Basically, God didn’t make the whole world look like Eden. It’s just a common conflation for us to read the more “zoomed in” account and think it refers to everything even in the “zoomed out” setting. He created Eden as a prototype, made divine diplomats as agents and ambassadors of his rule, placed them in this garden, and essentially pointed out to the rest of the earth and said, “Your job is to go make the rest of the world look like this.” The divine vocation and call is to build. To rule. To bring order and shalom to bear on everything we touch. And to do it justly, wisely, and lovingly.
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