of parks & paradise

Mitchell Memorial Forest

On Sunday afternoons or Monday mornings I've been making it a point to leave the smoggy city behind and lose myself in nature. Monday mornings tend to work out best, since there's hardly ever anyone on the trails with me. On these walks (and sometimes runs) I bathe in creation, walk about in prayer, listening for God's voice and laying my burdens and concerns before Him. More often than not He speaks, and I'm ever thankful for those moments. As I walk through these woodlands with spring blossoming, I can't help but look forward to the day when all creation is renewed, purged of its infection with evil, and I can't help but yearn to explore the world anew in a new physical body free of the constraints of death and decay (and those anxieties spawned by death and decay). It may sound like science fiction, but it's downright biblical. On many of these walks my mind drifts to "the present heaven," or "paradise," where God's people go when they die to relax, rule with Christ, and await their future and final bodily resurrection. Here's something on "paradise" that I've pulled from an essay I wrote many months ago:

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What happens when a Christian dies before Jesus’ appearing? Where do they go? Are they conscious? Do they exist in some sort of soul sleep, time passing absent their awareness? When it comes to the concept of “heaven”, and here I mean it as the place where God’s people go when they die, the Bible is surprisingly quiet. This place is mentioned in only a handful of New Testament texts: 2 Corinthians 5.8, Philippians 1.23, Revelation 6.9-11, and Luke 23.43. The latter text is where we find Jesus hanging on the cross and telling the penitent criminal beside him, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” I capitalize the letter of that last word not because it’s a noun but because it’s a proper noun: Jesus is talking about a very specific and concrete place cemented in Jewish minds.

The word “paradise” comes from the Persian word pairidaeza, meaning “a walled park” or “an enclosed garden.” This word was used to describe the great walled gardens of the Persian King Cyrus, not least the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Many Jews believed that God would restore Eden. The word paradise came to describe the eternal state of the righteous and, to a lesser extent, the nature of the present heaven. “Paradise” wasn’t invoked as mere allegory, with some strange metaphorical or spiritual meaning that we have to decipher. In Jewish thought it was a real place, be it physical or spiritual, where God and his people lived together, bathing in beauty and enjoying much pleasure and happiness.

So what, then, is Paradise? It is, as Jesus says in Luke 23, the place where the saints go when they die. And here’s the kicker: it could actually be the real-life, physical Garden of Eden. In Revelation 2.7, we find the tree of life in “the Paradise of God.” The same tree is seen later in the New Jerusalem on the New Earth (22.2). Remember: after the Fall in Genesis 3, God banished mankind from the Garden and made it unreachable for them (Genesis 3.24). It may very well be the case that Eden didn’t dissolve or disappear but, in a sense, was relocated. As a physical place, it very well may not have been destroyed. There’s no notion of Eden being torn of its physicality and stripped down into a mere “spiritual” reality. The tree of life, found in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2.9, shows up in Revelation 22.2 and then becomes a hallmark of the New Jerusalem. One can make the argument that the Garden of Eden is the Paradise of God, that physical place of beauty and rest, a place where the saints go and relax following their lives on earth, a place from which (as some texts seem to imply) they can rule presently over the world with Christ. Following the Great Judgment, Paradise/Eden will not be discarded or done away with: in the portrait of new creation in Revelation 21-22, the tree of life is smack-dab in the middle of it all.  Come the appearance of Christ and the Judgment, Eden will take its place in the center of New Jerusalem; but until then, I believe, it remains dislocated from us, and those who die in Christ spend their time there, resting and ruling with Christ, until the day Christ makes his triumphal entry to finally put all the universe to rights. 

Caldwell Nature Preserve