church. But the overview of the biblical story is one of Creation - Fall - Redemption - Restoration.
Creation
Creation
God created a perfect, beautiful garden and put man and woman inside it to guard and tend it. Creation was perfect and Good.
Fall
Fall
The man and woman fell to temptation, disobeyed God, and were driven out of the garden.
Redemption
Redemption
But God had a plan to make things even better than they were before. It involved a promise of a coming offspring of the woman who would defeat the enemy and restore all things. We know that offspring is Jesus, who died, rose from the dead, and comes to claim his kingdom and rule over this fallen world.
Restoration
Restoration
And when He reigns, Jesus will restore all things and make an even better home to dwell with man.
So let's look a little harder at the story of a Garden in the Bible.
First, we begin in the Garden in Genesis and how it was ruined.
Story of Garden and Sin
Story of Garden and Sin
And what a beautiful place this garden was.
And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.
And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food. The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers.
The name of the first is the Pishon. It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.
And the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there.
These are elements of the first Garden, perfect in creation, home to God and man together. Beautiful. Pleasant to the sight, meaning that visually, it was tremendous. It also met all our physical needs, was fruitful, bountiful. idyllic.
God's presence was part of this picture.
And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
God also assigned a task for the man and woman who inhabited the Garden.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
But you know the story. You know what happened. There was one prohibition in this garden.
And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden,
but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.”
But that is what they did. The Serpent - who is Satan - came and tempted Eve, and Adam failed to protect the garden from the Serpent or counter the temptation. So they fell into sin.
And we must not forget this imagery of Satan as a serpent, a venomous dragon-like snake, because that imagery will repeat itself in the rest of Scripture.
God curses the snake in verse 14.
The Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, cursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.
But remember, Adam and Eve were not cursed. Instead they were recipients of the promise that we see in God's pronouncement on the serpent in
I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.”
This offspring, literally the word seed, looks forward to a descendant of the man and woman that, it is promised, will crush the skull of the serpent, inflicting a mortal wound and resolve this cosmic conflict by a glorious victory over evil.
But our story today is one of geography, not genealogy. Genealogy is important, critical to the story, but this morning we look at place. While we wait for the victory of the offspring of the woman, we live outside the garden, as per
He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.
The serpent is cursed, the ground is cursed, the beauty is lost, the conflict continues. Evil has entered God's good creation.
And remember this Cherubim with his flaming sword. He keeps the man and the woman from returning to the garden. Now that they are condemned by their sin and rebellion, they cannot enter into the presence of a Holy God. They cannot eat of the tree of life. They have been exiled from the Garden, driven away to the east.
But God has a plan.
Story of a Promised Land
Story of a Promised Land
A major part of this plan is that God called out a man, Abraham, to become a great nation. And out of this nation was to come the lineage of one man, an offspring, or seed of the woman, who would defeat Satan by crushing his skull. But as I just said, this morning we are considering another aspect of this story, that of land, a location, a place.
We live today out of place. I love the Flint Hills. I love prairie more than woodlands. Tall grass is, to me at least, better than tall trees. So I love this place in Kansas. Here we find the last tiny portion of the most endangered ecosystem on the planet, more endangered than jungles or forests, that of the tallgrass prairie.
Place is important. But even the tallgrass prairie is not the garden of eden. We are still prohibited entrance to that garden.
You might love the mountains, the beaches of the world, or whatever splendor you find in a created place. But they all pale in comparison to the Garden, where we were created to live in the presence of God.
And God's plan is to get us back into the garden, back into his good creation, free of the curse, and in his presence.
So God prepared a land for his chosen people, the sons and daughters of Abraham.
Then the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him.
The Lord said to Abram, after Lot had separated from him, “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward,
for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever.
I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, your offspring also can be counted.
Arise, walk through the length and the breadth of the land, for I will give it to you.”
God promised many things. Among them was the promise of place, a land.
And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.”
But the Serpent opposes this plan. There is enmity, conflict, opposition from the serpent.
We pick up the story with Abraham's family having moved to Egypt because of the famine. There, they grew numerous, but were enslaved. And the Serpent wanted to keep them enslaved.
Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.
And he said to his people, “Behold, the people of Israel are too many and too mighty for us.
Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, lest they multiply, and, if war breaks out, they join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.”
The book of Exodus portrays the pharaoh, who wears the symbol of a serpent in his crown, as the seed of the serpent who is judged by God in the 10 plagues. We must understand the pharaoh here represents the serpent, the serpent's interests. This is cosmic conflict.
