Adam And Eve And Paradise Lost

January 2010 – Grace & Truth Magazine

Adam And Eve And Paradise Lost

The year was 2008. “The last ten years have been the warmest in the earth’s history,” said the environmentalist at a national conference on the earth’s sustainable future. “This dramatic shift is due to one thing – man’s careless consumption of natural resources.” The sad fact is that man, in his attempts to make life more comfortable for himself, has misused the earth’s resources in a most polluting manner.

This expert went on to say, “It is no longer a matter of recovery, but one of temporary repair only. We cannot return to the days of Adam and Eve in the garden; we can only remember our sin. Paradise is lost and doomsday is upon us.” Then he said, “All we can do is adopt an alternative “greener” lifestyle that’ll give us a little more time before the end.”

While I appreciated the statistics used to support his message, what impressed me most was this speaker’s references to “Adam and Eve,” “paradise lost,” “our sin,” and “doomsday.” If his subject was the earth’s sustainable future, he didn’t give his audience much hope of sustaining anything for long.

The immediate future looks dim. Environmentalists see that “our sin” is bringing about ever-increasing global warming, but Christians see man’s sin as leading to a time of “great tribulation” (Mt. 24:21), and that apart from Christ there is no hope for us to ever regain anything even close to paradise.

But it is possible to gain something far better than an earthly paradise. Through Christ we can gain salvation that leads us to victory over the global pollution of sin, suffering, and death for all eternity: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn. 3:16).

While this environmentalist tells us that a “greener” lifestyle will give us “a little more time before the end,” the Bible tells us that a life “with Christ” will give us an eternity in heaven, “which is far better” (Phil. 1:23).

By Larry Ondrejack