The Species from Two Realms: Heaven, Earth, and the New Creation (Chicago – 1989)

Before time.
Before space.
Before angels.

There was only God.

In this sweeping, imaginative, and theologically rich message, Gene Edwards unfolds the story of creation as the story of two realms — the invisible spiritual realm and the visible physical realm — and reveals why man was uniquely created to belong to both.

God first created the spiritual realm: invisible, timeless, dimensionless. Angels, archangels, cherubim, and seraphim belonged there. It was their habitat.

Then, through what the message describes as a “door,” God created a second realm — space, time, matter, stars, galaxies, and finally Earth.

But something unprecedented happened.

From clay, God formed man — a physical being belonging to the visible realm. Yet before awakening him, God returned through the “door” into the spiritual realm and breathed into him the winds of heaven.

Man became a creature of two realms.

He could see the unseen.
He belonged to heaven and earth.

The Garden of Eden was his habitat — a place where the two realms overlapped. There stood the Tree of Life, living water flowing from it, gold and precious stone beneath its riverbed. Eden was not merely a garden. It was the joining place of heaven and earth.

But when man chose the Tree of Knowledge, the light within him went out. The door closed. Cherubim guarded the entrance. Humanity became a species confined to one realm.

Yet the story did not end.

Throughout Scripture, the “door” reappears — Abram hearing a voice, Jacob seeing a ladder joining heaven and earth, Moses and the elders eating before God, Isaiah stepping beyond the veil.

Then came the Incarnation.

The door did not merely open — it became a womb.

Jesus Christ was born from two realms: fully man, fully God. Not only did He have a spirit from the other realm — He was the Tree of Life. At His baptism, the door opened publicly. At His resurrection, He inaugurated something entirely new.

A new species.

On the night of resurrection, He breathed again — not the wind of creation, but eternal life. Dead human spirits were raised. The life of God indwelt man.

The redeemed now biologically belong to two realms.

And like every species, they require a habitat.

That habitat is the Ecclesia — the church — where heaven and earth touch again. A foretaste of what is coming.

The message culminates in Revelation’s vision: a restored Eden — now called the New Jerusalem. The tree, the river, the gold, the living stones — but now built into a city. The redeemed themselves become the dwelling place.

The story that began with two realms separated ends with two realms united.

You belong to both.

And you already live in a foretaste of that union.