The concept of the Kingdom of God involves, in a real sense, the total message of the Bible. Not only does it loom large in the teachings of Jesus; it is to be found, in one form or another, through the length and breadth of the Bible….from Abraham, who set out to seek “the city whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10; cf. Gen. 12:1ff.), until the New Testament closes with “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God”(Rev. 21:2). To grasp what is meant by the Kingdom of God is to come very close to the heart of the Bible’s gospel of salvation.” (John Bright former professor of Hebrew and Old Testament interpretation at Union Theological Seminary (1940–1975))
As we follow the threads of the Kingdom of God in Scripture leading to Christ, the first thread takes us back before Israel was a nation, before Moses lead the Hebrews out of Egypt, before Joseph ruled in Egypt, even before Abram is Abraham—you can probably guess where I’m going with this. We have to go all the way back to page one, before creation. “Now wait a minute” you may ask, “doesn’t the Kingdom of God specifically have to do with people interacting with God? How could there be a Kingdom before Adam?” I’m glad you asked—but I’ll warn you, the answer’s weirder than you may think.
The Bible is explicit that God wasn’t alone when He created the heavens and the earth. Before the stage is even set, there is already a host of characters, specifically the “sons of God” or elohim. Although the sons of God don’t make their appearance in Genesis until chapter 6, God’s account of creation to Job in Job 38:4–7 is reason for reflection,
4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell Me, if you have understanding,
5 Who set its measurements? Since you know.
Or who stretched the line on it?
6 “On what were its bases sunk?
Or who laid its cornerstone,
7 When the morning stars sang together
And all the sons of God shouted for joy?
The same elohim, “host of heaven”, or “divine council” which we read of later in the Old Testament are said to already be there before creation (2 Ch. 33:5; Dan. 8:10; Ps. 89:7). These are not angels or humans, and it’s not some tricky language about the Trinity. The Hebrew word elohim in particular is very helpful for uncovering the ancient imagination of the nature of YHWH God’s assembly of gods (Ps. 82). The word literally means “god”, and is used interchangeably in Scripture for pagan gods and the God of Israel. For instance, in Genesis 1:1 it is not explicitly YHWH who creates the heavens and the earth, the word is just elohim. However, since the verb “created” which comes next is singular, and because the rest of Scripture affirms God alone created everything, we know that this elohim is YHWH. So why such a nondescript word for God? The problem is we are not supposed to read the word as being a name or title, but as a positional or locational term. It is less restrictive than meaning merely both pagan god and YHWH God, but as something which inhabits similar space—that space being the spiritual realm.
I glean this interpretation of the word elohim from Biblical Scholar Michael Heiser, who has spent decades researching the Hebrew vision of the spiritual world, most of which is contained in his monumental work, The Unseen Realm which is a written as a synthesis of the best scholarship on the topic. If anything I say in this chapter bothers you, I highly encourage you to put down this book and read chapter 3 of his book which explores this topic comprehensively. For now though, play along with me.
“The sons of God are divine, not human. The sons of God witnessed creation long before there were people. They are intelligent nonhuman beings….God has created a host of nonhuman divine beings whose domain is (to human eyes) an unseen realm” (Michael Heiser The Unseen Realm p. 25). We can even surmise that these nonhuman divine beings are, as well, made to be imagers of God for two reasons. First, because when God creates man in Genesis 1, God does not just say it, He says it to the assembly of the sons of God,
“Then God said, “Let Us [plural] make man in Our [plural] image, according to Our [plural] likeness”” (Gen. 1:26).
Second, because the sons of God and human beings share a similar mandate: to be administrators, stewards, agents of God’s rule. Only, rather than ruling over the planet and subduing it like humans, the sons of God’s responsibilities were to rule over people, over the nations. Remember, the sons of God are His administrators, His own “council” or “assembly”, much the way an ancient king would have a household or courtiers (Job 15:8; Ps. 82, 89). Evidently God set the sons of God over the nations when they divided at Babel, not as a further judgement, but as a grace to the people, giving them divine guidance,
“When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God” (Deut. 32:6).
