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Adam, Noah, and the Kingdom: The Edenic World and Biblical Eschatology To develop an eschatology that is wholly Biblical, we must begin with the creation story in Genesis. Two aspects of that story are particularly relevant for biblical eschatology. First, God established a pattern for man in the way that He created the world, a pattern of work and rest that pointed the way for man to live and gave man some idea what his work would consist in. Second, God gave man a commission that made explicit what was implicit in the six-day creation pattern. Creation As Paradigmatic Work Why did God create the world in six days when He could have just as easily created it all in an instant? The answer is found clearly in the Genesis record when we are told that God worked for six days and rested on the seventh, setting an example for man to follow. God's creation week is the model for man's work week. We can be more specific. When God first created the world, He created it so that it would need to be improved in three particular areas. The original world was 1) dark, 2) without form, and 3) empty (Gen. 1:2). In God's six-day work week, He made light to drive away the darkness. He separated the day from the night, the land from the sea, the heavens from the earth, giving the world a clear form. He also began to fill the world with plants and animals. Doing this in six days and creating man last of all was the way that God showed Adam how to work. It is important to note, however, that Adam was not present to see either the original condition of the world or God's work to change it. He could only know what God had done and how He had done it through the word of God. From the very beginning of creation, Adam could only know the truth about God and the world, as well as his own responsibility through a verbal revelation from God. We must also note that not everything was made before Adam. For it was after creating Adam that God planted the Garden of Eden (Gen 2:7-8). Adam watched God design and make this Garden sanctuary. We assume that the Garden was planted according to a pattern of some sort because two special trees with names were in the center and it is implied that the Garden had a wall since it seems to have had an entrance at the East (Gen. 3:24). However the details may have been, Adam watched God build the Garden and learned from God what his own task in the larger world was to be. For to be God's image means to be like God. What, therefore, God does, man also does, though in a qualitatively different way since man cannot literally create. Man imitates the heavenly Father in the earthly sphere, the mimetic relationship being designed by God from the beginning as an aspect of what it means that man lives as God's image.
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