Part 3: Paradise
Iino: You guys are late!
Yoshiya: You’re here already?
Gō: Sorry! Oh, I’m so hungry!
Doc: I figured you would be. So I prepared some snacks.
Yoshiya: Yay!
Gō: You’re the man, Doc!
Doc: Okay, let’s get started, shall we?
What comes to your mind when you think of “paradise”?
Iino: White sand beaches. Blue sea.
Yoshiya: Yeah. It’s like a tropical island, isn’t it? You certainly don’t think of paradise being cold!
How would you define a human being?
Iino: A rational animal. A mammal.
Gō: Biologically speaking, I know we’re mammals, but…
Gō: Even before I read the Bible, back when I was in Junior High School, I wondered why humans are so different from other animals. I mean, only humans build buildings with concrete, right? It’s really weird when you think about it.
Yoshiya: Did you find the answer in the Bible?
Gō: Hmm, I’m not going to tell you now, because I’m sure we’ll be looking at those Bible verses in a moment.
Doc: Thank you all. We’ve certainly covered quite a bit of ground so far, haven’t we?
Doc: First, we thought about how we’re always aware of being inside and outside many circles. Then about the perfect circle of everlasting love. And about the house of the Lord. We saw that the ultimate communion of love is within God himself. That God exists eternally as three Persons. That God created everything. That human beings are also invited into the “inner (uchi) fellowship” that God has in himself, and so on.
In lesson 3 of the booklet it says: “The whole universe is ‘God’s house’”. This is a bit surprising, isn’t it? Because if the place of perfect fellowship is “God’s house” and the whole universe is also “God’s house”, you’d think we would all be enjoying perfect fellowship already!
Doc: But the reality is far from that, and that’s where our studies began. Why “God’s house” is not in fact like it ought to be is a question we’ll consider next time. Today we will look at another question: Why does God care about human beings in particular?
First, let’s read some poetry from the Old Testament. Would you read it for us, Iino?
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him,
and the son of man that you care for him?
Yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings
and crowned him with glory and honor.
You have given him dominion over the works of your hands;
you have put all things under his feet,
[…]
O Lord our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
Old Testament, Psalm 8:3-9
Doc: Thanks. The writer of this Psalm (or song) was called David. He lived about 1000 B.C.
What does the writer of this song (David) say about God’s relationship with human beings?
Iino: God is mindful of them. He cares for them.
Doc: Mmm. Those expressions “mindful of” and “care for” have the same sort of meaning, don’t they? This was originally a poem written in the Hebrew language. In English, it’s common for poetry to rhyme, but Hebrew poetry is noted for “parallelism”. In parallelism, you can repeat the same thing in slightly different phrases, or say the opposite of what you said in the first line in the second line. This psalm has a lot of repetition. In verse 3, the first and second lines are similar, and the two lines of verse 4 repeat the same idea.
Gō: God crowns man with glory and honor.
Doc: What do you think that means?
Yoshiya: I think it means that human beings have a valuable status in God’s sight.
Gō: It’s the king who wears the crown, isn’t it? And it says God has given man dominion over everything. Like the lion is sometimes called the “king of the jungle”, I wonder if human beings are like kings over the entire creation?
Doc: Yes. The ultimate King of kings is God himself, and the king who represents God is man.
How does this understanding lead David to respond towards God?
Gō: He’s responding a bit like I did in Junior High School when I wondered, “What does it mean to be human?”
Yoshiya: He’s got a sense of awe or a kind of reverence towards God, doesn’t he? I think David is praising God because of how he treats people.
Doc: I think so too. Okay, let’s open the book of Genesis and look at the story of the creation of man. Human beings were made on the sixth day of God’s creation. We could say that from the first to the fifth day, a suitable environment was created for man to live in, and that man was created as the pinnacle of the work of creation.
Doc: Would you read it for us, Yoshiya?
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”
So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” […] And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
Old Testament, Genesis 1:26-28, 31
Doc: In the ancient world when the Bible was written, the statue or “image” of a god was thought to represent that god. Statues were placed in temples. It’s like how in Japan, Buddhist statues are placed in temples, Shintō deities on the god-shelf, and Inari-san statues in shrines.
Doc: In many languages of the Ancient Near East, “temple” and “house” are the same word.
In the booklet it says that the whole universe is “God’s house”, which is the same as saying that the whole universe is the “temple” of God the Creator. People go to temples to worship statues. This is because statues are thought to embody or mediate the presence of God. In the ancient world, human kings were also considered to be living embodiments of the local deity. The Egyptian pharaohs are a good example: they were considered “living gods”.
Doc: In the following chapter, Genesis 2, God places man in a garden in a place called Eden. The Garden of Eden was a special place in God’s creation. God made man to cultivate and take care of it. By the way, the Hebrew word “Eden” is paradeisos in Greek, which is the root of the familiar English word “paradise”. Here’s the question, then:
What do you think God means when he says he will make man in his “image”? [The Japanese Bible says as God’s image.]
Iino: According to your explanation just now, God created man as his representative.
Where is the temple or house in which God’s image is placed?
Yoshiya: The whole universe is a temple, but Adam and Eve were placed in Eden. From a universal point of view, the earth is the temple, and then in the context of the earth, it’s the garden of Eden.
Why do you think God speaks in the plural: “Let us…”? (verse 26)
Iino: Are you saying that’s because God is Trinity?
Doc: Yes! God is one, but he exists as three Persons, so that’s why it’s in the plural.
What commission does God give to man? What do you think this entailed?
Iino: He says, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.” So that means to have children and spread out?
Gō: There’s also a commission to subdue and have dominion. I guess it means to rule the whole earth while increasing and spreading around it.
Yoshiya: Yeah, as a representative of God, as the head of creation, I think it means that mankind was commanded to take good care of it.
Doc: Sounds good. Eden is the temple, the house of God. A place where God is and people worship God. We can’t pinpoint where Eden actually was and point to it on a map. But the Bible says that the Euphrates River watered it, so we can assume that it was somewhere around that part of the world. In any case, it was man’s mission to expand paradise from one place on earth to the whole earth.
The world that God created and the “uchi inside fellowship” that God had with man are described as “very good”, aren’t they? It seems certain that something has gone wrong somewhere. We’ll consider this next time. But first, what have we learnt from the Bible today about the definition of humanity?
Iino: Human beings aren’t just ordinary mammals. They’re the image of God!
Gō: And they were made to be kings.
Doc: Right. Mankind was the image of God and was given authority as God’s representative, wasn’t he?
Why do you think God cares about human beings in particular?
Yoshiya: He made them as his own image, to receive his love.
Doc: Yes. For God, human beings are truly special. But rather than just lump everyone together as “the human race”, what about each of us individually?
Do you believe that this God cares about you?
Iino: I wonder… I guess Gō and Yoshiya would confidently say, “Yes. God cares for me!” But I’m not sure about that yet.
Doc: That’s totally fine if you don’t know yet. Well, thank you all very much again for today. I’m looking forward to reading the Bible with everyone again next time.
The ESV Bible. Crossway, 2001, www.esv.org/.