Faced with a world full of ugliness and abuse, I want to run home to the garden. I want to recapture that time when the man and the woman existed lovingly with each other, at peace with God and with all of His beautiful creation.
God isn’t returning us to life in the garden. He is grooming us to live as His bride in Heaven.
But we left that garden behind long ago, and the way back has been barred ever since. Cut off from our Life-source, our former beauty has faded. The image of God within us is tarnished almost beyond recognition, its dim remains further broken down by the destructive ways that we treat each other. Abuse denies the remnant of God’s image within us, screaming to our souls that we are worth nothing more than the dirt from which we were created and to which we will return.
Abandoned. Beaten. Violated. Accused. We quiver and cringe, cut off from God, isolated from each other. Hagar weeps by a well in the desert, longing to be loved. Tamar rips her clothes, lamenting her lost purity. The concubine clings to the doorframe, pleading for protection.
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.
For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
Colossians 1:15, 19-20
And God draws near. His glory puts on flesh and walks among us. He sees the unwanted Samaritan woman alone by the well, and He loves her. He defends the accused adulteress standing before Him with her purity in tatters, and He restores her. He delivers the Magdalene woman from a horde of spirit attackers, and He opens the door for her to stay right by His protective side.
But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation …
To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.
Colossians 1:22, 27
But His redemptive work doesn’t stop there. He isn’t content to merely fix the problems and right the wrongs. He doesn’t want to simply return us to the garden. He has been planning something much better from the beginning, a surprise that surpasses the goodness that we started out with. He is in the process of putting His glory into us, reversing the decay of our souls and raising us up to a life that is better than ever.
Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb has come, and his bride has made herself ready. Fine linen, bright and clean, was given her to wear.”
I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.”
Revelation 19:7-8; 21:2-3
Unlike the king in Esther’s story, our King picks up the basin and the towel to wash away our impurity with His own hands. He then proceeds to oversee our beauty treatment, dressing and bejeweling us until we radiate with loveliness. And with a crowning touch, He will present us to Himself as the bride of His dreams, the helper suitable that He has been waiting on since there was none found for Him in the garden.
“Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” And he … showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal.
Revelation 21:9-11
And we, with unveiled faces, will stand eye-to-eye with our Kingly Groom. We will perfectly reflect His resplendent glory, and He will adoringly gaze on our radiant beauty. We will dance and sing in His presence, bold, beautiful, and confident in the love of our Husband. Our home will be a place of healing and joy, of comfort and safety, of security and peace. And the best part is, we will live there happily ever after with Him.
Praise the LORD. Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise in the assembly of the saints. …let the people of Zion be glad in their King. Let them praise his name with dancing and make music to him with tambourine and harp. For the LORD takes delight in his people; he crowns the humble with salvation.
Psalm 149:1-4
messytheology 
I love those verses in Revelation (19:7-8; 21:2-3) that tell us heaven will be here, not some faraway place. He will bring all of creation back to Himself to walk with us again. It won’t simply be the old garden, but a new, resurrected Eden where we will be with Him daily. What a wonderful, lovely reminder to start the week.
Sometimes the best things are the hardest to believe. Taking these glorious verses seriously means that we are already being prepped for heaven, that our experiences now count for something then, and that our expectations will be exceeded, not disappointed. That keeps me going, too!