By Its Maker Unmade

O! You 'ologists! Who search e'er in vain
For the Garden where the Pair were planted,
Think you that He who flung the starry train
Would o'erlook the Tree of Life enchanted,
For tourists to taste and live forever?
Why else rush them out Eden's gate apace;
Set angels to guard; if not to sever
The race from a cheap circumvent to grace?
The perfect dell which housed the fated Pair
In blissful peace and joy, before their guilt,
Is gone; removed by God; no longer there;
By its Maker unmade, as if ne'er built!

"Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east of Eden, and there he put the man he had formed. And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground---trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. ... And the Lord God commanded the man, 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it, you will surely die.'" (Genesis 2:8-9, 16-17)

God's plan was so simple, yet so magnificent. Adam and Eve, the first man and the first woman created, were placed in a beautiful, sustaining garden, where they could have lived forever at ease, yet God placed one prohibition on them---they were not to eat the fruit of only one of the many trees. Notice they were permitted to eat of all the trees; but one tree was forbidden; it carried a penalty of death. They didn't understand what death was; God had in mind two kinds of death---physical and spiritual. As all men since, they had a free will; they could choose to eat, or not to eat. God gave all men a choice, and, like Adam, choosing to disobey brings death---spiritual death.

Of course, you know the story. They chose to disobey. Notice Satan was already there, on earth. In the form of the serpent, who walked uprightly and was the most beautiful creature in the garden then, he convinced Eve to eat, in the presence of Adam, and he did, too. This brought physical death to them and to all men; it also brought them and all men spiritual death, which means becoming a part of Satan's fallen angels destined to spend eternity in hell. All men are going to die spiritually, but all men are to be resurrected with new bodies---only those who choose to accept the gift of salvation by accepting Jesus as Lord and living for Him will go to heaven, which is to be a new Garden like Eden, and live there forever. Those who do not accept Jesus will live with Satan in a place called hell, which is a burning lake of fire that never ends.

What a magnificent plan! Only God could have conceived it. How could it be an invention of man? The Bible, containing 66 books, written by more than 40 authors over a 1500-year stretch of time, reveals the whole plan of God, with no inconsistency or conflicting statements. The poem above points out that, even though archeologists have discovered most of the places mentioned in the Bible; evidencies of its truth and no evidence of its falsity; no one has ever found a trace of the Garden of Eden. They never will. Believe it or not, the Bible tells almost precisely where it was located: Not far from the present city of Baghdad, Iraq!