Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

The wallpaper on my laptop computer is a picture of a small island located somewhere in the South Pacific.  There are three palm trees on this island, and this island is covered with white, sugary sand, the kind you love to feel between your toes as you’re walking on the beach.  Surrounding this island in the South Pacific is the crystal clear water that you can see as far as the eye will take you.  And the sky above this picture of this land is the bluest sky you’ve ever seen.  And it has little puffs of white cloud dotted throughout the blue sky.  No rain in sight because it doesn’t rain in paradise, okay.  Off in the distance there is a sailboat that’s moving toward that island.  In my dreams, I’m on that sailboat.  Because this picture that is on the desktop of my laptop computer is a picture of paradise for me.  And when things get a little bit rough, when things get a little stressed, when I feel a little frayed around the edges, I just take a few minutes and I look at that picture, that wallpaper on my laptop computer.  And I just breathe a sigh of relief because I imagine myself on that island paradise in the middle of the South Pacific.  Oh, there is some other detail I left out.  My wife Cathryn is with me.  That really makes it paradise, okay.

0:02:04.7

The travel industry loves to sell paradise adventures.  Hawaii, the Caribbean, the Virgin Islands and some island you’ve maybe never heard of located somewhere out in the ocean.  And some of you have traveled to places like that.  Others of us, we dream of going to places like that.  If you’re like me, I’m tempted to live in paradise, some island paradise that I only see in pictures.  Hollywood loves the paradise theme.  Have you noticed that?  Do you remember the movie Blue Lagoon?  It was that film that launched the career of an actress named Brooke Shields.  And it was about two young teenage kids who were shipwrecked on an island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, and they fell in love.  And they began to experience and enjoy the ups and downs, emotionally and otherwise, of young, innocent love in a paradise setting.  That’s what Blue Lagoon was all about.  I also grew up in the 70s and 80s watching a popular television program called Fantasy Island.  Remember Fantasy Island?  What a crazy show.  Ricardo Montalban, the actor who played Mr. Roarke, he was this, kind of, strange mysterious overseer of this island located somewhere in the South Pacific.  And people would pay him money to travel to Fantasy Island.  And Mr. Roarke, who always wore this white suit…aren’t you glad I don’t wear a white suit?  He always wore this white suit, and he would welcome his guests to Fantasy Island.  And he would fulfill their fantasies.  He had a little sidekick named Tattoo.  You remember Tattoo?  He was about 4’ 2”, about up to here.  And he would climb up to that bell tower.  And as the plane would arrive with the guests, he would say, “Da plane, da plane, da plane.”  And Mr. Roarke in his white suit would lift his champagne glass to his guests.  And he’d say, “Hello, my name is Mr. Roarke.  Welcome to Fantasy Island.”  And everybody wanted to go to Fantasy Island. Everybody wants to experience young innocent love in a paradise setting.  Most Christians I know would like to live in the Garden of Eden.  That’s because…and I’ve got a theory on this, just a theory.  But I think it’s because we were created for paradise.  We were created for paradise.

0:04:23.5

Let’s go back to Genesis 2.  And let’s pick up on the creation story in verse 4, where we are introduced to the garden paradise in verses 4-14 known as the Garden of Eden, a place that was beautiful and delightful.  The word “Eden” means delightful.  But Moses the writer picks up the story in Genesis 2:4, and it says this.  “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made earth and heaven.  Now no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground.  But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.  Then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”  Now, let’s stop right there just for a few comments.  Verse 4 says, “This is the account of the heavens and the earth.”  I think the King James Version says, “This is the history of the heavens and the earth.”  Ken Ham, the executive director of Answers in Genesis, that creation ministry, likes to refer to the Bible as the history book of the universe.  And I think this is where he picks up the idea.  This, the scripture says, is the history.  It’s the account of the heavens and the earth.  God is the ultimate historian.  It is His story.  It is His account.  And God is a perfect historian.  He never makes mistakes with the facts and the figures.  And when we on our biblical glasses and we look at the world around us and the universe around us using the history book of the universe, the Bible, we come to different conclusions with the facts.  We’ve talked about that over the weeks.  Evolutionists look at it one way.  Creationists look at it another way.  And there are a lot of folks in between.  But this is the account, this is the history of the heavens and the earth.

