The Garden of Eden
[This is the text of the sermon given by Pastor James Windrow on Sunday, July 14, 2024.] Greetings, brothers and sisters. Today, we reflect on humanity’s origin in the Garden of Eden and its fall and devolution thereafter. When Christians used to think about the Garden of Eden, it was common to imagine it as an almost metaphysical place, existing on another plane of reality, permanently inaccessible to us “fallen” people. The Biblical text is clear that it is on Earth; it even tells us its approximate location. Yet many people couldn’t quite accept that. They were willing to accept the existence of God, Angels, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life, but only when they existed “over there,” away from the “real” world. Even today, when it’s been scientifically proven that the Bible is true, some still think this way. You know who didn’t think this way? Our ancestors who lived before the Flood. From their recovered artifacts, we know they could sail up the river to Garden and see for themselves the cherubim and the flaming sword. Some deranged people even tried to fight the cherubim so they could seize the fruit of the Tree of Life. We know where the Garden is. We’ve excavated it and found … nothing. No cherubim, no flaming sword, no wall that pre-Flood texts state surrounded the Garden. These things were presumably destroyed or taken to heaven during the Flood. It is as if God did not want us to know anything more about the Garden than what he deigned to tell us in the Biblical text. In the Garden were Adam, Eve, and all the animals, including the serpent. God granted mankind dominion over the animals, for he was made in God’s image. While only Adam, Eve, and the Serpent are shown to speak, we now know, based on the recovered remains of animals underneath the flood layer, that all animals larger than rats had brains large enough for intelligent thought and vocal tracts that enabled them to speak human language. Some see a contradiction be