However, as we continue reading through Genesis and on into Exodus, it because abundantly clear that the elohim ruling over the nations are not exactly doing God’s will. In fact, it looks like they’ve set to the task of making everyone think they’re the true God, or at least the best god. So what broke down? We’re told explicitly what happened in Psalm 82 as God takes “his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgement”. The same gods He had appointed over the nations of mankind back in Genesis 11 have experienced their own spiritual tower of babel. Rather than obey God’s good plan which had heaven and earth working in tandem, potentially creating harmony, the elohim have made a grab for power, staging a kind of cosmic coup. They, just like the human kings they influence, have seized power, and innocent people are caught in the crossfire. That’s why God’s judgements against the elohim or here, “sons of the Most High” in Psalm 82 have to do with injustice toward the fatherless, weak, and poor—because they were supposed to be His delegates, representing His will. What God says next is fascinating,
“7 nevertheless, like men you shall die,
and fall like any prince.
8 Arise, O God, judge the earth;
for you shall inherit all the nations!”
Note, verse 7 is in the voice of God as He curses and dethrones the gods, and 8 is in the voice of the psalmist. Together they say something which should prick up our ears. What is being said here is a shadow of a new order coming in the future, one where the rule of God is not delegated out to elohim but will be more directly administered by God Himself. It’s a leitmotif of the Christological Kingdom of God. Basically, the multitudinous delegates of God’s Kingdom are out, and He Himself will provide His own unique “Son of God” to represent His will to the whole world, and not just to Israel. But I’m getting ahead of myself, the point here is God had a set order in which His creation would work from the very beginning, and that involved both humans and elohim doing God’s will in and amongst creation. The spiritual realm and the earthly realm were meant to work together under His good will. As we know, this wasn’t the case, and the rest of the story of Scripture follows God’s redemptive efforts to reestablish that initial harmony between heaven and earth in His Kingdom.
We see God’s plan to achieve this goal involving direct one-on-one contact with human beings, both individual and collective (e.g. Abram and later Israel). God, in His wisdom, chooses to go about this process of reuniting His perfect realm with His fallen creation through families, covenants, temples, and the grace of the Mosaic Law, but nowhere does God’s perfect realm intersect closer with earth than at Eden. As we’ll see in a moment, the imaginations of the biblical writers were restlessly haunted by images of Eden.
True Myth
“The Lord God planted an orchard in the east, in Eden; and there he placed the man he had formed.” (Gen. 2:8)
I hope the modern cultural milieu surrounding our imagination of Eden has not hardened your heart to how potent Scriptures’ imagery of it is. It should not surprise you that Scripture’s imagery of perfect harmony and unity with God does not segregate spiritual and physical. It also doesn’t put us through exhaustive metaphysics to explain how God, Who is spirit, could plant a garden or walk in the cool of the day (Gen. 3:8). It’s not explained how a human being is formed out of dust, nor how one of the elohim supposedly takes the form of a talking snake. We can write it off as “myth” or give up critical evaluation all together and say it’s a hundred percent text-book-style fact.
I don’t think Moses was going for either when he wrote Genesis. I believe what was on his mind was closer to what C.S. Lewis has called, “true myth”, namely that it is a myth told by God and not a myth conjured up in the imagination of a man. The creation account, the garden, the Kingdom itself are all undoubtedly true, but they are also undoubtedly myth. They are God’s rendering of incomprehensible realities into humanly comprehensible stories. Our minds naturally absorb stories better than longhand exposition, and stories have the unique advantage of shaming scholars and the worldly wise and being best understood by children (Prov. 21:30; Matt. 11:25; 1 Cor. 1:27).
