From The River of God by Kim Cimio — Part IV. Destiny, Chapter 11
A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits. (Matthew 7:18–20)
The river of God running through Scripture, the garden as the start of God’s plan to turn the desert into a garden, why culture matters to God, why the secular–sacred divide is false, and how God’s people are called to teach the nations.
What is the “river of God” in the Bible?
Although the Bible was written over many centuries, it shows remarkable consistency through recurring images. One is a river flowing from God’s presence. Scripture begins and ends with it. “A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divided and became four rivers” (Genesis 2:10). “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God” (Psalm 46:4), though Jerusalem has no river. Ezekiel saw water flowing from the temple (47:1), and Zechariah living waters flowing out of Jerusalem (14:8). Jesus said, “Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:38), meaning the river Scripture speaks of becomes reality in the believer, in whose heart God now dwells. Finally, the river of the water of life flows from the throne of God in the new Jerusalem (Revelation 22:1). This image gives the book its title.
Why did God plant the garden of Eden?
We often imagine creation as perfect and self-sufficient. But Genesis 2:5 says that no plants had sprung up “for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground.” Even before the Fall, the world lacked water, workers and plants. God did not create a self-sufficient world; without connection to him and without human work, there could only be death. So God planted a garden and placed Adam and Eve in it. Eden was not just a paradise for their enjoyment. It was meant to be a source of life for the surrounding desert. Adam and Eve were created not for happiness alone but to join God’s plan to turn the desert into a garden. That is the meaning of the first command: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28).
Why do cultures matter to God?
Had Adam and Eve not sinned, their descendants would have followed the four rivers flowing from Eden to settle the whole earth. Different environments create different cultures. In the Alps, cattle meant milk, milk meant cheese, cacao later meant Swiss chocolate, and deep valleys gave birth to yodeling. Finland’s winters produced the sauna; Korea’s produced kimchi. Culture shapes language, giving untranslatable words like Swedish fika, Danish hygge and German Feierabend, and Korean has no polite form of “you.” Thorleif Boman noted that verb-rich Hebrew asks “What is happening?” while noun-rich Greek asks “What is this?” God called cultures into being when he said “fill the earth,” and the Bible ends with the nations bringing “their glory and honor” into the new Jerusalem (Revelation 21:26). The glory of the nations is their culture. God wants culture from us, not only religious activity.
What is wrong with dividing life into secular and sacred?
Many Christians think serving in church is meaningful and spiritual, while studying, working and socializing are secular and meaningless. Theology is sacred, engineering secular; working for a church is sacred, working at Nvidia secular; Bethel music is sacred, Taylor Swift secular. Life becomes a struggle to avoid the secular. Adam and Eve had no such divide. Whether they gathered leaves or harvested crops, they did God’s will. If Adam hurt his foot and discovered healing herbs, that was the birth of medicine, and it was part of God’s work. We think a doctor must do something outside the hospital to live as a Christian, but they wouldn’t have. The divide comes from a twisted view of the body. Jesus warned against the leaven of the Sadducees (materialism) and of the Pharisees, which sounds spiritual but denies bodily reality and so becomes “hypocrisy” (Luke 12:1).
Is ordinary work like cooking, cleaning or exercising part of God’s plan?
Yes. When God told Adam and Eve to care for the garden, he implied they should care for their bodies too, because without that they could not do the task he gave them. Cooking, cleaning and exercising are part of God’s plan. A personal trainer is valuable in God’s kingdom, just like a Bible teacher. One of my jobs in Berlin is collecting donated bread from a local bakery. I go with a big shopping cart and bring it back. Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” and when I bring bread, people see their prayer answered. I don’t think, “Others lead worship and teach the Bible, and I’m doing something meaningless.” What I do helps people stay alive, and that is precious to God.
What does it mean that God put Adam in the garden “to work it and keep it”?
