The Sabbath was a holy sign of the covenant bond between God and His people. It was as much a part of the order of creation as was creative labor, and in being obedience in the work and rest, Israel would demonstrate its total allegiance to God.
As the Sabbath (like work and marriage) is rooted in the nature of creation, it is certain that the Sabbath (like work and marriage) was part of the cultural expression of Eden. While we have no explicit mention of human observance of the Sabbath in the first chapters of Genesis, the arguments made in passages such as Exodus 31 about the nature of the Sabbath indicate that God’s sanctifying of it (Genesis 2:2ff.) was from then on part of how creation functioned. The intimate fellowship between God and man in the Garden presupposes that man would honor what God had established as holy. Since the Fall is the first occurrence of human disobedience to the divine order established in creation, it is impossible that man would not have observed the Sabbath in the original culture of Eden. – Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes
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What if eden is just a parable
Gosh Marty, we lose a lot if Eden wasn’t real. First off, the Sabbath, but that’s obvious. What about marriage? That was an institution made in the garden and Jesus appealed to it in his defense of marriage (Matt 19:3-9). Ultimately, we lose the hope of salvation. Jesus is the second Adam who succeeded where the first Adam failed (Romans 5:12-21). We lose the resurrection if we who were made like the first man, are not then remade like the second Man (1 Cor 15:42-49). We lose the hope that Satan will be ultimately defeated and the damage he did recovered because the promise made to Eve in Genesis 3:15 that her seed would crush his head didn’t happen. There, then, is no hope of ever overcoming evil in this world.
But we also lose some of the implications of Eden that aren’t necessarily set forth in the Bible. Labor loses its meaning. God created Adam and put him to meaningful, fruitful work. If that didn’t happen, then, like the teacher in Ecclesiastes says, all our work is done “under the sun” and useless since we’ll pass it on to someone we don’t know who may well squander it all. What about real relationship? Adam had that with Eve because he and Eve were created in God’s image. They had real relationship with God because he walked with them in the cool of the evening there. Relationship is reduced to nothing more than a particular chemical reaction in our gray matter.
Eden is a short part of Genesis but the implications of it are huge. If we lose a historic Adam and Eve and a historic Eden we lose a lot of hope in this fallen world.