Sermon Transcript
Thank you, Nate, and good morning. Uh, continuing on with Genesis, today’s scripture reading comes from chapter 2, verses 7 through 9 and 15 through 17. Then Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden in the east, and there he put up the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.
The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The Lord took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.
As a kid, if you remember, one of the common frustrations of kids is all the rules that you have to follow. Follow. You have to go to bed at a certain time. You have to brush your teeth. You have to eat your dinner, even the foods you don’t like.
Even if you have made it clear to your parents 4,000 times that you do not care for broccoli, there it is on your plate once again. So you are forced to insist one more time that you cannot eat it, but your parents don’t listen. You feel like your opinion doesn’t matter. Then your screen time is limited, right? It seems perfectly reasonable to you that every moment of your day could be spent looking at a screen, but your big meanie parents don’t allow that.
If that weren’t all bad enough, you have to go to school, you have to do your homework, you have to probably practice something— a sport, a musical instrument, you know, your lines for the upcoming play. You have to make your bed, put away your laundry. Then you get a little older and you want a smartphone, but your parents say not yet. And then once you finally get one, you want to be on social media because you are your— the only kid in your entire school not on social media, to which your parents are totally unsympathetic. They say no way.
Then you get even older. You want to be out with your friends, but you have a curfew. For some reason, you’re not allowed to stay out all night. Your whole life, you constantly feel boxed in, restricted. You never seem to be able to do what you want.
You remember being a kid? And as a result, sometime between when you were first able to speak your opinion and when you graduated from high school, sometime in that window, you probably said at least once, I can’t wait until I’m a grown-up and I don’t have any rules anymore. Anyone want to admit that they ever said that? Anyone ever heard a kid say that? Can’t wait until I’m a grown-up so I don’t have all these rules.
And when you said that as a kid, if you said it in the presence of a responsible adult, the responsible adult likely responded by saying something like, even grown-ups have rules. Grown-ups have to go to work, have to save money, have to go to bed at a reasonable time or pay the price, have to treat others with respect or lose relationships, can’t buy everything we want, have to say no to certain desires. There are still rules as a result. I mean, as an adult. And if an adult told you that when you were a kid, or if you tell a kid that today, the kid will ask you— or at least my kids ask me— why?
Why can’t adults do whatever they want whenever they want? Who gives you these rules, Dad? Is it Grammy? Will Grammy put you in timeout if you don’t follow her her rules? No, Grammy doesn’t give me rules anymore.
She’s no longer in charge of me. Well then, where do your rules come from?
Where do they come from? That’s a fair question, isn’t it? Kids often have terrific questions, and they deserve terrific answers. Um, we’re in a series, uh, which we entitled Good Creation, studying just the first 2 chapters of the first book of the Bible, when God made the world. And we are finding really everything we consider to be significant can be traced back to how God made the world in the beginning and how he made it good.
Today we’re looking at the goodness of rules, of boundaries, where they come from, why they exist, who put them there, what happens if we don’t follow them, just like a kid would ask. So as we look at our small passage today of when God created rules. We will see rules express wisdom, care, and love. What’s at stake if we don’t follow them or do follow them? How to find the right rules and then how to follow the right rules.
Wisdom express wisdom, care, and love. What’s at stake if we follow them or not? How to find the right rules and then how to follow them. For many of us, not much of this will be brand new information. Nation.
And yet it’s what every single one of us needs to be reminded of pretty much every single day. So first, rules express wisdom, care, and love. Um, the first observation to make from our text is that rules preceded anything going wrong in the world. Rules did not first appear after sin entered the world. There was a boundary in the world when the world was totally good, which means rules aren’t some kind of punishment.
They weren’t invented out of wrath or anger. Of course, there are other times when restrictions are part of a punishment, and really, at their best, even anger and punishments come from love. That’s a different sermon. That’s not what we’re talking about today. Today we’re looking at the first moments in the human story when there was no punishment whatsoever, when there was zero rift in the relationship between God and man, when God and humanity were totally in sync with one another.
Goodness is all that there was.
And even then, there was still a rule, which means rules are good. Rules had to be an expression of love given out of God’s infinite wisdom to enable us to thrive and have fullness of life, because at that time, fullness of life is all there was. And yet there’s still a rule. It’s important to notice because often we are with God like little kids are with their parents. And one of the biggest doubts of a little kid is that all of these rules come from a place of love, of care, of wanting them to thrive.
