“God hath made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions.” Eccles. vii. 29.
1 The state of our parents as God made them “upright,” and “very good,” in the day that they were created, presents much to excite our interest and sympathy, though we, their descendants, have passed away into a far different state. Since that time our nature has gone through many fortunes,—through much evil to greater good. That primeval state is no longer ours. It is no longer ours, though it is no longer forfeited. The penalties are removed; the flaming sword no longer bars the entrance of Eden; yet have we not returned to it. For so is it with all that happens to us,—the past never returns, not in what it contained, any more than in itself. Each time has its own peculiar attributes; it is impressed with its own characters. We recognise them in memory. When from time to time this or that passage of our lives rises in our minds, it comes to us with its own savour. We know it as if by taste and scent, and we know that that peculiar and indescribable token, be it good or bad, never can attach to anything else. And what is true of indifferent things, is true also when right and wrong come into question, and in the great destinies of man. If we sin and forfeit what God has given, not God Himself (such seems to be His will), not God Himself, in the fulness of His mercies, ever brings back what we were. He may wash out our sin,—He may give us blessings, greater blessings than we had,—He does not give us the same. When man was driven out of Paradise, it was for good and all,—he never has returned,—he never will return,—he has been born again, but not into possession of the garden of innocence: he has a rest in store, and a happier one,—a more glorious paradise, but still another.
This being so, it would seem as if there was little to interest us now in the first condition of Adam. As lost, it would only raise remorse and distress; as found again, it is something new. And yet, though Almighty God does not bring back the past, His dispensations move forward in an equable uniform way, like circles expanding about one centre;—the greater good to come being, not indeed the same as the past good, but nevertheless resembling it, as a substance resembles its type. In the past we see the future as if in miniature and outline. Indeed how can it be otherwise? seeing that all goods are but types and shadows of God Himself the Giver, and are like each other because they are like Him. Hence the garden of Eden, though long past away, is brought again and again to our notice in the progress of God’s dealings with us, not only in order to instruct us by the past, but unavoidably, if I may so speak, from the resemblance which one condition of God’s favour bears to another;—of Adam’s first state to the Law, and of the law to the Gospel, and of the Gospel to the state of rest after death, and of that to heaven. For instance, the land that flowed with milk and honey, was a sort of visible return of the lost garden; and in a manner reversed the sentence of banishment which God has laid upon our first parents. Again, the reign of Christ too is imaged as a state in which the beasts return to the dominion of man, and are harmless;—when the serpent is no longer venomous, and when “the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose,” and “instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle-tree;” when “the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” [Isa. xxxv. 1; lv. 13, 12.] And so of the intermediate state; for our Lord says to the penitent thief, “Today shalt thou be with Me in paradise.” And lastly, to describe heaven too, in the last words which God has vouchsafed to us, ending His revelations as he began them, He sets before us the vision of a happy garden. “He showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the Tree of Life, which had twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month; and the leaves of the Tree were for the healing of the nations.” [Rev. xxii. 1, 2.] Thus God takes away the less to give the greater,—not reversing the past, but remedying and heightening it; preserving the pattern of it, and so keeping us from forgetting it.
Therefore we may well look back on the garden of Eden, as we would on our own childhood. That childhood is a type of the perfect Christian state; our Saviour so made it when He said that we must become as little children to enter His kingdom. Yet it too is a thing past and over. We are not, we cannot be children; grown men have faculties, passions, aims, principles, views, duties, which children have not; still, however, we must become as little children; in them we are bound to see Christian perfection, and to labour for it with them in our eye. Indeed there is a very much closer connexion between the state of Adam in Paradise and our state in childhood, than may at first be thought; so that in surveying Eden, we are in a way looking back on our own childhood; and in aiming to be children again, we are aiming to be as Adam on his creation. Let us then now compare together these two parallel states, and in doing so let us have an eye to that third state, higher than either; I mean our regenerate state in Christ, of which these two are both types.