Preface Excerpts: The Creator of the Universe created a perfect environment of thrilling beauty, security, and unimaginable peace. None of us can truly understand the depth of the Creator’s love expressed in His creative acts. And how can He fully explain to us how and why the world of our day and our personal lives are so far from that which we read of in the first two Chapters of the Book of Genesis? We’re talking about the need to communicate from one completely other spiritual realm to our messed up, earthly, corrupted existence-to minds and hearts clouded and corrupted by all that’s wrong with ourselves and our world. How does one do that? By telling the Creator’s side of the big story. And by using lesser stories that use comparative expressions of all He knows. We are talking here of metaphors, simple linguistic tools, figures of speech, designed and used for effecting understanding in the hearer that sometimes cannot be reached in any other way. Metaphors in Scripture are the language of "inter-realm" communication-God’s way to help his created, earthly beings begin to understand the differences and similarities between the earthly and spiritual realms. I’m not going far into this metaphor business, but I must at least superficially overview the subject. Like all languages, it has its limitations. It also has its risks particularly of creating confusion. The caution I want to alert you to is that this whole book is about a metaphor. The wedding, marriage, Bride, Bridegroom, husband, and wife metaphor. See, I can’t use just one word and there are more I could add to the list and stay on the wedding metaphor topic. Each of the words in the sentence above tells of different aspects of the wedding story. My writing a whole book based on the Garden Wedding metaphor might be confusing to some. Also, it might make some think I am writing about the only useful or important metaphor in Scripture. I most certainly do not want to leave that impression. My delving into the topic of the Garden Wedding for God’s Son is not to detract from the power of the many other metaphors in Scripture. But this effort has been one that has been quite revealing to me. This is a topic I have been exploring for 5-6 years. The urgent needs we see in our world today and the pained behavior of our own culture in the US and all cultures around the world are addressed in the text of Scripture. And, to my mind, in as powerfully helpful a fashion as possible through God’s use of the wedding metaphor. It gives us a framework for evaluating our own lives, relationships, behaviors, and choices. It creates within our own minds and hearts the comparative benefit of visualizing the wholly good life and behavior of God Himself as He lived among us through the walks and tender expressions of the Messiah Jesus on this earth in the Palestine of the first century. Yet we also learn that He will do what needs to be done to remove the rebels and haters who make the Re-creation and Securing of Eden’s Shalom impossible without their elimination. May you find a fresh understanding of the love of God in what you read in these pages. May those new understandings bring to you some vision of the true peace and beauty that God intended in His Creation of the Ultimate Garden of True Shalom. And may these understandings bring needed changes to each of our lives as well as fresh hope and anticipation for our eternal life to come because of Him.
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