So what does the Eden account tell us through story which we would have lost in expository teaching? First of all, like all stories and myths, it is written within a context of other stories and myths—and where the Biblical story diverges from other common myths is where both scholars and its original hearers listen most closely. Since I hold with orthodoxy that Moses was the sole writer of the Pentetuch (Gen.–Deut.), I cannot believe scholars who say that Genesis was written based on Babylonian mythos, although they clearly share similar traits: a similar order of creation, division between sea and land, darkness in the beginning, and later the centrality of trees and gardens in relation to divinity. The interest in comparing Genesis with the Babylonian narrative exploded in 1849 after the discovery of the Enuma Elish in Nineveh, which recounts this creation narrative. However since then, there has been a growing body of evidence against the Babylonian theory. One point of evidence simply being the Babylonian creation narrative is hardly unique among other world creation narratives; eg. it shares similarities to the Norse creation narrative and ancient Japanese accounts; people with no contact with the ancient near east.
More recent scholars, such as A. H. Sayce, Cyrus Gordon, A. S. Yahuda, and James Hoffmeier believe it more likely that Genesis borrows certain elements from the Egyptian creation narrative, which would agree with the ancient origins of the Pentetuch. There are striking similarities between ancient Egyptian accounts of creation, including: a hierarchy of gods with a creator God at its head, creation by divine word, primordial darkness and boundless water before dry land, and man being molded out clay. Interestingly though, there is little attention in these accounts to man’s relationship to the gods. Like nearly every other ancient cosmology, the rationality behind the creation of mankind is for the gods to have servants. This is the primary location these ancient pagan cosmologies are exposed to be royal propaganda—ancient kings, especially the pharaohs, routinely painted themselves in a divine light, as manifestations of the gods.
Genesis diverges from this line of reasoning. Rather than mankind being made to be subservient to a god-king on earth, man himself is made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27). This Imago Dei language has been tossed around liberally among Christians throughout history. Bible readers have made it out to mean: human rationality, free will, emotions, vaguely the spiritual element in humanity, etc. Bluntly put, while you might see some of these attributes reflected in Scripture, none of these are what the Bible means when it speaks of humans as made in the image of God. It, as in terms of God’s assembly or council, has more to do with the idea of authority and hierarchy.
Put on your imagination hat for a moment. Imagine yourself in a small rural village in ancient times. It can be 1000 BC or 1000 AD, in ancient Europe or ancient Asia, it doesn’t matter. What do you think you’d see when you show up at the town square? You guessed it, likely a statue of your nation’s ruler. It could be a conqueror or a regional governor, the point is the ruler of your land has set his image in the land. He may not be present in your little village, but his image is. Blow this up to a cosmic perspective. God is the supreme ruler of creation—after all, He made it—and He has set His image in the land, His mark of rule and authority over creation in individual human beings. This is not a privilege reserved for rulers, a certain gender, or even a certain race, it is given to everyone with human DNA. “We are created to image God, to be his imagers. It is what we are by definition. The image is not an ability we have, but a status. We are God’s representatives on earth. To be human is to image God” (Michael Heiser p. 43). While this might bother some people today, it was an absolute abomination to ancient civilizations who held no one but their king was a manifestation of the gods’ authority on earth. The implication that all human beings, including women, have the God-given status as co-ruler of creation was deeply subversive to the ancient mind.
Moreover, God sets his imagers in a garden, not just to enjoy the fruit of God’s labor, but to work it, eventually to actually expand it into the whole world (Gen. 1:15, 28). Evidently the garden was not that big at first, and the rest of the earth needed people to tame its vast tracts of wilderness. But why couldn’t God have just created nature in such a way that it tended to itself? We could also ask at this point the glaring question, why would God create an assembly of other Gods? This points us to another key theme which is essential for understanding the Kingdom of God, both in its biblical context, and for us today. God’s chain of command.
God Delegates
We may not understand it, we may not like it, but it’s impossible to get around in the biblical narrative as well as in lived experience. There is a point at which God does not directly manipulate His creation but gives it to others to take care of. Yes, He sustains creation, holds it together, and gives life to it (Job 33:4; Matt. 6:26; Col. 1:17), but it is for His created beings to do His will. More than just being a quirk of God’s character which we can easily overlook, this is a core tenant of His reality. God delegates. He does this with people and with elohim. He divvies out the work of running creation amongst His created imagers.
