their original home. It was a pleasant location in which to create man, and it was well called Eden, which means “Pleasure.” But more than that. “Jehovah God planted a garden in Eden, toward the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. . . . Now there was a river issuing out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it began to be parted and it became, as it were, four heads. . . . And the name of the third river is Hiddekel [Tigris]; it is the one going to the east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. And Jehovah God proceeded to take the man and settle him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and to take care of it.” (Gen. 2:8-15) Then, in the interest of increasing the human race, God gave this first man Adam a perfect wife. God had built her up from a rib taken from Adam’s body to be his helper, a complement of him.

24. What were the man and woman commanded to do, and what effect would this have upon their Paradise home and the doing of God’s will?

²⁴ To this perfect human pair their Creator gave the command to use their reproductive organs and to produce children and fill the earth with them. But along with this filling of the earth with the human kind they must “subdue it.” All these perfect children were meant to live in an Edenic garden or Paradise. The original one in which Adam and Eve were settled would become too small after a great increase in their family, with children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and so on, with no one dying because of paying the penalty for sin. So it would become necessary for them all to subdue the earth outside the initial garden or Paradise of Eden by spreading out the garden’s boundaries, gradually cultivating the as yet uninhabited parts until the Paradise garden embraced the whole earth, from east to west and from the North Pole regions to the South Pole. This earth-girdling Paradise would require the constant attention and care of them all. Together with this garden care they were to have in subjection all the living creatures moving through earth’s waters and over its land or through its skies. Thus God’s will, which began to be done in the original Paradise of Eden, would finally be done everywhere on earth.

25. When that glorious climax was reached, what would it be unscriptural for us to think that God would want to do?

²⁵ This was the glorious, God-honoring climax that Jehovah God envisioned for all the earth. When that grand, loving purpose was fully realized, why would God want to destroy the Paradise earth? Or why would he want to depopulate Paradise by taking those doing his will in it somewhere else, leaving Paradise untended and no longer a place where the divine will was done just as it is done up in heaven? It is not Scriptural for us to think of God’s doing that, for it would bring to nothing his grand purpose.

(To be continued)

Christianity as Front-Page News

“It should never be forgotten that Christianity did not come into the world through the editorial page; it came through the news columns,” writes Halford E. Luccock, as quoted in Treasury of the Christian Faith. “It was a news event—front-page, stop-the-press news. Something happened. . . . The gospel was first preached as news. Whenever it has been preached with power, it has been preached as news. Whenever it has dwindled down to mere advice, become merely editorial Christianity, it has evaporated into a cloud as vague as fog.”

Christ Jesus showed that the message that God’s kingdom has been established in the heavens is news, the best kind of news, “good news” that must “be preached in all the inhabited earth for the purpose of a witness to all the nations.”—Matt. 24:14.