In six days God created heaven and earth, stars and planets. He called every kind of fish out of the sea and all kinds of plants and animals out of the earth. But when He got to Adam, the first man—the first one of you and me—He called us out of Himself. Adam is the exact duplicate of God, made in His image.
God and Adam functioned in this earth not as two but as one. And God blessed Adam and said to him, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28).
With that blessing, God’s work was complete! He was finished and He rested.
The Rest of the Plan
God took a spot on earth He called Eden and created a garden. His plan was that as Adam lived forever in the blessing God had commanded, the Garden would take over the whole earth. All He asked Adam to do was to plant heaven in the earth…just step out there and flourish in the blessing!
God’s blessing was powerful enough to do it! He had already provided everything to make it happen. All Adam had to do was rest in the blessing. The energy to live in the blessing was in God’s union with Adam. The supply of all Adam’s needs and desires was in that union, but Adam let himself be talked right out of the blessing.
Adam chose to satisfy his needs his way, and suddenly he and Eve were out there “going it alone.” They put themselves in a position to operate in the earth apart from God’s plan—apart from the blessing of God. In Genesis 3:17 God declared to Adam, “…the ground is under a curse because of you; in sorrow and toil shall you eat [of the fruits] of it all the days of your life” ("The Amplified Bible"). The word toil means “to work; to exert strength with pain or fatigue in body or mind.” What an inheritance Adam left us.
Our ancestors lost a lot with that decision, and next to our eternal life, our rest in God was one of the most important things they gave up. But, God did not give up!
God may have rested on the seventh day of Creation, but His plan continued! Man may have quit on God, but God was determined from before the foundation of the earth that this would be the place where His blessing would rest—the whole earth would be His Garden, and His man would be both the deliverer and recipient of His plan.
BVOV : 25
