First, God created man & woman in the Garden of Eden. I think, in Orthodoxy, that the Garden is not intended to be understood literally, i.e there may or may not have been a physical place that would have been the 'Garden of Eden' - I think what it's meant to convey is that First Man and First Woman were living in a right relationship with God - their wills were perfectly united to His own and so they lived in Paradise and the physical location didn't matter..
We (Adam and Eve) stood with God and acted as "priest, prophet and King" to the physical world, the world of trees, shrubs, lions and whales and Leviathan.
So - as 'priest' we offered to God on behalf of ourselves and the material world our love and obedience.
As prophet, we were the voice of God to the material world - because we were perfectly united with Him, then we could hear and understand him, and pass His word on to the rest of His material creation.
King - that one I'm not sure of - except that because we were made 'a little lower than the angels', we acted to the creatures of the world as God acted to us - and being in perfect unity with Him, we would be as wise and just and merciful as it was necessary to be, as He is. It would be sort of like the lesser Kings in Arthur's Britian - Arthur was High King, and his word was Law - the lesser Kings took and enforced his rule in their own lands, and acted also on their own behalf - i.e they wouldn't pass a problem up to Arthur, they would handle it themselves, unless it was something that either impacted directly on Arthur's authority, or that couldn't be solved by them, for whatever reason.
The difference in the analogy is of course, that we dont' have any 'territory' in that sense - all of the authority comes from God, we are to enforce and temper and adminster His rules and His justice on His behalf - but our relationship to the material world was to be that of King, as God was and is High King.
In addition, as Kings are charged to do, we were supposed to protect the material world the world of God's creation from enemies. But this is where we fell down - because we didn't do that.
The snake entered the garden - again this isn't a literal understanding - somehow, the Enemy tempted Adam and Eve, and they succumbed to his blandishments - in effect, gave their allegiance to him. In doing so, they fell away from perfect unity with God, and becasue of this agreement they made with Big Red, death entered the world - now, we die, and when we die, Satan claims us. (And is this where judgment comes from? Satan claiming us and God having to see if we have in fact submitted to the original, Garden of Eden agreement with God? Or stuck with the contract Adam & Eve made with the snake?)
We lost the prophet - we were no longer able to speak with God's voice because our wills were no longer perfectly submissive to His.
We lost the priest because we did not offer to God our love and obedience.
King - we failed to defend our subjects from the enemy at the gate - we betrayed both our responsibilty to our subjects, and our agreement with God - as Kings we were subject to the authority of the High King, and one of his charges for us was the resistance of the enemy - and we failed there, and so were rightly deprived of our Kingship. Instead we were now enslaved to death and evil.
But God sent Jesus, to live among us, to dwell with us, as Paul says, to lower himself to our level so that we might be raised to His. Jesus was both man and God. But as man, he was fully man - so that meant that he had the choice of not following God's will - of living down to his human heritage and buggering off and marrying Mary Magdalene and raising a family and making a decent living as a carpenter, and mediating between his wife and his mother (always a fun task! not.)
But as a man, he chose not to do that - instead, he chose to align himself with God's will, to submit himself to what God wanted, in everything, from not remaining with his mother, Mary and supporting her after Joseph died, to not marrying Mary Magdalen and raising that fictiious family, to wandering around without a home or a pillow on which to rest his head, preaching the new good news, and the old good news (i.e how to behave like a God-made human being, which God had been telling us for eons); being arrested, tried and condemned as a traitor and a revolutionary, and dying on the cross as a petty criminal.
In Him, as human, we saw the way we were supposed to be - we saw God's will fully and totally united with Man's will, and so Jesus became as Adam and Eve had been - prophet priest and King - prophet in that He was God's voice for us; in His life, by telling us how to be fully human, and showing us what that was; on the cross he was the perfect image of God - totally, volunatrily (and that's important - he could have smote them mightily, but chose not to) weak, totally, voluntarily (again that's important - he could have mustered arguments that would have not only swayed the Sandhedrin, but probably converted Pilate and made Herod the perfect renunciate! but chose not to) defencesless, willing to die the most ignominious and horrific death for the creation He loved.
Priest in that He offered to God everything that we should. He loved God enough to give his life to God - the mission work, the wandering, the crowds (I get the feeling that while God may be the ultimate extrovert - you'd have to be in order to create us!
He offered his blood - to hang on the cross until he died - and he gave God his love - you see it in the way he talks about God, and just the fact that he went to the cross so peacefuly - if you don't trust in and love someone very deeply, you don't make your peace with the fate they have decreed for you when that fate is as painful and humiliating as Jesus' was. He loved God a lot to do that - and not just do it, but do it with the peace he found in the Garden of Gethsamane.
He became King because he destroys our enemies - in hanging on the cross, in defeating death, he fulfilled the mandate we had failed in - he protected us from our enemies - evil and death. But to do that part, he needed his Godly nature. For as human, he faced the Enemy, and death. But as human, he wasn't strong enough to defeat it. That required the Godly nature.
Because He wasn't only human, things didn't quite work out the way they might have been supposed to by those from warmer regions who had a vested interest in seeing that God died. Cause see, while man can die, that means Jesus could die. Which would, Big Red figured, end up with God in his clutches, and wouldn't that be the coup of all coups?
And it would have - but Big Red forgot one small detail. God can't die.
So, when Jesus the man died, and according to the ancient contract/agreement, became one of Big Red's, Big Red got more than he counted on - because death could not hold Jesus the God. Jesus, still both fully man and fully God, rose again, and thereby broke the contract our first father and first mother had made with the Enemy, and by doing so (again I'm a bit foggy on this part) reestablished the original relationship with God. Which means that for us, we can, if we submit totally to God's will, become as Adam and Eve in the Garden.
That's it so far - comments welcomed and pondered. More to come when Father picks himself up from the floor after laughing at my poor attempts at explaining the unexplainable in less than reverent terms, and corrects me.
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