Broken Boundaries

Do you imagine that our common diseases today were absent from the Garden of Eden?

If so, you would still be suffering from Western mythology. In the Hebrew culture, disease wasn’t some alien presence in nature. It was always there, created by God. Rather, it was moral purity that provided the hedge of protection against disease afflicting people. Disease wasn’t supposed to threaten us but we stepped into its path. In other words, the basic principle is that we don’t end disease or poverty of any of the unnumbered afflictions on human life; we set boundaries by moral dominion. We constrain ourselves to what God offers within His glory and stop chasing the dream of being our own gods in a world we did not create.

Adam was a manager in the Garden. He enforced the boundaries for natural forces that God designed and provided as the proper setting for human existence. That context required then, and still does, bacterium and viruses and a jillion other things we can’t see with unaided vision, but which God built into the system as a whole. Adam carried a moral authority that affected how nature interacted with his own flesh, because flesh is a part of our constitution.

The Fall is not a dramatic change in nature, but in our natures. Adam and Eve surrendered their moral authority for the allure of something else. It was something that only seemed sweeter on the first taste, but left their entire existence bitter. The bitterness included losing that moral communion with the natural world; their hearts were silenced.

Recovering any measure of that moral authority from God’s character means that nature regains some boundaries. It requires the wisdom of the Creator to set proper boundaries, but you’ll notice that godly people suffer less from those unrestrained natural forces. It was never meant to be absolute; it was never meant to meet the proof tests of human logic. It was meant to be noticed in the heart. Such is the nature of our best and only path for understanding God’s Creation, AKA reality.

When you depart the moral boundaries of God, you are unprotected, you are powerless, your life is pointless. The expiration of human existence from this current life is not a tragedy in itself. It’s not as if you lose anything valuable. What’s precious is not this life but the opportunities within this life for seizing upon God’s glory. There are limits, but they are within our own fallen natures. What causes nature so much agony is our own failed moral boundaries and the moral consequences. So, for example, the awareness of time and space as boundaries is a symbol of our moral failures. In moral purity before the Fall, Adam and Eve did not know time and space that way. We can’t imagine a different awareness, so language fails us. The weight of glory is too heavy for human expression because it is beyond the limits of human intellectual awareness.

Stop fearing nature. Fear the backlash of moral savagery arising from the dominance of the intellect. Train yourself; reawaken your heart’s moral perception so that you become familiar with how it will be when Christ Returns.

The worst disease is sin.