This week, I’m meditating on a few particular aspects of the Advent event. I’m thinking through and writing about how, in Jesus, God inhabited our creaturely form, care-taking function, comprehensive fallenness, and communal formation.
As I said in the teaching I gave over the summer about the Nature and Narrative of the Bible, the opening chapters of the Bible describe this divine act of creating in very architectural terms; the same words are later used in describing the building of the tabernacle and the temple. In this we see that God’s act of creating was, in essence, building this world as his temple in which he would rest (for more on this see John Walton’s amazing book, The Lost World of Genesis One, or just watch this short video).
In the story, he builds and establishes this Temple-World, and then creates and ordains two priests–Adam and Eve–to be his representatives in this temple to care for it and work in it faithfully. In the ancient world, temples were usually placed in the midst of large and beautiful gardens which acted as extensions of the temple itself; to care for the garden was to care for the temple, and to make the garden larger was to expand the scope and size of the temple.
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the long way home 
