Life in the Garden

The hymn is a magnificent proclamation of what Paul will put more enigmatically in 2 Corinthians 5:21: ‘For our sake, God made the sinless one into sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’.

The question here is what Paul means by ‘righteousness’.

To be made righteous is to be restored to that right relationship which is the essence of the life of Eden.

Life outside the Garden is a life of wrong relationship – between God and the human being, between human beings, between human beings and the creation.

Life in the Garden is the life of right relationship, with the human being finding his or her right place within the scheme of things in a way that Adam and Eve did not.

- Mark Coleridge, “The Truth Will Set You Free”, The Way, July 1995