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From Paradise Lost to Paradise Restored
The House of the Lord
Unfiltered communion with Jesus is what makes our future the paradise that it will be.
There is a theme expressing this fellowship, a whole-Bible theme running from Eden in the first two chapters of the Bible to the New Jerusalem in the final two chapters of the Bible. That theme is the house of the Lord: in other words, the temple.
A temple is a place where humans meet with God. Even more specifically than that, it is where impure humanity meets with pure divinity. It is where the divine and the human, otherwise alienated from one another, meet; where the sacred and the profane intersect once more. All of humanity knows itself to somehow be outside. A temple is where, briefly, we can be brought back in.
Temple Buildings
What was Eden? A garden, yes. But more deeply, the first temple. It didn’t have walls; but it was a place where the divine and the human met, where the immortal and the mortal intersected. God and man enjoyed unbroken fellowship. Indeed, God put Adam in the garden and told him to “work it and keep it”—innocuous-sounding English verbs, but in fact the very two verbs with which the priest was instructed to care for the tabernacle, working it and keeping it (Num. 3:7–8; 8:25–26; 18:5–6; 1 Chron. 23:32; Ezek. 44:14.). In other words, Adam was the first priest—or to put it the other way around, all Israel’s priests were picking up where Adam left off, caring for a place where God could meet with people.
Therefore the LORD God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life. (Gen. 3:23–24)
The rest of the Bible is not an aimless, meandering story. The rest of the Bible is an Eden-recovery project; that is, a temple restoration project. The garden of Eden is not only our past—“paradise lost,” as Milton called it four hundred years ago in his epic poem. It is also our future. The temple theme is the route by which Scripture takes us from paradise lost to paradise restored.
Finally Home
Dane Ortlund
In Finally Home, Dane Ortlund ushers readers into the surprising wonders of our final future in the new heavens and the new earth. It provides deep comfort and joy that outweigh all our many heartaches as we journey through this broken world.
After Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, the sinfulness of humanity, rather than the presence of God, was what spread throughout the earth. So God determined to blot out almost all humanity and almost all the animals. In other words, having carefully created the animals and then mankind in Genesis 1, he was now going to undo both man and beast—an act of de-creation.
The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the LORD regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” (Gen. 6:5–7)
God set his favor on Noah, however, choosing to save humanity through Noah’s family. How? By having Noah build a floating wooden house called an ark. Noah and his family, along with pairs of all the wildlife from Genesis 1, came in to the ark. The rest of humanity was out. Inside this floating building was the only place of non-condemnation. In other words, the inside of the ark represented restored fellowship with God. The very thing lost in Eden.
Noah, while righteous, was not perfect. After the flood subsided and his family spread out and started over God’s project of spreading his glory throughout the earth, Noah wound up drunk and naked in a tent. And so the story goes.
God’s people ended up enslaved in Egypt, once more out of the place of God’s favor, the promised land. Liberated by God through Moses and Aaron, they journeyed home to the promised land. God gave them the Ten Commandments (Ex. 20) and confirmed his covenant commitment to his people (Ex. 24). And again God was re-creating, starting over: “The glory of the LORD dwelt on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day he called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud” (Ex. 24:16). Once more, a six-day cycle followed by a culminating seventh day dawned the start of a new project to spread God’s presence throughout the earth.
And once more God had the people construct a wooden building. Whereas the ark of Noah moved by floating on top of the water, this building, called a tabernacle, would move along the land. The priests would work it and keep it, folding it up and carrying it along on behalf of the people. Carrying what, exactly? The presence of God. A miniature Eden. Inside the tabernacle, drab as it looked from the outside, was a world of splendors. The inside ceiling was a gorgeous sky blue. In the midst of the tabernacle was a beautiful golden table with dishes and flagons and bowls, involved in drink offerings and “the bread of the Presence” (Ex. 25:30)—a table representing the verdant feasting of Eden in the presence of God. Also inside the tabernacle was a lampstand fashioned as a flourishing tree, echoing Eden’s tree of life. The Ten Commandments were carried in a box given the very name of Noah’s floating temple—an ark, drawing the people’s minds back to the first ark.
The tabernacle was a portable, miniature Eden. It was built, God said, “that I may dwell in their midst” (Ex. 25:8).
Eventually the portable tabernacle would become a permanent structure in Solomon’s temple (think of the difference between an RV and a home). Constructed in Jerusalem a thousand years before Christ came, it was unparalleled in its magnificence. This temple was a monumental achievement, and it represented a stable place of fellowship between God and his people. When Solomon dedicated the temple, he asked that God would listen to the prayers made in the temple because the temple was the location of restored fellowship with God (2 Chron. 6:18–21).
