It is challenging to think that Eden was a garden and the new earth (heaven) will be a city. I always thought of heaven as a restoration of what was lost. But I guess that is an assumption I have to adjust. Biblical images of where we are going simply are not the same as the images of where we first started.
For me, a garden carries the symbolic values of harmony, peace, closeness to nature, staring into the eyes of a lion and falling in love. A city, on the other hand, symbolizes connection, energy, motion, and creating cool things.
Today I wonder what that means for the history of God’s people. Perhaps we started out in a place of peaceful harmony and will continue in a place of energetic creativity. There has to be a difference. But what is it? Why did we start in a garden and end in a city?
Related Posts:
- What If There Is No Romance in Heaven?
- Do We Think about Heaven in an Egoistic Way?
- Do You Believe a New Earth Is Coming?
Photo: Sprengben
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Someone suggested to me that there’s an evolution going on, from garden to city. This is a VERY interesting idea because it suggests that there’s an evolutionary principle at work in the “other world” - that God’s created world does not look exactly the same as God’s redeemed world.
This is not the same as saying that God develops and changes over time, which many Christian evolutionists end up saying.
Someone else suggested that garden and city are not so different because in the city there’s still trees and running water etc. But then I’m thinking that there’s also gold and pearls etc. These things require a long time to develop.
You know, around the turn of the (previous) century in North America there was a big anti-city sentiment. They wanted to turn cities into gardens, because at the time cities were terribly dirty, dangerous, “sinful” places. This is where we got the City Beautiful movement (which got us Lincoln Park in Rock Island, among other things) (like Central Park in Manhattan).
What I think is interesting is to trace the evolution of our ideas about wilderness alongside this. Because at about the same time people were also starting to revere the wilderness as this special set-apart place, whereas in Genesis the first humans are exiled from the garden into the wilderness.
It does seem like the New Jerusalem is some kind of “garden city.” I like the evolutionary idea; it makes sense that the redeemed world wouldn’t look exactly like the created world. We can’t ever really go back to the garden, I guess!