Dear John
I wanted to give you an opportunity
to review a new book I’ve just published that has massive implications on our
understanding of Bible prophecy.
I started writing a paper
associating
Eden
with the
land
of
Israel
about four years ago and I believe that I’ve
come up with an intriguing geographical model that makes sense of this
Eden
in
Israel
proposition. My geology
background helped make sense of the maps of the Middle East, as it became
evident that all four rivers in the
Eden
narrative are coincidental to the Great
Rift Fault. The Tigris and Euphrates flow directly out of the East Anatolian
Fault (which is actually an extension of the Great Rift Valley), the Gihon
(assuming that Josephus and the book of Jubilees are correct in suggesting the
Nile is the Gihon) and the Pishon (assuming that Farouk El-Baz’s Kuwait river in
Arabia is the Pishon) also have headwaters that are suspiciously coincidental to
the Great Rift Valley.
Tying this together with Genesis
2:6, “But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the
ground,” it seems apparent that the water was flowing underground from the
center of all these river headwaters from an area we now know as
Israel
.
I’ve recently discovered that Dr A. Yahuda suggested the water from
Eden
flowed underground 70 years ago, but I believe I’m the
first to put together this connection with the
Great Rift
Valley
.
However, what is really interesting
about this Eden in Israel model is the theological implications – not only that
the very ground that saw the first sin and failure became the very place of
redemption and restoration, but I started to see how much of redemptive history
flows out of Eden’s landmarks and symbolism. In fact, I realize that this
Eden
in
Israel
proposition is a kind of
encryption key that unlocks much of the symbolic imagery throughout the
scriptures’ text and most significantly, how this message is tied together with
the message of God’s Kingdom in the end times.
If you are interested in reviewing
this 124 page book, let me know and I’ll send along a pdf copy for your eyes
only. I’ve included much of the books introduction below to give you some idea
of how the book reads. Please remember – I’m looking for all kinds of feedback,
form, structural, content, and theology - good or bad.
Kindest
Regards
Bruce Paul
www.faith-friends.com
408-717-0223
__
Thanks, Bruce.
John
Introduction
I began this study while investigating
the work and purpose of the Holy Spirit during a period of great sorrow in my
life. Because "Living Water" is Scripture's principal metaphor for the Holy
Spirit, I was going through every verse in the Bible referring to water, wells,
rivers, and springs, and it soon became clear that the river in
Eden
is a type of the Holy
Spirit. An interesting principle of scripture I've often meditated on is how God
regularly visits certain places over and over again, such as the temple residing
on the very location where Abraham took Isaac to be sacrificed. After working
through my study, I became convinced that the first river from
Eden
mentioned in Genesis 2, was the same river mentioned
in Ezekiel 47, and both of these were for-runners of the
River
of
Life
found in Revelation
22.
I had come to believe these were all
one in the same river because:
1. All three of these rivers appear
during principal transformational points of the earth throughout redemptive
history.
· Eden's River
at the beginning of creation(Gen 1-2).
· Ezekiel's
river during the New Millennium (Eze
40-47)
· The River of
Life when the New Jerusalem comes down from heaven (Rev
21-22).
2. All three rivers were accompanied
by a version of the Tree of Life
· Eden's River
with the Tree of Life (Gen 2:9)
· Ezekiel's
River has trees on either side of the river. The Ezekiel 47 passage records that
there will be all kinds of trees for food, which ties Ezekiel's orchard together
with Eden (Gen 2:9), but the trees will bear fruit every
month and the leaves are for healing, which ties it together with the River of
Life in (Rev
22:2).
· The River of
Life has two Trees of Life on either side of the river (Rev
22:2)
3. All three of these rivers have an
incredibly vast distribution
· Eden's River
turns into four other rivers that water the whole surface of the earth (Gen 2:6).
· Ezekiel's
river flows down to the dead sea, but Zechariah 14 suggests that it will also
flow down to the Mediterranean Sea (Zec 14:8)
· The River of
Life will go out to all the nations (Rev
22:2)
4. All three of these rivers have a
remarkable source
·
Eden
's
River flowed out of
Eden
(Gen 2:10).
· Ezekiel's river flows out of the altar
outside the temple (Eze 47:1)
· The River of Life flows from God's
thrown and from the Lamb (Rev 22:1)
I realized there is a very logical
conclusion in associating these three rivers together! If
Eden
's river flows from the same point these other two
rivers come from,
Eden
had to have originally
been in the region we now know as
Israel
. My mind started to race as I
began to appreciate the principle implication of this hypothesis, that the very
ground that saw the first sin and failure would become the very ground of
redemption and restoration. Why else would Israel be the Promised Land if God
didn't have an extraordinary plan in mind for this territory, and under premise
of the Eden in Israel Proposition, He was winning humanity back on the very
ground that saw man's original fall from grace.
Invigorated by this glorious
possibility, and equipped with a geology background that enabled me to
proficient review maps of the region, I tried to understand how
Eden
's River could have
acted as the source of the four other great rivers mentioned in the Genesis 2
account. But once the source of the first river was fixed, the pattern was
obvious.
Eden
's River would have poured down into
the Dead Sea rift, which is part of the worlds largest transformational fault
zone called the
Great Rift Valley
, and all four
of these other Edenic river headwaters I discovered are coincidental to this
fault zone. This could not possibly be a mere coincidence . . .
Eden
's River must have
flowed underground along this fault zone to the headwaters of the other four
rivers.
I remember my utter bewilderment at
these insights and how I would stare out of my window for hours at a time. This
was a revolutionary theory that could change the way the church understood much
of the message of the scriptures and the Lord also had given me a geologic model
to demonstrate how it could have worked. As I continued to investigate the
theory over the next three years, layer upon layer of evidence blustered the
proposition, from remnant images residing within the stories of ancient
mythology, to ancient Jewish apocrypha texts. But the most compelling evidence
in my mind was how the proposition unlocked so many unsolved mysteries in the
Bible. Like an encryption key that exposes a hidden message within an encrypted
document, the
Eden
in
Israel
proposition unlocks symbolic imagery throughout the scriptures text. God's
redemptive purposes using this region and the imagery of the garden take on a
whole new weight. The law of first reference comes into play, and passages
containing imagery and terms associated with
Eden
can be viewed in a different light. A tree
can still be "just a tree," but many of these pervasive metaphors we see in the
Bible from the
Eden
narrative can hold a more insightful
meaning in the text.
For example, just before King Saul is
rejected as king, we see him abiding under a pomegranate tree in his hometown of
Gibeah (see 1 Samuel 14:2), and just before he kills the priests of the Lord at
Nob, we see him this time in Gibeah, abiding under a tamarisk tree – a kind of
cedar (see 1 Samuel 22:6). It's as though Saul was
being controlled by the shadow of these trees (see Judges 9:15,
Ezekiel 31:6, 12, 17). As
though the spiritual forces that caused the Benjamites at Gibeah to rape the
Levite's concubine in Judges 19 were now influencing Saul to make the most
horrible decisions of his life, and ultimately determining his fate, to be
buried under a tamarisk tree after he commits suicide (see 1 Samuel
31:13).
Soteriology, Pneumatology,
Eschatology, and even Hermeneutics all have wide-ranging implications effected
by this
Eden
in
Israel
proposition, yet there's a theme that can
be found weaving its narrative throughout all these fields of endeavor, tying
them all together and affecting the very way we live - The message and mandate
defining our inheritance within the
Kingdom
of
God.