He has tasked the humans with subduing the earth, stewarding it, ruling it.
Some of these verbs, these ideas. If it was perfect, you wouldn't need to do that.
Let's just start here. There is a description of Eden. Okay, I don't know if it was this class,
or if it was the Thursday class, but there was a question in the Q&A last time about,
I don't know what it was. Eden or the world or something like that.
And I made the comment that hey, you know, all the world wasn't Eden.
Eden wasn't the whole world. And I could tell, because that was last week,
that that was kind of news to some people. So here we are, if that was you guys well,
here we are finally at week five, but most of you would probably would have known that,
if you were familiar with Unseen Realm content, certainly.
And one of the bases for this, probably the most obvious is;
Eden gets a specific geographical description.
It's one of those things it's easy to read over. You don't often notice it, but there it is.
So «A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden,
and there it divided and became four rivers. The name of the first is the Pishon.
It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Havilah,
where there is gold. And the gold of that land is good;
bdellium and onyx stone are there
[Thanks for that little footnote]. The name of the second river is the Gihon.
It is the one that flowed around the whole land of Cush.
And the name of the third river is the Tigris, which flows east of Assyria.
And the fourth river is the Euphrates.»
So, I mean, you got a number of geographical points to that. That is not the whole world.
I mean, what could be more obvious? Yet, there's this assumption
that sort of just flows through evangelicalism that when we talk about
the world God created, we speak of it like we're talking about Eden,
like it's this perfect place. And then again, we spill over and we start talking about Eden;
tree of life, like little animals frolicking around, and Adam and Eve. It's like, No.
That's just a little piece of the planet. So, for some reason, we often just sort of
of conflate these things, probably just because of tradition.
That's just the way stuff gets talked about. And we don't often stop to think about it.
But it's very clear, this is a little spot on the earth, it has specific geography.
Another indication of this is Genesis 1:31. Before we even get to the geography,
«God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.»
The text says it was very good. It doesn't say it was perfect.
You don't need to drill down into word study,
(which I'm going to do in a moment here).
All you need to do is think about what Adam and Eve are tasked with.
We've had that in chapter 1, before God says "hey, it's very good. I'm looking at it.
Good. You know, I like what I've done here."
He has tasked the humans with subduing the earth, stewarding it, ruling it,
some of these verbs, these ideas. If it was perfect, you wouldn't need to do that.
If it was perfect, like there's no work here left to do.
Then you find some other way to describe it. So that's a little bit of a hint,
but if you drill down into the vocabulary, we will find here, let me see if which one I have here.
Here's Tob. This is why we got the yellow highlights. This is "good".
We saw this last week Tob and Rah, good and evil.
And in ESV, it's translated like you'd expect; "good", "better", you know, "well",
"best", a superlative idea. But over here is a different term Tamim,
and this is where you get the notion of something without blemish.
Something that we might use a term like perfect, ther's no problem with it.
Tamim is not the way this is described in Genesis 1:31.
We turn our little interlinear pane on we click on very good, it's Tob meod.
Tob "good", meod is an adverb; "very", or "extraordinarily". It's not Tamim.
So again, there are these little things in the text that kind of hint at, well,
there's something to do here. It's good, it's really good,
but it could be better or it needs maintenance, or it needs you know, it's not...
the rest of the world is not like fixer upper state, but it's not Eden neither.
Okay, there's a little bit of a difference.