Why won’t you let me stay up late? Why won’t you let me eat sugar for dinner? You aren’t letting me have what I enjoy most, parent. You are blocking me from You aren’t letting me have what makes me happy. Therefore, you must hate me.
That’s the kid’s perspective. That’s often our perspective with God. But the parent knows there’s a broader picture the kid doesn’t see. The parent has wisdom the kid doesn’t, and the parent cares about the kid. It does not have anything to do with the kid has done something wrong or the parent is mad and lashing out.
It’s nothing like that. Boundaries are an expression of love coming from a greater wisdom. That’s what we see in the garden. God tells man, there’s a tree over there. It’s a good tree because I made everything good.
I have a good purpose for everything in the world including that tree. But that doesn’t mean you can use everything in the world for any purpose and it will be good. You can’t break off one of the branches and stab someone in the eye die. That wouldn’t be good. And you can’t eat of its fruit.
If you do, it will lead to your death. You can eat from all the other trees, but not of that one. And I’m telling you that because I care about you.
If you doubt that God gave humanity that boundary regarding the tree because he cares about us, or any boundary, if you doubt God’s care, I challenge you to think about the parents that you know. Even if you don’t have kids, right, you’ve seen other people raise kids. You’ve seen some parents give rules and boundaries to their kids, and you’ve seen some parents not do that. Some parents let kids do whatever. Both kinds of parents probably say that they love their their kids.
Both kinds of parents probably feel great affection for their kids, but you could ask the question this way: what does love require a parent to do in regard to rules? What does love require? Does love require letting the kid run wild without any boundaries whatsoever, or does love require giving the kid appropriate rules. Obviously, love requires more than rules. Love also requires affirmation, support, quality time.
Love requires more than rules, but it does not require less. We know it instinctively when we see neglectful parents. Parents who give their kids no rules whatsoever have failed the kid. Now, for all of us parents in the room who might suddenly have anxiety and we’re wondering if we have been neglectful if we should have done more. Let’s just give ourselves a little bit of a break, right?
All of us understand when we observe other parents and ourselves on any given day, we could be exhausted from work, juggling 14 balls at the same time, dealing with our own stress. We’ve tried 17 different strategies with the kid, can’t figure out what to do next, we’re frazzled. If that’s you, talk to Alba. That’s our Director of Family Ministries. She’s awesome.
She can help, okay? But none of us want to be judged on our worst day of parenting, and that’s not what we’re talking about, just to relieve your anxiety. But all of us have seen parents over a period of time display a pattern of no rules whatsoever. And when we see those parents, we know that they have failed their kids because love carries with it a requirement. You’ve got to have rules.
You’ve got to set boundaries. We know that, at least when when we look at parents raise their kids. But what that should teach us then, we should apply to ourself and our own relationship with God, is that when God gives us a rule, it’s because he’s far more wise than us and he loves us. The rule is good even if we don’t understand it. So let me ask you, what boundary within Christianity makes no sense to you?
In what area does God say, do it this way, don’t do it that way, and you want to protest? What is that? It’s probably something. How you spend money, how you save money, how much you give away, how much debt you carry, living beyond your means, forgiveness, even of the people who really hurt you, even if they won’t admit that they’re wrong, still must forgive? Loving your enemies?
Or is there something you do in secret that you hope no one ever finds out about, but yet simultaneously somehow the thing you do in secret that you hope no one finds out about, you think it’s no big deal? Well, if it’s no big deal, then you really wouldn’t care if people find out about it, right? For all of us, there’s something God says and we don’t think it’s a good rule. Or maybe we think it’s a good rule for other people to follow, but we’re the exception. Or we think, yeah, that’s a good idea, so I’ll get around to it someday.
I don’t have to do it right now. I’ll save someday. I’ll tithe someday. I’ll quit someday. As parents will tell you, delayed obedience is disobedience.
Very good. Somebody said it. There’s something— maybe there’s a lot of things that you can’t see any reason for. You don’t think it’s a good rule. But point one today is God gives instructions to us because he’s far more wise than us and he loves us.
