¯Here’s the common three-way debate on Creation; Darwinism is best; Biblical history is best; ignoring the whole question is best.
The Kingdom worldview, however, is option 4; that this is a perfect picture of the Kingdom of God — of how God wants the world to be. Not only does it portray the most potentially magnificent lifestyle for we human beings but the outcomes of all our troubles today simply don’t appear in the picture at all. And God still describes his own dream as being ‘very good’. It breathtakingly describes family life with him at its very, very best. It describes our lives, physical, emotional and spiritual as being the best. It describes our relationships with each other and with God himself as being both intertwined and at their best. And God describes his picture as being ‘very good’.
The humans in the story then ‘muddied the water’ entirely by deciding they could work things out better for themselves — the most enormous error that most of us continue to make to this day. We lost everything.
Now we see Jesus in his earthly ministry, overflowing with compassion, with inclusion, with healing, with restoration, displaying the never-changing state of God’s mind towards us, a longing to see us living in our ordained family life — back in the spiritual garden with him.
We do not get closer to this ideal through regularity of church attendance or through the perfectly repetitive performance of our religion’s rituals. No, we come closer to the idea through our own discipling, through paying close attention to the words and works of Jesus that reflect God’s nature into the world. We come closer through allowing God to rebuild our relating to himself.
