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I want to share with you a brief overview of the Bible – from the beginning to the end.
In Genesis 1, we learn that God created the “heavens and the earth.” God already was based in Heaven, so “the heavens” means the stars and the galaxies – all the magnificent things we see when we look up at the sky.
Why did God want an “earth”? He wanted a physical place where His cherished creation could live for His glory and where He could have a special and intimate relationship with them. Humans were created for just such a purpose: to know God intimately and have a loving relationship with Him. These human beings were created in the image of God and to reflect His glory throughout the Earth.
Human beings provide the means through which God will fill the earth with His glory. As Numbers 14:21 says, "But as truly as I live all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the Lord." Strictly speaking, it is only humans who can truly reveal the glory of the Lord. The mountains, the forests, the seashore, sunrises and sunsets, and other aspects of God's natural creation, beautiful as they are, cannot fully reveal God's character. A tree cannot show love, a mountain cannot show grace; they all lack the essential characteristic that gives humans the capacity to reveal God's character: free will.
The Earth is a “colony” of Heaven, where heavenly (spiritual) things would be duplicated in the physical realm. God is establishing His kingdom on Earth. Jesus’ model prayer tells us to pray, “Thy Kingdom come on Earth as it is in Heaven” (Matt. 6:10).
Although believers will spend some time in Heaven after death, Earth is the permanent home God established for mankind – not Heaven. But, we learn in Revelation that there will be a new Earth. The colony of Earth was the initial physical Kingdom of Heaven, and the Garden of Eden was its original capital. This capital will eventually move to Jerusalem, and ultimately to a new Jerusalem. The Garden of Eden was the perfect place for humans to live and enjoy a perfect relationship with Him. and His creation was the ideal example of His love and grace. God prepared a “heavenly” paradise for Adam and Eve, with perfect conditions for His creation to expand and thrive, including:
Perfect nutrition
Perfect weather
Magnificent beauty
No pollution
Perfect health
Perfect peace and safety
Abundance, flourishing
Perfect Sabbath rest
Ron McGatlin has described the Garden of Eden this way: “Everything was alive with the perfect order of God’s love. All grew and prospered continuously renewing and restoring and replacing itself with everlasting life. Every living thing had its seed within itself and every system of life functioned perfectly in its place in harmony with and in support of every other part of the living world. Love brought perfect balance and order in the Garden of Eden. All things moved together in perfect harmony of obedience by love.”
That’s what God wanted – a perfect place for His children to enjoy and steward, and in which to procreate and expand to fill the earth. So, what could go wrong?
Many people believe that God was surprised by what happened to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and that God had to revert to a Plan B after the “original sin”. But that is not the case. In fact, God carefully designed everything about “the fall” and restoration down to the slightest detail.
God is omniscient and knew that Adam and Eve would disobey Him and eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. He already had a plan for a more perfect “re-creation” and that His son, Jesus, would have to die for that to happen.
Adam and Eve were necessarily created with two imperfections: They did not have perfect love or perfect wisdom. These two “flaws”, together with the “free will” God had endowed them with, would cause Adam and Eve to make “mistakes”. You see, both love and wisdom cannot be created; they have to be developed through experience. Perfect love (God’s kind of love), as described in 1 Cor. 13, “never fails.” But God cannot “manufacture” that kind of love. From the moment He created Adam and Eve, God loved them perfectly. But Adam and Eve were not capable of loving like God. They were innocent, sinless beings, who enjoyed God’s companionship, as they walked with Him in the garden. They were dependent upon Him, but, like newborn infants, they did not know perfect love. While God loves us perfectly, because He is love, we have to learn to love Him (and other people) the way He loves us. That is one of the things we learn from Jesus.
Wisdom also needs to be developed experientially. Information can be given to others, but that information needs to be turned into knowledge, and that knowledge into wisdom. Information becomes knowledge when it is organized and enables us to make decisions leading to action. But wisdom is much more than that; it is deep understanding that allows us to choose the best courses of action and learn more wisdom from experience. Wisdom results from knowledge plus experience. That is one of the reasons why older people may have weaker bodies, but tend to have more wisdom than younger people.
