The Line in the Sand
The line in the sand was drawn “in the beginning”
“In the beginning, God…”[1]
God was. Before time, God was.
God was. Then God created the material universe. The order of nature was established by God, “in the beginning”.
God is before all things and above all things. God is supreme, and sovereign.
God created humanity in God’s own image. Male and female He created them.[2]
The line in the sand was established “in the beginning”.
God created them without knowledge of evil, and forbade them to access that knowledge. “From the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it, dying you shall die.”[3]
They knew good because they knew God. God is good.[4] They knew truth because Jesus Christ, the eternal God, was truth. ‘I am The Way, The Truth, and the Life; none comes to the Father but by Me.”[5] Eating from the tree would not introduce them to good, but it would introduce them to the personal experience of evil, because evil is that which is opposed to God.
To oppose God is to stand against God: to disbelieve God,[6] to deny God, to disobey God, to blaspheme God, to blame God. God is the source of all that is good. To reject God is to reject good. To reject good is to embrace evil. Ignorance of evil is the ideal state. To reside in the knowledge of God without the knowledge of evil is ideal. “This is eternal life: that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom You have sent.”[7]
When God commanded to abstain from eating from the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, He drew the line in the sand so that humanity could see it and avoid stepping over it. From that day forward, when anyone chooses to cross that line, they do so with knowledge: the knowledge that we are not to participate in evil.[8]
Yet, wilfully, the first man stepped over the line. “So He drove out the man, and He set at the east of the garden of Eden cherubim…” that he may not “… stretch out his hand and take also from the Tree of life, and eat and live forever.”[9]
Ever since that day, humanity has sought to disbelieve God, to deny God, to blaspheme God, to blame God, and to disobey God, to redefine God’s established terms of what is good, and to “do what is right in his own eyes.”[10] And ever since then, humanity dies.
“Why should you die? Turn, turn from your wicked way and live!”[11]
[1] Genesis 1:1
[2] Genesis 1:27
[3] Genesis 2:17
[4] Daniel 9:14
[5] John 14:6
[6] John 16:8-9
[7] John 17:3
[8] Luke 18:20; Ephesians 5:5, 11
[9] Genesis 3:22-24
[10] Deuteronomy 12:8; Proverbs 12:15
[11] Ezekiel 33:11 – adapted
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