We should again be hearing leitmotifs of Jesus’ teachings on this point, specifically the parable of the vineyard (Mk. 12:1–9; Lk. 20:9–16). A man builds a fully functioning vineyard and leaves it in the charge of some tenants. At harvest time he sends servants to tell the tenants to yield their produce, but instead of comply they beat and kill them. The story ends with the tenants killing the man’s son in a half-witted rush to gain His inheritance. Jesus says that these tenants will be destroyed and the vineyard put into the hands of more capable tenants. Or maybe God’s delegating attribute reminds you of the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14–30). In both cases, God is seen putting people in charge of what He made, people profit, and they are expected to give back to God in a self-sufficient cycle.
Jesus summarizes this theme throughout God’s Word neatly. God’s delegation of work and authority is not an anomaly, it is the rule. The way the Kingdom of God functions both before creation, now, and in eternity is with people and divine beings doing the will of God. However, as Jesus vividly depicts in His parables, God’s delegates have become non-compliant, and the result is not good to say the least. When people or divine beings buck their responsibility and try to cut corners what results is disunity, dysfunction, disequilibrium between our wills and God’s will. It is what Scripture knows as sin, the root of death, sickness, sadness, and pride. The image of the Kingdom of God coming back together: with eternal life, health, joy, and humility, is uniquely a return to Eden. Not just a return but also a development from Eden. This is why, in Revelation, we are not only left with the image of the tree of life, but of the New, heavenly Jerusalem. A city is a pretty big development from a garden.
But for now, let’s jump back to the garden of Eden. Let’s return to my question earlier about what Eden tells us through myth or story. In addition to adopting and reshaping a whole library of cultural imagery from Israel’s neighbors, the Eden account in Genesis sets in motion a thread of allusions and references found in nearly every book of the Bible. Scripture is replete with references to trees and high places at moments of critical decisions, the reference to the woman’s seed, and to humanity’s calling to subdue the earth. Biblical authors reuse certain key phrases from the first three chapters of Genesis, such as: he/she looked and saw it was pleasing to his/her eyes, and to work it and keep it. The imagery of the temple in Jerusalem later is itself a monument built on allusions to Eden and the life in God’s presence it represented. Eden is more than just a good starting spot for Scripture, it’s the rhythm Scripture is set to. It’s the first pebble that starts generations of ripples which can be traced all the way to Revelation and subsequent Church tradition. So what exactly is Eden, and what does it tell us about the Kingdom of God?
In the Center of the Garden
Eden is where the biblical idea of the Kingdom of God originates. It is where God’s will is being perfectly done in and through His infant creation. In Eden, God’s perfect realm of harmony and order in heaven corresponds exactly to the physical created order, and the result is peace, love, abundance, meaning, and life. It was the object of which all our pleasures and joys today are only a shadow. God Himself, the neverending spring of joy and life, made His home there, and in the center of the garden, we’re told, is what equates to God’s own throne: the tree of life.
8 And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. 9 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. (Gen. 1:8–9).
Most Bible readers tend to overlook the tree of life and skip directly to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—but without the tree of life the garden would just be a garden, and humanity would not be immortal (Gen. 3:22). The story implies that Adam and Eve did in fact have access to this tree, as with every tree in the garden, but they were simply not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because it would lead to death. The later prohibition of the tree of life was not to say they had not yet earned the fruit of eternal life—as if God was testing them to see if they would measure up to eternal life. Adam and Eve are to be understood as eating the fruit of the tree of life as part of their perfect existence with God in His perfect habitation. What comes later is God cutting off their access to the tree of life, because to live eternally in sin would be a cruel existence.
Although we’ve become accustomed to considering the tree of the knowledge of good and evil as the center of the story of, what is commonly called, the fall narrative, the tree of life in fact takes center stage. The tree of life was set in the center of the garden as an unavoidable focal point—but so was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Every time Adam and Eve would come to receive fruit from the tree of life, there was the forbidden tree just yards away. I implore you not to think of some gnarled, villainous looking tree. The language of Genesis paints it as just as attractive, or perhaps more attractive, than the other fruiting trees of the garden. In fact, this tree was not evil—it was the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, or in Hebrew Tov and Ra.
