Mountain Park Church

Have you ever wondered what happened when Jesus died? Where did he go? What did he experience? A key to understanding this might be in Jesus’ words to Mary “Don’t hang on to me, I haven’t ascended yet to my Father and your Father.” In his gospel, John draws on the rich symbolism of Genesis often, and in the story of the betrayal, death and resurrection of Jesus John uses beautiful connections to the the story of Eden to express the fullness of what Jesus has accomplished in his death and resurrection. This isn’t just a story about how our personal sins are forgiven and our ticket to heaven when we die, this is a cosmic story with cosmic implications.

Good Friday 2026

The triumphal entry is one of the most widely known stories in scripture, but have you ever wondered why the crowd who is cheering and singing while Jesus rides in on a donkey are yelling “crucify him” a few days later? What if there is more going on in this story? Maybe, what it looks like for God to go to battle to free his people doesn’t look the way they think it should. To understand Palm Sunday, we need to back up to another pivotal moment, the transfiguration.

How do you see the world? What does evil look like to you? What does evil sound like to you? Sometimes our imagination of what was happening in the Garden in Genesis 3 will shape how we see the world and what evil looks and sounds like to us. But who, or what, was the serpent in Genesis 3? Is there more going on in this story than we’ve considered before?

Genesis 2 describes a garden in Eden that Ezekiel 28 describes as the “garden of God” on “God’s mountain”. If the Garden is meant to be thought of as a sacred space (temple) for God’s presence on the earth, what does it mean for him to place Adam & Eve in that temple? How does the picture of Adam and Eve in garden inform our identity as a Royal Priesthood described in the New Testament?

We are unpacking one of the most well known passages of scripture. You’ve probably read or heard this story a thousand times, but our question today is first, not what does this mean to us today—but rather, what did this mean to the ancient men and women who first heard this from Moses? What would have been clear to them? What would these words and descriptions of the account of God creating woman have plainly meant to them?

What was the purpose of Eden in the Genesis narrative? What would the context of the first audience of ancient Israelites have thought about when Moses began to tell them about Eden? Eden wasn’t just a nice garden where Adam was supposed to learn how to farm. Eden was a garden temple on a Mountain. It was the place where the unseen realm and the seen realm overlapped. It was the place where humanity had direct access to God where Adam and Eve were called to be priests who protected that space and brought the life of Eden to the rest of the planet.

Jesus is our model for life. He is our model for living in the overlap between heaven and earth.