This teaching is part 4 of teaching number 84, The Fall and Rise of Adam.
God is a master at regeneration, salvation, and restoring people and places. What He has done for us through Jesus is a miraculous thing. When we receive His goodness and place ourselves in His hands, He makes our lives better from now through all eternity. Everything lost gets made new, and that’s the story of God in a nutshell.
To learn the gospel of Jesus through the story of Adam is an enlightenment that should help clarify the nature of sin and death as well as your hope for eternal life in you. If you have read the other three teachings on this subject, then you should now be able to see the reflection of Adam in yourself, whether the first or the last. Just remember that you will and should experience both to understand the complete revelation of God and His Son, Jesus, from death to redemption.
The earth is important to God, and you must believe that. Though sin and death are all around us, it wasn’t that way in the beginning and won’t be that way in the end. Just like the first Adam was saved and restored to heavenly places with His Father through Jesus Christ, the earth itself will be restored and made a new dwelling place for God and His people.
The beginning was good; the end is better.
Adam began his story formed from the earth with an earthly body that could live in the garden of God without any hindrance. The earth at that time was not cursed, and God intended for it to be a place of oneness with the celestial heavens. It was a place where He could fellowship with His earthly people and teach them the ways of God.
Before Adam sinned, He could fellowship with God even though he had a body made from the earth. Today the earthly body is considered corruptible and full of death, temporal in nature, and has significant problems communicating with God. But in the beginning, Adam was not a corruptible man, and his body could live forever because sin and death weren’t present. That’s how God made earthly bodies in the beginning; sin caused God to change the earthly body. (More on that in the next teaching.)
Adam wasn’t just angelic, as we might speak of when we refer to angels, but it was a body that could entertain the presence of God. Again, the reason is that Adam had no sin at the beginning. It wasn’t until Adam sinned that he couldn’t continue in fellowship with God. It was not because God couldn’t do it Himself but because Adam was too weak and afraid to hang with God. It was his consciousness that stopped him from perceiving God correctly. That’s what sin did to him and continues to do to God’s people today.
Because of sin, God cursed the earth’s ground, put garments of skin on Adam and Eve, and sent them into the earth to work and experience the effects of sin and death. As you know, there is a lot to that whole story. When they were sent out, God closed the garden of God, His heavenly dwelling place where He met with Adam, and did not allow him or anyone else back into it so that sin and death could not defile it.
If you consider that Jesus is the beginning and the end, you can see that God intends to fix the problem that separated man from Him so that He can reopen the garden of God and restore His communication with man. He wants to make the end like the beginning, except better.
Remember, the earth was good in the beginning until sin entered it. From then on, death reigned in people and the earth for many generations because man could not access the garden and fellowship with God. You needed special access to talk to God, and it was mainly for those who were sent to fulfill God’s mission.
All this continued until Jesus redeemed Adam, and God finished His judgment against all the evil powers that prevailed during Adam’s sleep. In the end, He makes a new heaven and a new earth so that, once again, God can bring down the New Jerusalem out of heaven and place it in the earth so that He can again fellowship with people, even individually, on the earth in the New Jerusalem.
This New Jerusalem was a greater version of the garden of God that Adam started in. It is the new meeting place for God to talk to His people around His throne. To understand this, let’s review the beginning again. First, God created the earth and everything in it, including man, and then planted a garden there for that man to meet with Him without restraint.
Once sin disrupted the fellowship between God and His man, the garden was closed off, and the earth was changed to a place of good and evil with massive deterrents to eliminate communication with God. Knowing God, it makes sense that He would not leave the beginning unfinished without restoring a meeting place for Him to meet with His people again.
That’s where the New Jerusalem comes in. It’s the recreation of the garden of God, where God sets up His throne on the earth and abides with His people forever and ever without any disruption. What am I saying? God not only redeemed Adam and glorified him with Christ but also redeemed Adam’s meeting place and gave him full access again, all while restoring His fellowship with God.
This teaches us that the beginning and the end are the same in God’s mind; both include the uninhibited fellowship between God and His people. The difference between the two is that Adam did not understand good and evil in the garden, which is why he failed. But in the New Jerusalem (Revelation 21-22), we see all those who have been born of the Spirit and have returned to God live on the new earth and go in and out of the city of God without any hindrances. The garden, which was closed to Adam, is now open to the last Adam, Jesus, and all His saints.
What makes this so powerful is that we don’t have to wait until the end of our physical world to experience the New Heaven and New Earth. As we put on a new man in Christ and grow in Him, we progressively enter everything God promises now because of Jesus. For those who can believe, the old earth and heavens are being removed, and the new is being created in you right now.
If your communication with God is disrupted or hindered in any way, it’s time to let God be who He says He is. He will reveal His salvation, restore power to your life, and bring you to a new place of worship where nothing is hindered between you and God.