That’s why we have them. Now our next question, again, just like a a kid, we might ask, but what happens if we don’t listen? What’s the consequence? Maybe I’ll decide the consequence is worth it and just do it anyway. Like, what’s at stake if we follow or not?
And the answer is our freedom and life. That’s what’s at stake— freedom and life. God says, in the day you eat of the tree, you shall surely die. Which means at least whenever we don’t listen, we will lose something precious to us. There will be some kind of death.
If we lie or we cover something up, intimacy will die. You have to be known in order to have intimacy, so if you don’t let yourself be known and you lie and you hide and you cover up, you will lose intimacy. If you live beyond your means, borrower is slave to the lender. Proverbs 22:7. Financial freedom dies if we live beyond our means.
Something always dies when we overstep one of God’s boundaries. Maybe not right away, but eventually. Even if there is a blast of euphoria at the beginning, it will end up ensnaring us and killing something within us later, and that’s not freedom.
The paradox paradox with rules is that true freedom comes from living within the rules. That’s a paradox because we, especially in this country, we believe freedom is living without any boundaries whatsoever. We think freedom is do anything we want, anytime we want, as much as we want. That’s what freedom is. That’s what we think.
But if you reflect for even just a minute, it’ll become obvious why that isn’t true. There is no such thing as being able to live completely without any limits. That doesn’t exist. If you remove all limits from one area of your life, if you get total freedom over here, it will enslave you in some other area. Just what you eat as one example, especially as you get older, right?
Maybe used to you could eat whatever you want whenever you want and not feel it ever, but as you get older, if you have total freedom in what you eat, it will kill something else. Your doctor will tell you that. Eat all the delicious fatty sugary foods your heart desires. Okay, but then your heart will die, or your pancreas will die, or your mobility will die and you won’t have freedom. On the other hand, if you watch what you eat, how you exercise, you will gain one type of freedom, right?
Better health, mobility, probably longer life. But that freedom will come at a cost of eating whatever you want, whenever you want, as much as you want. There’s always restrictions somewhere. We can’t create a life without restrictions. Something will be restricted, limited.
So freedom, to correctly think about freedom, is not the absence of all restrictions because that doesn’t exist. Freedom is not the absence of all restrictions. Freedom is living by the right restrictions. Limiting yourself correctly is what leads to true life and freedom, being within the right boundaries. A fish could say, I want to be free!
Free. I want to live wherever I choose, so I’m going to jump out of my tank onto the table, and then I’ll be free.
I mean, a fish may say that, but that’s not freedom. That’s death. The fish needs the right restriction— living in water— in order to be free and have life. That’s what’s at stake if we overstep a boundary— freedom and life. Which means one of the most important questions we can ask is, how do we find the right restrictions?
How can we be sure what leads to fullness of life and what leads to death? How can we know? Now, of course, since we’re a church If you didn’t know, that’s where you are right now. If you wandered in off the street somehow, you are in a church. We worship Jesus.
So we’re going to say, and we’ve already said, true freedom is found in what God says. God, in his infinite wisdom and love, is the one who gives us the right restrictions. That’s one of the points in the creation story. And really, that’s all we would need to know. But to emphasize why his boundaries are more reliable reliable than any other instruction we could receive.
Let’s consider the other places we often seek counsel for how to live our lives and why they are not as reliable as God. Or to say it another way, if we’re trying to figure out how to have fullness of life and we aren’t listening to God, who else do we listen to? And frequently, and we see these in the creation story, Number 2, we listen to ourselves, to those around us, and to our feelings. To ourselves, to those around us, and to our feelings. None of those are as reliable as setting right boundaries for how to live in freedom as God.
Now, just as a preface, when we say ourselves, our others, and our feelings are not as reliable as God, that does not mean that we should listen to our own wisdom, or that we should never ask advice from someone else, or listen to what culture is teaching us, or we should never pay attention to what feels wrong, right? All of those sources of counsel can be very good. They’re especially good for the many questions of life of which the Bible gives no specific instruction, right? If you’re asking, should I take this job or that job? Should we try to have kids?
Should I retire this year or next year. Okay, seek out all kinds of sources of wisdom for sure. That’s not what we’re saying. We’re saying in the areas where God sets a boundary, if ourselves or those around us or our feelings contradict what God says, it is far better, it is far more reliable to go with the boundary that God has set. We see that in the creation account and we know it from our own experience.