The serpent wanted to keep Israel out of the land. There is much we could discuss at this point. The promised land was full of Canaanites, the cursed descendent of Ham from the story of Noah.
Remember, God never cursed Adam or Eve for their sin. They received a promise. Elements of creation, the land itself was cursed, but never was a curse pronounced against Adam or Eve. Cain was cursed.
And the Canaanites, who, by the wickedness of their religious practices, with child sacrifice, cultic prostitution, and many other religious atrocities, earned the curse from God.
Satan was actively working through his seed to keep the sons and daughters of Abraham out of the land.
God would not be defeated, however. He had promised the land to Abraham and reiterated that promise now to Israel in
and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.
This is part of God's plan, to drive out the serpent from the promised land and through Israel, get you and I back into the Garden.
When God took Israel from out of Egypt, into the wilderness, he was leading them to this promised land. As we see in
“Behold, I send an angel before you to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place that I have prepared.
An Angel to lead them into the land? Why not. There was an angel that kept Adam and Eve out of the Garden. Now God sends another angel to lead them back into the promised land.
And He lead them there from the East, where they crossed the Jordan River to enter the Land from the Eastern side.
Look at
When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand. And Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?”
And he said, “No; but I am the commander of the army of the Lord. Now I have come.” And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped and said to him, “What does my lord say to his servant?”
And the commander of the Lord’s army said to Joshua, “Take off your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did so.
Entering from the East. Led by the angelic (Cherubim!?) commander of the Lord's host. Sent by God. With a sword.
The Cherub drove Adam and Eve out. Now, God was bringing them back to the garden, now in the form of the promised land, the holy land.
But! That didn't end well for Israel, did it? When the Lord established a covenant relationship with this people of Israel, He warned them that if they abandoned God, they would be exiled, driven out, removed from the land.
After the long history of Israel in the Land, in Jerusalem, with the temple, the people abandoned the Lord, broke the covenant, and were driven into Exile, to Babylon, IN THE EAST!
This exile would be exactly like the Garden. If the land of Israel is like a new garden, promised by God as an eternal dwelling for his people, then like Adam and Eve were driven to the east, out of the Garden, so Israel was driven out of the land, to the East, to Babylon.
Story of a Tabernacle and a Temple
Story of a Tabernacle and a Temple
So, what does the tabernacle, which is a portable version of the temple, have to do with the Garden? Why everything.
The tabernacle, and by extension, the temple, was designed to picture the first Garden of Eden, as a place where the presence of God was to meet with his covenant people.
But remember, because of sin we were kicked out of the Garden, and unable to be in the presence of God.
That is why sacrifices were so important in the tabernacle. To come close to God, who indwelt the holy of holies, in the heart of the tabernacle, sacrifice was needed to cleanse away the effects of sin. We are not holy, so we need to be made holy through sacrifice to come into God's presence.
Remember, these sacrifices had no effect on our eternal standing, our eternal life. Only Jesus' sacrifice can reclaim that relationship. But, without taking the time to enter into those details, for the moment, it is sufficient to know that these sacrifices in the tabernacle worked in relation to the Mosaic Covenant, so that God's people could live in his presence.
But first, we have to see how the tabernacle pictured the garden and what that means.
One connection is the task Adam was asked to do. Remember in Genesis, the man man was placed in the garden to "work and keep" it. That makes him a priest, because later, when the tabernacle was built, those same words describe the work of the priests in the tabernacle.
They shall keep guard over him and over the whole congregation before the tent of meeting, as they minister at the tabernacle.
They shall guard all the furnishings of the tent of meeting, and keep guard over the people of Israel as they minister at the tabernacle.
So Adam was a priest in the garden, meant to represent the Lord and rule in his place over the garden. The work of the garden was priestly work.
Much like Israel, who was to be a light to the nations, to represent God before the world.
Another connection is found in the furnishings of the tabernacle. Like the Garden, the tabernacle held the presence of God, where God and man met. God met man at the mercy seat, which was placed on top of the ark of the covenant and placed in the holy of holies.
And you shall put the mercy seat on the top of the ark, and in the ark you shall put the testimony that I shall give you.
There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are on the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you about all that I will give you in commandment for the people of Israel.
The Holy of Holies was the innermost chamber of the tabernacle, in the shape of a cube, where sat this ark and the mercy seat. Only the high priest was allowed to enter, and only once a year.
Like the garden, this holy of holies was guarded by cherubim. Two cherubim on the ark. And also more cherubim guarding the entrance, the veil that separated the holy place from the holy of holies.
