The Garden Grows
The Border Nobody Told the Wildflowers About
Matthew Vander Els opened this installment of the Image Bearer series in his own yard. You prepare the soil, scatter wildflower seed in a tidy corner, set a wooden border around the bed, and in your mind the arrangement is clear: flowers here, grass there, a line between. "Everyone understands it except for the wildflowers." Next spring they are three feet out in the grass, thirty feet away by the fence, somehow in the driveway. Wind moves a seed, a bird carries one, rain washes another to good soil and it grows. A garden is not a decoration you purchase and admire on the way past. It is alive, and because it is alive it is always pushing outward. "You don't really have a garden, you're always just fighting it."
The Garden Was Never Meant to Stay Put
The Bible opens with God planting a garden and ends with something that has covered the world, so somewhere in between, he said, "the garden got out." The first words God speaks to humanity in Genesis 1 are be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. But Adam and Eve are inside the garden, and leaving it is later the punishment, so the only way to fill the earth is to take the garden with them. "This is an invasion of the Garden of Eden. God did not put his images in the garden to mow it."
Genesis 2:15 is the job description: the Lord placed the man in the garden to work it and watch over it, two verbs that in Exodus are the priests' duties in the tabernacle. Adam is a priest posted at the boundary with two orders, keep it growing inside and guard the edge outside. Then a beast walks in, the man says nothing while the unclean walks straight past him, and he reaches for the one thing he was told not to take. "He fails all the orders in one afternoon." The fall was bigger than fruit: it "was the day when the garden got closed up and stopped growing."
What follows is a presence meant to fill the earth that instead keeps contracting. A mountain. A tent in the wilderness. Walls at Shiloh. A building in Jerusalem. Then the temple burns and it is a memory. The real monster, Vander Els suggested, may never have been the beast at all: "Maybe the bigger monster was the dormancy of the garden."
Pictures of the Garden Growing Back
Ezekiel, whom he called the street performer prophet, is sitting in Babylon after the temple has burned when he is shown a temple that does not exist yet and notices a trickle leaking from under its threshold. In Ezekiel 47 an angel with a measuring line walks him downstream a third of a mile at a time: ankles, knees, waist, then a river he cannot cross. No creeks feed it, just a leaky faucet under a door, and the farther it travels the deeper it gets. It runs downhill to the Dead Sea, the lowest and saltiest place on earth, and the deadest water there is fills with swarming life and fishermen on the shore with nets. "This is what it looks like when God moves."
Daniel gets the same story as a rock. A pagan king dreams of a statue of gold, silver, bronze and iron, every empire stacked on the last, and a stone cut by no human hand strikes it and grinds it to chaff. Then the stone grows into a mountain and fills the earth. The text withholds its origin the way a film withholds a hero's backstory: the stone broke off the mountain. In the Bible a mountain is where God lives, Eden and Sinai and Zion and the temple, so Daniel is watching a piece of God's own mountain drop into history, knock the empires over, and grow back into a mountain covering the world. Filling the earth is the Genesis 1:28 line again.
Yeshua starts smaller still. In Matthew 13 the kingdom is a mustard seed, smallest of all seeds, that becomes a tree where the birds of the sky nest. The image has an edge, because the prophets use trees full of birds two ways. Ezekiel makes Pharaoh a giant cedar and God chops it down. Daniel makes Nebuchadnezzar a huge tree with birds sheltering in it and it is felled. But a few chapters before Pharaoh's cedar, God plants a tiny sprig with his own hand on a high mountain and grows it into a majestic cedar where every kind of bird nests. Yeshua is "planting the tree the prophets were waiting for," the one that never gets cut down. "They are the nations finally finding a tree that will not fall on them." Habakkuk had said it plainly: the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord's glory as the waters cover the sea.
