21 Days in the Garden of Eden

By Dr. Ted Beam

By reading through the entire Bible, anyone can begin to see the consistent influence the first three chapters of Genesis have on the rest of the Bible. These three chapters begin the great doctrines of creation, grace, the virgin birth, marriage, angels, human free will, humans created in the image of God, the existence of evil, and prophecies fulfilled in the life of Jesus. Instead of a scientific debate, Dr. Ted Beam offers solid scholarship with logical explanations to answer that all-important question, "So what?" He answers that question over and over again as he takes us deeper and deeper into the beauty and the mystery of the garden of Eden.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781685263218

Book preview

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Preface

Day 1: The Day God Created Grace

Day 2: The Trinity and Elementary School

Day 3: Creation—a Unique Idea

Day 4: There Is Only One Creator

Day 5: The Virgin Birth, Part 1

Day 6: The Virgin Birth, Part 2

Day 7: Created Good

Day 8: Why Place Temptation in the Middle of the Garden?

Day 9: Satan, Part 1

Day 10: Satan, Part 2

Day 11: The Fall

Day 12: God Dreams of Reconciling with You

Day 13: Common Grace and Prevenient Grace

Day 14: Created in the Image of God—Value

Day 15: Created in the Image of God—Reason, Forethought

Day 16: Created in the Image of God—Free Will

Day 17: God Reveals Himself by His Name

Day 18: God Designed Marriage, Part 1

Day 19: God Designed Marriage, Part 2

Day 20: God Desires Intimacy with You

Day 21: Adam—A Living Soul

Bibliography

About the Author

Index

cover.jpg

21 Days in the Garden of Eden

Dr. Ted Beam

ISBN 978-1-68526-320-1 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68526-321-8 (Digital)

Copyright © 2023 Dr. Ted Beam

All rights reserved

First Edition

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB) New American Standard Bible, Copyright 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation unless otherwise noted. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

I dedicate this book to my wife, Debbie. I started falling in love with her when we voted her the most intelligent girl in the sixth grade. I also dedicate this book to our children: Ariel, Alexander, Alissa, and Amelia.

I am grateful to Sheree Pruett, acquisitions agent, for giving me an unknown this great opportunity to reach a lifetime dream of publishing. I also want to thank Ben Kerchner for his patience and wise guidance in walking me through every step of the process.

I also want to thank the entire team at Covenant Books for making this dream a reality.

Foreword: Dr. Allan Coppedge

by Rev. Dr. Allan Coppedge

Every good non-fiction book provides the reader with an introduction to what is happening in the later chapters. This alerts the reader to what to look for and introduces themes, issues and ideas (sometimes persons) that pervade the book. Any serious reader goes carefully over an introduction to prepare him for what is to come. The Bible is no exception to this.

In the first three chapters of Genesis, we are introduced to the unique character, thinking and personhood of God. This sets the stage for an understanding of a creative world and especially of human persons made in the image of this God. Here we get a picture for how people were made to be, to live, and to enjoy life as God designed it.

We are introduced also to why persons are not all God intended, how sin entered our world and its devastating effects on creation, human persons, personal relationships, and God's plans for their lives. Without understanding this problem there is no understanding of God's solution. The solution will be unfolded in the rest of Scripture.

This book focuses on the original design and then on the problem that faces humankind and creation. If these things are clear to us, we have the opportunity to see God's solution to the problem and the ways he works this out in individual lives in the rest of Scripture. Without seeing the plan and the problem there will be no understanding the solution for God's design for life going forward. It is just this plan and this problem that are so effectively unfolded in this book. It will help you understand God's solution to the problem in your own life so that you may work out God's plan for your life in the days ahead.

This means a key for this book as you read is to ask what is God saying to me through this? How does he want to use this to challenge my life?

The challenge to you is, listen carefully. Do not miss anything God has to say to you in this work. Keep growing in your mind, heart, emotions, imagination, and character so that you can be all that God has designed you to be.

Dr. Allan Coppedge, retired

Professor of Historical Theology

Asbury Theological Seminary

Wilmore, Kentucky

Foreword: Rev. Larry Cochran

by Rev. Larry Cochran

Someone has said, the two most important days of your life are the day you were born and the day when you discovered why?

Ted Beam, as a scholar and pastor, takes us through an amazing journey in Genesis 1–3 to discover the why of life. I love Ted's love for Scripture and the practical ways of explaining the Bible to others. I know many others after hearing Ted teach the Word say, you have made Scripture come alive to me. In short, Ted's scholarly and practical way of teaching is backed up by a life of personal devotion to God and his family.

I have witnessed firsthand Ted's giftedness in teaching Latin American pastors the joy of inductive Bible study. Ted has invested his life in making disciples of Jesus throughout the world and this study of Genesis will compel the reader to consider the pursuit of a Holy God to call all of creation into an intimate relationship with him.

Dr. Dennis Kinlaw, former president of Asbury University once noted, all of history began with a wedding and all of history will end with a wedding. Ted reminds us in this twenty-one-day journey in creation how in all of history the Bible is the story of God's glory. Listen carefully to Ted's description of human free will, prevenient grace, marriage, the existence of evil, the prophecies of the life of Jesus Christ, and other important doctrines that will stimulate the mind of the reader.