Adam and Eve were also given free will, otherwise they would be robots, and robots cannot love or be wise; they can only follow the data programmed into them. So, God knew that human beings needed to be more than cookie-cutter creations that follow orders, and He knew the limitations of what He could create from scratch. He could create perfect mountains and sunsets, but He couldn’t create perfect love or wisdom without experience. Adam and Eve were innocent, which is the opposite of mature. God’s plan is for his human creatures to become mature, in the image of Christ.
There was another “problem.” Satan was on the scene. He might not have had love, but he had incredible wisdom – after all, Satan had been around for a long time and had plenty of experience to become wise. We read in Gen. 3:1 that the serpent (Satan) was “shrewder” or “craftier” than any other creature. So, when Eve (an innocent woman without much experience) was confronted by Satan, she didn’t have a chance. She was a “sitting duck.” Most people think that this meeting between Eve and Satan was happenstance, but nothing is by chance to God. God could easily have prevented this momentous confrontation, but it was part of His plan from the very beginning. God knew what Satan would do, how easily Eve would succumb to the temptations, and that Adam would go along with Eve. By enabling Eve and lying to God, Adam clearly demonstrated his imperfect love and wisdom. Of course Adam was even more guilty than Eve, because he had more experience with God, was supposed to protect Eve, and was the “head of the family.” Both Adam and Eve loved God as much as they were able and had as much “wisdom” as God had implanted in them when they were created, but it was grossly insufficient to handle this obvious mismatch. Those who believe that God was surprised by what occurred obviously don’t know much about God. The most common explanation of the “original sin” implies that God said something like, “Gee, I am so shocked! I goofed!” Can you imagine the Father saying to Jesus: “You need to go down to Earth and clean up my mess”? Instead, the only reasonable explanation for “the fall” is that it was part of God’s Master Plan – and a brilliant plan it was! This is the plan that is playing out now, and has been since day one. My God is omniscient and omnipotent and doesn’t make mistakes. All His plans are perfect!
Then there was the “problem of sin.” Clearly Adam and Eve’s disobedience could not just be excused. They had sinned against their Creator, and there had to be consequences. However, both the fall and its consequences were preordained, and part of the “good news”. It might seem quite paradoxical that a rebellion against God could be considered “good news”, but it is truly good news that the God used the restoration of His relationship with His creation to open the way to the larger part of His Master Plan and Jesus’ role in it.
Just as God used the Jewish people to instigate the necessary death of Jesus, God used Satan to produce the necessary conditions that would enable Him to the fill the Earth with loving and (ultimately) wise, loving, Christlike humans. The major consequence of Adam and Eve’s disobedience was the broken relationship between man and God. The new, more perfect creation could not start in full until this reconciliation occurred.
The “gospel” (or good news) of Jesus Christ is not just the remediation of the sin problem. Beyond that, Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection were the beginning of the entire preordained recreation and repopulation process – for both individuals and the entire Earth. But, before that could happen, there needed to be a remnant of receptive learners (disciples) who God could transform into Christlikeness, and use to transform others. To prepare that remnant, God led His chosen people through an often painful experiential developmental process. Jesus could not come to Earth as the Savior until this remnant of people was ready for His arrival. This remnant was “the Jew first and then the Gentile.” God introduced the Law to demonstrate to the Jews their lack of “righteousness” (right standing before God), their need for a savior to address the sin problem, and to model and guide them in developing the love and wisdom they lacked.
Although sin separated human beings from their Creator, eliminating sin alone was not going to make people perfect (loving, wise, and mature). It is sad that so much of traditional Christianity focuses on sin (and sinlessness), as if this was the ultimate concern and goal of God’s plan. After all, Adam and Eve were initially sinless – and look what happened to them! Our faith must be a living and active one that takes us far beyond salvation and toward maturity – even though we will not achieve perfection until we are glorified. In addition, the developmental process required passionate and well trained, and God-enabled disciples to follow Jesus’ example to expand the Kingdom of Heaven* throughout the earth – not just comfortable Christians who would rest on their “salvation laurels” and fill church pews!
So, everything that occurred in the Bible happened so that human beings would develop perfect love and perfect wisdom (the essential prerequisites for “righteousness”), which were missing (and impossible) in the original creation. For this to happen, they needed to have a lot of love- and wisdom-building experiences, including some very painful ones. There would be floods and discipline, successes and failures, wins and losses, warfare, bad kings and good kings, bad judges and good judges, godly people and evil people, heroes and traitors, etc. None of this was a surprise to God. It was all a part of His Master Plan.
