The blessings of Christ on the land are really typical of His blessings on His people. It will be fully realized in His dwelling with His people in the new heavens and new earth—a completely renovated habitation in which only righteousness dwells. It is image bearers with which God is most concerned. The environment of God’s dwelling with redeemed mankind is the totality and comprehensiveness of His riches in Christ Jesus.

By the time I turned forty, I had lived in twenty-five different houses in seven different states. Relocating became standard fare for me during what many call “the formative years.” By way of contrast, my wife lived in the same house until she left for college. For the past nine years, I have pastored a church in a military town that has 400 percent turnover. I suppose that my upbringing helped prepare me for weathering the unique dynamics that come with pastoring a church in such a town. Nevertheless, where Christians live is not something incidental or unimportant. The Scriptures actually have a great deal to say about the significance of where we live. Jesus went to the cross to prepare a final home for believers in the new heavens and new earth.

As He approached Jerusalem and the sufferings that He was about to endure there, Jesus told His disciples: “Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also” (John 14:1–3). The imagery of “the Father’s house” is drawn from the language about the temple in the Old Testament. Solomon’s temple was the place of God’s dwelling with His people. In the temple, there were rooms for the priests to live in and from which they served. Jesus was eternalizing what the temple had typified and speaking about the implications of it for the believer in the hereafter. He had come into this world to “prepare a place” for believers. He was going to the cross to make room for those He came to redeem by shedding His blood for their sins. By shedding His blood, Jesus made room for His people in the everlasting temple—the new heavens and new earth in which He would dwell with His own for all eternity.
In turn, Jesus’ teaching about securing a dwelling place for His people in the eternal temple is built on the biblical teaching regarding the various dwelling places of God with His people throughout redemptive history. The biblical metanarrative carries us from the garden of Eden (the place of man’s original dwelling) to the new heavens and the new earth. As it does, it moves us from the garden of Eden to the land of Israel, from the land of Israel to the incarnate Christ, from the incarnate Christ to His dwelling in and with the church by His Spirit, and from His dwelling in and with the church to His dwelling with His bride in the new heaven and earth. The Scriptures carry us along the stepping stones of these various “dwelling places” until we finally arrive at the garden-city bride (Rev. 21–22). The Apostle John envisioned the church—the redeemed bride of the Lamb—coming down out of heaven to dwell with Him in the new heaven and earth. The connection between the garden of Eden and the new heaven and earth is the theological significance of “the ground” out of which God made man.
Eden was a special dwelling place—a unique land—in which God placed man at creation. God had created man from “the ground” outside of the garden and then, by His grace, placed His image bearer in this paradisiacal sacred space. It was a precursor to the promised land. God formed man out of the dust of the ground (Gen. 2:7). The ground (Hebrew adamah) was man’s original environment. In fact, there seems to be an intentional play on words in Genesis 2:7, where we are told that the Lord formed adam (man) out of the adamah (the ground). There is a clear connection between the ground and the man who was formed out of the ground. The name Adam means “red.” Since he was made out of the reddish clay of the ground, the name is a play on the word “ground” (adamah).
The ground was the sphere of blessing and fruitfulness for mankind at creation. Eden was the sphere of God’s richest blessing. God intended to create an image bearer who would work the ground and who would turn the world into the temple, extending the borders of the garden-temple out into the far reaches of the earth.
Read More

Related Posts:

Written by William C. Godfrey |
Tuesday, January 17, 2023
The presence of the image of God in all human beings is cause for hope. God’s will concerning peacemaking, for both maintaining and mending peace, can be applied even in our workplaces, schools, communities, and digital spaces in the world. 

We undergo a radical change in becoming Christians. We are born again to a living hope through true faith in Jesus Christ. We are no longer citizens of this world, and we become citizens of heaven. We are still in the world, but we are no longer of the world. Our citizenship in heaven involves alienation from the world. Our Christian commitments now differ starkly from the commitments of those in the world around us. We no longer share the same loyalties and priorities.
Psalm 120 vividly captures the reality of these divergent commitments. This psalm is the first in a collection of psalms that each bear the title “A Song of Ascents” (Pss. 120–34). The word “ascents” simply means “going up.” These psalms were likely given these titles because they were used by pilgrims as they made their way up to Jerusalem for their holy feasts (because Jerusalem is on a mountain, one always travels up to Jerusalem). In Psalm 120, we find the psalmist at the beginning of his pilgrimage. He is far from home (Ps. 120:5), surrounded by a world of “lying lips” and “deceitful tongue[s]” (Ps. 120:2). And the psalmist prays, expressing the desire for deliverance from a world of people who “hate peace” and who “are for war” (Ps. 120:6–7).
Of course, we thank the Lord every Sunday that we are able to “go up” to church and to our heavenly worship, fellowshipping with like-minded believers. But after the Lord’s Day, most of us are called to go “back down” into the world for another six days. Our jobs, our schools, our volunteer and recreational pursuits, even our digital and social media activities bring us into contact with the world. So how can we bring the peace of Christ to bear on a world that hates peace?
God’s people must begin with the calling we have received in Romans 12:18: “If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” This is an important passage because it reminds us of our God-given responsibility. We are to do what we can to live peaceably with all, including with the world. Wherever Christians can make peace without compromising godliness, we ought to do it.
In the first place, we live peaceably when we strive not to be the ones who interrupt the peace. Peace is an aspect of the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22) and a characteristic of the wisdom that is from above (James 3:17). Psalm 120 reminds us that the world hates peace and is war-mongering. The hatred of peace and love of war are characteristics of the sin-cursed flesh and manifest themselves in enmity, strife, rivalries, dissensions, and divisions (Gal. 5:19–20). What Samuel Miller said to his incoming divinity students about their conduct in the church certainly applies to all Christians and their conduct with the world: If war is made and peace is broken, “see to it that none of you be found among the workers of the mischief…Do not lend your influence to the unhallowed work of corrupting and dividing.” Our God-given responsibility to live peaceably begins with not being the ones who break peace by our sinful conduct.
Read More
Related Posts:

The book, while scary and disheartening, is truth-seeking and ultimately optimistic. Ritchie doesn’t come to bury science; he comes to fix it. “The ideals of the scientific process aren’t the problem,” he writes on the last page, “the problem is the betrayal of those ideals by the way we do research in practice.”

In a year where scientists seemed to have gotten everything wrong, a book attempting to explain why is bizarrely relevant. Of course, science was in deep trouble long before the pandemic began and Stuart Ritchie’s excellent Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth had been long in the making. Much welcomed, nonetheless, and very important.
For a contrarian like me, reading Ritchie is good for my mental sanity – but bad for my intellectual integrity. It fuels my priors that a lot of people, even experts, delude themselves into thinking they know things they actually don’t. Fantastic scientific results, either the kind blasted across headlines or those which gradually make it into public awareness, are often so poorly made that the results don’t hold up; they don’t capture anything real about the world. The book is a wake-up call for a scientific establishment often too blinded by its own erudite proclamations.
Filled with examples and accessible explanations, Ritchie expertly leads the reader on a journey through science’s many troubles. He categorizes them by the four subtitles of the book: fraud, bias, negligence, and hype. Together, they all undermine the search for truth that is science’s raison d’être. It’s not that scientists willfully lie, cheat, or deceive – even though that happens uncomfortably often, even in the best of journals – but that poorly designed experiments, underpowered studies, spreadsheet errors or intentionally or unintentionally manipulated p-values yield results that are too good to be true. Since academics’ careers depend on publishing novel, fascinating and significant results, most of them don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. If the statistical software says “significant,” they confidently write up the study and persuasively argue their amazing case before a top-ranked journal, its editors, and the slacking peers in the field who are supposed to police their mistakes.
Ritchie isn’t some crackpot science denier or conspiracy theorist working out of his mom’s basement; he’s a celebrated psychologist at King’s College London with lots of experience in debunking poorly-made research, particularly in his own field of psychology. For the last decade or more, this discipline has been the unfortunate poster child for the “Replication Crisis,” the discovery that – to use Stanford’s John Ioannidis’ well-known article title – “Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
Take the example of former Cornell psychology professor Daryl Bem and his infamous “psychic pornography” experiment that opens Ritchie’s book. On screens, a thousand undergraduates were shown two curtains, only one of which hid an image that the students were supposed to find. The choice was a coin toss, as they had no other information to go on. As expected, for most kinds of images they picked the right curtain about 50 percent of the time. But – and here was Bem’s claim to fame – when pornographic images hid behind the curtails, students choose the right one 53 percent of the time, enough to pass for statistical significance in his sample. The road for top-ranked publication was wide open.
When the article came out after passing peer review, the world was stunned to learn that undergrads could see the future – at least when images of a sexual nature were involved. Proven by science, certified by The Scientific Method™, the psychology world was thrown into chaos. The study was done properly, passed peer review, and published in a top field journal, with the same method that underlies all the other well-known results in the field. Still, the result was totally bonkers. What had gone wrong?
Or take the don of behavioral economics, Daniel Kahneman, whose many quirky experiments convinced an entire economics profession of individual irrationality and ultimately earned him the Nobel Prize. The psychological literature on so-called ‘priming,’ part of which is used by behavioral economists, suggested that tiny changes in settings can produce remarkably large impacts in behavior. For instance, subtly reminding people of money – through symbols or the clicking noise of coins – makes them behave more individualistically and less caring of others. “Disbelief is not an option,” wrote Kahneman in his famous best-seller Thinking, Fast and Slow, “you have no choice but to accept that the major conclusions of these [priming] studies are true.”
Beginning in the 2010s, psychologists tried to replicate these famous results and more. When tried elsewhere, with other students, better equipment, or larger samples – or sometimes with the exact same data – the same results wouldn’t emerge. How odd. Lab teams tried to replicate many established findings, coming up way short: “The replication crisis seems,” writes Ritchie, “with a snap of its fingers, to have wiped about half of all psychology research off the map.” There was something structurally wrong in the way that psychology found and displayed knowledge. Some research.
Read More