The People Are the Border
Zechariah supplies the last picture, and Vander Els drew attention to one verb. A man is measuring Jerusalem, the sensible thing to do before rebuilding, and an angel is sent to run and stop him. Angels in visions stand and proclaim; this one sprints, because whatever line that young man draws will be too small. Jerusalem will be a city without walls, not because it is weak but because it is too crowded to ever finish one. God says he himself will be a wall of fire around it, and that many nations, plural, will become "my people," singular. "It's not Israel plus the nations. But the nations as Israel." Since a selem, an image, was what Assyrian kings planted at the far edge of their territory to mark how far their rule reached, a city packed with people from every nation is a kingdom whose frontier is made of people. "The king here does not wall his city. He marks his frontier with his people, his face upon them."
Application
Vander Els closed with Yeshua as the gardener who held the line. Offered in the wilderness everything the first Adam could not wait to grab, he refused to take it and told the adversary to go, "what Adam and Eve should have said to the serpent." Then, risen, he takes his disciples up a mountain and sends them to make disciples of all nations, which Vander Els called Genesis 1:28 delivered a second time. Be fruitful. Fill the earth. Push the edges outward. The story lands in Revelation with a river and a tree of life back in the city, and John looking for the temple and finding none, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.
The question he left was whether zeal for the fence line has quietly replaced any interest in growth. "Have you become okay with looking at the garden and then getting the weed whacker out and making sure it doesn't cross over the fence line? Have you become selfish with your little piece of the garden?" The calling instead is to let the love, grace, mercy and wisdom of God flow outward through you, so that wherever you stand the garden is there. "I'm going to plant flowers every step that I take. That's the mission."
Read the transcript (6,179 words)
Automated transcript, lightly edited for readability. Scripture appears as spoken; the video is the authoritative teaching.
I don't know what continuing image bear series. Hopefully it's been a fun series and a blessing and again one of my selfish goals whenever I preach or teach the scriptures is I just really want to get you excited about the word. I want every I want people to be excited to go home and dive into the word. Whether or not you read something a little bit differently than I did, I don't know. It's not as big of a priority to me as you just getting in it and diving into it and experiencing what the word of God is and what the story that it's telling actually says. But today I want to talk about gardening.
A Garden Never Stays Where You Plant It
Cuz well, any gardeners? Gardeners? A couple? Attempted? So, there's one thing about a garden that I've come to realize when I was voluntold to participate in gardening at my house. A garden doesn't really stay where you want it to stay all the time. You plant some like wildflowers, you know, and maybe one little nice corner of your yard and you prepare the soil and you do the Miracle-Gro and all the stuff and you scatter the seed around and you put this nice big border around it and in your mind the arrangement is clear. The wildflowers go here and the grass goes here and there is a border between them and everyone understands it except for the wildflowers because next spring when everything starts coming back, all the flowers come back in the bed like they're supposed to and oh look, there's some in the grass.
3 ft outside the bed. And why is there some flowers popping up over near my fence 30 ft away? And how did it get in the driveway? Right? Because you know that little wooden border that I bought at Home Depot like it clearly said this is this is the line. This is the boundary, right? But what happens when you put seed down? The wind sometimes blows the seed or a bird carries it around. Rain kind of washes it out and wherever it finds the good soil, it grows, right? That's what That's what living things do. You plant ivy, right? You want to make a nice ivy wall. It's going to look pretty, just like in all the movies.
And so you plant some ivy and now you own a machete because that's what you need to fight the ivy that you welcomed onto your property. And if you've ever planted bamboo intentionally, then get out. Get out. Because a garden a garden's not like a it's not a decoration that you just kind of purchase and look at. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that. He's taking care of me. It's not a painting that you buy and just kind of put on the wall and admire it whenever you pass by. It's alive. And because it's alive, it's always pushing outward. You don't really have a garden, you're always just fighting it.