From the creation story— spoiler alert— our ancestors didn’t listen to God about the tree. They instead listened to their own judgment, each other, and what felt right. God said, don’t eat of that tree. That’s chapter 2. But then very next chapter, chapter 3, Genesis 3:6, it is recorded, when the woman saw that the tree was good for and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate.
And she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. So just from this one verse, we see unreliability of ourselves, those around us, and what feels good looks good. Take those one at a time from the story and from our own experience. The unreliability of ourselves. Eve, that’s the woman, decides she is not going to do what God says.
If you know more of the story, you know she was deceived by a serpent tempter, but she takes the serpent’s information, she takes God’s information, and she chooses to do what she thinks is best. No one forced her to do something, which means ultimately she listened to herself, to her own wisdom, and the result was devastating. That’s from the text. But we’ve done the same thing. Every once in a while I hear someone say— this is usually someone who grew up in church— but occasionally someone will say, I need to figure out what I believe is right and wrong on my own.
I know what God says, I’ll take that into consideration, but this is something I need to sort out for myself. We probably all said that at some point in our lives, but it’s unwise. We are not a reliable source to figure it out on our own. If you don’t believe me, just look back on your own life and identify all the things you once believed were good and right and life-giving, only to later realize were the exact opposite. How many of those are there as you look back over your life?
For example, what did 5-year-old you think was a good idea but it was not? I’ll go first. Confession: when I was 5, I ate boogers.
Pick my nose, ate whatever I found. Grown-ups told me not to, but I said, grown-ups, you don’t know anything. Have you tried boogers? They’re great.
I was wrong.
Not just a little wrong, right? Totally wrong. How about teenagers you? Anything you were doing as a teenager that you thought was good and life-giving but was in fact the exact opposite? I’ll go again first.
In our neighborhood there was a little creek that ran through it, great place to splash around on a hot day. But occasionally when there had been heavy rains the creek would flood. It became just a torrent of whitewater. It was incredible. It totally overran its banks, raging river, so me and some of my friends decided we should get inner tubes and ride the rapids.
Best thing we could think of. But of course, our pesky parents ruined our plans. Not one of any of our parents said yes. They all said, you will not ride inner tubes in the creek when it is flooded. There could be tree branches under the water you can’t see.
You get trapped. You get turned over. Robert, you could, you could die. And of course they were right. I wasn’t just wrong, I was totally wrong.
How about 25-year-old you? How many of the things you wanted most when you were 25 you now realize if you had gotten them, they would have ruined your life?
How about 45-year-old you? 65-year-old you, don’t you keep looking back on previous versions of you and say, what was I thinking? I was so wrong. Now here’s the scary question: what might we believe right now that future us will look back on and say, how could I have ever thought that?
Why should we have any confidence that our future selves will look back on us today and say, that’s when I had really arrived. After that moment, I never learned anything again.
Listen, we are not a totally reliable source to figure out what leads to freedom in life. We’re not. Sometimes we get it right, sometimes we don’t. So whenever we hear ourselves say, I just need to figure this out on my own.
We can do better than that.
Second, what about those around us? Maybe our immediate friend group or maybe the culture at large. Are other people a reliable source? Are they more reliable than God? When they contradict God, who should we follow?
From the creation story, other people are not reliable. Right? At this point in the biblical narrative, the total population of the earth was 2 people. So man and woman comprised the collective sum of all cultural thoughts. Whatever they did was the trend for the day.
So they were each other’s friend group, and they were also the culture at large. And they were aware of what God said. They took his instruction into consideration. They weighed some evidence, and then they influenced each other to overstep God’s boundary, resulting in disaster. They were not for each other a reliable compass to find freedom in life.
And we have lived that same story as well. Just like when we look back on past decades of our own decision-making, we can look back on past generations in our culture, past generations in the history of the world, or even other cultures from today, and we would say there are things people used to think were good and right that were actually totally wrong. We can find something totally wrong in every other generation, in every other culture. In other words, humanity has never gotten it completely right. Even though the people in any given culture and time thought they had it right, they didn’t.
And so we say, now we know better. But again, here’s the question: what makes us think that we have it right, right now. Do we think our moment in time is the pinnacle of human cultural advancement? Will future generations look back on us and say, wow, 2024, Silicon Valley, that’s when we finally got it? Of course not.
