Cris said:
Thanks.
I’m not sure that I would, but if I was just limited to the garden only for eternity then there is only so many times I could do something an infinite number of times in one place before it became really repetitive, right?
Well, you're "just limited" to the earth as it is. And if you have a job, it's likely that 80% of it is routine. Excitement is exciting because it's rare and different; you don't enjoy life simply because it's in short supply. If you're exactly where you want to be, doing exactly what your purpose is, none of those things are an issue. Face it, the root of your worries is not what you might have been doing for eternity, but that there might be something better or more worthwhile while you're doing it - that if you don't want to die, you would want to be somewhere else. But with that, you're bound to argue in circles. For eternity
Our nagging discontentment with this world is a symptom of not being where and who we should be. Do you think you would you have that feeling if you
were where and who you should be? Not unless there is the temptation of something "better", and that might be an illusion. That's what Adam was tempted with. Away from God, we're bound to try filling the gap with something else - but nothing can replace God, so nothing will satisfy. Not even all the knowledge of good and evil, of what is better or worse for us, will make us feel whole.
Possibly because the bible gives no indication of anything else other than a garden paradise. Even descriptions of heaven, presumably our goal and greatest prize, is not clearly defined anywhere – it is left to our imagination. But why would there be any progression? If everything is provided, presumably God would discreetly clear away any excess excrement, all food would be provided in abundance, life would be eternal, and there would be no disease and no fear of death, and no struggle for survival – what then would be the purpose of doing anything?
The Bible merely describes the stage and the promise, and how we are saved from the alternative. Where our goal would have been to be with God, it is now to be
reconciled with Him. But creation itself was at its best just a limited expression of what God had in mind. In other words, we can't know more than Adam did about his future, and what we read about and experience is only half of the equation. At the end of time, all creation will be renewed and merged with heaven, where it will find full expression. What isn't compatible will be burned up.
And to what I said earlier I would add that to be completely content we shouldn't just be where and who we were intended to be, but also
with whom we were intended to be. Or in a word: Loved. God saw that it was "not good" for Adam to be alone, so He made Eve, not just as a wife, but also as an equal. The reason for this, I think, is that an equal can give as just much as we can take from them, which means there's an equilibrium. Neither can become exhausted. God keeps the relationship from becoming static by providing for it.
So to your last question: the purpose of everything won't be obscured by those things you mention - neither in appearance or reality. We would simply be free to apply ourselves to other things and other people, not just to ourselves and our own preservation (which is incidentally what Christians have been asked to do in the light of God's providence).
What was man created to do?
Our purpose has everything to do with our relationship with God, and can't be found outside Him. The creation can't know its purpose without knowing its creator, and He created us to BE, not necessarily to DO. The shift to "doing", working
for a life, only happened after the fall.
But there would be no death and if we were to do as God commands and continue to multiply then the Earth would become wall-to-wall people in about 38 generations, or about 1 trillion people, and continuing to grow at an exponential rate.
In real practical terms most would need to leave the planet and expand into the rest of the galaxy and beyond which would become full eventually given eternal lifetimes. The bible doesn’t appear to mention space travel.
We're not limited to what the Bible mentions, are we? And God certainly is not limited to what He has decided to reveal to us. We don't know what God would have said and revealed if there was no fall. The Bible we have was a contingency of the fall. But if we assume Adam had carried out his mandate, our mastery over nature would have been complete, and the universe would be our playground.
That raises another question – if we cannot die then would we need to breathe? Presumably God would provide adequate spacecraft which would never fail and he would provide suitable new Earthlike worlds for us to fill.
Being alive is more than breathing, and I'm inclined to think (based on what happened after the fall) that by "death" God meant
more than physical death, while Satan meant
nothing but physical death. According to Genesis itself, they had not yet eaten from the tree of life when they lost access to it in Gen 3:22, or they had been sustained by it until then (cf. Rev. 22:2). Either way, Adam had lost the spiritual sustenance God provided for him in the garden, and death now presented a crisis it hadn't before. It had become an obstacle, like nature itself became an obstacle to survival, with suffering and hard work - all separating them from life in paradise and subsequent eternal life with God. You are assuming a life that is intrinsically separate from God - the way it is now - not one where death and overpopulation, whether they can occur or not, are no threat.
And that is good because? And, doing what?
Because we won't run out of options, like you seem to suggest. Doing whatever we would be doing.
Unlike the command to multiply in Eden it is not clear if people in heaven are meant to have sex.
I think it's safe to say that heaven is populated by God, while earth is populated by man. God's children are those who bear his image (Rom. 8:29; 2 Cor. 3:18), while our children bear our own image (Gen. 5:3).
Sex is presented as the consummation of the relationship between two people ("the two will become one"), and that this is seen in the context of a whole unit (body, mind and soul) - so that according to Jesus people in heaven will "neither marry nor be given in marriage", and be "like the angels", lacking nothing. In our consummated bodies we would retain our identities, possibly even our genders, but since we would not be physically
or spiritually alone anymore, the "season" (if I may call it that) for marriage and copulation would be over. Since our lives will not revolve around reproduction and survival as it does now, I think Adam's earthly mandate would also have been fulfilled.
