God still loves His children and knows what is best for them. In His love, He has given us limitations. Limitations like our need for sleep. Or like the fact that the sun comes up and goes down in a regular cycle signaling the time for rest. Or that He explicitly set aside one day a week when no work was to be done, and even went so far as taking a day off Himself even though He was not tired so that we would do as He did. But in our rebellion, we refuse to honor those limits and justify our unwillingness to do so.
Most everyone knows the story, even if they don’t believe the story. In the beginning, there was only God. Nothing else. And then God spoke, and “nothing” became “everything”, including human beings.
Everything was good. Very good, in fact. All creation existed in perfect harmony, and at the center piece of everything was the crown jewel of creation. The man and the woman lived in perfect fellowship with God, walking without guilt, shame, or any other hindrance with Him. God gave His creation the twin gifts of freedom and constraint, all summarized in this simple statement:
You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die (Gen. 2:16-17).
The first people did not trust the Lord and His Word and chose their own way, and with that choice everything that was good and right and harmonious was corrupted. It is, of course, a well known story. Maybe the best known story. And at least for the Christian, it’s not only well known but essential because it is through this story that we find the answer to the question of what is really wrong with the world.
Yes, there are all kinds of answers to that question, depending on the person you ask and the particular issue at the forefront of a person’s mind, but those are all downstream answers. The upstream answer – the one at the source of the trouble – is sin. That’s what’s wrong with the world. And this moment in the garden is when it all started.
Knowing this story, then, is an essential part of knowing who we are and what is wrong with us.