It threw me for a major loop when I first learned that tov and ra do not equate to our modern moral terms “good” and “evil”. It’s english equivalent is closer to “good and bad”, “right and wrong”, or “helpful and harmful”. Theologian Tim Mackie discusses this in detail in a podcast on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, “They [Adam and Eve] don’t know what is right and wrong. They need God to teach them how to be wise and how to choose what is right from wrong….“Knowing tov and ra’” is a sign of maturity.” The english way of scolding a child by saying, “you know better than to do that” would equate for the Hebrew as “you have knowledge of tov and ra”. So why did God keep this from them?
Many Hebrew Bible scholars think God did not always intend for humans not to have tov and ra, because it is not an inherently bad thing, and is actually praised elsewhere in Scripture (Deut. 1:39; 1 Kng. 3:7–9). The trouble came if human beings took and ate of the fruit themselves, outside of God’s timing. The core tenet of life in the garden was it was life out of God’s hand, living completely sustained by His provision. To do anything contrary to that would be, not only to mistrust God, but to fall out of line with His created order.
The tree planted by streams of water in Psalm 1 echoes this theme. Here the psalmist describes the kind of man who lives on God’s time and from God’s life. He likens the man to a tree planted by streams of water and adds interestingly that he bears fruit in season. The idea of fruit in season is all over Scripture as a symbol of loving trust in God, and children lovingly ought to trust their Father. The desert wanderings are filled with moments where the Israelites are tempted to take fruit out of season. Abram and Sarai take fruit out of season when they scheme a way to have an heir before God’s timing (Gen. 16:3). In this fascinating story, God has promised Abram a son who will become a great nation, but the couple wait for years and nothing happens. Sarai remains barren and they’re both getting very old. So she has her husband Abram hook up with her maidservant Hagar to have a son. It’s another test like in the garden, only here the tree of life is waiting on God, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is having a son through, what would essentially be, the rape of her servant. There is a tree of life (God’s way) and there is a tree of the knowledge of good and evil (man’s way). The language has unmistakable overtones of Genesis 3, as Sarai looks on Hagar and sees she is good to her eyes, gives her to her husband, and he listens to the voice of his wife, which is word for word associated with God’s curse to Adam in Genesis 3:17.
But note, Hagar is not the villain of the story. Even after she gives birth to Ishamael and Sarai and Abram have sent into the wilderness with her child, essentially to her death, God provides a spring for Hagar in the desert and promises to do great things through Ishmael. God redeems this particular tree of the knowledge of good and evil, just as He does with the knowledge of good and evil, tov and ra, elsewhere in Scripture, even in Isaiah’s prophecies about the Messiah (7:15–16). So, if the tree of the knowledge of good and evil isn’t the villain, what is? The actual villain of the story is an enemy we see throughout all of Scripture.
In the Center of Mankind
Yes, the serpent is the villain to a point, but he is only the Satan (lit. “the adversary” or “withstander”). Even Eve had a chance to deny herself and the Withstander by just trusting the word of YHWH. The actual enemy of the story is something within human beings—a wild, untrusting, disorderly tendency which ought to be tamed and cultivated to trusting God, just as the whole earth was meant to be turned into a garden and not a wilderness. It is the tendency to hear God, ignore Him, and believe we know best. It is to take the fruit out of season, to make ourselves into gods who can decide when something is in or out of season. When we decide what is good and what is bad, we forfeit our position as co-rulers with God, ruling instead a made up kingdom which gives us all the power, but denies us the real power that leads to eternal life. You can jump back to chapter 6 if you want a refresher on this strain in human thought.