0:06:44.5

Now, some people get confused in chapter 2 because it sounds like a different creation story.  And some people have cast dispersion upon the scriptures and upon the book of Genesis, saying chapter 2 and the account there contradicts chapter 1.  They really don’t contradict.  They compliment.  And what’s happening here in the literary form of the text is that it was common for people to give kind of summary statements, short and terse as they are in chapter 1, and then come back to the story and give expanded detail and expanded commentary on some but not all of the details in chapter 1.  And that’s what’s happening here in chapter 2.  The purpose was not an ordering of events.  If you try to read verses 4 and following as an ordering of the creation story, you’re gonna have a hard time figuring out how this compliments chapter 1.  The writer Moses is simply reaching into the creation story and pulling out some but not all of the details, giving us some expanded commentary.  So, for instance, in chapter 2, we learn how God created man in His image.  From the dust of the ground He formed him.  In chapter 1 we just learn that He created man in His image.  Okay?  In chapter 2, as we move on we’ll bump into this place called Eden, this garden paradise for which God created man.  We don’t have any of that account in chapter 1.  We learn that God created man in His own image.  Male and female, He created them.  That’s chapter 1.  In chapter 2, we meet the male and female, Adam and, later, Eve.  So chapter 2 is expanded commentary on chapter 1.  It gives us a few more details.  And in chapter 2 and beginning in verse 6, it tells us that mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground.  Remember our discussion back on, I don’t know, day two-ish, day three, about the firmament, the expanse and the waters above the expanse, and that theory that there was this canopy, sort of this canopy above the expanse, the waters above there that created, like, this tropical greenhouse in the earth.  And it was from the expanse above the earth that God would water the earth, and the mist would rise from the ground.  Some of that theory is taken from chapter 2 and verse 6 and this comment on the mist.

0:09:13.1

The word “day” is used in verse 4.  “This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the heaven and earth.”  Now, because we made such a deal of the word “day” in verse 1, I thought I’d just make a passing comment here.  Here the context might suggest that the word day speaks of a time period.  “In the day that God did this.”  It’s not referring to a specific day of creation.  But, remember, context always determines who words are used.  And any word has multiple meanings or nuances.  The context determines here that maybe the word day refers to a period of time when the Lord made the heaven and the earth.  But it does not negate the idea that day, in the context of chapter 1, refers to a 24-hour, you know, literal solar day.

0:10:04.0

And then we come to this idea in verse 7 that says that “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”  Here we learn how God created us in His image.  It says that He reached down and grabbed some of the dust of the earth.  And He formed man.  The word “formed” there is the picture of a potter who works with his clay.  A skilled, hand-crafting potter who works with the clay and forms the clay into a particular way.  And as God formed us from the dust of the earth, He stamped us with His image.  We talked in detail about that a couple weeks.  But here we have this idea that the master potter with the skill of His own hands, as it were, formed us from the dust of the earth.  And it says something again about who we are as human beings.  I like to say it this way.  We are dust, but we are dignity with a divine purpose and a destiny.  Let me say that again.  We came from the dust of the earth, but we are stamped with the image of God.  So we are dust and dignity, and we were created for a purpose.  We have a divine purpose and a divine destiny that we will learn about today as we talk about being created for paradise.  And so this is man.

0:11:43.9

Now, let’s get back to this idea of what it means to be created for paradise.  There is something inside all of us that I think longs for the paradise for which we were created.  You know, we see it in some Hollywood movies.  We see it in the travel industry.  I just experience it on my laptop.  I want to go there.  I was made for a place like that, okay.  Let’s talk a little bit more about that.  Let’s read on verses 8 and 9.  It says, “The LORD God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed.  Out of the ground the LORD God caused to grow every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  Doesn’t that sound fascinating?  Now, long before the days of Better Homes & Gardens, God was the first gardener.  He was the first landscape architect.  And when He created man in His own image, the scripture says to the east…and we don’t know the frame of reference anymore than that.  But to the east He planted a garden, a garden paradise called Eden.  And Eden means delightful.  It was a beautiful place.  It was a place you’d want to go to.  And not only did He plant this garden, but even though God had created all the trees and all of the vegetation and all that was on the earth, the scripture indicates or suggests that He picked out particular trees and particular vegetation. Trees that were pleasing to the eye.  It was a beautiful place.  And trees that produced fruit that were good to the taste buds, okay.  In other words, it just struck me that when God created man in His image, He didn’t put him in a ghetto.  He didn’t say, “Hey, Adam, I got a great deal on a doublewide over here.  You want to live there?”  He didn’t put him in government-assisted housing.  Does anybody want to live in those places?  No, you want to live in paradise, don’t you.  And it says something about how much God valued His creation that He would place Adam in this beautiful garden paradise.  It’s a paradise for which we were created.

