From Eden to Easter | Connecting history to glory

Welcome to our final and deepest Easter episode. Today, we are going deep! You know the story. God created the world and everything in it. Including a man, for whom God created a beautiful garden. The man was to tend the garden and enjoy its luscious produce, amidst unbroken fellowship with God and with all the animals. But something was missing… This is not a story primarily about genders or human relationships. This is the Easter story. It is the origins story of our identity, and it is completely wrapped up in the identity of our King.

Listen here: https://www.podcastics.com/episode/227879/link/ 

You can also view the video of this episode on YOuTube at https://youtu.be/AN0Vkhnms_Q  

You have heard it said that Jesus is the second Adam. It is straight from several passages of the New Testament. And when we see the birth and core identity of Adam and Eve, we behold Jesus’ death. God caused Jesus to die. God created a bride for the man – God created a bride for Jesus. We are Eve. We are the bride. We have been taken from the heart of the Son of God. And, when Adam is brought to sleep to birth Eve, this is God drawing a stick figure to announce to us what He has already decided in the heavenly places before time was. He is announcing what will take place in future time but has been decided before Genesis 1:1. We have been taken out of the beating heart of Christ, our eternal Adam. The decision was made before the foundation of time. The stick figures were drawn by the Father in the garden, with Adam and Eve as the actors playing for us the scene that would truly take place later. And later came on the cross. It is the Easter story.

It means that our deepest identity is that we are Eve. We are the beating heart of Christ, the rib that was taken from Him through death. His beloved whom He calls bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh.  There is nothing you can do to lose your identity in Christ, because you did nothing to earn it. It is the Easter story.

All the Pauline passages about the roles of Adam and Eve suddenly shine with new depth when you consider this. Indeed, Christ is the head of the church, and that is symbolized in the way Adam was first and gave life to Eve. Christ preexisted the church – He preexisted humanity as a whole. Easter is the actual event to which this passage points. On the cross Jesus was put to sleep, so that the church could be born.  On the cross His side was pierced. That is where the bride came from.

The church has one name that echoes through the centuries as its most compelling identity. We are the body of Christ and the bride of Christ. Just like Eve is, literally, the body of Adam and the bride of Adam. When Jesus sees you, He sees the bone of his bones and the flesh of His flesh. He sees His bride, his beloved. Just like Adam knew that Eve had come from him, yet was different.

It took the death of the Son to birth the fullness of the new creation, the fullness of what it means to be Imago Dei. This indeed is the Easter story.