When the remnant was ready for Him, Jesus would come on the scene…
Demonstrate the true love of God (agape love) love and wisdom
Offer the Kingdom of God to the Jewish people (to fulfill all the Messianic prophesies)
Be rejected by His people to open the way to the Gentiles (who would make the Jews jealous)
Be the perfect atoning sacrifice to replace the sacrificial system under the Law of Moses
Rise from the dead and usher in the dispensation of Grace
Send the Holy Spirit, who would guide “saved” humanity to develop (over time and through experience) true godly love and wisdom
Establish and serve as the head of the Church (the Body of Christ), which is the community of believers, through which disciples would learn to live and expand “on Earth as in Heaven”
Finally the culmination of the re-creation: the new Earth (the New Jerusalem) that would replace the old Earth that had been irrevocably tarnished by sin and be the better Garden of Eden, where we (as believers) will live for all eternity (on Earth – not in Heaven).
The missing elements of the original Creation will be finally, and meticulously, be enabled.
Of course, there is one more step that is needed before the end of the story. The Jewish people must accept their Messiah and bow down before Him and worship Him. That will require a period of Tribulation, because the Jewish people have always been hard-hearted. This wrath is part of His “tough love”. The Earth must also be sufficiently cleansed in preparation for Jesus’ 1,000 year (Millennial) reign on Earth. Only then can the final chapter of God’s Master Plan come.
(Rev. 21:1-4) “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. I saw the Holy City, the New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look, God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.’”
When we put the pieces together, we can see the full picture – from beginning to end! What God could not create out of dust, Jesus Christ manifested in the flesh, and then the rest of the story is about readying human beings to accept Jesus as the Savior of the world and enabling Holy Spirit to do His work internally to re-create us in the fullness of the image of God in Jesus Christ – including everything that God created in Adam and Eve plus perfect love and perfect wisdom. Jesus represents the doorway, the perfect example, and the master teacher (Rabbi) who uses His Word and the Holy Spirit to lead us to realize all Truth and the fullness of God’s amazing Master Plan!
So, here we are today – near the end of the amazing drama of the Creation and the Re-creation of the Earth and of humanity.
God's Master Plan is in progress and nearing its culmination. There is nothing anybody – not even Satan – can do to stop it. What Satan tried to use against God has been turned around and used for God’s glory. Little did Satan know that what he thought was his great victory in the Garden of Eden was actually the beginning of his defeat!
Our spirits are groaning for the fulfillment of God’s Master Plan – and it is almost here. Jesus will be returning soon and we will go with Him in the rapture of the Church to protect us from His wrath (which was never intended for His obedient remnant), and we will live in His presence with unspeakable joy eternally – first in Heaven and then on the New Earth.
This is what Christians have to look forward to – the reward for our salvation and our faithfulness, and the Lord saying to us “Well done, good and faithful servant.” How sweet those words will be when we stand before Him face-to-face to receive His blessing and our rewards.
This is what God is doing on this Earth and in our lives. This is the amazing story that the Bible recounts – past, present, and future.
The message of the Bible is really pretty simple. It began with the creation in Genesis 1, when all things were initially made, and ends with our ultimate, eternal destiny in Revelation 22, when all things were made new and perfect. This is the whole story of the Gospel – the whole good news – the almost too-good-to-be-true news. Make sure you understand it; communicate it with others; and be comforted that you are part of the redeemed creation.
Father God, I pray that you will plant your truth inside each person who reads this and you will make Your Word come alive to them in a new and exciting way. May all your people see, rejoice, and share in the fullness of the “good news”, the big picture of your perfect plan – and not fear the things that are yet to come or get mired in the details. Your Master Plan is nearing completion and is being stewarded by the perfect King, Jesus Christ. For all who are part of the remnant, both Jew and Gentile, let us continue to progress toward maturity – including perfect love and perfect wisdom – even though we will not get there until we are glorified. As the Apostle Paul said, “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:14). Let us all do the same.
* Note: The terms “Kingdom of Heaven” and “Kingdom of God” are, for the most part, interchangeable in the Bible. Kingdom of Heaven tends to be used primarily in Matthew’s gospel because the Jewish audience it was directed toward was reluctant to use God’s name. However, the Kingdom of Heaven is a powerful image of some aspects of Heaven being replicated on Earth.