0:14:15.9

And there were two trees there- the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the scripture says.  What’s with these trees?  Well the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was God’s way of establishing moral accountability from day one.  You and I were created in His image.  We were created as free will beings.  Adam could love God or choose not to love God.  He could choose to obey God or not obey God.  Adam could choose to go God’s way or choose to go his own way.  And it was all about tree of the knowledge of good and evil and that forbidden fruit.  That was the one tree that, later in the text, God tells Adam and Eve, “You can’t partake of that one.  You can enjoy everything else, including freely eating from the tree of life.  But don’t take from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  Moral accountability.  We are created with free wills.  We are created with choice, but we are held morally accountable for the choices that we make.

0:15:20.8

The tree of life is sort of an enigmatic symbol and reality in the Garden of Eden.  It’s more than just a symbol.  It was an actual tree.  And we’re not told much about the tree of life.  It kind of reappears in Genesis 3, the fall of man.  When Adam sins, they are banished, he and Eve, from the Garden of Eden.  We’re getting ahead of the story here.  And then it says in chapter 3 that they were protected essentially from taking from the tree of life.  That the angel, the cherubim, had a flaming sword that protected them from eating from the tree of life.  I take that to mean that because in their fallen state they would have lived forever in their fallen state.  So they were banished from the garden, protected from the tree of life.  It wasn’t a punitive thing.  It was a protective thing so that God could make way for His plan of redemption so that Adam and Eve wouldn’t live forever in their fallen state.  That’s all I want to say about the tree of life right now.  It’s gonna reappear in just a few moments.  But what I want you to understand at this point is we were created for this.  We were created for paradise, but we don’t live there, do we.

0:16:37.2

Which bring me to a second thought, and that is that we live in paradise lost.  Reality check this morning.  We were created in paradise, but we live in paradise lost.  We live in a post-Genesis 3 world.  We live in a fallen world, stricken by sin and rebellion.  We are Adam’s descendants.  We inherited a sin nature.  And all of that explains why pain and suffering, disease, death and bloodshed exist in our world today.  I said it explains it.  It doesn’t make it easier to contend with, but it does explain it.  And we need to accept that reality, I guess, that we live in paradise lost.

0:17:28.2

Hollywood has kind of figured this out.  One of the recent popular shows that is on television today is a show called Lost.  I’ve not seen it very many times.  I’ve just kind of seen some of the promos on.  I got a gist of what it was all about.  Apparently there was a group of people who were flying from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles, California.  And their plane crashes somewhere in the Pacific Ocean on an island.  They’re strangers.  The survivors wake up.  They look around, and they think they’ve landed in this island paradise, this garden paradise.  But soon into their survival existence, they learn that this is anything but paradise.  Murder, betrayal, deceit, lying and a whole host of other things begin to threaten their very existence on this island.  They are lost.  They're in paradise lost.  Okay?  We were talking about this in one of our planning meeting this week, and one of the young guys on our staff who is kind of a fan of the shows, he says, “Yeah, but it’s also a healing place,” because one of the characters who, you know, has a physical ailment, after the crash he kind of experiences healing.

0:18:42.4

But we live in a paradise lost.  That’s why when a friend betrays you, you’ve just got to remember, I live in paradise lost.  When a staff member at the church lies in a coma in South Carolina, we need to remember we live in paradise lost.  When the stock (0:19:00.1) market crashes and my retirement plan goes down the tubes with it, I need to remember I live in paradise lost.  When your marriage ends in divorce…hey, you didn’t plan on that, did you?  Nobody does.  We live in paradise lost.  It’s just kind of a wakeup call, isn’t it?  We were created for paradise.  There is something inside of us that defaults in that direction.  We want to go there, but we’re in this fallen world where there is sin and sickness and disease and suffering and bloodshed.  It was not meant to be this way, friends.  God created us for paradise.

0:19:43.7

Now, I don’t want to just leave you in paradise lost.  I don’t want to be there myself.  Let’s move the story on a little bit.  We were created for paradise.  We know we live in paradise lost.  But here is something else to consider.  God (0:20:00.1) is preparing a new paradise for us.  And here is where we need to leave getting for a few minutes and turn to the end of the story, Revelation 22.  Revelation is the last book of the Bible, chapter 22 the last chapter in the Bible.  And interestingly enough, when we come to Revelation 22, we not only come to the end of the Bible, but we also run into this mysterious tree of life again.  Revelation 22:1-2.  Listen to this.  This is John on the island of Patmos.  He has received a vision from the angel of the Lord.  And John says, “He showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal.”  Reminds of that picture on my laptop computer.  “Clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and from the Lamb in the middle of its street.  And on either side of the river was the tree of life, bearing twelves kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.  And the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations,” it says.  Earlier in the book of Revelation, chapter 2, in the midst of those letters to the seven churches, the Lord Jesus says to one of those churches, “To him to who overcomes I will give the right to eat from the tree of life, which is the paradise of God.”  You see, we live in paradise lost.  But the reality is we’re between paradises.  The paradise for which we were created, and the paradise that God is preparing for us in the age to come.  And in the book of Revelation we get a little glimpse into the new paradise, also known as the New Jerusalem or the new heaven and the new earth.  And this is an incredible place.