“And you shall make a veil of blue and purple and scarlet yarns and fine twined linen. It shall be made with cherubim skillfully worked into it.
And you shall hang it on four pillars of acacia overlaid with gold, with hooks of gold, on four bases of silver.
Cherubim at the entrance. Four pillars of silver, like four rivers.
And the menorah, or lampstand is described like a tree.
“You shall make a lampstand of pure gold. The lampstand shall be made of hammered work: its base, its stem, its cups, its calyxes, and its flowers shall be of one piece with it.
And there shall be six branches going out of its sides, three branches of the lampstand out of one side of it and three branches of the lampstand out of the other side of it;
three cups made like almond blossoms, each with calyx and flower, on one branch, and three cups made like almond blossoms, each with calyx and flower, on the other branch—so for the six branches going out of the lampstand.
And on the lampstand itself there shall be four cups made like almond blossoms, with their calyxes and flowers,
There are other connections between the garden and the tabernacle, more than we have time to examine. Like the onyx stones, precious gems found in the garden and now used to adorn the high priest's breastplate.
So, hopefully you see, the tabernacle, the center of worship in the promised land, where God met man, was built to represent the Garden as first created, where God met Adam and Eve.
Sin broke that garden relationship, and it also breaks the relationship of Israel to God in the land. Both stories end in exile, being driven from God's presence.
Which eventually brings us to Jesus, and the way these relationships are restored. The way our relationship with God today is part of the same story. The way we can enter into the presence of God. Through a torn veil.
Story of a Torn Veil
Story of a Torn Veil
There are so many ways we could talk about Jesus right here. There are so many connections to his life and the garden. He is the ultimate seed of the woman who crushes the serpent. His virgin birth points to his birth as the ultimate of a string of miraculous births throughout the Old Testament. His baptism, his ministry, the miracles, the teaching, everything in his life connects Jesus to the story and indicates He is our true redeemer, come to defeat the enemy and open the way for us to enter into the presence of God.
But I just want to look at one element of Jesus story.
Jesus is on the cross. He is there to be the sacrifice, the only true sacrifice that brings us eternally into the presence of God. His sacrifice overcomes the sin and evil introduced when Adam sinned.
On the cross, next to a criminal being crucified at the same time, this criminal acknowledges that Jesus did nothing wrong. And Jesus indicates Luke 23 43
And he said to him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
Note, Jesus mentions paradise, the bosom of Abraham. At that point, Luke tells what happens next.
It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour,
while the sun’s light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.
Remember that curtain, the veil that separates the holy place from the inner holy of holies, where sits the presence of God in the garden of the temple.
On that veil were woven images of cherubim, angelic beings who guarded the entrance into the garden, like that first cherub in the Garden of Eden.
That veil was torn in two. The cherubim cast aside, allowing us once again entrance into the holy place.
he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption.
For Christ has entered, not into holy places made with hands, which are copies of the true things, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf.
Nor was it to offer himself repeatedly, as the high priest enters the holy places every year with blood not his own,
Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus,
by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh,
and since we have a great priest over the house of God,
let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.
Jesus is our way back into the garden. The only way.
We can enter by faith. Trusting the finished work of Jesus.
You see, this is an ongoing story. It is not just a past event. It is current.
We must get back to the garden. We were created to live there. We find no satisfaction, no comfort, no true joy, outside of the garden.
We were created to live there. Outside is filled with evil, cursed, a broken and unreliable imitation of the Garden.
This explains why we seek joy, seek peace.
We are seeking our eternal home.
Story of an Eternal Home
Story of an Eternal Home
At the end of the story, after the return of Jesus, after his reign on the throne of David, the physical and outward full expression of the Kingdom Jesus inaugurated during his first coming, we see a New Jerusalem.
Note some similarities
And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God,
having the glory of God, its radiance like a most rare jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.
It is a cube, a very large holy of holies
The city lies foursquare, its length the same as its width. And he measured the city with his rod, 12,000 stadia. Its length and width and height are equal.
There is more onyx
The foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with every kind of jewel. The first was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald,
the fifth onyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh jacinth, the twelfth amethyst.
There is no temple, because God's presence fills the city, He is the temple
And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb.
And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb.
By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it,
and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.
They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations.
But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who does what is detestable or false, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life.
It will be a recreation of the garden. The garden 2.0
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb
through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations.
No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him.
They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads.
This is where we are meant to live. Jesus is the way to the garden, where we are meant to live.