Anything I say about this subject will always be an approximation, a characterization that helps us know what to expect and act justly. That’s what God intended with the use of parable and symbolism in the Bible. Don’t take this explanation literally.
In a certain sense, the Garden of Eden was not a specific place. It should be seen as the whole earth. Adam and Eve in their glory-bodies were not restricted by time and space as we are now. They were put there to manage things as a place where God could enjoy His Creation and meet with His servants. The nature of the Garden was for God’s enjoyment, one of His many homes in Creation.
It’s utterly wrong to think of Eternity as some realm you can enter into at the same time-stamp as you leave this world. Eternity is not endless time; it is variable time. Time is simply not a factor except for the natural world. It’s a manipulable variable that eternal beings can see through completely. The same goes with space; they can be wherever they choose in that same time-space continuum. You might say they don’t have to travel at all, just slide the universe around themselves to the time and place they wish.
This was how Adam and Eve experienced the Garden of Eden, the natural world we live in today. What happened to us? In the Fall, Adam and Eve were forced down into the natural world. We are now a part of nature, bound under the same space-time restrictions. Space and time are barriers to us in our fallen form. Furthermore, we no longer have the full freedom to command nature to respond as Adam and Eve had in the garden. We are managers by divine privilege, but not in our current status as fallen creatures.
The key to restoring just a taste of what we lost is exercising faith. By faith we can command the natural world to do things like Jesus did. We can begin to develop our relationship with the living universe and get just a small sample of the mastery that is ours by design. The key is learning to sense the Will of God (AKA, the divine moral character of our Creator). When acting in His Will, we can do anything Adam and Eve could do, but with certain limits.
One of those limits is our human inability to think eternally. Our fallen brains cannot develop a sense of time as a variable. We can sense it indirectly in our hearts, and some level of clue can dribble down into our intellects, but the intellect really can’t go there. Thus, we cannot actually understand with our current conscious awareness the fullness of how many miracles are a matter of reaching back into time to change something so that we come back and harvest a different result.
We most certainly do not have the ability to calculate out all the implications of changing small things in the past. It takes divine moral awareness to do that properly. We absolutely must sacrifice human self-will to even approach that.
When Christ returns for His people, He will restore the natural world — His Garden of Eden — to what it would have been had we not chosen Satan’s path. He will reach back into time and close off the Fall, and then meet back with the “present” to watch the natural world change to what it should have been all along.
On a related note, I keep trying to build for you the parabolic notion that the natural world is alive, sentient and willful in its own right. It surely needs the guidance of morally redeemed people who serve the Will of God. Given the perverted way fallen humans typically approach things, this article indicates something of a mixed good and evil. It’s a good shift in assumptions about the natural world, but we can be sure it will be implemented corruptly.
We most certainly are a part of nature in our fallen state. One primary mistake is how fallen people tend to view this life and nature in general as something precious. They think what we have now can become Eden without restoring our eternal bodies. They hold this notion despite the Word of revelation saying that this life is of no consequence, since it will all be changed in a moment at Christ’s Return. It’s not that our actions have no consequence, but that the issue of deciding what’s right and what’s wrong has long been settled, even before Creation. Humans cannot possibly come up with anything approaching the truth about good and evil without deferring from the heart to divine revelation.
Our mission is to desire what is right, and strive to act according to divine justice against our lack of actual capability. The article notes that the most likely line of reasoning from most activists is that humans have no business poking around in nature in the first place, when that’s a blasphemous rejection of what God said about providing for us in our fallen state through the natural world around us. Human minds are incapable of discerning what is in our own best interest within this setting, not without first submitting from the heart to our Creator. Only He can see the whole picture, with all its influences and implications, how it’s all woven together.
Still, that movement is a glimpse of truth.
The first time I read about the space time continuum however many years ago, I was fascinated. As my faith has grown, its true meaning has enabled me to fathom the absolute wonder of His Creation, the Fall and the restoration on Christ’s return. A couple weeks ago, while having dinner with a dear friend and her three sons (25, 17 and 12), the conversation somehow found us talking about Heaven and what it would be like. They got a lesson on the continuum, from a new perspective. It was really cool and their ears were definitely perked. How blessed am I to be given such insights ?? An open heart enables such things !!