So the story of the two trees in Eden is more than just a historical narrative, it is a window into the human self and the two choices. It’s a mistake to assume the Eden narrative is a stand-alone story in Scripture. In fact, many scholars hold that it is the backbone of the whole story of Scripture. The biblical skeleton of the human personality is found right there in Genesis 1–3. Humans were created to be with God, and not just to coexist with God, but to rule with God in His Kingdom as His unique imagers. As the unique imagers of YHWH, we were made to draw our life directly from Him, and this life comes from an intimate relationship of trust with Him in ceaseless delight (Eden is Hebrew for “pleasure” or “delight”). Eternal life did not derive from being in the garden, eternal came from knowing and trusting God (Jhn. 17:3; cf. Gen. 2:15–16). The challenge to eternal life came when that relationship was tested, and this kind of testing is unique. It is not an arbitrary challenge, like a math test, to prove the worth of the person being tested, it is any time the temptation to take fruit out of season arises. Remember, in the reality God created the tree of life and the forbidden tree are planted very near each other—and we know this from experience.
When a good thing happens, when we’re walking in step with the will of God, there are always new ways to spoil that good thing. When someone gets married, it is a life-changing good that can be used to glorify God and grow the couple in godliness. But it also opens up a thousand new pathways to sin, injure trust, and allow bitterness. The deciding factor is how the individuals decide whether to trust God or trust their own practical wisdom. Or take for example someone becoming a pastor. There are few better ways to manifest Christ’s Kingdom than to minister as, what Paul called, a shepherd of the Church. But the amount of trust and authority given to pastors can lead to thousands of opportunities to trust in man’s knowledge of good and evil and not God’s, thus the endless sea of heartbreaking stories of church-goers who have had their trust abused by pastoral leaders.
Take this principle into any mode of human life and you’ll find it rings true. There is a tree of life and a tree of the knowledge of good and evil planted in the center of every human heart, and the decision to listen to God or listen to our own reason is always before us. The central, binary, on-off switch of human life or death is our decision to trust and obey God’s will or to follow our own line of sight or intuition.
This crucial decision is soaked into every page of Scripture, from Adam to the Apostles, and it is taking place in your heart right now. But don’t imagine it’s a decision you can make on a dime. It’s not the same kind of decision we make when we change brands of laundry detergent, or decide to start working-out again. We make the decision to trust or disobey God every day implicitly, without giving it much thought. The problem is deeper than just our decision making paradigm, it’s anchored in what kinds of people we are. The “come as you are” mantra in Christianity is a good place to start, but we were never meant to stay where we are. Where we are is anchored in sin, in worldly wisdom which leads to more and more sin, and consequently death.
We are to become the kinds of people who naturally choose the tree of life without even glancing at the forbidden tree—at least until God gives it to us to eat. Impossible, you ask? Jesus doesn’t think so. The world you see around you today is built on a false schema of mankind’s knowledge of good and evil, redefined and catered to our whims and desires and, according to Scripture, to the rebellious elohim who still hold sway over people, nations, and organizations (Deut. 32:6, Eph.2:1–3, 6:12, Col. 2:20; Rev. 18:2). Jesus came to offer another way—Himself as the substitution for our sin and as the example for us to live by. Listen to Jesus’ word from the Sermon on the Mount, as He describes the Kingdom of God come to earth through Himself and how we are meant to respond to it,
“Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the way is broad that leads to destruction, and there are many who enter through it. For the gate is small and the way is narrow that leads to life, and there are few who find it.” (Matt. 7:13–14).
If you read the Bible as “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”, as I’ve heard it put before, or just as an instruction manual for how to get to heaven when you die, you’ll be sorely disappointed. The core meaning of Scripture is not getting people to say the magic word to allow a malignant deity to let them into paradise. It is about humans turning into something greater than just humans. It is the human being eating from the tree of life. There is a choice at the center of Scripture and at the center of every human heart, a choice we don’t make once but every moment. Do we choose God’s way, or man’s way.
Jesus says the way to life is difficult; it’s narrow and easy to overlook—but it is not an impossible way. It’s there for those who are willing to trust God, give up their expectations of how God ought to be running the show, and give up their right to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Jesus provides this way, and the result of choosing the narrow way is life in a way we’ve never known it. Co-ruling on earth as it is in heaven—today and on into eternity. If this topic has your cylinders firing then skip down to the next unit, where I talk more about living in the Kingdom today. In the following chapters we will continue to trace the drama of the Kingdom of God through Scripture, as God draws mankind back to, and beyond, Eden.
The Witness to the Kingdom