The picture of two people strolling in Eden doing nothing but picking fruit comes from a worldview that says work is bad. The Bible says only that after the Fall the ground is cursed and work became toil (Genesis 3:17–19). God placed Adam in Eden “to work it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15), so we should expect to work in the new Jerusalem too. To work it means to develop it, realizing its potential. To keep it means to guard it from the desert. Today the Sahara grows by thousands of square kilometers a year, and planting walls of trees against it is exactly this kind of noble work. It required mental as well as physical effort; Adam named the animals. Our sweet fruit is the result of thousands of years of cultivation; old watermelons were mostly white and eggplants were egg-sized. People learned to eat bitter almonds, acorns and even poisonous fugu through long trial and error.
Why does the Bible compare God’s people to trees, and what is the “fruit” we bear?
Besides religious words, the Bible teaches through natural images like rivers, mountains and trees. The righteous person “is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season” (Psalm 1:3). David is “a green olive tree in the house of God” (Psalm 52:8); God’s people are “oaks of righteousness” (Isaiah 61:3). Jesus is “the true vine” (John 15:1), the kingdom grows from a mustard seed into a tree, Israel is a fig tree awaiting fruit, and the cross itself is called a tree (Acts 5:30). We are like trees because we draw water from God’s river to bear fruit. Fruit is the expression of the tree’s hidden nature: “you will recognize them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:20). For people, fruit is action and word. That is why John the Baptist said, “Bear fruit in keeping with repentance.”
What does it mean that humans are made in the image of God?
We share much of our DNA with chimpanzees; Jared Diamond calls us “the third chimpanzee.” So why do we act so differently? Because we carry God’s image. Abilities don’t settle it: Koko the gorilla learned sign language, chimpanzees sharpen sticks as spears, crows make hooked tools, and otters crack shells on rocks. But humans have unique desires. We want to know: “All men by nature desire to know” (Aristotle). We want moral excellence, justice and goodness, and will risk our lives against injustice. We want beauty in homes, partners, nature and art. And we love to communicate, not only for practical reasons; we choose partners through conversation. Culture expresses these desires: philosophy and science from truth; law and politics from justice; art and design from beauty; media from communication. These desires reveal who God is: true, just, good, beautiful and communicating.
What is Isaiah’s vision of the mountain of the house of the Lord?
Eden was the beginning of God’s plan to turn the desert into a garden through human fruitfulness in children and culture. Despite repeated failure, from the forbidden fruit to Cain to Babel, God never abandoned it. Through Abraham he began a godly nation meant to influence the nations through its culture. In national disaster, God reaffirmed this: “the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains… and all the nations shall flow to it… that he may teach us his ways” (Isaiah 2:2–3). Mountains are where people meet God: Sinai, Carmel, Ararat, and in other cultures Mount Tai and Mount Fuji. Eden, with its river dividing into four, was probably a mountain too. Mountains are also where law is given: Moses on Sinai, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. The nations come to learn how to live. From Moses they learned justice; from Jesus, forgiveness and mercy.
How should the church teach the nations today?
Jesus told his disciples to teach the nations “to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:20), and the church has been doing so even when Christians didn’t realize it. Education is an example. For most of history, education served the teacher’s interests, not the students’. John Amos Comenius, the last bishop of the Unity of the Brethren, proposed that students should be at the center, and wrote Orbis Pictus, a textbook that taught the world through pictures, pairing Latin with the vernacular. His life was full of suffering: he lost wives and children, was exiled from Bohemia, and saw his home and manuscripts burned. His ideas seemed fruitless, but through Rousseau they shaped modern education. Every picture textbook and every classroom that respects children carries his legacy. We teach the nations not by forcing our ideas but by showing how biblical teaching transforms life and culture. We are the mountain of the house of the Lord.
Source: Kim Cimio, The River of God (Vision & Logic, 2025), chapter 11, “The Mountain of the House of the Lord.” Answers are condensed from the book in the author’s words.
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