You're fighting a garden. And that's kind of the lesson that we're going to take today is how relentless gardens are. In the Bible, I make this point conveniently because the Bible opens with God planting a garden. And I hope to make the point that the garden was never supposed to stay where he planted it. God plants a garden and let's say it's a few acres, I don't know. Nice small cute garden. Put some people in it. And then we fast forward to the end of the story and it's it's it's covered the whole world as well. It's grown. And so somewhere between the first pages of the Bible and the last pages of the Bible and the visions of the prophets, the garden got out.
The Command to Fill the Earth
Something jumped fence. And so, when we go back to the beginning, Genesis 1, some of this is review. We're here with the first thing that God says to humans. He says God had blessed them. God said to them, "Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. And then rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the sky and every creature that crawls on the earth." Fill the earth. Were Adam and Eve supposed to leave the garden? No, that was their punishment, right? That was the exile. But they're commanded to go fill the earth. How are they going to fill the earth without leaving the garden?
I guess I guess they just take the garden with them. I guess the idea is that they're supposed to expand. It's supposed to grow. It's supposed to break out. Because what's outside the garden? Where you have this little area of Eden and then you have the rest of the world and from what we It's still wilderness. It's the wildness out there. And man is charged to fill the earth. It's like God is saying, "You're here inside this small place where I am and out there is everything else and it's not a garden yet, but that's this is why you're my gardeners. Fill the earth. Take the edge of the garden and push it out.
A Priest Posted at the Boundary
Adam and Eve were to extend the geographical boundaries of the garden until Eden covered the whole earth. This is an invasion. This is an invasion of the Garden of Eden. God did not put his images in the garden to mow it. No. Genesis 2:15, the Lord took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and watch over it. Work it and watch over it. Now, we looked at those two words in our first message of the series and they mean to what? To serve and to guard. The two things that the priests were commanded to do in the sanctuary, the tabernacle in Exodus. So, man is a priest posted at the edge of the holy garden and his orders are to keep it growing on the inside and to guard the boundary on the outside.
And then Genesis 1, the push to push it out. And it's kind of neat because remember there's a garden that runs off from the mountain into the garden and then there is this river that runs out of the garden and it splits into the four rivers and they water the rest of the earth. So, the trajectory is already there. Everything that flourishes comes out of the garden. And then what happens? A beast walks into the garden. And the man who was posted to guard the edge of it stands there and says nothing while the unclean walks straight past him. He does not guard the garden. And then he reaches for the one thing he was told not to take.
And he doesn't serve either. He fails all the orders in one afternoon. Rather than extending the divine presence of the garden, the sanctuary, Adam and Eve were expelled from it. The fall was not simply about eating fruit. It was about something much bigger than that, much larger. The fall was the day when the garden got closed up and stopped growing, if you will. Man chose to determine good and evil for themselves autonomous from God. And that breaks the whole mission, the whole mandate, everything that they were made to do. And throughout the story of the Bible, and we read it like an epic story.
The Presence That Kept Shrinking
That's kind of how it was written. We feel the echoes of this, the divine presence that was supposed to fill the earth keeps shrinking back into these small bounded places when you look through the Bible. I mean, think about it. The divine presence of God is on a mountain. Okay, at the top. All right, we go up to see him. And then he's put into a he makes his dwells in a tent in the middle of the wilderness. Just a itty-bitty tent. And then he has some concrete walls in Shiloh, and then he has a building in Jerusalem, a temple. One holy area in a very wilderness wild world that's still guarded right at the front.
And that's that's most of the Old Testament. The presentation of where God's presence is, it's in these small places. A people planted in a good land like a seedling in a plot, they were told to fill it. Israel, and then they were slowly strangled by the wildness of everything around them. To the point where the temple gets destroyed and they go into exile, and then it's just a memory. See, maybe the monster maybe the monster in the movie, in this film, the way it's directed was never about the beast in the garden. Maybe the bigger monster was the dormancy of the garden. When we stop taking care of it, when we stop gardening, when we stop pushing it to grow.