0:22:03.8

Here the tree of life appears again.  And we learn a little bit more about the tree of life.  It sports 12 different kinds of fruit.  What an amazing tree.  I don’t know if it’s a different fruit, you know, every month.  That’s sort of…you know, the fruit of the month, the basket of fruit of the month on steroids, isn’t it.  I mean, you get a different fruit every month.  Wouldn’t that be great?  It’s an amazing tree.  There are also some amazing leaves on this tree.  It says the leaves of the trees were for the healing of the nations.  What’s that all about?  You say, “I thought heaven…I thought paradise was a place where there’s no sin, there’s no sickness, there’s no suffering.  Why would there need to be a tree with leaves to heal the nations?”  Well, the word “healing” really gives us our English word “therapeutic.”  And some would suggest that this word is better translated “therapeutic” or “health-giving.”  Wellness is the idea here.  It’s the idea that the leaves of the tree of life provided some kind of enjoyment for living in this new paradise for which we are moving toward and for which God is preparing us and preparing for us.

0:23:16.3

And also in Revelation 22 there is a river.  Did you see that?  “And he showed me a river of the water of life, clear as crystal, coming from the throne of God and from the Lamb.”  And it’s really a flashback to Genesis 2.  Got to turn back there now.  Let’s pick up the story in Genesis 2.  And let’s read on in verses 10-14 where we find a river, actually four rivers in the Garden of Eden.  Look at this.  Genesis 2:10, “Now a river flowed out of Eden to water the garden; and from there it divided and became four rivers.  The name of the first is Pishon; it flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold.  The gold of that land is good; the bdellium and the onyx stone are there.  The name of the second river is Gihon; it flows around the whole land of Cush.  The name of the third river,”—here is one you recognize—“is Tigris; it flows east of Assyria.  And the fourth river,”—here is another one you recognize—“is the Euphrates.”  You know, for a long time I’ve read the book of Genesis chapter 2 and I’ve wondered, what in the world are all these rivers about?  Why did the Holy Spirit feel it was necessary for us to know that these rivers flowed through the Garden of Eden?  Was there some, you know, symbolic or spiritual significance to it, or are they just nothing more than geographic coordinates to help us kind of understand where the Garden of Eden was?  The Bible says that there was a river that flowed through the Garden of Eden, and it split into four different rivers.  Usually it’s four tributaries that become one river, but in this case it’s one river that’s split into four- the Pishon, the Gihon, Tigris and the Euphrates.

0:25:11.5

These rivers were used as sort of sprinkler system in the Garden of Eden to water the ground.  Rain had not appeared on the earth yet.  There was a mist that formed and maybe this canopy thing.  But these rivers were used to water and keep lush and green this beautiful garden.  Some people doubt the very existence of the Garden of Eden.  They say, you know, the Garden of Eden is sort of this mythical place like Atlantis.  And Adam and Eve were symbolic people of humanity, but they weren’t real people.  That wasn’t the intention of the author who wrote historic narrative in Genesis 1 and 2.  Certainly Moses understood this to be a real place.  And in one sense I think he gave us some geographic coordinates.  He mentions the Tigris and Euphrates.  We can go to the Middle East today and identify those rivers.  He mentions Cush, which is modern day Ethiopia, and Assyria.  These are real places, real physical places, real nations, real rivers.  And so there is every reason to believe that the Garden of Eden was once a real place.  Now, some people kind of get sidetracked, and they believe, well, we need to figure out and pinpoint the exact location of the Garden of Eden.  I think that’s kind of a silly exercise.  But some use satellite technology today.  And they take these pictures from outer space, and you can see the Tigris and the Euphrates.  And some say you can even see what might have been the Pishon and Gihon River emanating from the mouth of the Persian Gulf.  But it’s buried underneath layers and layers of earth sediment, okay.  It makes for a good Indiana Jones movie plot.  That is, you know, trying to find the exact location of the Garden of Eden.  I don’t think it really matters.  We know that the Garden of Eden was probably located somewhere there near the Persian Gulf.  But the cataclysmic flood of Noah probably changed the geography considerably.  It’s why we can’t find the Pishon and the Gihon today.  The Tigris and the Euphrates, it may have been like that back then.  But, again, the flood really changed the topography of the earth pretty significantly.  I think the point is simply this.  That these were real, physical places, and this river appears again in Revelation 22, this crystal clear river that irrigates and provides watering for heaven.

