No doubt you’ve asked a question like that. Why doesn’t God just snap His fingers and give us all we want, instead of us having to work so hard for it? The Garden of Eden restored! Who wouldn’t want that? If God is all-powerful, as He claims to be, then surely He can do it. If God is as loving as He claims to be, then why hasn’t He done it?
The only way to understand the answer to this is to understand what happened in Eden. God said to Adam and Eve ‘you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die’ (Gen. 2:17). Adam and Eve disobeyed, and the price of their disobedience was separation from God Himself. As soon as our first ancestors sunk their
teeth into the forbidden fruit, they destroyed their perfect relationship with Him.
Then God said ‘The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live for ever.” So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken’ (Gen. 3:22, 23).
You see, God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden so that they wouldn’t have to endure the curse of sin – that is, of separation from Him - for ever. In Eden there was eternal life, yes, and God could recreate it now. But imagine a life full of woe and sadness, illness, droughts and fires, social breakdown, old age and more - the life we all live right now - only never
ending! This is what a return to the garden of Eden would mean for us. Everything would be fixed, indeed – except sin. And sin is our deepest problem.
That’s the very life from which God wants to spare us!
That’s why Jesus didn’t get rid of poverty, hunger or sadness. Jesus came to fix the root problem behind these things – the curse of sin. And He did so on the cross, to the extent that when God looked at earth on Good Friday, the only sinner He saw was Jesus, for ‘God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God’ (II Cor. 5:21).
But here’s the thing – by His life, death and resurrection, Jesus has won life for me and you, life in an eternal kingdom filled with riches beyond earthly imagination, a place of unbroken joy in the presence of God and His saints and angels for ever! Our wildest dreams could not match the riches of heaven which are ours in Christ Jesus – not even all the earthly riches we could possibly seek! In Christ, when God looks at you He’s as pleased as He was when He first created Adam and Eve - ‘And the Lord looked on all He had made – and it was very good’ (Gen. 1:31).