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What Does the Bible Really Teach about Everything? By Kevin DeYoung
Tale as old as Time (and Older Still)
The first person we meet in the Bible is God (Gen. 1:1). And the first thing we see about this God is that he is before all things (cf. Ps. 90:1-2). God is self-existent, independent, without beginning or end, without equal, the Creator God distinct from his creation, a holy and unrivaled God-eternal, infinite, and, in his essence, unlike anything or anyone that ever was, is, or will be. This is the God we first meet in the first verse of the first book of the Bible.
And this is the God who created all things (Neh. 9:6; Acts 14:15; 17:24), He created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it (Rev. 10:6). What's more, he made men and women as the crown of his creation, making them in his image and after his likeness (Gen. 1:26). He created them to rule and to reproduce and to have a relationship with him (Gen. 1:26-28; cf. 3:8).
But the first man and the first woman disobeyed God's command. They listened to the Slithering One as he tempted them to doubt the clarity and goodness of God's word (Gen. 3:1-5). They took a bite from the forbidden fruit, and the fruit bit back. When sin entered the world, it was not just a fall; it was a curse. The man, the woman, the Serpent, the ground—all felt the sting of the curse so that "not the way things are supposed to be” became "the way things are." In just retribution for sin, God drove the man and the woman from the garden and placed an angel to guard the way to the tree of life (Gen. 3:24). Their heaven on earth was no more, at least not until God would bring heaven back to earth (Gen. 3:15). The central plotline of the story of Scripture was set in motion: a holy God making a way to dwell in the midst of an unholy people.
Space does not permit a full retelling of this story, but one only has to look at the Promised Land or the temple to see the same narrative carrying forward. The Promised Land was a type of Eden, and Eden was a foreshadowing of the Promised Land. God describes the creation of Israel in the same way he describes the creation of the heavens and the earth (Jer. 4:23-26; 27:5). The boundaries of Eden and the boundaries of Canaan are similar (Gen. 2:10-14; 15:18). When Jacob comes back from the east to enter Canaan, he is met by an angel (Gen. 32:22-32)—an allusion to the angel placed at the entrance to Eden. Joshua likewise encounters a heavenly guardian when approaching the Promised Land by way of Jericho (osh. 5:13-15).
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