How Heaven Came to Earth
a scripture rewrite of Genesis 2:4-25
What better way to anticipate Christmas than to recall how God made manifest Himself on earth by sending us Christ. Christ’s coming showed us a new way to rule and reign on earth. Christ’s way of ruling and reigning was not through armies and government policies but by establishing and upholding His church through His sacrificial life and death. The way God did this is not unlike how God made Adam and Eve.
Let’s examine Genesis 2:4-25 to discover the gospel message there.
*Note: This is a scripture rewrite transposing the gospel message into Genesis 2. I have kept the verse numbers for reverence, but this is not a word for word rewrite. Always check your Bibles.
How Heaven Came to Earth: Gen. 2:4-7
4 This is the account of how God made heaven manifested on earth when Christ and the Church were created, when the Lord God made the earth to bring about the inhabitation of the heavens.
5 Now no part of heaven had yet appeared on the earth and no fruit of the spirit had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not yet sent His spirit on the earth nor had Christ yet come to work the ground, 6 but the headwaters of Christ’s lineage came up from the earth and these would eventually reveal the living water, that is Jesus, to the whole surface of the ground and its people. 7 The Lord God would do this by taking the Son of Man made of dust from the ground and breathing into His nostrils His living spirit, and that Son of Man became the first eternal being, that is Christ.
The Place and the Process: Verses 8-14
8 Now the Lord God had established a place for all this to happen in the east, in Eden; and there He put mankind. 9 The Lord God made all kinds of good things exist on earth—God’s good gifts that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. Everything the Son of Man might like and enjoy. In the very midst of all the good things God made, He put His Words, that is, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 These Trees were the headwaters of God’s Spirit in the garden flowing from God Himself; from there it was separated into four headwaters. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon, which roughly means God’s outpouring; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold, God’s kind of treasure. 12 (The gold of that land is better than earthly gold; aromatic resin, sweet incense that pleases God, and onyx, the material where our names are engraved, are also there.)
13 The name of the second river is the Gihon, or God’s resolve; it makes its way through the entire land of Cush, that is where enemies and hardships abide. 14 The name of the third river is the Tigris, which means a force of governing power; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates, which means water breaking, like that of a woman giving birth.
Man, the Force: Verses 15-20
15 The Lord God took the Son of Man and put Him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the Son of Man, “You are free to use and make use of all creation that I give you; 17 but you must not use the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil as if were literal food to live off of, for when you do this, you use the symbol as sustenance and bind yourself to earth instead of Heaven.”
18 The Lord God said, “It is not good for the Son of Man to do all this work alone. I will make an ally for Him to work the ground and complete this task of tending my garden.”
19 Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the Son of Man to see what he would do with them; and whatever he told each living creature to do, it did. 20 So the Son of Man commanded all the livestock, the birds in the sky, and all the wild animals. He ruled them all.
But for the Son of Man no one yet existed to complete this task of working the garden.
Woman, the Formation: Verses 21-25
21 So the Lord God caused the Son of Man to fall into a deep sleep, that is He died on a cross; and while He was sleeping, God took half of the man’s glory and then closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the Lord God made His Church from Christ’s glory that He had taken out of the man, and He presented the woman, that is, His Church to Christ the groomsman.
23 And Christ said,
“Now, this is bone of My bones
and flesh of My flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
for her glory was formed out of Me.”
24 That is why a person leaves his father and mother of origin and is united to Christ, and they become one flesh, just like husbands and wives unite and form a family.
25 Christ and His bride were exactly what they were—God-man and dust-man, established and upheld, perfect and made-perfect—and they felt no shame.
To read more on this topic, here’s a poem I wrote about Genesis 2:10-14