Take your time. Read carefully and meditate on the great doctrines of the church in the author's depiction of perhaps the most important three chapters in the Bible. Ted will help you see clearly the foundation of biblical truth in which individually, each one of us can find a satisfying and rewarding relationship with the Creator. Your eyes will be opened to see the Master of the universe unveil his redemptive plan to point everyone to his plan for salvation through Jesus Christ.

And finally, you will see clearly why you are here on earth! God wants to fulfill his purposes in your life and bring glory to him alone.

Rev. Larry Cochran, retired

President of GO InterNational

Wilmore, Kentucky

Preface

Do you ever stand outside at night and gaze at the moon? Can you see the craters? Can you find the Sea of Tranquility, where Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins landed Apollo 11? Can you identify Mercury, Venus, Mars, or Jupiter?

As a child, I would stare at the moon. I would try to find the Big Dipper, Orion's Belt, and many other star combinations. I enjoyed watching the moon and Venus seemingly dance together as they crossed the sky in their orbits.

When I was ten years old, my parents gave me a telescope. I would line it up carefully and then look through it at many things in the sky. Sometimes I would be outside for hours looking through that telescope at the moon, at Mars, and at Antares.

Maybe you can imagine my thrill when in college I learned about the darkness that lasted for three hours while Jesus hung on the cross. I thought maybe my learning a little bit of astronomy would come in handy. We know the moon orbits the Earth every twenty-eight days. When we follow the lunar calendar and the Passover calendar (because Jesus died on Passover), we learn that the moon was fourteen days out of position to cause a solar eclipse on the day while Jesus hung on the cross. So we know the moon did not cause the darkness that came over the earth that day.

We also know from more recent solar eclipses that the darkness from a solar eclipse lasts only a few minutes, not three hours. I have never learned about anything in space that would cause a three-hour solar-eclipse type of darkness in the middle of the afternoon.

Eight documents from ancient history mention this darkness that lasted three hours. The Gospel of Matthew (27:45), the Gospel of Mark (15:33), and the Gospel of Luke (23:44) all mention it, but some people could accuse these authors of being religiously biased. Phlegon and Africanus, both Greek historians, mentioned the darkness and tried to explain it by calling it a solar eclipse, as did Thallus (a Samaritan), Tertullian (a Roman born in North Africa), and the Fourth Acts of Pilate (a Roman document). All eight of these mention the darkness without giving a reliable explanation.

So we cannot explain the cause of the darkness with accuracy, but we can draw the conclusion accurately that an unusually long darkness did happen on that day. We can use this information to identify the date of the crucifixion of Jesus on April 7, AD 30, but we will save all that information for another day and another book.

When I was eleven years old, my parents gave me a microscope. It came complete with brine shrimp, a fly's wing, and a grasshopper's antennae. I became amazed with the small details of the world. I emptied my three-feet-by-three-feet closet of all the clothes and shoes and transformed it into my microscope laboratory. Between my telescope and my microscope, I wanted to learn everything I could learn about the world and the universe.

During my early years of staring at the heavens, my parents would tell me that God created the heavens and the earth. They took me to church, where my Sunday school teachers and pastors also told me that God created the heavens and the earth. I do not remember how old I was when I began to read the creation story myself, but I was still in elementary school.

The only Bible I had at that time was a King James translation. I found it hard for me to read that Bible. It had lots of big words, and it said things differently than the way I would say them. Later, I learned that the King James Version translates the Bible on a twelfth-grade reading level. The King James is a wonderful translation and has helped many people for over four hundred years, but most English-speaking people do not read well on a twelfth-grade level. Across our society, most of the newspapers, magazines, Internet posts, grocery store food labels, and road signs are at a fifth-grade or sixth-grade reading level.

My home church gave me a New American Standard Bible when I graduated from high school. It translates the Bible on a tenth-grade reading level. The New International Version has become one of the most widely read translations. It translates the Bible on a seventh-grade reading level. In the early 1990s, several of my seminary professors participated in the New Living Translation, which translates the Bible on a sixth-grade reading level. Each of these standard translations had over one hundred scholars participate in the translation. Each publisher that contracts with the scholars is trying to translate the Bible so that it can be understood by the majority of the people in our society.

John Wycliffe produced the first English translation of the Bible in 1382. William Tyndale started an English translation in 1522 but it is unclear when he finished it, and Miles Coverdale gave us one in 1535. Every scholar and every team of scholars, with each translation, has tried to get the Bible into the hands of every person, read by every person, and understood by every person. The scholars and publishers hope that if a person can understand the Bible, that person will pick up the Bible daily and read it. Their hope is that at some point, every person will come to faith in Jesus Christ as their Savior.

Once I got my hands on a Bible translation I could understand more readily, I began to read those early chapters of Genesis, where the account of creation and the events of the garden of Eden are both recorded. I did the very thing that the scholars and the publishers hope will happen. I understood enough of what I read in that translation of the Bible that I was eager to pick it up again the next day and read more. Over the course of three