The living thing that has quietly agreed with us to just stop growing. Until it gets loose again. And so, when we read the Bible, we're left on the edge of our seats with the question of is the garden ever going to keep growing again after man left it? And there's several prophets throughout the scripture that tell us, and this is a spoiler alert, they say, "Yes, it will. And here's what it's going to look like." And they present this in a lot of different ways that are really neat. And I find them quite nerdy in the how they're Is it me? We're good? You think so? I'm looking at you like you did it, and I'm sorry.
Ezekiel's River From Under the Door
I didn't mean it. We're going to All right. There's a prophet in exile. He's the ADHD street performer prophet. He's the one that when God spoke through him, the Holy Spirit spoke through him to give a message, he acted it out on the street, and he probably looked absolutely insane, and that's why I love Ezekiel. And so, he's a prophet, and he's in exile, and he gets shown something and he gets shown how the garden is starting to grow again. And it starts, of all places, underneath the door. And so, he's sitting in Babylon, and again, the temple has been burned down, very little hope left. And God gives him a vision of a temple that doesn't exist yet, a really large temple, at the end of Ezekiel.
And the angel in the vision walks him up to the front door of the temple, and he looks down and he's noticing there's a trickle coming out of the door, like a leak. It's just Whatever. I don't know why that just that sound of like a fish tank. It's kind of like the leak that you get when you forget to put the final on the faucet, right? So, it's just a little trickle that's coming out of this threshold at the temple, and it's running east, and it's just trickling down the hill. And the angel is like, "Well, come on, let's take a walk." And so, they start walking along the trickle. And here's here's what the scripture say in Ezekiel 47.
As the man went out east with a measuring line in his hand, he measured off a third of a mile, and he led me through the water, and it came to my ankles. And the man with his long tape measure measures another third of the mile and led me through the water there, and it came up to my knees. And then he measured another third of a mile, and he led me through the water, and it came up to my waist. Again, he measured off another third of a mile, and it was a river that I could not cross on foot, for the water had risen. So, if you can imagine, sometimes we read the visions and of the prophets, and we've we've heard them so many times that we just kind of glaze over and like, "Yeah, that seems completely normal." no, there's there's there's an angel that has this like mile long tape measure, and he's just stringing along, and he's walking with Ezekiel.
Come on, another third of a mile. Let's go. So, Ezekiel's walking. Ah, here we go. Okay, now what? Walk out into the water. Okay, so he walks out in the water, it's his up to his ankles. He comes back. My ankles are wet now. So, the angel says, "Well, let's go another third of a mile." So, he's measuring out another third of a mile. Ezekiel walks in, it's up to his It's getting deeper. It's getting deeper to the point where they finally make it down the road and he can't even cross cuz it's such a rushing raging it'll it'll it'll drown. You can't cross the river. Love that. And the one thing that's neat about this is the farther out it goes, it gets deeper.
Anyone ever take physics in high school? Okay, yeah. Water doesn't do that. There's no creeks feeding into this river. There's no other water sources. This is a trickle, a little leaky faucet coming out of the doorway of the temple. And the farther away it gets, the greater and rushing it gets. This is the presence of God coming out from under his own door. And it's not draining. It's growing. It's increasing. It's multiplying. It's breaking out. And watch where it goes. So it continues running from Jerusalem downhill and eventually it makes it to the lowest point on Earth down in past Judea in the desert, which is the Dead Sea, right?
Who's ever You guys know about the Dead Sea? So the Dead Sea is the lowest point on Earth and it has the highest salt concentration and there's so much salt in it that nothing can live there, but if you happen to jump in the water, you can't drown. You'll just burn your eyes. You'll float, right? And here's what he says when the when Ezekiel is speaking about how when the water everything it touches just sprouts and it's going through the land and it's going through the Negev and just trees and everything's flourishing and then it hits the Dead Sea, the deadest place on Earth. And what's taking place there?