The rest of the Bible is not an aimless, meandering story. The rest of the Bible is an Eden-recovery project; that is, a temple restoration project.
Yet it had walls. There was still a boundary up, separating God’s people from their Creator. Indeed, this temple alienated those who didn’t measure up. Lepers and the unclean were kept out.
In 586 BC, Solomon’s temple was destroyed by invading armies. It is difficult for us to appreciate how disastrous this was for the people. This is not like a modern-day church building being destroyed. The one place where Israelites had fellowship with God evaporated. Now Eden truly was lost. A new temple would be built a few generations later, but when the elderly men of Israel saw it, they wept—it didn’t come close to the splendor of the original temple (Ezra 3:12–13). The hope of restored fellowship with God continued to decline. And even that second temple would be destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. God’s people have been given promises of a restored final temple, such as we have in the final nine chapters of Ezekiel and in the book of Haggai. This final temple is depicted in Edenic terms. For example, a river flows from the temple down to the sea, flowing eastward (Ezek. 47:8). Adam and Eve had been ejected from Eden eastward, bringing ruin everywhere they went, and this river pursues them, bringing healing everywhere it flows: “Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish. For this water goes there, that the waters of the sea may become fresh; so everything will live where the river goes” (Ezek. 47:9).
In other words, this final temple will be the recovery of the teeming life of Eden that was lost at the beginning of human history.
A Temple Body
So prophesied Ezekiel. Then, silence.
For century after century following the destruction of Solomon’s temple, God’s purposes to dwell once more with his people seem to have disappeared. Attempting to regain the Israel they used to be, one Jewish military leader after another rises up, seeking to throw off whoever the latest subjugator of God’s people happens to be.
Then a Galilean quietly appears on the scene. One of his friends tells us that, in him, God was “tabernacling” among his people once more (John 1:14).1 This man walked into the second temple and forcibly cleansed it from the business transactions that were diluting its true purpose of restored fellowship with God—“a house of prayer,” he called it (Luke 19:46). When challenged by the religious authorities, he responded: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19). But he was talking about a body, not a building.
This man did not come to build a temple. He came to be a temple. He was the final temple of which Ezekiel prophesied, bringing life and healing everywhere he went.
The second temple was destroyed by the Romans in the first century and not rebuilt, because the final temple was destroyed by the Romans in the first century and was rebuilt.
In the Old Testament, the divine and the human mingled in a physical building, where, with strictly limited access, we could fellowship with the holy God. In the New Testament, the divine and the human mingled in a physical body, where, with unlimited access, we could fellowship with the holy God. And while the Old Testament temple kept out the unclean, weak, and defiled, the New Testament temple embraced the unclean, weak, and defiled. Eden after the fall, Noah’s ark, the tabernacle, Solomon’s temple, the second temple—they all had walls. Access denied. The final temple had no walls. Full access opened.
We no longer enter a temple of wood and stone to meet with God. God has entered a temple of flesh and blood to meet with us. His name is Jesus of Nazareth.
But we live two thousand years after Jesus Christ, the final temple, walked around, offering the de-walled presence of God to any who desire it. So how do we today benefit from Jesus Christ’s templing presence?
The astonishing answer of the New Testament is that we have something much better than being able to touch and hug that walking temple. We are part of that final temple. We relate to Christ not as clothes to a body but as body parts to a body.
“God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple” (1 Cor. 3:17).
Eden 2.0
Yet life is so hard. The presence of sin is often more real to us than the presence of God. We know that we are united to Christ by faith and that we are now a part of the final temple that the Old Testament prophets longed to see. But any given day feels more like hell than heaven, more like expulsion from Eden than enjoyment of it.
So it is. And so we wait patiently. For what? For the day coming soon when we will wake up in Eden 2.0. “And I saw no temple in the city, for its temple is the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev. 21:22). By his mighty grace God has finally accomplished that ancient purpose established in Genesis 1 and 2: to spread his life-giving presence throughout the earth. The reason there is no temple in the new earth is because the entire earth has become a temple. This is the meaning of the New Jerusalem being presented as a massive cube (Rev. 21:16); the only other perfect cube in Scripture is the Most Holy Place in Solomon’s temple (1 Kings 6:20). The Most Holy Place has exploded out to encompass the whole planet. No more “out.” The entire globe is one giant in.
Notes:
- The Greek word translated “dwelt” in John 1:14 is the verb form of the Greek noun for tabernacle.
This article is adapted from Finally Home: The Christian Hope of Heaven by Dane Ortlund.
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