The Garden: He Chose to Give Birth to Us by Giving Us His True Word. and We, out of All Creation, Became His Prized Possession. James 1:18 Nlt

Copyright © 2012 Daniel Shum

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ISBN: 978-1-4497-4086-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-4087-0 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4497-4088-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012903901

WestBow Press rev. date: 3/27/2012

Contents

The Garden

Preface

Prelude: The Preparation, the Plan, the Purpose

Chapter One:

Adam

Chapter Two:

The First Couple

Chapter Three:

A New Day in a New World

Chapter Four:

The Lord’s Day

Chapter Five:

The Lord’s Pleasure

Chapter Six:

The Time Apart

Chapter Seven:

Ever Learning

Chapter Eight:

The Sabbath and the Lamb

Chapter Nine:

More Learning

Chapter Ten:

The Deception and the Fall

Chapter Eleven:

Judgment

Chapter Twelve:

Outside the Garden

Endnotes

Study Guide:

The Garden

He chose to give birth to us by giving us his true word. And we, out of all creation, became his prized possession (James 1:18 NLT).

Adam, Adam, where are you? Such an innocent, simple question. But to the Lord it was filled with sadness. Though He knew this day would come, it surprised Him how heavy the words were coming out of His mouth. It had been easier to speak worlds into existence than to choke back the sorrow enough to get the words out without giving away what He already knew.

For my daughter, Elizabeth Grace, who has already found her home in God’s Garden

Preface

The idea to write this book came from a series that I taught for our youth group, Lessons to be Learned from the Garden. If Genesis is the book of origins, the garden of Eden is the first grain of sand to fall through the hour glass of time. I believe that we can look at the garden of God and learn many things about His plan and desire for a relationship with mankind—almost as if it were a microcosm of God’s original intent and purposes for creating the earth and its inhabitants.

The first idea that really captivated my imagination was the consideration of why God instructed Adam to look for a helpmate among the animals when He knew full well that Adam would be unsuccessful. The best answer, as brought out in the story, is that God wanted Adam to understand why mankind was created.

The Garden was not written as an attempt to give a literal account of the events of creation. Nor was it necessarily written to explore what life in the garden of Eden may have been like for Adam. The Bible gives us only sketchy information as to the actual process of creation and of life in the garden. There are questions that simply can’t be answered, and in my opinion, not all questions require an answer. It pleases God when we exercise our faith and trust Him for details that we don’t understand. Truly, I don’t have as much interest in the hows of the origin of man as I do in the whys. The Garden was written to gain an understanding of the relationship between the Creator and His creation, between God and mankind.

Many have said, and I believe rightly so, that the Bible is really a love story between God and man. That love story began even prior to the garden of Eden. Back in the eons of time, when all that existed was God—and really I am in error to say in the eons of time in reference to God, because God is everlasting and eternal and time is not relevant to His condition—but for poetic purposes… Back in the eons of time when all that existed was God, He was passionate, but He was alone. His passion ignited His powerful creative nature to solve this dilemma. Thus began the creation of man; thus began the love story.

The book of Genesis gives us three chapters to begin the love story between God and man. Generally, somewhere in the process of befriending a couple, the question is asked, How did you two meet? You can learn a lot about a couple by knowing how they met. I found it fascinating to contemplate the beginning of this love story. But as I’ve said, we only have three chapters and although I believe they are powerful, but they are not full of detail.

Writing The Garden is best compared to what an excavator must do when trying to represent what something must have looked like based on skeletal remains. No doubt there is much conjecture in that process. In like manner, my attempt to tell the story of The Garden is an attempt to flesh out a bare-boned account; to take something that we normally read as ethereal, ancient, and untouchable and make it personal, current, and relative. I have made every attempt to follow the Scriptures, but in the process of fleshing it out, I have had to employ some imagination and ponder some possibilities. In many cases where I have had to fill in some blanks, I have added footnotes, explaining why I believe these thoughts to be reasonable. But if you, the reader, want to paint it a little differently, feel free to do so. It really doesn’t matter as long as you catch the two main points of the story:

1. God loves us. God, who is love, created mankind to be—if you’ll allow me to say it in human terms—the love of His life. We need to understand how much God loves us and how much He desires to be in a relationship with us.