Oh, every kind of living creature that swarms will live wherever that river flows and there will be a huge number of fish because this water goes there. Since the water will become fresh there, there will be life everywhere the river goes. There's fishermen at the Dead Sea. That's pretty cool. That's the point. It's going to play be a such a place of abundant life everywhere that this water touches. Fishermen on the shore of the Dead Sea. Standing there with nets on their shoulders. The presence came out from under the door, it ran downhill into the deadest place there is, and the deadest place there is filled up now with life.
Daniel's Stone That Became a Mountain
This is what it looks like when God moves. There is yeah. Another story is from a prophet also in exile. Daniel. And Daniel doesn't use water or see water in his vision. He sees a pebble a stone. He sees a rock. And in his vision or what he what in his situation there's a pagan king that has a nightmare. Sorry, it's it's the king. But the pagan king has a nightmare and he can't understand it. And so he gets this Hebrew exile Daniel that pulled away into exile. And Daniel's the one that interprets the dream. And the king in his vision saw this giant statue, right? It was gold and it was silver and it was bronze and it was iron.
It represented all of the empires stacked on top of one another. So we have this we have this statue that represents all of the empires of the world that are trying to build themselves up instead of trying to be a imitation of God's kingdom. And in this nightmare he has he saw this. There we go. During this vision with the statue, it says, "As you were watching, a stone broke off without a hand touching it. Struck the statue at its feet of iron and fired clay and crushed them. Then the iron and fired clay and bronze and silver and the gold were shattered and became like chaff from a summer threshing floor.
The wind carried them away and not a trace of them was found. So, you have a rock that no hand cut and it hits the empires out of nowhere and they blew away like dust. And do we And what takes place after this is the rock sits there and then the rock begins to grow after it destroys this pagan statue. And the rock continues to grow and continues to grow and continues to grow which is kind of scary in my opinion, but it grows into a big mountain. And then it overtakes the whole world. The rock eats the world. Is how this dream ends. All through the Bible a mountain is where God lives, right? The garden was on a mountain.
That's the imagery that Ezekiel 28 gives us. Sinai was on a mountain. The temple sat on a mountain. And so, when Daniel watches this rock grow into a mountain that fills the earth he's watching the garden grow again. The stone this time, though. Until it covers the whole world. And don't think I had the slide in there, but in Daniel it says that the mountain grew and filled the earth. Filled the earth. We just We just read that cuz that's That's a Genesis 1:28 line, right? That's the mandate of the images of God. You're supposed to fill the earth. The mountain is filling the whole earth, and now it's being carried out by a rock not cut from any human hands.
And what's neat is during this whole scene when Daniel's or when the film is being directed and you're seeing this vision and you're being told the story of how the dream occurred. We're going to try it again. No, Satan. No. So, Daniel's telling you this dream and you don't really know where this rock is coming from. It just kind of came out of nowhere, and he kind of like You ever see a movie and you don't really know what to you know, you don't know the origin story of the protagonist until the end of the movie and then like, "Oh, now you see where it came from." He lets us know where the rock came from.
The stone broke off from the mountain without a hand touching it, and it crushed the iron and bronze and gold. This wasn't just a random asteroid or meteorite that came out of anywhere. It was a part of the mountain, a chip off the old mountain. It's across the whole story. It's the mountain where God makes his home. It's Eden. It's Sinai. It's Zion. It's the temple. A piece breaks off of God's mountain that no human hand touched. It drops into history. It knocks the empires off their feet, and then it grows back up into a mountain that fills the whole earth. Mountain to stone to mountain. I love how the prophets have this Then Yeshua picks up the exact same picture.
The Tree the Prophets Were Waiting For
And or he uses this imagery. One of many. Matthew 13, "The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, but when grown, it's taller than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the sky come and nest on its branches." The smallest of all the seeds. And it does not just grow into a nice bush. It becomes a tree so large that birds of the sky come and nest in it. Now, the imagery in the Bible of birds nesting in trees is a familiar one. And the prophets use this imagery in usually one of two ways. One way is as a warning.
