This time of the year many are again enjoying the pleasure of gardening or seeing gardens. Do you realize there is a long line of succession of gardeners that goes back to the very beginning of the earth and civilization? Yes, that actually we are following the footsteps of the great and very first gardener, the LORD God Himself? God had planted a garden for man whom He had created after his image and to whom He had given the mandate to fill the earth and subdue it. In his fatherly care He gave man a teaching model showing what could be done with the great potentials and resources present in this brand new earth.

Try to imagine Adam’s situation, in as far as we can do this in our fallen state. God had created the earth and prepared a beautiful home with innumerable plants, animals and resources: a place for man to live and glorify his creator with all his gifts and talents. But what an enormous mandate! There is one man or one couple on this whole, big world where everything is new and unknown to them. They do not know any of the plants or trees, neither any of the animals. Being the first people they couldn’t learn from others nor go by previous experience. Yet they had to provide for themselves from the first day on. Where do you begin as first creature on a new earth?

The LORD our God, the almighty creator, is at the same time a most wonderful Father. Moses, telling us about these first events, indicates that already by the name used for God even in these first chapters: it is the LORD God! That is his covenant name, which speaks about the special relationship of loving care for his people. God himself makes a beginning for Adam and Eve in fulfilling the mandate given to them and planted a garden for them, known as the Garden of Eden and also referred to as Paradise.

What do you do when you plant a garden, and what sets a garden apart from the rest of nature? You carefully select the trees and plants that are useful to you and place them in proximity to you so that you can benefit from them. A garden is also a place of beauty where you combine colours and plants in order to be pleasing to the eyes. It is a place where you can enjoy God’s gifts in nature inviting you to give glory and honour to the creator of it all! Having been planted by God Himself this garden was truly a bliss and delight, surely a true Paradise!

This garden would provide man with all he needed to live and enjoy the dwelling place God gave him. After all, the tree of life was there! God did not leave man in a wilderness with a club in his hands to go see what he could hunt up and gather. No, God and Adam lived in a father-child relationship. God’s child was allowed to live in a garden planted by his Father. At the same time Adam was an apprentice of God who taught him by example what could be done on this earth. God is so good!

Yet man, when given the opportunity to show that he loved and served God with all his heart by not eating from the forbidden tree, fell into disobedience and rather listened to the serpent and did eat from this tree, with the inevitable result that he was expelled from the garden and had to live with the effects of a cursed earth.

Still God in his goodness and grace did not abandon the idea of a garden for his people to live in. Being redeemed by Jesus Christ, we may believe in a Paradise restored and anticipate another garden prepared by God, a heavenly Paradise to be followed by a new, earthly Paradise! When the criminal, crucified beside Jesus, asked the Lord to remember him, Jesus promised him: “I tell you the truth, today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). The last book of the Bible again speaks about the future garden, the Paradise to come with its promises of having the right in Jesus Christ to eat “from the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God” (Revelation 2.7).

In Jesus Christ the LORD God has again planted a luscious garden for us to dwell in with all the riches and treasures of his kingdom. No longer will there be any curse.

Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life...Revelation 22:14

God is indeed so good!