The Young Earth Before Sin

Whenever I read about creation in Genesis, I like to take what I read and try to make it tangible. I try to imagine being there. Creation itself is very difficult to do this with because there is not enough detail and I don't have the ability to accurately imagine some of it. But when God's Spirit led Moses to write about the pre-flood earth, many details were included. So let's open it up and take a little trip into the pre-sin, pre-flood earth.

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The land was all one mass, namely a super-continent we call Pangea, and the terrain looked very different. If you look at a current world map you can easily see how some of it fits together, for example, the western coast of Africa fits the contours of North and South America's east coast.

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A foggy mist kept everything watered instead of rain. Yes, it didn't rain on the earth until the great flood 1656 years from Adam's 1st year. Imagine a land where most everything grew freely without human intervention. God did not give Adam the task of tending the whole earth. Instead He gave him a garden to tend from which he and his wife would get food.

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Now Eden was a large mountainous country. For simplicity, let us imagine two mountain ranges in Eden, with a river running between them to the east. On the eastern border of Eden was where God planted the garden. The whole of Eden was not the entire garden. Whether the garden was flat or rolling terrain, we know that in the garden or toward the eastern edge of it the great river divided into four out-going riverheads.

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The Pishon skirted the whole land of Havilah. The Gihon goes around the whole land of Cush. The Hiddekel (or Tigirs)travels towards the east of Assyria. The fourth river is the Euphrates.

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Considering that the flood totally wiped out any remembrance of the Pishon and the Gihon, it is logical to assume that the modern Tigris and Euphrates are not the same rivers that existed in the garden of Eden. However, they could be in the general locality of the pre-flood rivers. The origins of both rivers are in the Turkish mountains today, which makes me wonder if that was the region of the garden. What Moses writes about the lands bordered by these rivers is very specific, but the flood appears to have erased the signs of these early lands.

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The garden was special because God cultivated it personally, planting in it things for the man and woman to eat. We do not know how far apart the Tree of Knowing Good and Evil and the Tree of life were, but I imagine that they were not side by side. Apparently both trees were recognizable, possibly even set apart by themselves with boundaries. The fact that they had not eaten from the Tree of Life makes me also think they were not in the garden very long.

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The trees and plants were all super-grown by God on that first week, so that the garden was ready for man on the day he was created. Also all living things were created with some physical age. Adam and Eve were not infants the day they were created. I imagine they were created in the prime of their youth. However, I believe Adam's age of 130 years at Seth's birth, was his relative age from creation.
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Since death entered the world through sin, this world was totally free from death. Adam could have gone below the water to decide what to name the fish and not have died. The world was also free from pain. Having children would have been a pleasure for Eve. Thorns, thistles, briers, and stickers did not exist. Neither did poisonous animals. The closest thing to death was the consumption and digestion of the fruits and vegetables and plants that Adam and Eve ate. But no blood was shed.

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God's whole plan for putting the "forbidden" tree in the garden is hard for me to understand. By the time God had rested on the seventh day, satan had already been cast down from heaven. Since we know that satan is always accusing and slandering God's ways, it is possible that satan was trying to disqualify God by coaxing the man and woman to eat the forbidden fruit. Whatever the case, the forbidden fruit is not the the only odd-ball in the garden. The legged serpent, fallen cherub, satan himself, was also in the garden. I am still not sure of God's ultimate plan for allowing satan in the garden, unless the Lord was going to show the devil after the first angelic judgment that He would have a free-will creature that would choose to worship Him alone.

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We know that the climate must have been temperate for Adam and Eve to have been naked in the garden and to not have cared. Also, neither of them seemed the least bit concerned about the serpent talking to them. Did other animals also talk, or did they just not know to be suspicious when this one did talk? There were also what we call dinosaurs alive back then. How could they be extinct when death entered the world through Adam?

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We must also remember that this is just a piece of our past. Paul wrote in Ephesians 1:4, "He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world." So we were in God's mind even before creation. The innocence of the pre-sin earth did not last very long.

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---Johnie