Preparing For Paradise

Food, drink, beautiful scenery, and companionship. Adam and Eve were living in paradise, that is, until the devil deceived them out of their inheritance from God. [1]

After Adam and Eve sinned, God asks Adam, “Where are you?” [2]

Where Adam is and where God wants him to be is still the most important question today!

Paradise has been lost due to sin. We are living in exile from paradise. God’s heart is to restore us to paradise. On the cross Jesus said to the believing thief next to Him, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” [3] That is what the death of Jesus on the cross for our sin is about – paradise restored to every believer.

Walter Brueggemann in his book “Hopeful Imagination – Prophetic Voices in Exile” speaks of the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel in terms of shepherding God’s exiled people. The events of 587 BC are decisive to their prophetic writings. This is when the temple and the holy city of Jerusalem were destroyed. Descendants of King David were dethroned from ruling and Jerusalem’s top minds and leaders were deported to Babylon.

These despairing people saw nothing new, hoped nothing new, and spoke of nothing new.

The goal of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel was to help the people of faith to make two crucial and difficult moves, to relinquish and receive.

The world as they knew it was gone forever, but the Lord was offering them a new world. They must let go of the world of King and Temple and receive a new world from God that it is hard for them to believe possible. It is also not of their design.

“Do not remember the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing. Now it shall spring forth; shall you not know it? I will even make a road in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.” [4]

God has a plan to replace the wilderness with paradise. Part of the problem is that we are so used to the wilderness, it is the only world we know, we have no concept or imaginative power to comprehend what God wants to do.

Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel write some of the most beautiful poetry of what God is going to do for people in exile. Remember, we are all in exile. We are not living in the paradise God originally designed for us. We are not enjoying the intimate relationships that God originally created us to enjoy. But Jesus wants to say to us, “Today, you will be with Me in paradise.” We must let go of our tight grip on the world Babylon sells us and trust God to receive the new world He is creating.

The new world order will be where God and the Lamb rule and people live in paradise. This is the world we are called as Christians to make our fellow man aware of. This is one of our key functions while we walk this earth – to make people aware of the coming kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Just as Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel sought the Lord for artistic and poetic expressions to make God’s reality real to the people living in Babylon so must we. We are called to prepare people for the kingdom of God.

A new world is about to emerge where Jesus Christ rules as the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. Like John the Baptist, we are called to prepare people for His coming. God is ending our known world and inviting to us a new world where righteousness, peace, and joy reign.

The loss authority of David’s kingly descendants and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem are analogous with the loss of the godly governors and Biblical law in America. We are living in a nation adrift from God. Like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, we need to draw on all the strength, wisdom and inspiration God gives us to be poet prophets to our generation.

We need to die to the old order of Babylon and come alive to what God is doing. He is doing a new thing for us too. Jesus is about to return. Roses do bloom in the wilderness as Isaiah says in chapter 35. Rivers do flow in the desert.

We need to defy the lies of Babylon that says that all you see is all you get. That material pleasure is the only real pleasure. Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. We have a much brighter future with God than that.

We need to stop being double minded as though Jesus will not return. We need to believe that HE IS restoring paradise.

As we draw upon God through Scripture reading, prayer, group Bible Study, congregational worship, group prayer and fellowship in the body of Christ, God activates all our inspiration and resolve to live for the coming kingdom and not for this world.

“Adam, where are you?”

“We are right here Lord studying Your Word and preparing for paradise.”

[1] Genesis 2:8-10, 15, 21-25, 15; 3:1-6
[2] Genesis 3:9
[3] Luke 23:43
[4] Isaiah 43:18-19