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PARADISE a Persian word (pardes), properly meaning a “pleasure-ground” or “park” or “king's garden.”

Among almost all nations there are traditions of the primitive innocence of our race in the garden of Eden (paradise). This was the “golden age” to which the Greeks looked back. Men then lived a “life free from care, and without labour and sorrow. Old age was unknown; the body never lost its vigour; existence was a perpetual feast without a taint of evil. The earth brought forth spontaneously all things that were good in profuse abundance.”

It came in course of time to be used as a name for the world of happiness and rest hereafter (Luke 23:43; 2 Cor. 12:4; Rev. 2:7). For “garden” in Genesis 2:8 the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures has “paradise.”

ON PLEASURE

Men pursue pleasure with such breathless haste that they hurry past it.
--SØREN AABYE KIERKEGAARD (1813–1855)

Pleasure is our greatest evil or our greatest good.
--ALEXANDER POPE (1688–1744)

The only path to pleasure is in pleasing God.
--RICHARD OWEN ROBERTS

We tire of those pleasures we take, but never of those we give.
-- JOHN PETIT-SENN

ON EDEN delight.
The garden in which our first parents dewlt (Genesis 2:8-17).

ON PLEASURE

Everthing is good
1 Tim. 4:4 (Message Bible)
Everything God created is good, and to be received with thanks. Nothing is to be sneered at and thrown out.

However, keep a proper perspective
Mark 8:36-37 (Message Bible)
What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?

Improper use of pleasure can be destructive
Isaiah 5:11-13 (Message Bible):
Doom to those who get up early
and start drinking booze before breakfast,
Who stay up all hours of the night
drinking themselves into a stupor.
They make sure their banquets are well-furnished
with harps and flutes and plenty of wine,
But they'll have nothing to do with the work of God,
pay no mind to what he is doing.
Therefore my people will end up in exile
because they don't know the score.
Their "big men" will starve to death
and the common people die of thirst.

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