The Garden-City Vision: Eschatology and Cosmic Redemption

A Garden at the End of the Universe

If Chapter 6 showed us how the story begins in a garden and stretches toward the stars, this chapter invites us to glimpse how it ends, and why that ending changes the way we live and labor now.

Scripture closes, not with humanity retreating back to Eden, but with a city coming down from heaven, a city that is also a garden. “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal… on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit” (Rev. 22:1-2). This is the New Jerusalem, the place where God’s dwelling is with His people, where sorrow and death are gone, and where the glory of the nations is brought in (Rev. 21:3-4, 24).

This “Garden-City” is the marriage of creation’s first beauty and humanity’s redeemed creativity. The wild life of Eden and the cultivated culture of the city exist together in perfect harmony. It’s the fulfillment of both the Cultural Mandate and the Great Commission, a redeemed world filled with worshippers and flourishing under God’s reign.

When we look toward Mars, or beyond, we are not chasing escapist dreams. We are training our hands for the kind of work God always intended: cultivating life, beauty, and worship until the day the Garden-City arrives in fullness.

From Eden’s River to the River of Life

Eschatology Shapes Mission

Christian eschatology, the study of last things, is not merely about timelines or symbols; it’s about destiny and direction. The biblical story moves from creation to new creation, from Eden to the New Jerusalem, from God’s image planted in one garden to His glory filling the cosmos.

In that final vision, the nations walk by the light of God’s glory, and the kings of the earth bring their treasures into the city (Rev. 21:24-26). This is not just a spiritual metaphor; it affirms that human culture, purified of sin, has a place in God’s eternal plan. Art, science, technology, and governance, all rightly ordered, are caught up in cosmic redemption. Herman Bavinck argued that only a humanity spread across vast reaches of space and time could reflect the fullness of the Imago Dei. In other words, even our expansion into the stars could serve the eschatological goal of creation being filled with God’s glory.

The Cosmic Scope of Redemption

Romans 8 tells us that creation itself “will be set free from its bondage to corruption” and share in “the freedom of the glory of the children of God” (Rom. 8:21). This includes not just Earth, but all that God has made, the “heavens” of Genesis 1:1 and Psalm 8:3. The Great Commission’s scope (“all nations”) and Christ’s authority (“in heaven and on earth”) already point toward a mission that is not spatially bounded.

Mars, then, is not a side project. It is one more place in God’s universe awaiting the touch of redeemed human hands and the sound of redeemed human voices. A Christian vision of space settlement should see habitats, governance systems, and even interplanetary economies as arenas for demonstrating Christ’s reign, provisional, partial, but real anticipations of the Garden-City.

From Mission Fields to Mission Galaxies

The unity of the Cultural Mandate and Great Commission means that planting gardens, building cities, and making disciples are all of a piece. The New Jerusalem’s gates stand open, implying expansion and welcome. Our eschatology does not call us to shrink back from new worlds, but to fill them with righteousness, justice, and praise.

From a missiological standpoint, this invites us to think about cosmic contextualization. Just as the gospel was translated into the languages and cultures of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Rome, it will need to be lived out in Martian domes, orbital stations, and perhaps one day, habitats around other stars. This demands the same principles global church-planting movements have honed on Earth, abundant gospel sowing, obedience-based discipleship, indigenous leadership, but applied with the creativity that the imago Dei affords.

Living Now for the Garden-City

Let the End Shape the Journey

If the Garden-City is our destiny, then our work now is rehearsal. Every act of faithful stewardship, from cultivating soil in a Martian greenhouse to shaping just laws in a lunar colony, is a foretaste of the redeemed order to come. Every new church planted, every disciple made, is a brick laid in the city whose builder and maker is God.

The practical implication is urgent: the first wave of settlers to Mars will lay down cultural DNA that could endure for centuries. If that DNA is shot through with the gospel, then the colony can grow as a community that embodies love, justice, and worship. If it is absent, we risk repeating the pattern of godless expansion that has marred so much of human history.

The Church’s Mandate

This means the Church cannot be a latecomer to the final frontier. We must train scientists and engineers who see themselves as missionaries. We must inspire mission agencies to think in terms of off-world unreached people groups. And we must equip ordinary believers with the vision that their daily work, whether on Earth or Mars, can be part of filling creation with God’s glory.

Hope as Fuel

In space exploration, hope keeps crews moving forward through long, dark stretches. In Christian mission, hope in the Garden-City does the same. We are not wandering aimlessly through the void; we are headed toward the day when the dwelling place of God is with humanity, and the light of His presence fills every world we have touched.

And so, whether we tend the soil of Eden’s shadow or plant the first gardens under a Martian dome, our calling is the same: to live, labor, and love in a way that whispers to the watching cosmos, “The King is coming, and His city is already breaking in.”