2. The devastation of sin. We read in the Scriptures that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), which we understand to be a spiritual death. Adam was told that if he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that he would surely die. I don’t know how completely he understood the warning, but I don’t think that we today understand how vastly sin changed Adam’s world. We oversimplify it; Adam and Eve sin, get kicked out of the garden, God doesn’t come to visit anymore, Adam gets a job, Eve develops labor pains, and everybody hates the snake. What’s the big deal? So I took some time to explore what Adam and Eve’s existence in the garden may have been like in order to show the drastic change they experienced. Think about it like this: One day they are walking with God the Creator, hand in hand through a meadow, face-to-face with love passionate enough to endure the cross, sitting around the campfire telling stories while petting the lions. And the next day, they see that face of love turn stern and sorrowful as He sheds innocent blood to cover them, and then they never see Him again. We need to understand the incomprehensible cost of sin.

There are other points and patterns to consider, other interesting theories and ponderings, but they all wane in comparison to the two main points.

In reading this work, one may find the dialogue between God and Adam to be innocent and simple. Remember that Adam was created without sin—completely innocent. We really have no concept of what pure innocence is like. Small children provide our best picture of such innocence, but even then, they are born with a sinful nature, and no one has to teach a child to be selfish. While Adam was probably the smartest man who has ever lived, I doubt that he was created with much built-in knowledge. He had a lot to learn. These facts lead me to write the dialogue between the Creator, Adam, and his wife in pretty simple terms. Maybe they discussed physics and trigonometry later, but not likely at first.

So sit back and read, smile, ponder, or fuss, but whatever you do, I hope that you hear the voice of your Creator saying, (Insert your name here), I made you, I love you, and I want you to know Me as I know you. I hope that you reflect on His love for you and how your own sin has vastly damaged your life story. And then I hope you … well, I hope you then eat from the Tree of Life.

He chose to give birth to us by giving us his true word. And we, out of all creation, became his prized possession.

—James 1:18 NLT

Prelude: The Preparation, the Plan, the Purpose

Long before the beginning of time, in a place before there really was a place, the Sacred One—the self-existent one who has neither beginning nor end—existed. He existed because His name is I Exist. He existed alone by Himself in three facets: the Will, the Word, and the Spirit. ¹ He was profusely passionate and copiously creative. He had all power to do anything His limitless imagination inspired. He had all wisdom to create every thought—not just to bring into existence something that He imagined but to create all things so they existed harmoniously together. And so, alone in cosmic emptiness, He thought, It’s not good to be alone. Then divine desire and inspired imagination conceived a plan.

The Plan—Part 1, Preparation

The first step of the plan was to prepare a place, so the Will expressed Himself through the Word; He spoke. As the sound of His voice passed through the emptiness, the emptiness became space and matter. Where His voice had not yet been, there remained emptiness. The all-powerful Will expressed the Word, and that Word was carried on the breath of the Spirit who knows no bounds or limitations. Where once was nothing, His Word went out and created a place—the heavens and the earth. They were empty and void, but they were there. There was now a place. I Exist made His abode in the heavens.

Having established a place, the Sacred One thought, It’s very quiet in this place. The Will imagined and then created four winged creatures. The first embodied majesty; the second, enduring strength; the third, passion; and the fourth, a righteous champion. Each creature had six wings and was covered with eyes. The Will also imagined heavenly spiritual beings—shining, luminous beings to administer His will and do His bidding, like obedient sons. These were called angels. Once the angels and creatures were created, the Word spoke the command, Praise Him. There was an immediate response. As the command went out, the angels lifted up a shout and began to sing the song of creation in praise to the Will.² So powerful was the song that even the heavens and the earth began to sing along. The four creatures, now living, began to resonate with the heavenly chorus, Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, who was, and is, and is to come.

Among the ranks of the angels, there was one that the Will had created differently from the others. He was more powerful and shone a little brighter—at least on the outside. But on the inside, he was created with darkness in his core. Every time the angels would sing, this shining one would