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.

In the opening chapters of Genesis we see a beautiful world coming into being, made by God. The creation account of Genesis is the story of God bringing order to the “formless and void” chaos waters of the earth. God begins to separate spaces and then he fills those spaces with good and beautiful things, with abundance. Once those spaces are filled on the seventh day God “rests”. But what does that mean? Rest here is not inactivity, it is the completion of something that is now ready to function the way it was intended. Rest means that things are now ready to work the way they were designed. Rest means trust. Trusting that the way God has ordered life is what is best. The sabbath was meant to teach us to trust God with our lives.

When we read the scriptures we need to do our best to read from the perspective of the original audience it was written to, an ancient near eastern people who thought in different ways than we do as modern westerners. The writers of scriptures use different mechanisms to tell the story: problems, patterns and pointers. In this episode we are going to examine a pattern that emerges in the first three chapters of Genesis and continues through the whole of scripture. The chaos pattern. We will see how this pattern is established and repeated throughout the Old Testament and how Jesus breaks this pattern. This is part of the good news that he and his followers announced in the New Testament.

The Scriptures, what we now call The Bible, are a collection of 66 different books written across 1500 years in three main literary genres: narrative, poetry, discourse. The scriptures aren’t meant to be shackles that imprison you, they are meant to be a doorway into another world. One page 1 we are introduced to God, the creator; but what is this God like? Is he like the capricious and volatile gods of the ancient peoples that surrounded the Israelites? Is he the angry, intolerant and harsh God that many Christians believe He is? In this episode we begin in Genesis 1 and then take a “tour” through this world of the Bible to examine how God describes himself and how the story of Jesus and the demoniac in Mark 4/5 hyperlinks us right back to the creation narrative to announce that He is the God whom we read about in the whole Old Testament.

The scriptures are not just a story about ancient people from a different time and place. The scriptures are a cosmic story that describe God, the unseen spiritual realm that he created, the rebellion of the “sons of god” in the heavenly realm and how that rebellion spilled over into humanity and the world that God created.