Coulda Hada Pear: Rules, Rules, Rules Series

Common thought today;

° Rules are meant to be broken

° Boundaries are meant to be challenged

° Guidelines are merely suggestions, recommendations, and preferred expectations

Almost no one likes rules. Almost no one wants to be ‘governed’, controlled, directed, and worse… forced to do something they’d really rather not do. This is not a “suck it up, buttercup” pep-talk… it’s not an exposé on why rules are your friend… it’s not even an attempt to get you to adapt and just accept that they exist. You need them, and the world is a better place with them than without them.

Rules, Guidelines, Boundaries… they all help convey limitations… something of a “you can go to this point (here), but not that far (there)” premise. When God plunked Man into the Garden (remember, Eve was made after man was put into the Garden), there is only one recorded limitation placed on Man’s presence in that Garden… not to eat of the fruit of that fateful tree; The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Now, this is the only recorded rule that God gave Adam. There may have been others, but this one seemed to be a show-stopper for God.. this one seemed to carry ‘the weight of the world’ with it... this one was that important. So… we really should take a little time to consider why a rule even needed to be added to this wonderful world God made.

Too often, we don’t grasp the brevity of a rule, or a leading step from the Lord. We hear that a limitation is placed on us, and we almost instantly question why and what happens if I go beyond that limitation or boundary. Please remember, God is not trying to squelch our lives… He is not trying to be sure we remain subservient…. not even trying to remind us that “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out again”, as our parents would always say…. OK… my parents would always say!

Genesis 1:16 - And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

See? Rules are good. Were it not for God’s rule over the universe, our world would be in chaos. Rules help ensure the original design and implementation God created remains intact. Sure… that is a ‘rule of nature’ and nature doesn’t have its own free-will. Man was made ‘like God’, and our free-will puts us in a precarious place of trust… of faith… of obedience to God’s leading.

There is also a ‘scope’ for rules… an intended application, or a way of isolating when and where the rule applies. Scope helps to ensure we don’t have an ambiguous rule (Thou shalt not belch in public, say) and use that to incarcerate someone because they hiccuped, or have a abdominal spasm that caused them to gasp. No… I am not suggesting that all rules are subject to interpretation and open to scrutiny for their application… I am just trying to convey that many of the rules in life do have a scope or an application.

Contrarily, we need to be careful that we don’t dismiss a rule because we don’t agree with the purpose for it… the goal it is intended to ensure… or even the underlying intentions. Sure… in the case of the fateful ‘garden rule’, God told Adam, “…for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” Genesis 2:17 Now… that is where the serpent twisted things for Eve… convincing her that God had ulterior motives… He was being deceptive and was hiding a special secret. We’ll never know how Adam and Even would have handled all this had God merely told Adam, “Don’t eat of that fruit” and left it at that. It is OK… it is appropriate… it is even encouraged to grasp the underlying purpose, goal or intention of a rule… even question/challenge it (not defiantly)… but, obedience is what God is actually expecting.

It is tough to not reason through it all… to question things… or really just to analyze the end-game goal for this rule being presented. See… God did tell Adam the ‘why’ part (…for thou shalt surely die), but honestly… Adam wasn’t even formally ‘born’, so he mostly likely didn’t understand ‘die’, as it were… it may well be that God told him straight out what would happen, but the consequence just didn’t seem to matter or have relevance for Adam… and then Eve. Sure… when the serpent was taunting Eve about it all, she at least did remember that was the consequence and even told the serpent, too. He quickly bypassed that little detail and quickly went to the sly part of his trickery. Again and again… getting into a reasoning discussion over God’s leading will cause you so you much turmoil… so much anguish… so much distraction from enjoying the world God has you in that very moment.