So, it's it's a warning against proud empires. So, like if an empire gets too large or too arrogant, usually they're displayed as a tree that's going to get chopped down. Ezekiel makes Pharaoh a giant cedar with all of the birds of the sky nesting in its branches, and God chops it down to the ground because of its arrogance. Daniel makes Nebuchadnezzar a huge tree with the birds sheltering in it, and it gets cut down, felled for the very same reason. In both, the tree is a world empire clawing its way up toward heaven, and the whole point of the story is that God brings it back down. But, there's a second way that the prophets use the same imagery of a tree with birds in it.
Just a few chapters before Pharaoh's cedar tree, Ezekiel watches God do it to himself. God takes a tiny sprig, plants it with his own hand on a high mountain, and it grows in his words, a majestic cedar. Where birds of every kind will nest under it, taking shelter in the shade of its branches. That tree is not an evil empire. That tree is the kingdom of God. That's God's own empire, or God's own kingdom, planted by God on a mountain, sheltering every type of bird there is. And so, hear what Yeshua is doing here. Because he's he's not trying to compare, of course, this to Babylon. He's planting the tree the prophets were waiting for.
The one God grows himself. The one that proud empires were only straining to imitate before they all got cut down. The empires grew because of force, reaching up toward the sky like the Tower of Babel. And every last one of them were cut down. This one This one doesn't claw its way to the top. It starts as a seed. A little itty-bitty seed that you could you could lose sight of in palm of your hand. I mean, and it grows because God grows it. And it never gets cut down, and it fills the sky, and the birds nesting in it are not these frightening subjects hiding under a tyrant like the other trees.
They are the nations finally finding a tree that will not fall on them. That's the kingdom. This It looks like nothing. And the nations are going to find security and sheltering in them. And what's Habakkuk say? For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord's glory as the water covers the sea. As the water covers the sea. Every inch. No dry patches. That's how full of God the earth will be. As the prophets are perceiving this. The wild, the wilderness, the chaos, the uncertainty, the fear, the danger, it's gone. And now there's just a luscious, invasive garden that's turning everything that's dried and dead into something alive.
Yeshua has several parables about this very same thing. The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and mixed into 50 lb of flour until it was all leavened. So, a pinch of leaven, just a little bit of leavening. So, sourdough starter, just a pinch of it in 50 lb of flour. And she hides it real deep in the middle. You can't see it. You have no idea it's there. It disappears. Can't pick it back out. You can't even But it doesn't stay a pinch. It goes to work in the dark in the center of the dough and it does not stop until every last portion of this dough is fully leavened. The whole thing.
That's the garden getting out. It's how it gets out. Now, fast forward. When the exile's over, the Babylonian exile ends and the Persians have now taken over and they're allowing the Judeans to return back to Judah and some of them do. And they want to begin rebuilding. And people are back in Jerusalem and the city's a wreck. Again, it's burnt down. It's just everything's destroyed. And a man walks out into it and he does the only sane thing that you start to do when you want to rebuild something big. You get the measuring tape out, right? You can hear it. Zechariah is what says, "I looked up and saw a man with a measuring line in his hand and I asked, 'Where are you going?'
Zechariah's City Without Walls
And he answered me, 'To measure Jerusalem to determine its width and length.'" It's a very reasonable thing to do. You survey before you start building. You find the corners of everything and the footprint where everything's going to go and right? No one's doing anything wrong here. But as the prophets, the next thing that happens gets a little strange. "Then the angel who was speaking with me went out and another angel went out to meet him and he said to him, 'Run and tell this young man, Jerusalem will be inhabited without walls because of the number of people and animals in it.'" So, automatically, as readers of the Bible, if you've read the Bible your whole life, you're you're probably focused on oh cool, so Jerusalem is going to be inhabited, it's not going to have walls, that's the theological point.
