In the last post, we learned that the gospel is the announcement of God’s kingdom. However, we still know very little about this kingdom. In this post, we’ll explore how God’s kingdom is revealed in the human story.
The last thing God created—after heaven and earth, light and darkness, water, sky, and land, and every kind of plant and animal—was people. People are the crowning feature of God’s creation. You may have heard that God created people “in His image” (Genesis 1:27), but what does that mean?
To understand this statement, we turn to what God says immediately after this: “Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (1:26). God created people for a very specific purpose: to rule the earth and all its animals. Therefore, being made in His image means people have the responsibility of ruling.
This idea is supported by how the language of “God’s image” was used in other cultures around the time and place where the Bible was written. In these cultures, kings were considered to be the image of whatever god their people worshiped.1 These kings were living representations of their god on earth. In the same way, God created people to represent Him to the rest of creation. He gave this responsibility and privilege not to a few only, but to everyone. People were meant to be kings and queens under the high King.
God gave people a beautiful kingdom to rule over—a huge garden that He Himself planted (2:8). This garden had every kind of fruit tree; it would have made Uganda’s selection of bananas, mangos, pineapples, jackfruits (and so on) seem small. There was even a tree with fruit that could make people live forever (2:9)! In this kingdom of paradise, there was no death, sickness, pain, sadness, or hunger. The first man and woman had a perfect marriage; things like abuse, lying lovers, single mothers, and orphaned children were not even possible. Best of all, people enjoyed God’s company, as He was with them every day in the garden (3:8). God’s desire was that people would produce children and fill the earth, spreading the goodness of the garden wherever they traveled (1:28).
God’s kingdom had all the common features we might expect in a kingdom: a king, citizens, territory, and laws. God Himself was the King, with people as lesser kings and queens under Him. People and animals were the citizens (people being God’s citizens and animals being the people’s citizens). The garden was the territory of the kingdom, which was supposed to grow with time to include the whole world. God made only one law: people were not allowed to eat from a specific tree, the tree of knowing good and evil (2:17).
However, God’s kingdom also had an enemy, an evil being who took the form of a snake and entered the garden. At the snake’s suggestion, the woman and the man ate from the tree which God told them not to eat from (3:1-6). Because of this act of rebellion, God sent the man and woman into exile, away from the garden (3:23). People lost the privilege of being co-rulers in God’s kingdom as soon as they disobeyed Him, and instead became slaves of the enemy’s kingdom (Hebrews 2:15).
With their rebellion also came God’s curse. Because of this, all people eventually die, women give birth to children with much pain, and men have to hustle for what to eat (Genesis 3:16-19). Also, floods and landslides, diseases like malaria, and accidents injure or kill people.
However, God did not leave us without hope. He also promised that someone from the woman’s family line would defeat God’s enemy, the snake. He would be a warrior-king who would crush the snake’s head (3:15), freeing all people from slavery to the snake and their own rebellion against God. But God did not say when this promised king would come.
Meanwhile, the trend of people rebelling against God continued, and their rebellion created many other problems. People began killing each other (4:8), marrying multiple women (4:19), and so on. This evil soon became so bad that God chose to destroy everyone and start over with a single good man and his family (6:5-8). However, this man soon rebelled against God like the first one (9:20-21), and this pattern of rebellion has continued ever since. How could such people ever recover their place in God’s kingdom?
1. Gary V. Smith, “The Concept of God/The Gods as Kings in the Ancient Near East and the Bible,” Trinity Journal 3, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 20.
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