He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
Genesis 3:10 (NIV)After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision: “Do not be afraid, Abram. I am your shield, your very great reward.”
Genesis 15:1 (NIV)
If you study it from the beginning, you’ll see that Genesis 15 is speaking directly to the things of Genesis 3.
These are the first two instances of this word “afraid” in scripture.
You’re going to see yourself cast out of the garden.
Marked for death.
A random name in a list of names.
Left off the boat as the flood rises.
But that’s not the story.
He left the garden with you.
He shielded you from vengeance.
He knows your name.
He carries you in the boat.
It is your story. It is the story of His great love for you.
Now Enoch lived sixty-five years, and fathered Methuselah. Then Enoch walked with God three hundred years after he fathered Methuselah, and he fathered other sons and daughters. So all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God; and he was not, for God took him.
Genesis 5:21-24 (NASB)
The Rabbis, believing that 7 is God’s perfection, see the 7th from Adam and find an oddity: a man whose years match the days around the sun, pointing to Light and the garden where God walked.
The word here is “ruah,” which is the same word that describes the Spirit of God. It’s the breath that brought life into humanity. It’s a wind, as though it happened during the windy time of day.
It’s fascinating.
Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden.
Genesis 3:8 (NIV)
But the rabbis point to a different strangeness in the verse: In what way did the man and his wife hear the sound of God walking? What does that sound like?
Genesis 3:8-9 (NIV)
The last verse of Genesis 2 ends with perfect creation. It ends with humanity being like a child, running around the garden in the back yard in their birthday suit, full of trust, full of joy, without any sense of embarrassment or shame.We long for this because God calls us back to this.
Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame
Genesis 2:25 (NIV)
I think the clue is that it occurs immediately after the mention of the Two Trees.
The rivers seem to be Empires, flowing into the sea.
Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground–trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”
Genesis 2:8-17 (NIV)
We wrestle with a good God who would make a tree that points to misery and death, or a God who creates a serpent who tempts. He did.
Israel must have wondered about Assyria, Babylon, their enemies, and wondered about injustice & wickedness. But God made all of the nations.
And they all are sourced through one Adam. Sourced by one river that feeds all the land.
Israel, too, is a river. It’s the Jordan river, and long after Eden, when God steps into new covenant with man, we read this about the river:
Lot looked around and saw that the whole plain of the Jordan toward Zoar was well watered, like the garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt. (This was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.)
Genesis 13:10 (NIV)
The Jordan is not like the rivers that branched off in Eden. It isn’t connected to them. This is the first mention of the Jordan, and it’s almost like God is showing us the NEW way after Abram allows Lot to choose first. To humble himself. To love. And to trust God’s way.
Jonah didn’t want to preach to Nineveh, capital of Assyria, but maybe God wanted him to see that this nation was sourced in that same garden. That He cared for them, too, desiring that none would perish but that all would be in relationship with Him. In peace. Flourishing.
I can’t help but think we are being reminded to love our enemies, not just because we are told to, but because all nations flow from the river that watered the garden.
And one day, those rivers will stream back to Eden in reverse, up to the high place of God.
In the last days
the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established
as the highest of the mountains;
it will be exalted above the hills,
and all nations will stream to it.
Isaiah 2:2 (NIV)