“Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer… I am the Lord, your Holy One, the Creator of Israel, your King” (Isaiah 43:14-15). Although we do not generally associate God’s redemption with Eden, the connection is there. We spend a lot of time painting God as a Redeemer King, seeking to redeem His people from sin and restore an intimate relationship with them. It is significant that Isaiah tied God’s kingly attributes to His creative purpose and redemptive plan. The King is the Creator. The Creator is the Redeemer. The Redeemer is the King. All three are tied together, and it is very important that we see the connections between these three, because they all take us back to Eden.
As much as God is Creator of Israel, He is Creator of the entire world. On the sixth day, God, the Creator, created humans and placed them in Eden. Eden was God’s first kingdom – it was there that His people were to dwell, living in agreement with His will. God’s first humans did not live by His will, so they were ejected from Eden. The rest of history has been the story of God redeeming people back from what the first humans started.
Adam and Eve fell, and Israel did not live righteously. So God brought forth Jesus, His ultimate plan to restore the atmosphere of Eden. There are plenty of others, but I want to highlight for you two passages that make this very clear, Ephesians 4:17-24 and 2 Corinthians 5:16-21. In Ephesians 4, Paul spent a good amount of ink teaching the Christians that they should not live as the Gentiles lived, using words like “futile,” “alienated,” “ignorant,” “blind,” “greedy” and “unclean“ to describe them.
Then, he told them how they should behave themselves. “But you have not so learned Christ, if indeed you have heard him and have been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus: that you put off, concerning your former conduct, the old man which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lusts, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and that you put on the new man which was created according to God, in true righteousness and holiness” (Ephesians 4:20-24).
Did you catch the Eden language? Instead of living as the Gentiles, those without God, Paul taught them to live like they were created in God’s image. In fact, the rest of the chapter is Paul’s discussion of how they were to leave their former conduct and live as God’s image bearers. Jesus was the catalyst. Because they had learned about Him (Ephesians 4:20), they knew how to live as God’s image. Because of His work, they had been redeemed, and it was time they started acting like it. In other words, they needed to start seeking God’s kingdom above all. They were His people, but they were still living like the godless Gentiles.
Now for 2 Corinthians 5:16-21. Paul spent most of his time in this section talking about God’s redeeming purpose, how He reconciled us back to Himself and how Christians should work to redeem others from sin, reconciling them to God. In short, Paul spent a lot of time teaching people the need to restore the Eden-like atmosphere. Before the section about redemption and reconciliation, take a look at how Paul introduced the topic: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new” (2 Corinthians 5:17). Did you see it? To introduce topics like redemptions and reconciliation, Paul went back to the place where it all began, Eden. Jesus was there (John 1:1-3), and just as God used Jesus to create the universe and place people in Eden, He counts on Jesus to make new creations (Christians). Jesus was and is God’s plan for redeeming humans from sin and reconciling us back to Himself. Yet, God’s redemptive purpose does us no good if we do not allow Him to redeem us, to be our King. We cannot claim Him as our King if we do not seek His kingdom above all. That was Jesus’ message when He came upon the scene.