I would like to direct you to the word run. And yeah, what's it look like when an angel's running? I don't know. I've just never seen that. Go. Does he have a wing? I don't know. So, he rushes over to him. Yeah, it's fast. Angels and visions typically don't run, that's why I point that out. They stand, they proclaim, they announce, they stop being scared. I know whatever you see is freaking you out, just don't be afraid. Close your eyes. I have a message for you. They're running. Hey, what are you doing? Stop with your measuring. I don't know. I love it. This one is sent to sprint to catch a man before he can finish measuring.
It's as if heaven is interrupting the survey because whatever line that young man draws is going to be way too small for what God has planned for this city. Jerusalem will be a city without walls. Now, in that world, a city without walls, that was that was a weak city. That was a city that was going to be owned by someone else every single month. Right? It's protection. So, why no walls on this one? Not because it's weak, not because it's so defended, because it's too full. It's too full. It's growing too fast. It's growing too fast to ever have time to build a wall because if you start building a wall, you're just going to have to tear it down the next day and start moving again because the city is expanding.
It's growing. Put the line down. Put the measuring tape down, right? And so, what defends a city with no walls? Well, God has I myself will be a wall of fire around it, and I will be the glory within it. So, we have a perimeter of fire, and in the center of the city is glory. Zechariah keeps going. He doesn't stop there. God says, "Shout for joy, daughter Zion. I'm coming to live with you." And then, this. "Many nations will join themselves to the Lord on that day and become my people. I will dwell among them and you will know the Lord of armies has sent me to you. So, why I love this imagery is so you have a city that doesn't have walls because it's just absorbing all of the people and all of the animals and everything it can get.
And it the more people that it Yeah, I don't want to say devoured. Right? I'm having images of There was a movie in the '80s or maybe it was the '60s called The Blob, you know? And that's what that's where my brain's going right now. It's the big blob and it's just overtaken the world and it's oh, no! And then and if it gets you, it grows bigger, right? Probably not the best, but you get the idea. It's It's expanding. It's expanding over It's moving It's getting out. It's getting out. I love that. The city does not conquer the nations. It just absorbs them. Just They join themselves to it and become part of it.
And it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And the nations The nations are plural. The nations are plural. I love that. And they will become my people. That's singular. That's my favorite part. All of the nations will become my people. One people. It's not Israel plus the nations. But the nations as Israel. One people belonging to God. All right? You don't get the guest wing over on the side of the city over here where you have to stay because you're No, they become the city. Remember what selem was when we spoke, I think, the first week. Remember the image of God. So, an image in the ancient world is a Hebrew word selem and it's a statue.
It's an idol. That's what an image is. So, you are the image of God. You are the physical representation of everything that's supposed to be the dwelling place of God. That's what a selem was. If you were a pagan nation, you would set up a statue of your God, and you would assume that the God's spirit would dwell in there, and the God's presence was in the statue, and you could have proximity to it. And that's a that's a that's a copy. That's a fake of what God was doing here. And so, but in the ancient world, when a king wanted everyone to know how far his rule reached, he it would be common in some places that they would plant their image, his statue, on the far edges of the territory.
And this is mainly Assyrian kings and Egyptian pharaohs set these up. But you would you would put the images along the borders, and that would dictate where the kingdom is, standing there at that's how far the king's rule reaches. And so, when we look at this, and this is what we're saying, that we have a city with no walls, and it's just jam-packed with people and animals of every nation, and every single one of them is a living image of the king. This is not an undefended city. This that's the border. The people are the border. The border of the kingdom, but not made out of stone, but people.
