It is heaven on Earth. Imagine we are living in the Garden of Eden in the well-known story of Creation. Some prefer the Bible story to the theory of Evolution and some prefer it the other way around.
In truth the story is a picture, a blueprint, of how God wanted and wants the world to be. What is there in that Garden?
No death, No ill health, no breakdown of relationships, no crime, no disagreement, no unresolved injury, no stress, no politics and no economics. Wonderful, you may say.
What’s more, the inhabitants were living comfortably with God himself. Together with God they were friends in spirit and partners in service.
We people, as a race, tend to turn our backs on God, choosing to make up our own minds and make our own decisions about everything. In doing so we demonstrate that we do not need him, we lose our friendship and our working partnership with God. Without him alongside, all the benefits of Garden living get reversed.
Worse than that, God seems nowadays to us to be just a set of rules religious folk want us to stick to.
There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God where the Most High dwells. (Psalm 46,4) and this river of life, the river of Grace, flows through the world although most of us continue to ignore it.
Jesus, the king of the kingdom, has come to show us what God is like and how he wants to react to us. Where we let him loose in our lives, he does exactly this – restoring our lives to be like those experienced in the Garden of Eden.
Life there is known as ‘living in the kingdom of God’, under his domain.
Living with him, speaking with him, learning more and more of him allows us deeper and deeper into this river of Grace and peace, with all its benefits, that flows from heaven.