You see how narrow and culturally elitist it is to say that we have it right, that we are the authority for whatever everyone else should be? It’s nonsense. We know it if we think about it. The collective thought of the people around us is not a reliable source to discern life and freedom. They never have been.
So it’s not wise to go with what they think if they contradict what God says. Third, what about following what feels good or looks good?
Is that reliable? It’s so obvious that it’s not. I doubt we have to explain why. And yet at the same time, we make the same error over and over again, don’t we? Right from the creation story, man and woman see this fruit as a delight to the eyes, desirable, tastes great, so they go with it.
It feels good to their downfall. And if you’ve been alive for more than a couple of years, you can relate. What looked good, tasted good, felt good, could have been great for a minute led to disaster. We’ve all been there. It’s the fallacy of hedonism.
The pleasure we feel for a minute is a false positive. It’s not a reliable source. The reliable source for what leads to life and freedom is what God says, is how God set up the world. Similar to how God set up laws for the mechanics of the universe, not exactly the same, but similar to how God set up gravity and electromagnetic radiation and on and on, similar to how God set up the physical universe, God set up the system for freedom and life. And we can live in defiance to any of his systems.
We can, but it’s to our detriment. We can live in defiance of gravity. Sure, we have that choice. But we’re going to find much more life if we don’t. God gives the right restrictions for life and freedom.
Now finally, how to follow the right rules, because it’s not always easy, is it, to follow where God leads? Often our difficulty isn’t knowing the right thing to do, it’s, it’s doing it. And some of us have been at this Christianity thing for decades and we still have room to grow. So what’s our problem?
And of course there isn’t just one answer to that question. There’s many answers. But at the root of why we don’t listen to God, we have the same doubt as our earliest ancestors. Our first ancestors strayed from what God said because they began to doubt his love for them. They essentially asked, does God really have our best interest in mind when he told us about the tree?
Is God really good? Is he really for me? Can I really trust what he says? They doubted his love and then they strayed. And we often have the same doubt.
We question whether what he says is good and right and And best, should I really confess what I hide in the darkness? Should I really love my enemies? Should I really prioritize giving? Won’t I get hurt? Can I trust him?
Is he good? Is he for me? We have the same doubts, and those doubts lead to us straying from him, just like the first humans. But we have something they didn’t have. We have undeniable proof God loves us and is for us.
We have Jesus.
And that’s what helps us follow. How to follow the right restrictions is seeing his undeniable love for us. Because of what Jesus did, we don’t have to wonder if God is for us. We don’t have to wonder if God has our best interests in mind. We know he does because the God who always had life and the God who had always been free, the God who never acted in contradiction to his holiness or goodness and therefore never experienced any death of any kind, that God chose to give up his freedom and life for us on the cross that we may be whole and free again.
The more that we see him doing that for us, the more that we trust that he is for us, the more we will then follow, which means learning to follow him. It isn’t a one-time event. This is a lifetime of growth. We try and we fail and we confess and we trust and we seek and we see he’s still for us even when we have failed again. And we see he’s still for us even when we failed again and we see he’s still for us.
And over time, we really start to believe that he’s really for us. And we get to these moments where we have to decide, do I trust God or do I feel— or do I trust what feels good right now? Or what I think is best? Or what others say? And who is reliable?
And we’re deliberating. And the more times we are faced with those decisions and the more times in those moments we look at the cross and we say, I’m going to believe the one who died for me. Even though it feels scary, even though it seems like a different way is better, even though other people are telling me to go with my feelings, I am going to believe what God says because he proved he loved me and is for me on the cross. And the more we do that over an entire lifetime of trying and failing and seeing he’s still for us, the more free freedom that we will find.
So may we all see his love for us this week, because I will bet sometime this week, probably even by the end of today, we will be faced with a choice of who to trust, who to follow, who to believe. We will have a choice soon, and may we all follow the one who proved his love for us on the cross. Let’s pray.
Father, you are good, and what you tell us is good, and you want to lead us to where it is good. Father, I pray that we would see you as reliable as you are. I pray that our trust for you would grow. I pray that we would see your love for us on the cross, and we would never question if you are for us. And if you are for us like that, Lord, then we know we can follow, and I pray that we would.
Pray all those things in Jesus’ name. Amen.