Pushed all the way out to wherever the last one of them is standing. The king here does not wall his city. He marks his frontier with his people, his face upon them. And it just keeps moving and multiplying and getting larger and larger and larger. Think about who Yeshua is when he's speaking about these parables. He's He's the gardener who held the line, held the fence, the border in the garden. When the beast met Yeshua in the wilderness, the temptation, and offered him every single thing that the first Adam could not wait to partake in. Yeshua did what Adam and Eve would not. He held his ground.
He refused to take. And in the end, he told the adversary he told he told Satan, "Go away, devil. Get away from me. This you have no power here. Go." He said what Adam and Eve should have said to the serpent. He's the one who kept the guard. He's the one who embodied what a priest was supposed to do. And after he dies and after Yeshua's raised from the dead where does he take all of his disciples up at the very end of Matthew? Oh, they go up they go up on a mountain. And he says this, "All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. Baptize them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit."
We call this the Great Commission. And we treat it like it's something that Matthew just made up or Yeshua just said it's it's the same assignment as Genesis 1:28. But this time it's being delivered through Yeshua. Be fruitful. Fill the earth. Push my garden. Push the edges outward. You have this mountain. You have this empty tomb. And now you have a mission. Take it. And so that's not the person. That's not you. I hope it's not you. Grow flowers. That sounds so hippie, doesn't it? I like it. Grow flowers. That yard would never take flowers. See, the last thing you were ever expected to do is to stop growing the garden.
And we have to get out of the mindset that we have to get out of the mindset that our zeal for holding the fence line and making sure the boundary is set doesn't get in the way of us allowing the flowers to grow. Many of us get in a bad habit of straining gnats and calling our gavel grace. And that's not what called God would expect us to do. Because look where the whole thing ends. At the end there. Then I heard a loud voice from the throne, "Look, God's dwelling is with humanity and he will live with them. They will be his people and God himself will be with them and will be their God." In Revelation, it says at the end.
God's dwelling is with humanity. The story started in a garden, a place where heaven and earth met, where God walked with his image bearers, and then we lost it. And the humans went east and the gate closed and the cherubim stood and swords. But the garden didn't die. It kept showing up. It Again, it shows up in the tabernacle in the wilderness. That's why it's decorated with trees and flowers in the fabric. With cherubim angels embroidered on it guarding the entrance. It's Eden. It's the garden. It's just in a building right now. Ezequiel watched this itty-bitty leak out of the door become a river that no one could cross.
Daniel watched a little rock break loose and knock all the empires over and then grow into a big mountain that covered the whole earth. And Yeshua held up a seed you could barely see. This is what the kingdom looks like. The small things that don't stay small. The whole Bible is pushing that direction outward. And now John gets to see this vision and he sees the culmination of it. There's a river in here in this new Jerusalem. There's a river in there again. There's a tree of life in there again. The nations are here. And John looks for the temple. He's like, "Where is the temple to this magnificent city?"
And there's no temple. Because the Lord God Almighty and the lamb are its temple. The presence that once dwelled behind a curtain in one itty-bitty back room is unleashed and that's that's how the story that's where the story points us. Have you become okay with looking at the garden and then getting the weed whacker out and making sure it doesn't cross over the fence line. Have you become okay with keeping whatever piece of the garden you may experience to yourself? Have you become selfish with your little piece of the garden? This is my garden. Are you doing what you called to do as the image of God.
And that means that your identity becomes the love and the grace and the mercy and the wisdom that God intended to be flowing through you. It's the whole story of the Holy Spirit being within us. That authority and strength to be able to walk out and say, "You know what? The garden's going to be here today." And the garden's going to be here today. And the presence of God and His kingdom is going to be here today because I'm going to represent it. I'm going to put my old self down. I'm going to make a choice. And I'm going to be the representation of what Yeshua is to people. I'm going to plant flowers every step that I take.
That's the mission. And so, I don't know where you're at today, but hopefully this resonates with you and hopefully we can be reminded of just what our calling is to impact this world. So, if you would stand with me, we'll go ahead and conclude with worship.