0:27:44.1

God is preparing a new paradise for us.  That’s what I’m trying to say.  Remember on the night before Jesus was crucified He got together with His disciples.  And He says, “Gentlemen, let not your heart be troubled.  You believe in God; believe also in me.  I go to prepare a place for you.  And if I go to prepare a place for you, guess what?  I’m gonna come again.  And I’m gonna receive you to myself, that where I am, there you may be also.”  It’s a wonderful promise.  Are you ready for it?  If He were to come back today, this afternoon, are you ready to be ushered into paradise?  You were created for it.  We live in paradise lost.  Jesus left this earth to prepare a new paradise for us.  We get a glimpse of it in Revelation 22.

0:28:40.0

But here is a fourth idea.  God is preparing us for a new paradise.  You understand that?  Jesus said, “I go to prepare a place for you.  And I’m gonna come again.  And I’m gonna receive you unto myself.”  But He was about to go to Calvary.  He had some work left to be done, some work that was left to prepare for the paradise for which we were created.  And you remember the two thieves on the cross on either side of Jesus.  One of them mocked Jesus and said, “People say you’re the Messiah.  Why don’t you save yourself?”  And the other thief looked at Jesus, and he said two words, faith-filled words.  He said what?  “Remember me,” didn’t he?  And Jesus turned to this thief and said, “I tell you the truth.  Today you will be with me in paradise.”  Can you imagine how that thief felt?  He’d just spent no telling how much time in a smelly jail cell.  Anything but paradise.  And he heard words from Jesus that said, “Today, [today] you will be with me in paradise.”  Absent from the body, present with the Lord.

0:30:00.9

He is preparing a new paradise for us.  But He had work to do on the cross to prepare us for a new paradise, the paradise for which we are created, the paradise we long for deep down in our soul somewhere.  And when we see all the pain and the agony and the suffering and the disease and the death and the fallenness of our world, well, to put it in Paul’s language, all of creation groans.  You ever groan?  Did you groan this week?  I do when I turn on the news.  I just grown. Man.  “I go to prepare a place for you.”  But are you prepared for that place?  Are you prepared for His return, which could happen before the election on Tuesday.  Wouldn’t that be a great thing?  And here is how you get prepared.  Jesus did all the work for us.  There on the cross He paid the penalty for your sin and for my sin and made it possible to be recipients of the tree of life all over again.  Because once we are redeemed, then in paradise we can eat of the tree of life and live forever in our redeemed state.  Isn’t that wonderful?  But you’ve got to come through the cross.  He is preparing a new paradise for you and for me.  But to get prepared for the new paradise for which we are created and that He is preparing for you and me, you’ve got to come through the cross.  Everything after Genesis 3 is God’s redemption plan.  He says, “I’ve got to get these folks ready for paradise.  I’m gonna send My Son to die upon the cross and to pay the penalty for their sin and their rebellion.”  And by faith in Jesus Christ we put on a new suit for paradise, probably a white one like Mr. Roarke wore.  I don’t know, something like that.  But are you prepared for paradise?  Do you know you’re going there?  Have you trusted Jesus Christ as your Savior?  Let’s pray together.

0:32:14.0

Father, thank You so much for Your Word.  And I thank You for the way You created us.  Dust and dignity.  You had a divine purpose in creating us.  And there is a paradise destiny You’re preparing for us right now.  We thank You for that.  We glory in the cross of Jesus Christ that prepares us for this new paradise.  And even as Christian, Father, You are conforming us into the image of Your Son day after day through and work of Your Holy Spirit.  Father, help us to be willing participants in that process.  To be more like Christ.  More prepared to enter the paradise for which we are created.  And, Father, I pray for anyone here today who can honestly say, “You know, I don’t know that I’m prepared. The idea that Jesus could come back today or tomorrow frightens me a little bit.  And I need to know that I’m ready and that I’m prepared.”  And if that describes you, just from the depths of your soul, cry out to your Creator in however you want to express it.  The thief on the cross just said, “Remember me.”  And Jesus recognized that as faith.  As faith in the finished work that He was doing right there on the cross.  And if you reach out to Christ today with words like that or something like it, acknowledging your need for a Savior, you can rest assured that He will whisper back to you, “One day you’ll be with Me in paradise.  You're in by faith in Me and trusting what I’ve done on the cross.”  Father, we pray to that end.  We pray for salvation decisions today that only You can recognize in the human heart but that populate this new paradise You’re preparing for us.  And we pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.

0:34:57.1